Between President Obama’s surprisingly hawkish second inaugural address, and the confirmation of John Kerry as Secretary of State, moves to combat climate change may be afoot in Washington.

That momentum extends to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where ranking minority member Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and his fellow Democrats have been pushing to move hearings on climate change onto the group’s agenda for this congressional session. Unfortunately, Republicans still control the House and thus the committee, and have already shot down Democrats’ efforts twice, according to a report in The Hill.

On Wednesday the Committee, along party lines, voted down Democratic amendments to its formal oversight plan for the 113th Congress….

One defeated amendment, from Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), would have required hearings on the role of climate change in drought, heat waves, wildfires, reduced crop yields and other effects….

A second defeated amendment, by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), called for hearings on climate-related coastal threats including sea-level rise, more frequent and intense storms, and ocean acidification. Both proposals called for witnesses including National Academy of Sciences members.

The good news is that Waxman intends to keep pressing, in order to get the GOP on record refusing to investigate an issue that is rapidly moving to the forefront of the American public’s concern:

More votes – with a similar outcome – are expected when the meeting to approve the oversight plan resumes next week.

Waxman is offering a third amendment calling for a hearing on recent reports that warn, “the window for action to prevent irreversible harm from climate change is closing rapidly.”

The need for American lawmakers to come to grips with the reality of climate change and global warming is pressing. In January, the Federal Advisory Committee released its draft of the third National Climate Assessment, and its prognostications were grim: If the United States remains on its current emissions path, most of the country will see a rise of 9 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit over the coming century, with ever-worsening extreme weather, heat waves, deluges and droughts as the result.

Encouragingly, there are signs President Obama will call for new policy pushes in next week’s State of the Union address. Even without new laws from Congress, the executive branch has numerous regulatory tools with which it can combat climate change, including having the Environmental Protection Agency move to curb carbon emissions from both new and existing power plants. Nor are Waxman and other Democrats sitting idle — they’ve announced the formation of a new Bicameral Climate Change Task Force, “dedicated to focusing Congressional and public attention on climate change and developing effective policy responses.”

As for where the Republicans are at, the House Science and Technology Committee is set to hold a hearing that appears destined to degenerate into a forum for climate denialism. The committee’s new chair, Rep. Lamar Smith’s (R-TX), has criticized “the idea of human-made global warming, railed against the media as “lap dogs” for not devoting enough airtime to climate deniers, and taken $500,000 from the oil and gas industries over his political career.

by David Doniger, via NRDC’s Switchboard

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today released plant-by-plant data on 2011 emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping air pollutants.  The data show once again that power plants are the number one source of the carbon pollution that drives climate change, churning out more than 2.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2011.

The new data confirm that cleaning up the nation’s fleet of power plants should be the centerpiece of President Obama’s actions to reduce the threat of climate change.

In his inaugural address two weeks ago, the president vowed: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

Power plants are far and away the number one source of carbon pollution, responsible for two-thirds of the 3.3 billion metric tons reported by all large industrial facilities, and for 40 percent of the nation’s overall CO2 emissions.  (Overall U.S. emissions of CO2 and other heat-trapping pollutants total about 6.8 billion metric tons, including those from transportation, other industries, and smaller sources.)

Total power plant CO2 emissions in 2011 were down about 4.5 percent from 2010, reflecting the shift towards burning more natural gas and less coal (a trend that continued in 2012 — see here, p.87 — and will show up in the plant-by-plant pollution reports EPA publishes next year).  Renewables and efficiency are growing fast – renewable investments increased by 23 percent from 2010 to 2011 according to the Energy Information Administration, and electric efficiency program budgets, for example, rose from $2.7 billion to $6.8 billion between 2007 and 2011.

NRDC issued an innovative plan in December showing how the president can use the Clean Air Act to cut the dangerous carbon pollution from the nation’s existing power plants, slowing climate change, saving lives, creating jobs, and growing the economy.

Our plan achieves huge health and climate benefits at surprisingly low cost, is fair and flexible for each state and power company, holds power bills down, and triggers huge job-creating clean energy investments that can’t be outsourced.

The NRDC plan cuts overall power sector carbon emissions 26 percent in 2020 and 35 percent in 2025, from 2005 levels.  Because of its fair and flexible design features, our plan achieves enormous climate protection and public health benefits worth $26-60 billion in 2020, at a reasonable cost of $4 billion.

You can check out which of the nation’s 1,594 power plants is in your backyard, and how much carbon pollution it puts out, using EPA’s handy map-based emission data website, which includes data from about 8,000 large facilities in nine industrial sectors.

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By Jessica Goad

A poll released today by Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project reveals important insight into westerners’ attitudes towards conservation, energy development, and public lands.

A majority of those surveyed believe that protecting public lands is economically significant and are wary of the impacts of oil and gas drilling:

-  91% say “our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas are an essential part of (my state’s) economy”

-  74% agree that “our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas help to attract high quality employers and good jobs to (my state)”

-  59% believe “the impact of oil and gas drilling on our land, air and water” is a serious problem

The poll was conducted in six western states (Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) among registered voters.

This year, voters were also asked to respond to claims that there is “too much public land” and proposals to turn lands over to the states or private companies.  While this proposition is dubious constitutionally, it hasn’t stopped legislatures in Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico and Utah from introducing or considering such bills.  But they may want to reconsider after these results:

-  Only 30% of respondents believe that “too much public land” is a serious problem

-  When asked whether they “support or oppose the sale of public lands,” 67% oppose while 27% support

-  79% believe that public lands support the economy while 15% believe they “take land off the tax rolls, cost government to maintain them, and prevent opportunities for logging and oil and gas production that could provide jobs”

The release of this information comes at a very important moment for conservation policy.  Yesterday, President Obama announced he would nominate Sally Jewell, the CEO of outdoor giant REI, to be his new Secretary of the Interior following the departure of current Secretary Ken Salazar.  As President Obama put it, Jewell:

…knows the link between conservation and good jobs.  She knows that there’s no contradiction between being good stewards of the land and our economic progress, that, in fact, those two things need to go hand in hand.

Additionally, earlier this week Secretary Bruce Babbitt called on the Obama administration to put energy development and conservation on equal ground by protecting one acre of public land for every one leased.  He noted that the Obama administration leased more than 6 million acres of public lands over the last four years, while only permanently protecting 2.6 million acres.

There is some indication that the administration is already hearing this message.  For example, the Colorado Bureau of Land Management yesterday threw out a number of controversial oil and gas leases that would have impacted organic farming and outdoor recreation near Paonia, Colorado.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie says he’s been so darn busy helping his state recover from Sandy that he has no time “to ponder the esoteric question” of whether global warming super-charged the superstorm. He said of those victimized by Sandy, “I don’t think they give a damn” what caused it.

Christie did have time to joke with David Letterman about his weight on CBS. And he even had time to fly down to New Orleans for the Super Bowl and some photo-ops.

He should have spent a few minutes talking to leading climate experts, who say climate change did worsen Sandy’s impact — and we can expect more frequent and destructive superstorms until we act on carbon pollution.

Here is what Christie said at a news conference Tuesday when asked about a link between climate change and Sandy:

“I have no idea. I’m not a climatologist and in the last hundred days I have to tell you the truth, I’ve been focused on a lot of things, the cause of this is not one of them that I’ve focused on…. Now, maybe in the subsequent months and years, after I get done with trying to rebuild the state and put people back in their homes, I will have the opportunity to ponder the esoteric question of the cause of this storm…. If you asked of these people in Union Beach, I don’t think they give a damn.”

You would think that the governor of a state slammed by two superstorms in two years would give a damn whether storms like Irene and Sandy had become the norm thanks to climate change and man-made carbon pollution. After all, in August 2011, Christie himself said of Hurricane Irene: “From a flooding perspective, this could be a 100-year event.”

His neighboring governor, Andrew Cuomo of NY, who has also been pretty busy, prebutted the charge that this is an esoteric issue, in his recent State of the State Address:

First thing we have to learn is to accept the fact — and I believe it is a fact — that climate change is real. It is denial to say this is — each of these situations is a once in a lifetime. There have been —  there is a 100 year flood every two years now. It’s inarguable that the sea is warmer and that there is a changing weather pattern, and the time to act is now. We must lower the regional greenhouse gas emission cap. And let’s make a real difference on climate change by reducing the CO2 cap.

Christie unilaterally withdrew from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) back in 2011, bowing to Koch pressure.

Even President Obama had time to figure out that this isn’t an esoteric question but a key moral issue of our time. As he said in his second inaugural address:

We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. .

So even if the state doesn’t join with others to reduce its carbon pollution — indeed, especially if it doesn’t — planning for future superstorms becomes that much more important.  Environmental blogger Bill Wolfe thinks “Christie should spend some time reading his own State Hazard Mitigation Plan instead of doing Letterman and the Superbowl. Here are some excerpts:

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by Stephen Lacey via GreenTechMedia

It’s nearly impossible to get Congress to agree on anything.

But at a clean energy policy forum today, two congressmen — one Republican and one Democrat — agreed on three things: renewable energy is necessary, government should help leverage private investment in the sector, and the upcoming congressional showdown over sequestration and the debt ceiling may seriously hurt what’s left of federal support.

“We’ve got to be a more reliable partner,” said Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King. “We do all of this [wind, solar, biofuels] and our country becomes more energy secure. […] It’s the right thing to do.”

King was speaking to a packed crowd of policymakers, renewable energy companies, and investors on Capitol Hill at the American Council on Renewable Energy’s yearly policy forum.

His comments come after a political fight over the production tax credit, which pitted conservative Republicans like Rep. King against their own party during an election year. King was one of a handful of Republicans representing states with high wind penetrations who stood firmly in support of the tax credit. He has also been a major proponent of keeping the renewable fuels standard in place, even as members of his own party seek to repeal that target as well.

His speech touched on the importance of federal clean energy policies — mostly on biofuels, but also on wind and solar — that weren’t nearly as controversial five years ago as they are today among conservatives in Congress.

“The central theme that I’d like to address here is that we want to attract risk capital. Wise investment money. There has to be a reliable partnership. [...] When you hear people on the other side say, ‘Just cut out all the subsides’ and ‘Free enterprise will sort it all,’ you think about all the money for M16s and bulletproof vests we spend [to get energy]. That’s a subsidy.”

But when talking to reporters in the hall after his speech, the Congressman didn’t have much good to say about Congress’ ability to ensure that reliability.

“Congress has a lot of important things to do and we aren’t very good at multi-tasking. We’re sitting here looking at sequestration, the debt ceiling and the national debt. [...] I don’t think it becomes less politicized.”

King’s Democratic colleague, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, agreed wholeheartedly. The intensifying debate in Congress over automatic budget cuts and the country’s borrowing limit — commonly described as a “self-inflicted wound” — could end up hurting existing federal programs for clean energy.

“We’ve got some rocky moments ahead, most of them self-inflicted,” said Van Hollen in a speech. “The across-the-board cuts at the Department of Energy will hit ARPA-E, hit important efforts for renewable energy at EERE, and also have a negative impact on the 1603 [grant] program.”

Those cuts — part of $1 trillion in automatic spending reductions — will occur because of the 2011 Budget Control Act Congress passed in order to force an eventual deal on deficit reduction. However, because lawmakers haven’t yet agreed on a deficit reduction package, those cuts could happen after a self-imposed deadline of March 27.

Along with cuts to R&D programs and scaling back grants to companies that have already qualified, the “overall hit to the economy” of such a drastic measure will decrease demand for clean energy, said Van Hollen.

“In this era of divided government, it’s going to be hard to deal with these issues. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look longer-term. And I would encourage you all not to give up. If we stop talking about it, we’re never going to get it,” said Van Hollen, ending his otherwise gloomy speech on the state of congressional politics.

– Stephen Lacey is a senior editor at GreenTechMedia.  This was reprinted with permission.

Related CP Posts:

• 46 Republicans Claim Wind Credits Are Too ‘Costly’ After Voting To Retain Billions In Big Oil Subsidies
• Koch-Affiliated Group Campaigns To Make Wind Tax Credit ‘So Toxic’ Republicans Won’t Back It

By Danielle Baussan

Ten years from now, Super Bowl XLVII will be remembered for several reasons:

• 108-yard kickoff return for a touchdown
• an energized, though unsuccessful, comeback from the 49ers, and
• a record 164.1 million viewers who saw the Superdome lose electricity for 34 minutes.

Super Bowl XLVII’s blackout wasn’t the first outage at a sporting event, but it may be the first time that such a blackout served as a kickoff for conspiracy theories and misleading facts about energy infrastructure. Here’s a ten-yard run through misleading facts that have been attributed to the blackout.

We need more coal!

Entergy’s claim that there was no problem with energy supply wasn’t enough to deter Peabody Energy Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Gregory Boyce, who stated that, “Without coal, you might as well turn off half the lights not just for our favorite games but also for our cities, shops, factories and homes.” Yet coal use in power plants has dropped from 50 to 36 percent, based on the low cost of natural gas, and the high cost of respiratory problems from its pollution. Coal-powered electric plants are the nation’s top source of carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution, the primary source of climate change. Power plant emissions also cause smog, which triggers a host of health problems from lung damage, asthma attacks, and chest pain. Boyce’s claims aren’t just wrong—they’re dangerous.

We need to drill more!

Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-AK, said that the Super Bowl outage “helps to perhaps kick-start the debate,” as she released her energy plan blueprint that gives a big boost to increased drilling for oil and gas. “We’ve got this Immaculate Conception theory of energy: It just happens, the lights turn on, it’s the temperature we want, until it’s not,” said the Senator. Oil isn’t generally used for electricity, though natural gas is a significant fuel for power plants. Regardless of what happened at the Super Bowl, an energy plan relying on fossil fuels gives us temperatures we really don’t want, in the form of global warming.

Energy efficiency caused the power outage!

Others tried to blame the Superdome’s 26,000 LED lights for the blackout, despite the fact that energy efficient lights reduce strain on the electrical grid and can help prevent blackouts. This sly finger-pointing was quickly shot down when others noticed that the LED lights were on the outside of the stadium — and did just fine.

Blame it on Beyonce!

Pop stars aren’t often blamed for infrastructure failures, but Beyonce’s high-voltage halftime performance raised theories that the brightly lit show caused an electric demand overload. Not so, says the Superdome’s manager — the performance was lit with generators.

While we haven’t quite discovered the true cause of the outage, this year’s Superbowl has sparked a new kind of Monday morning quarterbacking about energy infrastructure. Let’s hope that by next January, people will stop making the blame game the next “Superbowl shuffle,” end tired plays to promote dirty fossil fuels, and instead make forward passes on energy efficiency, cleaner power, and smart grid reform.

Danielle Baussan is the Associate Director of Government Affairs at the Center for American Progress

Deep-water oil exploration has been disrupted from the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil by the discovery of faulty bolts used in safety equipment, less than three years after the Deepwater Horizon spill, the worst-ever crude spill in U.S. maritime history. [Bloomberg]

Energy explorers such as Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Transocean Ltd. said they have been directed by U.S. regulators to suspend work aboard rigs that employ General Electric Co. devices connecting drilling tubes to safety gear and the seafloor. The equipment must be retrieved so defective bolts can be replaced, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said in an alert issued on Jan. 29.

Installing new bolts and resuming drilling may take as long as three weeks for each rig, Credit Suisse Group AG said….

The defect was discovered last month after a leak of drilling fluid was linked to bolts that failed because of stress corrosion, according to the Jan. 29 alert….

In the Gulf of Mexico, 24 of the 83 rigs actively drilling wells at the time of the alert carried connectors that may have flawed bolts, the agency said. Of those, six rigs have so far been cleared to return to drilling operations.

On Wednesday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ bid to require the high-profile panel to hold hearings on links between climate change, extreme weather and threats to coastal areas. [The Hill]

According to a new World Economic Forum report, additional climate-related public funding of approximately $34 billion could mobilize private capital in the range of US$ 570 billion — most of what’s needed to stabilize global temperatures at an acceptable level. [WEF]

A new bill in Arizona would prohibit any local government in the state from implementing any “creed, doctrine, principles or any tenet” of Agenda 21. [Grist]

A powerful storm is slated to plaster southern New England with blizzard conditions, hurricane-force winds, and coastal flooding, beginning on Friday and lasting through at least Saturday. [Climate Central]

Rooftop solar continues to have a dramatic impact on the energy market in South Australia. [Clean Technia]

Projections of how much tropical rainforest like the Amazon we’re likely to lose during the 21st century could be too high, according to a new study just published in Nature. [Carbon Brief]

Climate change is threatening the survival of a number of Asian bird species, including those in India, a new study warns. [Times of India]