Another day, another icon of the global financial system becomes a climate hawk.

You may recall World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said of the climate crisis: “If there is no action soon, the future will become bleak.”

Turns out IMF managing director Christine Lagarde is also a climate hawk — and she’s the former conservative finance minister of France.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, she said, “the real wild card in the pack” of economic pivot points is “Increasing vulnerability from resource scarcity and climate change, with the potential for major social and economic disruption.” She called climate change “the greatest economic challenge of the 21st century.”

Ms. Lagarde concluded with a call for a new kind of economic growth. “So we need growth, but we also need green growth that respects environmental sustainability. Good ecology is good economics. This is one reason why getting carbon pricing right and removing fossil fuel subsidies are so important.”

In response to a question from the audience, she said: “Unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled.”

Perhaps the IMF can release an analysis as blunt as the stunning World Bank Climate Report from November that concluded: “A 4°C [7°F] world can, and must, be avoided” to avert “devastating” impacts. Its 2012 release, “Fiscal Policy to Mitigate Climate Change: A Guide for Policymakers,” was kind of a yawner.

Then we need to see the IMF actually focus on environmentally sustainable growth, as opposed to say, our currently unsustainable trajectory, which will roast, toast, fry and grill countless future generations.

By Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky via Shaping Tomorrow’s World

There is growing evidence that conspiratorial thinking, also known as conspiracist ideation, is often involved in the rejection of scientific propositions. Conspiracist ideations tend to invoke alternative explanations for the nature or source of the scientific evidence. For example, among people who reject the link between HIV and AIDS, common ideations involve the beliefs that AIDS was created by the U.S. Government.

My colleagues and I published a paper recently that found evidence for the involvement of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions—from climate change to the link between tobacco and lung cancer, and between HIV and AIDS—among visitors to climate blogs. This was a fairly unsurprising result because it meshed well with previous research and the existing literature on the rejection of science. Indeed, it would have been far more surprising, from a scientific perspective, if the article had not found a link between conspiracist ideation and rejection of science.

Nonetheless, as some readers of this blog may remember, this article engendered considerable controversy.

The article also generated data.

Data, because for social scientists, public statements and publically-expressed ideas constitute data for further research. Cognitive scientists sometimes apply something called “narrative analysis” to understand how people, groups, or societies are organized and how they think.

In the case of the response to our earlier paper, we were struck by the way in which some of the accusations leveled against our paper were, well, somewhat conspiratorial in nature. We therefore decided to analyze the public response to our first paper with the hypothesis in mind that this response might also involve conspiracist ideation. We systematically collected utterances by bloggers and commenters, and we sought to classify them into various hypotheses leveled against our earlier paper. For each hypothesis, we then compared the public statements against a list of criteria for conspiracist ideation that was taken from the previous literature.

This follow-up paper was accepted a few days ago by Frontiers in Psychology, and a preliminary version of the paper is already available, for open access, here.

The title of the paper is Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, and it is authored by myself, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and Michael Marriott.

I enclose the abstract below:

Conspiracist ideation has been repeatedly implicated in the rejection of scientific propositions, although empirical evidence to date has been sparse. A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and the rejection of other scientific propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and between HIV and AIDS (Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, in press; LOG12 from here on). This article analyzes the response of the climate blogosphere to the publication of LOG12. We identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 and that questioned the validity of the paper’s conclusions. Using established criteria to identify conspiracist ideation, we show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking. For example, whereas hypotheses were initially narrowly focused on LOG12, some ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors of LOG12, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. The overall pattern of the blogosphere’s response to LOG12 illustrates the possible role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science, although alternative scholarly interpretations may be advanced in the future.

– Stephan Lewandowskyos Winthrop Professor at the School of Psychology, University of Western Australia. He has published nearly 140 papers, chapters, and scholarly books on how people remember and think. He received a “Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award” from the Australian Research Council in 2011.

According to a story in Gizmag yesterday, a group of researchers at Newcastle University in the U.K. may have accidentally stumbled on a solution to the problems that have bedeviled carbon capture and sequestration — by studying sea urchins.

“We had set out to understand in detail the carbonic acid reaction, which is what happens when CO2 reacts with water, and needed a catalyst to speed up the process,” Dr. Lidija Šiller, the leader of the team, said in a press release. “At the same time, I was looking at how organisms absorb CO2 into their skeletons and in particular the sea urchin which converts the CO2 to calcium carbonate.”

The use of calcium carbonate to grow shells and other bony parts is a trait urchins share with other marine animals. And when the team examined the urchin larvae, they found a high concentrations of nickel on their exoskeleton. Working off that discovery, they added nickel nanoparticles to their carbonic acid test. The result was the complete removal of the CO2 as it was converted into calcium carbonate.

According to Gaurav Bhaduri, a PhD student in Newcastle University and the lead author of the team’s paper, the methodology they derived — and have now patented — is simpler and much cheaper than the traditional enzyme-based approaches:

“The beauty of a Nickel catalyst is that it carries on working regardless of the pH and because of its magnetic properties it can be re-captured and re-used time and time again. It’s also very cheap – 1,000 times cheaper than the enzyme. And the by-product – the carbonate – is useful and not damaging to the environment.”

The research team developed a process to capture CO2 from waste gas by passing it directly from a chimney top through a water column rich in nickel nanoparticles. The solid calcium carbonate can then be recovered at the bottom of the column.

The researchers say their discovery could provide big CO2 emitters, such as power stations and chemical processing plants, with a cheap way to capture and store their waste CO2 before it is released into the atmosphere.

Every method invented so far to capture or sequester carbon from emitters before it can enter the atmosphere has suffered from difficulties regarding cost, feasibility, and side-effects. Pumping CO2 into the ground, for instance, is difficult, expensive, and carries risks of leakage, water contamination, and even earthquakes. Other processes, like the ones mentioned by Bhaduri, also convert CO2 into calcium carbonate or magnesium carbonate through the use of enzymes like carbonic anhydrase. But because of the chemical complexities they’re inefficient and expensive.

Calcium carbonate, which is essentially chalk, is widely used in the building industry to make cement and other materials. It’s even used by hospitals to make plaster casts. So once removed from the Newcastle team’s carbon capture process, the calcium carbonate could potentially be put to other uses.

The discovery certainly isn’t a cure all. The process can’t be fitted to car, so its use is limited to power plants and other major emitters. But Dr. Šiller believes it could someday have a big impact: “It is an effective, cheap solution that could be available world-wide to some of our most polluting industries and have a significant impact on the reduction of atmospheric CO2.”

By Jackie Weidman

Today, BP was the last of the Big Five Oil companies to announce its total 2012 earnings, raking in a net profit of $1.6 billion in the fourth quarter and bringing the company’s annual profits to $11.6 billion.

BP is one of the most profitable companies in the world, ranking fourth-highest on the Fortune 500 Global companies list. In November 2012, BP agreed to pay a $4.5 billion criminal fine -– the highest fine in U.S. history -– as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. The majority of the fine ($2.4 billion) will be used for restoration in the Gulf of Mexico, where 5 million barrels of oil flowed into the Gulf over 87 days. An estimated 1 million barrels of oil remain in the Gulf.

Below is a glimpse at how BP spent its billions in profits last year:

• BP received an estimated $200 million in tax breaks last year, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.
• BP spent $8.9 million lobbying Congress in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
• BP spent nearly $450,000 on campaign contributions during the 2011-2012 election cycle.
• Almost two-thirds of their contributions went to Republican candidates.
• Meanwhile, BP’s oil production decreased by 8 percent, from 1.29 million barrels of net liquids (oil + natural gas) per day in 2011 to 1.18 million barrels per day in 2012.
• BP is sitting on cash reserves totaling $19.5 billion.

High oil and gasoline prices contributed to another year of huge profits for the Big Five Oil Companies: BP plc, Chevron Corp, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil Corp, and the Royal Dutch Shell Group. These companies earned a combined $119 billion in profits in 2012, while collecting an estimated $2.4 billion in annual tax breaks. Average gas prices hit a record high last year, enriching the biggest oil companies while hurting consumers’ wallets.

By John Podesta

In his inaugural address, President Obama laid out a clear commitment to “our children and future generations,” saying that as a nation we must “maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure—our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks.” This includes the more than 700 million acres of public lands—national parks, monuments, forests and wildernesses—that belong to all Americans.

Indeed, it is one of the great responsibilities and joys of a president to uphold and maintain the uniquely American commitment to conservation. One of my proudest accomplishments from my time with President Clinton was working with Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt to protect the national treasure of our public lands. Together, we helped President Clinton protect more land in the lower 48 states than any president since Teddy Roosevelt.

Since then, however, conservation has all too often taken a back seat to issuing energy leases for development of public lands. That’s why today, Secretary Babbitt introduced a bold new idea for America’s public lands that will put conservation on equal ground with energy development. Secretary Babbitt, in remarks at the National Press Club, proposes that President Obama adopt a simple “One-to-One” principle: for every acre of land leased for energy development, another acre of public land will be protected for future generations.

Both President Clinton and President George H.W. Bush ended their time in office with the number of acres of public land permanently protected comparable to those leased for oil and gas development.  However, the scales have inexorably tipped in favor of the oil and gas industry during the first four years of the Obama administration, with almost two and a half acres leased for every one permanently protected.

Secretary Babbitt’s remarks by no means suggest that energy leases for public lands cease. Instead, we must recognize that any sustainable energy strategy must address conservation as a tool to protect clean air and water, especially in the face of a changing climate. We must balance the economic pressures of today against the need to preserve public spaces and natural resources for the long term. Secretary Babbitt’s proposal is all the more needed in the face of the ongoing oil and gas boom, lest an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy become an “all-of-the-acres-drilled” strategy.

To be sure, we have seen significant, hard-won conservation successes over the past four years. As part of the America’s Great Outdoors initiative, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar traveled the country to hear from local communities and identify conservation priorities.  This level of collaboration takes time and has prepared the administration well to move forward with protecting landscapes with strong local support, starting with honoring the request by New Mexico Senators Udall and Heinrich to designate Rio Grande del Norte as the nation’s next national monument.

The last Congress’ inaction on dozens of wilderness bills introduced by various members—bills that would have protected 5 million acres of public land—should help motivate President Obama to creatively use the executive authorities provided to him.  This is not just about protecting the freedom to roam the wide open country that belongs to all of us.  It is about the 6.1 million American jobs and $646 billion in spending directly supported by the outdoor industry, which depends on protected public lands.  That’s an industry practically twice the size of the oil and gas industry.  That’s part of the reason why in 2011, 100 economists wrote to President Obama stating that they see federal protected public lands as “essential to the West’s economic future.”

Protected public lands are more than just beautiful landscapes.  They are economic drivers that ensure the health and vitality of our great nation are preserved for our children and for future generations, as President Obama noted on Inauguration Day. It’s time to put conservation of these lands back on an equal footing with energy development.

John Podesta is the Chair of the Center for American Progress and the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Full remarks of Former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt:

Read more

Amory Lovins, author of "Reinventing Fire." (Photo: Judy Hill/RMI)

By Adam James

This week the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners heard from Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, about his new book “Reinventing Fire.” One of his key messages was that the vast majority of changes that need to occur in transforming the energy system lie at the state regulatory level.

Amory had an excellent summary as to what such a regulatory wish list would look like:

• Equality in interconnection: Ensuring that renewables have an opportunity to compete on equal footing by accessing the grid.
• Supporting entrepreneurial activities at the edge of the grid: Regulations allowing new market entrants to creatively compete with incumbent utilities.
• Moving ahead on net metering 2.0: Net metering is absolutely essential to capturing the true value of renewables. However, there are very real problems with compensation to utilities and cost-shifting to other customers that do need to be addressed. Integration with dynamic pricing and behind-the-meter PV will require regulatory innovation.
• Aligning rate structuring and business models: On the topic of regulatory innovation, utilities need to be given the incentives to make the kinds of forward looking investments which will lead to climate stabilization (i.e. investing in renewables and efficiency).

On this last point, it is important to remember that since utilities are highly unlikely to make investments that undercut their rate base, it will be crucial to find a way to prevent leaving utilities overly reliant on the “fixed cost” portion of utility bills (which reflect sunk costs in infrastructure, centralized generation, and operations and management) while the “variable costs” (how many KWh are consumed) shrink with the introduction of net metering, dynamic pricing, and behind-the-meter solar PV. There needs to be a radical realignment of incentives to shift utilities to a “network management” role, and push for distribution systems that move towards an overlapping microgrid model. Rocky Mountain Institute did excellent work on this here.

Lovins walked through a very compelling, and integrated, vision for what the American electricity sector could look like. A fundamental premise of this vision is that by 2050 we will have to replace America’s electrical infrastructure. The process of upgrading the grid will cost approximately $6 trillion no matter what technologies we include. The question, then, is do we continue down the path of centralized, fossil fuel dependent infrastructure- or do we begin investing in decentralization, microgrids, efficiency and smart energy management?

The difference, Lovins notes, between these technology pathways are the risks associated with each. As Lovins put it, America faces a multiple choice test. Do we want to:

A) Die by oil wars
B) Die from climate change
C) Die from nuclear holocaust
D) All of the above
E) None of the above

I will admit, I am personally biased towards whichever technology pathway allows for “E.” By Lovins estimation, pursuing “E”, will require an integrated approach to all four energy sectors: electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry. This approach has to harnesses innovation in design, policy, and technology to solve real world problems. The result? An energy system that runs on 80 percent clean energy.

Read more

Vice President Joe Biden reaffirmed the Obama administration is “committed” to a “united effort” on behalf of “young people in both our countries”to tackling climate change during the president’s second term in a meeting with French President Francois Hollande Monday. [The Hill]

“I was impressed in the discussion we had relative to climate change — and I mean this sincerely, Mr. President — I could have been sitting in a private meeting with President Obama,” Biden said in joint remarks with Francois Hollande following their meeting at the Elysee Palace….

“As I pointed out to the Foreign Minister [Laurent Fabius], he is going to have an interlocutor in John Kerry. There is no one in my country who has been, over the period of time he’s been in the Senate, more concerned with or knowledgeable about the issues relating to global warming.”

The blackout at Sunday’s Superbowl and the failure of the stadium’s electrical system could show how improvements to energy infrastructure can contain damage, at least according to an early official statement. [National Journal]

A global switch to fewer work hours and more vacation time might help slow global warming, according to a new study released Monday by the Center for Economic Policy and Research. [US News]

The discovery that sea urchins use Nickel particles to harness carbon dioxide from the sea could be the key to capturing tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. [E! Science News]

A new report published in Nature Climate Change suggests that earthworms can increase the amount of greenhouse gas emissions given off by soil. [The Guardian]

According to a new study published Monday, it’s possible to use cellular telephone networks to estimate the amount of rainfall that falls between those two points. [Climate Central]

Asia Pulp & Paper, the third-largest pulp and paper company in the world, announced Tuesday that it is halting logging operations in Indonesia’s natural rain forests. [WaPo]

UK greenhouse gas emissions fell seven per cent from 2010 to 2011 as emissions from the residential sector dropped to their lowest level since 1990, government figures revealed today. [Business Green]