As Wikipedia puts it, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz “demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but his intact frogs attempted to escape the water.” Other 19th Century studies appeared to have different results, but modern experiments (!) show that frogs with brains are in fact smart enough to leap out of water as it is heated up.

James Fallows of The Atlantic, who I am quite certain holds the world record for boiling frog posts, has one from Michael Jones who cites “Sensation in the Spinal Cord” from Nature, Dec. 4, 1873:

“Goltz observed that a frog, when placed in water the temperature of which is slowly raised towards boiling, manifests uneasiness as soon as the temperature reaches 25° C., and becomes more and more agitated as the heat increases, vainly struggling to get out, and finally at 42° C., dies in a state of rigid tetanus. The evidence of feeling being thus manifested when the frog has its brain, what is the case with a brainless frog? It is absolutely the reverse. Quietly the animal sits through all successions of temperature, never once manifesting uneasiness or pain, never once attempting to escape the impending death.”

Even so, I am inclined to agree with Jones that this should not be fatal to the metaphor.  It just needs to be tweaked.

Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, as I’ve said before (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“).  Such are the privileges of being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the “sapiens.” And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens” sapiens at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from ourselves.

If we destroy a livable climate, which means “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse” and are renamed just plain Homo, then in fact we will  have demonstrated we are dumber than frogs (who were, after all, doing just fine until we came along).

At that point, we will be brainless frogs.

Related Post:

• Glenn Beck proves he’s a brainless frog, warning (?) “Barack Obama has galvanized the country…. He’s forced us to think!”

BIDEN: Looking at your kids, most you have kids here, and it was the first time in my career, my life, I realized someone could go out and I probably shouldn’t say this with the press here — but it’s more important, you’re more important.

For the first time in my life I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart, they never get there in the end. There was never going to get — there never going to be that way ever again. That’s how an awful lot you have feel.

There will come a day, I promise you, and you parents as well, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. [...]

So, hang onto each other. Hang onto each other. And I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you how deeply the five of us on this stage feel about the sacrifices you’ve made for this country. That doesn’t — that doesn’t fill the black hole. You should know only 1 percent of you have fought these wars and much less thank God than 1 percent that fought the wars are through what you`re going through.

We owe you more than we can ever, ever repay you. As I said, my prayer is that that smile will come sooner than later, but I promise you it will come. God bless you all and my God protect our troops. Thank you.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aired a clip of Biden’s speech:

1. Scott has created a massive list of Floridians to purge from the voting rolls before the election. Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” But Browning did not have access to reliable citizenship data. The state attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing the voting file with data from the state motor vehicle administration, but the motor vehicle data does not contain updated citizenship information. The process, which created a list of 182,000 people, was considered so flawed by Browning that he refused to release the data to county election officials. Browning resigned in February and Scott has pressed forward with the purge, starting with about 2600 voters.

2. The list of “ineligible” voters is riddled with errors and includes hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens. According to data obtained by ThinkProgress, in Miami-Dade county alone, 1638 people were flagged by the state as “non-citizens.” Already, 359 people on the list have provided the county with proof of citizenship and 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county. The remaining 1200 have simply not responded to the letter informing them of their purported ineligibility. Similar problems have been identified in Polk County and Broward County.

3. Scott’s list is heavily targeted at Democratic and Hispanic voters. A study by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls.” For example, Hispanics comprise 58 percent of the list but just 13 percent of eligible voters. Conversely, “Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”

4. Florida election officials have acknowledged that, as a result of Scott’s voter purge, eligible voters will be removed from the rolls. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress. On or about June 9, anyone who hasn’t responded to the ominous and legalistic letter informing them of their purported ineligibility will be removed from the rolls. Some eligible voters won’t have been able to respond by that time due to travel, work obligations, family obligations or confusion as to the purpose of the letter. Some will forget to open it. Others may have moved.

5. Florida will likely be a close contest in 2012 and purging eligible Democratic and Hispanic voters could tip the balance to Romney. In the latest Real Clear Politics average of polling in the state, Romney and Obama are separated by just 0.5 percent. Hundreds of eligible voters in Democratic strongholds, wrongfully purged from the rolls, could easily make the difference for Romney.

6. Winning Florida could clinch the election for Mitt Romney. Nationally, the race between Obama and Romney is within two points. It’s expected to be close all the way to election day and Florida’s 29 electorial votes would be the deciding factor in many plausable electorial scenarios.

Will history repeat itself in Florida this year? By one estimate, 7000 Florida voters were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls for the 2000 presidential election — 13 times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in that state after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the post-election recount.

But all of the impacts occurring simultaneously will have an even more devastating synergy (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).  It means the rich countries will be far less likely to be offering much assistance to the poorer ones, since there will be ever worsening catastrophes everywhere simultaneously so we’ll be suffering at the same time.  Heck, this deep economic downturn and the record-smashing disasters of the past two years has already exacerbated media myopia and compassion fatigue to help those around the world staggered by floods and droughts.

And that suggests another deadly climate impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.

Last November, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan “said rising temperatures and rainwater shortages are having a devastating effect on food production. Failing to address the problem will have repercussions on health, security and stability.”

The NYT reported in 2009:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

That’s a key reason 33 generals and admirals supported the comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs bill in 2010, asserting “Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place” and “threatening America’s security.”  The Pentagon itself has made the climate/security link explicit in its Quadrennial Defense Review.

Sadly, the chance that humanity will avert catastrophic climate impacts has dropped sharply in the past two years (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).  And that means it is increasingly likely we face a world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which in turn means we likely cross carbon cycle tipping points that threaten to quickly take us to 800 to 1000 ppm — a world of rapid warming and a ruined climate far outside the bounds of any human experience.

It is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs and Pakistani mega-floods, of countless environmental refugees — hundreds of millions in the second half of this century — all clamoring to occupy the parts of the developed world that aren’t flooded or desertified.

In such a world, everyone will ultimately become a veteran, and Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day may fade into obscurity, as people forget about a time when wars were the exception, a time when soldiers were but a small minority of the population.  And if we don’t act swiftly and strongly to stop it, the worst impacts could last a long, long time (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe and Nature Geoscience: ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).

So when does this start to happen?

Thomas Fingar, “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst,” sees it happening by the mid-2020s:

By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Fingar said, while the United States will face “Dust Bowl” conditions in the parched Southwest“¦.

He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.

For the latest literature review and projections, see my May 13 post “Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now” as well as the 2011 study, Michael Wehner et al., “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico,” and the 2010 piece, “Must-read NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path.”

The 2010 NCAR is being revised, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be in mid-century — if we are so self-destructive as to let this happen:

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

And, of course, we’ve seen that even in areas expected to become wetter, can experience an extreme heat wave so unprecedented that it forces the entire country to suspend grain exports:

• Russian Meteorological Center: “There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”
• Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”

See also Nature Publishes My Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security

Significantly, the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a scenario similar to Fingar’s in a 2009 speech to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it.

You can see a five-minute BBC interview with Beddington here. The speech is online. Here are some excerpts:

We saw the food spike last year; prices going up by something in the order of 300%, rice went up by 400%, we saw food riots, we saw major issues for the poorest in the world, in the sense that the organisations like the World Food Programme did not have sufficient money to buy food on the open market and actually use it to feed the poorest of the poor.

So this is a major problem. You can see the catastrophic decline in those reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves”….

So, what are the drivers? I am going to go through them now very briefly.

First of all, population growth. World population grows by six million every month “” greater than the size of the UK population every year. Between now and”¦ I am going to focus on the year 2030 and the reason I am going to focus on 2030 is that I feel that some of the climate change discussions focusing on 2100 don’t actually grip”¦. I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events come together.

By 2030, looking at population terms, you are looking at the global population increasing from a little over six billion at the moment to about eight billion”…

… you are going to see major changes but particularly in the demand for livestock — meat and dairy….

… By 2030, the demand for food is going to be increased by about 50%. Can we do it? One of the questions. There is a major food security issue by 2030. We’ve got to somehow produce 50% more by that time.The second issue I want to focus on is the availability of fresh water”¦. The fresh water available per head of the world population is around 25% of what it was in 1960. To give you some idea of this; there are enormous potential shortages in certain parts of the world”¦ China has something like 23% of the world’s population and 11% of the world’s water.

… the massive use of water is in agriculture and particularly in developing world agriculture. Something of the order of 70% of that. One in three people are already facing water shortages and the total world demand for water is predicted to increase by 30% by 2030.

So, we’ve got food — expectation of demand increase of 50% by 2030, we’ve got water — expectation of demand increase of 30% by 2030. And in terms of what it looks like, we have real issues of global water security.

…. where there is genuine water stress [in 2025 is] China and also parts of India, but look at parts of southern Europe where by 2025 we are looking at serious issues of water stress”….

So, water is really enormously important. I am going to get onto the climate change interactions with it a little bit later but water is the one area that I feel is seriously threatening. It is so important because a shortage of water obviously interacts with a shortage of food, there are real potentials for driving significant international problems — what do you do if you have no water and you have no food? You migrate. So one can have a reasonable expectation that international migration will occur as these shortages come in.

Now, the third one I want to focus on is energy and, driven by the population increase that I talked about, the urbanisation I talked about and indeed the movement out of poverty”…. For the first time, the demand of the rest of the world exceeded the demand of energy of the OECD …. Energy demand is actually increasing and going to hit something of the order of a 50% increase, again by 2030.

Now, if that were not enough … those are three things that are coming together. What will the world be like when that happens? But we also have, of course, the issue of climate change. Now, this is a very familiar slide to you all but we are shooting for a target of two degrees centigrade, a perfectly sensible target. There is enormous uncertainty in the climate change models about that particular target. It is perfectly reasonable to say ‘shouldn’t we be shooting for one degrees centigrade or, oddly enough, it is perfectly reasonable to say ‘shouldn’t we be shooting for three degrees centigrade’, the only information we have is really enormously uncertain in terms of the climate change model.

Shooting for two seems a perfectly sensible and legitimate objective but there are enormous problems. You are talking about serious problems in tropical glaciers “” the Chinese government has recognised this and has actually announced about 10 days ago that it is going to build 59 new reservoirs to take the glacial melt in the Xinjiang province. 59 reservoirs. It is actually contemplating putting many of them underground. This is a recognition that water, which has hitherto been stored in glaciers, is going to be very scarce. We have to think about water in a major way….

The other area that really worries me in terms of climate change and the potential for positive feedbacks and also for interactions with food is ocean acidification….

As I say, it’s as acid today as it has been for 25 million years. When this occurred some 25 million years ago, this level of acidification in the ocean, you had major problems with it, problems of extinctions of large numbers of species in the ocean community. The areas which are going to be hit most severely by this are the coral reefs of the world and that is already starting to show. Coral reefs provide significant protein supplies to about a billion people. So it is not just that you can’t go snorkelling and see lots of pretty fish, it is that there are a billion people dependent on coral reefs for a very substantial portion of their high protein diet.

… we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we’ve got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Some of this can be avoid or minimized if we act now. Some of it can’t. But if we don’t act strongly now, then by Memorial Day 2030, many of the global conflicts will either be resource wars or wars driven by environmental degradation and dislocation (see “Warming Will Worsen Water Wars). Indeed that may already have started to happen (see “Report: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Trigger Darfur Crisis).

For one discussion of the kind of wars we might be seeing, albeit for the year 2046, here is a three-part radio series on Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian journalist and historian of warfare.

For all of the above reasons, veterans and security experts and politicians of all parties have begun working together to avoid the worst.   A key leader on climate and energy security has been the conservative Virgina Republican, John Warner, who pushed hard to pass the clean energy bill — because he is a former Navy secretary and former Senate Armed Services Committee chair and because he is a former Forest Service firefighter now “just absolutely heartbroken” because “the old forest, the white pine forest in which I worked, was absolutely gone, devastated, standing there dead from the bark beetle” thanks in large part to global warming.

Warner has been “trying to build grass-roots support for congressional action to limit global warming,” as Politics Daily reported. “He is traveling the country to discuss military research that shows climate change is a threat to U.S. national security.” Here is part of PD‘s interview:

PD: Does the responsibility fall to us to respond to the consequences of climate change?

JW: Not exclusively, but we’re often in the forefront of response to these things. We’re the nation with the most sealift. The most airlift. We have more medical teams which are mobile, more storehouses of food and supplies to meet emergencies. And throughout our history, from the beginning of the republic, America’s always had to respond to certain humanitarian disasters.

PD: What are some examples of destabilization due to climate?

JW: One clear case of it is Somalia. [In the early 1990s] the prolonged drought began to tie up the economy, the food supplies. There was a certain amount of political and economic instability. Where you have fragile nations . . . a serious climactic problem will come along, with a shortage of food or water, and often those governments are toppled. And then they fall to the evils of . . . terrorism or others who try to exploit these fallen governments. You saw it in Darfur. You saw it in Somalia. This political instability and weakness is given the final tilt by a problem associated with climactic change.

Our choice today is clear. We can continue listening to the voices of denial and delay and disinformation, assuring that everyone ultimately becomes a veteran of the growing number of climate-related conflicts.

Or we can launch a WWII-scale effort and a WWII-style effort to address the problem as Hansen and I and many others have called for. That is our most necessary fight today.

This post is an update.

Related Posts:

• Nicholas Stern: Climate inaction risks a “global war”
• Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
• Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization
• Steven Chu on climate change: “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”
• Sen. Barrasso (R-WY) seeks to block intelligence on the national security threat posed by climate change. He needs to see the Fingar.
• Juan Cole: The media’s failure to cover “the great Pakistani deluge” is “itself a security threat” to America

by Ned L. Harvey, via Rocky Mountain Institute

Over the weekend I read a blog post by author Nicholas Carr describing what he calls the hierarchy of innovation.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation, especially about how it might spread through the global energy system. I’m especially interested in how entrepreneurs and new technologies may create disruptive innovation within the system and what that’s likely to look like.

Carr’s blog is a little off that topic, but it did get me thinking about the underlying drivers of innovation. The article is essentially an attempt to explain and to some extent lament what he and others perceive as stagnation in innovation in the last century. Carr describes what he refers to as the Hierarchy of Innovation, which is loosely analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As Carr puts it:

“The focus, or emphasis, of innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think fire), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think steam engine), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).”

I’m OK with the hierarchy concept and think it’s a fine first-order mechanism to understand the underlying social values driving innovation at any given stage in civil development.

However, I think much deeper drivers are worth considering. Obviously, the one with which I’m most familiar relates to the ability of a civilization to harness energy to drive the economic wealth and ultimately wealthy lifestyles, which push them up what I’ll call Carr’s first-order innovation pyramid.

Most of the 19th and early 20th century innovations highlighted in the article relate directly to or result directly from a radical revolution in humankind’s ability to harness energy for its own benefit. Prior to the industrial revolution, energy for economic production came primarily from livestock and human labor. By the mid-19th century, Western civilization was pushing on the very capacity of those energy-producing technologies to sustain the economic growth and wealth creation demanded by its societies, setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

With the Industrial Revolution, humankind harnessed the power of fossil fuels and unleashed an entirely new paradigm of production and economic wealth generation. This created the energy production “headroom” that set the stage for the massive change in human capabilities in the early to mid-20th century. In fact and quite literally, without the energy technologies and production capacity we developed 100-150 years ago, we never could have escaped the bounds of Earth and started our exploration of the solar system. However, sometime mid-century as we achieved new heights of global economic prosperity, we stopped innovating on energy and moved up Carr’s innovation hierarchy to focus on leisure and self.

Presently, 125 years later, civilization is still reliant on the core energy production technologies created in the Industrial Revolution. Economies with the mastery and control of those technologies enjoy almost unlimited access to abundant and cheap energy, and it is in those societies that we see the shift in innovation so lamented by Carr in his article.

Yet the current energy paradigm, not so unlike the one based on livestock and human power, is fundamentally based on commodity fuels and highly fragmented production and distribution industries that can be owned and controlled (usually to their own benefit) by anyone with the resources and power to do to so. As such, the paradigm is defined by energy haves and have-nots; and the energy have-nots are consistently plagued by crushing poverty and disease. This disparity is growing rapidly. On a global basis, this imbalance is likely coming to a critical point, and, like the mid-19th century, the stage is formally set for another innovation in energy production, one that frees us from the burdens and challenges of fossil fuels and unleashes another unprecedented transformation in economies and ultimately the human condition.

So in the end, I’m still left pondering innovation in the energy system. I can’t help remembering the grade school axiom that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Carr’s pyramid is interesting and maybe a cynical comment on the modern developed world, but to me its not that complicated. If he and his peers want to refocus innovative energy on Technologies of Prosperity, their time may be better served by exploring the deeper issues than simply describing the problem.

Ned L. Harvey is the Chief Operating Officer of the Rocky Mountain Institute. This piece was originally published at RMI’s Outlet blog and was reprinted with permission.

In an interview with ThinkProgress, West pointed to three popular provisions of the health care law that he would like to see preserved: allowing parents to keep children on their health insurance plans until 26, ensuring that people with pre-existing conditions aren’t denied insurance, and closing Medicare’s prescription drug donut hole:

KEYES: Say we repeal [Obamacare] tomorrow. Do you think that will then precipitate a drop in insurance premiums?

WEST: Well you’ve got to replace it. You’ve got to replace it with something. If people want to keep their kid on their insurance at 26, fine. We’ve got to make sure no American gets turned back for pre-existing conditions, that’s fine. Keep the donut hole closed, that’s fine. But what I just talked to you about, maybe 20, 25 pages of legislation.

Watch it:

The problem with West’s reasoning is that the pre-existing condition ban can’t function without an individual mandate or some other mechanism for bringing healthy people into the health care system. Without the individual responsibility provision, a death spiral begins whereby only sick people buy insurance and it soon becomes unaffordable for everybody. As the American Prospect’s Pat Caldwell writes, “the preexisting condition ban and the individual mandate are inseparably tied to one another.”

Still, West’s embrace of a few key parts of the Obamacare law puts him to the left of many of his Republican colleagues. As Politico reports, infighting has now broken out among Republicans between hard-liners who favor full repeal and lawmakers like West, who like some parts of the law. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who is perhaps the man most responsible for Republicans coalescing around the full repeal effort, has long maintained that every piece of Obamacare needs to be scrapped, including the donut hole coverage. “There will always be those who slip through the cracks,” King explained last year.

West isn’t the only Republican who Congress who voted last year to fully repeal Obamacare but now wants to protect some of the health care law’s popular provisions. Salon notes that Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) defended the provision allowing children up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance.

by Daniel J. Weiss, Jackie Weidman and Celine Ramstein

Memorial Day weekend is an opportunity to remember and honor the countless sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform in order to protect this great nation. It also marks the traditional start of the summer driving season—when families pack their bags and pile into their cars or minivans to hit the road for destinations across the country. This weekend nearly 35 million Americans are expected to travel 50 miles or more to visit family and friends. Ninety percent of them will likely drive to their destination, filling up their tanks with expensive gasoline or diesel fuel before hitting the road.

The number of Memorial Day travelers is expected to increase by 1.2 percent—an estimated 500,000 more people—to 34.3 million travelers this year compared to 2011. But those travelers are projected to stay closer to home this weekend, with the average travel distance dropping by 19 percent. This may reflect the spike in gasoline prices earlier in the year, averaging around $4 per gallon at one point.

As we pointed out in our report—“Is Big Oil Rigging Gasoline Prices?”—the price of gas at the pump dramatically increased during the first quarter of this year despite the fact that domestic production was at an eight-year high, and domestic demand for oil and oil products was down.

Since reaching its peak in late March, the cost of a fill-up has fortunately receded. Gasoline prices fell for the sixth straight week to an average of $3.75 per gallon. Despite the fact that gas prices are 21-cents-per-gallon lower than they were this time in 2011, it is still a big bite out of many Americans’ budget. According to an analysis by the American Automobile Association, 47 percent of travelers said that high prices at the pump will impact their plans this Memorial Day.

This past week the American Petroleum Institute—the political operatives of Big Oil—released a “report” outlining its policy wish list. Some of the demands included the “opening of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf, and the Pacific Outer Continental Shelf” to oil and gas production.

If Big Oil gets its way, it could have devastating impacts on coastal tourism. Many of the areas that Americans travel to during the summer months would be vulnerable to oil spills similar to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster that spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, devastating the ecosystem and the Gulf economy.

The Outer Banks—an area that would be vulnerable to drilling located off the mid-Atlantic coast—attracts more than 7 million visitors each year. When surveyed, more than 49 percent of respondents said “beautiful beaches” are the main reason for summer visits there. It’s highly doubtful that tourists would flock to build sandcastles on oil-soaked beaches.

Likewise, those vacationing out west could find a peaceful kayaking trip disrupted by the 1,300 gas wells that Denver-based Gasco Energy, Inc., wants to drill in Desolation Canyon, Utah. This remote area on the Green River is an essential part of Utah’s tourism industry, which generates nearly $300 million annually in total state tax revenue from tourism.

Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family and friends, with many people taking the opportunity to enjoy the nation’s natural wonders. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of Americans’ travel expenditures on fuel while at the same time fighting for increased drilling that threatens some of our most cherished vacation destinations.

Here is a by-the-numbers examination of what Big Oil will cost us this weekend:

An expensive holiday weekend ahead

• 642 miles: Average distance Americans will travel this Memorial Day weekend
• 804.5 million: Gallons of gasoline expected to be purchased over the three-day weekend
• $113: Total cost of gasoline for an average trip this Memorial Day weekend [1]

Wall Street speculators drive up oil and gas prices

• $92.60: Price of a barrel of oil on May 21, 2012
• $20: The estimated price-per-barrel-of-oil increase due to speculation, according to Forbes magazine’s formula
• $14.60: Additional gasoline expenditure for the average Memorial Day trip, thanks to speculation
• 11: Number of quarter-pound hamburgers with buns for a Memorial Day picnic that you can make for $14

High pump price increases Big Oil profits

• $33.5 billion: Amount of profit the five biggest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—made in the first three months of 2012
• $1 billion: Estimated combined earnings the big five oil companies will earn over the three-day Memorial Day weekend if second quarter profits replicated first quarter profits

Increased drilling would destroy vacation spots for millions of Americans

• 7 million: Number of tourists that visit the Outer Banks in North Carolina each year
• 1 million: Number of people employed by Florida’s tourism industry
• $4 billion:Value of the tourism industry in Utah, where Gasco Energy wants to drill 1,300 gas wells

Big Oil’s influence machine

• $14 million: Total lobbying expenditures by the big five oil companies so far in 2012
• $906,000: Amount given to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney by the oil and gas industry thus far in the 2011–2012 election season
• $182,000: Amount given to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign by the oil and gas industry thus far in the 2011–2012 election season

– Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy, Jackie Weidman is Special Assistant for Energy Policy, and Celine Ramstein is an intern with the Energy Policy team at the Center for American Progress. This piece was originally published at the Center for American Progress.

Endnotes

[1] This calculation is based on the most recently available fuel economy data (2009) for all passenger vehicles and SUVs/light trucks, and employs the U.S. Department of Transportation data on the composition of the passenger vehicle fleet, which is 57 percent cars and 40 percent light trucks. For more information, see: “Table 4-23: Average Fuel Efficiency of U.S. Light Duty Vehicles,” available at http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_23.html.

But the campaign’s wink and nod to the birther crowd is unmistakable and this morning, during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, columnist George Will slammed Romney for sharing a stage with the self-promoting businessman. Describing Trump as a ”bloviating ignoramus,” Will said, “I do not understand the cost benefit here. The costs are clear. The benefit — what voter is gonna vote for him [Romney] because he is seen with Donald Trump? The cost of appearing with this bloviating ignoramus is obvious it seems to me”:

WILL: Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics. Again, I don’t understand the benefit. What is Romney seeking?

Watch it:

Trump endorsed Romney at an event in February and has since been used extensively in primary states to bash Romney’s opponents. In March, Ann Romney called him an “honorary Buckeye” after the campaign’s victory in Ohio.

On Friday, Romney adviser Kevin Madden said Romney will “stand up next to Donald Trump and he’ll talk about why he wants to be president.” “Anytime the subject goes off of that, or if something where …Governor Romney would disagree, he’s going to make that very clear,” Madden claimed, but did not say if Romney would rebuke the birther conspiracy in front of Trump. Given his resistance to confronting the right, however, that appears more than a little unlikely.

Last month, the White House edited climate change from Obama’s Earth Day 2012 proclamation. That was after the President omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address.

But then, in a Rolling Stone interview, Obama unexpectedly broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change, saying he thought climate change would be a campaign issue.

Of course, it would be hard for climate to be a campaign issue if the president doesn’t actually talk about it in public. After all, his challenger Mitt Romney seems unlikely to bring it up, having Etch-a-Sketched his position on that subject many times. And Lord knows that media isn’t itching to talk about climate.

So it was disappointing again once again that on Thursday, the President reverted to form in his big speech on energy at TPI Composites, a wind-blade manufacturing plant in Newton, Iowa.

The speech never mentions “climate change” or “global warming” or even “greenhouse gases” or “carbon” or even “pollution”!

It’s a fairly long speech, over half of which is focused on energy, to argue for extending “tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year for clean-energy companies like TPI.” Those credits are certainly worth fighting for since 37,000 wind jobs are at stake – as is leadership in a global industry that will be one of the largest job creators in the coming decades when  the world finally start taking serious action on climate.

But as Henry Waxman (D-CA), the Ranking Minority Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said last year:

If you are a science denier, there is no reason for government to invest in clean energy.

Now it may be that in the current political climate, no argument would win. But both climate action and federal clean energy investment are classic wedge issues that have broad support with the American public, including independents and moderate Republicans, those not aligned with the Tea Party (see “Can We Stop The Collapse of Federal Clean Energy Support Without Talking About Climate Change Or A Carbon Price?” and links below).

Here, are the President’s remarks on energy in Iowa:

The fifth item on my “To-Do” list — I’m calling on Congress to extend tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year for clean-energy companies like TPI.  (Applause.)  Let’s not wait.  Let’s do it now.  (Applause.)

Many of you know the story of what’s happening here better than I do, but I just want to remind you how far we’ve come.  Shortly after I took office, I came to Newton — some of you remember — and we unveiled an all-of-the-above energy strategy for America.  We said let’s produce more oil and gas, but let’s also produce more biofuels; let’s produce more fuel-efficient cars; let’s produce more solar and wind powerand other sources of clean, renewable energy.  And I came to Newton because Newton is helping to lead the way when it comes to building wind turbines.

And since then, our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year that I’ve been in office — every single year. (Applause.)  America is now producing more domestic oil than any time in the last eight years.  But we’re also producing more natural gas, and we’re producing more biofuels than any time in our history.  And that’s good for the Iowa economy.  (Applause.) We’re laying the foundation for some of our nation’s first offshore wind farms.  And since I became President, America has nearly doubled the use of renewable energy, like solar power and wind power — we’ve nearly doubled it.  (Applause.)

So this country is on the path towards more energy independence.  And that’s good for everybody.  It’s good for people’s pocketbooks; it’s good for the environment; it’s good for our national security.  We don’t want our economy dependent on something that happens on the other side of the world.  We don’t want every time there’s a scare about war or some regime change in the Middle East that suddenly everybody here is getting socked and the whole economy is going down.

And the best thing is, in the process, we’re also putting thousands of Americans back to work — because the more we rely on American-made energy, the less oil we buy from other countries, the more jobs we create here at home, the more jobs we create here in Iowa.

So let’s look at the wind industry.  It’s so important to Iowa.  This industry, thanks in large part to some very important tax credits, has now taken off.  The state of Iowa now gets nearly 20 percent of all your electricity from wind — 20 percent.  Overall, America now has enough wind capacity to power 10 million homes.  So this is an industry on the rise.  And as you know, it’s an industry that’s putting people to work.  You know this firsthand.  There are more wind power jobs in Iowa than any other state.  That’s a big deal.  (Applause.)

And one of these modern windmills has more than 8,000 different parts — everything from the towers and the blades to the gears, to the electrical switches.  And it used to be that almost all these parts were imported.  Today, more and more of these parts are being made here in America — right here.  (Applause.)  We used to have just a few dozen manufacturing facilities attached to the wind industry.  Today we have nearly 500 facilities in 43 states employing tens of thousands of American workers — tens of thousands.

So we’re making progress.  And you know it better than anybody.  I mean, when I was talking to Quinten and Mark and a whole bunch of the other folks who are working here, they reminded me of the experience at working at Maytag and putting your heart and soul into a company and making a great product, and then, suddenly having that company leave, and how hard that was for families and how hard it was for the community.  But folks made the transition.

And now, when you look at what’s happening here — 700 to 800 jobs, over $30 million being put back into the community — this gives folks hope.  It gives people opportunity.  I met some folks who have been in manufacturing for 30 years, but I also met a couple of young folks who were just getting started.  And that’s what we’re looking for.  Nobody wants a handout.  Nobody wants to get something for nothing.  But if we’ve got a chance to create energy and create value and put people back to work, why wouldn’t we do that?

So I’m here today because, as much progress as we’ve made, that progress is in jeopardy.  If Congress doesn’t act, those tax credits that I mentioned — the ones that helped build up the wind industry, the ones that helped to bring all these jobs to Newton, those tax credits will expire at the end of the year if Congress doesn’t do anything.

If Congress doesn’t act, companies like this one will take a hit.  Jobs will be lost.  That’s not a guess, that’s a fact.  We can’t let that happen.  And keep in mind that — and this is something Congress needs to understand — Dave Loebsack understands it, but I want every member of Congress to understand it.  These companies that are putting in orders for these amazing blades, they’re making plans now.  They’re making decisions now. So if they’re cutting back on their orders, if they’re not confident that the industry is going to be moving at a fast clip and they start reducing orders here, that affects you.  You can’t wait for six months.  You can’t wait for eight months.  You can’t wait for a year to get this done.  It’s got to be done now.  (Applause.)

So this is a simple thing on Congress’s “To-Do” list — extend these tax credits.  Do it now.  Every day they don’t act business grows more concerned that they will not be renewed.  They’re worried demand for their products is going down, so they start thinking twice about expanding, more cautious about making new investments.  They start looking overseas.  I was talking to your CEO.  We got an opportunity to branch out, but we want to branch out by making the stuff here and then sending it there.  We don’t want to branch out by sending the jobs and the investments over there, and then shipping it back to America.  That doesn’t make sense.  (Applause.)  One company that had plans to invest $100 million to build a wind manufacturing plant in Arkansas — and create hundreds of jobs –- put those plans on hold.

And by the way, this should not be a partisan issue.  There are several Republican governors –- including the governor of this state -– who are calling on Congress to act.  There are members of Congress in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle –- including your two senators –- who support these tax credits.  And that doesn’t happen much in Washington where Democrats and Republicans say they agree on something.  So if you agree, why haven’t we gotten it done yet?

This is not just an issue, by the way, for the wind industry.   Some of America’s most prominent companies -– from Starbucks to Campbell’s Soup –- they’re calling on Congress to act because they use renewable energy.

Well, actually many of those companies are Calling on Congress to act because they are concerned about global warming, for which renewable energy is a core solution — see “Starbucks: Global Warming is Hurting Coffee.”

How lame is it that a high-end coffeehouse chain is more comfortable talking about the gravest threat to the nation’s health and well-being than the President of the United States?

Related Posts:

• “Independents, Other Republicans Split With Tea-Party Extremists on Global Warming“
• Brulle: “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.”
• Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?
• Stanford’s Krosnick: “Our research suggests that it would be wise for the President and for all other elected officials who believe that climate change is a problem and merits government attention to say this publicly and vigorously, because most Americans share these views.  Expressing and pursuing green goals on climate change will gain votes on election day and seem likely to increase the President’s and the Congress’s approval ratings.”

The unemployment rate for veterans between ages 18 and 24 is more than 17 percent, down from 29 percent, but Tim Tetz, legislative director of the American Legion, said that younger veterans are still facing a higher unemployment rate than their civilian counterparts, which stands at 15 percent. Older veterans are also struggling to find employment:

TETZ: [O]f the 780,000 veterans who are currently out of a job, two-thirds of them are between the ages of 35 and 64. And they might not have the resources like the GI Bill and many of the other things that these younger veterans have to use.

Watch his comments here:

Obama’s initiatives are helping to improve the jobs outlook for veterans. That’s more than can be said for Mitt Romney, who has no specific plans to address veterans issues, including unemployment.

NRDC released a report [this week] projecting that more than 150,000 additional Americans could die by the end of this century due to excessive heat caused by climate change. This startling conclusion is based on peer-reviewed scientific papers published recently by Dr. Larry Kalkstein and colleagues.

This is the kind of study that should make headlines around the country but is generally ignored when published only in scholarly journals. So NRDC is presenting the information in a more accessible manner, adding calculations of the cumulative additional death toll attributable to projected global warming by mid-century and century’s end (the report, including these additional calculations, was reviewed by Dr. Kalkstein to ensure that we have presented the information accurately)

The “Killer Summer Heat” report gives the results for all 40 cities analyzed in the original papers. The three with the highest number of projected heat-related deaths through the end of the century are: Louisville, KY (19,000 deaths); Detroit (18,000); and Cleveland (17,000). Other cities’ death tolls include:

• Baltimore: 2,900 deaths
• Boston: 5,700 deaths
• Chicago: 6,400 deaths
• Columbus: 6,000 deaths
• Denver: 3,500 deaths
• Los Angeles: 1,200 deaths
• Minneapolis: 7,500 deaths
• Philadelphia: 700 deaths
• Pittsburgh: 1,200 deaths
• Providence, R.I.: 2,000 deaths
• St. Louis: 5,600 deaths
• Washington, D.C.: 3000 deaths.

The projected deaths are based on the widely-used assumption that carbon pollution will steadily increase in the absence of effective new policies, more than doubling the levels seen today by the end of the century.

These findings bring home the fact that global climate change has a number of real life-and-death consequences in our local communities. One of which is that as carbon pollution continues to grow, climate change is only going to increase the number of dangerously hot days each summer, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of lives lost.

Already an average of 1,300 heat-related deaths occur per year due to direct and indirect effects of heat exacerbating life-threatening illnesses, such as heat exhaustion, heat stroke, cardiovascular disease, and kidney disease, according to Dr. Kalkstein’s analysis. That estimate comes from analyzing the 40 largest U.S. cities from 1975 through 2004, so it doesn’t account for the impact of the record-setting heat seen more recently. Last summer at least 42 states saw record daytime highs and 49 states saw record high nighttime temperatures, according to NOAA. And last week NOAA reported that the twelve months that ended on April 30th were the warmest twelve months in the United States since reliable record-keeping began in 1895.

To prevent the health impacts of climate change from getting as bad as the “business-as-usual” scenario portrayed in today’s report we need to change business as usual by establishing a comprehensive program to reduce heat-trapping pollution from all sources. The biggest step taken by the Obama administration so far is a set of landmark clean car standards that will cut tailpipe carbon emissions from new vehicles in half by 2025. The EPA also took an important, but limited, step forward recently by setting the first national standards to reduce air pollution from wells that use fracking to stimulate natural gas production.

But there are still no national limits on carbon pollution from power plants—the largest source of global warming pollution in the United States. That will be the subject of public hearings tomorrow on EPA’s proposal to limit carbon pollution from new power plants. Of course, pollution from existing power plants, refineries and other sources will need to be addressed as well.

If you live near Washington, D.C. or Chicago I urge you to attend the hearing and let EPA know that you agree that it’s long past time to end the practice of dumping unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into our atmosphere. EPA’s proposal is an important step toward protecting public health from the consequences of climate change driven by carbon pollution, and more than one million comments have been filed with the agency in support of moving forward. That’s already a record, but we can’t stop now. Let’s blow the record away with another million before the comment period ends on June 25th. Add your voice here.

Dan Lashof is the Program Director for Climate & Clean Air at the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.

According to data from the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections obtained by ThinkProgress:

- 1638 people in Miami-Dade County were flagged by the state as “non-citizens” and sent letters informing them that they were ineligible to vote.

- Of that group, 359 people have subsquently provided the county with proof of citizenship.

- Another 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county.

- The bulk of the remaining 1200 people have simply not responded yet to a letter sent to them by the Supervisor of Elections.

You can see a similar letter sent to alleged “non-citizens” by the Broward County Supervisor of Elections HERE. (“The Supervisor of Elections… has received information that you are not a citizen of the United States.”) If recipients of the letter do not respond within 30 days — a deadline that is mere days away — they will be summarily removed from the voting rolls. The voters purged from the list, election officials tell ThinkProgress, will inevitably include fully eligible Florida voters.

In short, an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as “non-citizens” in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher.

An analysis of the state-wide list by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted” as ineligible by the list. Conversely, “whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”

Late last year, Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not access to reliable citizenship data. So election officials attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file. That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable and refused to release. Browning resigned in February and Scott pressed forward with the purge.

The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their license information was collected.

For example, Juan Artabe, a resident of Miami-Dade, was flagged as a “non-citizen” based on motor vehicle records from 2006. He became a citizen in 2008 but no one notified the state. He was able to retain his ability to vote only by sending his citizenship papers to the Supervisor of Elections.

The situation in Miami-Dade is also apparent in elsewhere in Florida. According to a local reports in smaller Polk County of the 21 voters flagged by the state “nine appear to be citizens, leaving 12 as questionable.”

The purge of fully eligible voters from the voting rolls by Scott could be enough to tip the balance in Florida and, perhaps, the presidential election. In 2000, the final (disputed) margin was just 537 votes.

Coal export proponents like to argue that, climate-wise, it doesn’t matter:  Asia will burn the same amount of coal regardless of whether we ship it from the Northwest.  This argument is weak because it: a) defies basic economics – see here; b) ignores the x-factor:  economic “lock-in” to dangerous climate disruption – see here; and c) is morally dubious – see here.  So we know coal export is bad for the climate.  Check out Eric de Place’s social math for scale.

It’s true, however, that Powder River Basin isn’t the only coal available in Asia.  Estimating the net emission impact requires some elaborate economics (forthcoming). [i] But this graph is a rough, directional guide:

Let me explain.

It all comes down to the difference between the cost of producing and transporting Powder River Basin coal and the value of that coal in Asian markets.  That difference appears to be huge.

PRB coal isn’t dirt cheap.  It’s cheaper (than, say, top soil or gravel).  Most of it lies under public land, and the federal government basically gives it away.  Strip-mining is the very definition of quick and dirty – and, yes, super-cheap.  The mine-mouth cost of “producing” PRB coal is in the range of 10-15 bucks a ton.

Transporting it by rail and mega-ship to Asia is much more costly than snatching it from federal land, but there’s still plenty of margin.  Rail costs run about a penny a ton per mile, so that’s maybe another $20 a ton to get it to port.  Throw in say $15 for ocean shipping, tack on a value-added tax and port fees in China, and we’re looking at maybe $70 per ton delivered cost.

The benchmark thermal coal price in China in January was $115 per ton.  So PRB coal suppliers could significantly undercut the market, and still make a bundle.  This also explains why Asia is “just drooling” for this coal, and why, in turn, Big Coal is drooling to get it there.  Saliva speaks volumes.

The fact that they could sell coal so much cheaper also means that other suppliers would have to lower their prices to remain competitive.  And that would mean even greater increases in emissions, and more irreversible commitments to coal infrastructure.

So, both the potential for profits and the potential for net emission increases depend on the same factor – the amount by which the value of the coal in Asia exceeds the cost of getting it there.  In other words, the coal export business succeeds roughly in direct proportion to how much it disrupts the climate.

That means there is a reliable if not precise way to gauge how big the net emission impacts of coal export would be:  by observing how desperately the coal industry tries to make it happen. One more walk through the logic:

The harder the coal industry tries to mow down the opposition to coal export, the more we can infer that enormous profits are at stake.  And the size of the prospective profits is directly related to how competitive their coal is in Asia, which is directly related to how cheaply they can deliver it, which is directly related to how much would be burned.

Yup, how bad it would be for the climate is an indirect function of how much the coal industry wants it.  Judging by the money they are throwing at the early rounds of this battle, it’d be real bad.  And, they have warned, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

There is, of course, a corollary conclusion about how we should respond:

We will know that coal export would be okay from a climate perspective when they give up and stop trying to make it happen.

– KC Golden is Policy Director at Climate Solutions, a Northwest-based nonprofit. This piece was originally published at the Getting a Grip on Climate Solutions blog and was reprinted with permission.

Yesterday I pulled a red wagon through the streets of Washington, DC, my hometown. Inside the wagon were more than 8,000 comments from Moms Clean Air Force members supporting a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that will limit carbon dioxide emissions from newly constructed power plants. I brought those messages from people like YOU to EPA officials to let them know how much we want that rule to be finalized. I also testified at a public hearing before EPA staff on the proposed rule.

I have a public health degree, and I studied epidemiology, but I spoke yesterday as a mom.

Air pollution gets personal.

I’ve been working in the field of environmental health for several years, but the issue of air pollution became personal for me in a new way last year. I developed wheezing and respiratory symptoms. I started using an inhaler and other medications. My doctor told me to pay attention to the air quality. And I noticed that my symptoms were worse on poor air quality days. I was wheezing more, I was short of breath, I was coughing.

I had heard that air pollution is bad for our lungs, I had even studied it in public health school. But suddenly I could actually feel it, in my own body.

If this is happening to me, I thought, what is that same air doing to my children’s lungs? This is the kind of thing that keeps moms up at night. It kept me up at night. I got pretty upset about it.

The burden of asthma.

More than 7 million children have asthma in this country. Behind each of those children is a mom (or dad) taking care of their child, making sure she takes her medicine, vigilantly watching for symptoms. Asthma makes kids sick, and keeps them home from school. There are more than 14 million days of school lost each year to asthma. Behind each one of those lost school days is a mom (or dad) who is probably missing work, taking that child to the doctor, and all too often going to the emergency room. Indeed, asthma is responsible for over 600,000 emergency room visits in children each year. This is a terrible burden for families, and we know that air pollution makes it worse.

It would be one thing if we were dealing with a health problem that we didn’t understand. But scientists and doctors know what’s going on. They know how to ease this problem. They know what to do, and we have the technology to do it.

How does carbon pollution relate to asthma?

Reducing carbon pollution is a critical step in this process. Power plants are our nation’s largest source of carbon pollution. Carbon pollution is causing global warming, and hotter weather means more ozone. More ozone in turn causes more lung damage – for children’s lungs in particular.

Asthma is just the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve been talking about asthma, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Global warming is hurting children on so many fronts. We as moms know that reducing carbon pollution is quite literally an investment in our children’s future. We have a responsibility to leave them a decent world, in decent shape, where they can thrive and hope for a healthy future for their children. Global warming is a children’s health emergency, and we need to address it now, before it’s too late.

Last summer there were many days when air quality was predicted to be so bad that I kept my children inside for the day. If we don’t reduce carbon pollution, and stop global warming, there will likely be many more days like that in the future. It is wrong for our air to be too polluted for children to play outdoors. It is wrong for power plants to make kids sick.

Here is the testimony I delivered to the EPA yesterday:

Good afternoon, I’m Molly Rauch. I live in Washington, DC. I am speaking today as a representative of Moms Clean Air Force, as a public health professional, and as a mom. My daughter turned 9 just yesterday, and I have two boys, ages 4 and 6.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today in support of EPA’s proposed carbon rules.

Moms Clean Air Force is a community of moms united by concern over the effects of air pollution on our children. We read the health research on air pollution, and we have learned a lot about the health effects of breathing dirty air. We know that in its many forms, air pollution has been linked to the major health problems of our time. We see that asthma attacks, heart attacks, heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, premature death, emergency room visits, hospital admissions– all of these health problems have been linked to air pollution.

Many of these problems harm our children in particular. We at Moms Clean Air Force think that’s unacceptable.

I have with me and wish to submit the comments of more than 8,000 members of Moms Clean Air Force in support of the proposed carbon pollution standard. These moms, dads, and grandparents know that protecting our children means preventing pollution.

Carbon pollution is disrupting our planet’s climate, causing temperatures to rise. These rising temperatures increase formation of ground-level ozone, or smog, which triggers asthma. This is just one of the many health impacts that people will endure in a warming world. After reviewing a massive volume of research by leading climate scientists on smog formation and other climate impacts, EPA found that carbon pollution is a health threat to Americans.  I am here to assert that carbon pollution is a health threat especially for our children.

Just last year, I was personally affected by air pollution. I developed wheezing and respiratory symptoms, and started using an inhaler and other medications. I noticed that my symptoms are worse on days when the air quality around Washington, DC, is poor. Doctors and scientists know that the high smog and particle pollution levels we have here in DC and around much of the country can harm our lungs and trigger asthma attacks. Because of my wheezing, I exercise less. I spend less time outside with my children; and, of course, I am concerned about what pollution is doing to my children’s lungs, and whether they will develop asthma symptoms too. And I have it easy — very, very easy.

Take Rachael Lemire Murphy. She has two children with asthma. She lives in Massachusetts, where wind currents carry pollutants from power plants – many of which are in other states – into her community, forming smog. Her daughter Mia has such severe asthma that last year blood vessels in her eyes burst from the coughing. Mia regularly has to take 5-day courses of steroids for her asthma, which cause nightmares, outbursts, and uncontrollable tears. Rachael says, and I quote: “cleaning up air pollution from coal fired power plants would have a tremendous impact on my children’s health.”

Or, take Chandra Baldwin-Woods, whose son, Jovante, had a severe asthma attack almost two years ago at home in Ohio and died at age 16. He was one of the more than 3,000 people who die of asthma every year. Jovante was an athlete who had suffered from asthma since he was a baby. His sudden attack, which led to his death, is a horror to contemplate. Chandra says, and I quote, “air pollution causes asthma attacks and cuts short the lives of those we love most.”

Our blog is full of stories from Chandra, Rachael, and so many others. We need to do everything we can to prevent children like Jovante from dying; to prevent Mia’s next severe asthma attack; to prevent the damage smog causes inside my children’s lungs. Reducing carbon pollution is a critical step toward protecting their health.

Our electric utilities claim that they’ve given us cheap electricity. But for Jovante’s mom, it could not have been more expensive.

Moms have a lot of experience cleaning up messes. We know that most children won’t clean up their messes on their own. Neither will our power plants. Our children deserve a well-regulated electric power industry that produces electricity from clean sources, without destabilizing the climate, increasing smog levels and associated respiratory health problems, and causing other grave health effects of global warming. It’s EPA’s job to set the rules that will give us the clean and safe power industry all Americans – and especially our children – deserve.

Please finalize the Carbon Pollution Standard, for the sake of our children.

– Molly Rauch is a mom who lives and works in Washington, DC. When not building Lego spaceships and cleaning out sippy cup valves, she works at Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) on environmental health policy issues. This piece was originally published at Moms Clean Air Task Force and was reprinted with permission.

by Tom Smerling, via ClimateBites

After watching this TEDx clip, you may never want to stand before an audience again without pausing, at least once, to utter these seven magic words:

“Let me tell you a little story.”

But most advice about the importance of narrative comes from psychologists and communication consultants, not storytellers.   So here is a master storyteller, Bill Harley, talking about his life’s work, and sharing what he’s learned about why storytelling is so central to human understanding.

A small sample:

It has a power nothing else has. . .

I’m not talking just about literature and English.   I’m talking about history and astrophysics and biochemistry and law and mathematics.

All of those things are best explained through story. Because “story” is how we are reminded, and how we remember.   If we want it to be memorable, it must be a story. . .

We are not built to memorize lists, or unrelated facts. We are built to remember narrative.So try this the next time you are giving a lecture or a talk or standing in front of a bunch of people:    Stop in the middle of your offering of facts or your closely-reasoned argument, and say “Let me tell you a little story.”

And watch what happens. You see the faces relax, you see people reseat themselves in their chairs, and get ready. . . to hear . . . a story.

Harley’s points apply not only to public speeches, but to all climate communication, from written articles to interviews, blogs, and even dinner-table conversation.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy Bill Harley’s anecdotes.

If you want to look further into the art of climate storytelling, below are some suggestions for where to start:

• There are two ways of thinking about climate storytelling

1) the overall narrative (aka storyline) you select to describe the problem and its solutions to a given audience.  There are many different approaches; ClimateBites has compiled 23 alternative ways to tell the climate story.

2) short, personal anecdotes used to draw the audience in and make your message stick.   For tips on becoming a better storyteller for any public cause, check out Andy Goodman’s work linked at “Numbers Numb, Jargon Jars.  And Nobody Ever Marched on Washington Because of a Pie Chart.“

• As role model for climate storytelling, nobody beats Dr. Richard Alley, host of PBS’s Earth: the Operators’ Manual.   That entire series is filled with great stories, and the book includes even more.   In this short clip Alley draws on his own life events to illustrate how ‘skeptics’ cherry-pick data, ala “The Escalator.”

– Tom Smerling is a climate communicator who formerly worked in the Special Projects Office of NOAA’s National Ocean Service. This piece was originally published at ClimateBites and was reprinted with permission.

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Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not get access to reliable citizenship data. So Scott urged election officials to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file.

That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable. The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their driver’s license information was collected.

Browning resigned in February. But Scott has pressed forward with his efforts to purge voters from the rolls based on the dubious list. Here’s the letter Maureen Russo, a U.S. citizen and registered voter in Florida for the last 40 years, received two weeks ago:

In Broward County 259 people recieved letters just like the one addressed to Maureen above, according to the Broward County Supervisor of Elections. So far only 7 (including Maureen) have responded to the ominous and legalistic letter. Five of the responses included proof of citizenship.

If the other 252 people don’t respond within 30 of recieving the letter — a deadline that is rapidly approaching — they will be summarily removed from the voting roles. Cooney, the Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman, says some of those who are purged under this “very new” process will “be eligible” but will have to be removed from the rolls anyway.

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) and other Democratic members of the Florida Congressional delegation — as well as a coalition of voter protection groups — have called on Scott to “immediately suspend” the voting purge since the lists of ineligible voters has proven extremely unreliable.