If a tree falls in the forest (because of global warming), but the media doesn’t report on it, does it make a sound?

That is the question posed by the amazing banner graphic in today’s Washington Post:

In its quantification of the key elements of the speech, the paper’s editors apparently couldn’t see or hear or speak of the nearly 10% of the State of the Union address devoted to climate and energy. But, hey, Obama devoted 3% of the speech to immigration — that’s news!

Coincidentally, former VP Gore had this to say about the major media in a book tour event yesterday covered by ClimateWire (subs. req’d):

“The American networks, they won’t cover it,” he said. “It changed a little bit after Superstorm Sandy, but not much. It’s almost like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage at the mention of alcohol or his problems, and so everybody in the family learns to keep quiet, don’t mention the elephant in the room, let’s just don’t ever say it.”

… “We had disasters related to the climate one after the other, $110 billion worth of climate-related disaster damage last year, completely blowing away the previous record, half the North Polar ice cap melted last summer, and Superstorm Sandy devastated Manhattan and New Jersey, and all the while, we had a presidential campaign with more debates than ever in history,” he said, his voice rising. “And not one single reporter asked a single question in any of the debates of any of the candidates about the climate crisis. That is pathetic.”

‘Pathetic’ is the word.

Related Posts:

• Silence Of The Lambs 3: Media Coverage Of Climate Mixed In 2012, But Still Down Sharply From 2009

On Monday, USA Today reported that the price of gasoline hit $3.60 a gallon for the first time since October — an early start in comparison to the usual price rise seen in the spring. The increase occurred despite world oil production climbing to 88.8 million barrels per day in 2012, about 2 million barrels higher than two years ago according to the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer. And about half of that increased production is due to an oil boom in the United States that’s driven imported oil to its lowest level since 1987.

That increased oil production will bring down gas prices is one of the most reliable Republican canards when it comes to energy, so what gives?

As Plumer points out, “The big thing to remember is that oil prices are a function of both supply and demand. If world demand for oil rises faster than producers can pump the stuff out, prices will go up.” Plumer cites a piece by James Hamilton of UC San Diego, which shows China’s consumption of oil is booming, and that the world economy as a whole is growing apace — and thus demanding more oil — even as fuel efficiency increases.

Technically, the world isn’t even producing enough oil to keep pace with the rise in global incomes. Oil supply has risen by 2.3 percent since 2010. But the world economy has grown by 7.1 percent since then. The only reason that oil prices haven’t soared to record highs, Hamilton points out, is that countries have been undertaking new conservation measures. Americans, for instance, are buying more fuel-efficient cars in droves.

Granted, oil prices would almost certainly be even higher than they are now without the drilling boom over the past two years in places like North Dakota. But at this point, the extra drilling is struggling to keep up with the pace of global economic growth.

Here are the global production and consumption numbers for the last few years from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (note the numbers to the left start at 84,000 thousand barrels per day):

And despite forecasts from BP and the International Energy Agency that domestic and global oil production will continue rising, Plumer notes that high gas prices aren’t going away anytime soon:

The [IEA] recently projected that U.S. oil production would continue rising through 2020 and beyond, as companies extract more “unconventional” oil from shale rock and other sources. But global demand was also expected to rise 35 percent between now and 2035, with China on pace to become the largest oil consumer in the world in the next two decades.

And that’s the optimistic scenario. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a geophysical sciences professor at the University of Chicago and a lead author on the third IPCC Assessment Report, recently pointed out in Slate that while going after unconventional oil remains profitable, and thus likely to continue, it requires ever greater effort to retrieve the same amounts of oil:

Read more

By Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman

The United States was subjected to many severe climate-related extreme weather over the past two years. In 2011 there were 14 extreme weather events — floods, drought, storms, and wildfires — that each caused at least $1 billion in damage. There were another 11 such disasters in 2012. Most of these extreme weather events reflect part of the unpaid bill from climate change — a tab that will only grow over time.

CAP recently documented the human and economic toll from these devastating events in our November 2012 report “Heavy Weather: How Climate Destruction Harms Middle- and Lower- Income Americans.” Since the release of that report, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has updated its list of “billion-dollar”-damage weather events for 2012, bringing the two-year total to 25 incidents.

From 2011 to 2012 these 25 “billion-dollar damage” weather events in the United States are estimated to have caused up to $188 billion in total damage. [1] The two costliest events were the September 2012 drought — the worst drought in half a century, which baked nearly two-thirds of the continental United States — and superstorm Sandy, which battered the northeast coast in late October 2012. The four recently added disastrous weather events were severe tornadoes and thunderstorms.

Here is an update of vital extreme weather event data after the addition of these four events:

• 67 percent of U.S. counties and 43 states were affected by “billion-dollar damage” extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012.
• 1,107 fatalities resulted from these 25 extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012.
• Up to $188 billion in damage was caused by these severe weather events in 2011 and 2012.
• $50,346.58 was the average household income in counties declared a disaster due to these weather events—3 percent below the U.S. median household income of $51,914. [2]
• 356 all-time high temperature records were broken in 2012.
• 34,008 daily high temperature records were set or tied throughout 2012, compared to just 6,664 daily record lows—a ratio of 5-to-1.
• 19 states had their warmest year ever in 2012.

Read more

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) made an appearance on Fox and Friends Wednesday morning less than 12 hours after delivering the GOP rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address. The Republican Party’s newest champion took the time to shoot down the realities of climate change and the kinds of regulations that he himself once supported as the speaker of the house in Florida.

During his speech on Tuesday, President Obama called for a market-based approach towards solving the climate crisis, stressing the economic as well as environmental benefits that derive from investments in clean energy. In response, Rubio attacked cap and trade legislation as an economic menace that would cripple the recovery, and he repeated the claim again this morning:

RUBIO: The government can’t change the weather. I said that in the speech. We can pass a bunch of laws that will destroy our economy, but it isn’t going to change the weather. Because, for example, there are other countries that are polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are at this point, China, India, all these countries that are still growing. They’re not going to stop doing what they’re doing. America is a country, it’s not a planet. So we can pass a bunch of laws or executive orders that will do nothing to change the climate or the weather but will devastate our economy.

Watch it:

In fact, Rubio is wrong that “there are other countries that are polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are at this point.” There is only one — China — and it is still a long way away from reaching America’s level of cumulative carbon pollution, and it is the total pollution emitted to date that drives climate change. That’s why it is so important America lead the way on climate action.

Rubio’s anti-science rhetoric is no surprise since he has also expressed skepticism towards the nearly universal consensus among scientists that humans have played a detrimental role in climate change.

While Rubio is right that America is not a planet, he is wrong to suggest that cap and trade — which has in the past enjoyed bipartisan support — would hinder economic growth. In fact, just last week a consortium of 9 northeastern states and the privately owned energy companies that power them announced they would be expanding a regional cap and trade system that has been in place since 2008, citing the positive economic and environmental benefits reaped over the last five years.

Rubio himself sought to turn Florida into “the Silicon Valley” of the green energy industry, lauding the state’s push for a version of cap and trade legislation as a potential moneymaker for Floridian businesses during a 2008 floor speech. There is also ample evidence to suggest that investments in renewable energy would help create millions of jobs and quicken the economic recovery, not hamper it as Rubio claims.

As President Obama noted in his address, other countries — China included — have raced ahead of the United States in the development of clean, alternative energy. And in Europe, countries like Germany have taken far greater strides than the U.S in solar energy, producing as much as 80 times more electricity relative to energy consumption through photovoltaic panels as compared to the United States.

NRDC President Frances Beinecke. (Photo credit: Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com)

By Tom Kenworthy

The head of the Natural Resources Defense Council appeared before a Senate committee looking into the implications of the nation’s shale gas revolution yesterday. Frances Beinecke issued a compelling appeal for tougher federal oversight of the oil and gas industry and its drilling practices that have raised widespread concerns about public health and safety.

“I have never seen a single issue that has frightened, antagonized and activated people across this country like the practice of fracking,” NRDC president Beinecke told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Referring to the industry practice of stimulating oil and gas production by injecting a mix of chemicals, water and sand into underground rock formations, Beinecke said:

“Families are angered and frustrated by their inability to control fracking in their towns, and sometimes on their own property. They want to know that their water is safe, their air is clean and their lands and farms are protected. They want to know their children are healthy.”

Beinecke’s comments captured a troubling truth for the oil and gas industry, which to a large extent has been caught off guard by the mounting public hostility to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing. Fracking is now used in the vast majority of drilling operations and has opened up vast new domestic reserves of oil and gas previously locked in shale formations. As Beinecke noted, a December Bloomberg poll found that 66 percent of U.S. respondents believe there should be more aggressive government oversight of fracking, a majority that surged by ten points in just the previous three months.

While the industry favors the current patchwork of state regulation, Beinecke said states have neither the technical ability nor the political will to adequately protect the public from ill effects of drilling that can include air and groundwater pollution, hazardous wastes, and carbon pollution from methane leaks.

In addition, as other groups like the Center for American Progress have pointed out, Beinecke said that numerous oil and gas exemptions from bedrock national environmental laws make federal oversight also insufficient. “There is simply no justification for exempting fracking from the basic environmental laws that have applied to other industrial activities for four decades,” she said in written testimony, noting exemptions enjoyed by oil and gas from statutes such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act among others.

She also called on the federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees drilling on some 700 million acres of federal land and other properties where the federal government controls the mineral rights, to toughen pending fracking rules that now appear to be in the process of getting watered down. The BLM, she said, “may be going in exactly the wrong direction.”

That concern was also raised last week by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who chairs the Senate energy panel. In a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Wyden urged that he ensure a “properly constructed rule with sound requirements for public disclosure, well integrity, and monitoring.”

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

By Bill Becker

Barack Obama is very likely the last American president who can keep us from plunging helplessly off the climate cliff. Judging by his Inaugural and State of the Union speeches, he gets that.

It has been a long time coming.

Lyndon Johnson was the first president on record to be warned that unless our energy policies changed, climate change would become apparent, and perhaps irreversible, by the turn of the century. In 1965, Johnson’s panel of science advisors told him:

By the year 2000 there will be about 25 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere than at present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable through local or even national efforts, could occur.

Now, 48 years and eight presidents later, climate disruption is accelerating more quickly than most scientists predicted. U.S. energy policy is still dominated by denial, by the political influence of fossil energy industries, and by Congress’s negligent disregard for climate science. The growing consensus now is that the world is locked in to global temperature increases well above the 2 degrees Centigrade that scientists say would give us an even chance of avoiding the worst impacts of global warming.

In 2009, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned that global greenhouse gas emissions must begin to decline by 2015 if we are to keep climate disruption from spinning beyond control.

“It is not enough to set any aspirational goal for 2050,” he said. “It is critically important that we bring about a commitment to reduce emissions effectively by 2020.”

That threshold year — 2015 — is happening on Obama’s watch.

President Obama can’t reverse the world’s race toward the climate cliff single-handedly, of course. It would be both unrealistic and unfair to expect him to become the world’s environmental superhero.

But he has reignited hopes that the United States, the source of most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today, and still the world’s second-largest source of those emissions, will make the effort. American leadership has been a missing catalyst for a serious global climate commitment.

In his State of the Union address, Obama said that if Congress doesn’t act, he will. The President‘s powers are not insignificant. But most of the actions Obama can take unilaterally are perishable. Executive orders and presidential proclamations can be undone by the next President or by Congress.

That’s why America’s diverse “stakeholders” in a more stable climate — from farmers to homebuilders, from coastal communities to the evolving dustbowl in the heartland, and from sports fishermen to the workers who assemble wind turbines and solar panels — must have Obama’s back.

Obama has said he’ll do his job. Ours is to create such strong grassroots political support for climate action that no future President would dare undo what we hope Obama will accomplish.

– William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project. The information, opinions and unattributed quotations in this blog are derived from “The Boundaries of Executive Authority”, a two-volume analysis of presidential powers by the Center for Energy and Environmental Security at the University of Colorado School of Law. See its analysis here and here.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) center, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) right.

Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are expected to outline climate legislation on Thursday morning, which will include a tax on carbon emissions. [The Nation]

Senators Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer will outline the legislation on Thursday morning. Details are scant, though it’s being billed as “major” and “comprehensive” legislation, and will have a carbon tax, per a statement from Sanders’s office:

“Under the legislation, a fee on carbon pollution emissions would fund historic investments in energy efficiency and sustainable energy technologies such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass. The proposal also would provide rebates to consumers to offset any efforts by oil, coal or gas companies to raise prices.”

In response to President Obama’s proposals in tonight’s State of the Union address to fight climate change, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is launching a multi-state TV ad campaign to support that goal. [EDF]

A study in the February Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans ties the measured acceleration of sea level rise along the mid-Atlantic coast of the U.S. to a simultaneous slowdown in the flow of the Gulf Stream. [Climate Central]

Superstorm Sandy was the deadliest hurricane in the northeastern U.S. in 40 years and the second-costliest in the nation’s history, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Hurricane Center. [AP]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reaffirmed its initial conclusion that Hurricane Sandy was no longer a hurricane when it made landfall. Instead, it was a “post-tropical cyclone” packing hurricane-force winds, the report said. [Climate Central]

Europe’s emissions trading scheme has spurred some companies to file patents for technology that cuts greenhouse gas emissions, but had virtually no impact on the number of so-called low carbon patents since the scheme launched in 2005, a new study has found. [Reuters]

Two office blocks in Norway from the 1980s are about to be refit with geothermal and solar energy capacity as a demonstration project for “energy positive” buildings. [Reuters]

The UK will need to develop a huge fleet of currently experimental nuclear reactors by mid-century, to meet the most nuclear-intensive scenario for moving away from fossil fuels, according to a report by the government’s most senior scientific advisers. [The Guardian]