During the campaign, Romney has routinely dismissed the nation’s 3.1 million clean energy jobs while intensifying his attacks on the industry. Ironically, the clean energy industry is booming in his home state of Massachusetts, creating 64,000 jobs across the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors.

In a story published over the weekend, the Boston Globe highlights how solar is “flourishing” in his home state:

In the past two years alone, solar energy-generating capacity in the state has more than doubled to 105 megawatts, ­according to the state Department of Energy Resources. That’s enough to power at least 15,750 homes.

The number of solar installation firms in the state has also exploded, to nearly 200 last year from about 43 in 2007. In total, state energy officials estimate that more than 1,300 solar energy firms — installers, manufacturers, and others — operate in Massachusetts, employing about 14,000.

In addition, Massachusetts has created a market for solar renewable energy credits, which solar project owners can sell to power plant operators to meet state regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gases.

The money from those sales helps further lower the cost of solar power.

Such policies have made solar economically competitive in the state, despite less than optimal sun, said Jim Dumas, principal at Solect Inc., a Hopkinton company with 10 employees. Solect is currently installing a 475-kilowatt solar system atop a commercial building in Northborough.

In April, the Center for American Progress filmed a short documentary on the explosion of activity in Massachusetts’ clean energy sector.

Even while solar grows quickly in Massachusetts, helping grow new businesses, Romney’s plan would reduce investments in clean energy. He would strike subsidies, loans, and research for the clean energy industry — all while endorsing a House GOP budget that maintains subsidies for oil and coal giants.

Despite a year of investigation finding no evidence of political misconduct, the GOP has hammered away at Solyndra. American Crossroads is up with its own ad today on Solyndra, following an earlier fact-challenged ad from its affiliate Crossroads GPS.

Factcheckers have called every one of these ads bogus. The Washington Post FactChecker labeled these ads a “depressing duty” because the same “erroneous assertions” had been debunked years ago. And Politifact gave a “false” to the claim that Solyndra contributed to higher gas prices.

In fact, an independent review of the loan guarantee program that supported Solyndra found that it will cost $2 billion less than originally anticipated.

And the U.S. southeast is being whipsawed from brutal drought to deluge (via tropical storm), which, curiously enough, is just what scientists have said global warming has started to do in the summertime, too.

Here are some charts that tells the story.

Beryl is Earliest “B” Storm on Record

“The chart shows the date of formation for the second named Atlantic tropical cyclone of the season from 1950 through 2012. The average date through 2011 was August 1, so Beryl is nearly 10 weeks earlier than average.”

While warm Gulf stream waters have helped spin up Beryl, the heat has been socking the mainland U.S. all year, as this chart from Capital Climate shows:

Following a March heat wave that was “unmatched in recorded history” for the U.S. (and Canada), heat records continued to trump cold records by a huge amount in both April and May. I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming.

A 2009 analysis shows that the average ratio for the 2000s was 2.04-to-1, a sharp increase from previous decades. Lead author Dr. Gerald Meehl explained, “If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even.”

Many of the country’s leading climatologists and meteorologists have looked at the data and concluded that like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace (see also “March Heat Records Crush Cold Records by Over 35 To 1, Scientists Say Global Warming Loaded The Dice“).

Climate Central has a great graphic of the record temperatures for any month that you can play around with, which I’ll post at the end. But first, as Capital Climate notes with the following chart, “the U.S. is well on its way to crush the record for warmest spring since national temperature data began in 1895“:

It would have to be staggeringly cold in the coming in the coming days for 2012 to not set the record.

Until Beryl, the Southeast, along with much of the country, was under a brutal drought, as last week’s U.S. Drought Monitor made clear:

No doubt this Thursday’s map will show significant improvement in parts of the southeast because of Beryl. But this whipsawing from drought to deluge and back is not good for farming or ecosystems or human health. Unfortunately, climate science suggests we are going to have to get used to it:

• Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’
• Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse

Finally, here’s that Climate Central graphic of US temperature records by month. It’s set for May 2012, but March is even more amazing.

According to a new poll from Consumer Reports, 37 percent of Americans say that fuel economy is their top consideration when looking for a new car. That makes efficiency the most important factor for consumers by far.

The next closest consideration was safety, which was ranked as a top priority by 17 percent of Americans.

The poll also showed that nearly three quarters of respondents were open to considering new types personal transportation like electric vehicles:

The survey, conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, found that car owners were open to different ways of saving at the pump, from downsizing to looking at hybrids, electric cars, or models with diesel engines. In all, nearly three quarters (73 percent) of participants said they would consider some type of alternatively fueled vehicle, with flex-fuel (which can run on E85 ethanol) and hybrid models leading the way. Younger buyers were more likely to consider an alternatively-fuel or purely electric vehicle than drivers over the age of 55.

Electric vehicle sales in the U.S. have been slower than expected. While record numbers of Chevy Volts were sold in March, the following month saw a major dip in sales. Nissan has faced a similar pattern of sales with its Leaf.

But auto industry executives say it’s far too early to draw conclusions about the success of the electric vehicle in the U.S.

“I don’t want you to take a one-month or two-month sales result in one particular market to try to make your opinion about the evolution of a very important technology for the industry,” said Nissan’s CEO in April.

Despite the current lag in the EV market, it is clear that America’s relationship with the automobile is changing. Consumers are driving less, using less fuel, and buying more efficient cars. Indeed, many younger consumers are choosing not to buy automobiles at all.

As concerns mount over the accessibility and quality of meals in cities, urban agriculture is becoming a practical solution to give communities more choice — all while helping address greenhouse gas emissions from centralized agriculture.

With over 80 percent of the American population living in metropolitan centers, urban farming has the ability to dramatically enhance economic growth, increase food quality, and build healthier communities.

The Problem: Carbon Intensive Meals

“Would you like some CO2 with that?”

The globalization of food has dramatically increased the amount of carbon emissions in our meals — particularly in America.

For example,  food related emissions in the U.S. account for 21 percent of total emissions, or 6.1 tons of CO2 per year. Additionally, 15 percent of personal transportation emissions, 20 percent of home energy use emissions, and 23 percent of the aggregate remaining activities are food-related as well. Add it all up and you find that our food choices make up a very large portion of our overall footprint.

Consumer activities like traveling to the grocery store, eating at restaurants, and cooking make up 46 percent of total emissions from food.

The other 54 percent of emissions come from the production, distribution, and selling of food. This includes activities like packaging, storage, and transportation. The average meal has traveled 4,200 miles just to get to the table. And at the end of the line, food related emissions account for 28 percent of all U.S. landfill gas emissions.

So what can be done?

The Solution: Urban Farming’s Wide Range of Benefits

There are already plenty of resources on the energy intensity of food and how to calculate the emissions from a given meal. But people — particularly those in cities living in “food deserts” — can’t act on this information if they don’t have the resources.

This is where urban agriculture comes in. Urban agriculture is defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as:

“[A]n industry that produces, processes and markets food and fuel, largely in response to the daily demand of consumers within a town, city, or metropolis, on land and water dispersed throughout the urban and peri-urban area, applying intensive production methods, using and reusing natural resources and urban wastes to yield a diversity of crops and livestock.”

Basically, urban farming allows individuals or groups to establish gardens or mini-farms on small plots, using creative techniques to maximize, output, meet local needs, and help make efficient use of the land. Gardeners are finding all kinds of ways to grow food: On rooftops, in abandoned buildings, and on deteriorating plots of land.

These operations can help consumers lower their food emissions by giving them the choice to eat food grown within their communities, not thousands of miles away.

But that’s not all. In addition to offsetting emissions, there are at least three concrete benefits to urban farming: economic growth; community building; and improved health.

Economic Growth

The economic benefits realized through urban farming are localized, thus keeping dollars circulating through the community. These urban farms also have a fantastic return on investment, with every $1 invested in a community garden generating $6 worth of vegetables.

And these community food enterprises are actually competitive with big-box retailers. As one report puts it:

“In recent years CFEs have discovered that they actually have unique advantages over bigger companies. They have a deeper awareness of local tastes and markets, they can obtain consumer feedback more quickly, and they can tweak their business models more swiftly. They can deliver goods and services faster, with shorter distribution links and smaller inventories. They can rely more on word-of¬mouth advertising that costs nothing.”

These projects can be structured in unique ways to encourage greater economic impacts in communities. For example, Food From the ‘Hood turned an abandoned football field into a 2 acre farm, with 25 percent of the proceeds going to a scholarship fund for local youth in South Central Los Angeles. To date, $250,000 has gone to sending youth in the community to college.

Furthermore, in low-income communities, where food costs can be as much as 30-60 percent of income, localizing food can help stabilize food costs.

Community Building

In 2010, a total of 14.5 percent of households were food insecure, with a further 5.4 percent experiencing “severe” food security.

Community health is, as one report describes it, “the social and economic capacity of a community to create an environment that sustains the visions, goals and needs of its residents.” Increased food security is a crucial component to realizing this vision.

The social organization required for most urban farming projects can forge stronger community bonds by creating “stakeholder interactions” that give individuals a sense of responsibility and productivity.  By harnessing two sources of capital — social capital and the existing built environment — urban farming uses the inherent strengths of cities to solve some of their most serious problems.

Food Quality and Health

Studies have shown that nutrition, exercise, and mental and physical health are all augmented with urban farms.

In temperate climates, a 10’ x 10’ garden can feed a family of four year-round and meet almost all basic nutritional requirements, according to three experts from the Community Food Security Coalition.

This solves the directly related problems food insecurity and poor nutrition. The act of gardening is also great exercise that improves physical health: reducing risk of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. The act of cultivation has significant impact on mental health as well — assisting with social skills, self-esteem improvement and stress reduction.

Bringing It Home

The impact of urban farming on local communities and families is undeniable. While this activity gains traction in cities across the country, the potential for reducing our food related emissions continues to grow — all while helping improve the economic and social dynamics of the urban environment.

Adam James is a Special Assistant for Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress.

Related Post:

• Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security

by Robert Stavins, via An Economic View of the Environment

Debate continues in the United States, Europe, and throughout the world about whether the forces of the marketplace can be harnessed in the interest of environmental protection, in particular, to address the threat of global climate change.  In an essay that appears in the Spring 2012 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, my colleague, Joseph Aldy, and I take on this question.  In the article – “Using the Market to Address Climate Change:  Insights from Theory & Experience” – we investigate the technical, economic, and political feasibility of market-based climate policies, and examine alternative designs of carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and clean energy standards.

The Premise

Virtually all aspects of economic activity – individual consumption, business investment, and government spending – affect greenhouse gas emissions and, therefore, the global climate. In essence, an effective climate change policy must change the nature of decisions regarding these activities in order to promote more efficient generation and use of energy, lower carbon-intensity of energy, and a more carbon-lean economy.

Basically, there are three possible ways to accomplish this: (1) mandate that businesses and individuals change their behavior; (2) subsidize business and individual investment; or (3) price the greenhouse gas externality proportional to the harms that these emissions cause.

Harnessing Market Forces by Pricing Externalities

The pricing of externalities can promote cost-effective abatement, deliver efficient innovation incentives, avoid picking technology winners, and ameliorate, not exacerbate, government fiscal conditions.

By pricing carbon emissions (or, equivalently, the carbon content of the three fossil fuels – coal, petroleum, and natural gas), the government provides incentives for firms and individuals to identify and exploit the lowest-cost ways to reduce emissions and to invest in the development of new technologies, processes, and ideas that can mitigate future emissions. A fairly wide variety of policy approaches fall within the concept of externality pricing in the climate-policy context, including carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and clean energy standards.

What About Conventional Regulatory Approaches?

In contrast, conventional approaches to environmental protection typically employ uniform mandates to protect environmental quality. Although uniform technology and performance standards have been effective in achieving some established environmental goals and standards, they tend to lead to non-cost-effective outcomes in which some firms use unduly expensive means to control pollution.

In addition, conventional technology or performance standards do not provide dynamic incentives for the development, adoption, and diffusion of environmentally and economically superior control technologies. Once a firm satisfies a performance standard, it has little incentive to develop or adopt cleaner technology. Indeed, regulated firms may fear that if they adopt a superior technology, the government will tighten the standard.

Given the ubiquitous nature of greenhouse gas emissions from diverse sources, it is virtually inconceivable that a standards-based approach could form the centerpiece of a truly meaningful climate policy. The substantially higher cost of a standards-based policy may undermine support for such an approach, and securing political support may require weakening standards and lowering environmental benefits.

How About Technology Subsidies?

Government support for lower-emitting technologies often takes the form of investment or performance subsidies. Providing subsidies for targeting climate-friendly technologies entails revenues raised by taxing other economic activities. Given the tight fiscal environment throughout the developed world, it is difficult to justify increasing (or even continuing) the subsidies that would be necessary to change significantly the emissions intensity of economic activity….

In practice, subsidies are typically designed to be technology specific. By designating technology winners, such approaches yield special-interest constituencies focused on maintaining subsidies beyond what would be socially desirable. They also provide little incentive for the development of novel, game-changing technologies.

That said, there is still a role for direct technology policies in combination with externality pricing, as I have argued in a previous essay at this blog.  This is because in addition to the environmental market failure (appropriately addressed by externality pricing) there exists another market failure in the climate change context, namely, the public-good nature of information produced by research and development.  I addressed this in my essay, “Both Are Necessary, But Neither is Sufficient: Carbon-Pricing and Technology R&D Initiatives in a Meaningful National Climate Policy.”

Back to Markets, and Some Real-World Experience

Empirical analysis drawing on actual experience has demonstrated the power of markets to drive profound changes in the investment and use of emission-intensive technologies.

The run-up in gasoline prices in 2008 increased consumer demand for more fuel-efficient new cars and trucks, while also reducing vehicle miles traveled by the existing fleet. Likewise, electricity generators responded to the dramatic decline in natural gas prices in 2009 and 2010 by dispatching more electricity from gas plants, resulting in lower CO₂ emissions.

Longer-term evaluations of the impacts of energy prices on markets have found that higher prices have induced more innovation – measured by frequency and importance of patents – and increased the commercial availability of more energy-efficient products, especially among energy-intensive goods such as air conditioners and water heaters.

Experience with Externality Pricing

Real-world experience with policies that price externalities has illustrated the effectiveness of market-based instruments. Congestion charges in London, Singapore, and Stockholm have reduced traffic congestion in busy urban centers, lowered air pollution, and delivered net social benefits.  Likewise, the British Columbia carbon tax has reduced carbon dioxide emissions since 2008.

More prominently, the U.S. sulfur dioxide (SO₂) cap-and-trade program has cut SO₂ emissions from U.S. power plants by more than 50 percent since 1990, resulting in compliance costs one-half of what they would have been under conventional regulatory mandates.

The success of the SO₂ allowance trading program motivated the design and implementation of the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), the world’s largest cap-and-trade program, focused on cutting CO₂ emissions from power plants and large manufacturing facilities throughout Europe.

And the 1980s phasedown of lead in gasoline, which reduced the lead content per gallon of fuel, served as an early, effective example of a tradable performance standard.

These positive experiences have provided ample reason to consider market-based instruments – carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and clean energy standards – as potential approaches to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

The Rubber Hits the Road

The U.S. political response to possible market-based approaches to climate policy has been and will continue to be largely a function of issues and structural factors that transcend the scope of environmental and climate policy. Because a truly meaningful climate policy – whether market-based or conventional in design – will have significant impacts on economic activity in a wide variety of sectors and in every region of the country, it is not surprising that proposals for such policies bring forth significant opposition, particularly during difficult economic times.

In addition, U.S. political polarization – which began some four decades ago and accelerated during the economic downturn – has decimated what had long been the key political constituency in Congress for environmental (and energy) action: namely, the middle, including both moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats. Whereas congressional debates about environmental and energy policy have long featured regional politics, they are now largely partisan. In this political maelstrom, the failure of cap-and-trade climate policy in the Senate in 2010 was collateral damage in a much larger political war.

Better economic times may reduce the pace – if not the direction – of political polarization. And the ongoing challenge of large federal budgetary deficits may at some point increase the political feasibility of new sources of revenue. When and if this happens, consumption taxes – as opposed to traditional taxes on income and investment – could receive heightened attention; primary among these might be energy taxes, which, depending on their design, can function as significant climate policy instruments.

Many environmental advocates would respond that a mobilizing event will surely precipitate U.S. climate policy action.  But the nature of the climate change problem itself helps explain much of the relative apathy among the U.S. public and suggests that any such mobilizing events may come “too late.”

Nearly all our major environmental laws have been passed in the wake of highly publicized environmental events or “disasters,” including the spontaneous combustion of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1969, and the discovery of toxic substances at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, in the mid-1970s. But note that the day after the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, no article in The Cleveland Plain Dealer commented that the cause was uncertain, that rivers periodically catch on fire from natural causes. On the contrary, it was immediately apparent that the cause was waste dumped into the river by adjacent industries. A direct consequence of the observed “disaster” was, of course, the Clean Water Act of 1972.

… Until there is an obvious and sudden event – such as a loss of part of the Antarctic ice sheet leading to a dramatic sea-level rise – it is unlikely that public opinion in the United States will provide the bottom-up demand for action that inspired previous congressional action on the environment over the past forty years.

A Half-Full Glass of Water?

Despite this rather bleak assessment of the politics of climate change policy in the United States, it is really much too soon to speculate on what the future will hold for the use of market-based policy instruments, whether for climate change or other environmental problems.

On the one hand, it is conceivable that two decades (1988–2008) of high receptivity in U.S. politics to cap-and-trade and offset mechanisms will turn out to be no more than a relatively brief departure from a long-term trend of reliance on conventional means of regulation.

On the other hand, it is also possible that the recent tarnishing of cap-and-trade in national political dialogue will itself turn out to be a temporary departure from a long-term trend of increasing reliance on market-based environmental policy instruments. Perhaps the ongoing interest in these policy mechanisms in California (Assembly Bill 32), the Northeast (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative), Europe, and other countries will eventually provide a bridge to a changed political climate in Washington.

– Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, and Chairman of the Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Group. This is an extended excerpt of a piece originally published at An Economic View of the Environment blog and was reprinted with permission.

A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post other links below.

German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours of Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank has said. [Guardian]

The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world’s leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed….

Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four percent of its overall annual electricity needs from the sun alone. It aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2020.

An advance guard of 18-wheelers is scheduled to roll into a business park in Cheyenne, Wyo., this week to unload components of a supercomputer called Yellowstone. This 1.5-quadrillion-calculations-per-second crystal ball will model future climate and forecast extreme weather. [Washington Post]

According to hurricane researchers, the spell of relative calm between major hurricanes is mainly due to the random variability that is inherent in the weather and climate. [Climate Central]

Southern California Gas Co. is trying out an unusual new technology that uses the sun’s rays to provide air conditioning as well as power. [Los Angeles Times]

The Army and Air Force are confident they can each meet a White House target to produce a gigawatt of renewable energy on their installations by 2025. But it’s going to depend on industry’s ability to make good business deals to construct those projects. [Federal News Radio]

So what does the presumptive GOP nominee really believe? And how would he address climate change if elected president? One person who may well know is Gina McCarthy, who Romney tapped for top environmental posts in Massachusetts. But these days she’s not talking—presumably because she’s working for President Barack Obama as a top-ranking political appointee at the Environmental Protection Agency. [Mother Jones]

With crude prices bouncing around above $90 a barrel, many companies are trying to wring the oil out of their operations. [Los Angeles Times]

The debate may be continuing about global warming, but the ground reality here is that dozens of streams and brooks of Kullu district have dried up completely, while many others are about to disappear. [Times of India]

As Wikipedia puts it, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz “demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but his intact frogs attempted to escape the water.” Other 19th Century studies appeared to have different results, but modern experiments (!) show that frogs with brains are in fact smart enough to leap out of water as it is heated up.

James Fallows of The Atlantic, who I am quite certain holds the world record for boiling frog posts, has one from Michael Jones who cites “Sensation in the Spinal Cord” from Nature, Dec. 4, 1873:

“Goltz observed that a frog, when placed in water the temperature of which is slowly raised towards boiling, manifests uneasiness as soon as the temperature reaches 25° C., and becomes more and more agitated as the heat increases, vainly struggling to get out, and finally at 42° C., dies in a state of rigid tetanus. The evidence of feeling being thus manifested when the frog has its brain, what is the case with a brainless frog? It is absolutely the reverse. Quietly the animal sits through all successions of temperature, never once manifesting uneasiness or pain, never once attempting to escape the impending death.”

Even so, I am inclined to agree with Jones that this should not be fatal to the metaphor.  It just needs to be tweaked.

Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, as I’ve said before (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“).  Such are the privileges of being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the “sapiens.” And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens” sapiens at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from ourselves.

If we destroy a livable climate, which means “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse” and are renamed just plain Homo, then in fact we will  have demonstrated we are dumber than frogs (who were, after all, doing just fine until we came along).

At that point, we will be brainless frogs.

Related Post:

• Glenn Beck proves he’s a brainless frog, warning (?) “Barack Obama has galvanized the country…. He’s forced us to think!”
• An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces

But all of the impacts occurring simultaneously will have an even more devastating synergy (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).  It means the rich countries will be far less likely to be offering much assistance to the poorer ones, since there will be ever worsening catastrophes everywhere simultaneously so we’ll be suffering at the same time.  Heck, this deep economic downturn and the record-smashing disasters of the past two years has already exacerbated media myopia and compassion fatigue to help those around the world staggered by floods and droughts.

And that suggests another deadly climate impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.

Last November, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan “said rising temperatures and rainwater shortages are having a devastating effect on food production. Failing to address the problem will have repercussions on health, security and stability.”

The NYT reported in 2009:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

That’s a key reason 33 generals and admirals supported the comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs bill in 2010, asserting “Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place” and “threatening America’s security.”  The Pentagon itself has made the climate/security link explicit in its Quadrennial Defense Review.

Sadly, the chance that humanity will avert catastrophic climate impacts has dropped sharply in the past two years (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).  And that means it is increasingly likely we face a world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which in turn means we likely cross carbon cycle tipping points that threaten to quickly take us to 800 to 1000 ppm — a world of rapid warming and a ruined climate far outside the bounds of any human experience.

It is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs and Pakistani mega-floods, of countless environmental refugees — hundreds of millions in the second half of this century — all clamoring to occupy the parts of the developed world that aren’t flooded or desertified.

In such a world, everyone will ultimately become a veteran, and Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day may fade into obscurity, as people forget about a time when wars were the exception, a time when soldiers were but a small minority of the population.  And if we don’t act swiftly and strongly to stop it, the worst impacts could last a long, long time (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe and Nature Geoscience: ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).

So when does this start to happen?

Thomas Fingar, “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst,” sees it happening by the mid-2020s:

By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Fingar said, while the United States will face “Dust Bowl” conditions in the parched Southwest“¦.

He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.

For the latest literature review and projections, see my May 13 post “Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now” as well as the 2011 study, Michael Wehner et al., “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico,” and the 2010 piece, “Must-read NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path.”

The 2010 NCAR is being revised, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be in mid-century — if we are so self-destructive as to let this happen:

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

And, of course, we’ve seen that even in areas expected to become wetter, can experience an extreme heat wave so unprecedented that it forces the entire country to suspend grain exports:

• Russian Meteorological Center: “There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”
• Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”

See also Nature Publishes My Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security

Significantly, the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a scenario similar to Fingar’s in a 2009 speech to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it.

You can see a five-minute BBC interview with Beddington here. The speech is online. Here are some excerpts:

We saw the food spike last year; prices going up by something in the order of 300%, rice went up by 400%, we saw food riots, we saw major issues for the poorest in the world, in the sense that the organisations like the World Food Programme did not have sufficient money to buy food on the open market and actually use it to feed the poorest of the poor.

So this is a major problem. You can see the catastrophic decline in those reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves”….

So, what are the drivers? I am going to go through them now very briefly.

First of all, population growth. World population grows by six million every month “” greater than the size of the UK population every year. Between now and”¦ I am going to focus on the year 2030 and the reason I am going to focus on 2030 is that I feel that some of the climate change discussions focusing on 2100 don’t actually grip”¦. I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events come together.

By 2030, looking at population terms, you are looking at the global population increasing from a little over six billion at the moment to about eight billion”…

… you are going to see major changes but particularly in the demand for livestock — meat and dairy….

… By 2030, the demand for food is going to be increased by about 50%. Can we do it? One of the questions. There is a major food security issue by 2030. We’ve got to somehow produce 50% more by that time.The second issue I want to focus on is the availability of fresh water”¦. The fresh water available per head of the world population is around 25% of what it was in 1960. To give you some idea of this; there are enormous potential shortages in certain parts of the world”¦ China has something like 23% of the world’s population and 11% of the world’s water.

… the massive use of water is in agriculture and particularly in developing world agriculture. Something of the order of 70% of that. One in three people are already facing water shortages and the total world demand for water is predicted to increase by 30% by 2030.

So, we’ve got food — expectation of demand increase of 50% by 2030, we’ve got water — expectation of demand increase of 30% by 2030. And in terms of what it looks like, we have real issues of global water security.

…. where there is genuine water stress [in 2025 is] China and also parts of India, but look at parts of southern Europe where by 2025 we are looking at serious issues of water stress”….

So, water is really enormously important. I am going to get onto the climate change interactions with it a little bit later but water is the one area that I feel is seriously threatening. It is so important because a shortage of water obviously interacts with a shortage of food, there are real potentials for driving significant international problems — what do you do if you have no water and you have no food? You migrate. So one can have a reasonable expectation that international migration will occur as these shortages come in.

Now, the third one I want to focus on is energy and, driven by the population increase that I talked about, the urbanisation I talked about and indeed the movement out of poverty”…. For the first time, the demand of the rest of the world exceeded the demand of energy of the OECD …. Energy demand is actually increasing and going to hit something of the order of a 50% increase, again by 2030.

Now, if that were not enough … those are three things that are coming together. What will the world be like when that happens? But we also have, of course, the issue of climate change. Now, this is a very familiar slide to you all but we are shooting for a target of two degrees centigrade, a perfectly sensible target. There is enormous uncertainty in the climate change models about that particular target. It is perfectly reasonable to say ‘shouldn’t we be shooting for one degrees centigrade or, oddly enough, it is perfectly reasonable to say ‘shouldn’t we be shooting for three degrees centigrade’, the only information we have is really enormously uncertain in terms of the climate change model.

Shooting for two seems a perfectly sensible and legitimate objective but there are enormous problems. You are talking about serious problems in tropical glaciers “” the Chinese government has recognised this and has actually announced about 10 days ago that it is going to build 59 new reservoirs to take the glacial melt in the Xinjiang province. 59 reservoirs. It is actually contemplating putting many of them underground. This is a recognition that water, which has hitherto been stored in glaciers, is going to be very scarce. We have to think about water in a major way….

The other area that really worries me in terms of climate change and the potential for positive feedbacks and also for interactions with food is ocean acidification….

As I say, it’s as acid today as it has been for 25 million years. When this occurred some 25 million years ago, this level of acidification in the ocean, you had major problems with it, problems of extinctions of large numbers of species in the ocean community. The areas which are going to be hit most severely by this are the coral reefs of the world and that is already starting to show. Coral reefs provide significant protein supplies to about a billion people. So it is not just that you can’t go snorkelling and see lots of pretty fish, it is that there are a billion people dependent on coral reefs for a very substantial portion of their high protein diet.

… we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we’ve got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Some of this can be avoid or minimized if we act now. Some of it can’t. But if we don’t act strongly now, then by Memorial Day 2030, many of the global conflicts will either be resource wars or wars driven by environmental degradation and dislocation (see “Warming Will Worsen Water Wars). Indeed that may already have started to happen (see “Report: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Trigger Darfur Crisis).

For one discussion of the kind of wars we might be seeing, albeit for the year 2046, here is a three-part radio series on Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian journalist and historian of warfare.

For all of the above reasons, veterans and security experts and politicians of all parties have begun working together to avoid the worst.   A key leader on climate and energy security has been the conservative Virgina Republican, John Warner, who pushed hard to pass the clean energy bill — because he is a former Navy secretary and former Senate Armed Services Committee chair and because he is a former Forest Service firefighter now “just absolutely heartbroken” because “the old forest, the white pine forest in which I worked, was absolutely gone, devastated, standing there dead from the bark beetle” thanks in large part to global warming.

Warner has been “trying to build grass-roots support for congressional action to limit global warming,” as Politics Daily reported. “He is traveling the country to discuss military research that shows climate change is a threat to U.S. national security.” Here is part of PD‘s interview:

PD: Does the responsibility fall to us to respond to the consequences of climate change?

JW: Not exclusively, but we’re often in the forefront of response to these things. We’re the nation with the most sealift. The most airlift. We have more medical teams which are mobile, more storehouses of food and supplies to meet emergencies. And throughout our history, from the beginning of the republic, America’s always had to respond to certain humanitarian disasters.

PD: What are some examples of destabilization due to climate?

JW: One clear case of it is Somalia. [In the early 1990s] the prolonged drought began to tie up the economy, the food supplies. There was a certain amount of political and economic instability. Where you have fragile nations . . . a serious climactic problem will come along, with a shortage of food or water, and often those governments are toppled. And then they fall to the evils of . . . terrorism or others who try to exploit these fallen governments. You saw it in Darfur. You saw it in Somalia. This political instability and weakness is given the final tilt by a problem associated with climactic change.

Our choice today is clear. We can continue listening to the voices of denial and delay and disinformation, assuring that everyone ultimately becomes a veteran of the growing number of climate-related conflicts.

Or we can launch a WWII-scale effort and a WWII-style effort to address the problem as Hansen and I and many others have called for. That is our most necessary fight today.

This post is an update.

Related Posts:

• Nicholas Stern: Climate inaction risks a “global war”
• Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
• Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization
• Steven Chu on climate change: “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”
• Sen. Barrasso (R-WY) seeks to block intelligence on the national security threat posed by climate change. He needs to see the Fingar.
• Juan Cole: The media’s failure to cover “the great Pakistani deluge” is “itself a security threat” to America

by Ned L. Harvey, via Rocky Mountain Institute

Over the weekend I read a blog post by author Nicholas Carr describing what he calls the hierarchy of innovation.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation, especially about how it might spread through the global energy system. I’m especially interested in how entrepreneurs and new technologies may create disruptive innovation within the system and what that’s likely to look like.

Carr’s blog is a little off that topic, but it did get me thinking about the underlying drivers of innovation. The article is essentially an attempt to explain and to some extent lament what he and others perceive as stagnation in innovation in the last century. Carr describes what he refers to as the Hierarchy of Innovation, which is loosely analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As Carr puts it:

“The focus, or emphasis, of innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think fire), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think steam engine), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).”

I’m OK with the hierarchy concept and think it’s a fine first-order mechanism to understand the underlying social values driving innovation at any given stage in civil development.

However, I think much deeper drivers are worth considering. Obviously, the one with which I’m most familiar relates to the ability of a civilization to harness energy to drive the economic wealth and ultimately wealthy lifestyles, which push them up what I’ll call Carr’s first-order innovation pyramid.

Most of the 19th and early 20th century innovations highlighted in the article relate directly to or result directly from a radical revolution in humankind’s ability to harness energy for its own benefit. Prior to the industrial revolution, energy for economic production came primarily from livestock and human labor. By the mid-19th century, Western civilization was pushing on the very capacity of those energy-producing technologies to sustain the economic growth and wealth creation demanded by its societies, setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

With the Industrial Revolution, humankind harnessed the power of fossil fuels and unleashed an entirely new paradigm of production and economic wealth generation. This created the energy production “headroom” that set the stage for the massive change in human capabilities in the early to mid-20th century. In fact and quite literally, without the energy technologies and production capacity we developed 100-150 years ago, we never could have escaped the bounds of Earth and started our exploration of the solar system. However, sometime mid-century as we achieved new heights of global economic prosperity, we stopped innovating on energy and moved up Carr’s innovation hierarchy to focus on leisure and self.

Presently, 125 years later, civilization is still reliant on the core energy production technologies created in the Industrial Revolution. Economies with the mastery and control of those technologies enjoy almost unlimited access to abundant and cheap energy, and it is in those societies that we see the shift in innovation so lamented by Carr in his article.

Yet the current energy paradigm, not so unlike the one based on livestock and human power, is fundamentally based on commodity fuels and highly fragmented production and distribution industries that can be owned and controlled (usually to their own benefit) by anyone with the resources and power to do to so. As such, the paradigm is defined by energy haves and have-nots; and the energy have-nots are consistently plagued by crushing poverty and disease. This disparity is growing rapidly. On a global basis, this imbalance is likely coming to a critical point, and, like the mid-19th century, the stage is formally set for another innovation in energy production, one that frees us from the burdens and challenges of fossil fuels and unleashes another unprecedented transformation in economies and ultimately the human condition.

So in the end, I’m still left pondering innovation in the energy system. I can’t help remembering the grade school axiom that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Carr’s pyramid is interesting and maybe a cynical comment on the modern developed world, but to me its not that complicated. If he and his peers want to refocus innovative energy on Technologies of Prosperity, their time may be better served by exploring the deeper issues than simply describing the problem.

Ned L. Harvey is the Chief Operating Officer of the Rocky Mountain Institute. This piece was originally published at RMI’s Outlet blog and was reprinted with permission.

by Daniel J. Weiss, Jackie Weidman and Celine Ramstein

Memorial Day weekend is an opportunity to remember and honor the countless sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform in order to protect this great nation. It also marks the traditional start of the summer driving season—when families pack their bags and pile into their cars or minivans to hit the road for destinations across the country. This weekend nearly 35 million Americans are expected to travel 50 miles or more to visit family and friends. Ninety percent of them will likely drive to their destination, filling up their tanks with expensive gasoline or diesel fuel before hitting the road.

The number of Memorial Day travelers is expected to increase by 1.2 percent—an estimated 500,000 more people—to 34.3 million travelers this year compared to 2011. But those travelers are projected to stay closer to home this weekend, with the average travel distance dropping by 19 percent. This may reflect the spike in gasoline prices earlier in the year, averaging around $4 per gallon at one point.

As we pointed out in our report—“Is Big Oil Rigging Gasoline Prices?”—the price of gas at the pump dramatically increased during the first quarter of this year despite the fact that domestic production was at an eight-year high, and domestic demand for oil and oil products was down.

Since reaching its peak in late March, the cost of a fill-up has fortunately receded. Gasoline prices fell for the sixth straight week to an average of $3.75 per gallon. Despite the fact that gas prices are 21-cents-per-gallon lower than they were this time in 2011, it is still a big bite out of many Americans’ budget. According to an analysis by the American Automobile Association, 47 percent of travelers said that high prices at the pump will impact their plans this Memorial Day.

This past week the American Petroleum Institute—the political operatives of Big Oil—released a “report” outlining its policy wish list. Some of the demands included the “opening of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf, and the Pacific Outer Continental Shelf” to oil and gas production.

If Big Oil gets its way, it could have devastating impacts on coastal tourism. Many of the areas that Americans travel to during the summer months would be vulnerable to oil spills similar to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster that spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, devastating the ecosystem and the Gulf economy.

The Outer Banks—an area that would be vulnerable to drilling located off the mid-Atlantic coast—attracts more than 7 million visitors each year. When surveyed, more than 49 percent of respondents said “beautiful beaches” are the main reason for summer visits there. It’s highly doubtful that tourists would flock to build sandcastles on oil-soaked beaches.

Likewise, those vacationing out west could find a peaceful kayaking trip disrupted by the 1,300 gas wells that Denver-based Gasco Energy, Inc., wants to drill in Desolation Canyon, Utah. This remote area on the Green River is an essential part of Utah’s tourism industry, which generates nearly $300 million annually in total state tax revenue from tourism.

Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family and friends, with many people taking the opportunity to enjoy the nation’s natural wonders. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of Americans’ travel expenditures on fuel while at the same time fighting for increased drilling that threatens some of our most cherished vacation destinations.

Here is a by-the-numbers examination of what Big Oil will cost us this weekend:

An expensive holiday weekend ahead

• 642 miles: Average distance Americans will travel this Memorial Day weekend
• 804.5 million: Gallons of gasoline expected to be purchased over the three-day weekend
• $113: Total cost of gasoline for an average trip this Memorial Day weekend [1]

Wall Street speculators drive up oil and gas prices

• $92.60: Price of a barrel of oil on May 21, 2012
• $20: The estimated price-per-barrel-of-oil increase due to speculation, according to Forbes magazine’s formula
• $14.60: Additional gasoline expenditure for the average Memorial Day trip, thanks to speculation
• 11: Number of quarter-pound hamburgers with buns for a Memorial Day picnic that you can make for $14

High pump price increases Big Oil profits

• $33.5 billion: Amount of profit the five biggest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—made in the first three months of 2012
• $1 billion: Estimated combined earnings the big five oil companies will earn over the three-day Memorial Day weekend if second quarter profits replicated first quarter profits

Increased drilling would destroy vacation spots for millions of Americans

• 7 million: Number of tourists that visit the Outer Banks in North Carolina each year
• 1 million: Number of people employed by Florida’s tourism industry
• $4 billion:Value of the tourism industry in Utah, where Gasco Energy wants to drill 1,300 gas wells

Big Oil’s influence machine

• $14 million: Total lobbying expenditures by the big five oil companies so far in 2012
• $906,000: Amount given to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney by the oil and gas industry thus far in the 2011–2012 election season
• $182,000: Amount given to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign by the oil and gas industry thus far in the 2011–2012 election season

– Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy, Jackie Weidman is Special Assistant for Energy Policy, and Celine Ramstein is an intern with the Energy Policy team at the Center for American Progress. This piece was originally published at the Center for American Progress.

Endnotes

[1] This calculation is based on the most recently available fuel economy data (2009) for all passenger vehicles and SUVs/light trucks, and employs the U.S. Department of Transportation data on the composition of the passenger vehicle fleet, which is 57 percent cars and 40 percent light trucks. For more information, see: “Table 4-23: Average Fuel Efficiency of U.S. Light Duty Vehicles,” available at http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_23.html.

Last month, the White House edited climate change from Obama’s Earth Day 2012 proclamation. That was after the President omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address.

But then, in a Rolling Stone interview, Obama unexpectedly broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change, saying he thought climate change would be a campaign issue.

Of course, it would be hard for climate to be a campaign issue if the president doesn’t actually talk about it in public. After all, his challenger Mitt Romney seems unlikely to bring it up, having Etch-a-Sketched his position on that subject many times. And Lord knows that media isn’t itching to talk about climate.

So it was disappointing again once again that on Thursday, the President reverted to form in his big speech on energy at TPI Composites, a wind-blade manufacturing plant in Newton, Iowa.

The speech never mentions “climate change” or “global warming” or even “greenhouse gases” or “carbon” or even “pollution”!

It’s a fairly long speech, over half of which is focused on energy, to argue for extending “tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year for clean-energy companies like TPI.” Those credits are certainly worth fighting for since 37,000 wind jobs are at stake – as is leadership in a global industry that will be one of the largest job creators in the coming decades when  the world finally start taking serious action on climate.

But as Henry Waxman (D-CA), the Ranking Minority Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said last year:

If you are a science denier, there is no reason for government to invest in clean energy.

Now it may be that in the current political climate, no argument would win. But both climate action and federal clean energy investment are classic wedge issues that have broad support with the American public, including independents and moderate Republicans, those not aligned with the Tea Party (see “Can We Stop The Collapse of Federal Clean Energy Support Without Talking About Climate Change Or A Carbon Price?” and links below).

Here, are the President’s remarks on energy in Iowa:

The fifth item on my “To-Do” list — I’m calling on Congress to extend tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year for clean-energy companies like TPI.  (Applause.)  Let’s not wait.  Let’s do it now.  (Applause.)

Many of you know the story of what’s happening here better than I do, but I just want to remind you how far we’ve come.  Shortly after I took office, I came to Newton — some of you remember — and we unveiled an all-of-the-above energy strategy for America.  We said let’s produce more oil and gas, but let’s also produce more biofuels; let’s produce more fuel-efficient cars; let’s produce more solar and wind powerand other sources of clean, renewable energy.  And I came to Newton because Newton is helping to lead the way when it comes to building wind turbines.

And since then, our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year that I’ve been in office — every single year. (Applause.)  America is now producing more domestic oil than any time in the last eight years.  But we’re also producing more natural gas, and we’re producing more biofuels than any time in our history.  And that’s good for the Iowa economy.  (Applause.) We’re laying the foundation for some of our nation’s first offshore wind farms.  And since I became President, America has nearly doubled the use of renewable energy, like solar power and wind power — we’ve nearly doubled it.  (Applause.)

So this country is on the path towards more energy independence.  And that’s good for everybody.  It’s good for people’s pocketbooks; it’s good for the environment; it’s good for our national security.  We don’t want our economy dependent on something that happens on the other side of the world.  We don’t want every time there’s a scare about war or some regime change in the Middle East that suddenly everybody here is getting socked and the whole economy is going down.

And the best thing is, in the process, we’re also putting thousands of Americans back to work — because the more we rely on American-made energy, the less oil we buy from other countries, the more jobs we create here at home, the more jobs we create here in Iowa.

So let’s look at the wind industry.  It’s so important to Iowa.  This industry, thanks in large part to some very important tax credits, has now taken off.  The state of Iowa now gets nearly 20 percent of all your electricity from wind — 20 percent.  Overall, America now has enough wind capacity to power 10 million homes.  So this is an industry on the rise.  And as you know, it’s an industry that’s putting people to work.  You know this firsthand.  There are more wind power jobs in Iowa than any other state.  That’s a big deal.  (Applause.)

And one of these modern windmills has more than 8,000 different parts — everything from the towers and the blades to the gears, to the electrical switches.  And it used to be that almost all these parts were imported.  Today, more and more of these parts are being made here in America — right here.  (Applause.)  We used to have just a few dozen manufacturing facilities attached to the wind industry.  Today we have nearly 500 facilities in 43 states employing tens of thousands of American workers — tens of thousands.

So we’re making progress.  And you know it better than anybody.  I mean, when I was talking to Quinten and Mark and a whole bunch of the other folks who are working here, they reminded me of the experience at working at Maytag and putting your heart and soul into a company and making a great product, and then, suddenly having that company leave, and how hard that was for families and how hard it was for the community.  But folks made the transition.

And now, when you look at what’s happening here — 700 to 800 jobs, over $30 million being put back into the community — this gives folks hope.  It gives people opportunity.  I met some folks who have been in manufacturing for 30 years, but I also met a couple of young folks who were just getting started.  And that’s what we’re looking for.  Nobody wants a handout.  Nobody wants to get something for nothing.  But if we’ve got a chance to create energy and create value and put people back to work, why wouldn’t we do that?

So I’m here today because, as much progress as we’ve made, that progress is in jeopardy.  If Congress doesn’t act, those tax credits that I mentioned — the ones that helped build up the wind industry, the ones that helped to bring all these jobs to Newton, those tax credits will expire at the end of the year if Congress doesn’t do anything.

If Congress doesn’t act, companies like this one will take a hit.  Jobs will be lost.  That’s not a guess, that’s a fact.  We can’t let that happen.  And keep in mind that — and this is something Congress needs to understand — Dave Loebsack understands it, but I want every member of Congress to understand it.  These companies that are putting in orders for these amazing blades, they’re making plans now.  They’re making decisions now. So if they’re cutting back on their orders, if they’re not confident that the industry is going to be moving at a fast clip and they start reducing orders here, that affects you.  You can’t wait for six months.  You can’t wait for eight months.  You can’t wait for a year to get this done.  It’s got to be done now.  (Applause.)

So this is a simple thing on Congress’s “To-Do” list — extend these tax credits.  Do it now.  Every day they don’t act business grows more concerned that they will not be renewed.  They’re worried demand for their products is going down, so they start thinking twice about expanding, more cautious about making new investments.  They start looking overseas.  I was talking to your CEO.  We got an opportunity to branch out, but we want to branch out by making the stuff here and then sending it there.  We don’t want to branch out by sending the jobs and the investments over there, and then shipping it back to America.  That doesn’t make sense.  (Applause.)  One company that had plans to invest $100 million to build a wind manufacturing plant in Arkansas — and create hundreds of jobs –- put those plans on hold.

And by the way, this should not be a partisan issue.  There are several Republican governors –- including the governor of this state -– who are calling on Congress to act.  There are members of Congress in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle –- including your two senators –- who support these tax credits.  And that doesn’t happen much in Washington where Democrats and Republicans say they agree on something.  So if you agree, why haven’t we gotten it done yet?

This is not just an issue, by the way, for the wind industry.   Some of America’s most prominent companies -– from Starbucks to Campbell’s Soup –- they’re calling on Congress to act because they use renewable energy.

Well, actually many of those companies are Calling on Congress to act because they are concerned about global warming, for which renewable energy is a core solution — see “Starbucks: Global Warming is Hurting Coffee.”

How lame is it that a high-end coffeehouse chain is more comfortable talking about the gravest threat to the nation’s health and well-being than the President of the United States?

Related Posts:

• “Independents, Other Republicans Split With Tea-Party Extremists on Global Warming“
• Brulle: “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.”
• Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?
• Stanford’s Krosnick: “Our research suggests that it would be wise for the President and for all other elected officials who believe that climate change is a problem and merits government attention to say this publicly and vigorously, because most Americans share these views.  Expressing and pursuing green goals on climate change will gain votes on election day and seem likely to increase the President’s and the Congress’s approval ratings.”

NRDC released a report [this week] projecting that more than 150,000 additional Americans could die by the end of this century due to excessive heat caused by climate change. This startling conclusion is based on peer-reviewed scientific papers published recently by Dr. Larry Kalkstein and colleagues.

This is the kind of study that should make headlines around the country but is generally ignored when published only in scholarly journals. So NRDC is presenting the information in a more accessible manner, adding calculations of the cumulative additional death toll attributable to projected global warming by mid-century and century’s end (the report, including these additional calculations, was reviewed by Dr. Kalkstein to ensure that we have presented the information accurately)

The “Killer Summer Heat” report gives the results for all 40 cities analyzed in the original papers. The three with the highest number of projected heat-related deaths through the end of the century are: Louisville, KY (19,000 deaths); Detroit (18,000); and Cleveland (17,000). Other cities’ death tolls include:

• Baltimore: 2,900 deaths
• Boston: 5,700 deaths
• Chicago: 6,400 deaths
• Columbus: 6,000 deaths
• Denver: 3,500 deaths
• Los Angeles: 1,200 deaths
• Minneapolis: 7,500 deaths
• Philadelphia: 700 deaths
• Pittsburgh: 1,200 deaths
• Providence, R.I.: 2,000 deaths
• St. Louis: 5,600 deaths
• Washington, D.C.: 3000 deaths.

The projected deaths are based on the widely-used assumption that carbon pollution will steadily increase in the absence of effective new policies, more than doubling the levels seen today by the end of the century.

These findings bring home the fact that global climate change has a number of real life-and-death consequences in our local communities. One of which is that as carbon pollution continues to grow, climate change is only going to increase the number of dangerously hot days each summer, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of lives lost.

Already an average of 1,300 heat-related deaths occur per year due to direct and indirect effects of heat exacerbating life-threatening illnesses, such as heat exhaustion, heat stroke, cardiovascular disease, and kidney disease, according to Dr. Kalkstein’s analysis. That estimate comes from analyzing the 40 largest U.S. cities from 1975 through 2004, so it doesn’t account for the impact of the record-setting heat seen more recently. Last summer at least 42 states saw record daytime highs and 49 states saw record high nighttime temperatures, according to NOAA. And last week NOAA reported that the twelve months that ended on April 30th were the warmest twelve months in the United States since reliable record-keeping began in 1895.

To prevent the health impacts of climate change from getting as bad as the “business-as-usual” scenario portrayed in today’s report we need to change business as usual by establishing a comprehensive program to reduce heat-trapping pollution from all sources. The biggest step taken by the Obama administration so far is a set of landmark clean car standards that will cut tailpipe carbon emissions from new vehicles in half by 2025. The EPA also took an important, but limited, step forward recently by setting the first national standards to reduce air pollution from wells that use fracking to stimulate natural gas production.

But there are still no national limits on carbon pollution from power plants—the largest source of global warming pollution in the United States. That will be the subject of public hearings tomorrow on EPA’s proposal to limit carbon pollution from new power plants. Of course, pollution from existing power plants, refineries and other sources will need to be addressed as well.

If you live near Washington, D.C. or Chicago I urge you to attend the hearing and let EPA know that you agree that it’s long past time to end the practice of dumping unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into our atmosphere. EPA’s proposal is an important step toward protecting public health from the consequences of climate change driven by carbon pollution, and more than one million comments have been filed with the agency in support of moving forward. That’s already a record, but we can’t stop now. Let’s blow the record away with another million before the comment period ends on June 25th. Add your voice here.

Dan Lashof is the Program Director for Climate & Clean Air at the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.

Coal export proponents like to argue that, climate-wise, it doesn’t matter:  Asia will burn the same amount of coal regardless of whether we ship it from the Northwest.  This argument is weak because it: a) defies basic economics – see here; b) ignores the x-factor:  economic “lock-in” to dangerous climate disruption – see here; and c) is morally dubious – see here.  So we know coal export is bad for the climate.  Check out Eric de Place’s social math for scale.

It’s true, however, that Powder River Basin isn’t the only coal available in Asia.  Estimating the net emission impact requires some elaborate economics (forthcoming). [i] But this graph is a rough, directional guide:

Let me explain.

It all comes down to the difference between the cost of producing and transporting Powder River Basin coal and the value of that coal in Asian markets.  That difference appears to be huge.

PRB coal isn’t dirt cheap.  It’s cheaper (than, say, top soil or gravel).  Most of it lies under public land, and the federal government basically gives it away.  Strip-mining is the very definition of quick and dirty – and, yes, super-cheap.  The mine-mouth cost of “producing” PRB coal is in the range of 10-15 bucks a ton.

Transporting it by rail and mega-ship to Asia is much more costly than snatching it from federal land, but there’s still plenty of margin.  Rail costs run about a penny a ton per mile, so that’s maybe another $20 a ton to get it to port.  Throw in say $15 for ocean shipping, tack on a value-added tax and port fees in China, and we’re looking at maybe $70 per ton delivered cost.

The benchmark thermal coal price in China in January was $115 per ton.  So PRB coal suppliers could significantly undercut the market, and still make a bundle.  This also explains why Asia is “just drooling” for this coal, and why, in turn, Big Coal is drooling to get it there.  Saliva speaks volumes.

The fact that they could sell coal so much cheaper also means that other suppliers would have to lower their prices to remain competitive.  And that would mean even greater increases in emissions, and more irreversible commitments to coal infrastructure.

So, both the potential for profits and the potential for net emission increases depend on the same factor – the amount by which the value of the coal in Asia exceeds the cost of getting it there.  In other words, the coal export business succeeds roughly in direct proportion to how much it disrupts the climate.

That means there is a reliable if not precise way to gauge how big the net emission impacts of coal export would be:  by observing how desperately the coal industry tries to make it happen. One more walk through the logic:

The harder the coal industry tries to mow down the opposition to coal export, the more we can infer that enormous profits are at stake.  And the size of the prospective profits is directly related to how competitive their coal is in Asia, which is directly related to how cheaply they can deliver it, which is directly related to how much would be burned.

Yup, how bad it would be for the climate is an indirect function of how much the coal industry wants it.  Judging by the money they are throwing at the early rounds of this battle, it’d be real bad.  And, they have warned, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

There is, of course, a corollary conclusion about how we should respond:

We will know that coal export would be okay from a climate perspective when they give up and stop trying to make it happen.

– KC Golden is Policy Director at Climate Solutions, a Northwest-based nonprofit. This piece was originally published at the Getting a Grip on Climate Solutions blog and was reprinted with permission.

Yesterday I pulled a red wagon through the streets of Washington, DC, my hometown. Inside the wagon were more than 8,000 comments from Moms Clean Air Force members supporting a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that will limit carbon dioxide emissions from newly constructed power plants. I brought those messages from people like YOU to EPA officials to let them know how much we want that rule to be finalized. I also testified at a public hearing before EPA staff on the proposed rule.

I have a public health degree, and I studied epidemiology, but I spoke yesterday as a mom.

Air pollution gets personal.

I’ve been working in the field of environmental health for several years, but the issue of air pollution became personal for me in a new way last year. I developed wheezing and respiratory symptoms. I started using an inhaler and other medications. My doctor told me to pay attention to the air quality. And I noticed that my symptoms were worse on poor air quality days. I was wheezing more, I was short of breath, I was coughing.

I had heard that air pollution is bad for our lungs, I had even studied it in public health school. But suddenly I could actually feel it, in my own body.

If this is happening to me, I thought, what is that same air doing to my children’s lungs? This is the kind of thing that keeps moms up at night. It kept me up at night. I got pretty upset about it.

The burden of asthma.

More than 7 million children have asthma in this country. Behind each of those children is a mom (or dad) taking care of their child, making sure she takes her medicine, vigilantly watching for symptoms. Asthma makes kids sick, and keeps them home from school. There are more than 14 million days of school lost each year to asthma. Behind each one of those lost school days is a mom (or dad) who is probably missing work, taking that child to the doctor, and all too often going to the emergency room. Indeed, asthma is responsible for over 600,000 emergency room visits in children each year. This is a terrible burden for families, and we know that air pollution makes it worse.

It would be one thing if we were dealing with a health problem that we didn’t understand. But scientists and doctors know what’s going on. They know how to ease this problem. They know what to do, and we have the technology to do it.

How does carbon pollution relate to asthma?

Reducing carbon pollution is a critical step in this process. Power plants are our nation’s largest source of carbon pollution. Carbon pollution is causing global warming, and hotter weather means more ozone. More ozone in turn causes more lung damage – for children’s lungs in particular.

Asthma is just the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve been talking about asthma, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Global warming is hurting children on so many fronts. We as moms know that reducing carbon pollution is quite literally an investment in our children’s future. We have a responsibility to leave them a decent world, in decent shape, where they can thrive and hope for a healthy future for their children. Global warming is a children’s health emergency, and we need to address it now, before it’s too late.

Last summer there were many days when air quality was predicted to be so bad that I kept my children inside for the day. If we don’t reduce carbon pollution, and stop global warming, there will likely be many more days like that in the future. It is wrong for our air to be too polluted for children to play outdoors. It is wrong for power plants to make kids sick.

Here is the testimony I delivered to the EPA yesterday:

Good afternoon, I’m Molly Rauch. I live in Washington, DC. I am speaking today as a representative of Moms Clean Air Force, as a public health professional, and as a mom. My daughter turned 9 just yesterday, and I have two boys, ages 4 and 6.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today in support of EPA’s proposed carbon rules.

Moms Clean Air Force is a community of moms united by concern over the effects of air pollution on our children. We read the health research on air pollution, and we have learned a lot about the health effects of breathing dirty air. We know that in its many forms, air pollution has been linked to the major health problems of our time. We see that asthma attacks, heart attacks, heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, premature death, emergency room visits, hospital admissions– all of these health problems have been linked to air pollution.

Many of these problems harm our children in particular. We at Moms Clean Air Force think that’s unacceptable.

I have with me and wish to submit the comments of more than 8,000 members of Moms Clean Air Force in support of the proposed carbon pollution standard. These moms, dads, and grandparents know that protecting our children means preventing pollution.

Carbon pollution is disrupting our planet’s climate, causing temperatures to rise. These rising temperatures increase formation of ground-level ozone, or smog, which triggers asthma. This is just one of the many health impacts that people will endure in a warming world. After reviewing a massive volume of research by leading climate scientists on smog formation and other climate impacts, EPA found that carbon pollution is a health threat to Americans.  I am here to assert that carbon pollution is a health threat especially for our children.

Just last year, I was personally affected by air pollution. I developed wheezing and respiratory symptoms, and started using an inhaler and other medications. I noticed that my symptoms are worse on days when the air quality around Washington, DC, is poor. Doctors and scientists know that the high smog and particle pollution levels we have here in DC and around much of the country can harm our lungs and trigger asthma attacks. Because of my wheezing, I exercise less. I spend less time outside with my children; and, of course, I am concerned about what pollution is doing to my children’s lungs, and whether they will develop asthma symptoms too. And I have it easy — very, very easy.

Take Rachael Lemire Murphy. She has two children with asthma. She lives in Massachusetts, where wind currents carry pollutants from power plants – many of which are in other states – into her community, forming smog. Her daughter Mia has such severe asthma that last year blood vessels in her eyes burst from the coughing. Mia regularly has to take 5-day courses of steroids for her asthma, which cause nightmares, outbursts, and uncontrollable tears. Rachael says, and I quote: “cleaning up air pollution from coal fired power plants would have a tremendous impact on my children’s health.”

Or, take Chandra Baldwin-Woods, whose son, Jovante, had a severe asthma attack almost two years ago at home in Ohio and died at age 16. He was one of the more than 3,000 people who die of asthma every year. Jovante was an athlete who had suffered from asthma since he was a baby. His sudden attack, which led to his death, is a horror to contemplate. Chandra says, and I quote, “air pollution causes asthma attacks and cuts short the lives of those we love most.”

Our blog is full of stories from Chandra, Rachael, and so many others. We need to do everything we can to prevent children like Jovante from dying; to prevent Mia’s next severe asthma attack; to prevent the damage smog causes inside my children’s lungs. Reducing carbon pollution is a critical step toward protecting their health.

Our electric utilities claim that they’ve given us cheap electricity. But for Jovante’s mom, it could not have been more expensive.

Moms have a lot of experience cleaning up messes. We know that most children won’t clean up their messes on their own. Neither will our power plants. Our children deserve a well-regulated electric power industry that produces electricity from clean sources, without destabilizing the climate, increasing smog levels and associated respiratory health problems, and causing other grave health effects of global warming. It’s EPA’s job to set the rules that will give us the clean and safe power industry all Americans – and especially our children – deserve.

Please finalize the Carbon Pollution Standard, for the sake of our children.

– Molly Rauch is a mom who lives and works in Washington, DC. When not building Lego spaceships and cleaning out sippy cup valves, she works at Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) on environmental health policy issues. This piece was originally published at Moms Clean Air Task Force and was reprinted with permission.

by Tom Smerling, via ClimateBites

After watching this TEDx clip, you may never want to stand before an audience again without pausing, at least once, to utter these seven magic words:

“Let me tell you a little story.”

But most advice about the importance of narrative comes from psychologists and communication consultants, not storytellers.   So here is a master storyteller, Bill Harley, talking about his life’s work, and sharing what he’s learned about why storytelling is so central to human understanding.

A small sample:

It has a power nothing else has. . .

I’m not talking just about literature and English.   I’m talking about history and astrophysics and biochemistry and law and mathematics.

All of those things are best explained through story. Because “story” is how we are reminded, and how we remember.   If we want it to be memorable, it must be a story. . .

We are not built to memorize lists, or unrelated facts. We are built to remember narrative.So try this the next time you are giving a lecture or a talk or standing in front of a bunch of people:    Stop in the middle of your offering of facts or your closely-reasoned argument, and say “Let me tell you a little story.”

And watch what happens. You see the faces relax, you see people reseat themselves in their chairs, and get ready. . . to hear . . . a story.

Harley’s points apply not only to public speeches, but to all climate communication, from written articles to interviews, blogs, and even dinner-table conversation.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy Bill Harley’s anecdotes.

If you want to look further into the art of climate storytelling, below are some suggestions for where to start:

• There are two ways of thinking about climate storytelling

1) the overall narrative (aka storyline) you select to describe the problem and its solutions to a given audience.  There are many different approaches; ClimateBites has compiled 23 alternative ways to tell the climate story.

2) short, personal anecdotes used to draw the audience in and make your message stick.   For tips on becoming a better storyteller for any public cause, check out Andy Goodman’s work linked at “Numbers Numb, Jargon Jars.  And Nobody Ever Marched on Washington Because of a Pie Chart.“

• As role model for climate storytelling, nobody beats Dr. Richard Alley, host of PBS’s Earth: the Operators’ Manual.   That entire series is filled with great stories, and the book includes even more.   In this short clip Alley draws on his own life events to illustrate how ‘skeptics’ cherry-pick data, ala “The Escalator.”

– Tom Smerling is a climate communicator who formerly worked in the Special Projects Office of NOAA’s National Ocean Service. This piece was originally published at ClimateBites and was reprinted with permission.

Related Post:

• In Praise of Clint Eastwood’s Metaphorical “Halftime in America” Superbowl Ad
• Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate

by Michael Conathan

Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual “Status of Stocks” report to Congress outlining the overall health of our nation’s fisheries. To the relatively small cadre of fish geeks (myself included), the release of this document is a major event. It lacks the panache of the Oscar nominations, but for us it is perhaps comparable to the way the 1 percent gets all giddy for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual letter to shareholders.

NOAA’s report for 2011, similar to that of Warren Buffett’s financial powerhouse, continued its recent trend of positive returns. The topline numbers showed modest yet continued growth in the overall health of America’s fish populations. At the end of 2011, just 14 percent of fish stocks were subject to overfishing, and 21 percent were in an overfished state—down from 16 percent and 22 percent in 2010, respectively. (Recall this description of the difference between a stock that is “subject to overfishing” and one that is “overfished.”)

Yet the most impressive news to emerge from this year’s report was that six stocks have been declared fully rebuilt—more than in any other year—bringing the overall total of stocks rebuilt since 2000 to 27.

Despite these positive trends and all the feel-good stories the report has spawned (in more than 100 newspapers nationwide), correspondence in my personal inbox this week was dominated by references to a Washington Post Wonk Room blog post proclaiming boldly that it had found “The end of fish, in one chart.”

The chart in question comes from a wide-ranging World Wildlife Fund study on global biodiversity, and it displays the dramatic increase in global fishing pressure from 1950 to 2006. The blog piece goes on to reference an overpublicized doomsday scenario article published by lead author Dr. Boris Worm in 2006 in the journal Science. Worm’s study predicts the demise of global commercial fisheries by 2048. Ah, how the mass media truly loves a ticking clock.

The rest of that story, as I explained in an earlier column, is that Worm later collaborated with several other colleagues, including Dr. Ray Hilborn, on a follow-up article that Science ran in 2009 showing a far rosier outlook on the future of the world’s fisheries—specifically that “conservation objectives can be achieved by merging diverse management actions, including catch restrictions, gear modification, and closed areas.” Sound management practices mean fishery rebuilding is possible.

And that’s precisely what we’re now seeing in domestic fisheries with the slow but steady recovery of fish populations. Our regulations are working—at least for the fish. Yet as always, we must continue to seek the balance between regulations that work for the fish and for the fishermen.

Hilborn hit this point perfectly with an op-ed he co-authored for The New York Times earlier this week with his colleague and wife, Ulrike Hilborn. Their point, similar to one I made in this series four weeks ago, is that when we as consumers eschew overfished fisheries that are in the process of rebuilding under strictly enforced science-based catch limits, we unnecessarily penalize fishermen who are acting in the best interests of the ecosystem, coastal communities, and our national economy.

Americans should not feel guilty about eating domestically produced seafood, as long as we keep strict regulations in place that reflect the best available science and that continue working toward the rebuilding goal achieved in 2011 by six different fish stocks.

The Magnuson-Stevens Act—the law that regulates our nation’s fisheries—will be up for reauthorization again in 2013, and some commercial and recreational fishing groups have already begun their call to arms, insisting legislators roll back the stringent requirement that all catch limits be based on the best available science. While there is no question that our understanding of fish populations must improve, lawmakers should think long and hard about weakening safeguards against overfishing just as they are starting to pay positive dividends.

After all, slow, steady progress is a pretty good long-term growth strategy. Just ask Warren Buffett.

Michael Conathan is Director of Oceans Policy at the Center for American Progress.

Rebuilt fish stocks in 2011

Below are the six fish stocks that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “Status of Stocks” report declared fully rebuilt.

Bering Sea snow crab

One of the darlings of the Discovery Channel’s hit reality show, “The Deadliest Catch,” the Bering Sea snow crab (also known as opilio crab or “opies”) is perhaps the highest-profile stock to haul itself across the rebuilding finish line in 2011. In 2005 the fishery underwent a massive management overhaul—from a system that forced fishermen to fish as fast and hard as possible until the entire annual quota was met, to an individual fishing quota system that assigns each permit a total amount of crab that the permit-holder can catch at any time during a defined season.

One measure of this system’s success is that after landing 54.5 million pounds in 2010–2011, managers hiked the catch limit for 2011–2012 to 89.9 million pounds.

Summer flounder

Summer flounder is a fish with many suitors. It’s a staple of both the commercial and recreational fishery from North Carolina to Maine in state and federal waters. Perhaps because it’s so well known and sought after, it’s also one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s highest-profile success stories.

After rampant overfishing decimated the species in the mid- to late-1980s, it took more than two decades of legal and regulatory wrangling to implement catch limits in line with scientific recommendations. Now, thanks to strict harvest caps and a few robust-year classes of young fish, the stock—which has brought commercial fishermen between $20 million and $30 million annually since 2001 and has become one of the most popular sport fish in the mid-Atlantic region—is now fully rebuilt.

Gulf of Maine haddock

For all the negative news that has come out of the New England groundfishery in the past few years, including terrible new stock assessments for cod and yellowtail flounder, the groundfish species that has quietly dominated the northwest Atlantic ecosystem has been Gulf of Maine haddock.

Unfortunately for fishermen, they have been largely unable to take advantage of the increasingly large catch limits that come with a healthy haddock population. Because cod haddock and many flounders all school together, trawls, gillnets, and other fishing gear cannot selectively target haddock while avoiding the less healthy species. In 2010 fishermen caught just 20 percent of their total allowable catch of haddock, and that figure stood at just 11 percent of the total through the first 11 months of 2011.

Chinook salmon—Northern California coast: Klamath (fall), and coho salmon—Washington coast: Queets

Many consumers think of salmon as a single species. But this is like thinking all wine is a single varietal. Not only are salmon divided into Atlantic and Pacific (virtually all wild salmon is Pacific and most farmed is Atlantic), but there are also five different species of Pacific salmon alone. Each species is further divided into subpopulations since salmon, which spend their adolescence and adult lives in the open ocean, have the uncanny ability to return to the same tributary of the same river in which they were spawned.

Confused yet? Now try managing each river’s population of each distinct species and rebuilding them all to optimum biomass levels.

This year, two rivers in the Pacific Northwest can claim rebuilt populations for a species of salmon: Washington’s Queets River’s coho salmon and California and Oregon’s Klamath River’s chinook salmon.

The Klamath River story is particularly remarkable. As recently as 2008, this fishery was completely shut down—that year, just 68,000 fish returned to the Klamath, a paltry fraction of the historic highs. In 2011 that figure had limped its way up to 233,000—still far short of what fishery managers considered sustainable. This year? More than 1.6 million fish came back to the Klamath.

It’s too early to tell why the numbers have rebounded so dramatically or whether they will stay high in the years to come, but for now northern California and Oregon’s salmon fishermen are truly in the pink.

Widow rockfish

The sixth species declared rebuilt is the widow rockfish. This is neither a terribly abundant nor commercially critical species even in the best of times, but in the late-1980s and mid-1990s West Coast fishermen were landing between 16 million and 22 million pounds per year and bringing in $4 million to $6 million. That total dropped off a cliff around the turn of the century and from 2000–2011 landings totals have been in the neighborhood of 300,000 pounds per year. The species is currently managed under the Pacific groundfish multispecies complex, and it represents just a tiny fraction of what fishermen bring in overall.

Michael Conathan is Director of Oceans Policy at the Center for American Progress. This piece was originally published at the CAP website.

NOTE: How about crowd-sourcing some real pennies for cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan, who has given me permission to reprint her cartoons. Here’s the link to Paypal: CLICK HERE (then click where it says DONATE).

API President Jack Gerard

by Lee Fang, via the Republic Report

When oil companies need help in Washington, they call Jack Gerard. But in January of next year, assuming he wins the presidency, Mitt Romney may be dialing Gerard for political support. According to media reports in his native Idaho, Gerard is on the shortlist to become Romney’s White House chief of staff.

Gerard is the president of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil lobbying associations in the country. Using a budget that is rumored to be in the hundreds of millions (funded by all of the major oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, etc.), Gerard finances pro-oil propaganda on network television, academic studies to promote his policy positions, front groups to hold rallies in pivotal swing states, and of course a large teams of lobbyists from D.C. to over a dozen state capitals across the country. For his work, he’s one of the highest paid lobbyists in the Beltway, making $6.4 million in 2010 alone.

Rumors are against circulating that Gerard, a prominent Mormon and close ally to the Romney campaign, may be selected to take the top slot in a Romney administration. And there’s other evidence that Gerard has already ingratiated himself with the Romney campaign:

– Senator Jim Risch (R-ID) told the Idaho Statesman that he thinks Gerard may be selected as Romney’s chief of staff. “Gerard is a heckuva player in Washington, D.C.,” Risch told the newspaper. “He’s well thought of, well connected, has incredible street cred. He’s certainly got the qualifications to do any of that.”

– Former Senator Jim McClure (R-ID), Gerard’s former boss when he worked on Capitol Hill, predicted that Gerard would be Romney’s chief of staff had he won in 2008.

– Breaking a tradition of trade association nonpartisanship, Gerard endorsed Romney during the Republican primaries this year, and indicated the he is close to the Romney family.

– Jack Gerard’s son, who shares the same name, is now a spokesman for the Romney campaign.

The Romney campaign, like most political campaigns, has remained largely silent about its future staffing plans.

Lee Fang is a reporter with the Republic Report. This piece was originally published at the Republic Report and was reprinted with permission.

The worse news is that, “The new data provide further evidence that the door to a 2°C trajectory is about to close,” according to IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol. Why does that matter? As Reuters reported:

Scientists say ensuring global average temperatures this century do not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is needed to limit devastating climate effects like crop failure and melting glaciers.

Darn you truth-telling scientists, always ruining the party (see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now“).

And the worst news, as Birol told Reuters, is that:

“When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius [11°F], which would have devastating consequences for the planet.”

As Birol said of 11°F warming late last year, “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us.” If only school children ran the country.

In fact, the scientific literature now makes clear that even 4°C (7°F) warming would destroy the livable climate 7 billion people have come to depend upon (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

So what is the ‘good’ news? We have has been reducing our emissions:

CO₂ emissions in the United States in 2011 fell by 92 Mt, or 1.7%, primarily due to ongoing switching from coal to natural gas in power generation and an exceptionally mild winter, which reduced the demand for space heating. US emissions have now fallen by 430 Mt (7.7%) since 2006, the largest reduction of all countries or regions. This development has arisen from lower oil use in the transport sector (linked to efficiency improvements, higher oil prices and the economic downturn which has cut vehicle miles travelled) and a substantial shift from coal to gas in the power sector.

Actually, the change in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) predated the downturn. VMT “began to plateau as far back as 2004 and dropped in 2007 for the first time since 1980,” as Brookings has reported. Indeed, per capita driving saw “flat-lining growth after 2000 and falling rates since 2005.”

The point is that given Obama’s strong new fuel economy standards and the reality of peak oil (that high oil prices are here to stay absent a global depression), the U.S. could meet its Copenhagen target of a 17% reduction in CO2 from 2005 levels with a pretty modest carbon tax (see “Bipartisan Support Grows for Carbon Price as Part of Debt Deal“). And that is the prerequisite for a global deal that would take us off the 6C path and give us a fighting chance at 2C.

"Activists" offered $50 to wear pro-coal shirts.

Apparently unable to find real activists, the coal industry paid astroturfers $50 to wear pro-coal t-shirts at an Environmental Protection Agency hearing yesterday.

The EPA hearings, held yesterday in Chicago and Washington, D.C., were focused on the agency’s first-ever carbon standards for new power plants. The industry has adamantly opposed these standards, as well as standards on mercury — a pollutant that even Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) admits is harmful.

This year, coal is throwing around its weight by spending tens of millions of dollars on media advertising and political contributions.

Coal is also engaging in fake advocacy campaigns, known as astroturfing. In a Craigslist ad found by the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago, a coal group promised participants $50 to “wear a t-shirt in support of an energy project.” Upon further digging, the Sierra Club blog pieced together much of the deleted Craigslist ad:

People needed to attend a public meeting (Tinley Park /Chicago)

Reply to: px6mq-3031150602@gigs.craigslist.org (email address no longer valid)

Looking for people THIS THURSDAY, MAY 24 who want to make a couple of dollars for a few hours of your time.

All you need to do is wear a t-shirt in support of an energy project for two hours during the public meeting. We will be departing the Tinely Park convention center at 8:15 am for the meeting and we will be back by 1:30 pm. For your time we will pay you $50 cash and provide you lunch once we return to the convention center.

If you can’t beat ‘em, cheat ‘em.