Today, scientists, youth, and coalfield residents came together to protest the coal industry’s destruction of our future in a global day of action. In Washington, DC, top climate scientist James Hansen, who warned Congress of the coming scourge of global warming in 1989, joined over a hundred others who were arrested at the White House for protesting mountaintop removal, which Barack Obama has called an “environmental disaster.” The Rainforest Action Network, which helped organize the Appalachia Rising protest, reports on the arrests:

More than 100 people were arrested today during Appalachia Rising, the largest national protest to end mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining. Arrests included Appalachian residents; retired coal miners; renowned climate scientist, James Hansen; and faith leaders. After a march from Freedom Plaza and a rally at Lafayette Park, more than 100 staged a sit-in in front of the White House to demand President Obama follow his own science and end mountaintop mining.

“In a stark reminder of the national connection to the coalfields,” journalist Jeff Biggers described, “the Obama administration officials looked on from their White House offices, as their electricity came from a coal-fired plant generated partly with coal strip-mined from Appalachia.”

On the other side of the planet, activists “shut down the world’s largest coal export operation” in Newcastle, Australia:

Climate activists brought Newcastle’s billion-dollar coal-loaders to a grinding halt yesterday, suspending themselves midair to effectively shut down the world’s largest coal export operation. Police arrested 41 members of the Rising Tide group, which launched a simultaneous protest at three coal-loader sites at dawn yesterday.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles hit an all-time record 113°, freak floods hit Minnesota and Wisconsin, and Wall Street remains bullish on coal. On October 10, thousands of people around the world will come together in a global day of activism for clean energy.

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.

Oh, this Guardian piece is just too damn good not to reprint in its entirety.  If the Brits had The Onion, Martin Robbins of The Lay Scientist would be their science reporter.  His generic science story continues:

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Solar radiation management (SRM) –  aka ‘hard’ geo-engineering — is, literally, a smoke and mirrors solution to the dangers posed by unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases,.

As science advisor John Holdren resasserted in 2009 of strategies such as space mirrors or aerosol injection, “The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.”

And, of course, those ‘solutions’ do nothing to stop the consequences of ocean acidification, which recent studies suggest will be devastating all by itself (see Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).

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The greatest crisis we confront in the 21st Century is not a future environmental crisis predicted by computer models, but a human crisis today that is fully within our power to solve. For too long, too many have been focused on the wrong end game.

For everyone who has voiced a 2050 greenhouse gas goal, we need 10 people and policy bodies working toward the goal of broad energy access. Only once we have a growing, vibrant, global economy providing energy access and an improved human condition for billions of the energy impoverished can we accelerate progress on environmental issues such as a reduction in greenhouse gases.

That would be Gregory H. Boyce Chairman and CEO of Peabody Energy, “the world’s largest private-sector coal company.”  Last week he “outlined a multi-step plan to eliminate energy poverty and inequality by unlocking the power of coal to advance energy security, generate economic stimulus and create environmental solutions.”

Yes, the power of coal needs “unlocking.”  Poor, imprisoned, climate-destroying coal — can anyone set it free from its rampant growth curve?

Boyce can relax.  For everyone who has voiced a 2050 greenhouse gas goal there are 10 people funded by the corporate polluters to shout them down, spread disinformation, or lobby against serious action (see “Dirty Money“).

The rest of us, however, can’t relax because here is the “Peabody Plan”:

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This a TP cross-post.

Millionaire businessman John Raese, running as the GOP Senate nominee to fill Robert Byrd’s West Virginia seat, wants to take the state back to the 19th century. Not only does he want to return capitalism to the era before child labor laws, Social Security, and civil rights laws, he also promotes a pre-industrial vision of science. In an interview with Real Clear Politics, Raese said he has “zero” trust that “human activity is contributing to climate change”:

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Millionaire businessman John Raese, running as the GOP Senate nominee to fill Robert Byrd’s West Virginia seat, wants to take the state back to the 19th century. Not only does he want to return capitalism to the era before child labor laws, Social Security, and civil rights laws, he also promotes a pre-industrial vision of science. In an interview with Real Clear Politics, Raese said he has “zero” trust that “human activity is contributing to climate change”:

The oceans that surround the world produce 185 billion tons of CO2 per annum. Man per annum only produces six billion tons, so what could possibly be the concern? One volcano puts out more toxic gases-one volcano-than man makes in a whole year. And when you look at this “climate change,” and when you look at the regular climate change that we all have in the world, we have warm and we have cooling spells.

Although Raese is well versed in conspiracy-theory talking points, they’re as nonsensical as his desire to abolish the Departments of Energy and Education. Human activity puts about 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, well over 100 times as much as all the volcanoes in the world. The oceans actually vent about 332 billion tons of CO2 per year, but also absorb that much. Human emissions have disrupted the balance of the carbon cycle, leading to rising concentrations of greenhouse pollution in the atmosphere. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 40 percent, and global temperatures are on an inexorable rise, overwhelming any natural cycles.

Far from protecting West Virginia’s coal industry, Raese’s desire to abolish the Department of Energy, kill the Recovery Act, and deny global warming would end federal policy to support advanced coal technology, the only hope for this 19th-century fuel in the 21st century.

See full data on how much energy companies and trade associations spent on oil lobbying for 2009-2010 (.xls)

Oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill makes a pattern in Gulf waters in this AP photo.  Here’s another pattern:  Big Oil and its allies have spent more than  half a billion dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions to stop pollution reductions over the past year an a half.

CAPAF’s Daniel J. Weiss, Rebecca Lefton, and Susan Lyon have the numbers and charts in this cross-post.

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Growth in renewables capacity, annual and five-year average

Renewables Continue Remarkable Growth

By 2010, renewable energy had reached a clear tipping point in the context of global energy supply, concludes the “Renewables 2010 Global Status Report.” With renewables comprising fully one quarter of global power capacity from all sources and delivering 18% of global electricity supply in 2009, the latest release of the definitive assessment of the state of the global renewable energy industry from the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) details the current status and key trends of global markets, investment, industry and policies related to renewable energy.

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Brad Johnson of The Wonk Room is covering the Clinton Global Initiative.

Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday, new UN climate chief Christiana Figueres criticized the failures of the Copenhagen talks and said that a comprehensive “big bang” global climate treaty is not possible.

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Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?

Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.

Is there a way to guess which ones?

I thought this was going to be another just-doesn’t-get-it opinion piece in the Washington Post.  After all, the answer to its headline question, “What will future generations condemn us for?” is painfully obvious to anybody who follows climate science (as I discussed here).

But the author, Kwame Anthony Appiah, has in fact written a very thoughtful piece on the “three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.”  And the Post is running an online poll where “Our treatment of the environment” is already easily winning.  Here are the three signs:

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Thomas Edison perfected the first incandescent light bulb in 1879. It burned for 13.5 hours. And incandescent bulbs are still burning 131 years later, but at a price that’s costly to both our wallets and the environment. Incandescents are extremely inefficient. They operate at about 20 percent efficiency with the other 80 percent given off as heat energy. And an incandescent light bulb’s average lifespan is only around 5,000 hours or roughly one year.

But while incandescents are looking more and more like the has-beens of light bulbs, light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, could be the future. LED bulbs are more efficient, less costly in the long run, and better for the environment because they use far less energy than the alternatives.

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Calls for progressives to stand up to extremists in November: “I don’t think you want the Tea Party running your community, running your family, running your government.”

Lee Fang of Wonk Room has the story and the video.

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Put on your head vises.  Here’s more brain busting must-see-TV from the one-time dabbler in witchcraft and full-time GOP Senate candidate, courtesy of Bill Maher, via a TP cross-post:
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UPDATE:  Hertsgaard responds to comments here.

Mark Hertsgaard, the terrific environment correspondent for The Nation (and author of a lot of great books), has a new book coming in January, “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.” He previews it on HuffPost, reprinted here with his permission.

My daughter Chiara, age five, is a member. So is my goddaughter Emily, age twenty-two. So are the thousands of Pakistani children now suffering after record monsoon rains left 20 percent of their country — an area the size of Great Britain — under water.

In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988 belongs to what I call Generation Hot. This generation includes some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under global warming and are fated to spend the rest of their lives confronting its mounting impacts.

For Generation Hot, the brutal summer of 2010 is not an anomaly; it’s the new normal.

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NRDC has launched an ad campaign mocking the American Petroleum Institute with this gem:

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UK opens world’s biggest offshore windfarm

It is a very rare thing for the UK to claim pre-eminence in the much-touted global green economy, so the assembled local dignitaries, industry folk and one cabinet minister were not letting the dismal maritime backdrop put a downer on proceedings.

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The Wonk Room is covering the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.

Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday, new UN climate chief Christiana Figueres criticized the failures of the Copenhagen talks and said that a comprehensive “big bang” global climate treaty is not possible. Figueres, who was chosen to be the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary after Yvo de Boer stepped down following Copenhagen, discussed her expectations for the next round of talks that will take place this December in Cancun, Mexico. “What went wrong at Copenhagen,” her brother, former Costa Rica president Jose Maria Figueres asked, “and what are you going to make Cancun better?” After saying that she intended to avoid the logistical chaos civil society groups encountered in Copenhagen, Christiana declared that there will never be a comprehensive global climate treaty to follow the Kyoto pact, which expires in 2012:

I think that one of the major mistakes that we all bought into, because all of us bought into, was the myth of the big bang theory in climate. Maybe the universe was created by a Big Bang. But what is clear is that this planet is not going to be saved by any big bang agreement. Not in Copenhagen, not this year, not next year. The fact is that it’s unreasonable to expect that there is going to be one large comprehensive agreement that will address all issues and will miraculously change the way that we’ve been doing things for a hundred years.

Watch it:

Figueres then outlined her vision for the Cancun talks in the context of the non-binding Copenhagen Accord: a “realistic” and “probably sane” “progressive approach” that achieves the “politically possible,” recognizing this would be “only a step” in the right direction:

So the big lesson learned for us this year is: let us be realistic, let us really make a very concerted effort — and governments are doing so — to see what is politically possible, what is achievable in Cancun. Let’s focus on that and let us ensure that what we’re doing here is taking one step at a time, ensuring that Cancun is going to be a firm step in the right direction, but only a step. That’s there’s going to have to be much more work going forward.

Now this progressive approach is probably a sane approach, but it is in stark contrast to the urgency of the matter. That’s the problem: that we can only go in incremental steps but the matter is really very urgent, particularly for low-lying states.

This is the essential challenge of climate diplomacy — by definition only the “politically possible” can be achieved by the UNFCCC, but global warming is governed by the laws of physics, not of man. The timeline to reduce greenhouse pollution is not governed by treaties but by collapse of a livable planet. Because of the inevitability of long-term sea level rise, it may already be too late to save low-lying states from extinction — so they have little sympathy for “incremental steps.”

Figueres hopes to tackle this challenge by changing the “psychodynamics” of the negotiations from the cost of climate destruction — and the moral and economic culpability of the developed world — to the “opportunities moving into the future”:

Which is why we need to change the psychodynamics to exactly what you said when you started, Jose Maria. The psychodynamics right now in the negotiations is focusing on the cost. Who is going to pay for what when because of the debt that we have incurred with each other over the past x number of years. That’s an important part of the conversation. But we should also focus part of the conversation on: what are the opportunities moving into the future? And that part of the conversation is not present.

As the life story of CGI’s organizer, Bill Clinton, proves, there is indeed great political power in hope, no matter how ephemeral it may often seem.

A chart-filled excerpt from the terrific book, “Greening Our Built World: Costs, Benefits, and Strategies”

Recent surveys find that concern over first costs remains the primary barrier to green building. For example, Global Green Building Trends study, released in 2008, reports that of the over 700 construction professionals who responded to the survey, 80% cited “higher first costs” as an obstacle to green building.

Green buildings””designed to use fewer resources and to support the health of their inhabitants””are commonly viewed as more expensive to build than conventional buildings. For example, a 2007 opinion survey by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development found that, on average, green buildings were thought to cost 17% more than conventional buildings. But we found this widespread perception””that greening costs a lot more than conventional design””to be wrong. In fact, the green 170 buildings analyzed for Greening our Built World cost, on average, less than 2% more than conventional buildings; moreover, green buildings provide a wide range of benefits””both direct and indirect””that make them a very good investment.

The figure above derived from the WBCSD survey illustrates this perception and compares it to the actual green premiums. The public also appears to underestimate the environmental impacts of buildings:  The same international survey showed a public perception that buildings produce roughly 20% of CO2 emissions, when in reality they account for about 45%. And, as noted in an earlier post, a recent survey of U.S. homeowners found that nearly three-quarters believe that their homes have no adverse environmental impacts.

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Leaders lead.  Whitman waffles.   Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story.

In an attempt to ensure that California has neither an old-energy nor new-energy economy, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has announced her opposition to Proposition 23, the oil-fueled campaign to suspend California’s landmark climate law AB 32. Whitman also reiterated her call for a one-year moratorium of AB 32, attacking it as a “job-killer”:

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In an attempt to ensure that California has neither an old-energy nor new-energy economy, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has announced her opposition to Proposition 23, the oil-fueled campaign to suspend California’s landmark climate law AB 32. Whitman also reiterated her call for a one-year moratorium of AB 32, attacking it as a “job-killer”:

While Proposition 23 does address the job killing aspects of AB 32, it does not offer a sensible balance between our vital need for good jobs and the desire of all Californians to protect our precious environment. It is too simple of a solution for a complex problem. I believe that my plan to fix AB 32 strikes the right balance for California. I will vote “no” on Proposition 23.

Whitman’s “plan to fix AB 32″ is to delay its implementation and reconfigure its key provisions as the world burns, putting years of private investment and planning into disarray.

Whitman also implied that green jobs come at the expense of “the other 97% of jobs”:

This is not an easy issue. While green jobs are an important and growing part of our state’s economic future, we cannot forget the other 97% of jobs in key sectors like manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and energy. We compete for jobs with many other states and our environmental policy must reflect that reality.

In fact, the provisions of AB 32 make it possible for California’s jobs “in key sectors like manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and energy” to become green jobs, as they become more efficient, high-tech, and sustainable. Whitman’s call to suspend AB 32 would scrap the investments that would take those sectors into the twenty-first century — which is why California’s high-tech community so strongly opposes Proposition 23. In a odd coincidence, 97 percent of the funding for Proposition 23 comes from oil companies, most from three outside giants, Valero, Tesoro, and Koch Industries.

Jerry Brown campaign spokesman Sterling Clifford told the Los Angeles Times that Whitman’s position on the measure was “two empty gestures in one press release” and called it an example of “transparent politicking.”

“Throughout this campaign, she’s tried to have everything every way,” Clifford said. “Nobody has any idea what a Meg Whitman governorship would mean.”