The top six newspapers most negative about the Australian government’s carbon policy are all owned by Rupert Murdoch.

I was struck by a recent analysis from Daily Climate showing a substantial drop in the number of stories covering climate change in 2011. In spite of the dramatic increase in extreme weather events and the white-knuckled political tension around government investments in energy, there was still a 20% drop in coverage of climate-related issues last year.

One of the exceptions to that drop, however, was Australia. News outlets like the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and the Sydney Morning Herald saw a 60% increase and a 21% increase respectively. Australia was a particularly important country to watch in 2011 because of the dramatic political battle that unfolded over a comprehensive climate bill.

But experience in that country illustrates a hole in analysis that simply tracks the quantity of articles — it ignores the quality of those stories.

A recent report from the Australian Center for Independent Journalism attempts to fill in that hole. The researchers looked at climate policy stories in 10 major newspapers from February of 2011 through July of 2011 and tracked how positive or negative those stories were, who was quoted, and what kid of language was used. The results were overwhelmingly negative. Here are some highlights:

• Overall, negative coverage of the Gillard government’s carbon policy across ten newspapers outweighed positive coverage across ten Australian newspapers by 73% to 27%. (Note: After neutral items were discounted).
• After neutral items were discounted, negative coverage (82%) across News Ltd newspapers far outweighed positive (18%) articles. This indicates a very strong stance against the carbon policy adopted by the company that controls most Australian metropolitan newspapers, and the only general national daily. [Note: This is an organization owned by Rupert Murdoch.]
  
• Headlines were less balanced than the actual content of articles. Neutral articles were more likely to be headlined negative (41%) than positive (19%).

In an interview with Climate Progress at the Durban climate talks, Christine Milne, the Deputy Leader of Australia’s Green Party, lamented the domination of negative stories in Murdoch publications:

“The Murdoch press is a very big problem in Australia. It owns 70% of the print media and has run a massive campaign against the climate science and against the climate pricing policy that we’ve delivered in Australia. And it will continue to do so in the hope that the opposition is elected and the whole thing is repealed. This is a critical time in Australian politics and for the climate.”

Remarkably, even though the Green Party provided the political catalyst for getting a climate bill considered in the first place, members of the party only received 5% of quotes in stories on the issue.

When journalists reached out to the business community, which sector got the most quotes? By far, sources directly or indirectly representing the fossil fuel industry, “often without any critique or second source”:

(The researchers also factored the aluminum and steel industries into these figures.)

The range of findings show a clear political bias against the carbon pricing policy moving through parliament in 2011:

• The claims by many single sources about the likely impact of the carbon policy were not tested against the views of other sources. Only 42% of the rest of the articles included
  more than two sources.
• Fossil fuel lobby and other big business sources opposed to the policy were very strongly represented, often without any critique or second source.
• Business sources (23%) receive more coverage than all Australian civil society sources together including unions, NGOS, think tanks, activists, members of the public, religious spokespeople, scientists and academics (17%).
• Business sources quoted 4 or more times over the 6-month period were quoted being negative towards the policy in almost 80% of occasions. Many Australian readers would have been left with the impression that the nearly the entire business community was opposed to the carbon price policy. In fact this was far from the truth.
• Academics and scientists were also poorly represented.
• Over half the articles only used the word ‘tax’ (51%), 11% used ‘price’ and another 39% referred to both. Once again there are differences between Fairfax and News Ltd.’s metropolitan newspapers.

Let me take my last statement back: These findings show far more than a simple “bias.” They show a stunningly blatant attempt to stop a price on carbon. One wonders how political leaders were ever able to pass a climate bill at all.

“Some of Australia’s leading newspapers have been so negative in their reporting of the Gillard government’s carbon policy it’s fair to say they’ve campaigned against it rather than covered it,” reads the primer for the report.  The top six newspapers most negative about the Australian government’s proposed carbon policy are all owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Tracking the raw number of stories focused on climate is an important task. But this kind of qualitative analysis gives us a much fuller picture of how the content of those articles influence the actual story itself.

Related Post:

• Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change.”

If President Obama needs a role model for his stance (or lack thereof) on climate change, he should look no further than the Deputy Leader of Australia’s Green Party, Christine Milne.

In a wide-ranging interview with Climate Progress at the COP 17 climate talks in Durban today, Senator Milne outlined her strategy for helping pass a comprehensive climate bill in Australia this year — even when faced with “a massive campaign against the climate science” that rivals the War on Science being waged in America (see Aussie Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change.”)

One of the main reasons the Australian Parliament was able to pass a price on carbon, said Milne, is because proponents actually led by talking about climate change. And they didn’t back down or shift their talking points when the attacks picked up.

“We fought back. It was a totally committed strategy,” Milne told Climate Progress. “This is about saving the planet’s climate. That is what we are here for. This is why you need real leadership and not just a response to the populist views echoed from the vested, self interests.”

In other words, the exact opposite strategy of the Obama Administration in 2009 and 2010 as it let a climate bill slip down the legislative priority list and allowed the Tea Party to hijack the issue as a completely bogus War on Freedom (see Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

Unlike Obama and Congressional allies of the 2009 climate bill, Milne has explicitly called out the organizations working overtime to derail action on climate policy. The same players funding the Denier Industrial Complex in America — the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heartland Institute and the Murdoch Press, among others — exported their tactics to Australia to battle the climate bill, said Milne:

“Australia has been heavily influenced by some of the major think tanks in the United States that are funded by Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Fossil Fuels interests. We’ve already seen the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heartland Foundation [Institute] supporting Australian politicians going over to the United States and picking up those tactics to the point where one Australian politician was exposed recently for fake websites, a tactic straight out of those kind of foundations.”

“We have seen a heavily funded negative campaign being directed straight into Australia, straight into conservative think tanks and onto the front pages of the Murdoch press.”

“The Murdoch press is a very big problem in Australia. It owns 70% of the print media and has run a massive campaign against the climate science and against the climate pricing policy that we’ve delivered in Australia. And it will continue to do so in the hope that the opposition is elected and the whole thing is repealed. This is a critical time in Australian politics and for the climate.”

Milne lamented the bullying of climate scientists in Australia, many of whom were moved into different facilities after receiving death threats and threats against their families. “It is shocking, and we need to stand up to it,” she said.

The Greens stood up to it by not wavering from their stance on the urgent need to address climate change.

In 2010, when the Labor Party led by Prime Minister Julia Gillard came out of the elections with a hung parliament, they turned to the Greens for support. In exchange for their support, Milne demanded that the government push for a price on carbon by the middle of 2012.

This November, a comprehensive climate bill designed to cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050, invest $13 billion in renewable energy, and invest $1.7 billion in sustainable agriculture was signed into law. The price on carbon will be $23 per ton for the top 500 emitters, rising 2.5% per year in the first three years, and then transition into a floating market. After the first five years of implementation, the program will be re-negotiated to account for changes in international policy and scientific findings.

But the battle is not over yet. The opposition party has sworn a “blood oath” to repeal the law if it comes into power after the 2013 elections.

The bill gives Australia more credibility coming into this year’s climate negotiations in Durban. But Milne says she’s still concerned about her country’s push for lax deforestation standards standards that would allow Australia to meet short-term emissions targets through creative accounting, rather than actually doing something. Australia has also balked on supporting a second commitment under the Kyoto Protocol.

The Australian experience is representative of what’s happening around the world. With very little progress on binding global targets for emissions, action will be coming unilaterally from countries. But the cumulative action of those countries don’t get us to the needed emissions reductions scientists say we need to stabilize temperatures at 2 degrees Celsius.

That’s why we need to continue to make bold choices, both domestically and internationally, said Milne.

“There’s a huge disconnect between the science in the politics. The science clearly tells us that global emissions need to peak in 2015 and start coming down after that. We can’t wait until 2020. We will be beyond tipping points.”

Related Post:

• Australian Climate Commission says act now or “the global climate may be so irreversibly altered we will struggle to maintain our present way of life.”

Marriage equality is a hotly contested issue in Australia, where some 62 percent of voters now support marriage equality. Last week, Prime Minister Julia Gillard of the Australian Labor Party announced that she would support a conscience vote on same-sex marriage, but would not favor including marriage equality in the party’s platform. A conscience vote could doom the effort because Labor MPs would be split, while the Coalition — a group of center-right parties — would vote against it. (HT: Kevin Farrell)

Murdoch’s company sustained another major blow today as police revealed they are investigating News Corp. for attempting to bribe a former Australian senator into voting for favorable legislation. The charge stems back to 1998, when Senator Bill O’Chee was approached by an “unnamed executive of News Ltd” and promised favorable treatment by the media conglomerate’s numerous outlets if the conservative lawmaker voted against proposed digital TV legislation. The AP has more:

The newspapers reported that an unnamed executive of News Ltd asked O’Chee during a lunch on 13 June 1998 to vote against his conservative government’s legislation on the creation of digital TV in Australia. The news group stood to profit from the legislation failing. [...]

O’Chee, a former senator for the state of Queensland with a track record of voting against his National party’s wishes, alleged the executive told him that while voting against the digital TV legislation would be criticised, “we will take care of you”.

The executive “also told me we would have a ‘special relationship’, where I would have editorial support from News Corp’s newspapers, not only with respect to the … legislation but for ‘any other issues’ too,” O’Chee reportedly told police in his statement.

Murdoch, who was born in Australia, “has a near monopolistic control of the media in many major cities,” notes Joe Romm. His media empire includes the largest Australian newspaper – The Australian – as well as “the sole dailies in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin and the most popular metropolitan dailies in Sydney and Melbourne.”

Today’s bribery charges, which are punishable by up to six months in prison, underscore how pervasive the culture of corruption has been at News Corp. for years. From Australia to the United Kingdom to the United States, major ethical breaches appear to have been the norm, rather than the exception, at Murdoch’s media conglomerate.

Despite the seemingly-endless parade of scandals, Murdoch and his sons were reelected to News Corp.’s board last month.

(HT Climate Crocks)

AP Pool Photo

Obama: Slashing carbon emissions is ‘good for our economies’

President Obama said Wednesday that policies to curb carbon emissions bring economic benefits but acknowledged that crafting an international deal that imposes commitments on China and India will be a “tough slog.”

Obama, at a press conference with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, touted U.S. policies including increased auto efficiency standards and green energy research investments.

“As we move forward over the next several years, my hope is, is that the United States, as one of several countries with a big carbon footprint, can find further ways to reduce our carbon emissions,” Obama said in Canberra, Australia.

“I think that’s good for the world. I actually think, over the long term, it’s good for our economies as well, because it’s my strong belief that industries, utilities, individual consumers – we’re all going to have to adapt how we use energy and how we think about carbon,” Obama added, according to a White House transcript.

JR:  Ya think? Here’s more from Obama, including his strongest remarks on climate in a long time:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

Obama noted Australia, which is moving ahead with a carbon pricing and trading system, is pursuing a “bold strategy” and also affirmed his belief in the threat of climate change.

“I share the view of your Prime Minister and most scientists in the world that climate change is a real problem and that human activity is contributing to it, and that we all have a responsibility to find ways to reduce our carbon emissions,” Obama said.

Report Calls for Changes in the Energy Department

Already under fire for granting a $535 million federal loan guarantee to Solyndra, the Department of Energy now faces a critique from within.

On Tuesday, the department’s inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman, issued a report calling for a wholesale restructuring of the department’s far-flung laboratories and other operations. He warned that “painful” staff reductions were certain to come as Congress sought deep federal budget cuts in the months ahead.

In one of his more striking criticisms, Mr. Friedman wrote that the department spent nearly $13 billion a year to run 16 separate laboratories but that only about half of that money went toward actual research, with 49 percent paying for overhead and capital spending. That ratio is “out of sync,” he said, and could be improved by combining some operations. The report noted that the Energy Department has three centers for nuclear weapons work, two for Navy propulsion reactors, five for energy technology and 13 for general science. “The department’s research complex is organized essentially as it has been for over a half-century,” it said.

Mr. Friedman called for the creation of an independent panel to examine ways of consolidating the labs.

Pipeline Twists Create New Uncertainties

Over the last year, images of Randy Thompson in his cowboy hat have become a symbol of opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and the source of the rallying cry, “Stand with Randy.”

As he took a break from fencing chores on Tuesday, Thompson acknowledged that TransCanada’s deal to move the pipeline out of the Sandhills might not make any difference on the portion of route where his family owns land in Merrick County.

“Ironically, I may have helped save the Sandhills,” he said, “but I might not have done myself any good.”

Uncertainty about where TransCanada goes following Monday’s announcement could be expected to run high among people who live east of the original route and west of the first Keystone pipeline, now carrying oil across the Missouri River and into Nebraska near Yankton, S.D.

Spokesman Shawn Howard confirmed that there are no plans to change Nebraska’s entry point for Keystone XL in Keya Paha County. Beyond that, there really is no plan, at least not one the company is ready to make public.

Carbon Trading May Be Ready for its Next Act

Gone are the days when carbon trade was seen as a vital policy tool to cut emissions at the cheapest cost, and not many people talk about its prospects for overtaking the oil market in terms of traded value anymore.

Its reputation has been battered by a €50 million, or $69 million, scandal over permit thefts and a €5 billion fraud in the European Union’s emissions trading program, the world’s largest.

The United Nations’ main carbon offset market, the Clean Development Mechanism, has also been tainted by an association with land grabs and human rights abuses in poor nations.

The prospect of a second European recession in four years has compounded these woes, slamming the price of carbon emissions permits to near three-year lows.

The slump has prompted an exodus of brokers and traders and means few companies will now switch from coal to cleaner power generation or invest in zero-emissions technology, like carbon capture and storage.

Yet the idea of buying and selling pollution remains attractive, as recent events in Australia show. One-third of global emissions could be capped and traded by the end of the decade, according to some estimates, up from current levels of 6 percent.

“The carbon market is not dead,” said Wolfgang Sterk, a policy analyst with the Wuppertal Institute in Germany. “It is still seen by many as the most flexible way to cut emissions. Australia and California don’t care how low prices are in the E.U.”

Solyndra Highlights Long History Of Energy Subsidies

When Energy Secretary Steven Chu appears on Capitol Hill on Thursday to defend the Obama administration’s solar energy subsidy program, he will face questions about the solar panel firm Solyndra, which went belly up this summer.

The Energy Department has drawn stiff criticism over a government loan guarantee program that lent the company half a billion dollars, but the government has a long history of subsidizing many forms of energy.

Chu says he does not believe Solyndra should alter U.S. support for clean-energy companies.

“The government should play a role in this because it’s a competitive world out there,” he says. “Other countries are helping their companies. In order to even just level the playing field, the U.S. government should play a role.”

U.S. Brings Diplomacy to Politics Of Energy

The State Department is creating a bureau to focus exclusively on energy, a sign of the growing importance of energy issues to U.S. foreign policy and national security.

The new Bureau of Energy Resources, which opens shop Wednesday, is designed to help shore up stable supplies of affordable energy for the U.S. and avoid crippling effects of supply shocks and disruptions.

The agency also will promote clean energy and changes in markets to make alternative-energy technology more competitive, an effort to open the door for U.S. exports in a fast-growing sector. It will also promote sustainable energy in developing countries as a way to boost economic growth.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flagged the creation of the new bureau in a speech last month, saying: “You can’t talk about our economy or foreign policy without talking about energy.”

Other humor from down under:

• Aussie climate scientists go all Beastie Boys on the deniers
• Funniest Denier Punking Ever: Lord Monckton Isn’t An Act by Sacha Baron Cohen, Is He?

Australia Passes Landmark Carbon Price Laws

Australia passed landmark laws on Tuesday to impose a price on carbon emissions in one of the biggest economic reforms in a decade and injecting new impetus into December’s global climate talks in South Africa.

Tuesday’s vote in the upper house Senate made Australia the second major economy behind the European Union to pass carbon-limiting legislation. Tiny New Zealand has a similar scheme.

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Its impact will be felt right across the economy, from miners and liquefied natural gas LNG.L producers to airlines and steel makers, and is aimed at making firms more energy efficient and push power generation towards gas and renewables.

The vote is a major victory for embattled Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who staked her political future on what will be the most comprehensive carbon price scheme outside of Europe, despite deep hostility from voters and the political opposition.

“Today Australia has a price on carbon as the law of our land. This comes after a quarter of a century of scientific warnings, 37 parliamentary inquiries, and years of bitter debate and division,” Gillard told reporters in Canberra.

Russia sees need for more urgency on climate deal: EU

Russia recognizes that concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions need to be agreed at climate talks in South Africa next month before a globally binding climate deal can emerge by 2015, EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said on Thursday.

Negotiators from around the world are due to meet in Durban at the end of this month to try to work on a new deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Expectations are low that a binding deal will emerge, as rifts between countries have stifled progress.

A group of small island states accused countries such as Russia and Japan on Thursday of trying to delay a new international agreement until 2018 or 2020.

“Russia shares our view that we should go for a roadmap and have timetables in it,” Hedegaard told reporters.

The “roadmap” would include a set of standardized actions toward a global deal, perhaps similar to a proposal by Australia and Norway last month, Hedegaard said.

Permafrost-Dwelling Microbes Could Spew Greenhouse Gases

The US Department of Energy has assembled a team of researchers to examine greenhouse gases that are currently trapped in permafrost but could be released as global temperatures rise.

The frozen territories around the North Pole and Arctic Ocean contain an estimated 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon — around 250 times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released by the United States in 2009. As global temperatures rise, so do concerns about the potential impact of the released greenhouse gases.

As permafrost thaws, trapped frozen organic matter becomes accessible for microbes to degrade, releasing greenhouse gases as a byproduct. Understanding what sorts of microbes are in the ice is key to predicting the impact of the melting of permafrost soils.

The US Department of Energy has teamed up with the Joint Genome Institute, the Earth Sciences Division of Berkeley Lab and the US Geological Survey to understand how microbes found in the permafrost might respond to a warming environment.

The team is using a technique known as metagenomics to study communities of microbial organisms directly in their natural environments — assembling microbes based on samples found in the frigid soil. The technique makes it possible to understand the genetic make-up of communities of microorganisms without the need to isolate them and grow them in the lab.

Climate talks: China calls on developing countries to “step up”

Developing countries must step up with concrete plans to cut carbon emissions to break the deadlock in beleaguered UN climate talks, China’s top climate change official has told the Guardian.

With four weeks to go until the next round of long-running international talks in Durban, the move highlights China’s attempt to take on a new leadership role by bridging the gulf between rich and poor countries.

But Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman of the Chinese government’s National Development and Reform Commission, also told the Guardian that the best chance of progress was for developed countries to draw up a “Kyoto 2″, a second phase of the Kyoto protocol, the first agreement between nations to mandate country-by-country reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Its first commitment phase is due to expire next year.

In the past, this approach has been seen by rich countries as simply continuing the stalemate that has afflicted the long-running talks, and several nations – including the US and Japan – have rejected a “Kyoto 2″ because it would not require binding legal commitments from emerging economies to limit their emissions.

Zuma: Climate Negotiations to be Stormy

The United Nations climate change negotiations set to take place in Durban at the end of November are going to be difficult, President Jacob Zuma warned on Monday.

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“We go to Durban with no illusion at all that it will be a walk in the park,” he told delegates at a meeting….

On what South Africa, which is hosting the giant event, expected from COP17, he said outcomes should be “balanced, fair, and credible, and one that preserves and strengthens the multilateral rules-based response to climate change”.

Further, they should be informed by the principles that had formed the basis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations.

“These principles include multilateralism, environmental integrity, fairness … and the honouring of all international commitments and undertakings made in the climate change process.”

The Cancun Agreements had also to be “operationalised”, including the establishment of key mechanisms and institutional arrangements agreed to at COP16 in Cancun.

“The Green Climate Fund represents a centre piece for a broader set of outcomes for Durban. Developing countries demand a prompt start for the fund through its early and initial capitalisation.”

Airlines ready for next battle against EU carbon law

Twenty-six nations are expected to lodge a formal protest on Wednesday against a European Union law to make airlines pay for carbon emissions — adding to transatlantic tension on an issue that has triggered a tit-for-tat bill in the U.S. Congress.

Under EU legislation, from January 1 all flights to or from Europe will have to buy carbon permits to help offset their emissions under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) — the 27 member bloc’s prime tool for trying to curb the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Last week, in the U.S. Congress, where environmental issues have become a flashpoint between Republicans and President Barack Obama’s Democrats, the lower house passed a bill making it illegal for airlines to comply with the EU’s law.

On Wednesday this week, a council meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization ICAO.L in Montreal, Canada is also expected to take up the airlines’ cause.

EU lawyers have said any decision by the ICAO council would not be legally binding, but could be a step towards a formal dispute procedure, in which the president of ICAO would mediate.

A copy of an ICAO council working paper seen by Reuters said the law, unilaterally passed by the EU, posed “major challenges and risks for aircraft operators”.

Durban diplomats jostle for position ahead of crucial summit

Diplomats have this week continued to stake out their positions ahead of the upcoming international climate change summit in Durban, South Africa next month.

Speaking to reporters following a preparatory meeting for the two week UN summit, NJ Mxakato-Diseko, South Africa’s ambassador-at-large for the conference, urged negotiators not to talk up the chances of a legally-binding agreement being reached.

The hosts remain optimistic that significant progress can be made on a number of fronts, with sources predicting agreements could be reached on climate financing, emissions reporting, and carbon trading.

However, there is a general consensus that a formal treaty will not be finalised and fears are mounting the talks will remain deadlocked on the crucial issue of whether to extend or replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Head of the UN climate change secretariat Christiana Figueres also warned this week that governments may struggle to make progress on commitments made last year to introduce mechanisms to provide up to $100bn a year of funding for climate-related projects from 2020.

“This is not the best time to be talking about finance, because all developed countries are in a financial crisis,” she told reporters, adding that governments needed to realise that the bulk of the new funding would not have to be released until later in the decade.

“The financial needs of climate, both for adaptation and for mitigation, are not short-term needs – they are long-term needs, and they need to be seen in that respect,” she said. “The financial crisis is a financial crisis that we have now, but that is not a long-term crisis for the next 20, 30 years.”

Australia CO2 scheme must be scrapped, opposition says

Australia’s main opposition party vowed on Monday to repeal a carbon pricing scheme expected to become law next month as a key plank for polls due by 2013, threatening to prolong uncertainty in energy investments.

“We will absolutely deliver on our mandate. So the first thing we’ll do is we’ll seek a mandate for repeal,” Greg Hunt, opposition climate change minister, said in an interview.

Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who lags the opposition Liberal Party in opinion polls, has staked her minority government’s future on sweeping economic reform such as taxes on mining and carbon.

But voters have been concerned over industry fears the plan to tax carbon emissions will lead to higher costs and job losses, prompting Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott to announce a “blood oath” to repeal the scheme should his party and partners win the next election.

The government on Monday labeled the repeal pledge absurd, underscoring the divisive nature of plans to fight climate change by pricing carbon emissions in Australia, the United States and elsewhere.

Air China Operates First Biofuel Test Flight in China

Air China (CA) conducted the latest biofuel demonstration flight Friday, operating a Boeing 747-400 with Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines partially powered by jatropha-based fuel.

The 2-hr. flight to/from Beijing (PEK) was the first biofuel flight operated in China. It was conducted in conjunction with Boeing and Pratt, and follows a growing number of biofuel flights operated worldwide (ATW Daily News, April 26).

PetroChina worked with Honeywell’s UOP to source and refine the fuel derived from jatropha grown in China. China National Aviation Fuel blended the biofuel with traditional jet fuel; the ratio was 50:50.

China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) and Boeing also announced an agreement “for further study of regional biofuel development,” Boeing said, adding, “The study results will help support future efforts to establish a sustainable aviation biofuels industry in China, and also form the foundation for an announced renewable energy agreement between the US Trade and Development Agency and the NEA.”

CA and Boeing said they are making plans for an international biofuel flight between the US and China, although “no specific timetable” has been revealed.

Liberals in Ontario to Review Clean Energy Payouts

Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals are reviewing the hefty price paid to renewable energy producers who sell power to the grid under the feed-in tariff program.

Energy Minister Chris Bentley on Monday confirmed a long-expected look at FIT program will be led by deputy minister Fareed Amin in conjunction with the Ontario Power Authority.

“It has been enormously successful — 4,500 megawatts already contracted. Put another way, that’s 1.2 million homes,” Bentley said in an interview.

“We want to continue with a very strong, clean, green energy economy. We want it to be at the right price. This review will give us good information to make it sustainable over the long term.”

Amin’s review, which will be completed early in the new year, does not affect existing contracts with thousands of farmers and energy firms producing electricity through wind, solar, hydro and bio-mass generation.

With rates of to 80 cents per kilowatt hour paid for electricity produced by the sun — when nuclear-generated power costs about 4 cents — the FIT program was much debated during the Oct. 6 provincial election.

A somewhat strange and complicated series of political events has led Australia to the adoption of a carbon tax. John Quiggin, the blogosphere’s favorite Australian economist, delivers the analysis:

While the proposal is far from perfect, there’s a lot to like about it. The price of $A23/tonne is comparable to that in the EU, and should be enough to promote a wide range of reductions in CO2 emissions. Importantly in the Australian context, it should (with the support of some addition funds to allow the closure of existing power stations) end the use of brown coal (lignite) as a fuel. Brown coal produces about 50 per cent more emissions per unit of energy than anthracite (black coal), and Australia has lots of it. There will also be an incentive to continue the shift away from black coal in electricity generation and towards a combination of gas and renewables. Equally important, in the long run, will be improvements in energy efficiency. This is where price-based measures really shine, as compared to purely regulatory interventions – there are all kinds of ways to save energy and it is hard to predict, in general, which will be best.

The other side of the proposal is what to do with the revenue, and in this respect the current measure is a big improvement on the emissions trading scheme that failed to get through in 2009. That scheme gave greatly excessive compensation to large emitters in a way that encouraged them to stay in operation. While the business compensation in the current scheme is still excessive in economic terms, it’s a sensible compromise politically. More important is the use of the bulk of the proceeds to raise the income tax threshold from (around) $6000 to $20000, thereby taking a million or so people out of the income tax system. That’s a measure that will be hard to reverse, given that the Opposition has pledged “in blood” to repeal the tax if it win the next election.

Pricing carbon in order to enact offsetting tax cuts is generally considered the least politically plausible option in the United States context. Better to use the funds to buy off some polluters, and then once you’re doing that as a matter of coalition politics, you need to funnel subsidies into clean industries. But as Quiggin notes, the offset has a lot to recommend it as a matter of policy sustainability. If you do the tax-and-buyoff approach, there’s nothing stopping the bought-off incumbents from turning around and lobbying for relaxed regulations. By contrast, precisely because shifting the tax base is so politically challenging it’s also very hard to switch it back. Once the new system is in place for a few years, people will take steps to increase their personal energy efficiency and the “tax hike for making it cheaper to lazily forget to switch your lights off” deal isn’t going to look very appealing.

Climate change ‘blowing in’ stronger winds, CSIRO finds

WIND speeds in Australia have increased by about 14 per cent over the past two decades, but you may not have noticed because the speed of the air just above the ground has actually slowed down.

CSIRO scientists analysing data collected since 1975 at numerous wind stations around the country found the average speed measured 10m above the ground had increased by about 0.7 per cent per year, whereas that measured 2m above the ground had slowed by about 0.4 per cent per year over the same period.

Moreover, they found that the weakest winds had increased in speed but the fastest and strongest winds increased more slowly by comparison — good news for wind-farm developers but potentially bad news for farmers.

Alberto Troccoli, head of the CSIRO’s Weather and Energy Research Unit, said the difference between the measure at 2m and 10m was due to the lower stations being shielded by obstacles such as trees and buildings, and that the higher station provided the more accurate measure.

“We think the overall increase is caused by the widening of the tropical belt, due to climate change,” he said.

JR:  The widening of the tropical belt (and expansion of the subtropics) is a basic prediction of climate science.  It is occurring faster than expected and is associated with Dust-Bowlification.  I’ll  do a post on it in October.  More details on this research from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, here.

Wal-Mart plans solar energy at more Calif. stores

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Wednesday it plans to install solar-power panels at most of its California stores.

A Wal-Mart spokeswoman said the company has installed rooftop panels on about 65 California stores and plans to raise that number to more than 130 — about three-fourths of its stores in the state — by the end of 2013.

The Arkansas company hopes to use solar for 20 percent to 30 percent of each store’s electricity needs. It said solar energy has cut its energy spending by more than $1 million.

E-mails Show Bias in Keystone Review, Advocacy Group Says

Lobbying efforts on behalf of TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline project show the U.S. State Department’s pro-industry bias, an environmental advocacy group said today.

Paul Elliott, a former deputy campaign manager for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, set up meetings on behalf of TransCanada executives, according to e-mails released today by Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group that opposes the pipeline. If approved, the pipeline would run from Alberta to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.

Elliott also notified department officials of an upcoming environmental protest, sent letters advocating for the project and offered TransCanada’s assistance to the State Department on international climate talks in Copenhagen, according to the e- mails.

The department, which is tasked with reviewing the pipeline proposal because it would cross an international border, is expected to issue a final ruling on the project before the end of the year. A final environmental impact statement released by the State Department in August found the pipeline poses “no significant impacts to most resources,” prompting environmental groups to say the review was flawed.

The e-mails show that Clinton’s staff “sought to help TransCanada get a rubber stamp,” Damon Moglen, climate and energy director at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement.

A Tiny Alaska Village Stares Down Big Oil

This summer, four-year-old Micah Kinneeveauk helped catch and kill his first seal. His proud grandmother plans to reward him with a special dessert at Thanksgiving: A big bowl of ice cream flavored with caribou meat and fat. Hunting seals and whales in the Chukchi Sea and caribou and polar bears on the tundra has provided food, clothing, and rites of passage for centuries in tiny Point Hope, Alaska, a barren gravel village of 800 Inupiat natives located 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Many of the people live largely on what they catch.

That’s why Micah’s grandmother, Caroline Cannon, sees trouble in Royal Dutch Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. In the long shadow of the Exxon (XOM) Valdez and BP (BP) disasters, she’s unconvinced by Shell’s assurances that it has helicopters, robots, divers, and skimmers available to respond if it loses control of a well, along with a cap-and-containment system similar to the one that ultimately plugged the BP gusher. “There is no technology to clean up an oil spill, and it’s devastating if it happens,” says Cannon, who serves as the village president. “I have 25 grandchildren. That’s why I oppose offshore drilling 2,500 percent—I want them to have a chance to have the same kind of subsistence life I have.”

Many of Cannon’s fellow villagers feel the same way, and the town has been remarkably effective at delaying the company’s plans to begin work in the region. Point Hope successfully challenged government-issued permits for emissions from the rigs, preventing Shell from drilling this summer. It also sued to challenge the government’s lease sale, convincing a court that more public comment and environmental studies were needed. Although Shell won its first lease to extract oil from beneath U.S. Arctic waters in 2005, it has yet to drill a single well, despite spending what it says is almost $4 billion on leases, research, engineering, lawsuits, and government-ordered studies.

Part of Shell’s problem is that it doesn’t have much to offer the villagers to help win them over. The company predicts that development of the offshore fields would create 35,000 jobs a year in the state and bring $4 billion to local governments by 2057. Shell says Point Hope would get its share of the wealth. “We are committed to providing the village … with the same opportunities for jobs and shared services as other villages,” says spokesman Curtis Smith.

Many of the residents of Point Hope say they aren’t interested. The ramshackle village has a grocery store, a Chinese takeout, and not much else. They don’t want Shell coming in and building up the place. They aren’t expecting to be offered jobs on the rigs. They don’t want money. Mostly, the people say, they want to be left alone. “No matter how much money you’ve got, that money goes,” says Ronald Oviok, who says he has caught more than a dozen whales in his 69 years. “I’ve got no money. I don’t really care for money.”

Point Hope is exploring further legal challenges but likely can’t keep Shell from drilling forever.

SOLYNDRA: DOE official defends loan restructuring that put taxpayers on hook

Among Republican concerns about the Department of Energy’s Solyndra loan guarantee was an early 2011 restructuring effort that allowed $75 million of new private investment to become the priority loan ahead of hundreds of millions of dollars already invested by the federal government.

That restructuring means that now any money salvaged from the bankruptcy proceedings of the solar energy company will be used to first pay off those private investors. Only after they get their cash would money go back to the government, which began providing funds for the company in 2009.

Several Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have said that they are concerned that the restructuring deal was done in violation of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which states that DOE’s loan guarantees cannot be secondary to other financing.

Ahead of tomorrow’s hearing on Solyndra, Republicans sent a letter today to Energy Secretary Steven Chu asking for all communication between the White House and DOE regarding the restructuring decision, which could end up costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

But in an interview after this morning’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on President Obama’s green jobs agenda, DOE Deputy Secretary Daniel Poneman defended the restructuring decision.

“We had benefit of extensive legal review of that question; the statute is quite clear,” said Poneman, whose office signed off on the restructuring. “When you are issuing a loan, you have to have priority, and we did.”

But Poneman said that the 2005 law is also equally clear that the Energy secretary also has the responsibility to maximize interest of taxpayers when it comes to its loans.

“When you are in a restructuring situation, you have to have exactly this examination,” Poneman said. “Will the taxpayer return be maximized by sustaining this thing? What’s the higher return likelihood for the taxpayer? That’s the analysis that was done.”

Poneman said he and DOE’s legal counsel are confident that the restructuring was “entirely legal, consistent with the letter and spirit of the statute.”

But while DOE decided that it made financial sense to restructure Solyndra’s loan in February to get investors to inject $75 million into the company, the new money did not turn the company around.

In August, Solyndra sought another restructuring deal in order to get private investors to pump even more money into the company.

This time, six months after its first restructuring analysis, DOE and its outside experts came to a different conclusion.

“The [August] assessment was that the taxpayers’ best interests would not be served by going another turn of the wheel at that point,” Poneman said.

DOE declined a second restructuring deal, and the company went into bankruptcy.

While this decision may sound trivial to some, it could be revolutionary for the way it protects transgender people when they travel. When a person’s gender marker on their passport does not reflect their perceived gender, security personnel see the “mismatch” as suspicious. Trans people are disproportionately selected for invasive screenings like full-body scans and pat-downs.

But this decision also speaks volumes about how to respect trans people. A key goal of transgender equality is teaching society to trust and appreciate a person’s self-proclaimed gender identity. Australia’s new policy accomplishes this by not requiring people who are trans, genderqueer, or intersex to “prove” their gender or fit it into one of two boxes. Encouraging the authenticity of transgender identities counters the intense stigma and injustice they face throughout their lives.

Australia has not yet established full equality for LGBT people, but this is a significant step forward. Governments the world over should follow Australia’s lead by making it so easy for transgender people to self-identify their gender — not just for passports, but all forms of legal identification. Trans people will be safer and society will be better off.

My photo, available under cc license

Australia, as you may have heard, is an English-speaking settler state where a new center-left government took office in early 2008 with an ambitious agenda of progressive reform. But both under Kevin Rudd and under Julia Gillard, the governments in question have had trouble in practice getting a legislative agenda through the veto points and hurdles of the system. How it’s played out in detail is quite different, but in an abstract sense, Australia is not on some wildly different social or public policy trajectory in the United States. And yet as Karl Smith points out, the Australians keep seeming to be forgetting that regulatory uncertainty and/or bad luck from Europe make it impossible for a high productivity society with a growing population to continue to increase its output:

A closely-watched measure of Australian consumer confidence rebounded strongly in September as lessening fears of a hike in interest rates and better news on the economy helped offset turmoil on global markets. [...]

“This is a surprisingly strong result,” said Westpac chief economist Bill Evans.

He thought it likely that diminished fears of a rise in rates from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) may have helped sentiment. The central bank made it clear last week that it was best for policy to stay on hold while markets were so volatile.

What? What? It reminds me of, I dunno, 1997 and 1998 when “bad stuff” would happen in the world (Russian default, hedge fund wackiness, blah blah) and policymakers in the United States of America had a firm conviction that “lets have several million additional people sitting on the couch, unemployed and depressed” wasn’t going to make things any better. They of course could have chosen to let the economy fall into a deep depression and then said, “look we didn’t make this depression, it’s the banking crisis in Asia and market turmoil prompted by Russian default. Also Chiapas. Go blame Subcommandante Marcos.”

Is there some conservative explanation of why there’s less regulatory uncertainty in Australia than in the United States?

John Cook, founder of the blog Skeptical Science, has won the New South Wales Government Eureka Prize for Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge.  It is “awarded to an Australian individual, group or organisation for communication that motivates action to reduce the impacts of climate change.”

I know what you’re thinking — there’s an English-speaking government that awards prizes for advancing climate change knowledge — let’s move there!  But there’s no need to move — the American government’s lack of climate knowledge means we’ll have Australia’s climate soon enough!

Cook richly deserves the $10,000 prize for Skeptical Science, the must-read myth-smashing blog he has put together on a shoestring budget.  Hmm.  My daughter’s shoes don’t have strings anymore.  Maybe it should be a “velcro-strap budget.”  Cook certainly has velcro’s sticktoitiveness —  especially in the face of the unremitting assault from the anti-science extremists of the bunkosphere who go after anyone who is a good communicator on climate science.

What follows is a recent example of the kind of post that makes Skeptical Science so invaluable:

Dessler Demolishes Three Crucial ‘Skeptic’ Myths

by dana1981 & Rob Painting

Andrew Dessler’s new paper, which we first examined in a post yesterday, has some very far-reaching implications in terms of refuting climate “skeptic” myths.  In fact, its results are relevant to three seperate myths in the Skeptical Science database. As a result, we have incorporated the findings of Dessler (2011) into the three myth rebuttals as follows.

It’s not internal variability

Roy Spencer is the driving force behind the “internal variability” hypothesis, which posits that some unknown and undefined mechanism is causing cloud cover to change, which, by changing the overall reflectivity of the Earth, is the driving force behind the current global warming.

In attempting to substantiate this internal variability hypothesis, Spencer & Braswell (2011) assumed that the change in top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy flux due to cloud cover changes from 2000 to 2010 was twice as large as the heating of the climate system through ocean circulation.  Dessler (2011) used observational data (such as surface temperature measurements and ARGO ocean temperature) to estimate and corroborate these values, and found that the heating of the climate system through ocean heat transport was 20 times larger than TOA energy flux changes due to cloud cover over the period in question.

This empirical finding contradicts Spencer’s hypothesis that cloud cover changes are driving global warming.  However, it is consistent with our current understanding of the climate: ocean heat is exchanged with the atmosphere, which causes surface warming, which alters atmospheric circulation, which alters cloud cover, which impacts surface temperature.  While Spencer hypothesizes that the changes in cloud cover are the main driver behind global warming, Dessler concludes that they’re only responsible for a small percentage of the changes in surface temperature from 2000 to 2010.  Spencer’s internal variability hypothesis is contradicted by the observational data.

Spencer and Braswell (2011) is Contradicted by Observational Data

A highly-touted (and exaggerated in the media) claim in Spencer & Braswell (2011) was that their results suggested that climate sensitivity is low because climate scientists are misinterpreting climate feedbacks as climate forcings. In their paper, Spencer and Braswell analyzed 14 models, but they only plotted the 3 with highest and 3 with lowest equilibrium climate sensitivities.  In the process, Spencer and Braswell excluded the three of the climate model runs which best matched the observational data, and also cherrypicked the data set furthest from the model runs (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Dessler (2011) reconstruction of Spencer & Braswell’s Figure 3, showing relationship between top-of-atmosphere (TOA) net flux and surface temperature, as a function of lag between them.  The blue line is the observational data chosen by Spencer and Braswell.  The red lines show other available observational data.  The black lines show climate model results.  The black lines with crosses show the climate model runs chosen by Spencer and Braswell in their paper.

Dessler found that these three model runs excluded by Spencer which best matched the data are also among those which best simulate El Niño and La Niña, which is not surprising, given that much of the temperature change over 2000-2010 was due to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).  Thus Dessler concludes that

“since most of the climate variations over this period were due to ENSO, this suggests that the ability to reproduce ENSO is what’s being tested here, not anything directly related to equilibrium climate sensitivity.”

Spencer’s claim of low sensitivity and negative feedbacks is based on this test, which is actually a test of models’ ability to reproduce ENSO, and based on his internal variability hypothesis, which as noted above, Dessler’s paper has also put to rest.  Thus Spencer’s claim of low sensitivity and negative feedbacks is not supported by the empirical observational data.

Lindzen and Choi (2011) is Fundamentally Flawed

Lindzen and Choi (2009), slightly revised as Lindzen & Choi (2011), used measurements of sea surface temperature in the tropics and satellite measurements of outgoing radiation from 2000 to 2010 in an attempt to determine climate sensitivity, ultimately concluding that sensitivity is less than 1°C for doubled atmospheric CO2.

Lindzen and Choi plot a time regression of change in TOA energy flux due to cloud cover changes vs. sea surface temperature changes.  They find larger negative slopes in their regression when cloud changes happen before surface temperature changes, vs. positive slopes when temperature changes happen first, and thus conclude that clouds must be causing global warming.

However, Dessler also plots climate model results and finds that they also simulate negative time regression slopes when cloud changes lead temperature changes.  Crucially, sea surface temperatures are specified by the models.  This means that in these models, clouds respond to sea surface temperature changes, but not vice-versa.  This suggests that the lagged result first found by Lindzen and Choi is actually a result of variations in atmospheric circulation driven by changes in sea surface temperature, and contrary to Lindzen’s claims, is not evidence that clouds are causing climate change, because in the models which successfully replicate the cloud-temperature lag, temperatures cannot be driven by cloud changes.

Major Myth Mashing

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Dessler’s findings, because these are three of the most crucial arguments for climate “skeptics.”  In order for the man-made global warming theory to be incorrect, climate sensitivity must be low (see Climate Sensitivity: The Skeptic Endgame).  Since all previous studies using many different lines of evidence point to the same answer, that climate sensitivity is not low, climate “skeptics” had to rely on Spencer & Braswell and Lindzen & Choi as the only game in town arguing otherwise.  In one fell swoop, Dessler has demonstrated that the only two modern papers arguing for low climate sensitivity are both fundamentally flawed, and their assumptions are contradicted by observational data.  In short, there’s absolutely no reason to believe the IPCC’s equilibrium climate sensitivity range of 2 to 4.5°C for doubled CO2 is incorrect.

Additionally, climate “skeptics” have yet to put forth a plausible, coherent, internally consistent alternative to challenge the robust man-made global warming theory.  Despite its fundamental problems, Spencer’s internal variability hypothesis was probably the best alternative presented to this point, and Dessler drove another nail into its coffin by demonstrating what a small effect clouds have had on global temperature changes over the past decade.

– by dana1981 & Rob Painting for Skeptical Science

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