Juliet Eilperin drops this vial of nitroglycerin into her latest Washington Post piece:

… according to several people familiar with his private remarks at the home of clean-tech entrepreneur Vinod Khosla, Obama expressed concerns about the political pain involved, saying that “dial testing” of his State of the Union speech showed that the favorability ratings “plummeted” when he vowed to act on climate change if Congress refused to do so.

Not exactly “profiles in courage.” Not exactly “the Environmental President.”

This may not come as a big surprise given how Obama’s once soaring rhetoric on the moral urgency of climate action has recently crash landed.

But what makes this particularly feckless is that dial testing is all but meaningless. Compared to using polls to determine political positions — a common if widely criticized practice — using dial tests to do so is like consulting your horoscope.

For those who aren’t political junkies, I recommend this introduction, “What Are Those Squiggly Lines on CNN Telling You?”

Dial-testing relies on hand-held dials that can be turned to register positive and negative reactions in real time. Participants in the focus group — 30 is a typical size — sit together and are instructed to continually adjust the dial to reflect how they react to a word, phrase, or sentence.

Here is a typical expert view of the value of dial group information:

Cliff Zukin, director of the public-policy program at Rutgers University and former head of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, argues that dial-testing is unhelpful and misleading. He points to the fact that the sample of voters is far smaller than even the tiniest poll.

“It has no scientific validity — it’s not a sample of anything that has generalized validity,” he says. What’s more, he argues, it introduces inaccurate numbers that assume a power of their own. “The problem with bad numbers is that people tend to believe their eyes.”

So the President is basing his climate policy decisions on something that has no scientific validity. Awesome. Perhaps next time it’ll be Tarot cards — or denier blogs, which are much the same thing.

Even worse, it’s entirely possible that respondents give a negative dial reaction for something that in fact works.

CNN’s focus group is run by Rita Kirk, who concedes:
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The Seattle City Council unanimously passed a far-reaching Climate Action Plan Monday, with the ultimate goal of reaching zero net emissions by 2050.

The ambitious plan, crafted by city officials and community members, provides a long-term vision for reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions while building vibrant, prosperous communities.

Specifically, the plan focuses on three areas where Seattle can benefit the most from improvements: transportation and land use, building energy and solid waste.

“We can do something meaningful, not just for the planet, but also to create the city we want to live in, one that is safer to walk and bike and has cleaner air and water,” said city councilman Mike O’Brien.

The plan includes improving and expanding the city’s bus system, building the infrastructure to make it safer to walk or bike around, and building out the region’s light-rail system. These moves would help reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent, according to the Seattle Times.

To curb building energy costs, the plan details the continuation of projects to weatherize homes and to develop a way to rate home energy performance when a house is listed for sale.

Ways to conserve of electricity and water were identified as areas to improve upon and preparing for the possible impacts of climate change on at-risk populations, such as the poor.

The plan also includes strategies to prepare for adverse climate effects that the city could be subject to, such as identifying flood prone areas and creating land use plans that would adapt for rising sea levels.

In addition to the city council’s climate plan, Mayor Mike McGinn announced an energy efficiency initiative that will cut emissions and could save homeowners 35 to 50 percent in energy costs.

Many cities have prioritized plans for climate change in the wake of unprecedented extreme weather and rising average temperatures. On Monday, 45 mayors from cities across the country pledged to take action to prepare and protect their communities from the increasing disasters and disruptions fueled by climate change.

And in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, released an extensive climate resiliency plan last week. PlaNYC includes 250 recommendations to address the reality of climate change and prepare for its impacts.

Kirsten Gibson is an intern for ThinkProgress.

On Monday, twenty-two people peacefully obstructed the entrance to the building that houses the State Department’s offices in downtown Chicago. They were then arrested without incident.

Last week in London, several protesters were arrested inside the Parliament building after attempting to disrupt a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Hundreds were arrested in 2011 for trespassing on Parliament Hill in Ottowa.

In February, former NASA climate scientists James Hansen and dozens of leaders of the environmental movement like Michael Brune of the Sierra Club were arrested in front of the White House. Some 1,252 people were arrested in front of the White House in 2011 over 15 days.

All of these people have one thing in common — they are willing to risk arrest in an attempt to stop the U.S. and Canada from building the northern leg of the tar sands-pumping Keystone XL pipeline.

Monday’s protest was particularly significant since most of the activists who walked to the State Department’s Chicago office and got arrested were former Obama campaign staff, donors, and volunteers.

Organized by CREDO Action, Rainforest Action Network, and The Other 98%, the protesters went to State Department offices because that is where the decision process currently rests as the department drafts a Final Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The protest took place in Chicago because that is President Obama’s hometown and where he chose to locate the organization built upon his successful presidential campaign: Organizing for Action (OFA). Many of the 22 that walked to the State Department’s Chicago office and got arrested were former Obama campaign staff, donors, and volunteers.

Elijah Zarlin worked as a Senior National Email Writer on the 2008 Obama campaign for almost a year (it his t-shirt featured above, worn by many protesters on Monday, displaying President Obama’s words on his commitment to climate action) . Following the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Zarlin told Climate Progress he remembered then-Senator Obama telling campaign staff that if they wanted to do something about climate change, they had to win the general election. “I took that to heart,” he said.

“I never thought I’d be back in Chicago to risk arrest in order to get President Obama to do the right thing on climate change,” said Zarlin, who now works for CREDO. He said he participated in the sit-in because “we haven’t seen leadership and policies to truly make an impact,” despite the president’s “commitment he made to his staff and supporters to fight climate change.” In 2011 he was part of the 1,252 people who were arrested at the White House protesting Keystone.

Becky Bond, CREDO Action’s political director, said that the protest that happened Monday was “a preview of what’s to come if [President Obama's] State Department recommends approval of the pipeline.” More than 62,000 people signed the Pledge of Resistance, which is a commitment to risking arrest “to send a message to the president that he must reject Keystone XL.”

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– by Zach Heffernen

Starting March 1, 2014, through a non-profit called Great March for Climate Action, 1,000 climate hawks will march from Santa Monica, CA, across the United States to Washington, DC. This will be the largest coast-to-coast march in American history. It is aimed at inspiring and motivating the general public and elected officials to act now to address the climate crisis.

While marchers will undergo eight months of heat, wind, mountainous terrain, and insects, it will be an incredibly rewarding, life-changing adventure to promote a cause they are passionate about. Marchers will walk 14-15 miles per day and tent camp nearly every night. Also, educational activities will be conducted along the March as a key component to teach and inspire climate action within local communities. Several people are referring to it as “the adventure of a lifetime” and “an excellent opportunity to travel our beautiful country.”

The founder, Ed Fallon, inspired by other non-violent march leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, decided that organizing a march would be the best way he could stimulate change. “Climate change is not the prevailing issue confronting our society – it is the prevailing crisis!” Fallon exclaims. “This needs to become the defining issue of this century.”

So far, Great March for Climate Action has enjoyed several prestigious endorsements, including but not limited to: 350.org and Bill McKibben, Iowa Representative Bruce Braley, Iowa Senator Rob Hogg, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Center for Biological Diversity. More are coming in every week.

The organization will begin taking marcher applications in July 2013. “I anticipate to receive a large influx of applications that first month,” reports Zach Heffernen, Marcher Director. “I recommend submission of the application right away to everyone who is serious about marching.”

Please like our Facebook page and generate additional awareness! For questions or to learn how to volunteer or march, contact me at zach@climatemarch.org or 513-5-WE-WALK (513-593-9255).

A stunning expose by 100Reporters and Environmental Health News underscores how far some companies will go to squelch a scientific review of the impact of their products.

Award-winning reporter Clare Howard, now with the investigative journalism nonprofit, “100Reporters,” has a must-read piece on the length one company went to in order to discredit critics:

To protect profits threatened by a lawsuit over its controversial herbicide atrazine, Syngenta Crop Protection launched an aggressive multi-million dollar campaign that included hiring a detective agency to investigate scientists on a federal advisory panel, looking into the personal life of a judge and commissioning a psychological profile of a leading scientist critical of atrazine.

The Switzerland-based pesticide manufacturer also routinely paid “third-party allies” to appear to be independent supporters, and kept a list of 130 people and groups it could recruit as experts without disclosing ties to the company.

Recently unsealed court documents reveal a corporate strategy to discredit critics and to strip plaintiffs from the class-action case. The company specifically targeted one of atrazine’s fiercest and most outspoken critics, Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, whose research suggests that atrazine feminizes male frogs.

The campaign is spelled out in hundreds of pages of memos, invoices and other documents from Illinois’ Madison County Circuit Court, that were initially sealed as part of a 2004 lawsuit filed by Holiday Shores Sanitary District. The new documents, along with an earlier tranche released in late 2011, open a window on the company’s strategy to defeat a lawsuit that, it maintained, could have effectively ended sales of atrazine in the United States.

Of course, it’s not like there is an infinite supply of anti-science guns for hire. So we see again some of the usual suspects. Climate Progress has written in the past about how “Steve Milloy, Anti-Science Tobacco Apologist, Now Denies Coal Plant Pollution Kills People.”

Howard details his involvement with Atrazine:

Steven Milloy, publisher of junkscience.com and president of Citizens for the Integrity of Science, is also in Syngenta’s Supportive Third Party Stakeholders Database.

In a Dec. 3, 2004, email to Syngenta, Milloy requests a grant of $15,000 for the nonprofit Free Enterprise Education Institute for an atrazine stewardship cost-benefit analysis project.

In a letter dated Aug. 6, 2008, Milloy requests a $25,000 grant for the nonprofit Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research. In an email on that date, he writes, “send the check to me as usual and I’ll take care of it.”

While Op-Eds aim to shape public opinion, economic and cost-benefit analyses were also important, because EPA rulings on pesticide use are based on health, environmental and economic effects.

Junk science, indeed.

As the Obama administration’s decision regarding whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline draws nearer, the latest disaster is raising serious concerns about the safety of Canada’s rapidly expanding pipeline network.

A massive toxic waste spill from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta is being called one of the largest recent environmental disasters in North America. First reported on June 1, the Texas-based Apache Corp. didn’t reveal the size of the spill until June 12, which is said to cover more than 1,000 acres.

Members of the Dene Tha First Nation tribe are outraged that it took several days before they were informed that 9.5 million liters of salt and heavy-metal-laced wastewater had leaked onto wetlands they use for hunting and trapping.

“Every plant and tree died” in the area touched by the spill, said James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene Tha.

As the Globe and Mail reports, the Apache disaster is not an anomaly:

The leak follows a pair of other major spills in the region, including 800,000 litres of an oil-water mixture from Pace Oil and Gas Ltd., and nearly 3.5 million litres of oil from a pipeline run by Plains Midstream Canada.

After those accidents, the Dene Tha had asked the Energy Resources Conservation Board, Alberta’s energy regulator, to require installation of pressure and volume monitors, as well as emergency shutoff devices, on aging oil and gas infrastructure. The Apache spill has renewed calls for change.

Following initial speculation that the leak stemmed from aging infrastructure, officials from Apache Corp. revealed that the pipeline was only five years old and had been designed to last for 30.

The incident comes on the heels of accusations from the provincial New Democratic Party that Alberta Energy Minister Ken Hughes is withholding the results of an internal pipeline safety report pending the U.S. government’s decision regarding Keystone XL. The report was commissioned last summer by Alberta Energy following a series of toxic spills — including the Plains Midstream Canada spill that leached 475,000 liters of oil into the Red Deer River, a major source of drinking water for central Alberta.

According to Winnipeg Free Press, “an engineering firm completed the technical report last fall and presented the findings to the government, which sent the findings to the Energy Resources Conservation Board for a review that was to be completed by March 31.”

Hughes denied delaying the report but declined to give a release date, saying only that it would come “fairly soon.”

A recent Global News investigation found that over the past 37 years, Alberta’s extensive network of pipelines has experienced 28,666 crude oil spills in total, plus another 31,453 spills of a variety of other liquids used in oil and gas production — from salt water to liquid petroleum. That averages out to two crude oil spills a day, every day.

As concerns mount over Apache’s delay in detecting and reporting its extensive toxic waste spill, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that TransCanada is not planning to use the external leak detection tools recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency for its proposed Keystone XL pipeline. As a result, the State Department concludes “Keystone XL would have to be spilling more than 12,000 barrels a day — or 1.5 percent of its 830,000 barrel capacity — before its currently planned internal spill-detection systems would trigger an alarm.”

The largest study to date that examines the link between air pollution and autism found that women living in high-pollution areas were twice as likely to have a child with the disorder. [Bloomberg]

Researchers seeking the roots of autism have linked the disorder to chemicals in air pollution and, in a separate study, found that language difficulties of the disorder may be due to a disconnect in brain wiring.

Researchers from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that pregnant women exposed to high levels of diesel particulates or mercury were twice as likely to have an autistic child compared with peers in low-pollution areas. The findings, published today in Environmental Health Perspectives, are from the largest U.S. study to examine the ties between air pollution and autism. …

The link to air pollution was initially made in 2006 by a group led by Gayle Windham at the California Department of Health Services. Another study, published in November 2012, also found links between air pollution and autism.

“People were skeptical” of the initial report from Windham’s group, said Marc Weisskopf, an author of today’s study and an associate professor of environmental health and epidemiology at Harvard University’s School of Public Health in Boston. “I went to do this in a larger setting, not at all convinced we would see anything.”

In the public comment period regarding the proposed gold and copper Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay watershed, the comments supporting the mine come from the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute. No really: 117,401 out of 118,294 mass e-mail comments came from CEI. [Washington Post]

After beginning the year with record levels of air pollution, Beijing over the weekend detailed targets for pollution reduction, primarily from heavy-polluting industries. [Guardian]

The builders of the Keystone pipeline say they are not planning on using high-tech methods of detecting spills along its route. [Bloomberg]

It is still unclear how or why people exposed to oil spills get sick — and there are no clear federal chemical exposure guidelines for spills. [Inside Climate News]

Canada’s tar sands companies have failed to clean up toxic waste ponds created through tar sands mining, a new report finds. [Guardian]

Experts in Britain’s Met Office are meeting to discuss the country’s extreme weather patterns, including the coldest spring of 50 years this year and the wettest summer in 100 years last year. [The Independent]

45 mayors have signed a pledge promising to prepare their cities for the “disasters and disruptions fueled by climate change.” [Grist]

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New research finds that “unusual changes in atmospheric jet stream circulation caused the exceptional surface melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) in summer 2012.”
Prof. Jennifer Francis tells me these changes are consistent with those caused by warming-driven “Arctic Amplification.” And that means GrIS may melt faster than climate models have projected.

Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8, 2012 (left) and July 12, 2012. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed. Credit: NASA.

Back in May, a study found that by 2025, there is a “50-50 chance” of this unprecedented ice melt happening annually simply based on the continued rapid warming of GrIS.

This new study, “Atmospheric and oceanic climate forcing of the exceptional Greenland ice sheet surface melt in summer 2012,” suggests this kind of melt may become commonplace even sooner.

As the news release explains, an international team used a computer model and satellite data “to confirm a record surface melting of the GrIS for at least the last 50 years – when on 11 July 2012, more than 90 percent of the ice-sheet surface melted. This far exceeded the previous surface melt extent record of 52 percent in 2010.” Weather station data “showed that several new high Greenland temperature records were set in summer 2012.”

The research “clearly demonstrates that the record surface melting of the GrIS was mainly caused by highly unusual atmospheric circulation and jet stream changes, which were also responsible for last summer’s unusually wet weather in England.”

What were these changes? Professor Edward Hanna from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Geography explains:

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A poll released today by the Center for American Progress shows strong evidence that Americans believe energy development and land conservation are out of balance. It also demonstrates that there is a wide gap between political rhetoric by the oil and gas industry and their allies in Congress and the opinions of westerners about oil and gas drilling.

Consider, for example, that in this survey:

- 65 percent of voters (across party lines) say that permanently protecting and conserving public lands for future generations is very important to them
- 63 percent of voters are concerned with preserving access to recreation opportunities on public lands
- Only 30 percent of voters say that making sure that oil and gas resources on public lands are available for development is an important priority
- 49 percent of voters want the government to focus more on conserving public lands
- 29 percent of voters want the government to focus on more opportunities for oil and gas drilling

Additionally, poll respondents were most concerned with the impacts of drilling on their communities and environmentally sensitive areas (rather than too many restrictions being placed on drilling or too many areas being placed off limits to drilling). This finding directly contradicts industry rhetoric, which would have us believe that Americans want the doors thrown open to drilling on more public lands and waters. For example, Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute claimed that the public is “appalled” when it hears that some elected officials “resist development of American resources.”

The start of the second term of the Obama administration is an important time for conservation and energy policy. An analysis earlier this year shows that during its first term, the administration leased 6.3 million acres of public lands to oil and gas companies while only permanently protecting 2.6 million acres.

In order to address this disparity, a new campaign known as “Equal Ground” was launched today.

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New Yorkers’ food scraps will soon be turned into electricity, thanks to a new initiative announced Sunday by the office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The new “food recycling” program will call for the construction of a composting facility in the New York region to take 100,000 tons of food waste a year — just one tenth of the total one million pounds created by New York residents annually. Compost will be turned into biogas, with the express purpose of helping the city lower its electric bill.

The launch of the program will be voluntary, and city officials estimate that 150,000 homes will take part, along with 600 schools and 100 high-rise buildings, the New York Times reports. By 2015 or 2016, however, officials hope to have the whole city on board.

The program will be hugely beneficial for New Yorkers’ wallets. Just days ago, a report found that Americans throw out 40 percent of their food. That waste amounts to $400 per person annually.

Additionally, in 2012, the New York Citizens Budget Commission estimated that (PDF) New York would spend “$2 billion in tax dollars throwing out its garbage,” and about $300 million of that was on the process of disposing of the waste. Much of New York’s garbage is shipped out-of-state to landfills in Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. The Commission estimates that it cost taxpayers “$95 per ton for the three million tons the City exports to landfills,” meaning that New Yorkers are not just wasting money on food, they’re also wasting money on throwing it out.

The new program, however, will actually bring down costs of transporting waste by bringing a composting facility to the area. At the same time, by harnessing biofuels, it will introduce more sustainable and cheaper energy: Rotting food at landfills emit 17 percent of the total methane produced by the US. That methane goes up into the atmosphere and acts as one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

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When we talk about combating climate, the most obvious issues that come to mind are policies to prevent carbon dioxide emissions — cap-and-trade programs and carbon taxes and environmental regulations. Then there are the technological solutions like renewable energy and electrified vehicle fleets and more energy efficient infrastructure. If people are feeling desperate, they start discussing geoengineering

But one part of the climate change solution mix doesn’t get talked about as often, perhaps because it’s almost too obvious: we need more plants. Or, more specifically, we need more forests.

Thanks to photosynthesis — the process by which plants convert sunlight into energy — trees and other flora remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen. This allows them to act as a “carbon sink” — any process that results in a net removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Conversely, deforestation releases the carbon forests store up back into the atmosphere. The 2007 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that deforestation contributes roughly 17 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, putting it in third place behind the global energy sector’s 26 percent and the global industrial sector’s 19 percent. Most of that action is in tropical forests, where the most egregious deforestation is occurring. Also, contrary to the image of individual rural farmers chopping down rainforest for crop land, most tropical deforestation these days can be laid at the feet of major industries and corporations.

What It Can’t Achieve

Start with the bad news. A recent article in The Conversation pointed to a 2011 study that attempted to measure the effect of living biomass, dead wood, and other organic products from temperate, boreal, and tropical forests between 1990 and 2007. Assessing global satellite data, global forest growth, and density is tough, but the researchers determined that Earth’s forests are taking in around 4 billion metric tons of carbon a year. Unfortunately, deforestation — which exists in a constant tug-of-war with regrowth — rolled a lot of that back, resulting in a net carbon sink effect of 1.1 billion metric tons annually.

The problem is the sheer scale of the numbers surrounding the global forest carbon sink. In 2010, fossil fuel burning, cement production, land use — including deforestation — dumped a grand total of 36.7 billion metric tons into the atmosphere. But only half stayed there. (Deforestation’s 17 percent contribution was to that final atmospheric amount.) The rest was absorbed by the oceans and the land, the latter including the forest carbon sink’s 4 billion metric ton contribution.

Those numbers were about the same in 2011. So just considering the carbon dioxide that got into the atmosphere, even getting back all 3 billion metric tons lost to deforestation would take out only a slice of the problem. The most pessimistic study on this front was released in 2013, and determined that even the best case scenario of deforestation reduction would cut atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by 40 to 70 parts per million (ppm). That’s in comparison to the up to 600 ppm above 2000 levels human activity is anticipated to add by 2100 under most projections.

There are lots of reasons why reforestation’s potential to curb climate change is limited.

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You may be wondering if you should see the new pro-nuke movie, “Pandora’s Promise.” I think it’s safe to say that the answer is a resounding “no.”

Indeed, the most stunning thing I’ve read about the movie comes from someone who is generally positive about it, NY Times blogger Andy Revkin:

The film also avoids discussing the high costs and logistical and policy hurdles to adding substantially to the country’s, or world’s, existing fleets of operating nuclear plants. The scale and costs required to cut into coal use using any technology — nuclear, wind, solar or otherwise — is incredibly daunting.

Huh? Doing a movie about nuclear power without discussing the high costs, would be like doing a movie comparing the US healthcare system to that of other countries … without discussing the high costs!!!

Climate Progress has published dozens of posts about nuclear power — including two major reports (see here and here). I think nuclear power might provide as much as 5% to 10% of the “solution” to global warming.

But in virtually all of our pieces cost is a major — if not the major — focus. That’s because it is the failure of the industry to make their product affordable — not the environmental community’s supposedly unwarranted fears of radiation — that has knee-capped the industry (see here and below).

Indeed, while solar power and wind power continue to march down the experience curve to ever lower costs, nuclear power appears headed in the opposite direction.

Nuclear power has a negative learning curve:

Average and min/max reactor construction costs per year of completion date for US and France versus cumulative capacity completed.

Amazingly, in the past few few years utilities have told state regulators that the cost of new nuclear plants is in the $5,500 to $8,100 per kilowatt range (see Nuclear power: The price is not right and Exclusive analysis: The staggering cost of new nuclear power).

Pandora’s original promise was “too cheap to meter.” It is a broken promise.

So Pandora’s Promise would appear to be largely irrelevant to those interested in the climate debate. But is it something a CP reader should see anyway?

Like Dave Roberts at Grist, I’m not writing a movie review. Since my review copy hasn’t arrived yet, let’s treat it like any other movie and look at the big name reviewers at the NY Times and WashPost and see what the target audience thinks of it.

NY Times reviewer Manohla Dargis writes:

‘Pandora’s Promise’ is as stacked as advocate movies get…. In brief — or so the movie’s one-sided reasoning goes — everything that anti-nuclear energy activists and skeptics have thought about the issue is wrong….

But you need to make an argument. A parade of like-minded nuclear-power advocates who assure us that everything will be all right just doesn’t cut it.

Ouch! Michael O’Sullivan, reviewer for my “hometown” newspaper, the Washington Post, gives the movie 2 and 1/2 stars out of 4 — a “good” rating — noting:

Despite its pro-nuke slant, environmentalists are the film’s intended audience. After all, as the film points out, most pro-business Republicans are already in love with the idea of more nuclear power plants, and need no convincing.

So I guess Climate Progress readers are the film’s intended audience. O’Sullivan continues:

But left-leaning supporters of green energy aren’t just the film’s target demo. They’re also its main subjects. Gwyneth Cravens, Mark Lynas, Michael Shellenberger and other respected environmental activists, authors and experts appear throughout the film, explaining why they have recently started to reconsider their former staunch opposition to nuclear power.

Stop the presses! I guess Climate Progress readers — and environmentalists in general — are not the film’s intended audience after all. You have to look pretty hard to find many respected environmental activists who consider Shellenberger one of their own.

As CP readers know, Shellenberger has dedicated himself to spreading disinformation about Gore, Congressional leaders, Waxman and Markey, leading climate scientists, Al Gore again, the entire environmental community and anyone else trying to end our status quo energy policies, including me. Heck he even went after Rachel Carson!

Now this wouldn’t matter if this movie were just being sold as “watch an objective look at nuclear power from all sides.” But it is being sold as “watch environmentalists who have rethought their position on nukes.” That makes it “contrarian,” which the MSM, if no one else, usually eats up.

But the media — at least the informed media — isn’t fooled. As Mark Hertsgaard explains in the Nation, the environmentalists in the film are generally either sheep in wolves’ clothing or sui generis:

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Last week, the members and leaders of eighteen Latino organizations sent a clear message to President Obama, reiterating their strong support for addressing climate change by cutting pollution from power plants.

Emphasizing their hope to provide a healthy future for generations to come, the organizations stated, “Our members and supporters share your concerns about climate change and are eager to see your administration act now.”

The organizations’ letter to the President highlighted the dangers faced by a majority of the Hispanic community due to their work in the agriculture and construction industries, as well as their exposure to high levels of smog. In fact, 48.4% of Hispanics currently live in areas within the U.S. where ozone exceeds the threshold value set by the government.

Taking steps to limit and control carbon pollution from new and existing power plants is a key priority for the Latino organizations. A large portion of the Hispanic community faces adverse health effects and exposure to extreme weather events due to climate change implications related to emissions.

Power plants are currently responsible for 40% of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions and have a substantial contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gases. These vast emissions profiles make power plants significant contributors to climate change, but because power plants are often the largest direct sources of air pollutants, regulating them can lead to the most immediate emissions decreases.

The President can respond to the Latino community’s request by continuing to push the country towards his goal of a 17% reduction of CO2 levels by 2020. Thus far, the U.S. has cut carbon emissions to 9% below 2005 levels through extensive reductions in motor vehicle carbon emissions and increases in renewable energy generation.

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BP is stopping regular cleanup patrols in the Gulf, even though oil continues to wash up on the shores of the region. [AP]

Finding tar balls linked to the BP oil spill isn’t difficult on some Gulf Coast beaches, but the company and the government say it isn’t common enough to keep sending out the crews that patrolled the sand for three years in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.

Tourist John Henson of Atlanta disagrees, particularly after going for a walk in the surf last week and coming back with dark, sticky stains on his feet.

Henson said there were plenty of tar balls to remove from the stretch of beach where he spent a few days, regardless of what any company or government agency might say.

“I was out there yesterday and stepped all in it,” Henson said.

Environmental advocates and casual visitors alike are questioning the Coast Guard decision to quit sending out BP-funded crews that have looked for oil deposits on northern Gulf Coast beaches on a regular basis since the 2010 spill spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf after an explosion and fire that killed 11 workers.

The Obama administration has still not used the National Environmental Policy Act to weigh greenhouse gas emissions when approving projects, despite suggestions in 2010 that it would do so. [Reuters]

As coal demand drops in the U.S., the coal industry tries to export their product despite safety, public health, and climate issues. [New York Times]

Tar sands oil production in Canada seriously threatens the safety of the Mackenzie River Watershed, five times the size of France and essential for Canada’s ecosystem and economy. [Climate Central]

Fracking, which uses millions of gallons of water to produce oil and gas, is expanding into drought-stricken areas. [Arizona Daily Star]

Another report says that most of the world’s fossil fuels must be kept in the ground to avoid more than 2 degrees C in warming. [ABC News -- Australia, Guardian]

Illegal purposeful forest fires in Indonesia are making the air so bad in Singapore and Malaysia that residents are warned to stay indoors. [Reuters]

Warming lakes in Europe and North America are starting to seriously impact the wildlife and economy of the regions around them. [Daily Climate]

Though some “concrete progress” has been made, UN climate talks have faced delays over a disagreement about what “consensus” means. [Business Green, Agence France-Presse]

Goldman Sachs is contemplating a $3.19 billion investment in renewables in Japan, particularly offshore wind energy. [Bloomberg]

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A Father’s Day essay on the world we’re leaving our children

On the one hand, should I be blogging on Father’s Day? On the other hand, what more important day is there to blog on climate change than Father’s Day? So as a compromise, I’m doing a repost.

Salon published my Father’s Day essay back in 2010. It was a sequel of sorts to “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?” Sadly, it needs to be updated since we didn’t pass a climate bill and instead took a quantum leap closer to leaving our children a ruined climate.

As parents, we constantly admonish our children to share with others. The joke is that as adults, we hardly like to share anything at all. Who likes to lend out their car? Or their tools or books? We’re so worried they won’t come back in the same condition — or won’t be returned at all.

But the truth is that the people we like to share the least with are our own children. “We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children,” the saying goes. Right now, though, we’ve borrowed the entire Earth, trashed much of it, and don’t plan to give back the rest of it.

We are plundering the world’s “renewable resources” — arable land and tropical forests and fisheries and fresh water. And we are using an ever-greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources, especially hydrocarbons, with devastating consequences.

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Update: The Chinese Academy of Sciences has released an official response to Heartland’s “misleading statement”, which reads in part:

The Heartland Institute published the news titled “Chinese Academy of Sciences publishes Heartland Institute research skeptical of Global Warming” in a strongly misleading way on its website, implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) supports their views, in contrary to what is clearly stated in the Translators’ Note in the Chinese translation. The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false…

If the Heartland Institute does not withdraw its false news or refuse to apologize, all the consequences and liabilities should be borne by the Heartland Institute. We reserve the right for further actions to protect the rights of CAS and the translators group.

by Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science

As Cook et al. 2013 (also known as The Consensus Project) showed, the consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that humans are causing global warming has been growing over the past two decades.  In 2011, 98% of papers taking a position on the cause of global warming agreed that humans are causing it.

Percentage of “global warming” or “global climate change” papers endorsing the consensus among only papers that express a position endorsing or rejecting the consensus.  From Cook et al. (2013).

However, as Graham Readfearn recently documented, over those same two decades, fossil fuel interests have engaged in a number of campaigns to cast doubt on the existence of the consensus on human-caused global warming.  Convincing the public that this settled science is still in dispute has long been a top priority for industry groups.

The results of Cook et al. 2013 juxtaposed with some fossil fuel-funded campaigns to deny the scientific consensus.  Image by jg.

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As the level of hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells in the United States has intensified in recent years, much of the mounting public concern has centered on fears that underground water supplies could be contaminated with the toxic chemicals used in the well-stimulation technique that cracks rock formations and releases trapped oil and gas. But in some parts of the country, worries are also growing about fracking’s effect on water supply, as the water-intensive process stirs competition for the resources already stretched thin by drought or other factors.

Every fracking job requires 2 million to 4 million gallons of water, according to the Groundwater Protection Council. The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has estimated that the 35,000 oil and gas wells used for fracking consume between 70 billion and 140 billion gallons of water each year. That’s about equal, EPA says, to the water use in 40 to 80 cities with populations of 50,000 people, or one to two cities with a population of 2.5 million each.

Some of the most intensive oil and gas development in the nation is occurring in regions where water is already at a premium. A paper published last month by Ceres, a nonprofit that works on sustainability issues, looked at 25,000 shale oil and shale gas wells in operation and monitored by an industry-tied reporting website called FracFocus.

Ceres found that 47 percent of these wells were in areas “with high or extremely high water stress” because of large withdrawals for use by industry, agriculture, and municipalities. In Colorado, for example, 92 percent of the wells were in extremely high water-stress areas, and in Texas more than half were in high or extremely high water-stress areas.

“Given projected sharp increases in production in the coming years and the potentially intense nature of local water demands, competition and conflicts over water should be a growing concern for companies, policymakers and investors,” the Ceres report concluded. It goes on to say that:

Prolonged drought conditions in many parts of Texas and Colorado last summer created increased competition and conflict between farmers, communities and energy developers, which is only likely to continue. … Even in wetter regions of the northeast United States, dozens of water permits granted to operators had to be withdrawn last summer due to low levels in environmentally vulnerable headwater streams.

Another recent study by the University of Texas looked at past and projected water use for fracking in the Barnett, Eagle Ford, and Haynesville shale plays in Texas, and found that fracking in 2011 was using more than twice as much water in the state as it was three years earlier. In Dimmit County, home to the Eagle Ford shale development in South Texas, fracking accounted for nearly a quarter of overall water consumption in 2011 and is expected to grow to a third in a few years, according to the study.

Moreover, an April report by the Western Organization of Resource Councils found that fracking is using 7 billion gallons of water a year in four western states: Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota. “Fracking’s growing demand for water can threaten availability of water for agriculture and western rural communities,” said Bob Leresche, a Wyoming resident and board member of the group.

The national oil and gas trade association, American Petroleum Institute, correctly notes that the “industry’s water use is small when compared to other industrial and recreational activities.” But even though hydraulic fracturing usually accounts for just 1 percent or 2 percent of states’ overall water use, the Ceres study notes that “it can be much higher at the local level, increasing competition for scarce supplies.”
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Opine away!

Yesterday, new Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz sat before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee to discuss the Department’s proposed budget and ended up explaining basic climate science to a member of the majority party.

In an exchange with former committee chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) reported by E&E Daily, Moniz was blunt:

“It’s indisputable that we are experiencing warming, and that the pattern of consequences that has long been expected, in fact, are appearing around us, unfortunately — typically at the higher end of the predicted ranges,” Moniz said, pointing to melting ice caps, intensified storms, droughts and wildfires.

In recent years, the subcommittee has been used to push false talking points about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and to hold hearings just to throw climate denier talking points at real climate scientists.

Last year, Rep. David McKinley (R-WV) sponsored a raft of bills that would dismantle key public health and clean air provisions and undermine landmark environmental legislation. Last week, the committee marked up Rep. McKinley’s bill that would prevent the EPA from regulating toxic coal ash.

Unsurprisingly, McKinley’s asked Secretary Moniz if global warming was “primarly man-made, or natural and cyclical.”

The conversation that followed was educational, hopefully for all parties. Watch the exchange here, courtesy of Forecast the Facts:

Here’s the transcript:
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Last week, the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, DC quietly secured the final permits needed to transform it into an efficient cogeneration plant. Once constructed, the new cogeneration system will use 100 percent natural gas to power the buildings in the Capitol complex, including the Capitol Building, the House and Senate office buildings, the Supreme Court, the U.S. Botanic Garden and the Library of Congress buildings, among others.

Located in southeast DC, the Capitol Power Plant (CPP) was built in 1910 under the terms of an act of Congress passed on April 28, 1904. Originally intended to supply steam for heating and electricity to the U.S. Capitol, the CPP added a refrigeration plant to provide chilled water for air conditioning in the 1930s and stopped producing electricity altogether in 1951.

Today, the CPP produces steam and chilled water to heat and cool the 17 million square feet of building space of the 23 facilities in the Capitol complex using seven boilers capable of burning three types of fuel for steam generation: coal, natural gas, and oil. Fortunately, coal use has been steadily declining at the plant — going from 56 percent of CPP’s fuel mix in 2007 to 5 percent in 2011. Coal is mostly used as an emergency backup fuel source.

The effort to reduce the use of coal at the CPP goes back to 2000 when the office of the Architect of the Capitol, the administrator of the plant, tried to eliminate coal from the fuel mix. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and former Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), both representatives of coal-producing states and recipients of campaign money from the coal companies that supplied the CPP, effectively shut down the attempt to switch to natural gas — a cleaner-burning fuel source.

But momentum for the switch to natural gas began to slowly build and in 2007 Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi launched the Green the Capitol Initiative (defunded in 2011 by the GOP) and though it did not include a plan to reduce the CPP’s emissions, it did address the emissions controversially through a policy to purchase carbon offsets. More importantly, it called attention to the fact that the Capitol really wouldn’t be “green” until its main plant was no longer relying on one of the dirtiest, most air-polluting fuel sources.

The breaking point came in December 2008 when environmental activists Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben wrote an open letter to all Americans calling for civil disobedience that would take place in front of the CPP on March 2, 2009. This call to action seemingly prompted Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to pen their own letter in February 2009, but this one went directly to Acting Architect of the Capitol Stephen T. Ayers, saying:

… there is a shadow that hangs over the success of your and our efforts to improve the environmental performance of the Capitol and the entire Legislative Branch. The Capitol Power Plant (CPP) continues to be the number one source of air pollution and carbon emissions in the District of Columbia and the focal point for criticism from local community and national environmental and public health groups.

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Mari Hernandez is a Research Associate on the Energy Team at the Center for American Progress.