10:37: The Grammys president is getting his Bruce Springsteen on here with a pitch for music education and MusiCares: “We take care of our musicians in our creative community in their times of crisis.” On the other hand, given the artists with drug problems who died last year, it’s a bit odd to pitch the charity on the grounds that it gets people sober.

10:08: Adele, back from vocal surgery, sounds pretty great. But her performance, especially in comparison to a lot of what we’ve seen on stage tonight, is a reminder of how little authentic vocal performance matters at the Grammys—and in the industry overall—anymore.

9:52: I’m pretty sure Adele took looking-happy-and-grateful lessons from Taylor Swift. That said, she totally deserves this award.

9:22: People who are dismayed by this Beach Boys tribute in general and performance in particular should go buy the Live in London album, which is just divine, and very funny. The band sounds amazing and spends all the breaks making fun of the hysterically excited crowd. Which is not nice. But is very entertaining.

9:14: The Decemberists should win more things. Not least because they are awesomely progressive.

8:48: I like the Foo Fighters, but Dave Grohl will always be a member of Nirvana to me.

8:44: A reminder. Jay Smooth has everything dead to rights about Chris Brown:

8:36: Thank goodness Kanye’s winning SOMETHING tonight, even if it’s for “Otis” and not a track off My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. And I honestly think Kanye’s totally justified, and perhaps wise, not to be here tonight.

8:30: It’s only one barometer of the health of feminism in this country, but we really need to get to a point where abusers like Chris Brown and Charlie Sheen are unemployable in the entertainment industry until they’ve made meaningful amends to the women they hurt, taken public responsibility for their actions, and done work to help women escape abuse. I hate seeing Brown on the Grammy stage. And I hate that I’m going to see Sheen on FX, which is otherwise my favorite network.

8:24: Alicia Keys snarking about the suspense over Adele’s win for “Someone Like Me” just makes me like her more than I did 60 seconds ago.

8:23: I miss Alicia Keys. Can we have another album from her, too? Also, more stripped-down performances in this telecast that emphasize vocal performance rather than badly-wired theatrics?

8:15: I like Bruno Mars just fine, but there’s something awkward about someone who got off a serious cocaine rap consequence-free talking about remembering Whitney Houston.

8:08: “I Will Always Love You” would have been my choice for Whitney performance, too. But notable that they started it mid-song before the lyrics about leaving someone voluntarily.

8:04: Segging from the state of the American economy to Whitney Houston’s death was always going to be kind of awkward, L.L. Cool J.

8:03: I love “We Take Care of Our Own,” but that was a thinner-sounding performance than I would have liked.

8:02: Bruce Springsteen is probably the only man in America in his sixties who can get late-in-life dual ear piercings and not have it be labeled a midlife crisis.

8:01: The Boss wants to know if America is alive out there. This is probably the wrong live crowd to be asking that, but an interesting question for the country in general!

7:59: I’m hearing Nicki Minaj showed up with the Pope? I’d put money on that being the most interesting spectacle of the night, but I guess we’ll just have to see…

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) with President Obama.

They shouldn’t be forced to issue a permit until they are satisfied on the environmental effects involved. So I think that point is valid. Whether that requires another six or eight months, that’s open to question. It is a good issue to try to get resolved some way or another. The American public would like to see us go ahead with the project to the extent they know what the project entails. It sounds meritorious. We’ve got pipelines all over the country. That is true with most members of Congress, too. I think most members of Congress probably would like to go ahead to get the issue resolved.

Watch it:

Bingaman’s claim about the American public’s support for the foreign tar sands project is incorrect. A recent poll from Hart Research Associates found that Americans who are informed about the pros and cons of the pipeline don’t want it built by a 14-point margin. Americans without this information — influenced by the extreme pro-pipeline bias in corporate media — support the pipeline by an 11-point margin.

Bingaman also rejected Republican claims that there is an “urgency about getting this permit approved,” because oil production is so high that the United States is a net exporter of petroleum products.

If built, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would put six states at risk of toxic oil spills along its 1700-mile route, and would add about five billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere over its intended 50-year lifespan of bringing dirty crude from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries for foreign export.

Other Democratic senators who have expressed support for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline include finance chair Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), budget chair Kent Conrad (D-ND), Jon Tester (D-MT), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Mark Begich (D-AK), Ben Nelson (D-NE), and Claire McCaskill (D-MO). Nelson and Baucus have criticized Republican attempts to speed approval, while Manchin has signed on with the GOP.

Transcript:

Q: Moving on to the Keystone XL pipeline, Mr. Chairman, this is a major issue that’s coming up in both chambers of Congress. the White House continues to push it off to 2013 saying we have not rejected this project on the merits. We want to give it a full review over this longer period. Republicans obviously object, say it’s been reviewed for three years. How do you feel the White House has handled this? Is it time for them to come to a compromise with the company given with the issue has become?

BINGAMAN: The basic point they are making is a valid one. They shouldn’t be forced to issue a permit until they are satisfied on the environmental effects involved. So I think that point is valid. Whether that requires another six or eight months, that’s open to question. It is a good issue to try to get resolved some way or another. The American public would like to see us go ahead with the project to the extent they know what the project entails. It sounds meritorious. We’ve got pipelines all over the country. That is true with most members of Congress, too. I think most members of Congress probably would like to go ahead to get the issue resolved. Maybe there’s way to get it resolved contingent on certain things being determined. I don’t know.

Q: Would you consider using the Tuesday forums you have with Senate leadership as a way to come together with Democrats in the Senate and find a way forward on Keystone?

BINGAMAN: I think that frankly the Congress is reacting to actions by the administration here. We need to see what the administration is going to do. If the course of action that’s described by the administration is reasonable, then I would hope to support that. The idea that there is an urgency about getting this permit approved, I don’t buy into that. The truth is we have a lot of oil. We are refining more petroleum products than we can use in this country. We are exporting petroleum products. Oil production’s up. Gas production is up. The idea that we have an economic challenge that needs a streamlined process, I don’t buy that. There are jobs that are going to be created, and that’s good. There are lots of things that we’ve got on our plate that will create jobs that I’m sure will be reflected in the president’s budget.

So here are 3 things you can do for Mann:

1. Buy and read his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
2. Fight the denier attack at Amazon.com.
3. Friend “I Heart Climate Scientists” on Facebook [more on that later]

I’m about halfway through the book and can say its target audience is the exact same people who read Climate Progress — readers who want to be informed about real climate science and the state of the climate fight.

Mann is one of our top climate scientists, and so it shouldn’t be any surprise that he’s a good writer.  I’ll do a full review when the book comes out in hardcover (right now you can buy the Kindle eBook).

Here are two completely independent reviews that are much sought after by authors:

• “In this meticulous and engaging brief on climate change research and the political backlash to legitimate scientific work, Penn State professor Mann narrates the fight against misinformation from the inside.” — Publishers Weekly
• “An important and disturbing account of the fossil-fuel industry’s well-funded public-relations campaign to sow doubt about the validity of the science of climate change.” — Kirkus (STARRED REVIEW)

As CP readers know, the climate war is waged everywhere online, including Amazon book reviews.  So I’m reprinting below a post from Get Energy Smart Now on the subject and a full book review from Prof. Scott Mandia.

What follows is a post by A. Siegel

Amazon-ian challenge: what is the right thing to do?

[T]his post is about yet another ‘rating war’ (and rating abuse) on Amazon as anti-science syndrome sufferers, urged on by the Andrew Peter Breibart of the global warming denial world and other anti-science vigilantes, are swarming on Professor Michael Mann’s just-published book.

As Scott Mandia opened a discussion,

It is a shame that the science deniers are much better organized than the rational people. As of 8 AM this morning, Dr. Michael E. Mann’s latest book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines had 15 reviews, all of which were 5 stars. My review (posted below) had 58 out of 59 votes for being helpful.

Something has changed.  As of the moment of writing this piece, there are now 42 reviews:

• “5-star”: 24
• “4-star”: 4
• “3-star”: 0
• “2-star”: 0
• “1-star”: 13

Sigh.

Has the books suddenly gotten worse?

No, “Watt’s Up With That,” one of the most prominent climate science confusion sites, put up a post calling on readers to attack Mann’s book and to attack positive reviews.

Thus, a pile of 1-star reviews — essentially none with substance and the substantive ones with bad science . The ‘top rated’ 1-star review begins as follows:

221 of 430 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars assumptions are not fact., February 8, 2012

By

JrF “Jonny old boy” (UK) – See all my reviews

For someone who obtained a PhD, the lack of rigour and detail in areas such as greenhouse effect (he ignores the chemical fundamentals and fails to address saturation theory for CO2 and just draws a mickey mouse diagram for primary school kids), climate models (he goes into no detail about why models have been shown to be widely inaccurate according to some and spot on according to others) and the historical relationship between temperature and CO2 ( the lag argument ).

Besides the absence of “Amazon verified purchase” for a book released just today (with Kindle edition out for a little while), this doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. As Scott Mandia responded:

This reviewer packs quite a few climate myths into the first paragraph.  Can you say Dunning-Kruger?  The debunking of these myths can be found by visiting Skeptical Science’s Arguments page and clicking on #71, #6, and #12.

[Note: Debunking myths is difficult and resource demanding.  A very useful Debunking guide.  And, an example of a recent whacking moles debunking effort.]

In addition to the posting of shallowly dismissive 1-star reviews, there was a rash of downrating of those substantive reviews that were up prior to WUWT’s post.  Scott Mandia’s very substantive review now has a rating of “139 of 274 people found the following review helpful” which means that this (very substantive) review (published with permission, in full, after-the-fold) no longer appears on the front page of reviews.

This is a very open and blunt example of a conspiracy to mobilize resources to freep Amazon ratings, to drive down the visibility of seriously substantive reviews while seeking to drive down attention to (and interest in) a book through a raft of negative (even if shallow) reviews.  The Amazon review system is open to all sorts of gamesmanship and unethical behavior.   Such abusive behavior as seen today with Dr Mann’s work is far from isolated to climate science (see here for an interesting example of review abuse).

Thus, to the title question: “What is the right thing to do?”

Clearly, Amazon is not about to step in to provide some meaningful enforcement beyond what exists (such as “Amazon verified purchase”) to remove 1-star ratings, put meaningful reviews ‘higher’ in the queue despite the flood of ‘not useful’ ratings shortly after the WUWT call to action.

One option would be a call to action: go to  Amazon and uprate all five-star reviews and down-rate all 1-star reviews.  That, however, would be simply inappropriate.  Another option is to simply ignore which, in the larger scheme of things, is likely a better use of most people’s time.  A third option, one that would actually require far more time than option 1, would be to go to Amazon and actually read the 5 star and 1 star reviews. If you find a review helpful, no matter what the star rating, let Amazon know and do the same if you find it unhelpful.  While I have a good idea what the resulting ratings would be from a reality-based community, this is an ethical way to react to anti-science syndrome sufferering swarming within the flawed Amazon rating system….

With permission from Scott Mandia:

The Science, Drama, and Politics of Climate Science, January 29, 2012

By

Scott A. Mandia

Amazon Verified Purchase

Dr. Michael E. Mann’s book is a must-read for those that are relatively new to learning about climate science. This book has it all: science, drama, and politics. How many non-fiction science books can make that claim?

The hockey stick is a famous historical temperature plot that shows for the past 2,000 years global temperatures moved up and down very slightly (hockey shaft) but in the past several decades the temperature has rapidly risen (hockey blade). Although there are multiple lines of evidence and well-understood physics that show humans are dramatically warming the planet, climate science contrarians have seized upon the stick as being the single pillar that holds up the entire climate science edifice. They figure if they can take down the stick and Mike Mann, they can take down all of climate science. I know, sounds foolish, right?

Mike’s book takes the reader on a journey beginning with his early interest in math and science as a youngster, his various areas of career research (hockey stick is just one of many), and ends the book detailing the disturbing attacks on him and colleagues – many of which occurred on Capitol Hill!

The early parts of the book describe how he ended up researching climate. Mike, like just about all scientists, is motivated by curiosity. Even as a young boy he was fascinated by science and math and got his greatest adrenalin rushes from discovering elegant solutions he calls “tricks” to solve unique problems. While he was in high school he discovered a trick to program a tic-tac-toe game that used artificial intelligence to improve on itself and at UC Berkeley he worked with superconducting materials and found a neat trick to better model their properties.

While at Yale, Mike wanted to work on something that was big, new, and had many unanswered questions. Climate science was not on his radar at the time but then he met with Barry Saltzman who was using the tools of physics to simulate (model) Earth’s climate. Climate modeling was a big and new area of research so naturally Mike wanted to help. Mike’s research focused on understanding the importance of natural climate oscillations. In fact, in the early 1990s Mike thought natural causes of change were more important than human causes. However, by the mid-1990s, due to the mounting evidence, it became clear to him that human causes were “rising above the noise” of natural causes. During that time he was oblivious to the attacks on Ben Santer being waged by S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Patrick Michaels, Global Climate Coalition (a group of fossil fuel interests) and others because Santer’s (and others) research showed that humans were in fact causing climate to change (IPCC 2nd Assessment ,1995). Mike explains that by the mid to late 1990s scientists knew that humans were warming the planet and offers five easy steps of understanding.

It was Mike’s curiosity about multi-decadal natural climate changes and a serendipitous moment that led him to his research that led to the famous hockey stick temperature reconstruction. Mike’s parents happened to be speaking over a glass of wine with Ray Bradley of UMass-Amherst and suggested that their son Mike should meet up. After their first “scientific blind date” a partnership emerged. When Mike began working with Ray Bradley, he was interested in reconstructing the patterns of temperature variation in a way that would provide insight into the workings of the climate system. It was from this landmark research that the Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (1998/1999) hockey stick was born. (For the real climate/math geeks there is a lengthy chapter describing principal component analysis [PCA] but I think many readers might quickly skim over this section.)

Mike explains why his plot was highlighted alone by the IPCC TAR (2001) even though there were other reconstructions at that time. “(1) It was the only reconstruction done at the level of individual years rather than decadal or longer-term averages, and (2) it came with error bars, which the other reconstructions didn’t. Thus, unlike other studies, it spoke to whether recent years, such as 1998, stood out as unusual against the backdrop of the longer-term reconstruction and its uncertainties.”

The most important information in this book is the extensive detail describing climate science denial and the attacks on scientists. Mike is clear to distinguish true skepticism which all scientists possess versus denial which is the refusal to accept facts due to one’s political or financial interests. Mike offers to the reader his “six stages of denial”.

Mike describes the well-documented tobacco industry “doubt is our product” misinformation strategy that is now being used in climate discussions. This strategy is being funded by industry groups such as Koch Industries and the Scaife Foundations that find climate change science to be inconvenient to their bottom lines. Mike also calls out other groups such as American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Advancement of Sound Science Center, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, Fraser Institute, Heartland Institute, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Media Research Center, National Center for Policy Analysis, and Citizens for a Sound Economy (better known now as Freedomworks).

As Mike explains, various media outlets often propagate climate change disinformation in their editorial and opinion pages. He mentions newspapers such as the National Post and Financial Post in Canada; the

Daily Telegraph, Times , and Spectator in the United Kingdom; and U.S. newspapers such as the Washington Times and the various outlets of the Murdoch, Scaife, and Anschutz conservative media empires, which include Fox News and the Wall Street Journal , the regional Examiner.com network and Web sites like Newsbusters.

The most disturbing sections of this book detail the personal attack on Mike Mann and his family as well as attacks on other prominent scientists such as Ben Santer Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Herbert Needleman, Stephen Schneider, James Hansen, Eric Steig, and Wei-Chyung Wang. Mike relates these attacks as using “`Serengeti strategy’– the tried and-true tactic of the climate change denial campaign. The climate change deniers isolate individual scientists just as predators on the Serengeti Plain of Africa hunt their prey: picking off vulnerable individuals from the rest of the herd.”

The book also chronicles the dirty politics of climate change denial in Washington, D.C. Mann begins with Philip Cooney. In 2001, Cooney, a lawyer with a bachelor’s degree in economics and no formal scientific training, was appointed as chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). He was previously a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute (API). Cooney was instrumental in getting the environmentally friendly Christine Todd Whitman, head of the EPA to resign. Cooney also worked with the Competitive Enterprise Institute to invalidate a climate change report known as the National Assessment. Cooney also removed the hockey stick plot from the EPA’s 2003 State of the Environment report and instead placed in a study by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas that was financed by Cooney’s former employer, the American Petroleum Institute. The Soon and Baliunas paper was so bad that half of the Climate Research journal editorial staff resigned in protest because the seriously flawed paper should never have passed peer review.

Mike also details the 2003 Senate hearing called by friend of oil, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). In this hearing Inhofe’s expert witnesses included Soon, Baliunas, and Michael Chrichton - a novelist! It was in this hearing that Inhofe made his notorious claim that “manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

Mike then moves on to Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) who was the Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. (Barton is a household name now for his notorious public apology to British Petroleum in June 2010 when the White House asked BP to pay for the clean-up and lost jobs.) In 2005 Barton sent threatening letters to Mike Mann and several others suggesting that they may have engaged in scientific malpractice. Many major science organizations and the mass media issued loud protests because it was an obvious witch hunt. Senators and Congressmen on both sides of the aisle including Republican Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), chair of the Science Committee, and Republican Senator John McCain (R-AZ) told Barton he should immediately retract the letter but Barton refused.

In November 2005, Sen. Boehlert formally commissioned the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to review the science behind paleoclimate reconstructions and the final NAS report fully vindicated Mann.

Barton commissioned his own study by tapping stats professor Edward Wegman of George Mason University – a man with no climate science background. The Wegman Report repeated the debunked McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M) claim that the hockey stick was a mathematical artifact of using PCA conventions, while ignoring published peer-reviewed papers that refuted M&M’s claim. The more authoritative NAS review, for example, dismissed the claim that PCA conventions had any significant impact on the hockey stick results. (Currently, Edward Wegman is being investigated for plagiarism and his 2008 journal article on the subject was retracted by Computational Statistics and Data Analysis.) Mike then summarizes the two House hearings on the subject in July 2006 where Barton’s witnesses, including Wegman, were embarrassed by their own incompetence. Sadly, Wegman did not even understand the heat-trapping physics of greenhouse gases!

As the book nears the finish Mike describes the value of the peer-review process in rooting out bad science but admits it is not perfect and it is much slower than the immediately available Internet pseudo-science that most in the public read. To show how peer review can allow bad papers to slip through he discusses papers from Craig Loehle (2007), David Douglass, John Christy, Ben Pearson, and S. Fred Singer (2007), and John McLean, Chris de Freitas, and Bob Carter (2009). Each of these were trumpeted as the final nail in the coffin for manmade warming but subsequent analysis has dismissed them because of their many errors. (Of course, Mother Nature does not read these journal articles and the planet keeps on warming.)

Mike then moves on the stolen emails from Climate Research Unit, a well-orchestrated smear job on climate science that the press had unfortunately dubbed Climategate. Mike opens that chapter with this famous line by Cardinal Richelieu: “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” In an attempt to sabotage the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, the anti-science crowd loudly proclaimed (yet again) that climate science and its scientists were a sham. They used taken out of context quotes with words such as “trick” and “hide the decline” to smear Mike and many others. Of course, we all know that “trick” is just another word for an elegant solution which Mike has made a career out of. The media coverage was appalling and Koch Industries and the Scaife Foundations played a particularly important role. One report showed that twenty or so organizations funded at least in part by Koch Industries had “repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and appeared as media spokespeople” in stories about climategate. In time there were many independent investigations and Mike and others were fully vindicated. (Sadly, the vindications received little coverage and I do not recall seeing any formal apologies from the press and certainly not from the ant-science crowd which still today trumpets climategate even while droughts, floods, fires, and sea level rise keep increasing.)

Mike also writes about the failed attempt of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to try to access his private emails and other documents while he was a researcher at University of Virginia. (Although not appearing in the Kindle version of the book, Mike is under attack again by American Tradition Institute, a right-wing astroturf group that has ties to Koch Industries and others. Mike is now fighting a long and expensive legal battle to prevent them from using his and many others’ emails to spin up another climategate. It is a shame that so much of his time is being taken away from his research but I must commend him for standing up for climate science on his own dime. I wonder how many others would do what Mike is doing?)

One would think that after all of this bad history, Mike might end the book with sadness or cynicism. Instead, he offers much hope and describes how these attacks on him and others have awakened climate scientists to their responsibility to defend their work and speak out against attempts to stifle the free exchange of science.

To those that still question Mike’s research, know this: since the first hockey stick paper of 1998, there have been more than a dozen studies published by many scientists using different methodologies (PCA, CPS, EIV, isotopic analysis, & direct T measurements) that duplicate the hockey stick. To believe Rep. Joe Barton, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and American Tradition Institute, one must also believe in magic. Consider the odds that various international scientists using quite different data and quite different data analysis techniques can all be wrong in the same way. What are the odds that a hockey stick is always the shape of the wrong answer?

Hmmm … whether you agree with Mann or not, is this a “helpful review” in any decision-making process as to whether or not to buy this book?

You be the judge …

– A. Siegel

On ABC’s This Week, Rep. Paul Ryan echoed the Republican objection of contraception coverage. Ryan told host George Stephanopolous the compromise is nothing more than a “fig leaf” and an “accounting trick”:

RYAN: To paraphrase the bishops’ letter, this thing, it’s a distinction without a difference. It’s an accounting gimmick or a fig leaf. It’s not a compromise. The president’s doubled down. [...] If this is what the president’s willing to do in a tough election year, imagine what he’s going to do to implement the rest of his health care law after an election.

STEPHANOPOLOUS: You heard Jack Lew right there, this is not going to force the institutions to pay for the coverage. [...]

RYAN: It’s a distinction without a difference. This is an accounting trick.

Watch his interview:

Ryan’s own heavily-Catholic home state of Wisconsin currently mandates contraception coverage without any exclusion for religious institutions. As ThinkProgress reported, Marquette University, a Jesuit institution located in Milwaukee, even decided to offer contraception coverage prior to the state’s mandate.

White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew repeatedly defended President Obama’s decision on several Sunday morning TV shows. “It does not force an institution that has religious principle to offer or pay for benefits that they find objectionable, but it guarantees a women’s right to access,” Lew said on Fox News Sunday. “Hopefully now this will set the issue to rest.”

And Ryan and his Republican colleagues are arguing against a policy that a majority of Catholic voters support and that major Catholic organizations favor, including the Catholic Health Association, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and Catholic Charities USA. The Rev. John Jenkins, president of the Catholic-affiliated University of Notre Dame, supported President Obama’s compromise, calling it a “a welcome step toward recognizing the freedom of religious institutions to abide by the principles that define their respective missions.”

As Republicans stand with the conservative Catholic bishops in opposition to allowing women to receive contraception at no cost, they are embracing an increasingly extreme anti-contraception position, with which even many Catholics disagree.

Joe Nocera replies to his Keystone XL critics in “The Politics of Keystone, Take 2” in Saturday’s New York Times. He still doesn’t get it. Like many people, Nocera doesn’t seem to understand the relationship between energy use and energy prices. He writes:

The seemingly inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions is the result of deeply ingrained human habits, which will not change if the pipeline is ultimately blocked.

The truth of the matter is that human habits are not really all that deeply ingrained. In countries where energy prices are higher, people systematically use less of it. How much less is shown dramatically in the chart attached to my response to Nocera’s first defense of KXL. Wealthy countries like Japan and Germany that have much higher fuel prices than the United States use only a half to a third as much per capita:

Nocera plunges even more deeply into economic confusion when he writes, “The benefits of the oil we stand to get from Canada, via Keystone, far outweigh the environmental risks,” and then goes on to list, as one of the benefits, the fact that Canadian oil is currently selling at a discount from Saudi crude.

Yes, Canadian oil is currently selling at a discount, but that is not a valid argument for building KXL. An especially low price on oil from a relatively dirty source is not a “benefit” — it is bad energy policy and bad environmental policy. What is more, even fans of underpriced energy need to recognize that building more pipelines would allow oil from Canadian sands to mix more thoroughly into the world oil market, so its price would go up.

Nocera’s “Take 2” does make some valid points. One is that the oil export issue is a red herring. If KXL is good, then it is good whether the products refined from it are consumed in the United States or exported. The same goes if KXL is bad. The fact that some of it would be re-exported doesn’t make it any worse.

Nocera also catches out Robert Redford for saying that oil from Canadian sands is “the dirtiest oil on the planet.” The truth is more nuanced. Andrew Leach and other observers point out that not all oil sands are alike. Oil from some deposits, recovered using some techniques, is much dirtier than others. The worst of it is pretty bad; the best is cleaner than some U.S. domestic oil, for example, thermally extracted heavy oil from California.

Whether Canadian oil is or is not the dirtiest on the planet is not the real point. The real point has always been that we need a comprehensive energy policy that encompasses economic, security and environmental dimensions. At a minimum, such a policy would raise energy prices across the board by enough to cover all environmental costs. At best, it would use price signals based on carbon content that would provide incentives to use energy from the cleanest sources first, and at the same time, develop even cleaner technologies for the future.

That is the part Nocera just doesn’t seem to get.

Even with a few countries pulling back on government support of the industry because of fiscal troubles, 2011 was still a huge year for deployment — with wind and solar alone representing almost 70% of new capacity.

That’s almost a 10-fold increase over deployment in 2000, when only 3.5 GW of renewable energy projects were installed. Last year, 32 GW of renewables — mostly wind and solar — were deployed across European countries.

The figures come from the European Wind Energy Association, which just released a report on industry growth.

Growth in Europe has consistently outstripped forecasts. The EU currently has a target of getting 20% of its final energy (heat, electricity and fuels) from renewable energy. Numerous countries have already surpassed their needed targets in the electricity and heating sectors, and it’s likely that the entire region will move past the goal well ahead of schedule.

It’s expected that renewable electricity sources will meet 34% of demand in Europe by 2020, with 25 of 27 countries to surpass their targets beforehand.

In 2011, solar PV accounted for 26.7% of capacity additions, wind power accounted for 21.4% of additions, and natural gas made up 22% of installations. Below that was coal at 4.8%, fuel oil at 1.6%, large hydro at 1.3%, and concentrating solar power at 1.1% of capacity.

(A side note to anyone confused by terms: It is always important to remember that “capacity” is the ability to do work. It is completely different than actual electricity generation. Just because 68% of new capacity was added in 2011, doesn’t mean that Europe will get 68% more electricity from renewables. Hence, the major differences in generation figures).

So what does Europe’s power capacity mix look like today?

Notice the stunning increase in wind, solar and natural gas — by far the top three choices for developers in the region. However, coal and fuel oil still have a very large market share. Some experts are concerned that a roll back of nuclear in various countries will increase the share of fossil fuels, particularly coal.

But with wind, solar and gas prices all declining to record lows, the combination of those three resources could prevent a sizable increase in coal development.

Related Posts:

• Offshore Wind Could Meet 14% of Europe’s Energy Demand by 2030, Leveraging $193 Billion in Investments
• Clean Energy Stunner: Renewable Power Tops Fossil Fuels for First Time

Frank Gaffney and John Bolton, who condemned Gaffney in a unanimous ACU resolution

Gaffney’s attacks on conservative stalwarts like Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, and Suhail Khan, a Bush administration offical, as agents of the Muslim Brotherhood has made him a bit of a pariah among conservatives. David Keene, the then-chairman of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which puts on CPAC, and the current head of the NRA, told ThinkProgress last year that Gaffney “has become personally and tiresomely obsessed with his weird belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with him…[must be] dupes of the nation’s enemies.”

This year, the ban on Gaffney’s official participation remained in effect, but he was able to purchase a side room at the conference through TeaParty.net, giving him unofficial but proximate access to the conference. Conservatives are hesitant to speak ill about each other in public, but a source close to CPAC told ThinkProgress that Gaffney, already on thin ice, made CPAC leadership “livid” by attacking Norquist during his panel Saturday.

The degree to which conservative leaders have tried to distance themselves from Gaffney and his Sharia conspiracy theories is especially apparent given two documents obtained exclusively by ThinkProgress.

Last September, the board of the ACU unanimously passed a resolution (read it here) condemning the “false and unfounded” attacks Gaffney had made against Norquist and Khan, both board members, after having another board member, Cleta Mitchell, look into Gaffney’s serious charges of sedition and abetting an enemy.

In a letter to the ACU board (read it here), Mitchell, a prominent and very conservative attorney, said she reviewed the “evidence” Gaffney presented (including a lengthy PowerPoiint presentation and DVDs smearing Norquist and Khan), and found Gaffney’s “ceaseless war” to be “reprehensible.” She wrote in the conclusion:

I have tried to talk Mr.Gaffney into ceasing these attacks – but to no avail. I have done everything I know to do to try and bring this to a halt, including private conversations and public appearances saying essentially what I have said in this letter. I have taken whatever official actions in my capacity as a board member of various organizations to vote against any motion that would support Mr. Gaffney’s allegations and will continue to do so.

Further, I will work to ensure that any organization with which I am involved will not b eallowed to be used as a platform to spread Mr. Gaffney’s baseless attacks.

The unanimous ACU board — which includes neoconservatives like U.N. ambassador John Bolton — endorsed the letter and resolved that Gaffney’s claims against Kahn and Norquist were “false and unfounded,” writing that the board “profoundly regrets and rejects as unwarranted the past and on-going attacks upon their patriotism and character.”

The board includes some of the most prominent conservative operatives and activists in the country (view a full list here, though Asa Hutchison and Carly Fiorina were not members at the time of the letter).

Gaffney is increasingly isolated by his fellow conservatives, yet his organization continues to receive funding from major mainstream conservative donors like the Bradley Foundation.

View the letter and resolution.

by RL Miller, reposted from Daily Kos

On Feb. 1, the House Natural Resources Committee approved a three-headed monster of an energy bill: drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, drilling off the California coast, and expansion of oil shale drilling. But hey, the bill has the magic word “jobs” in the label, so it’s all good! The committee’s press release trumpets the quantity of oil shale lurking deep under the Green River formation (Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming) and the need for job creators’ certainty.

The committee doesn’t bother with the thirsty facts of oil shale mining. If drilling for easy oil can be analogized to sticking a straw into a lemon and watching juice seep up, obtaining oil from oil shale involves digging up fossilized lemons, reconstituting them with a lot of water – some estimates are 5 gallons of water for every gallon of oil – using vast quantities of energy to boil the watery dried out lemons, catching the vapor, distilling lemon juice vapor from water vapor, and dumping all that contaminated waste water somewhere. All these activities will be taking place in western Colorado and eastern Utah, not exactly known for their abundance of water.

The committee also doesn’t bother with the economics of oil shale mining. The technology isn’t in place for commercial oil shale mining and may never be. Oil shale, like nuclear fusion, has been “10 years away from commercial development” for much longer than 10 years; the Checks and Balances Project has compiled oil shale industry boosters’ promises (PDF) going back to 1916. Unlike Canadian oil sands (aka tar sands), oil shale has never been produced commercially in the United States.

Rep. Douglas Lamborn (R-CO-05), the author of the oil shale bill, also doesn’t seem to care about the reactions of Coloradoans. They’re fighting mad: : “It’s not a good deal for us,” said Rifle Mayor Jay Miller, a Republican. “We’re not against oil shale or gas development here, we just want it done in a way that doesn’t drive us into the ground.” Western Slope small town residents worry about low royalty rates, water, infrastructure, and impact on outdoor recreation.

This water-gobbling bill is part of the terrible transportation bill (says the New York Times) now working its way through the House, less a serious policy document than a wish list for oil lobbyists (says the Los Angeles Times), the “worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen” (says Republican Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood), and a list of all the transport bill’s failings would be a very long list indeed. Oil shale, Arctic drilling, and California offshore drilling are all years away from generating revenue, if ever, so sticking them into a transport bill on the pretense that they’ll pay for roads defies credibility. The Congressional Budget Office finds the obvious – a not-commercially-feasible technology will generate no revenue.

Why is this oil shale bill necessary? In November 2008, President Bush announced a plan to open up 2 million acres of public lands for oil shale. (I believe that among those 2 million acres were the leases bid upon by Tim DeChristopher.) In February 2011, President Obama announced a moratorium on the Bush expansion. Republicans want a permanent end to the moratorium. Meanwhile, on February 3, 2012, Obama’s Department of the Interior ended the moratorium in a good way, by formally rolling back the expansion, from 2 million acres to about 500,000 acres, with vastly less commercial potential.

The BLM’s plan favors continued research and development of oil-shale technology, but no commercial leasing of 461,965 acres — 252,181 acres in Utah, 174,476 in Wyoming and 35,308 in Colorado. In addition, nearly 100,000 acres would be made available in eastern Utah for development of tar sands. It’s a far smarter policy than Bush’s. But Republicans are furious. Utah’s Governor Gary Herbert is fuming, the American Petroleum Institute is whining, and the entire Utah Congressional delegation wants the BLM decision scrapped.

Now, a broader observation: this pair of actions illustrates a bit of a deficiency in the environmental movement, and progressives as a whole. The Lamborn bill is a fossil fuel giveaway, and deserves to be defeated. National environmental groups have already generated, and will continue to generate, thousands of signatures on hundreds of email petitions telling Senators to reject the transport bill. It will be rejected in its current form, because drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off the California coast are non-starters for Senators such as Barbara Boxer.

In the meantime, President Obama has done the mostly right thing here. He’s reduced the scope of a bad Bush decision by 75%. And he’s ensured that the remaining 25% will be used mostly for research and development, not to pad some oil company’s bottom line. Yet the decision has gone mostly unnoticed. No one is thanking Obama, Salazar, or the BLM for standing up to Big Oil. Of the half-dozen stories I read before writing this post, all but one include the American Petroleum Institute’s canned angry reaction, but only one story included a favorable reaction, and that was from a local sportsman’s group. If environmental groups are pleased, they’re not writing press releases and they’re not running thank-you emails. And if the progressive blogosphere reacted, I blinked and missed it. We’re quick to hurl sticks when Obama and Salazar do the wrong thing. Why don’t we grow carrots?

RL Miller is an attorney and environment blogger with Climate Hawks. This piece was originally published at Daily Kos and was reprinted with permission by the author.

Related Posts:

• GOP House Pushes a Fuel Dirtier and More ‘Disastrous’ Than the Tar Sands: Oil Shale
• Senate GOP: “balance” = climate-destroying shale. Shale is a clay-like rock, organic marlstone, containing very little energy — per pound, it has one tenth the energy of crude oil, one fourth that of recycled phone books, one-third that of Cap’n Crunch. Turning it into a usable liquid fuel would require a massive amounts of energy and probably release more carbon dioxide than even liquid coal.

Richard Mourdock, the insurgent Republican Senate candidate in Indiana who is locking in a primay contest against Sen. Richard Lugar (R), took a similar tack this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, telling ThinkProgress that while Obama’s policies were responsible for making the economy worse early in his term, the recent improvement has occurred in spite of Obama’s policies:

KEYES: If the economy does continue to improve over the next few months, is that something you’d be willing to give President Obama credit for, or not?

MOURDOCK: The American economy is incredibly resilient because Americans are incredibly resilient. It won’t be because of President Obama when we see recovery, it will be in spite of President Obama. He wants to add more and more layers of government, more and more government sector unions. Those are killing our economy. And while it’s possible we might see some recovery, it would be doing a whole lot more if we were rolling back the size of government.

Watch it:

The Mourdock stance is common in the GOP — presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a similar view following the January jobs report, as did House Speaker John Boehner.

The facts, however, tell a different story. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, despite Republican claims, has been a success, and since its implementation, the economy has added jobs for 23 consecutive months. The auto bailout, another favorite Republican target, has also worked, saving thousands of jobs and returning American automakers to profitability for the first time in a decade.

If anything, the economy is improving in spite of the best efforts of the Republicans Mourdock is trying to join in Congress. Republicans have targeted positive economic programs that benefit the less fortunate — like food stamps and unemployment insurance — for spending cuts, all while blocking other Obama proposals — like the American Jobs Act — that experts say would have had a positive effect on the nation’s economic recovery.

Rich countries like the U.S. need to cut CO2 emissions more than 80% by 2050 to have a serious shot at the 2°C (3.6° F) target climate scientists say is needed to avoid the most dangerous climate impacts and potentially irreversible tipping points (see “Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy“).  Here’s the key chart from the IPCC’s full Working Group III report (Box 13.7, page 776):

I’d like to put together a picture of the U.S. in 2050 if we met the target — but just the “modest” target  from the 2009 climate and clean energy jobs bill of an 80% reduction compared to 2005 levels.

Certain questions need answering.   How much total energy is consumed in 2050, which is to say how much energy efficiency and conservation has been achieved — they aren’t the same thing.  Certainly by 2030 (if not sooner), we’re going to be quite desperate to avert Dust-Bowlification and irreversible loss of the great ice sheets, so in the 2030s and 2040s one can imagine a considerable amount of conservation and dematerialization separate from the technologically-driven energy efficiency that is possible.  [No, I'm not interested in scenarios of economic/societal collapse.  That's avoidable if we act, but it is certainly in play if we don't.]

How much coal, oil, and natural gas is being consumed (with carbon capture and storage of some coal and gas if you want to consider that)?  What’s the price of oil?  How much of our power is provided by nuclear power?  How much by solar PV and how much by concentrated solar thermal?  How much from wind power?  How much from biomass?  How much from other forms of renewable energy?

What is the vehicle fleet like?   How much electric?  How much next-generation biofuels?  What about the rest of transportation, including air travel?  If  you want to waste time throwing in some hydrogen cars, I suppose that is your right, but it remains too expensive and implausible to be a major, cost-effective carbon-saver even in 2050.

Please, also, feel free to identify links to analyses that have already done part or all of this.  Again, I’m just looking for the U.S. energy mix.

On his personal YouTube page, more than a dozen sparsely-viewed videos show Friess discussing his philanthropic endeavors as well as his thoughts on President Obama, health care reform and the cause of the economic crisis. Here’s a look at some of the more interesting things about Friess that you may not know:

1. He has a long history funding Islamophobic organizations. One of Friess’ biggest beneficiaries is a collection of some of the largest Islamophobic organizations in the country, including Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and David Horowitz’s Terrorism Awareness Project.

2. He filmed an introduction video to Clarion Fund’s Islamophobic “Obsession” Documentary. The controversy and outrage over the film “Obsession” has been well documented, but that didn’t seem to faze Friess, who filmed a five and a half minute promotional video in which he encouraged viewers to purchase the full DVD and use it “as a voting guide when you go into the election booth on election day.”

3. He preached intolerance in a commencement speech at the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University. “Be more intolerant,” urged Friess to a room full of graduating students in 2007. “There’s a group of people—maybe the secular Taliban is a good name for them—who have morphed this idea, that you have to accept my values being every bit as cherished as your values. That’s not tolerance…there are too many things in this world which we sit back and tolerate.”

4. Friess has given A LOT to Republican politicians. Rick Santorum’s not the only beneficiary of Friess’ campaign contributions. Over the years, Friess has contributed millions of dollars to Republican candidates and committees across the country, including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich and Texas Governor Rick Perry. Perry’s also not the only former Santorum competitor who cashed big checks from Friess. Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign has received $5,000 from Lynette and Foster, Mitt Romney received $1,000 for this election (and the campaign maximum $4,600 from both Friess’s in 2007) and even Tim Pawlenty’s presidential exploratory committee deposited a cool $5,000. Talk about hedging your bets.

5. Friess donated to gay rights advocate, former Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato. And not just a few thousand dollars either. In the mid-1990s, Friess funneled over $260,000 to committees with ties to the former New York senator, who famously bucked his party on LGBT issues and voted against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in 1993 and for the Employee Non Discrimination Act. Granted, the donations were more likely contributed as a way to protect his own business interests than actual gay rights, but D’Amato is a strange bedfellow for someone supporting a candidate who compared homosexuality to man-on-dog sex.

6. He was a founding donor to conservative news site The Daily Caller. A $3 million initial investment into Tucker Carlson’s news site in early 2010 helped it get off the ground. He’s since made at least one additional contribution of $500,000. Yet as POLITICO notes, The Daily Caller has thus far failed to disclose its connection to Rick Santorum when covering him on the campaign trail.

7. Claimed liberals were to blame for Columbine shooting. In a speech delivered at the Metropolitan Club in New York City in 2002, Friess tried to pin the blame for 1999′s Columbine school shooting on liberals. “How hard have those intolerant of John Adam’s perspective worked to strip from young people any hope of knowing the concepts and truths that help deal with life…They have gone to great lengths to strip all of this away and we have sat back in the name of tolerance while our youth were robbed of these truths and proven tools. I think we should be encouraged to learn from Columbine and let it be a battle cry for all of us so that we may change our society through productive intolerance.”

by Zachary Rybarczyk

K-12 schools in America spend over $8 billion a year on energy. So they’re the perfect place to save money by implementing efficiency, conservation and green building techniques — all while educating students about energy issues.

A competition organized by the Green Schools Alliance aims to help facilitate that transition.

Across the U.S., students of all ages from kindergarten to high school are competing in the Green Cup Challenge, a four-week event that encourages schools to cut energy use. Three weeks into the event, one school has cut its electricity consumption by 17% through simple changes in behavior.

This is the fifth year of the Green Cup Challenge, which pits 116 public and private schools in 22 states against one another, tracking energy consumption during a four-week period from January 18 through February 15. The competition shows students how small tweaks in energy consumption can make a big difference.

So far the leading school, the New Roads School of Santa Monica, California, has reduced its total energy use over a three week period by 17%, through changes to thermostats, shutting off computer monitors and lamps, installing skylights, and using timers on lighting systems.

“It’s about creating habits,” said one student participating in the challenge.

Other schools have used the Green Cup Challenge to promote investments in renewable energy and efficiency projects that may have not been possible without the support of the Green Schools Alliance.

After installing a number of energy efficient technologies, including a solar PV system, a “bird-friendly” wind turbine, green roofs, and changing other energy habits, the Latin School of Chicago has seen a savings of $45,000 a year on their energy bills, and is expected to pay off its initial investment in less than 10 years.

These are just two examples among thousands. With a network of over 3,000 public and private schools (including their 2 million students) in 40 US states and 11 countries, GSA has a unique opportunity to create real change in the green movement.

The roundtable topics included education, energy, financial institutions and markets, defense/homeland security/foreign policy, health care, and infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, the panels were chaired and hosted by a few prominent Republican politicians and several wealthy investors and industry insiders. They roundtable leaders and industry finance chairs included:

– L.E. Simmons (energy), who has has “guided the investment of over $1.6 billion in private equity capital used to build energy service and equipment companies.”

– Patrick Durkin, managing director of Barclay’s Capital and a top Romney lobbyist-bundler.

– Richard Breeden, a hedge fund manager and a former SEC chairman under President George H. W. Bush.

– Tom Farrell, president and CEO of Dominion Power.

– Former Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO) (infrastructure), now a “distinguished fellow” at the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

– Former HHS Secretary and ex-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt (R), now head of a “health care intelligence business.”

If the number $10,000 seems familiar, perhaps it was because he offered to make a bet with then-primary opponent Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) for that amount in a disagreement over his previous positions on federal health insurance mandates. Now, Romney is asking the wealthiest 1 percent to make a similar-sized bet on him. And, according to one of the event’s co-chairs, the event raised $1.5 million for Romney’s campaign.

Pete Hoekstra

Hoekstra’s ad, which aired during the Super Bowl last weekend, featured an Asian woman in a rice paddy in China — the scene was actually shot in California — speaking broken English and thanking Stabenow because “we take your jobs.” Hoesktra is currently running for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat. Watch the ad here.

ThinkProgress spoke with Anuzis at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday about the ad. Anuzis spared few punches, calling the ad “dumb” and in “bad taste.”

KEYES: There’s been a bit of a controversy this week with this new ad. What’s your take? Do you think it was in poor taste?

ANUZIS: I’m not too worried about the poor taste, I just think it was a dumb ad. Pete Hoekstra voted to raise taxes, Pete Hoekstra voted for the “Bridge to Nowhere,” Pete Hoekstra voted five times to increase the debt ceiling, and then he goes out and leads with his chin by saying, “I’m against Debbie Stabenow because she sold all of our debt to China.” Well, he voted for that debt. [...]

KEYES: A lot of people have said this borderlines on racial insensitivity. Do you think you would agree with that?

ANUZIS: At best it was in bad taste. It’s not something I would have done. But I’m not too worried about that as much as the issues that are behind that. I think the beauty of this ad is the hypocrisy that Pete Hoekstra is trying to go after Debbie Stabenow for spending when he voted the same way.

Anuzis also called out Hoekstra for his “hypocrisy” in voting for many of the proposals that increased the very debt discussed in the ‘China’ ad.

Though Hoekstra originally unveiled the ad on the website www.debbiespenditnow.com, a major backlash ensued and he took down the site yesterday, now redirecting visitors to his campaign website. The ad itself is still live on Youtube, however.

His Republican primary opponent, Clark Durant, released a response ad this week, criticizing Hoekstra’s ad as “demeaning.”

The full week of Doonesbury myFACTS starts here.

So I got this green bag right here. And I filled it up with the black market light bulbs. And I brought them back to my office here in the Capitol. Whenever I need to put a bulb in the lamp, I reach in this green bag and I screw it in there and smile. A little bit of my liberty back. A little bit of our freedom back. And I want to challenge you to do the same thing. Bring back some of that liberty, some of that freedom.

Following his attack on energy-efficient light bulbs, Rep. King took on the water-saving showerhead in his shower, before bringing his tirade to a close with the declaration, “I want my liberty back!”

Watch it:

The new light bulb efficiency standards have faced strong opposition from members of the GOP, who consider the rules not only a ban on light bulbs, but as another example of unneccessary federal regulation. Environmentalists and energy-efficiency business groups disagree and are quick to point out that the standards do not ban incandescent light bulbs, but requires them to be more efficient. Despite the GOP’s best efforts to pass measures that would block funding for the standards’ enforcement, The Energy Department rules went into effect at the beginning of the year.

– Fatima Najiy

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO)

But Republicans and some conservative Catholic groups are not satisfied with the accommodation and hope to use their false claim of “religious persecution” to deny women access to preventive health services. Despite Obama’s decision to shield nonprofit religious institutions from offering birth control benefits, next week Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) is expected to offer an amendment that would permit any employer or insurance plan to exclude any health service, no matter how essential, from coverage if they morally object to it:

(6) RESPECTING RIGHTS OF CONSCIENCE WITH REGARD TO SPECIFIC ITEMS OR SERVICES —

“(A) FOR HEALTH PLANS. — A health plan shall not be considered to have failed to provide the essential health benefits package described in subsection (a) (or preventive health services described in section 2713 of the Public Health Services Act), to fail to be a qualified health plan, or to fail to fulfill any other requirement under this title on the basis that it declines to provide coverage of specific items or services because —

“(i) providing coverage (or, in the case of a sponsor of a group health plan, paying for coverage) of such specific items or services is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan; or

“(ii) such coverage (in the case of individual coverage) is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the purchaser or beneficiary of the coverage.

Under the measure, an insurer or an employer would be able to claim a moral or religious objection to covering HIV/AIDS screenings, Type 2 Diabetes treatments, cancer tests or anything else they deem inappropriate or the result of an “unhealthy” or “immoral” lifestyle. Similarly, a health plan could refuse to cover mental health care on the grounds that the plan believes that psychiatric problems should be treated with prayer.

Individuals too can opt out of coverage if it is contrary to their religious or moral beliefs, radically undermining “the basic principle of insurance, which involves pooling the risks for all possible medical needs of all enrollees.” As the National Women’s Law Center explains, Blunt’s language is vague enough that “insurers may be able to sell plans that do not cover services required by the new health care law to an entire market because one individual objects, so all consumers in a market lose their right to coverage of the full range of critical health services.” As a result, a man “purchasing an insurance plan offered to women and men could object to maternity coverage, so the plan would not have to cover it, even though such coverage is required as part of the essential health benefits.”

Read the full amendment here.