Last week I reported on the New Yorker’s expos© on the Koch brothers, including their greenwashing and whitewashing Smithsonian exhibit. Now meet the terrific CAP researcher behind the story:
Energy and Global Warming News for August 27th: Russia counts the costs of drought and wildfires; Your exhaust pipe could generate electricity; Peak wheat?
Russia counts the cost of drought and wildfires
The extreme heatwave, which caused a severe drought and wildfires in Russia, might be over, but both officials and consumers are now busy calculating its cost and trying to work out its consequences.
Russian deputy economy minister, Andrei Klepach, said earlier this week that the drought would take up to 0.8% off this year’s economic growth, “or maybe even more than that”.
The Coming Food Crisis: Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia’s fires and Pakistan’s floods are making a bad situation worse.
Podesta, Caldwell: “Lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require … action to confront climate change.”
Prices of basic foodstuffs like buckwheat and flour have soared in Russia over the past month as the effects of its worst ever drought hit supplies, statistics showed Wednesday….
Most alarmingly, the price of Russian staple buckwheat — enjoyed by generations for breakfast or as an accompaniment to meat — rose a very sharp 8.6 percent in the space of the week.
So Seed Daily reported Wednesday. Last year, Lester Brown and Scientific American asked “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
CAP’s John D. Podesta and Jake Caldwell have a new piece in Foreign Policy,”The Coming Food Crisis,” which I excerpt below:
DOJ Asks SCOTUS To Vacate Environmental Victory Against Greenhouse Gas Emitters
Yesterday, the Solicitor General’s office filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to vacate a victory against several polluters, including a federally-owned corporation:
The Department of Justice brief, filed with the Supreme Court this week, says the Environmental Protection Agency is already on the job, and doesn’t need help from private plaintiffs.
“EPA has already begun taking actions to address carbon-dioxide emissions,” a brief filed by Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal says. “That regulatory approach is preferable to what would result if multiple district courts — acting without the benefit of even the most basic statutory guidance — could use common-law nuisance claims to sit as arbiters of scientific and technology-related disputes and de facto regulators of power plants and other sources of pollution.”
The administration’s brief was filed in connection with litigation pitting the state of Connecticut and seven other states as well as New York City against a group of large coal-burning utilities. The suit contends the utilities are creating a “public nuisance’” through their greenhouse-gas emissions and seeks to force them to cut their emissions. The utilities, including American Electric Power Corp., countered that the issue was a political, not a judicial, matter and that the states didn’t have a right to sue, among other arguments.
Unsurprisingly, environmentalists are outraged by DOJ’s brief, and their outrage in many ways harkens back to the controversy over a previous brief defending the egregious Defense of Marriage Act.
Generally speaking, DOJ has a duty to defend lawsuits filed against the federal government, and several environmental attorneys that I spoke with agreed that DOJ should not be faulted for filing a brief defending against a lawsuit where a federal entity is a defendant. As was the case with DOMA, however, DOJ should not be required to make dangerous or offensive arguments, and DOJ’s brief in the environmental litigation advances an argument that could seriously undermine environmental protection the next time a conservative president is elected.
Ever since a 1907 Supreme Court decision required Tennessee copper companies to reduce emissions that were damaging Georgia farmers’ crops, states have been empowered to sue harmful emitters under a legal theory known as “nuisance.” So the case against greenhouse gas emitters should be a slam dunk, since unchecked greenhouse emissions will cause devastating harm throughout the world.
DOJ, however, makes two claims why nuisance law should not apply here. Their less troubling argument is that, because EPA has started to regulate greenhouse emissions after President Obama took office, these EPA regulations “displace” federal nuisance law. Under this line of reasoning, if a future administration were to lift Obama-era regulations protecting against climate change, federal nuisance law would remain as a backstop to prevent emitters from being completely unchecked.
DOJ’s second argument creates a much bigger problem. Under this argument, the states lack “standing” to assert a federal nuisance claim altogether. Should this reasoning be adopted by the courts, federal nuisance law would no longer provide a backstop against emissions, and it would no longer serve as a deterrent to prevent conservatives from gutting environmental regulations.
One additional wrinkle presented by this case is the possibility it could be heard by a panel of justices who have largely pushed a knee-jerk pro-corporate agenda. Justice Sotomayor heard oral arguments in this case while she sat on the Second Circuit, although she was promoted to the Supreme Court before the final decision came down, so she is likely to recuse from further involvement in the case. Additionally, if Justice Kagan had any involvement with the case while she was Solicitor General she would recuse as well. In other words, the future of environmental law could rest in the hands of the Court’s four most conservative members: Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito.
Perhaps this is why DOJ offered the standing argument to the Court–as a way to prevent an ideological four-justice majority from doing something even more damaging while they have a chance. Even so, this standing argument has troubling implications for the future if it is ever adopted by the courts.
KPMG review finds IPCC chief Pachauri innocent of financial misdealings or conflict of interest, UK Telegraph apologizes for smearing him
Monbiot: “A scrupulously honest man has been much maligned”
“No evidence was found that indicated personal fiduciary benefits accruing to Pachauri from his various advisory roles that would have led to a conflict of interest.“
That’s the finding of a detailed report by KPMG on the finances of Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A great many U.S. reporters and bloggers owe an apology to Pachauri (see “N.Y. Times and Elisabeth Rosenthal Face Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage“).
Let’s see if they own up to it as the UK’s Telegraph finally did:
On 20 December 2009 we published an article about Dr Pachauri and his business interests. It was not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC and we accept KPMG found Dr Pachauri had not made “millions of dollars” in recent years. We apologise to Dr Pachauri for any embarrassment caused.
In fact, suggesting Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position was the whole point of the story, which has been removed from their website but which you can easily find on right-wing websites by googling the title: “Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri” by Christopher Booker and Richard North.
This whole smear against Pachauri was so outrageous, but so eagerly parroted by U.S. disinformers and so willingly lapped up by the U.S. media that I’m going to reprint below in its entirety, George Monbiot’s piece for the UK Guardian. I hope others will echo this far and wide:
Justice Department asks Supreme Court to vacate environmental victory against greenhouse gas emitters
Another day, another in a long line of mesmerizingly message-muddying moves by the Obama administration on the environment.
As with the decision to embrace offshore drilling, we’ll no doubt eventually learn that this decision — which lies somewhere on the scale between between unproductive and counter-productive — was made without serious input from those in the administration who represent science or the environment.
I had applauded the original decision (see Federal court says states may sue utilities over GHGs. NY AG Cuomo: “This is a game-changing decision for New York and other states, reaffirming our right to take direct action against global warming pollution from power plants”).
I couldn’t find anyone who thinks this moves makes much sense. NRDC’s David Donger told the WSJ, “We are appalled.”
But I could find someone who can explain what team Obama did and why it doesn’t make much sense — CAP’s Ian Millhiser, who received a J.D., magna cum laude, from Duke University. He clerked for Judge Eric L. Clay of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. What follows is a Wonk Room cross-post.
Energy and Global Warming News for August 26th: California approves first new U.S. large solar thermal plant; Electricity from the air?
California Approves First New U.S. Thermal Solar Plant
California regulators on Wednesday approved a license for the nation’s first large-scale solar thermal power plant in two decades.
The licensing of the 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project after a two-and-a-half-year environmental review comes as several other big solar farms are set to receive approval from the California Energ y Commission in the next month.
Anatomy of a bad decision: Obama’s embrace of offshore drilling was made by limiting scientific and environmental input
Two of President Obama’s top environmental advisers told a panel investigating the cause of the BP oil spill Wednesday that they did not provide the environmental and scientific basis for the administration’s new five-year plan expanding oil and gas drilling off the nation’s coasts.
I was not a fan of Obama’s decision to allow drilling and/or exploration off much of the U.S. coast on energy, environmental or political grounds (see EIA: New offshore drilling will lower gas prices in 2030 a few pennies a gallon, Bush official Dan Bartlett admits authorizing offshore oil drilling will be unlikely to win over any GOP votes: “Republicans have made a calculation that cooperating with this administration at this time is not necessary for them to pick up seats”).
Ultimately, the decision proved catastrophic from a positioning and messaging perspective — making it one of White House’s biggest blunders to date. It put Obama on the side of drilling right before the biggest oil disaster in U.S. history.
Now it’s clear that this poor decision looked amateurish because it was. The administration simply didn’t do his homework. The decision was made without full scientific and environmental input — by design. The Washington Independent explains:
Hansen on why he became an activist: “Our planet is close to climate tipping points” and it is “clear that needed actions will happen only if the public, somehow, becomes forcefully involved.”
Top climatologist launches new website with graphs and analysis
60-month and 132-month running means of global surface temperature anomaly with a base period 1951-1980.
The nation’s leading — and most scientifically prescient — climatologist has a new website, Updating the Climate Science: What Path is the Real World Following? It “will present updated graphs and discussion of key quantities that help provide understanding of how climate change is developing and how effective or ineffective global actions are in affecting climate forcings and future climate change.”
He also has a new essay, “Activist”, for “J. Henry Fair’s upcoming book.” As an aside I simply can’t imagine why Fair titled his book, “The Day After Tomorrow,” the dreadful, scientifically inaccurate 2004 climate movie that many folks, like director James Cameron, actually say set back the cause of informing the public about climate science and the dangers of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions.
I’ll excerpt the essay and repost some of the graphs below:
Climate change is bad for nuclear power, industry needs a shrinking cap on carbon to survive
Conservatives who oppose clean energy and real climate action typically tout uber-expensive nuclear power as the solution (see Lamar Alexander calls nuclear “the cheap clean energy solution,” renews GOP call for 100 new nukes, which would cost some $1 trillion). CAP’s Richard W. Caperton explains in this Wonk Room cross post how failure to pursue genuine action on climate change – a shrinking cap and rising price on carbon – actually harms the industry (see also “2009 summer heatwave puts a third of French nukes out of action“).
Nuclear reactor developers have a compelling reason to support a cap on carbon pollution: the effects of climate change could make it to impossible to run nuclear reactors. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has drastically reduced power generation at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant this summer:
The Tennessee Valley Authority has lost nearly $50 million in power generation from its biggest nuclear plant because the Tennessee River in Alabama is too hot….
“All the radiant heat gets in the river when you have a summer as hot as this has been,” TVA President Tom Kilgore said.
First Energy Regional Innovation Cluster announced
$129 million Interagency Energy Efficiency Cluster Initiative to be located in Philadelphia
Tuesday was a landmark in our nation’s technology innovation policy, as CAP’s Sean Pool explains. The Department of Energy announced that a consortium of more than 90 public- and private-sector organizations based in the Philadelphia region will host the first Energy Regional Innovation Cluster or, E-RIC, a new interagency program to accelerate energy innovation and commercialization. The new E-RIC was selected among many applicants to win $129 million dollars in grants and programmatic support from the DOE and six other federal agencies for investment in energy efficiency technology innovation and commercialization.
The award itself is important because buildings directly or indirectly account for approximately 40 percent of national global warming pollution; technology innovation in this sector has the potential to make a big impact on climate change. CAP has documented extensively how energy efficiency is among the best ways to create jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign fuels, and save money.
But the concept behind the award is equally important from a policymaking perspective. Watching this first-of-a-kind public-private interagency collaboration unfold will shed light on the very process of bottom-up, American innovation itself.
Alaska firestorm: Leading GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller says “We havent heard theres man-made global warming.”
The leading Republican candidate for Senate from the state that’s Ground Zero for climate change is a flat-out denier of human-caused global warming. He apparently thinks the term “greenhouse gases” is just a figure of speech (see “10 indicators of a human fingerprint on climate change“). Hard to believe that anti-EPA Lisa “dirty air” Murkowski is too liberal, too “green” for Alaska. No worries though — if they keep electing people who oppose action on climate, there won’t be much greenery left between the bark beetles and forest fires.
Think Progress has the story of yet another right-wing flat-Earther, fiery Joe Miller:
The entire American economy, including renewable energy, benefited from the stimulus bill
Vice President Biden and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) yesterday both released reports showing how much the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, also known as the “stimulus bill”) helped the U.S. economy. The reports are a stunning rebuke to all of those who say the stimulus bill has been ineffective. CAP’s Richard W. Caperton has the story.
The Vice President’s report, “The Recovery Act: Transforming the American Economy Through Innovation,” details how ARRA has ramped up the levels of investment in numerous growing industries. In particular, ARRA’s policies have led to dramatic increases in investment in clean energy technologies, especially wind and solar. The report painstakingly documents success after success, demonstrating conclusively that the stimulus bill has helped move our country toward a clean energy future.
Most of ARRA’s support for wind and solar comes from three programs:
The Nuclear Industry Needs A Cap On Carbon To Survive
Our guest blogger is Richard W. Caperton, Policy Analyst with the Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress.
Nuclear reactor developers have a compelling reason to support a cap on carbon pollution: the effects of climate change could make it to impossible to run nuclear reactors. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has drastically reduced power generation at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant this summer:
The Tennessee Valley Authority has lost nearly $50 million in power generation from its biggest nuclear plant because the Tennessee River in Alabama is too hot.
Browns Ferry is located on the Tennessee River in Alabama and uses river water for cooling. To protect wildlife in the river, TVA is not allowed to raise the river’s temperature above 90 degrees. But this year’s record heat have already raised the river temperature to near 90, so TVA can only use small amounts of water, which limits how much power they can produce. In fact, the air temperature has stayed below 90 only three days since June 9, far above the historical norm. In the 1990s, the TVA decided not to build extra cooling towers because they “estimated that the chance of exceeding the 90-degree temperature limit in the Tennessee River was very rare.”
This situation also gives us a stark reminder of how climate change will take money out of consumers’ pockets. TVA has had to buy more expensive power to make up for the lost production at Browns Ferry. They then pass this new cost onto consumers in the form of a fuel cost adjustment. The new fuel cost adjustment will increase consumer bills by $1 to $3. So, if your utility buys its power from TVA, that’s a $3 loss next month due to warming.
Fortunately, a comprehensive climate bill can fix this problem. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that climate legislation would significantly lower the risk of catastrophic climate change. Now we also know that the nuclear industry’s future depends on putting a cap on carbon.
Every piece of proposed energy legislation we saw this year included incentives for building new nuclear reactors, including loan guarantees, production tax credits, accelerated depreciation rules, and changes to permitting. These would all certainly be helpful, but they ignore the biggest incentive for the nuclear industry: putting a cap on carbon emissions.
Currently, coal-fired generation is less expensive than nuclear power, which adds to the risk of investing in new nuclear reactors. Putting a cap on carbon, however, would make coal-fired power more expensive than nuclear power, making it much more likely that an investment in a nuclear reactor will make money.
This dynamic is at play in Maryland, where Constellation Energy has applied for a loan guarantee for a new reactor from the Department of Energy. According to the Baltimore Sun, Constellation’s project is now at risk, whether or not they get a loan guarantee. Project chairman Michael J. Wallace told the Sun, “When we get the DOE loan guarantee, that certainly is a major step forward for us. We then need to go through calculations on all the other variables to see whether this project can go forward on an economically sound basis. And we have to continue to do that over the next several months.”
That is, a loan guarantee is certainly valuable, and is a critical ingredient in the project moving forward, but it won’t ultimately determine the project’s profitability. The project will sink or swim because nuclear power can compete with coal, which will only happen with a cap on carbon.
I removed the BP greenwashing ads (again)
I’m very interested in your thoughts on the matter since you are the target audience for the ads that appear here.
Many readers were upset when they saw the BP greenwashing ads on Climate Progress over the weekend — I reprint one well-thought-out email below. Here’s the story of how they made it back onto CP.
NYT: Vitters dire prediction that drilling moratorium would be worse than BP oil spill “failed to materialize”
As part of its response to BP’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration in June issued a 6-month moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling in order to survey drilling safety measures and prevent a similar spill.
As TP explains, while the oil and gas industry went to court to prevent the moratorium from taking effect, Republicans responded by issuing fear-mongering rhetoric. The moratorium “could kill thousands of Louisiana jobs,” Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) said, while Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) called it “a second assault on the Gulf.” Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry, called on Obama to lift the temporary ban and claimed the moratorium would be worse for the Gulf region, economically, than the oil spill itself:
Energy and Global Warming News for August 25th: Geoengineering “not a solution” to sea-level rise; Veterans coalition says climate change a security issue
BBC: Geoengineering ‘not a solution’ to sea-level rise
Even the most extreme geoengineering approaches will not stop sea levels from rising due to climate change, a study suggests. New research proposes that as many as 150 million people could be affected as ocean levels increases by 30cm to 70cm by the end of this century.
Waxman and Stupak demand BP detail scope of greenwashing campaign
While on vacation, I missed reposting this Brad Johnson piece from Wonk Room:
In a letter to BP America CEO Lamar McKay, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) are demanding that BP disclose its “spending on corporate advertising and marketing relating to the the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and relief, recovery, and restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.” Their request follows the efforts of Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) to get answers about BP’s massive greenwashing campaign, which includes months of full-page advertisements in national and regional newspapers, radio spots, television commercials, and Internet ads on websites including ThinkProgress.org. Outside estimates of the scope of the greenwashing campaign managed by BP’s public relations firm Mediashare are in the tens of millions of dollars, the Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson reports:
Stop Prop 23: The ‘fact sheet’ vs. the facts
The economic benefits of climate and clean energy policies, such as California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, or AB 32, are clear. The Center for American Progress and this blog have reported on the opportunities for growth and job creation from AB 32 several times (see “A California Campaign With Global Consequences” and Economists agree, don’t block AB 32!). The Stop the Dirty Energy Proposition coalition provides additional background here.
Despite this, the oil-funded campaign to pass Proposition 23 that would repeal AB 32 is continuing to spill misinformation with a new “Fact Sheet: Green Jobs Utopia Is A Myth.” Aside from the fact that their arguments are nonsense, the “fact sheet” does not include any facts. There is not a single source or citation on the page.
CAP’s Rebecca Lefton and Sean Pool have the real facts.
The New Climate Denier Fad: Ocean Acidification Denial
As oceanic CO2 rises, pH falls.
The burning of billions of tons of fossil fuels is altering our planet — not only by making our atmosphere trap more heat, but also by changing the chemistry of the ocean. Most of the carbon dioxide pollution put into the air is absorbed by the world’s oceans. Dissolved as carbonic acid, the pollution increases the acidity of the oceans, which is disrupting the marine food chain, especially by making it more difficult for plankton, corals, mollusks, and crustaceans to form their calciferous shells. In 2009, the Interacademy Science Panel, a network of 70 national science academies, warned that fossil fuel pollution must be rapidly reduced to “avoid substantial damage to ocean ecosystems”:
Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. To avoid substantial damage to ocean ecosystems, deep and rapid reductions of global CO2 emissions by at least 50% by 2050, and much more thereafter are needed.
Thus, carbon dioxide poses a double threat to our oceans, by increasing both their temperature and their acidity. The global population of phytoplankton appears to have dropped by 40 percent. About a quarter of the world’s reefs have already died, including 80 percent in the Caribbean.
Of course, in the mirror-image world of fossil-fueled climate denial organized by Christopher Monckton’s Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), ocean acidification is just another mainstream scientific conspiracy:
In 2009, Australian geologist and mining executive Ian Plimer argued in his book “Heaven and Earth” that ocean acidification wasn’t happening, and even if it were, it would be beneficial for ocean life.
Coal company scientist and SPPI global warming denial advisor Craig Idso, a geographer, wrote in January that “the rising ‘ocean acidification’ scare is just more piffle.”
Citing Idso, Australian computer scientist Johannes Floris “J Floor” Anthoni believes “the scare for acidic oceans is entirely unjustified,” because “acidic seas are a good thing.”
Citing Idso, SPPI’s Dennis Ambler claimed in February there is “no evidence of any effects of lowered pH” and that even if pH has declined, “the ocean remains alkaline,” and it “is dishonest to present to a lay audience that any perceived reduction in alkalinity means the oceans are turning to acid.”
“Ocean Acidification is a Misnomer,” wrote Lawrence Livermore National Labs materials engineer Jack Dini last Friday on a conservative Hawaiian blog, citing Plimer and Ambler. Dini claims that a scientific paper by Elisabetta Erba “contradicts the assumption that ocean acidification leads to species die-offs,” even though her paper found it took 160,000 years for plankton to recover from an acidification event 120 million years ago.
It’s notable that ocean acidification denial is coming out of Australia and Hawaii — island states with coral reefs and ocean ecosystems of incalculable ecological, economic, societal, and cultural value now being destroyed by fossil fuel pollution. The bleatings of these fringe deniers have not yet been promoted by the “mainstream” right, but considering how well entrenched denial of climate science has become among conservatives, ocean acidification denial may just become the next great right-wing fad.
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
