CAP’s Tom Kenworthy, in a WonkRoom repost.

Speaking today at the Center for American Progress, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Obama administration will not shy away from pushing for expansions of the nation’s network of protected lands, including the designation of new national monuments. He also issued a strong defense of his department’s new policy giving interim protections to wilderness-quality federal lands just a few days after the House voted to block the use of funds to implement the policy this year.

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Bill Clinton warns: Too much ethanol could lead to food riots

I am not a fan of our corn ethanol policy as I made clear made clear during the last food crisis (see “The Fuel on the Hill” and “Can words describe how bad corn ethanol is?” and “Let them eat biofuels!“).  In a world of blatantly increasing food insecurity — driven by population, dietary trends, rising oil prices, and growing climate instability — America’s  policy of burning one third of our corn crop in our engines (soon to be 37% or more) is becoming increasingly untenable, if not unconscionable.

I was glad to see former Pres. Bill Clinton start talking about this in a Washington Post piece  headlined, “Clinton: Too much ethanol could lead to food riots” — though I tend to see the world’s increasing use of crops for fuel as an underlying cause for growing food insecurity, something that makes the whole food system more brittle and thus more vulnerable to triggering events, like once in 1000 100 year droughts and once in 500 year floods, which is to say climate instability (see WashPost, Lester Brown explain how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices).

If you want to understand why it will be politically difficult to roll back US ethanol production to saner levels, Reuters has a good article, “Analysis: In food vs fuel debate, U.S. resolute on ethanol.”  Yet it is that piece which notes, “U.S. ethanol production this year will consume 15 percent of the world’s corn supply, up from 10 percent in 2008.”

Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton, had an excellent piece in the WashPost explaining “How biofuels contribute to the food crisis,” which I excerpt below:

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By Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Speaking today at the Center for American Progress, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Obama administration will not shy away from pushing for expansions of the nation’s network of protected lands, including the designation of new national monuments. He also issued a strong defense of his department’s new policy giving interim protections to wilderness-quality federal lands just a few days after the House voted to block the use of funds to implement the policy this year.

In unveiling the America’s Great Outdoors initiative last week, President Obama laid the foundation for what could become a solid administration legacy on land conservation in the 21st century. Building on the broad national support for community-based efforts to protect America’s rich land and waterway resources, the initiative seeks to re-invigorate our connections to the outdoors, particularly among the young and urban residents, to facilitate local and state conservation programs, to look at land conservation in a broader, landscape-level context, and to begin managing federal lands to build resilience to climate change.

Interviewed by historian Doug Brinkley, Salazar said the initiative will rely heavily on what he called an extensive and broad-based “dialogue with the American people” about conservation priorities. He defended the administration’s new “wildlands” policy that seeks to provide interim protections for pristine federal lands as was done for several decades before the Bush administration relinquished that authority in a legal settlement with the state of Utah:

We need to manage the public estate for all purposes, including wilderness characteristics. . . . I think there are people who’ve made more of this issue than they should have, including people who are doing it for whatever political agenda they want to serve. . . . Wilderness is not a bad thing.

Watch it:

The launch of the America’s Great Outdoors initiative comes against a backdrop of Republican hostility on Capitol Hill to sensible land conservation efforts by the Obama administration. The House of Representatives has adopted a budget bill that would prevent the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management from implementing its wildlands policy, and only narrowly turned back a GOP-led effort to strip the president of his authority to designate national monuments, a power used by most presidents for more than a century.

Supporters of those extreme measures are so beholden to special interests that want to open treasured federal lands to more oil and gas drilling and other commercial development that they fail to understand how strongly the public supports stronger land conservation efforts.

Even in the midst of the great recession, voters across the country remain strongly committed to funding land conservation and acquisition measures. In 2010, according to the Trust for Public Land, 41 out of 49 state and local initiatives to fund land conservation were approved by voters, and those measures will provide nearly $2.2 billion for those purposes. Since 1988, voters across the country in local and state elections have dedicated more than $56 billion to conserving open space and other land conservation projects, approving bonding and pay as you go ballot questions more than 75 percent of the time.

And a new Colorado College poll conducted in five Rocky Mountain states finds that westerners are strongly committed to conservation and believe that environmental protections and a strong economy go hand-in-hand. The survey found that for 87 percent of western voters “having clean water, clean air, natural areas, and wildlife” is either extremely (47 percent) or very (40 percent) important to quality of life. And two-thirds say that boosting renewable energy production will create jobs in their state.

Westerners understand, Salazar said today, that protected areas like national monuments, are “economic generators” and that there is a direct connection between conserving land and economic development. “We can tone down the rhetoric,” he said. “We in the United States have some very special places — they are not Republican places, they are not Democratic places, they are not independent places, they belong to all of us.”

The recent unrest in the Middle East, which has been attributed, in part, to high food prices, gives us a warning of the type of global unrest that might result in future years if the climate continues to warm as expected. A hotter climate means more severe droughts will occur. We can expect an increasing number of unprecedented heat waves and droughts like the 2010 Russian drought in coming decades. This will significantly increase the odds of a world food emergency far worse than the 2007 – 2008 global food crisis. When we also consider the world’s expanding population and the possibility that peak oil will make fertilizers and agriculture much more expensive, we have the potential for a perfect storm of events aligning in the near future, with droughts made significantly worse by climate change contributing to events that will cause disruption of the global economy, intense political turmoil, and war.

That’s meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters from his WunderBlog.  For background on these issues, see CP’s food insecurity series.

I reported two weeks ago that if China’s drought continued through the month it would be the worst in 200 years (see “UN food agency warns severe drought threatens wheat crop in China, world’s largest producer“).  Below, Masters discusses what’s happening now and what’s forecast to happen in the coming weeks in this repost.

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The American Petroleum Institute, the Big Oil industry’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year.  WonkRoom has the story.

API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on lobbying, advertisements and Astroturf campaigns to support the the oil industry agenda. As CAP’s Dan Weiss wrote, API “wants to drill in fragile, sensitive places, keep government tax breaks, expand offshore drilling without reforms, and block global warming pollution reduction requirements.”

“This is adding one more tool to our toolkit,” Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs, told Bloomberg News.

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Global clean energy investments to rise in 2011 – UN

Brazil, China and India are expected to fuel global investments in clean energy in 2011 that are expected to reach $240 billion, the head of a United Nation’s green economy initiative said on Wednesday.

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The American Petroleum Institute, the Big Oil industry’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year. API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on lobbying, advertisements and Astroturf campaigns to support the the oil industry agenda. As CAP’s Dan Weiss wrote, API “wants to drill in fragile, sensitive places, keep government tax breaks, expand offshore drilling without reforms, and block global warming pollution reduction requirements.”

“This is adding one more tool to our toolkit,” Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs, told Bloomberg News. “At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.” As Bloomberg pointed out, oil-supported political action committees like the Independent Petroleum Association of America overwhelmingly donate to Republican candidates.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, API spent $6.7 million on lobbying alone last year, after clearing $7 million in 2009. In 2010, API was the seventh most prolific spender in the oil and gas industry, following ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Koch Industries and BP.

API’s turn toward direct political donations is doubly problematic because, in addition to acting as the industry’s chief lobbyists, the institute runs technical committees that set standards for the oil industry. In its official report, the commission that investigated the BP oil spill found that API was too “compromised” to be setting industry standards. “Because they would make oil and gas industry operations potentially more costly, API regularly resists agency rulemakings that government regulators believe would make those operations safer, and API favors rulemaking that promotes industry autonomy from government oversight,” the commission found. And this was before API decided to begin directly supporting candidates!

In its proposed 2012 budget, the Obama administration suggested, once again, removing the billions in subsidies that taxpayers give oil companies every year. API has been at the forefront of the lobbying fight to preserve Big Oil’s subsidies, demonizing the removal of them as new “energy taxes,” even while admitting that cutting the subsidies and plowing the money back into clean energy technology would create “a lot more jobs.”

Science study warns: “Ignoring climate projections at this stage will only result in the worst form of triage.”

[I'm on travel, so I'm updating this timely 2009 post on food insecurity.]

The quote above is the powerful final sentence from a 2009 study in Science, “Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat.”  The University of Washington news release release explained:

Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century and, without adaptation, will leave half the world’s population facing serious food shortages, new research shows”¦.

“The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn’t take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures,” said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.

Yes, this 2009 study is a serious underestimate of the speed and scale of likely impacts for two reasons.

First, the conclusions are solely based upon projected temperature rise.  They don’t even consider the potentially more devastating impact from more extreme drought and Dust-Bowlification (See NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts by mid-century even on moderate emissions path) — let alone the combination of heat stress and water stress together.

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One of America’s largest grassroots climate organizations is readying a national campaign against the lobbying efforts of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  Brad Johnson has the story.

The Chamber, described by 350.org founder Bill McKibben as the “power plant” of “money pollution” in Washington, DC, has led lobbying efforts to block action on climate change for decades.

Because of its pro-pollution, anti-science stance, the Chamber is threatening American prosperity “” its supposed mission. Several companies, including Apple, Exelon, and Pacific Gas & Energy, have quit the lobbying group over its climate denial. In the Tom Dispatch, McKibben explains how 350.org plans to expose the split between real American businesses and the multinational polluters that fund the “U.S.” Chamber of Commerce, with the simple message, “The U.S. Chamber Doesn’t Speak For Me“:

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Pete Altman, reposted from NRDC’s Switchboard blog.

Nationwide, nearly six out of 10 Americans (58 percent)  – including 55 percent of Independents and about half (48 percent) of Republicans – oppose the U.S. House vote to “block the EPA from limiting carbon dioxide pollution,” according to the survey of 784 registered voters conducted February18-20, 2011 by Public Policy Polling for NRDC.  My colleague Dan Lashof blogged on the bad votes, which have nothing to do with cutting federal spending, a few days ago.

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Curry repeats Muller’s smear that paleoclimate reconstructions were ‘dishonest’, and NASA’s Schmidt eviscerates her (again)

BEST is now a joke, officially, thanks to Dr. Judith Curry.  Sure, B.E.S.T.  seemed laughable from the start — see “Richard Muller, Charles Koch, Judith Curry and the implosion of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST).”

How could an effort to restore  the supposedly lost credibility of the global temperature record be run by one climate confusionist (Muller),  have as its sole ‘climate expert’ perhaps the leading confusionist (see “Curry abandons science“), and be funded in part by the world’s  biggest funder of climate disinformation!  And  I haven’t even blogged on the head-exploding conflict of interest of having Muller, who runs a for-profit climate consulting business, installing his daughter as B.E.S.T. project manager when she is the CEO of that business!

But that’s not funny.  What’s funny is that Curry had been advertising herself as some sort of a peace-making, I’m-ok-you’re-ok, why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along bridge builder among scientists — a reconciler, as it were (see “Fred Pearce jumps the shark“).

Now, however, she has devoted an entire post at her blog Climate etc. — judithcurry.com — to defending Muller’s claim (in this youtube clip) that “hide the decline” means the paleoclimate re-constructors of the Hockey Stick were “dishonest.”  For the record, the House of Commons vindication of climate scientists involved in the stolen emails  explicitly stated:

… insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty””for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”"”we consider that there is no case to answer.

Similarly, Michael Mann has  been through multiple vindications that specifically looked at all of these e-mails.  See also RealClimate (here).

NASA’s Gavin Schmidt  showed up on Curry’s blog to make some incisive comments, and, with Curry’s help, demonstrated that, using her standard, her own work is “dishonest.”  Curry also made clear that her days of reconciliation are over.  She has gone native — or, rather, gone tribal — the full disinformer, as they say.

WattsUpWithThat has, typically, tried to make Schmidt look bad with one piece of not-terribly-damning quote mining, but  I will endeavor to pull out all of the relevant comments (including some by Curry and others).  The whole post and comment chain  is only worth reading if you like unintentional humor and ‘credibility seppuku’:

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Our guest blogger is JW Randolph, Appalachian Voices legislative associate.

Late Friday night and into the wee hours of Saturday morning, the long-anticipated assault on clean air and clean water laws began in the House of Representatives. At 4:39AM on Saturday morning, Republicans passed their bill with zero Democratic support, and only three Republican dissenters (Jones (NC), Flake (AZ), Campbell (CA)).

The House approved a number of amendments to the budget bill (H.R. 1) that would prevent the EPA from updating rules on mountaintop removal permitting, coal ash storage, emissions of coarse particulate matter, and a variety of other clean air and clean water safeguards. Those amendments that were attached included the coal lobby wishlist of #109, #216, #217 (previously labeled as #10), and #498 (previously labeled as #219/220). These were revenue-neutral amendments, meaning they weren’t aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit, but were designed solely to prevent the EPA and other government agencies from updating and enforcing clean air and clean water laws. In short, it was Christmas for polluters.

Three of these amendments were aimed specifically at reversing the actions of the Obama Administration to strengthen permitting requirements for mountaintop removal mines (and thus would reinstate the polluter-friendly rules set up by the Bush Administration). Appalachian Voices supported a “NO” vote on each of the following three amendments. Most Republicans voted “AYE,”and most Democrats voted “NO,” with variations noted below each vote.

#109 Griffith (Defunding EPA’s mountaintop removal guidance)

Ds voting Aye: Altmire (PA), Boren (OK), Critz, Donnelly, Holden, Matheson (UT), Rahall (WV), Ross (AR)

Rs voting Nay: Bass (NH), Fitzpatrick, Hayworth (NY), Johnson (IL), Lance (NJ), LoBiondo (NJ), Reichert, Smith (NJ), Webster (FL), Wolf (VA)

216 McKinley (Defunding EPA’s 404c veto authority)

Ds voting Aye: Altmire, Boren, Cardoza, Carson, Costa, Costello, Critz, Donnelly, Gutierrez, Holden, Kissell, Matheson, McIntyre, Olver, Peterson, Rahall, Ross

Rs voting Nay: Amash, Bass (NH), Cravaak, Fitzpatrick, Forbes, Gerlach, Johnson (IL), LaTourette, LoBiondo, Paulsen, Reichert, Smith (NJ), Wittman, Wolf

498 Johnson (Defunding Dep. of Interior’s Stream Protection Rule)

Ds voting Aye: Altmire, Boren, Costello, Critz, Donnelly, Holden, Matheson, McIntyre, Peterson, Rahall, Ross
Rs voting Nay: Bass (NH), Fitzpatrick, Hayworth, Johnson (IL), Lance, McCaul, Reichert, Smith (NJ), Wolf

Appalachian Voices also joined many of our national partners in opposing #217, which limits EPA’s ability to regulate toxic coal ash. Compared to the mountaintop removal amendments, #217 passed with much greater Republican support, but also lost many more Democrats.

Though these votes didn’t go the way we would have liked, we have now seen 206 members of Congress take an anti-MTR action by either cosponsoring the Clean Water Protection Act, or voting “NO” on #109, #216, or #498 — enough to uphold a presidential veto. It does allow us a clearer picture of where many in Congress stand regarding mountaintop removal, and presents a more clear of who we can work with.

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Have we warmed as much as expected?

This is a repost from Skeptical Science.

Previously, in A Case Study in Climate Science Integrity, we qualitatively examined two errors which led the Universal Ecological Fund (Fundaci­on Ecol³gical Universal [FEU-US]) and Dr. Richard Lindzen to arrive at diametrically opposed, but equally wrong conclusions.  Here is Lindzen’s (emphasis added):

“According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greenhouse forcing from man made greenhouse gases is already about 86% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2 (with about half coming from methane, nitrous oxide, freons and ozone), and alarming predictions depend on models for which the sensitivity to a doubling for CO2 is greater than 2C which implies that we should already have seen much more warming than we have seen thus far“

In both publications, thermal inertia and negative forcings were neglected.  Both performed calculations which accounted for the positive anthropogenic forcings (carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases), but neglected these two factors.  The difference is that while the FEU-US completely ignored them, Lindzen did mention each factor in a halfhearted effort to justify neglecting them.  But before we get into the details, it’s worthwhile to examine the history of Lindzen’s “we should already have seen much more warming” claim. Read more

EU climate target: Less CO2-emissions could trigger more economic growth,

Increasing the EU’s 2020 greenhouse gas reduction target from 20% to 30% could help boosting European investments from 18% to 22% of GDP, leading to a GDP increase of up to ‚¬620bn ($840bn) and the creation of up to 6 millions additional jobs. These are the key findings of a report launched today.

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One of America’s largest grassroots climate organizations is readying a national campaign against the lobbying efforts of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber, described by 350.org founder Bill McKibben as the “power plant” of “money pollution” in Washington, DC, has led lobbying efforts to block action on climate change for decades.

Because of its pro-pollution, anti-science stance, the Chamber is threatening American prosperity — its supposed mission. Several companies, including Apple, Exelon, and Pacific Gas & Energy, have quit the lobbying group over its climate denial. In the Tom Dispatch, McKibben explains how 350.org plans to expose the split between real American businesses and the multinational polluters that fund the “U.S.” Chamber of Commerce, with the simple message, “The U.S. Chamber Doesn’t Speak For Me“:

Still, the rest of us can stand up and be counted. We can tell the Congressional representatives taking their money that they don’t speak for us. We can urge more big companies to act like Apple and Microsoft, which publicly denounced the chamber. (It’s good to hear Levi Strauss, General Electric, and Best Buy making similar noises.) We need to hear from more dissenting chambers of commerce. It cheered me to find that the CEO of the Greater New York Chamber said, “They don’t represent me,” or to discover that just a few weeks ago the Seattle chamber cut its ties.

But it’s even more important to hear from small businesspeople, the very contingent the U.S. Chamber of Commerce draws on for its credibility. Across America in the coming months, volunteers from the climate change organization I helped to found, 350.org, will be fanning out to canvass local businesses — all those bakeries and beauty salons, colleges and chiropractors, pharmacies and fitness centers that belong to local chambers of commerce.

The volunteers will be asking for signatures on a statement announcing that “the U.S. Chamber doesn’t speak for me,” and offering businesspeople the chance to post videos expressing just how differently they do think when it comes to global warming, energy, and the environment. It’s a chance to emphasize that American business should be about nimbleness, creativity, and adaptation — that it’s prepared to cope with changing circumstances, instead of using political cash to ensure that yesterday’s technologies remain on artificial life support.

“With my colleagues at 350.org, I’ll do what I can to help undermine the chamber’s claim to represent American business,” McKibben writes. “I don’t know if we can win this fight against money pollution, but we’re going to do what we can to clear the air.”

Goldstein and Cavanagh join in the debunking of the Breakthrough Institute, which “fails to back up its accusations with facts”

Energy efficiency saves energy, increases electric reliability, avoids the need to build new power plants, and saves Americans money. It’s really that simple.

Some of the nation’s top energy experts have debunked the Breakthrough Institute’s false assertions and misleading statements about energy efficiency.  Now two more leading experts, David Goldstein and Ralph Cavanagh, weigh in with their analysis.  They are co-directors of NRDC’s energy program, and each has been working to implement energy efficiency at the national and state level since the 1970s.  Their piece is repoted below, followed by Goldstein’s discussion of California’s experience.

Throughout almost four decades of societal progress in getting more work out of less energy, those who deny the promise of energy efficiency have persisted in a bizarre claim:  Any energy savings from efficiency are offset by activities that demand additional energy consumption.

Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters, in a WunderBlog repost.

A significant shift is occurring in the Equatorial waters of the Eastern Pacific off the coast of South America, where the tell-tale signs of the end to the current La Ni±a event are beginning to show up.

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A cross-post by CAP Energy VP Kate Gordon.

Newly elected Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker held an event called “Wisconsin is Open for Business” the day he was inaugurated. But every move the governor makes shows him to be an anti-business, anti-innovation politician intent on running the state into the ground.

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This is a TP cross-post.

Last Thursday, ThinkProgress revealed that lawyers representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful trade associations for large corporations like ExxonMobil and CitiGroup, had solicited a proposal from a set of military contractors to develop a surreptitious campaign to attack the Chamber’s political opponents, including ThinkProgress, the Change to Win labor coalition, SEIU, StopTheChamber.com, MoveOn.org, U.S. Chamber Watch and others. The lawyers from the Chamber’s longtime law firm Hunton and Williams had been compiling their own data set on some of these targets. However, the lawyers sought the military contractors for assistance.

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Our guest blogger is Jake Caldwell, Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade, and Energy at American Progress.

Ensuring Egyptians have access to a reliable and affordable food supply during its political turmoil is an urgent priority for both Egypt and the United States. Regrettably, conservatives in the House of Representatives appear headed in a different direction and are slashing funding for international humanitarian assistance. This includes funding for emergency food aid, investments in women and small landholder farms, and efforts to combat climate change in some of the most vulnerable countries in the world.

Any effort to stabilize food prices in Egypt must be led by Egyptians to identify and meet local needs. But the United States has a role to play to support the Egyptian people, collectively the world’s largest importer of wheat. In the short term the United States should:

– Temporarily reinstate a program to provide low-cost financing that enables the Egyptian private and public sector to purchase commodities to fill strategic reserves and maintain full and transparent wheat stocks beyond Egypt’s current six-month minimum.

– Support low-cost loans to Egyptian farmers to increase agricultural output.

– Work directly and through the U.N. World Food Program to identify and provide targeted emergency food aid to Egypt’s school-feeding programs and most vulnerable populations.

– Arrange for the upgrade and expansion of grain-storage capacity at major ports, including Alexandria, to facilitate relatively rapid investment in Egyptian food-distribution infrastructure.

– Mitigate shipping risk and provide further technical assistance to improve the efficiency and transparency of Egyptian financing, customs, and tariffs procedures to make sure that arriving overseas grain is offloaded efficiently and can get to where it needs to be in the shortest time possible.

– Ensure the Suez Canal operates at full capacity to ensure global grain shipments reach their final destinations expeditiously.

In the midterm to long term, the United States must increase its investment in Egypt’s agricultural development. Agriculture directly employs one-third of Egypt’s labor force and cost-effective and strategic agricultural investment in Egypt can produce lasting dividends while minimizing the impact of uncertainty on food markets.

This increased U.S. and private-sector investment and technical assistance should be used to strengthen yields in key domestic food commodities such as wheat, edible oil, sugar, and dairy to bridge Egypt’s food gap. A focus on women farmers and small landholders and the production of high-value export crops such as fruits, vegetables, and livestock can boost incomes and employment and take advantage of Egypt’s proximity to potential markets.

Food prices are at record levels partly due to population growth and increased demand from a recovering global economy, tight supplies, high oil prices, and weak agricultural production attributable to climate change-induced weather disasters and crop loss in key producing nations.

Climate change is causing extreme weather events such as massive flooding in Australia, Pakistan, and Brazil; unprecedented heat waves and drought in Russia, Ukraine, and now China; heavy rains in Iowa and Illinois; and dry conditions in key U.S. wheat-growing regions such as Kansas and Colorado. These are all affecting food production and have injected a level of doubt into forecasts for upcoming harvests, current stockpiles, and the prospects for the spring planting season. Read more