By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The Congressional Western Caucus, consisting entirely of Republican members of Congress, held a hearing this morning entitled “Washington Barriers to Prosperity and Property Rights in the West.”  It was an opportunity for members to criticize a variety of regulations that protect our lands, water, air, and public health like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Wilderness Act.  Congressman Steve Pearce (R-NM), co-chairman of the caucus opened the hearing by saying that such regulations are “devastating the West.”

Members also accused the administration of killing jobs, in ways such as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s recent decision to withdraw 1 million acres around the Grand Canyon from new uranium mining.  Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT) railed against “the extremist policies of this administration.”

But, new on-the-ground evidence shows that westerners don’t necessarily believe with the assertion that regulations kill jobs.  A recent poll from the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project found that voters in six western states overwhelmingly believe that regulations do not harm business. Only 38 percent of respondents agreed (and 60 percent disagreed) with the statement that:

One of the best ways to create jobs is to cut back environmental regulations that are weighing down [your state’s] businesses.

Another question on the poll asked, “when you hear about the laws that govern industry’s responsibility for [your state’s] clean water, clean air, natural areas and wildlife do you think those are more likely to be…”:

-  63 percent answered “…important safeguards to protect private property owners, public health and taxpayers from toxic pollution and costly clean‐ups.”

-  29 percent answered “…burdensome regulations that tie up industry in red tape, hurt them too much financially, and cost jobs.”

On top of this, westerners are not particularly trustful of the mining, drilling, and logging companies that Republicans promote and defend.  In fact, only 21 percent of voters queried in the poll believed that “we can trust companies to act responsibly to protect [your state’s] land, water and wildlife on their own, without laws and regulations that require them to do so.”

Rather than bash environmental regulations, Republican leaders would do well to listen to what their constituents are telling them—that regulations help keep protect and preserve the land, water, air, and wildlife that makes the American West so unique.

Following President Obama’s “all-the-above” energy speech last Thursday, conservatives have ignored the speech and instead latched onto a single point about investing $14 million in algae-based biofuel research. “Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this [algae] fuel that we can grow right here in the United States,” Obama said.

Newt Gingrich said the president’s comments are “worthy of Leno or Letterman.” The same candidate who wants moon colonies during his presidency attacked the president for a “weird” technology both Republicans and their industry allies have endorsed.

Gingrich isn’t alone in the right-wing attempt to simplify the administration’s multifaceted energy proposals:

Newt Gingrich: “And maybe what we ought to do at Newt.org is we ought to get t-shirts that say ‘You choose.’ Gingrich went on to suggest the slogans, ‘You have Newt: Drill here, Drill Now, Pay Less. You have Obama: Have Algae, Pay More, Be Weird.”

Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): I think the American people realize that a president who’s out there talking about algae when they’re having to choose between whether to buy groceries or to fill up the tank is the one who’s out of touch.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer: Why build a keystone pipeline with real oil from Canada to put in real refineries and put in real existing cars when you can do algae? I think he is on to something. And I think this shows the vision, the hope and change he promised in 2008.

Rush Limbaugh: This guy is so out of his league, to throw out there, “I’m looking at algae.” It’s patently absurd. In a sane world this guy would be laughed out of office, not voted out.

By mocking the president, conservatives ignore a history of party leaders and their industry allies endorsing algae research.

Republicans from Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) to Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) have requested Department of Energy grants for algae research. All three lawmakers wrote that algae investments would reduce America’s oil use. For instance, Johanns wrote that an algae biotechnology center “would develop technology to decrease our dependence on imported oil.”

Republican allies in the oil industry have also invested in algae, including No. 1 oil lobbyist ConocoPhillips and ExonMobil, which sunk $600 million in algae biofuel research.

On energy, the administration is doing far more than budgeting for biofuel research. The White House’s FY 2013 budget provides billions for R&D and manufacturing in clean energy technologies, while higher fuel economy standards will reduce U.S. oil consumption by more than 2 million barrels per day. Meanwhile, under Obama, domestic production of oil has reached record levels of quadruple the drilling rigs over the past three years.

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A new study led by the Georgia Institute of Technology provides further evidence of a relationship between melting ice in the Arctic regions and widespread cold outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere….

Since the level of Arctic sea ice set a new record low in 2007, significantly above-normal winter snow cover has been seen in large parts of the northern United States, northwestern and central Europe, and northern and central China. During the winters of 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, the Northern Hemisphere measured its second and third largest snow cover levels on record.

“Our study demonstrates that the decrease in Arctic sea ice area is linked to changes in the winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation,” said Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “The circulation changes result in more frequent episodes of atmospheric blocking patterns, which lead to increased cold surges and snow over large parts of the northern continents.”

That’s from the news release of an NASA- and NSF-funded study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall.”

I think Curry’s use of the phrase “cold surges” is important. Although there have definitely been some major cold blasts, our winters aren’t actually getting colder — see the 10/11 Climate Progress post, “Last Two Winters’ Warm Extremes More Severe Than Their Cold Snaps, Study Finds.” And that’s without counting this winter.  Of course, winters are just going to keep getting warmer globally — so I think some of the reporting on this study has been a tad misleading.

The point is that it now appears over the next couple of decades, the gradual rate of warming will not be able to overcome the occasional incredible winter cold surges fueled by the loss of Arctic ic. This is particularly true if, as I and others have argued, we’re going to see continued rapid ice loss in the next decade (see “The New Arctic Abnormal: Record Low Sea Ice Volume, Area and Extent*” and “The death spiral continues“).

Arctic sea ice in September 2007 reached its lowest extent on record, approximately 40% lower than when satellite records began in 1979. Sea ice loss in 2011 was virtually tied with the ice loss in 2007, despite weather conditions that were not as unusual in the Arctic.

The new PNAS report is about the third study to come to the same conclusion:

• Is Climate Change Bringing the Arctic to Europe? “The probability of cold winters with much snow in Central Europe rises when the Arctic is covered by less sea ice in summer.”
• Our Extreme Weather: Is Arctic Sea Ice Loss Partly to Blame? ”Such a large area of open water is bound to cause significant impacts on weather patterns, due to the huge amount of heat and moisture that escapes from the exposed ocean into the atmosphere over a multi-month period following the summer melt.”

The disinformers have repeatedly suggested that big snowstorms disprove (!) climate science. They can’t stand the fact that actual science says that the Snowpocalypses we’ve been seeing can be directly linked to global warming, which, of course, wasn’t news to anyone who actually reads the scientific literature or talks to real climatologists (see “An amazing, though clearly little-known, scientific fact: We get more snow storms in warm years!“).

This study is probably particularly annoying to the disinformers since it was co-authored by Curry, who has transformed herself from climate science advocate into a promoter of many long-debunked disinformers (see “The curious incident of Curry with the fringe“).

The lead author, Jiping Liu, a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech, explained that the study looked at more than just changes in atmospheric circulation. It also looked at changes in atmospheric water vapor content, which into scientists have long said would increase because of global warming and drive more extreme precipitation events, which  in fact is what has happened (see “Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment“).

As ABC News reports, “more water is evaporating into the air as Arctic ice at the ocean’s surface melts away”:

“This greatly enhances the transfer of moisture from the ocean to the atmosphere,” Liu said. That humidity, he says, essentially acts as fuel to help supercharge “Snowmageddon”-type storms like the ones that paralyzed parts of the northeastern U.S. in 2010. A more recent, deadly deep freeze in Eastern Europe left 650 people dead.

“The record decline in Arctic sea ice is at least a critical contributor to recent snowy winters in northern continents,” Liu said.

Liu says the new research may also help connect the dots between human-caused global warming, vanishing ice and our changing weather.

As Climate Central notes, “The Arctic has been warming at about twice the rate of the rest of the globe, a trend studies show is largely due to manmade climate change. Fall sea ice cover declined by 27 percent between 1979-2010, and the five lowest sea ice extent years have all occurred during the past five years.”

They spoke to another leading expert on the subject:

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by Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, reposted from NRDC’s Switchboard

Bullying American landowners and stockpiling pipe for a rejected project show the arrogance of the Canadian pipeline company TransCanada as it tries to reanimate the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The latest news is that TransCanada is proposing to split the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in two in order to get around the U.S. process to review international pipelines for their national interest. TransCanada says that it will seek the presidential permit for the border crossing, but move ahead separately with the southern portion of the rejected Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Oklahoma to the Gulf. This is a ploy to avoid a review that will show how the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will raise U.S. oil prices, send tar sands overseas, endanger U.S. homes and waters, and contribute to worsening climate change.

What part of “no” does TransCanada not understand? Texans, Nebraskans, and folks all across the country are saying that whether in a hundred pieces or one piece, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is not in the national interest. At a time of public worry about rising gas prices, lawmakers should be concerned about a project that will in diverting oil from the Midwest gasoline refining operations to Gulf Coast diesel refining operations thereby raising U.S. oil and gas prices.

So what exactly has TransCanada proposed? TransCanada announced that it has let the State Department know that the company will submit a new application for a presidential permit for the northern portion of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from the border crossing in Montana to Steel City, Nebraska on the Kansas border where an already existing part of the pipeline starts. TransCanada would supplement this application with the proposed route through Nebraska after that has been determined in cooperation with Nebraska. But there is some question as to how long this would take since Nebraska does not currently have laws in place to do this assessment. TransCanada will then apply separately to the various federal and state permits for the southern portion of the pipeline from Cushing Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast.

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Scientists have tied the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, caused by global warming pollution, to the recent extreme winters that hit the United States last year and Europe this year. In “Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall,” a new report published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers find that the loss of polar ice has changed atmospheric circulation and increased atmospheric water vapor, driving the popularly-dubbed “snowpocalypse” conditions:

We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.

Sea ice decline is contributing to catastrophic, deadly winters in two ways, the researchers find. The loss of ice changes wind patterns over the northern oceans, which in turn disrupts the jet stream, allowing cold polar air to plunge across the northern hemisphere. “If there is a dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice, the westerly winds that blow across the North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans are weakened,” lead author Jiping Liu, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Climatewire. “This means we will have a wavier jet stream.”

The loss of ice and warmer temperatures mean that there is much more evaporation from the Arctic Ocean, leading to a higher moisture content in the polar air that is pulled south. That means that intense snowfall is more likely, especially as the polar air collides with warm, moist air from the south.

In 1999, Kevin Trenberth explained how global warming would lead to more intense precipitation events, including snow storms.

The decline in Arctic sea ice is one of the primary indicators of man-made global warming. Arctic sea ice cover began shrinking decades ago, with a rapid acceleration in the last decade. Sea ice decline has been much more rapid than projected by climate models. Some scientists now expect the Arctic to be effectively ice-free during the summer in less than 30 years. The United States and other nations have responded to this troubling collapse of the planetary thermostat by making plans to drill for fossil fuels in the Arctic oceans. That decision hastens our march into a “no-analogue world,” in the words of NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco.

by Zachary Rybarczyk

Joint investment between the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors has enabled a breakthrough in lithium-ion cell technologies that could cut the price of electric vehicle batteries in half.

Armed with $7 million from from General Motors’ venture investment arm, G.M. Ventures, and $4 million from the Energy Department’s advanced energy research program, ARPA-E, California-based Envia Systems announced that it had created a battery pack with cells with energy density far greater than other technologies on the market.

Envia says its new manganese-based cathode design allows lithium cells to store almost three times the amount of energy per charge than today’s commercial lithium-ion battery packs. Envia’s chairman and CEO Atul Kapadia spoke to the New York Times:

“We will be able to make smaller automotive packs that are also less heavy and much cheaper,” Atul Kapadia, chairman and chief executive of Envia, said in a telephone interview. “The cost of cells will be less than half — perhaps 45 percent — of cells today, and the energy density will be almost three times greater than conventional automotive cells.”

Mr. Kapadia continued: “What we have are not demonstrations, not experiments, but actual products. We could be in automotive production in a year and a half.”

If these claims are true, they could provide a much-needed boost to the electric vehicle sector. Because batteries are one of the most costly parts of electric vehicles, dramatic improvements like this could substantially reduce the overall cost of vehicles. Dozens of companies are working on bringing battery costs down, but none have been able to get into a cost range that would break the market open.

Looks like a strategic government investment in good ol’ fashioned energy R&D could just get us there.

Other stories below: Santorum’s impious denial theology; debunking myths about wind turbines and carbon emissions

Keystone breakthrough may muffle Republican attack on Obama

A Canadian company’s decision on Monday to proceed with part of a U.S. pipeline might end up muffling one of the Republicans’ loudest arguments in this election year: that President Barack Obama has pursued failed energy policies.

TransCanada Corp announced it intended to begin work on the southern leg of the $7 billion Keystone XL project, from Oklahoma to Texas, leaving for later another run at the more controversial, and complicated, northern segment.

For months, Republicans have hammered Obama for blocking the pipeline project out of concern for the environmentally sensitive areas south of the U.S.-Canada border. Republicans seeking re-election to Congress uniformly branded his decision as a job-killer that undermines energy independence.

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If we’re going to take control of our energy future and can start avoiding these annual gas price spikes that happen every year — when the economy starts getting better, world demand starts increasing, turmoil in the Middle East or some other parts of the world — if we’re going to avoid being at the mercy of these world events, we’ve got to have a sustained, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy.  Yes, oil and gas, but also wind and solar and nuclear and biofuels, and more.

President Obama gave a speech at the University of Miami on Thursday discussing his energy plan — assuming that one can use the word “plan” to describe a strategy devoid of any judgment. Obviously, all-of-the-above = more of everything = more fossil fuels = Hell and High Water.

The president has come a long way from his 2008 declaration that this is “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Now it’s more like “Après nous, le Déluge” (see “JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050“).

Just a year ago, “all-of-the-above” was actually a standard Republican talking point, so much so that Democrats routinely mocked it (see Markey slams oil-above-all” approach). It is certainly true that when the president says it, he means it, whereas the Republicans merely say it and then bitterly oppose all of the clean energy programs that Democrats put on the table.  I’m not sure future generations will notice the difference.

Obama’s all-of-the-above energy speech took a none-of-the-above approach to environmental problems: It ignored them all, including the most important of them all, global warming.

Obama is currently in the midst of a failed presidency from a historical perspective because of his abandonment of the climate issue, which is the only issue future generations are going to care about if we don’t act now, as I’ve said many times.

Obama will probably get only one serious shot at redemption, the grand bargain on tax and the deficit at the end of this year (see “Bipartisan Support Grows for Carbon Price as Part of Debt Deal“).  Speeches like this provide no evidence whatsoever that Obama even understands the stakes anymore.

Here are two other places in the speech where he repeats his new slogan:

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Tomorrow, the D.C. Court of Appeals will hear arguments from carbon polluters and their political allies that the EPA scientific endangerment finding for greenhouse pollution should be overturned. This case — brought by the state of Virginia, the industry front-group Coalition for Responsible Regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Tea Party-industry front Southeastern Legal Foundation — is based on the right-wing myth that global warming is a hoax. Holland & Hart attorney Paul Phillips, representing the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, told InsideClimate News that “man-made climate change is not certain,” according to “a compelling amount of science and facts out there”:

There’s a compelling amount of science and facts out there that suggest man-made climate change is not certain. EPA needs to accurately and honestly those certainties as well as the uncertainties.

The Coalition for Responsible Regulation, established in 2009, has not disclosed who its member companies are.

The EPA endangerment finding, Inside Climate News notes, “is based on more than 100 published scientific studies and peer-reviewed syntheses of climate change research” by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program/U.S. Global Change Research Program, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Essentially every scientific society in the world — and every agency of the United States government — recognizes that the threat of man-made global warming is a fact. As the National Academy of Sciences wrote in 2010, man-made global warming is a “settled fact“:

From a philosophical perspective, science never proves anything—in the manner that mathematics or other formal logical systems prove things—because science is fundamentally based on observations.

Any scientific theory is thus, in principle, subject to being refined or overturned by new observations.

In practical terms, however, scientific uncertainties are not all the same. Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small.

Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

Since 2010, the science attributing the unequivocal warming of the planet to fossil-fuel pollution has grown even stronger. It’s now considered “highly likely” that all of the observed warming since 1950 is manmade (and “extremely likely” that most of the warming is manmade).

Call it the reverse Midas touch. Everything homo sapiens touches turns to acid.

A study led by the U.S. Geological Survey finds, “Human use of Earth’s natural resources is making the air, oceans, freshwaters, and soils more acidic.”  The USGS news release explains:

This comprehensive review, the first on this topic to date, found the mining and burning of coal, the mining and smelting of metal ores, and the use of nitrogen fertilizer are the major causes of chemical oxidation processes that generate acid in the Earth-surface environment.

These widespread activities have increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, increasing the acidity of oceans; produced acid rain that has increased the acidity of freshwater bodies and soils; produced drainage from mines that has increased the acidity of freshwater streams and groundwater; and added nitrogen to crop lands that has increased the acidity of soils.

Previous studies have linked increased acidity in oceans to damage to ocean food webs, while increased acidity in soils has the potential to affect their ability to sustain crop growth.

In short, global acidification is one more threat to global food security, which is already under grave threat by climate change, our idiotic biofuels policies, population growth and demographic changes (see Oxfam Predicts Climate Change will Help Double Food Prices by 2030: “We Are Turning Abundance into Scarcity”).

Here’s more background on the study and its findings:

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by Chris Mooney, reposted from DeSmogBlog

James Inhofe, Republican Senator from Oklahoma, has a new book out. It is entitled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.

I have not read it yet. So I cannot say much about its contents, but I can say this: The title suggests that Inhofe, like Rick Santorum, is endorsing the global warming conspiracy theory. Indeed, where Santorum only muttered the word “hoax” without a great deal of elaboration, it looks like Inhofe is going to put some real meat onto those paranoid bones.

Let me once again reiterate why the global warming conspiracy theory is, well, just plain ridiculous.

To believe that global warming is a “hoax,” or that there is a “conspiracy,” you must believe in coordinated action on the part of scientists, environmental ministers, politicians, and NGOs around the world. It won’t do just to situate the hoax in the United States and its own scientific and NGO community, because the idea of human-caused global warming is endorsed by scientists, and scientific academies, around the globe.

Any one of these could blow the whistle on the so-called “hoax.” That this has not happened either means there is no hoax, or that the degree of conspiracy and collusion—among people who are notoriously individualistic and non-conformist, by the way—is mindboggling. We’re talking about some serious cat-herding going on.

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The most serious threat to U.S. national security and economic health today is not not al Qaeda or a nuclear Iran or the price of gasoline.

No, at the moment the gravest threat is our own inability to take action on fundamental threats, like global warming. The jeopardy we are in is doubled by a Congress that is either incapable of or unwilling to act.

Congress’s failures are acts of commission as well as omission. A significant number of Senators and House members are trying to get rid of policies and tools that past Congresses put in place to protect us. Some of the Republican candidates for president are complicit.

Consider what Congress is doing, or not doing, about oil prices, economic stability, climate change, and our military effectiveness.

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How exactly does one break a deeply embedded myth? We often believe that bombarding people with facts and figures is the best way to combat misinformation. But busting myths is not just about providing more data — it’s about presenting the data in a way that people will actually process it.

John Cook, founder of the popular climate website Skeptical Science, likes to think about the way people think.

As a climate communications fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Cook devotes his time to understanding how the booby traps and backfire effects within the human mind allow us to embrace myths, even when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In this podcast, we’ll have a lengthy discussion with Cook about how to counter the backfire effects within the brain. He’ll discuss his recent “Debunking Handbook,” which he co-authored with the cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowski, and apply his research to the manufactured “debate” over climate change:

“Because there is such an organized disinformation campaign, we need to be as scientific and evidence based as we can in our response. Which means take advantage of all this psychological research and that will help us form the most effective responses we can in trying to reduce the influence of disinformation.”

“For a long time, scientists have been operating under the information deficit model, saying that if we could just get more information to people, then that will solve the climate problem…but there’s more to it than that. We need to understand how people think, how they process information, so when we do try to reduce the effect of disinformation — and we have to do that — then we can do it more effectively.”

The Climate Progress podcast is now on iTunes. If you want to get automatic updates when we post new shows, you can subscribe to our feed through iTunes. For manual updates, check out our RSS feed.

And if you want to read about the concepts we discuss in this show, check out the below posts on the various backfire effects:

• The Debunking Handbook Part 1: The First Myth About Debunking
• The Debunking Handbook, Part 2: The Familiarity Backfire Effect
• The Debunking Handbook Part 3: The Overkill Backfire Effect
• The Debunking Handbook Part 4: The Worldview Backfire Effect
• The Debunking Handbook Part 5: Filling the Gap With an Alternative Explanation

 

Homeowners associations are notoriously resistant to solar, often banning roof-top installations that conflict with their aesthetic values. But what if you could install an invisible solar system on your home that no one knows is there?

Last week, researchers announced they had produced the largest see-through organic solar module to date — a 170 square centimeter functioning module that is 14 times larger than the last iteration. The technology was produced through a collaboration with researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the organic solar company New Energy Technologies.

Organic solar technologies — often called plastic solar — utilize conductive polymers that allow for flexible cells and modules. Researchers are applying these unique polymers onto a see-through substrate that can be applied to glass:

Once electricity-generating polymers are applied to a material surface, the resultant effect is the production of an OPV cell. The prospect of SolarWindow™ products generating electricity on see-through glass is made possible by way of the unique architecture associated with this fabrication of the OPV device.

The technology was initially produced in a laboratory at the University of South Florida.

Research like this coming out of our nation’s laboratories is exciting. But we need to be extraordinarily cautious when evaluating the commercial viability of this technology.

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