by Dan Bakal, reposted from Ceres

When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its Mercury and Air Toxics Rule (MATS) in December, a handful of utility companies that rely heavily on coal-fired power plants claimed the rule would lead to power plant retirements.  Yesterday’s publication of the final rule in the Federal Register has set off a new round of criticism as the clock starts ticking on any last-minute legal or legislative actions to undermine the rule.

Take, for instance, FirstEnergy’s recent announcements that it will retire nine of its older coal-fired power plants by September 1, 2012.  In its statements, FirstEnergy blamed the EPA’s Mercury rule for forcing the retirements. Not only is the company blaming the EPA for the retirements, it is also placing potential layoffs and grid reliability issues at the EPA’s door. This decision poses an important question:  if these retirements are because of the EPA rule, why is FirstEnergy retiring the nine plants which are located in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland in 2012, rather than waiting until 2014, when these older plants would actually have to come into compliance?

In their news release, FirstEnergy states:

“We recently completed a comprehensive review of our coal-fired generating plants and determined that additional investments to implement MATS and other environmental rules would make these older plants even less likely to be dispatched under market rules. As a result, it was necessary to retire the plants rather than continue operations.”

Upon closer inspection, however, it’s fairly easy to see that this decision wasn’t based primarily on EPA rules; it was based on current economics, including the following:

• These Eisenhower-era plants are on average 58 years old and have rarely been used since 2010. (They have an average capacity factor of 36.5%.)
• A slower economy, energy-efficiency programs and mild weather have reduced demand for power.
• Today’s historically low natural gas prices, which are not expected to increase much any time soon, mean it is more expensive to produce power using coal-fired plants than natural gas plants. (The process of converting a coal plant to natural gas is complex, but is also a project that is fully achievable within the EPA’s timelines.)

So when a plant is already over half a century old, underutilized and inefficient during those occasions when it is used – it probably makes better business sense to retire it rather than making the investments to convert it to natural gas or retrofit it with pollution controls to comply with EPA clean air rules.  Sure, the MATS rule may have played some role in the decision-making process, but these plants were on a clear path toward retirement in the near future.

In contrast, my previous blog post discussed a report that details positive statements made by 30 power companies indicating that early investments in their power plants have put them in a good position to comply with EPA’s new air pollution rules.

The report notes that these companies represent 50% of the nation’s coal-fired power plants, and eleven of the 15 largest coal-based electric power companies. Across the fleet, about 50% of coal plants are very well controlled with scrubbers and other pollution control systems.  So, let’s do the math:

• 70% of the nation’s electric generating facilities are not affected by EPA’s MATS rule because they rely on natural gas, nuclear, or other non-emitting energy sources.
• 15% of the nation’s electric generating facilities are coal plants that are already complying or well on their way to comply with the MATS rule.
• This means that 85% of the nation’s electric generating fleet is unaffected by the rule or ready to comply.

The fact is that coal-fired electricity imposes significant costs on society and these costs need to be incorporated into the cost of doing business. This is precisely what the EPA rule aims to accomplish.

With yesterday’s inclusion of the EPA’s final MATS rule in the Federal Register, we are close to the culmination of a rule that has been anticipated for decades. Petitioners have already begun to file suit against the law, and members of Congress have threatened to force a vote under the Congressional Review Act that would vacate or delay the rule.

But these stall tactics don’t change the basic facts: those companies that have anticipated and prepared for the rules are ready to comply with the rules in a timely fashion.  Those companies that instead choose to close older plants, are evaluating a host of factors, and ought not to use EPA as a scapegoat for decisions that have been informed by many different economic drivers.

A recent analysis by Susan F. Tierney, Why Coal Plants Retire:  Power Market Fundamentals as of 2012, takes a closer look at these market drivers.  Tierney, managing principal of the Analysis Group, is a power industry expert who has conducted numerous studies on electricity reliability.  I’ve put Tierney’s white paper on the top of my weekend reading pile and look forward to having more to say about her findings in my next post.

Dan Bakal is director of Ceres’ Electric Power Program. This piece was originally published at Ceres.

But after 187,000 documents, 10 hearings, and multiple independent media investigations concluding there was no evidence of political “pressure” to approve the loan guarantee, Republicans show no signs of ending the political games around Solyndra. In response to the RNC, Climate Progress created its own infographic that puts the politics-infused investigation into perspective:

And if you hadn’t seen it, here’s the RNC’s version:

Related Post:

• It’s the One-Year Anniversary of House Solyndra Investigation, But the Traditional Gift of Paper Seems Superfluous

Chinese Tier-2 Modules Offered Below $1/W

Prices for crystalline-silicon (c-Si) solar photovoltaic (PV) modules fell below the $1/W mark in January 2012, and in some cases well below even that, marking the first time that global average prices have fallen below this milestone, according to IMS Research.

Economist: Global Warming Means Tough Choices for WV

A hotter planet, an economist visiting West Virginia said, is just something that will be a part of the lives of young people today.

“The reality is, especially for young people in their 20s or 30s, a hotter planet is just going to be a defining feature of their world,” said Eban Goodstein, director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, who spoke Feb. 22 as part of the ongoing “Energy: Who’s Got the Power” speaker series at the University of Charleston. “That means more floods, more droughts and there is going to be a lot of pressure on the coal industry as a consequence.”

That could be bad news for a state accustomed to raking in profits from the very resource — coal — that is catching a lot of the blame for global warming.

“Despite the politics of the moment the science is clear — that’s what’s causing the problem. That and gasoline,” Goodstein said just before speaking at the University of Charleston event. “So, I think folks in West Virginia have just got to sort of accept those facts. You can obviously fight them for a while, but they’re going to catch up with you, and find a new way forward.”

Another Executive to Face Charges in Mine Disaster

A U.S. attorney charged a former Massey Energy Co. mine superintendent Wednesday with conspiring to obstruct federal regulators before a 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners, in a move that signaled a widening criminal investigation.

Booth Goodwin, the U.S. attorney in Charleston, W.Va., charged Gary May, 43 years old, a former superintendent at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., with violating federal mine laws to conceal safety hazards and prevent inspectors from slowing coal production.

Judge’s Ruling Complicates Hydrofracking Issue in New York

A state judge’s decision this week supporting the rights of individual towns to determine whether to allow hydraulic fracturing has added a new wrinkle to the fight over the natural gas drilling process in New York.

Parties on all sides are trying to figure out what the ruling will mean, but a consensus emerged on Wednesday that there will be further court challenges and delays over when, how and where the process, known as hydrofracking, will be allowed in the state, and by whom.

Officials of natural gas companies voiced concern that such local restrictions could render more areas of the Marcellus Shale off-limits to drillers in a state that is already proposing strict regulation of where the industry will be allowed to operate.

Rahm Emanuel: Chicago Coal Plants Must Clean Up, Activists Call for their Closure

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has put Chicago’s two coal power plants on warning: Either present a plan to clean up their pollution or risk being shut down by the city within the next two years.

Various politicians, community groups and others have been pushing for more than a year to shut down the Crawford and Fisk plants — owned and operated by Midwest Generation — because they say the plants come with serious health consequences for the Little Village and Pilsen communities located nearby them.

As the Associated Press reports, Alderman Danny Solis (25th) and Dr. Ravi Shah of the Doctor’s Council of the Service Employees International Union of Illinois on Wednesday are among those who have spoken out against the plants. According to Shah, the coal-fired power plants such as theirs are the largest generators of the greenhouse gases associated with respiratory problems.

Trade Battles Buffet Europe’s Green Efforts

During the past decade, the European Union blazed a green trail with a series of laws mandating a low-carbon economy and promises to set an example for other parts of the world.

That now seems like another era.

A succession of economic crises has pushed European governments to pare subsidies to clean-energy sectors like solar power and has undermined initiatives in other areas like energy efficiency, where member states balked at binding targets.

The E.U. Emissions Trading System — the Union’s flagship climate policy, which requires industries to acquire emissions permits — has been battered by extreme volatility, tax fraud, recycling of used credits, suspicions of profiteering and online attacks.

A Harsh Winter for China’s Wind Industry and Its Leading Company: Sinovel

The Year of the Dragon has gotten off to an inauspicious start for the Chinese wind industry and in particular, Sinovel Wind Group Co. (Sinovel), China’s leading wind turbine manufacturer.

The media loves he-said, she-said stories. Those have the most narrative drama and require the least amount of actual judgment on the part of reporters or editors. Just relate the core facts and then slap some opposing quotes and you are done!

And so we have the Washington Post‘s story on the Heartland affair, “Climate scientist admits duping skeptic group to obtain documents.”

Of course the piece had to quote Heartland Institute President Joseph L. Bast. But recall that several leading climate scientists slammed Heartland last week for “spreading misinformation” and “personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals.” Bast himself told Climate Progress last year, the “ecological impact” of mining and burning fossil fuels is “not negative”!  And remember his 2006 quote on second-hand smoking that “no victim of cancer, heart disease, etc. can ‘prove’ his or her cancer or heart disease was caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.”

Surely one representative of the misinformers is more than enough in any serious news article on climate. But no, the WashPost actually quotes the long-debunked Richard Lindzen to close its piece — please, put your head vises on for this one:

Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has questioned whether climate change will cause effects as severe as some predict, said he has been struck by “the viciousness” of his opponents. But Lindzen feels obligated to keep questioning what Gleick and others say about climate change impact “because they’re lies, it’s that simple. What would you do if people were truly misrepresenting things, and it has consequences for society?”

The WashPost quotes Lindzen attacking others for telling lies and misrepresenting things?  Here are RealClimate scientists debunking a “series of strawman arguments, red-herrings and out and out errors” by Lindzen. Then we have climatologist Kevin Trenberth explaining that the flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got”.  Here is The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder debunking Lindzen, “Global warming denialists have been re-discredited”

How could the Washington Post run those head-exploding quotes from Lindzen?

But they are sober stuff compared to Lindzen’s crocodile tears about how he’s been “struck by ‘the viciousness’ of his opponents?” Last year, he smeared his one-time close friend climatologist Kerry Emanuel:

Emanuel “would tell me that he really felt that it would be a mistake not to take advantage of the issue . . . there is funding . . . it could benefit the department,” Lindzen said in an interview. “I always took a more moralistic view. There has to be a foundation.”

Lindzen is the last guy any serious newspaper should be quoting on this subject — for Emanuel’s response to this “pure fabrication” by Lindzen, as he called it, see here.

In addition to two misinformers, the Post led the piece off with a confusionist:

“My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved,” Gleick wrote in a post on his Huffington Post blog.

Gleick’s admission “is the latest in an escalating spiral of polarizing warfare between self-described ‘Climate Hawks’ and so-called Climate Deniers,” which leaves the majority of scientists and the public “caught in the crossfire,” American University professor Matthew C. Nisbet, who studies the issues, wrote in a blog entry.

[Pause to clean up grey matter because your head vise wasn't strong enough.]

You can see Nisbet’s biases in his word choice.  Climate Hawks are supposedly “self-described” whereas Deniers are “so-called.” This is just a subtle restatement of false balance. In fact, many deniers are ”self-described” (see here). Lindzen himself is!

“I actually like ‘denier.’ That’s closer than skeptic,” says MIT’s Richard Lindzen.

And I don’t know of any climate scientists who describe themselves as “Climate Hawks.”

Nisbet is someone who spends far more time criticizing climate science advocates than he does deniers. That’s his right, but the WashPost shouldn’t be quoting him as if he were some unbiased honest broker. Indeed he is a widely refuted confusionist — see Leading expert withdraws name fromClimate Shift report, explains how key conclusion that environmentalists weren’t outspent by opponents of climate bill “is contradicted by Nisbet’s own data.”

In that report, Nisbet tried to blame the polarization on Gore, but as Prof. Robert Brulle explained: “The discussion of Al Gore ignores basic scholarship on the climate denial efforts, and supports an ideological position that is not grounded in an empirical analysis.” Many of the leading social science researchers in this country agree with Brulle’s conclusion, including McCright and Dunlap and Krosnick (see here).

Nisbet has made clear whom he blames for the polarization, despite what the social science literature and polling data say. He downplayed the role of the deniers and false balance in the media, causing Brulle to say, “I think this conclusion is bogus.” He is not the guy to turn to for some independent assessment of “polarizing warfare.”

REVKIN REPLIES

Yesterday, I excerpted part of NYT blogger Andrew Revkin’s piece on Gleick and said he should retract his overstatements about Gleick.

Revkin replied today in a head-exploding way. He wrote:

First, I will not retract the post I wrote on Gleick’s confession, as demanded by climate campaigner Joe Romm in a piece yesterday on Heartland, Gleick and me.

I didn’t demand he retract the whole piece, as anyone can see, just the overstatements about Gleick. Still, face-saving move, I get it.

Then Revkin did in fact retract some of the overstatements:

I will acknowledge that certain phrases, written in haste, were overstated. Gleick’s reputation and credibility are seriously damaged, not necessarily in ruins ordestroyed.

Duh. Awesome. But here’s the amazing part. Revkin didn’t go back into the original post and make the changes. At least as of 7:40 pm EST — 7 hours after the acknowledgment of error — the now-acknowledged overstatements were still there!

Oh well, lesson not learned.

Then Revkin proceeds to rewrite some history about some earlier errors of his.  I pointed out Revkin has made countless mistakes that he has never formally retracted or apologized for [see, for instance, "NYT's Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation"].  He writes:

Romm’s claim that my news story on a recent lack of warming was wrong doesn’t acknowledge the sequence of scientific papers since that time….

Uhh, no. My claim his story was wrong was based on my identification of several errors — including a factor of 10 (lowball) mistake in the temperature rise in the past 10 years!

Now here’s the thing. If you check the sentences that I said were wrong or misleading, he went back and changed every single one of them in his online story for the Times — but without indicating that he made the change and without mentioning who had pointed out his errors.

So he can lecture someone else about admitting mistakes.

I critique Big Media so much because they have 10 to 100 times my readership and occasionally they fix their mistakes, even if they have a hard time admitting it.

Bizarrely, Revkin quotes some blogger who can’t count asserting I devoted only 27 words in my post to saying “Gleick was wrong.” But I reprinted Gleick’s entire mea culpa. All told, I devoted nearly 400 words to describing Gleick’s errors and agreeing with Gleick’s assessment that he committed a serious lapse of my professional judgment and ethics.

But again, I was quite confident that Big Media would overhype that part of the story. My aim is to put some perspective into the issue and criticize those who have the credibility and audience of Big Media. In this case, Revkin walked back some of his statements, sort of, so I stand by my post.

Finally, Revkin ends his piece this way:

I’m not proud of any errors, but I do make them. It’s enormously creditable that Peter Gleick has owned up to his terrible error in judgment.

The only people I see out there in the climate fight who – as far as I can tell — never admit to an error are people with agendas from which they can never stray. They’re perfect.

Obviously only the deniers — the rejectionists — never change their views as the facts change and never admit they were wrong.

I suppose Revkin wants folks to think he is talking about a certain climate blogger, but as a scientist who has written literally millions of words on this subject in the past few years, it would be impossible not to make mistakes and I admit them regularly — see, for instance, ironically enough, my post about whether you should cancel your subscription to the New York Times.

Aside from the errors common to all bloggers, I’d add that I have made two big errors in my two decades working on this issue. I have consistently underestimated the timing and speed of climate impacts and the level of greenhouse gas emissions that would likely cause catastrophic warming. In the 1990s, I was actually a 550 ppm guy! Now I’m a 450 ppm guy and I still may be too high! There’s also a mistake I’ve made in my approach to blogging that I’ve worked to fix in the last year or two. But I think I will leave that for a separate post.

NOTE: ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself to be Gleick. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the 2012 Climate Strategy document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

See also “CAPAF General Counsel Responds To Heartland Institute.”

by Shauna Theel, cross-posted from Media Matters

In a segment falsely blaming Obama for rising gasoline prices, Fox News’ America’s Newsroom aired the following chart yesterday. It shows three data points — including the vague “last year” — plotted nonsensically on the x-axis:

“Last year” refers to gas prices last February; Fox’s chart omitted what happened in the 13 months between February 2011 and last week. Here’s how Fox’s source, AAA, displays the data (green line):

This piece was originally published at Media Matters for America.

EIA figures show the massive boom in China's coal consumption through 2010. Coal use increased another 9.7% in 2011

Energy consumption figures just released by the Chinese government underscore how quickly coal use is booming in China, a country that is already the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

In 2011, China’s coal consumption increased by 9.7%, the most year-over-year growth seen since 2005. The country also saw a substantial increase in natural gas consumption, which climbed by 12% in 2011. The figures, released this week by the National Bureau of Statistics, show just how much work needs to be done in order to de-carbonize China’s rapidly growing energy system.

There are a few positive trends to report, however. Overall energy consumption per unit of GDP declined another 2% — continuing the 19.1% decline in energy intensity since 2005. In addition, solar installations increased by an astonishing 547% and wind installations grew by 48% last year.

Non-fossil fuels — solar PV, solar thermal, wind, and hydro — now account for 9.4% of China’s primary energy consumption. Officials expect renewables to make up roughly 11.4% of consumption by 2015 and energy intensity to decrease another 16% by 2015. China is also in the process of rolling out provincial greenhouse gas trading programs in an attempt to decrease emissions 45% by 2020 compared to 2005 levels.

These developments are promising, but they still don’t stop China’s rapid growth in emissions. Assuming a business-as-usual approach to energy development, the International Energy Agency projects that by the mid-2020s, China’s emissions will double those in the United States.

Related stories:

• The Deniers’ Fantasy World: EIA Projects 40% Rise in CO2 Emissions by 2035
• Interactive Graphic: China’s Explosive Consumption of Coal

Changes in ice thickness (in centimeters per year) during 2003-2010 as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, averaged over each of the world’s ice caps and glacier systems outside of Greenland and Antarctica. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Colorado

This piece was reposted from the NASA website

In the first comprehensive satellite study of its kind, a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team used NASA data to calculate how much Earth’s melting land ice is adding to global sea level rise.

Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), the researchers measured ice loss in all of Earth’s land ice between 2003 and 2010, with particular emphasis on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.

The total global ice mass lost from Greenland, Antarctica and Earth’s glaciers and ice caps during the study period was about 4.3 trillion tons (1,000 cubic miles), adding about 0.5 inches (12 millimeters) to global sea level. That’s enough ice to cover the United States 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) deep.

“Earth is losing a huge amount of ice to the ocean 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,” said University of Colorado Boulder physics professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study. “The strength of GRACE is it sees all the mass in the system, even though its resolution is not high enough to allow us to determine separate contributions from each individual glacier.”

About a quarter of the average annual ice loss came from glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica (roughly 148 billion tons, or 39 cubic miles). Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica and their peripheral ice caps and glaciers averaged 385 billion tons (100 cubic miles) a year. Results of the study will be published online Feb. 8 in the journal Nature.

Traditional estimates of Earth’s ice caps and glaciers have been made using ground measurements from relatively few glaciers to infer what all the world’s unmonitored glaciers were doing. Only a few hundred of the roughly 200,000 glaciers worldwide have been monitored for longer than a decade.

One unexpected study result from GRACE was that the estimated ice loss from high Asian mountain ranges like the Himalaya, the Pamir and the Tien Shan was only about 4 billion tons of ice annually. Some previous ground-based estimates of ice loss in these high Asian mountains have ranged up to 50 billion tons annually.

“The GRACE results in this region really were a surprise,” said Wahr, who is also a fellow at the University of Colorado-headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and extrapolated to infer the behavior of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, most of the high glaciers are located in very cold environments and require greater amounts of atmospheric warming before local temperatures rise enough to cause significant melting. This makes it difficult to use low-elevation, ground-based measurements to estimate results from the entire system.”

“This study finds that the world’s small glaciers and ice caps in places like Alaska, South America and the Himalayas contribute about 0.02 inches per year to sea level rise,” said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “While this is lower than previous estimates, it confirms that ice is being lost from around the globe, with just a few areas in precarious balance. The results sharpen our view of land-ice melting, which poses the biggest, most threatening factor in future sea level rise.”

The twin GRACE satellites track changes in Earth’s gravity field by noting minute changes in gravitational pull caused by regional variations in Earth’s mass, which for periods of months to years is typically because of movements of water on Earth’s surface. It does this by measuring changes in the distance between its two identical spacecraft to one-hundredth the width of a human hair.

– a NASA repost

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

The letter sent to the Heartland Institute is well worth reading and reprinted in full here:

Dear Ms. Martin:

I am General Counsel of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (“CAP Action”). This letter responds to your February 19 message regarding our reporters’ coverage of documents related to the Heartland Institute. Please be assured that CAP Action takes the accuracy of its reporting seriously.

Your letter asserts that the document entitled “2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” is “fabricated and false.” CAP Action has no interest in attributing a fabricated document to Heartland. Given the seriousness of this charge, and the fact that this document’s “tone and content closely matched that of other documents that [Heartland] did not dispute,”¹ we ask your assistance in verifying that the document is in fact “fabricated” rather than, for example, a draft of which you were not immediately aware. Please let me know the efforts that Heartland undertook to ensure that the document “was not written by anyone associated with Heartland,” as well as the “obvious and gross misstatements of fact” it contains. We have removed this document from the website while awaiting your response.

Your letter also notes that “Heartland has not authenticated” the remaining documents in the week since they were made public. To my knowledge, Heartland has never claimed that these documents were fabricated, and your February 15 admission that they were sent by a Heartland staff person to “an unknown person” posing as a Heartland board member suggests they are genuine. So does Heartland’s February 15 apology to the donors identified in the documents. Subsequently, the newly-admitted source has indicated that he received these documents directly from Heartland and has not altered them. Nevertheless, we await the outcome of your continued efforts to “authenticate” these documents.

Finally, your letter suggests that publication or even discussion of the Heartland documents “is improper and unlawful” because Heartland deems them “confidential.” The Supreme Court has flatly rejected this notion, repeatedly declaring that the First Amendment protects the right to publish information obtained lawfully – even if underlying sources act improperly, erroneously, or in violation of the law. See, e.g., Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514, 535 (2001). As CAP Action has reported, our bloggers received the documents via an anonymous email. Our reporters did nothing to purloin any documents, they did not encourage anyone else to do so, and they did not know the sender’s identity until many days later, on February 20, when the Huffington Post article titled: “The Origin of the Heartland Documents” was published. Faced with a substantially similar set of relevant facts in Bartnicki, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited recovery of damages for dissemination of an illegally-made recording that was left in a defendant’s mailbox because “a stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern.” Id.; see also Jean v. Massachusetts State Police, 492 F.3d 24, 29 (1st Cir. 2007) (applying Bartnicki). The same is true here, although we note that CAP Action takes no position as to whether the documents were lawfully obtained by the source.

CAP Action has taken extraordinary steps to ensure that Heartland’s perspective on these documents is included in our coverage. As your letter notes, CAP Action immediately and conspicuously linked to Heartland’s February 15 press release regarding the documents and has subsequently noted Heartland’s assertions in other blog posts in order to ensure that your position on these documents was reported fully and fairly. If you would like to provide us with additional information, including answers to the questions above, we will certainly consider it.

This is not a full recitation of the relevant facts and CAP Action reserves all its rights, remedies and defenses concerning these issues.

Sincerely,

Debbie Fine

General Counsel

¹ Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman, Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science, N.Y. Times, February 16, 2012, at A23.

Download the CAPAF response letter to the Heartland Institute.

Bill Koch celebrates his 1992 yachting win. He claims yachting will be destroyed by offshore wind.

by Michael Conathan

This doesn’t qualify as much of a news flash, but just in case you were curious, hypocrisy is alive and well in the Koch family. And this time it’s going to cost one of them half a million dollars.

After a lengthy series of lawsuits he filed against his better known brothers, Bill Koch has often been described as the “black sheep” of his family. And while Bill’s public and messy falling out with his $50 billion brothers has led to only a slightly less lucrative career as founder of the dirty energy conglomerate Oxbow Carbon, he has largely steered clear of his siblings extreme climate denial and political wrangling. Except when it comes to one pet peeve: offshore wind.

Earlier this year, Cape Wind became the first offshore wind farm to receive the green light from federal regulators despite Koch’s funneling over $1.5 million dollars to a nonprofit group, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, formed to combat Cape Wind. The site where the project will be built just happens to be visible from backyard of Koch’s mansion on a private island country club community in Osterville, MA. One of the favorite arguments used by Koch and the Alliance is that the project was the beneficiary of a “sweetheart, no-bid deal.”

Apparently, Koch only likes sweetheart no-bid deals for his own operations. Last week, Gunnison Energy, a subsidiary of Oxbow Carbon, was slapped by the Justice Department with a $550,000 fine “related to an agreement not to compete in bidding for four natural gas leases sold at auction by the U.S. Department of Interior.”

According to the complaint, [Gunnison Energy] and [co-conspirator SG Interests VII Ltd.] were separately developing natural gas resources in Western Colorado. In 2005, GEC and SGI entered into a written agreement under which they agreed that only SGI would bid at the auctions and then assign an interest in the acquired leases to GEC…. As a result of the agreement between GEC and SGI, the United States received less revenue from the sale of the four leases than it would have had SGI and GEC competed at the auctions.

Not, of course, that Bill Koch has ever been interested in allowing the federal government to get its fair share. His run to capture the America’s Cup yachting trophy in 1992 was fueled by tax breaks from donating his own money to a foundation set up to fund his pursuit of the prize. The donations saved him “a couple million dollars” on his taxes.

It should come as no surprise that a dirty energy magnate with a history of bilking the federal government might try to pull a fast one on federal regulators. Let’s just make sure we remember this one next time he accuses a clean energy company of working the system.

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at American Progress.

by Daniel J. Weiss

Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY) told reporters during a recent press conference on the economy on that “Solyndra and Keystone represent what’s at stake this November.  Two very different visions — I think Solyndra and Keystone typify them.”

She is not the first Republican official to make this comment, promoting a vision that means relying on a very flawed pipeline project that benefits foreign oil companies.  It sharply contrasts with President Obama’s clean energy investment vision.

A “Keystone” economy means:

• No additional oil produced for the United States.  The State Department’s final “Keystone XL Assessment” concluded:

“WORLD and ETP studies indicate that building versus not building Keystone XL would not of itself have any significant impact on: U.S. total crude runs, total crude and product import levels or costs.

“This is because changing WCSB [oil sands] crude export routes would not alter either U.S., Canadian or total global crude supply.” (emphasis original)

Additionally, there are indications that a significant portion of the oil sands piped through Keystone to Gulf Coast refineries will be made into products for export rather than kept here.  At a December Congressional hearing, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) asked the CEO of pipeline owner TransCanada whether he would agree to keep all refined products from oil sands in the United States.  He declined.

On February 15, Rep. Markey offered an amendment to H.R. 3408 to “ensure that if the Keystone XL pipeline is built, the oil that it transports to the Gulf of Mexico and the fuels made from that oil remain in this country to benefit Americans.”

The amendment failed 173-254.  Rep. Buerkle voted against it, opposing retention of Keystone oil in the United States and instead supporting its export to other nations.

• Same oil prices for the United States. The analysis determined that the pipeline will only have a tiny impact on the price of crude and other products:

“Under the KXL scenario, delivered prices for [oil sands]…into PADD3 Gulf Coast are lower than under the No KXL case and those for PADD2 [Midwest], higher.  The effect is limited, no more than around $0.70/bbl.”

This means that gasoline prices in the Gulf Coast region would at best be only one and three quarter cents lower per gallon.  Meanwhile gasoline prices would increase in the Midwest if Keystone is built because the oil glut there now is keeping prices lower.

Time magazine concurred that Keystone would have almost no impact on gasoline prices:

“Keystone would have little immediate [price] effect, especially since there’s already sufficient pipeline infrastructure in place for the next few years.”

• Relatively few jobs created.  The State Department’s “Executive Summary of the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Proposed Keystone XL Project” predicts that the construction workforce would only “consist of approximately 5,000 t0 6,000 workers.”

These are far fewer jobs than the claims of the big oil companies promoting Keystone.

In contrast, the Recovery Act investments in clean energy technologies created 733,000 direct jobs through 2010 according to the Economic Policy Institute and the Blue Green Alliance.

Keystone would produce far fewer jobs than the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently approved standards to require power plants to reduce their smog, acid rain, mercury and air toxics pollution.  The University of Massachusetts estimates that these rules will create 325,000 direct jobs over five years.

• Reliance on a project that is not “shovel ready.” The Keystone pipeline isn’t even map ready yet since its route through Nebraska has yet to be decided.  And there has been no assessment of the potential harm to adjacent air, water, and land from its construction and operation once it is sited.

In fact, there is a growing controversy over building the pipeline in places where the route is already mapped.  The Los Angeles Times reported on the conflict between landowners and TransCanada:

“Canadian company that wants to build the 1,660-mile structure [is] going to court to force the cooperation of landowners who don’t want it crossing their land.

“The issue has brought conservative tea party groups out rallying alongside environmentalists opposed to tar sands oil production, united behind [Julia Trigg] Crawford’s attempt to keep the pipeline from crossing her 600-acre farm in the town of Direct, near Paris, where she fears it could contaminate the creek that irrigates her fields.”

This controversy suggests that construction is not “shovel ready” outside of Nebraska either.

Rep. Buerkle and Republican Congressional leadership support approval of the Keystone pipeline as their solution to high gasoline prices, which is a major goal of big oil too.

This contrasts sharply with President Obama and the Democratic Congressional leadership’s energy vision, which includes the following policies in the proposed FY 2013 budget.

• Invest in clean, home grown renewable energy, including wind, solar and geothermal resources.

• Increase funds for R&D for “game changing” advanced energy technologies.

• Help businesses and home owners lower their electricity bills via energy efficiency retrofits of their buildings and homes.

• Cut $40 billion in tax breaks for big oil companies over the next decade.  The five largest companies made $137 billion in profits in 2011 – they don’t need additional subsidies.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama acknowledged that sometimes investments like the loan guarantee for Solyndra fail, but we must not surrender to our economic competitors.

“Our experience with shale gas…shows us that the payoffs on these public investments don’t always come right away.  Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail.  But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy…. I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here.”

Rep. Buerkle and her Republican allies would capitulate to our clean energy competitors while doing Big Oil’s bidding. Their vision is a path to doing nothing about the price of gas, creating fewer jobs, and spewing more pollution.

Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

GOP Not Listening to Even Conservative Scientists on Climate Change

Katherine Bagley, InsideClimate News

A number of prominent U.S. climate scientists who identify themselves as Republican say their attempts in recent years to educate the GOP leadership on the scientific evidence of man-made climate change have been futile. Now, many have given up trying and the few who continue notice very little change after speaking with politicians and their aides.

“No GOP candidates or policymakers want to touch the issue, and those of us trying to educate them are left frustrated,” Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a registered Republican, told InsideClimate News. “Climate change has become a third rail in politics.”

Heading into the 2008 presidential election, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, warned about the dangers of global warming. He was one of a group of moderate Republicans who used to be leading climate action advocates, acknowledging the scientific consensus on climate change and the need for federal policies to address it….

Brigham Young University geochemist Barry Bickmore is a Mormon and active Republican, serving as a county delegate for the GOP from 2008 to 2010. Bickmore first got involved with his party’s handling of climate change when he and other scientific colleagues in the state banded together to try to stop a 2010 Utah resolution that cast doubt on climate science and urged the Environmental Protection Agency to halt its efforts to regulate carbon emissions. The scientists said the resolution was riddled with scientific errors, but it won passage anyway….

Canadian oil: Could some of it be headed for California?

Much of the focus behind Canada’s push to build a new oil pipeline to the West Coast has been to diversify its markets, to reduce its reliance on the U.S. as a customer. The Canadian government says it wants to start selling oil to China and South Korea.

But there are strong indications that California could be the ultimate destination for much of the oil shipped on the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.

Analysts say California could see as much as half of the oil transported out of the tar sands of northern Alberta to a port on the coast of British Columbia, where it would be loaded onto tankers for destinations as yet unknown.

After the release in December of a University of Calgary study on the economics of transporting Canadian oil, energy economist Michal C. Moore, senior fellow at the university and a former California energy commissioner, predicted that half of Northern Gateway’s oil would go to “under-utilized California refineries,” the Calgary Herald reported, with the other half going to northern Asia.

Enbridge Inc., which is seeking to build the $5 billion, 731-mile pipeline, has by no means ruled out deliveries to the U.S. West Coast.

New York Judge Rules Town Can Ban Gas Hydrofracking

In a victory for opponents of the drilling process known as hydrofracking, a New York State judge ruled on Tuesday that the upstate town of Dryden in Tompkins County can ban natural gas drilling within its boundaries.

In August, Dryden’s Town Board used its zoning laws to pass a drilling ban, one salvo in a battle that is playing out nationwide as energy companies move to drill in densely populated areas. A month after the ban’s passage, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, a Colorado driller with 22,200 acres under lease in the town, filed a lawsuit arguing that the town’s authority did not extend to regulating or prohibiting gas drilling.

In a decision issued on Tuesday, Justice Phillip R. Rumsey of State Supreme Court said that state law does not preclude a municipality from using its power to regulate land use to ban oil and natural gas production. The ruling is the first in New York to affirm local powers in the controversy over drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a gas deposit under a large area of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

GM to Gingrich: You can put a gun rack in a Volt

General Motors Co. chided Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that the Volt is an “Obama car.”

“You can’t put a gun rack in a Volt,” Gingrich said in a line that drew cheers at a speech in Georgia this weekend, and is now appearing in his stump speech. “We believe in the right to bear arms and we like to bear the arms in our trucks.”

GM spokesman Selim Bingol responded to Gingrich in a new GM blog: “Newt Gingrich has taken up saying that ‘You can’t put a gun rack on a Volt.’ That’s like saying ‘You can’t put training wheels on a Harley.’ Actually, you can. But the real question is ‘Why would you?’ In both examples: It looks weird. It doesn’t work very well, and, there are better places for gun racks and training wheels — pickup trucks and little Schwinns, respectively.”

Bingol added: “Seriously, when is the last time you saw a gun rack in ANY sedan?”

GM sells hundreds of thousands of trucks annually, and many owners install gun racks.

UN climate chief courts CEOs in bid to accelerate efforts to curb warming

As governments bicker over who should do what to slow the pace of global warming, the U.N.’s climate chief is increasingly looking to business leaders to show the way forward to a low-carbon future.

Christiana Figueres told The Associated Press that her efforts to reach out to high-profile executives from companies such as Coca-Cola, Unilever and Virgin Group represent “a deeper recognition of the fact that the private sector can contribute in a decisive way.”

Since the start of 2012, the Costa Rican head of the U.N. climate agency has met corporate leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos and on a cruise to Antarctica organized by Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project.

“I’m hoping to accelerate what I call the push and pull process,” Figueres told the AP in a phone interview Tuesday from her agency’s secretariat in Bonn, Germany.

EU Carbon Tax Regulations Likely To Be Accepted By Non-European Countries

Once rhetoric surrounding a brewing “carbon trade war” has cooled, non-EU countries are likely accept charges against carbon emissions on their flights arriving in and departing from the European Union.

Opposed countries including the United States, China and India are meeting in Moscow this week, disgruntled over the perceived injustices of the EU scheme which applies a charge on the entire carbon emissions of flights including those parts outside EU airspace.

At most they will likely warn the EU, and demand that the U.N. body, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), resolves the problem.

The plea to ICAO will be in vain: it would be difficult to make a binding sanction stick against the EU, which would only accept an ICAO compromise launching a global scheme to curb emissions from aviation – something it has failed to do in 15 years.

But here’s the important thing to remember: The industry is being challenged, not beaten. Amidst all the hand wringing over what cheap natural gas will do to investment in renewables, we often lose sight of the fact that the cost and price of renewable energy technologies are still chasing the record price drops in natural gas. When the price of natural gas starts to climb back up (according to many estimates, it will fairly soon), renewables will be more competitive than ever.

Over the next couple of years, I believe that the age-old idiom will again be proven true: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Below are my top three reasons why natural gas won’t be the death of renewables.

1. Cheap gas won’t stay “cheap” for too much longer

Source: Slate.com

It’s often said that America has a 100-year supply of natural gas. However, those figures, which are based on estimates from the Potential Gas Committee, factor in “proved” reserves, “possible” reserves and “speculative” reserves. If we narrow these figures down to proven, technically-exploitable resources based upon current natural gas consumption rates, more cautious estimates put our supply at roughly 11-21 years.

With mature gas plays like the Barnett Shale and Marcellus Shale in decline or appearing to be nearing a peak, and drillers scaling back on operations because it’s not profitable to drill with such low prices, a growing number of analysts are questioning whether the U.S. gas industry is approaching peak production. Petroleum Geologist Arthur E. Berman recently wrote about the decline rates in conventional and unconventional gas fields at the Oil Drum:

“This development may expose the notion of long-term natural gas abundance and cheap gas as an illusion. The good news is that this adjustment will lead to higher gas prices in a future less distant than most believe. Higher prices coupled with greater discipline in drilling will allow operators to earn a suitable return and offer the best opportunity for supply to grow to meet future needs.”

In its latest Annual Energy Outlook, the U.S Energy Information Administration also cut estimates of unproved technically recoverable resources by 42%. As energy analyst Chris Nelder recently wrote: “Everything you know about shale gas is wrong.”

2. Renewable energy is challenged, but still competitive

Source: Institute for Local Self Reliance, using data from Lazard

Over the years, the conversation around gas has changed dramatically in renewable energy circles. For example, up until 2008 when gas prices were at their peak and wind development was soaring, the industry’s message was simple: We’re a far more cost-effective, reliable investment than gas.

But the tide turned in 2009, when gas prices started their precipitous drop. I remember the American Wind Energy Association’s annual conference in 2010, when shale gas dominated the CEO roundtable discussion. “Our single biggest challenge is improving technologies to compete with these low prices,” said one executive.

The industry clearly took the challenge seriously. Today, due to bigger turbines, more reliable equipment and better materials, the cost of wind has dropped to record lows. In fact, some developers are even signing long-term power purchase agreements in the 3 cents a kilowatt-hour range. And last fall, Bloomberg New Energy Finance projected that wind would be “fully competitive with energy produced from combined-cycle gas turbines by 2016″ under fair wind conditions.

The same technological improvements and maturation in project development in wind are driving down the cost of solar PV as well. For example, in California, solar developers have signed contracts for power below the projected price of natural gas from a 500-MW combined cycle power plant. (That projection does include a carbon price).

These trends are driving record levels of interest from investors. In 2011, for the first time ever, global investments in renewable energy surpassed investments in fossil fuels.

The bottom line: the price of renewable energy continues to come down while the projected price of natural gas is only expected to rise.

We do have to be realistic about the situation: assuming gas prices stay near record low levels for a long period of time — which they likely won’t — renewables deployment won’t grow at the rate we need it to. But if you look at the where large-scale renewables stack up with the cost of energy from peaking gas plants and combined cycle plants (chart above), you can see that the industry is still nipping at the heels of gas — even with a “revolution” underway in accessing shale resources. That’s something that can’t be ignored.

3. Natural gas is a fossil fuel and still contributes to global warming

Source: Nature

When considering our energy investment choices, it’s important for us to remember why we want renewable energy in the first place. Sure, it’s a domestic resource that empowers local communities, encourages entrepreneurial innovation, and spurs new types of economic development. But ultimately, renewables are an important tool for helping us reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat global warming. We should never lose sight of this environmental context.

So while gas will be an important short-term tool to knock old coal plants out of the energy mix and provide a source of back up for intermittent renewables, the global warming challenge will eventually present limits to our investments in natural gas, if not this decade, then certain in the 2020s.

As we’ve pointed out numerous times, without a price on carbon, natural gas is not a bridge fuel — it is a bridge to nowhere. Under the International Energy Agency’s “Golden Age of Gas” scenario that assumes an aggressive build-out of “clean” natural gas plants, we would still see global temperatures rise 6° Fahrenheit.

While the science is still far from settled on the life-cycle emissions issue, measured emissions in some cases are well above what drillers claim (see chart above).

Even if natural gas is cleaner than coal, it is still a fossil fuel. When we get serious about addressing global warming and put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, the current economic advantages of natural gas are diminished or disappear. Last October, three center-right economists — Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus — found that with a carbon price of $27 per ton, the cost of environmental and health damages from natural gas were greater than the resource’s added value to society.

In other words, natural gas isn’t nearly as inexpensive as current prices suggest (see also “Economics Stunner: Natural Gas Damage Larger Than Its Value Added For Even Low CO2 Prices“).

Writing to 415 of the world’s biggest global warming polluters this week, global investors representing $10 trillion put it best:

“The external costs of greenhouse gas emissions will become internalized into company cash flows and profitability,” Paul Abberley, chief executive officer at Aviva Investors in London said in the statement today. ‘‘Managing greenhouse gas emissions is therefore essential to delivering sustainable shareholder returns.’’

Natural gas certainly has a role to play in this long, complicated energy transition — assuming we properly value its environmental impact. But if we listen to these forward-thinking global investors and take their call for a low-carbon strategy seriously, renewables, efficiency and demand response will not be swept aside, no matter what the short-term challenges are.

Elizabeth Kolbert: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (“No Policy” — the policy aggressively advanced by most professional disinformers and tacitly accepted by most in the intelligentsia and media — eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

Humanity is putting its foot on the accelerator even though the world’s top scientists and governments have repeatedly explained we are headed over a cliff. The people who will suffer the most are people who have not contributed to this  impending catastrophe —  future generations and the poorest among us.

This is such a colossally immoral and unethical act —  collectively and in many cases individually — that most people, including the overwhelming majority of the so-called intelligentsia, simply choose to ignore it on a daily basis. That won’t save a livable climate, however, nor it will stop future generations from cursing our names.

And so it is not surprising that many immoral and unethical acts that regularly occur on a far less grand scale are condoned or winked at or simply ignored.

Every day, countless organizations spread misinformation aimed at delaying the action needed to avoid destroying a livable climate, which will cause billions to suffer — and needlessly, since every major independent study makes clear that the cost of action is incredibly low. Many of the disinformers routinely attack and smear climate scientists. Some routinely publish their e-mails, encouraging their readers to cyber-bully scientists who are doing nothing more than trying to inform the world of the consequences of its untenable choices.  But we have become inured to it — heck, there’s a whole TV network devoted to spreading lies — yawn, let’s change the channel to something we like.

The media continues to reduce coverage of the story of the century — “Silence of the Lambs 2: Media Herd’s Coverage of Climate Change Drops Sharply — Again. The three network news stations broadcast 14 climate change stories with a total air time of 32.5 minutes in 2011,  down from 32 stories and 90.5 minutes last year and well below the 2007 peak of 147 segments totaling 386 minutes. This is a stunning collective lapse in judgment by editors and producers. But the media — in a classic act of circular benchmarking — sees everyone else in the media doing it, so the inconceivable becomes an accepted norm.

Many in the media who do cover the story continue to downplay the science or fail to connect the dots, even between extreme heat waves and global warming. Worse, many in the media, including some at New York Times, quote long-debunked disinformers and confusionists who routinely smear climate scientists — people who should have zero credibility.  This is also a collective lapse in judgment that merits multiple apologies and retractions, but it has become the “norm” in journalism. Future generations will marvel at how the once lofty  profession of journalism destroyed its own credibility and misreported the story of the century.

In this sewer of unethical and immoral activity, we all have tough choices, most especially climate scientists, the victims of many of the worst attacks. These modern day Cassandras have become increasingly blunt and outspoken for obvious reasons — they understand best what is likely to happen if we keep listening to the disinformers and their enablers in the media.

Even the formerly reticent Lonnie Thompson explained why he and other climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” He continues:

That bold statement may seem like hyperbole, but there is now a very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible. This pattern emerges not, as is so often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.

That is simply what the science says, as my review of 50 recent studies makes clear (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

What is a scientist to do in such a casually self-destructive world? The prestigious journal Nature editorialized 2 years ago, “Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”

That is all prologue for the events of the last week or so.

As Climate Progress reported earlier this week, Heartland Institute documents revealed plans to dupe children and ruin their future. The AP worked to independently verify the documents and concluded, “The federal consultant working on the classroom curriculum, the former TV weatherman, a Chicago elected official who campaigns against hidden local debt and two corporate donors all confirmed to the AP that the sections in the document that pertained to them were accurate. No one the AP contacted said the budget or fundraising documents mentioning them were incorrect.”

Subsequently, several climate scientists who “had their emails stolen [in 2009], posted online and grossly misrepresented,” slammed Heartland for “spreading misinformation” and “personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals.” The scientists specifically noted:

In 2009, the Heartland Institute was among the groups that spread false allegations about what these stolen emails said. Despite multiple independent investigations, which demonstrated that allegations against scientists were false, the Heartland Institute continued to attack scientists based on the stolen emails. When more stolen emails were posted online in 2011, the Heartland Institute again pointed to their release and spread false claims about scientists.

You can read Heartland’s reply to similar charges here.

Last night I, and I imagine everyone else, was stunned to learned that Dr. Peter Gleick was the one who put these documents into the public domain. In a Huffington Post piece, he acknowledged “a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics,” an assessment I would not disagree with. He then apologized for his mistakes, a move that distinguishes him from Heartland or his critics in the media, like Andrew Revkin, whose too-rapid response to these events certainly crossed the line.

As an important aside, when considering whether the boundary between ethical violation and criminal act has been crossed, we should in all fairness use the Revkin rule. When someone posted on Climate Progress that the Climategate emails were stolen — the assertion made by the University of East Anglia and others — Revkin himself posted:

Just to be clear, no British law enforcement agency has yet said whether a crime has been committed. I have called the Norfolk Constabulary more than once and mum’s still the word.

Seriously! So we’ll just have to wait until some law enforcement agency makes its judgment — and I’m going to make a wild guess that we’ll have a long wait on that.

Here is Gleick’s statement:

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.

I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Yes, we live in an age where a large fraction of people pretend to be someone they aren’t online, where reporters routinely practice deception, where bloggers and other even pretend to be famous people to get a scoop or embarrass someone.

But Gleick is right that he committed a serious lapse of professional judgment and ethics. He is right to regret his actions and make a personal apology.

When exactly will the Heartland Institute apologize for “spreading misinformation” and “personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals”?

And when exactly will Revkin apologize for his various lapses, including his absurd and I think hypocritical response to Gleick’s post?

Here are the key parts of what Revkin wrote:

Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing….

The Heartland Institute had already signaled that it plans to seek charges and civil action against the person who extracted its documents under a false identity….

I won’t speculate on how the legal aspects of this story might play out.

Another question, of course, is who wrote the climate strategy document that Gleick now says was mailed to him. His admitted acts of deception in acquiring the cache of authentic Heartland documents surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary, which Heartland’s leadership insists is fake.

One way or the other, Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).

The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the “rational public debate” that he wrote — correctly — is so desperately needed.

I haven’t seen so much nonsense since, well, since I read something from Heartland.

Revkin has ZERO credibility in making these attacks.  Zero.

First off, if one act of this nature could ruin a reputation or destroy his credibility, then what precisely is Revkin doing routinely quoting and citing people who have been repeatedly debunked, the disinformers and confusionists.

Seriously, Revkin — and the NY Times itself — quote all manner of people who simply should have no credibility whatsoever on a regular basis (see “Revkin’s DotEarth hypes disinformation posted on an anti-science website” and “In yet another front-page journalistic lapse, the NY Times once again equates non-scientists — Bastardi, Coleman, and Watts (!) — with climate scientists“).

Revkin smeared Al Gore — equating his science-based talks with George Will’s long-debunked falsehoods — based on the false claims of one of the most debunked people in the blogosphere (see “Yes, the false accusation that Gore was exaggerating came from none other than Roger Pielke, Jr.: And yes, I just re-confirmed with Gore’s office that Pielke is as wrong today in his false claims as he was 2 years ago”).

But Revkin has never retracted his attack or apologized.  And he keeps quoting Pielke (as does the NY Times), even though Pielke’s statements on climate scientists inspire objections from scientists like Ken Caldeira (see here).  Heck, now Pielke brags about the ability to team up with the hard-core anti-science websites and drive traffic to his site. Revkin’s defense is that Pielke  has published articles in the peer-reviewed literature. Gosh, Gleick has published many more articles. So I guess his reputation remains intact for the New York Times.

Revkin himself has made countless mistakes that he has never formally retracted or apologized for [see, for instance, "NYT's Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation"].

The closest he ever came was his 2009 stunner on NPR: “I’ve made missteps. I’ve made probably more mistakes this year in my print stories than I had before. That’s kind of frustrating.”  Yes, the top reporter in the country made missteps and mistakes on the story of the century, but all he can offer up is “That’s kind of frustrating.”

Why haven’t that series of missteps and mistakes destroyed his credibility and ruined his reputation?

Again, Revkin has zero credibility in his statements about Gleick and he should retract them.

Revkin writes, “I won’t speculate on how the legal aspects of this story might play out.” Gosh, he’s happy to say there’s no crime in Climategate until the police weigh in.

He writes, Gleick’s “admitted acts of deception in acquiring the cache of authentic Heartland documents surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary, which Heartland’s leadership insists is fake.”  Why? Does Revkin have any evidence to back up this “suspicion.” Is he no longer a journalist but just a guy who passes on suspicions from the blogosphere and from an organization known for “spreading misinformation” and “personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals”?

To repeat, that sentence is dreadful and should be retracted. Revkin doesn’t even say where the “suspicion” came from or what its basis is. He just repeats it. We used to call that gossip. Now I guess it’s in the New York Times manual.

I’ll have to do a separate blog on the subject but its quite clear that Revkin does not think very much of climate scientists. In a dreadful February 1 column that once again quoted the long-debunked Pielke, he dismisses a letter to the Wall Street Journal from 39 of the leading climate scientists in the world this way:

The reality for most of the signatories of the rebuttal letter is that they are more akin to medical technicians — making sure the thermometers gauging a fever are reliable — and radiologists — interpreting a CT scan — than diagnosticians prescribing the appropriate treatment.

Seriously.  Trenberth, Somerville, Caldeira, Overpeck, Mann, Rignot, Watson — they are just technicians who test whether your hospital thermometer works! No wonder Revkin is so quick to jump on these guys.

What Gleick did was wrong and Gleick not only knows it, he admitted it and apologized, thereby preserving his reputation in a world where everyone makes mistakes, but few admit it.

All of us wait for the same from Heartland and Revkin.

UPDATE: ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents related to the Heartland Institute. The documents were sent to us from an anonymous source, and the identity of the source was unknown to ThinkProgress at the time. The source later revealed himself on February 20, 2012. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the 2012 Climate Strategy document as it works to determine the document’s authenticity.

by Donna Cooper, Richard W. Caperton, Kate Gordon , Daniel J. Weiss

Last year was a bonanza for the top five oil companies—BP plc, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil Corp., and Royal Dutch Shell Group—posting combined net-income earnings of $137 billion, a new record. Undeterred, Republican leaders in Congress are seeking to pass transportation legislation that will expand oil and natural gas drilling and will force the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project. House Republicans hope the Senate will concur and give these companies access for oil and gas production to some of our natural crown jewels.

Republicans in the House want to boost drilling offshore and on protected lands so that the federal revenues gained by this expansion of drilling can be used to pay for the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act—the House Republican five-year highway funding bill.

The Center for American Progress has a better idea: Tap the geyser of oil company earnings by imposing a tax on imported oil and ending antiquated federal subsidies for oil companies. Doing this will pay for an environmentally and fiscally sound plan to upgrade our crumbling transportation, water, and energy infrastructure.

CAP’s new report, “Meeting the Infrastructure Imperative,” recommends doing just that, among other things, to put more federal funds and state, local, and private money to work investing in infrastructure over the next 10 years. Our report details why $129 billion more per year is needed to meet our country’s infrastructure capital repair and improvement needs. CAP found that direct federal spending for infrastructure would need to rise by $48 billion a year, or about a 1.3 percent increase in total federal spending. Boosting federal spending by $48 billion would mean an increase approximately the same size as what was spent on the Iraq war in fiscal year 2011.

CAP projects that with this level of increased federal investment, as much as $60 billion in private infrastructure investment and $11 billion in new state and local investment could be mobilized as well. But where will the new federal money come from?

For decades federal gas tax revenues were dedicated to covering the cost of road, bridge, transit, and rail improvements. But Congress hasn’t raised the 18.4-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax in 19 years, and as a result, its value has eroded by one-third, leaving federal transportation programs chronically short of funds. If that tax had been indexed to inflation, it would be 28 cents per gallon today.

Instead of raising the gas tax now—or doing as House Republicans suggest and relying on mythical revenues from expanding oil drilling or scarring our nation’s heartland with a pipeline that could leak and pollute air and water—CAP calls for a tax of $9.50 per barrel on imported oil, alongside ending $4 billion in annual tax breaks for oil companies, both of which will help pay for the additional federal infrastructure investments to meet our transportation, water, and clean energy infrastructure needs. By CAP’s calculations an oil-import tax and the termination of the oil and gas subsidies would generate approximately $40 billion annually. These funds are needed on top of the approximately $36 billion generated by the federal gasoline tax.

Recent Republican proposals also look to oil companies to shoulder some of the financial burden of infrastructure improvements, but they do so by relying on revenues from an environmentally devastating expansion of drilling offshore and on protected lands. CAP instead proposes to broaden the user-fee model of infrastructure funding to include oil companies’ tax contributions since they are significant beneficiaries of infrastructure improvements.

Under CAP’s plan tax revenues on imported oil and the revenues gained by ending antiquated subsidies would help pay for a decade of investment at the scale needed to bring our infrastructure back up to world-class standards. Specifically, our plan would enable us to:

• Build out our transit, regional, and passenger rail capacity and as a result make a real dent in air pollution: With better transit and new federal investment in better roads, drivers would face less congestion and save an average of $335 per year due to fewer car repairs and better fuel economy.
• Stimulate $40 billion a year in private investment in clean energy generation, distribution, transmission, and smart grid infrastructure: At this level of investment, we can achieve an 80 percent reduction in carbon pollution by 2050 compared to the carbon pollution levels in 2005.
• Make it possible for older water systems to ensure the quality of our drinking water is safe, and that wastewater treatment and storm water overload systems can adequately protect our rivers and lakes by removing industrial and household pollutants from wastewater.

In addition to spending more on what needs to be done, this plan also shows how we can do a better job deciding where and how to invest.

For instance, to attract more private financing for clean energy, the CAP plan calls for a national infrastructure bank with a clean energy loan program and at least a 10-year extension of the investment and production tax credits for renewable energy generation that have been so effective at stimulating private investment in many wind and solar projects. The plan also proposes the creation of a national infrastructure council that would bring together federal agencies to strategically align their infrastructure investments to promote water and energy efficiency efforts and to reduce both traffic congestion and carbon dioxide pollution.

Unfortunately, the Republicans in the House are suggesting cutting funds for transportation infrastructure and suggesting that we rely on the expansion of offshore oil drilling that has very little potential to produce the needed revenues to pay for badly needed investments. In addition, House Republican leaders also plan to hold transportation investments hostage until the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, which would bring dirty tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf coast for refining, with a large portion sent overseas.

The House Republican leaders hope to move their transportation package after this week’s congressional recess. We suggest they consider a sounder approach that both protects our environment and ensures sufficient revenues to rebuild our infrastructure. CAP’s proposal is a game-changing strategy that could succeed with support from labor, business, environmentalists, and officeholders of both parties. It’s time to get to work on it.

Donna Cooper is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Richard Caperton is the Director of Clean Energy Investment at American Progress. Kate Gordon is the Center’s Vice President for Energy Policy. Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at American Progress.

This piece was originally published at the Center for American Progress.

by Dave Levitan, reposted from OnEarth

When the heat turns up in an overcrowded bar, patrons waiting for service tend to get thirstier. In the coming decades, a similar scenario may play out in the United States. According to a new study, more than a third of U.S. counties may be at “extreme” or “high” risk of water shortages by 2050. This won’t be due to a dearth in bartenders, of course, but the result of a swelling population, along with the potential temperature increases and precipitation changes associated with climate change.

The research, funded by the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth), appeared last week in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

The first strike against water supplies comes from increases in population. Projections suggest fairly linear growth between now and mid-century, meaning the U.S. will have about 419.9 million people in 2050 (up from its current population of 313,000,000). All of those additional Americana will have to drink, and eat food grown with water, and turn on lights powered by water-guzzling power plants.

Then there’s climate change. Temperature is expected to increase somewhere between 1.5 and 3° Celsius, and the warming air will be able to hold more water. The resulting changes in precipitation aren’t uniform by any means. Models suggest that Texas and the Gulf states will lose more than one inch per year, while the northeastern U.S. could get between two and four extra inches per year.

Notably, the study’s results are not meant to be taken as strict prognoses. “This is not intended as a prediction that water shortages will occur, but rather where they are more likely to occur, and where there might be greater pressure on public officials and water users to better characterize, and creatively manage demand and supply,” said the study’s lead author Sujoy Roy of Tetra Tech Research and Development, in a press release.

The end result of all this — hotter temperatures, changed precipitation, more people withdrawing more water — is that 412 of 3,141 counties (13 percent) in the lower 48 might be at “extreme” risk of water shortages in 2050. Another 608 counties will be at high risk, while 1,192 and 929 will be at moderate and low risk, respectively. Without climate change? Just 29 counties (less than 1 percent) would be at extreme risk, 271 at high risk, and more than 2,000 would be at low risk. It’s enough to make you thirsty for real action on this whole climate change thing. I’ll cheers to that.

Dave Levitan is a freelance journalist based in Philadelphia. This piece was originally published at OnEarth.

Climate change increased likelihood of Russian 2010 heatwave – study

The extreme Russian heatwave of 2010 was made three times more likely because of man-made climate change, according to a study led by climate scientists and number-crunched by home PC users. But the size of the event was mostly within natural limits, said the scientists, laying to rest a controversy last year over whether the extreme weather was natural or human-induced.

The 2010 heatwave broke all records for Russia – temperatures in the central region of the country, including Moscow, were around 10C above what they should have been for the time of year. More than 50,000 people died from respiratory illnesses and heat stress during that time. The temperatures also had a substantial impact on that year’s Russian wheat harvest, leading to economic losses of more than $15bn.

Two studies published in 2011 looked at the causes of the extreme weather, but they disagreed on whether it was a natural event or whether it was a result of anthropogenic climate change.

See also “Bombshell: Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming.”

Civilisation faces ‘perfect storm of ecological and social problems’

Celebrated scientists and development thinkers today warn that civilisation is faced with a perfect storm of ecological and social problems driven by overpopulation, overconsumption and environmentally malign technologies.

In the face of an “absolutely unprecedented emergency”, say the 18 past winners of the Blue Planet prize – the unofficial Nobel for the environment – society has “no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilisation. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us”.

The stark assessment of the current global outlook by the group, who include Sir Bob Watson, the government’s chief scientific adviser on environmental issues, US climate scientist James Hansen, Prof José Goldemberg, Brazil’s secretary of environment during the Rio Earth summit in 1992, and Stanford University Prof Paul Ehrlich, is published today on the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the UN environment programme (Unep). The paper, which was commissioned by Unep, will feed into the Rio +20 earth summit conference in June.

Santorum again hits Obama on energy, drops ‘phony theology’ barb

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum blamed the “radical environmental policies” of the Obama administration Monday for rising gas prices, and said he would promote “responsible environmental stewardship” as president, including support for the coal industry and approval of the Keystone Pipeline.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he told a cheering crowd of several hundred in this once-booming steel town, “we need someone who understands, who comes from the coal fields, who comes from the steel mills, who understands what ordinary working people in American need to provide for themselves and their families.”

Santorum grew up not far away, in the coal and steel country of western Pennsylvania, and often tells the story of how his grandfather came from Italy to work in the coal fields. As he introduced his wife, his in-laws and three of his seven children to the throng, he said, “It’s great to be back home.”

California leads nation in green-tech venture capital funding

When it comes to U.S. venture capital funding for the most promising new green technology firms, there’s California and there’s everybody else.

California companies raked in $2.8 billion, or 57%, of the $4.9 billion in venture capital offered up in the so-called clean-tech category of funding nationwide last year, according to a recently released analysis from Ernst & Young.

Massachusetts companies were a distant second with $465.1 million, followed by Colorado companies, which pulled in $363.3 million.

“It’s a good indicator of the innovation that can be found here and of the opportunities available in California,” said Mark Sogomian, an Ernst & Young partner and leader of its clean-tech group in Los Angeles.

Climate change reduces genetic diversity

Global warming has forced alpine chipmunks in California to higher ground, prompting a startling decline in the species’ genetic diversity, researchers say.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, say their study of chipmunks in Yosemite National Parks is one of the first to measure the impact on the genetic diversity of a species whose geographic range changes because of climate change.

Engineers Take Aim at a Barrier in LED Technology

In a brand-new factory here, Eric Kim, chief executive of Soraa Inc., cradles a palm-size light that he refers to as “LED 2.0.” The light has a circular snowflakelike cooling frame surrounding a lens that emits a bright white light.

But it also radiates a mystery — and a continuing controversy.

Over the past few years, energy-saving LED lights have popped up nearly every place where low power is required. They provide the backlighting for cellphones, smartphones and laptops as well as for headlamps for hikers, for instance.

But in the United States in particular, LED lights have not yet caught on for home lighting, still a bastion of the incandescent light bulb — which to this day is not much more efficient than when it was invented by Thomas Edison in 1879.

Feds identify 237,100 acres in Arizona for renewable energy projects

The Bureau of Land Management has recommended 237,100 acres of public land in Arizona are suitable for renewable energy development, part of an effort to speed up the process for clean-energy companies looking to set up shop in the state.

The agency Friday released a draft environmental impact statement for its Restoration Design Energy Project, recommending a middle course among six alternatives that ranged in size from 43,700 acres to 321,500 acres.

“Arizona has great potential to build a strong renewable energy economy,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a prepared statement.

The BLM project is unique to Arizona, but supporters said it is being looked at for other parts of the country. A similar effort has been launched across the West by the bureau.

The Arizona report looked for lands that could become Renewable Energy Development Areas (REDA) for solar and wind energy projects. The option recommended Friday identified agency lands that are either within five miles of points of demand – such as cities or towns – or of utility corridors and existing transmission lines that could carry energy to market.

Climatologist Andrew Weaver asks me to direct folks to this website and this video, ”in case the tar sands piece that Neil [Swart] and I published yesterday gets spun as a ‘tars sands is good’ story”:

I do think Weaver’s study — “The Alberta oil sands and climate” in Nature Climate Change (subs. req’d) – is a tad confusing. For instance, it doesn’t even include the extra emissions from tar sands extraction in its calculations!! So people who don’t actually read it carefully are likely to misreport its findings.

According to Time magazine, “Pipeline Politics: Are the Oil Sands ‘Game Over’ for the Climate? One Study Says No”:

The good news from the Nature Climate Change paper is that, should environmentalists lose their battle, the consequences might not be quite as bad as they’ve made it out to be.

Except that isn’t what the study finds. Indeed, the final paragraph states

If North American and international policymakers wish to limit global warming to less than 2 °C they will clearly need to put in place measures that ensure a rapid transition of global energy systems to non-greenhouse-gas-emitting sources, while avoiding commitments to new infrastructure supporting dependence on fossil fuels.

In short, if you care about the 2C (3.6F) target, building something like the tar sands pipeline is a really bad idea.

By the way, if you care about a 3C (5.4F) target, building something like the tar sands pipeline is also a really bad idea — see IEA’s Bombshell Warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy.” Risking 3C, roughly 550 ppm [assuming there aren't major carbon-cycle feedbacks], is not a good idea at all, as many studies make clear (see, for instance, New study of Greenland under “more realistic forcings” concludes “collapse of the ice-sheet was found to occur between 400 and 560 ppm” of CO2).

If 7+°F global warming — 10+°F warming over most of U.S. — by century’s end is fine with you, then the tar sands is not worth bothering about. Of course that is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

NASA’s James Hansen himself says of the new paper:

“The argument that the currently known amount of carbon in the tar sands pit is small compared to the total fossil fuels burned in two centuries is fallacious and misleading — every single source, even Saudi Arabia, is small compared to the total. If we once get hooked on tar sands and set up infrastructure, the numbers will grow as mining capabilities increase. Tar sands are particularly egregious, because you get relatively less energy per unit carbon emitted and there is associated environmental damage in the mining.”

Indeed, the point of the new study is pretty much the same as the forthcoming paper from Hansen (see figure below).  I’d put it this way:

There are big pools of carbon that the world must not burn.  Since the United States is responsible for more cumulative CO2 emissions than any other country and has to cut emissions by more than 80% in four decades to do our fair share to avert catastrophe, it’s quite safe to say that from America’s perspective, the huge pool of unconventional oil vastly dirtier than conventional oil up north is definitely on the no-burn list.

The study makes that point in a fairly straightforward way:

To have a 66% chance of limiting warming to less than the 2 °C limit put forth in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, one carbon– climate modelling study estimated that total future global carbon emissions should be limited to less than 5.9×1017 g C (ref. 9). If this amount were to be distributed equally among the current global population, the resulting allowable per capita cumulative carbon footprint would be 85 tonnes of carbon. The eventual construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would signify a North American commitment to using the Alberta oil-sand reserve, which carries with it a corresponding carbon footprint. For comparison, by fully using only the proven reserves of the Alberta oil sands, the current populations of the United States and Canada would achieve a per capita cumulative carbon footprint of 64 tonnes of carbon.

Let me clear up one serious confusion about the study right now.  The study does not actually include the extra emissions from tar sands extraction in its core calculations, as it states clearly:

Additional emissions resulting from natural gas, diesel and electricity use during bitumen extraction, upgrading and refining have not been included here, but could increase these numbers (see Supplementary Information).

The authors separately do a calculation on their website that indicate those extra emissions would add some 17% to the emissions they calculate.

What this means is that if the U.S. and Canada use only the proven reserves of the Alberta oil sands – 170 billion barrels, which we could do this century if production is quadrupled — then in fact we’d hit 75 tonnes of carbon per capita cumulative carbon footprint.  The point is, even this modest exploitation of the tar sands — a small fraction of the total “oil in place” — would blow out any chance of the U.S. and Canada contributing our share to the 2C target.  Or a 3C target.

That is the point Hansen and McKibben and I and many others have been making over and over again:

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts. Hitting 800 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels like the tar sands as Nocera advocates — represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear. [Estimated reserves and potentially recoverable resources are from EIA (2011) and GAC (2011).]

This is also pretty clear from Weaver’s paper.  But it is presented in a way that the global warming hand-wavers — those who never tell you what their temperature or concentration target is — can, well, wave away with their hands:

As you see, by including all of the coal and gas, it looks like the tar sands make such a tiny contribution as to be insignificant. But the tar sands contributions is only insignificant in a world with a climate that is ruined, one that simply will not support 9 billion or more people.  In short, if we destroy civilization with coal, tar sands isn’t a big deal. Woo-hoo!

As Bill McKibben puts it:

Today’s study is akin to saying: “True, smoking six packs a day is going to kill you. But if you want to make certain you die, smoke a hundred packs a day. And if you really want to make sure you die tomorrow, lie down in front of a train.”

Time magazine reports

Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart of the University of Victoria in Canada first modelled the warming impact of burning the 170 or so billion barrels of crude believed to be technically recoverable from the Albertan oil sands. They found that burning all of that carbon would produce just 0.02 to 0.05 C of warming. As David Biello of Scientific American points out, global warming to date is 15 times greater than that.

Should energy companies figure out a way to mine and burn all 1.8 trillion barrels of oil believed to be in the oil sands, the warming would obviously be greater—but not that much greater. Weaver and Swart estimate all that oil would lead to an additional 0.36 C of warming. Given that many scientists believe we need to prevent 2 C of warming above pre-industrial levels to avoid catastrophic effects—and that we’re already a little less than halfway there—the oil sands seem to represent an important but not decisive front in the climate battle.

The 170 billion isn’t the technically recoverable oil. It’s the “economically viable proven reserve,” which will rise over time as oil prices rise (and extraction technology improves).

And burning it, including all related emissions from extraction and the like, is probably at least 0.04 C of warming, which is about 10% of the total additional warming we can risk if we are sane.

So just the “economically viable proven reserve” we could well burn this century are a big, big deal. The oil-in-place is an unmitigated disaster.

Now you can certainly argue that we aren’t going to stabilize at 2C, but that is a political conclusion and has no bearing on whether climate scientists and climate hawks are right that going beyond 2C is dangerous and immoral.

Certainly if we do going beyond 2C it’d be nuts not to try as hard as humanly possible to stabilize at, say, 2.5C (4.5°F), which again means we need to stop wasting staggering amounts of money to expand  dirty fossil fuel resources like the tar sands.

David Biello of Scientific American writes on the study with this sub-hed, “The Keystone XL pipeline wouldn’t be a major environmental calamity, but oil addiction is.”  He concludes:

Nevertheless, building the pipeline keeps us in the carbon habit, through which the U.S. burns roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day along with copious quantities of coal and natural gas. Ending our fossil fuel addiction is the only way to truly combat climate change.

So Keystone is no big deal, yet we need to end our fossil fuel addiction. But if we are planning to end our fossil fuel addiction in a timely enough fashion to avert catastrophic warming, then, as the study says, we ought to be “avoiding commitments to new infrastructure supporting dependence on fossil fuels” which would certainly include Keystone.

Bottom Line: In the world we must strive to achieve, however difficult or implausible it may seem today, expanded extraction of the tar sands has no place.

by Christopher Mims, reposted from Grist.

“Well, let me state it unequivocally: I love sprawl,” says L. Brooks Patterson, county executive of Oakland County, Mich. “I need it. I promote it. Oakland County can’t get enough of it,” he continues, in an essay posted to the Oakland County website. Why should any of us care? Well, Patterson appears to be in a position of power, especially if you live in southeast Michigan. And unlike other people in positions of power who make absurd sprawl-feeding, bike-busting laws — ahem Congress — he’s laying all his reasoning out on the table.

To Patterson, sprawl is an issue of freedom.

Let’s stop the hysteria and honestly ask ourselves what is sprawl? “Sprawl” is the unfortunate pejorative title government planners give to economic development that takes place in areas they can’t control. In reality, “sprawl” is new houses, new school buildings, new plants, and new office and retail facilities. “Sprawl” is new jobs, new hope and the fulfillment of lifelong dreams. It’s the American Dream unfolding before your eyes.

In fact, opposing sprawl is un-American.

Today, if a company pulls up stakes, abandons a suburban location and moves into the central city (often doubling or tripling the commute time for its employees), the anti-American Dream doom-and- gloomers call it “economic revitalization,” and they praise it.

But if a company, a residential builder, or a family moves out into the suburbs, it’s condemned by the anti-American Dreamers. “It’s sprawl,” they hiss, “it’s bad.”

Patterson’s view of history is pretty straightforward. Maybe he knows something countless scholars of the city don’t? (After all, everyone knows the most simplified view of history is usually the right one.)

Sprawl did not cause the decline of the cities. Cities declined because they squandered their assets. High crime rates, high taxes, failing schools, foul air and a lack of open green spaces forced people to move.

Federal subsidies of highways and car culture? Redlining and white flight? Tax structures favoring sprawl while penalizing urban cores? Poof! Sprawl now happened because cities are gross:

Sprawlers, like me, simply wanted a home with green grass on a safe, well maintained street, a quality neighborhood school that actually educated their children, a good job, nearby parks and recreational spaces, and a local government that actually delivers the services their taxes paid for. In other words, they wanted a place like today’s Oakland County.

It’s a minor miracle that up to this point in his piece, he has yet to use the word “undesirables.”

And now, prepare yourself mentally for the coup de grace.

And the next time somebody rubs your face in the word sprawl, take a long, hard look at that person.  Too often you will see some limousine liberal who long ago fled our cities. Now, they want others to go back and take their place. They want to use the power of government to force you back into a city, or a neighborhood, or a housing type they chose not to live in themselves.

What about the mass-transit riding elites who live in dense, walkable neighborhoods that nurture their sense of community and connectedness while reducing their impact on the planet?

I guess they don’t exist. Or maybe L. Brooks Patterson can’t find them in the vast parking lots that pass for public spaces in his brave new Oakland County.

– Christopher Mims is a journalist who writes about ideas. Mostly. This piece was originally published at Grist.

I think science has mostly told us what it can about the urgent need to act swiftly and strongly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid destroying the planet’s livability for the next several hundred years (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Yes, more observations and more analysis are valuable — and I will keep reporting on the ever-worsening climate outlook — but right now we need much more persuasiveness (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1). As James Hansen says, we are still waiting for our climate Churchill.

One of Churchill’s defining characteristics was his mastery of rhetoric. Indeed, at the age of 22 he wrote a brilliant, unpublished essay, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric so.” But this is the day we remember Lincoln, so I’m going to rerun Part 1 of my series on Lincoln’s mastery of rhetoric, the 25-century-old art of influencing both the hearts and minds of listeners with the figures of speech. If you have any doubt about the importance of the figures to Lincoln, consider this:

In a famous 1858 speech, Lincoln paraphrased Jesus, saying “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and he extended the house metaphor throughout the speech. His law partner, William Herndon, later wrote that Lincoln had told him he wanted to use “some universally known figure [of speech] expressed in simple language “¦ that may strike home to the minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times.”

The best textbook on the figures of speech in the English language, other than the King James Bible, is the complete works of Shakespeare.

The Bard and his audience knew and used over two hundred figures of speech. The figures-the catalog of the different, effective ways that we talk-turn out to “constitute basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world,” as one psychologist put it.

Elizabethans like Shakespeare learned the figures the hard way. William likely attended the town grammar school from age seven to at least age thirteen. Grammar schools got their name because they taught grammar-Latin grammar. The schooling was intensive: ten hours a day, six days a week, thirty-six weeks a year.

The amount of repetition was staggering: Every single hour of instruction required, according to one sixteenth-century schoolmaster, six or more hours of exercises to apply the lesson to both speaking and writing. Much of the curriculum was rhetoric since the Elizabethans saw eloquence as the greatest skill to be acquired and rhetoric as the key to the Bible and literature. The teaching strategy was systematic: “First learn the figures, secondly identify them in whatever you read, thirdly use them yourself.” Hour after hour after hour, identifying every figure in Ovid or Cicero, then creating your own versions.

How did students respond to such rigorous teaching? C. S. Lewis says we must imagine the following mindset of would-be Elizabethan poets: “Your father, your grown-up brother, your admired elder school fellow all loved rhetoric. Therefore you loved it, too. You adored sweet Tully [Marcus Tullius Cicero] and were as concerned about asyndeton and chiasmus [figures of speech] as a modern schoolboy is about county cricketers or types of aeroplanes.”

Nineteenth-century America lacked the rigorous teaching of the rhetoric of Shakespeare’s day, but orators were widely admired, entertaining large audiences-and larger readerships-with speeches that lasted over two hours and that might be printed in a local newspaper, the text often filling the entire front page. This was the golden age of American oratory, the age of Daniel Webster, of Henry Clay, of Stephen Douglas, and of Abraham Lincoln.

In modern times, with multiple media to entertain ourselves with-television, movies, radio, the Internet, video games, iPods-we can hardly imagine what it was like to live at a time when public speeches and debates were a primary form of entertainment. One 1858 audience, after sitting through three hours of Lincoln and Douglas debating, actually went out to hear another speech. Lincoln himself, after his first debate with Douglas that year, headed off to hear another speech.

Lincoln, a master orator, debater, and rhetorician, was the most consciously rhetorical of our presidents. He once incisively attacked an opponent for employing a particular metaphor-using a metaphor of his own: “I wish gentlemen on the other side to understand that the use of degrading figures [of speech] is a game at which they may not find themselves able to take all the winnings.”

In Lincoln’s day, aspiring preachers, lawyers, and politicians were taught some rhetoric in college, though they would have learned much just from their study of the Bible. Lincoln worked hard to teach himself elocution and grammar.

Lincoln studied the great speechmakers of his time, like Daniel Webster, as well the great Elizabethan speechmaker. At an early age, he appears to have studied William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, which ends with forty-nine speeches from life and art, nineteen from Shakespeare, including a number that he memorized, such as the soliloquy by King Claudius on the guilt he feels for having murdered Hamlet’s father. At the age of twenty-three, Lincoln walked six miles to get a copy of Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar, which ends with a several-page discussion of the figures of speech.

Lincoln continued his passion for poetry and Shakespeare throughout his entire life. He spent hours reading passages from Shakespeare to his personal secretary John Hay and the artist F. B. Carpenter. After seeing one performance of Henry IV Part One, Lincoln debated Hay on the meaning and emphasis of a single phrase of Falstaff’s. During the painting of “Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation,” Carpenter describes Lincoln reciting Claudius’s 36-line speech in Hamlet “from memory, with a feeling and appreciation unsurpassed by anything I ever witnessed upon the stage.”

The one figure of speech discussed in both Kirkham’s book (briefly) and Scott’s book (with three full pages of examples) is antithesis-placing words or ideas in contrast or opposition, such as Lord Chesterfield’s quip, “The manner of speaking is as important as the matter,” or Shakespeare’s

Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.”

This became one of Lincoln’s favorite figures, in unforgettable lines such as “the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here” and “with malice toward none; with charity for all.”

Part 2 looks at Lincoln’s use of the figure of irony, Part 3 at his use of metaphor, and Part 4 at how he framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address with extended metaphor.

Related Post:

• 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.”

• Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?
• The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2

by Ned L. Harvey, reposted from the Rocky Mountain Institute

If you’ve have heard about Reinventing Fire, Rocky Mountain Institute’s roadmap for a secure, renewable energy future, and are like almost everyone with whom I have talked about it, you wonder where to start. This blog is the first of several by RMI staff to help business leaders identify the steps they can take now to begin seizing the economic and competitive opportunities available by leading in the new energy era.

Since releasing Reinventing Fire back in October, I’ve been on the road introducing its vision. The majority of my time has been spent with senior business executives, most of whom recognize the risks associated with our aging energy systems but struggle with the magnitude of the challenge and a clear picture for what they can do about it.

A lot of execs are already taking the initial, common sense steps to move their businesses and industries toward a new energy economy. Many others, though, despite their concerns about the consequences of business as usual in our energy system, seem to want that same business as usual to make things better.

Thankfully, Reinventing Fire provides a robust framework to develop solutions that transcend the industrial boundaries and entrenched interests hard-coded into our energy systems over the past century. Our guide to a 2050 energy system that requires no oil, coal or nuclear power includes detailed recommendations for key players within the relevant sectors: transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity. These suggestions range from no-regrets actions everyone can take today to truly innovative actions steps for the most progressive leaders.

Yet, faced with such complex and interconnected issues, many readers are still asking: How do I gain traction personally and professionally? Are there other tangible steps to take now, and how can I influence those around me to join in this grand quest? And, maybe most difficult to answer, how do I know if I am making progress? When asked these questions, I have a few suggestions. They include: Focus on the economics of opportunity vs. the economics of cost. The math may be the same, but people and organizations seem willing to accept a lower potential ROI or assume more investment risk when pursuing an opportunity they are excited about vs. trying to justify a cost they would prefer to avoid. Establish a winner’s mindset as winners and losers are sorted out in the shift from fossil fuels to a more efficient, renewable energy base. Accomplish this by focusing your own and your business’s attention on the opportunities created by action. Keep in mind the risks associated with inaction and maintaining a business-as-usual attitude toward energy.

Own your role in contributing to the problem — and pursuing the solution. I recently had a transformational experience at an event hosted by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Up on stage, in front of several hundred people, the CFO of UPS opened his presentation with a simple statement: “We are polluters.” His point was clear and honest — that in the execution of its core business, UPS generates a lot of pollution. The CFO said he — and all of UPS management — own this as a real business challenge, and have made addressing their environmental impact a top-line priority.

I realized that at some point the energy at UPS must have shifted from denial and obfuscation of the obvious facts to acceptance, so all the energy wasted before that turning point could be redirected to solutions. I was left wondering how many coal-based utilities would openly and honestly acknowledge that they were polluters, and how much energy and resource might be unleashed if they just accepted that fact and owned the responsibility to deal with it.

Become present with the problem and challenges for all stakeholders, and look across boundaries to embrace “coopetition.” It’s one thing to understand a problem from your own perspective. It’s another thing to really experience it — to internalize the challenges that the problem causes and really commit yourself to being an active, vital part of the solution. Yet, you’ll also want to understand the perspective and roles that others will play in the transformation and work in concert with them to achieve progressive alignment across all the powers with a stake in the game.

A great example of this is playing out in the renewable energy space, especially in the solar industry. Ultimately, deep penetration of renewables will require broad acceptance by electric utilities. However, management and engineers within today’s utilities often see renewables as a major nuisance with technical and economic hurdles that are not worth overcoming compared with the alternates at hand. While most entrepreneurs and renewables advocates are spending their energy and precious resources lobbying for mandates to force utilities to use renewables, a few are starting to understand they might gain more by working with utility leadership to envision solar and other renewables as a problem-solving asset.

Avoid a too big a focus on quick wins or buzz about the latest and greatest technology. Instead, measure progress one step at a time and in terms of potential scalability. Solutions to messy problems including climate change, national security and economic competitiveness take a long time to develop and rarely take the shape or form expected at the outset, so it’s really hard to predict and measure progress.

That’s OK, and as such it’s essential to see and celebrate small wins and to recognize that in many ways the ultimate scalability of what we are doing today may contribute more than the specific ideas themselves.

For example, many of today’s very successful solar business models and products, which work really well under subsidies, are likely not terribly scalable since they are often unintentionally customized for success within an artificial market. Conversely, some of today’s more moderately successful solar business models and products are slowly proving themselves in unsubsidized and less solar-friendly markets, likely building on a core set of customer-oriented values, which will serve them well in when all the subsidies fade away.

As visionary business leaders have shown, we can all take immediate actions in this grand effort to transform the biggest and most complex system in modern society. Beyond the first steps, diligent application of tested approaches including systems thinking to look beyond narrow boundaries will, in time, create solutions to some of the most wicked problems of our time.

Ned Harvey is the Chief Operating Officer of the Rocky Mountain Institute. This piece was originally published at RMI.