Joe Nocera is a business columnist for the NY Times.  He understands business, including some aspects of the energy business  (see Nocera on “The Phony Solyndra Scandal”: The “Real Winner is … the Chinese Solar Industry”).

But his Monday NYT article on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline reveals the myopia on climate that is characteristic of most business and economics reporters.  He simply asserts the tar sands “is hardly the environmental disaster many suppose,” while providing no evidence.

And Nocera asserts, “Environmental concerns notwithstanding, America will be using oil — and lots of it — for the foreseeable future,” which is true in a hand-waving sense:  If we ignore environmental concerns, we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing.  Whether humanity can withstand such self-destructive activity, however, is the real issue.

Ultimately Nocera writes:

As it turns out, the environmental movement doesn’t just want to shut down Keystone.  Its real goal, as I discovered when I spoke recently to Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, is much bigger.  “The effort to stop Keystone is part of a broader effort to stop the expansion of the tar sands,” Brune said.  “It is based on choking off the ability to find markets for tar sands oil.”

This is a ludicrous goal.

In fact, it isn’t a ludicrous goal.  As the nation’s top climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen said back in June,  “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”

If Nocera wants to take on Brune’s position, then he is going to have to actually discuss climate change, which he fails to do at all in this article.  So far, it seems as if Nocera’s views on global warming derive from reading the likes of the widely debunked physicist Freeman Dyson and attending Exxon-Mobil shareholder meetings, which causes him to dismissing knowledgeable people who express science-based views of as trying to “push Exxon Mobil toward their belief system — their global warming religion.”

That equation of science with religion puts him him the climate ignorati.

If Nocera wants to become informed on climate science, I’d suggest that he start talking to actual climate scientists, folks like Hansen (who is conveniently located in New York).  He might also call up Lonnie Thompson who can explain why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”

Nocera could also review the recent scientific literature, which  I have summarized here: “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces.”

One final note.   What is particularly ironic about Nocera being suckered by the “Big Lie” of the climate deniers is that he described how the Big Lie works in a different instance with uncanny accuracy  in a column titled, “The Big Lie“:

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Saving lives, encouraging clean generation, and creating new jobs are not enough for opponents of new mercury rules.

by Daniel J. Weiss and Zachary Rybarczyk

Yesterday’s House Subcommittee on Energy and Power meeting could more closely resemble a kangaroo court than real government oversight.

Here’s why. The subcommittee plans a hearing misleadingly titled “What EPA’s Utility MACT Rule Will Cost U.S. Consumers.” But the Republican majority is playing with words and the health of our children. Its witnesses from industry and their consulting firms suggest that the Republican majority has little interest in learning about the tens of billions of dollars of economic gains due to health benefits derived by the slashing millions of pounds of mercury, lead, arsenic, and other toxic air pollution from power plants that the rule would generate. And the subcommittee majority will pay little heed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s analysis that found the rules will only lead to modest electricity price increases, which are relatively small compared to the electricity price increases experienced over the past decade.

In addition, the majority will likely ignore the independent analysis and data that suggest that retrofitting power plants to cut toxic pollution will cost less than predicted by industry-funded studies. Instead, witnesses are likely to repeat findings from utility-and-coal-industry-financed reports that have already been debunked due to their flawed analysis.

Below we offer information on how the rules will affect U.S. ratepayers as well as the benefits that they will provide to all Americans.

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Perhaps a bit flustered from losing three primary races a day earlier to fellow GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney got his energy talking points confused at a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday.

Speaking about his plan to encourage domestic energy production, Romney got the solar company Solyndra and the Keystone tar sands pipeline mixed up:

“My course for America is to become energy secure and to open up that Solyndra – that, that pipeline, excuse me, the Keystone pipeline,” Romney told about 400 supporters at a stone importing company in northern Atlanta. “Not Solyndra. … The Keystone pipeline to get energy here in this country.”

The small stumble could have been a good opportunity for Romney to throw some support behind solar as an important domestic energy source. After all, the industry was the “fastest growing in America” for two years in a row, supports more than 100,000 direct and indirect jobs in all 50 states, and accounted for a $1.9 billion trade surplus in 2010.

Instead, Romney quickly fell back to his talking points and called federal loan guarantees an example of “crony capitalism.”

The Solyndra slip up is not the first for a Republican presidential candidate. Last December, Texas Governor and former candidate Rick Perry thought Solyndra (which he called “Solynda”) was a country that America gave money to.

Other stories below: Solar power to pay Nevada city’s debt; Bank of England says to evaluate fossil-fuel investment risk

A new study confirms we are on track for significant sea level rise this century

Global warming: CU-led study pinpoints Earth’s ice loss

Earth’s glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are shedding about 150 billion tons of ice annually, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The total mass ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica and all Earth’s glaciers and ice caps between 2003 to 2010 was 1,000 cubic miles, about eight times the water volume of Lake Erie.

“The total amount of ice lost to Earth’s oceans from 2003 to 2010 would cover the entire United States in about 1 and one-half feet of water,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study….

The measurements are important because the melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future, Wahr said.

The researchers used satellite measurements from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to calculate that the world’s glaciers and ice caps lost about 148 billion tons, or about 39 cubic miles of ice annually from 2003 to 2010. The total does not count the mass from individual glacier and ice caps on the fringes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which could add up to an additional 80 billion tons.

“This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of Earth’s glaciers and ice caps with GRACE,” said Wahr. “The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change.”

… According to the GRACE data, total sea level rise from all land-based ice on Earth including Greenland and Antarctica was roughly 1.5 millimeters per year annually or about 12 millimeters, or one-half inch, from 2003 to 2010, said Wahr. The sea rise amount does include the expansion of water due to warming, which is the second key sea-rise component and is roughly equal to melt totals, he said.

JR:  I checked with JPL’s Eric Rignot, who called the study “a solid confirmation” of his 2011 paper, which I wrote about here:  “JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050.”

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Air sampling by NOAA over Colorado Finds 4% Methane Leakage, More Than Double Industry Claims

Natural-gas operations could release far more methane into the atmosphere than previously thought. [Source: Nature]

How much methane leaks during the entire lifecycle of unconventional gas has emerged as a key question in the fracking debate.  Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4).  And methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned.

Even without a high-leakage rate for shale gas, we know that “Absent a Serious Price for Global Warming Pollution, Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere.”

But the leakage rate does matter.  A major 2011 study by Tom Wigley of the Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) concluded:

The most important result, however, in accord with the above authors, is that, unless leakage rates for new methane can be kept below 2%, substituting gas for coal is not an effective means for reducing the magnitude of future climate change.

The industry has tended kept most of the data secret while downplaying the leakage issue.  Yet I know of no independent analysis that finds a rate below 2%, including one by the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the DOE’s premier fossil fuel lab.

Now, as the journal Nature reports, we finally have some actual air sampling measurements, and they appear to confirm the higher estimates put forward by Cornell professor Robert Howarth:

When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might not be much better than coal when it comes to climate change.

Led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, the study estimates that natural-gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin are losing about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere — not including additional losses in the pipeline and distribution system. This is more than double the official inventory, but roughly in line with estimates made in 2011 that have been challenged by industry. And because methane is some 25 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, releases of that magnitude could effectively offset the environmental edge that natural gas is said to enjoy over other fossil fuels.

Methane is 25 times  more efficient than CO2 trapping heat over 100 year — but it is 100 times more efficient than CO2 trapping heat over two decades.

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Readers asked what a good extended metaphor was for global warming.  Here’s one, courtesy of the National Center for Atmospheric Research:

AtmosNews takes a lighthearted look at an unexpected analogy, explaining why some people call carbon dioxide (and the other greenhouse gases) the steroids of the climate system. Statistics and extreme behavior are involved, whether we’re talking about baseball or Earth’s atmosphere. NCAR scientist Gerald “Jerry” Meehl explains why.

NCAR has puts it together an very informative website on global warming and extreme weather, which I highly recommend.

Related Post:

• PBS Covers Link Between 2011′s “Mind-Boggling” Extreme Weather and Global Warming: It’s Like “Being on Steroids”

As the Obama Administration moves to open up Arctic waters for exploratory offshore oil and gas drilling, a raising tide of opposition is emerging to counter the decision.

In the last two weeks, dozens of members of Congress, hundreds of scientists, and tens of thousands of concerned citizens have expressed their concerns about the environmental impact of drilling in Arctic waters.

In an open letter signed yesterday by 60 members of Congress, federal lawmakers called on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to halt all leases for the Arctic in the agency’s five-year plan until a more sound review of disaster-response capabilities can be conducted:

“Successful oil spill response methods … cannot simply be transferred to the Arctic. The Arctic is a unique environment with significant hurdles that the DOI and related agencies must genuinely address before considering any new leasing in the region prior to including Arctic areas in a five-year plan.”

This follows a months-long investigation into disaster preparation in the Arctic by the Center for American Progress oceans team, which found a complete lack of infrastructure to deal with an oil spill:

There are no U.S. Coast Guard stations north of the Arctic Circle, and we currently operate just one functional icebreaking vessel. Alaska’s tiny ports and airports are incapable of supporting an extensive and sustained airlift effort. The region even lacks such basics as paved roads and railroads. This dearth of infrastructure would severely hamper the ability to transport the supplies and personnel required for any large-scale emergency response effort. Furthermore, the extreme and unpredictable weather conditions complicate transportation, preparedness, and cleanup of spilled oil to an even greater degree.

Just two weeks before, 573 scientists sent a letter to the White House urging the Obama Administration to take a science-based approach to issuing leases in the Arctic and to avoid opening up the region because of political pressure to expand drilling:

“Doing so prior to authorizing new oil and gas activity in the Arctic Ocean will respect the national significance of the environment and cultures of U.S. Arctic waters and demonstrate the value that your Administration places on having a sound scientific basis for managing industrial development of the Outer Continental Shelf.”

If one were to follow these concerns about taking a science-based approach to their logical conclusion, it’s highly unlikely that anyone would consider drilling for more fossil fuels in the Arctic. In its environmental impact statement, the Department of Interior even admits that “the Arctic is experiencing variations that are accelerating faster than previously realized” due to climate change — ironically making the region more attractive for oil and gas extraction as sea ice continues its downward spiral.

Apparently, the plan isn’t sitting well with many interested citizens either. Today was the final deadline for public comments, and almost 400,000 people have asked President Obama to stop the sales of leases in the Department of Interior’s five-year plan, according to the Alaska Wilderness League.

The Obama Administration is set to approve exploratory Arctic drilling permits to Royal Dutch Shell for operations next summer — a company that recently spilled 218 tons of oil in the North Sea and has the worst spill record in the UK since 2000.

Gary Trudeau is running a whole week on the disinformers.

Related Posts:

• Kentucky creationism theme park set to open in 2014 will “include dinosaurs”
• Doonesbury Takes on the Climate Change Deniers
• Great Doonesbury Global Warming Cartoon

Job creation in California’s clean energy/materials manufacturing sector increased by 53% from 1995 to 2010

When times get tough, companies often fall back on an old familiar phrase: “we just need to do more with less.” That usually applies to human resources. But it’s equally important with natural resources.

As it turns out, “green” companies in California that do more with fewer natural resources fared much better than companies in other sectors during the worst of America’s economic troubles — more than doubling the performance of the broader economy.

A new report from the non-partisan environmental think tank Next 10 shows that between 2009 and 2010, the “core green economy” in California — comprised of companies that provide products or services to cut natural resource use, re-purpose waste, and reduce global warming pollution — experienced half the number of job losses seen in the state’s broader economy.

Between January of 2009 and January of 2010, California’s economy shed 7% of jobs; however, the green economy saw only a 3% reduction in jobs. And from 1995 to 2010, the green economy in the state grew by 53% — far outpacing the 12% growth in the rest of the economy during that period of time.

California’s Core Green Economy shows signs of greater resilience than the economy as a whole. Over the past 16 years, its growth has outpaced the economy as a whole by more than a factor of four, and percentage losses are half those of the state’s total employment.

Despite these losses, some segments posted employment gains in the most recent observable period (January 2009 to 2010). Employment in Energy Infrastructure increased 14 percent, Advanced Materials expanded by four percent while Clean Transportation and Energy Generation grew by one percent each. Across the value chain, Manufacturing jobs in the Core Green Economy expanded by one percent from January 2009 to 2010, the only value chain segment to do so.

The big story was job creation in the clean energy/materials manufacturing sector, which increased by 53% from 1995 to 2010 while jobs in the rest of the manufacturing sector dropped by 18%. And as the report authors note above, even though companies saw a substantial slowdown due to the economic crisis between 2009 and 2010, employment in green manufacturing saw a slight increase in employment of one percent.

These figures echo those in a recent report from the Brookings Institution showing that clean energy jobs nationwide expanded by 8.3% per year from 2003 to 2010, with the rest of the “clean economy” (a broader definition including public transit, recycling and next-generation materials) growing 8.3% during the height of the recession between 2008 and 2009.

Related Posts:

• Green Jobs Reach 2.7 Million: The “Clean Economy” Starts Delivering on its Promise of High-Wage Jobs, Brookings finds
• Green Jobs Make Up 35% of Design and Construction Industry: “People Will Never Go Back to Building Inefficient Buildings”
• Top Five Reasons Why Attacks on Green Jobs Training Programs Don’t Hold Up

Neither California nor the Mojave will survive unrestricted emissions of heat trapping greenhouse gases, but we can harness solar energy responsibly

by Jessica Goad (with some thoughts by Joe Romm at the end)

The Los Angeles Times recently published a story on large-scale solar that gets much of the context and many of the facts about renewable energy on public lands flat out wrong.

The Times piece, called “Sacrificing the desert to save the Earth,” describes an apparent land rush for solar energy development on public lands, and raises important questions about the impacts of this technology on the Mojave Desert in California.

However, it gets the comparisons to oil and gas development completely wrong, and also omits important details about what the government has done thus far to ensure that solar on public lands does not become a real land rush.

First, much of the story is based on a comparison to oil and gas development on public lands. The Times argues that financial incentives for solar development in southern California have “sparked a land rush echoing the speculative booms” of other land rushes in the past:

Industrial-scale solar development is well underway in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The federal government has furnished more public property to this cause than it has for oil and gas exploration over the last decade — 21 million acres, more than the area of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties put together.

Even if only a few of the proposed projects are built, hundreds of square miles of wild land will be scraped clear. Several thousand miles of power transmission corridors will be created.

The desert will be scarred well beyond a human life span, and no amount of mitigation will repair it, according to scores of federal and state environmental reviews.

It is important to understand that this 21 million acres is the amount of public land that could be made available to solar energy development in six states (AZ , CA, CO, NV UT, NM), rather than the amount that will be eventually leased. (This is an arcane but important distinction when it comes to public lands, because companies bid for leases on parcels that are made available for development).  “Available” means that there is sufficient sun, the land is flat enough, none of the lands are protected (such as national parks), etc.

The data show that the Times’ comparison to oil and gas is totally incorrect. According to a Wilderness Society analysis, in just five western states (CO, NM, MT, UT, WY) over 50 million acres of public lands are already available to oil and gas development.

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To preserve a livable climate, we need to leave most remaining hydrocarbons in the ground. Guess who doesn’t like that idea?

by Bill McKibben, reposted from TomDispatch

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology.  Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.

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Top Five Oil Companies Made $1 Trillion in Profits from 2001 Through 2011

by Daniel J. Weiss, Jackie Weidman, Rebecca Leber

General economic theory holds that companies will produce more of a good if its price is higher, or if it receives subsidies. Funny that these rules didn’t seem to apply to Big Oil in 2011, when the highest oil price since 1864 and $2 billion in subsidies to the five largest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—yielded lower oil production than in 2010. But these five oil companies combined made a record-high $137 billion in profits in 2011—up 75 percent from 2010—and have made more than $1 trillion in profits from 2001 through 2011.[1] This exceeds the previous record of $136 billion in profits in 2008.

Here are some more highlights from the big five’s activities in 2011:

• They produced 4 percent less oil and “oil equivalent” in 2011 compared to 2010.
• They spent a total of $38 billion, or 28 percent, of their profits to repurchase their own stock.
• They are sitting on more than $58 billion in cash reserves as of the end of 2011.
• They spent $1.6 million on campaign contributions and $65.7 million on lobbying efforts.
• For every $1 spent on lobbying in Washington, the big five received $30 worth of tax breaks.

Let’s dig a little deeper into this mystery to see why these companies are making more money while Americans see less oil and pay more at the pump.

Where the money goes

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Other stories below: Global warming could kill off snails; South Korean lawmakers vote for limits on greenhouse gas emissions

AEP chief: Coal’s elimination ‘just not going to happen’

Although the amount of energy produced by coal will decrease in the nation — from 45 percent today to 39 percent by 2020 — a top electric utility company CEO said there is definitely a future for coal.

“Coal is naturally going to come down, natural gas will be the choice, but they’re really marginal,” said Nick Akins, president and chief executive officer of American Electric Power. “Once technology is proven, you’ll start to see coal come back. We still need coal . . .  . If someone is trying to eliminate that, it’s just not going to happen.”

… “We provide the basic necessity of life as we know it….  What’s counterproductive is not to have an energy policy.”

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Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part….

President Obama is no Teddy Roosevelt, even though he’d like people to think he is.  Needless to say, the GOP front-runner is no Roosevelt either (see Romney: I Don’t Know ‘What The Purpose is’ of Public Lands — a line that would set the Lion spinning.)

Roosevelt was a true progressive.  In his famous, “New Nationalism” speech of 1910, he uttered the remarks that open this post along with these timeless statements:

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the games, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service….

Now, this means that our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests….

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done….

The prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship, and, to get it, we must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.

Obama has turned out to be “the most moderate Democratic president since World War II.”  Nonetheless, back in December, Obama delivered a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, because it was where Roosevelt gave his 1910 speech.  Obama gave a good speech, as far as it went, focused on “the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness”:

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An Interview with Weather Underground’s Dr. Jeff Masters

The laws of physics demand that the huge amount of heat-trapping gases humans are pumping into the atmosphere must be significantly altering the fundamental large-scale circulation pattern of the atmosphere.

Stronger hurricanes, bigger floods, more intense heat waves, and sea level rise have been getting many of the headlines with regards to potential climate change impacts, but drought should be our main concern. Drought is capable of crashing a civilization.

by Christine Shearer, reposted from the Conducive Chronicle

If you are interested in weather, chances are you have visited Weather Underground and read the posts of its director of meteorology, Dr. Jeff Masters. The consistently reliable Masters has been a rare voice in helping make sense of, rather than cloud (zing!), the increasingly strange weather events hitting the planet.

Masters has studied weather both on the ground and in the air. He received his bachelors and masters degrees in meteorology from the University of Michigan, and then worked as a Miami-based flight meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Hurricane Hunters team. It was there that Masters and his crew, having lost temporary control of their radar and thinking they were heading toward a mild twister, flew right into the eye of Hurricane Hugo — a category 5 storm and the most destructive of its time.

Masters later wrote of the event in “Hunting Hugo“: “I look out my window, and behold the eye of Hurricane Hugo in its full fury. It is awesome, terrifying, supernatural.”

Although two engines of the plane were damaged, the crew made it out, which Masters attributes to the navigating of the team, the strength of the P3 plane, and luck. Masters returned to Ann Arbor for his PhD at U-M in 1991, continuing his work on the more applied science of air pollution meteorology: “I had a lot of concerns back then about how human activities were harming the environment and people who rely on the environment for jobs or for a strong economy.” He studied smog, but his attention soon turned to the growing issue of climate change.

He also started an earlier version of Wunderground in 1991, before it went online as the first weather site in 1995. Today, Wunderground.com is fed by the world’s largest network of 17,000 individual weather stations, and is the second most visited weather site in the world.

Masters shared some of his thoughts on meteorology, the effect of increasing greenhouse gases on weather and weather cycles, and the future of the earth’s climate.

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Protests Increase Against Canada’s Alternative to Keystone XL

Photo: Ian McAllister

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is currently visiting China to forge alliances and open up the Asian market for Canada’s environmentally-disastrous tar sands crude.

Harper may be making friends in China. But he’s certainly not making any friends in the environmental and conservation communities in the U.S. or Canada.

As Americans fight an increasingly intense political battle over the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, Canadian groups are stepping up their opposition to a proposed domestic pipeline that they say would destroy pristine wilderness and jeopardize the way of life of First Nations living in the path of the project.

This past weekend saw a new round of protests in British Columbia against the Northern Gateway project, a proposed 731-mile pipeline that would transport crude from a terminal near Alberta’s tar sands to the Douglas Channel — located in a sensitive rainforest — for export to China and other countries.

More than 1,000 people gathered in Prince Rupert, British Columbia to voice their deep concerns about the project. The demonstration was organized by First Nations and featured a variety of local politicians who said that the protests were “bringing people together” to protect British Columbia’s environment.

The groups were demonstrating against both the pipeline and the proposed shipping route that would allow hundreds of massive oil tankers to travel a treacherous path through pristine wilderness.

The Natural Resources Defense Council released a report last fall detailing the route:

At Kitimat, a tank farm at the edge of the water would facilitate the transfer of oil to holding tanks and then into large oil supertankers. These supertankers would then traverse 185 kilometres of inner coastal waters, including the Douglas Channel, before reaching open ocean in the unpredictably dangerous Hecate Strait, Queen Charlotte Sound, and Dixon Entrance. There is a reason that large oil supertankers have not used these waters in the past: the route poses many navigational challenges for large vessels, even under ideal conditions.

…To export tar sands oil, supertankers called “Very Large Crude Carriers” (VLCCs), with a capacity of 2.2 million barrels of oil (320,000 tonnes), would be required on a much more frequent basis. There is already strong opposition to large oil tanker traffic in coastal waters among local citizens, First Nation communities, and organizations concerned about the potential impacts of an oil spill in the ecologically sensitive marine habitats of the coast.

The people of the Gitga’at First Nation who live in the area have expressed deep concerns about the shipping route. In 2006, a ferry transporting 101 people ran off course and sank while sailing these inner coastal waters, killing two people. The vessel was only a fraction of the size of the supertankers that would be carrying crude:

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I’d love your comments on Clint Eastwood’s awesome ad for Obama Chrysler:

Seriously, though, I’m not going to spend much time on the rather absurd issue of whether Clint’s gritty optimism means he is channeling Obama’s gritty optimism, as the Washington Post and conservative commentators claim:

An an ad touting the resurgence of the American auto industry, Clint Eastwood declared that it’s “halftime in America and our second half’s about to begin,” which could be interpreted as a reference to Obama’s second term.

The ad’s themes seem to echo Obama’s own argument that his administration brought the auto industry back from the brink of disaster.

“They almost lost everything,” Eastwood says of Detroit. “But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again.”

Oh, no, we all pulled together to save Detroit.  And it worked.  I guess Eastwood is a socialist, too, albeit one of those socialists who is tough and successful.  I wonder if he was born in Kenya.

Obviously, anything that offends Karl Rove, “Bush’s brain,” can’t be all bad.  But the reason I’m highlighting the ad is because it is an extended metaphor — arguably the single most effective kind of advertising possible.

I’ll be publishing my book on messaging and persuasion later in the year.  It focuses on the figures of the speech.  As Aristotle said, “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” (see “How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, Part 3.”  So I’ll be focusing more on the use of rhetoric in  politics and popular culture this year.

Extended metaphor is, for me, the most important rhetorical device. This figure is at the heart of some of Lincoln’s greatest speeches and Shakespeare’s greatest plays (see “How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address“).

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GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum doesn’t mince words when it comes to his energy plan: humanity’s purpose is to dominate the environment.

Speaking at an energy summit in Colorado yesterday, the former Pennsylvania Senator explained his belief that humans were “put on this earth … for our benefit, not for the Earth’s benefit.”

In his speech, Santorum also blamed human-caused global warming — which played a role in making 2011 the most disastrous year ever for extreme weather in America — on the “vagaries of nature.”

“If you leave it to Nature, then Nature will do what Nature does, which is boom and bust. We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit.”

“We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create.”

It’s no surprise that Santorum is a proud global warming denier. More surprising was his call for “science and discovery” to “be better stewards of this environment.” In the same breath, however, Santorum casually swept aside the consensus among 97% of climate scientists actively publishing peer-reviewed research in the field that human activity is warming the planet:

“I for one never bought the hoax. I for one understand just from science that there are one hundred factors that influence the climate. To suggest that one minor factor of which man’s contribution is a minor factor in the minor factor is the determining ingredient in the sauce that affects the entire global warming and cooling is just absurd on its face.

Santorum is a devout Catholic and uses his religious beliefs as a major platform in his candidacy for president. However, his position on global warming is completely opposite that of the Catholic church, which has called for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions “without delay” in order to protect “the whole of creation.”

Santorum clearly hasn’t read about the physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which he dismissed as a “minor factor.” In fact, the radiative forcing of our CO2 emissions is the equivalent of 1 million Hiroshima nuclear bombs per day in the atmosphere.

“When there’s more energy radiating down on the planet than there is radiating back out to space, something’s going to have to heat up,” explained Mike Sandiford, Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute, in a recent article.

But if Santorum thinks that humans were created with the sole purpose of dominating the earth, no amount of science may be able to shake that belief.

BP’s 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill is still affecting the lives of many Americans, particularly the tens of thousands that have not settled lawsuits with the company. Yet the company has bounced back from the billions it lost in the wake of the spill.

BP announced today that its 2011 profit totaled $26 billion, a 114 percent jump from the year before, when the company’s “failure of supervision and accountability” caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history. As the company prepares for its upcoming trial, let’s take a look at how BP has made out after the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

• BP earned $3 million every hour in 2011. Its fourth-quarter profits reached $7.69 billion, which is up 38 percent from 2010.
• The company is sitting on another $14 billion in cash.
• The company continues to scale back its production in the wake of the spill, producing 10 percent less than 2010 levels.
• BP contributions to federal candidates totaled more than $98,000 in 2011, with more than half (65 percent) to Republican candidates.
• BP spent $8 million lobbying Congress in 2011, down from the record $15 million the company lobbied in 2009 – one year before the oil disaster.
• For every dollar the big five oil companies use in lobbying, they effectively receive $30 in subsidies. This could mean BP potentially gained up to $243 million in subsidies, although the exact amount for an individual company is undisclosed.
• In the third quarter, BP’s Bob Dudley announced the company had reached a “definite turning point” of boosted profits. However, nearly two years following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP has still only paid $7.8 billion of the $20 billion fund they created to compensate individuals and businesses for losses incurred by the spill.
• In order to pay the $40 billion cleanup costs and additional penalties, the company has committed to selling $38 billion worth of assets before 2014.

Despite being found “ultimately responsible” for the most devastating oil spill this nation has ever seen, BP has spent millions lobbying on bills that would speed offshore drilling and leases. This includes filing a total 24 reports on bills undermining safety regulation in the Gulf of Mexico, H.R. 1231 “Reversing President Obama’s Offshore Moratorium Act” and H.R. 1229 “Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act.”

At the time, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar accused House Republicans of having “amnesia” about the oil spill. No doubt the total $137 billion profits in 2011 for the five big oil companies had something to do with it.

Framing Matters: How Polls and the Media Misrepresent the Keystone XL [Tar Sands] [Oil] Pipeline

by Liz Barrat-Brown, reposted from NRDC’s Switchboard

First of all, you won’t find tar sands mentioned in any of the polling.  And in most polls, you won’t even find oil.  It’s just the Keystone XL pipeline, no context, no mention of what it will carry, and certainly no mention of the environmental risks of building a massive pipeline to carry toxic tar sands sludge through the heartland of America to the gulf of Mexico, where it would be exported out of the U.S.

The question asked by two recent polls, one by Rasmussen and the other by the National Journal, was more or less, “Do you support or oppose building the Keystone XL pipeline?”   And the Rasmussen poll also asks if job creation is more important than protecting the environment, posing these two goals as  oppositional.

Most Americans don’t see it that way.  In our opinion research and other opinion research, such as the major new survey in the West, Americans overwhelmingly believe that a strong economy and the environment can go hand in hand.  And they show a real concern for protecting resources, such as our water supply, from degradation.  But both the Rasmussen and the National Journal polls show a majority of Americans in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline.

But are they really?

What if the pollsters changed the question to more accurately represent the actual project and inserted “tar sands oil pipeline”?  What if they described to the public that the pipeline would jeopardize one of America’s most important freshwater aquifers, the Ogallala?  What if they were told that a first pipeline just like the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and built by the same foreign company, TransCanada, had had over 12 spills in the U.S. (30 if you count Canada) in just its first year of operation?  What if they were told that the oil is not really oil but a toxic sludge that is largely strip mined from under the Boreal forest in Canada and has to be diluted with toxic chemicals and pushed through pipelines at high temperature and pressure in pipelines only regulated to carry conventional oil?  And what if the public were given the opportunity to choose a tar sands oil pipeline or increasing our reliance on homegrown renewable energy?

No poll has set this tar sands pipeline in any kind of context.

Instead most of the questions are preceded or followed by generic questions about jobs and the economy or with questions about whether the country is going in the right direction.

So, without context, what do you think most Americans would first think of when asked about a pipeline?

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