A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below.

Coal Industry Backs Boehner

U.S. coal companies have pumped $1.5 million into House Speaker John Boehner’s political operation this year, a sign of the industry’s beefed-up efforts to fight new and proposed regulations from the Obama administration.

The coal industry now ranks as one of the top sources of cash for the Ohio Republican, rivaling such perennial GOP donors as Wall Street and the real-estate industry. A large part of the coal industry’s donations came in a single week at the end of June.

Donations from coal-industry interests account for more than 10% of the $12.5 million Mr. Boehner collected from Jan. 1 to June 30 for fund-raising accounts he directly controls. Mr. Boehner’s personal campaign account collected less than $200,000 from the coal industry during the entire 2009-10 election cycle.

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With the State Department’s final environmental assessment of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline complete, major public figures are starting to weigh in before a decision is made on whether or not to approve the project.

Keystone XL is a 1,700-mile pipeline that will bring hundreds of thousands of tar sands crude from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico to be refined. Producing crude from tar sands is the most energy and carbon intensive form of oil extraction – a process that environmental groups have called “the biggest global warming crime ever seen.”

Along with climate scientist James Hansen and the Center for American Progress, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Nebraska GOP governor Dave Heineman issued their opinions on the impact of the pipeline this week.

And their responses aren’t what you might think.

In an interview with EnergyNOW! at the National Clean Energy Summit, Steven Chu explained that the pipeline was a “tradeoff.” While he didn’t explicitly throw his support behind the project, he did say that companies extracting tar sands “are making great strides in improving the environmental impact of the extraction of this oil.”

However, the Canadian government expects carbon emissions from Alberta’s tar sands to double by 2020, cancelling out any emissions reductions that could come from developing renewable energy in the country by that time.

Directly after taping that interview at the summit, Chu explained in a brief conversation with Climate Progress that he believes that the fossil fuel industry has “an interest in seeing that action isn’t taken” on climate change and lamented the lack of understanding of climate science among political leaders.

“It saddens me. And I think as a scientist you have to re-double your efforts,” said Chu.

So which is it? Climate activists like Bill McKibben and James Hansen say that support of the Keystone pipeline “would be game over for the climate.” But Chu’s comments on the Keystone pipeline suggest that he would allow the pipeline to be built.

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In order to be a viable Republican presidential candidate in 2012, denying the science of climate change is a must. With all the leading candidates attacking basic science in varying degrees, it’s not a surprise that our Nobel-Prize-winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, believes science education should be one of the nation’s top priorities.

In a speech this morning at the National Clean Energy Summit, Chu outlined three major policy needs to “move aggressively” to develop clean energy — with science and energy education being on the top of his wish list.

Although climate change did not actually come up in his speech, Chu spoke to Climate Progress afterward and lamented the manufactured political “debate” over climate change, saying that “it saddens me. And I think as a scientist you have to re-double your efforts.”

Steering clear of anything political when asked whether the GOP’s anti-science platform scared him, Chu simply used the opportunity to explain the basic physics of climate change, adding “it’s not rocket science.”

Watch it:

America, Chu says, is the only place in the world where there’s an actual “debate” over climate science. He blamed the confused political situation largely on the fossil fuel industry, which, he says, has been effective in sowing doubt and “who have an interest in seeing that action isn’t taken. This reminds me exactly of what we saw in the tobacco industry.”

His remarks came from separate audio and video interviews at the National Clean Energy Summit.

It doesn’t take an accomplished physicist and Nobel Prize winner to notice that something is wrong. But at a time when uttering the word “climate” in Washington is anathema, it’s a good thing we have someone leading the Energy Department who isn’t afraid to talk about the issue.

Related Post:

• Steven Chu on climate change (2/09): “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

In 2009, the world’s largest geothermal developer, Ormat, moved into the solar market – using its power plant construction expertise to build solar PV and CSP plants in Israel.

And in the last couple of years, a number of CSP developers have partnered with natural gas and coal operators to create hybrid solar/fossil plants in an effort to lower the installed cost of solar and make fossil generation more efficient.

It was only a matter of time before we saw the hybrid geothermal-solar plant.

A group of business and policy leaders were in Las Vegas at the National Clean Energy Summit this morning announcing the groundbreaking of the world’s first solar-geothermal power plant – a 24-MW facility that will combine 80,000 polycrystalline PV modules with traditional hydrothermal technology.

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While the Obama administration is working to restore American innovation, particularly through Secretary Steven Chu’s Department of Energy, the Tea Party movement is increasingly attacking 21st-century jobs on all fronts. Rush Limbaugh is leading the charge against the breakthrough Chevy Volt, Republican governors are killing high-speed rail, Glenn Beck is cooking up conspiracy theories about smart grid technology, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is trying to kill the wind industry, and the entire right-wing movement is convinced green jobs are going to destroy the United States economy.

At a National Press Club speech today, Secretary Chu warned that China is outpacing the United States in innovating clean technology, and pointed to a new report from the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that recommended an integrated federal energy policy to spur domestic progress. “I believe innovation adds to the wealth of society,” he said. “Science and technology are at the heart of innovation.”

In a blogger call following the speech, the Wonk Room asked Secretary Chu about the right wing’s opposition to clean technology innovation. Chu derided this desire to turn back the clock, saying that the “United States is still the greatest innovation machine in the world”:

You know, what can I say? I disagree.

The people who are saying we don’t want to change are holding a view that when a new technology comes along it’s going to displace an old technology. The people whose business depends on old technology might get nervous. They can adapt and innovate or fight the change. That used to work when we weren’t so interconnected. In this new very flat world of multinational corporations, virtually all of western Europe, Japan, Korea, China are saying, “This is our future.” If we don’t go in this direction, we will be importing many of the technologies we could be exporting. I just installed an on-demand water heater and there were no American manufacturers. There were Korean, Japanese, European manufacturers. Kind of scary.

The American people need to be convinced. Or I should say: Does everyone else know something we don’t know or do we know something everyone else doesn’t know?

I believe the right direction is to develop these technologies. The United States is still the greatest innovation machine in the world. There will always be people who don’t want to go in a new direction, but you can’t go back to 1950 when we were exporting oil. We have to press forward. It’s very important to get that message out. This is how we have always achieved. Not by clutching to the past but by seizing the future.

“We are no longer the leaders in manufacturing, but more startlingly, we are no longer the leaders in high-tech manufacturing,” Chu said in his Press Club speech. However, he saw room for hope. “The good news is that if I look across the country, young people are seeing the energy and climate challenge and going into science and technology.”

At the GreenGov Symposium this morning, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced that the the Obama White House will bring back solar power, removed decades ago by the Reagan administration. “The number one question we get when greening the White House, is whether we’re putting solar panels on the roof,” Council on Environmental Quality chair Nancy Sutley said in her introduction. After noting the many practical steps the Obama administration has taken to restore the solar energy industry in this nation, Chu announced that the the “White House will lead by example” by installing solar panels and a solar water heater on the roof:

As we move towards a clean energy economy, the White House will lead by example. I am pleased to announce that by the end of this spring, there will be solar panels that convert sunlight into electricity and a solar hot water heater on the roof of the White House. It’s been a long time since we’ve had them up there. These two solar installations will be part of a Department of Energy demonstration project. The project will show that American solar technology is available, reliable, and ready to install in homes throughout the country. Around the world, the White House is a symbol of freedom and democracy. It should also be a symbol of America’s commitment to a clean energy future.

Watch it:

Although photovoltaic power was first developed in the United States, two decades of domestic neglect have allowed Germany, China, and Spain to leapfrog this country in solar energy. Buoyed by the Recovery Act, however, employment in the U.S. solar industry has been exploding in recent years, more than doubling from 2008 to 60,000 jobs in 2010.

Youth climate activists with 350.org had challenged the White House to lead the nation by example, bringing one of the original solar panels installed by the Jimmy Carter administration to a meeting with White House officials last month. Secretary Chu’s announcement comes days before 350.org’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party. During the largest climate-action mobilization in the planet’s history, hundreds of thousands of people from nearly every nation in the world will follow Barack Obama’s example and participate in actions large and small to make their lives more sustainable this Sunday.

In an Earth Day hearing, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was forced to explain to Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) how oil is found in the Arctic. Chu and other administration officials are testifying today before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Barton, the top Republican on the committee and a recipient of $1,330,160 in oil money, was flabbergasted by the concept of continental drift. After Chu explained that “oil and gas is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geology and in that time also the plates have moved around,” Barton questioned whether oil didn’t actually reach Alaska through a secret Texas pipeline:

Isn’t it obvious that at one time it was a lot warmer in Alaska and on the North Pole? It wasn’t a big pipeline that we’ve created from Texas and shipped it up there and put it under ground so we can now pump it up?

Watch it:

“No,” Secretary Chu responded, “there are continental plates that have been drifting around throughout the geological ages.” The “driving force” for Alaska’s oil formation during the Triassic era 200 million years ago, according to University of Alaska geologist Mark Rivera, “is plate tectonics, which is the unifying theory of geology.”

Ironically for someone who has called climate science “absolute nonsense,” Barton was actually onto something. During the Triassic, the entire planet was indeed a hothouse and entirely deglaciated. The carbon dioxide (CO2) content in the atmosphere was at its highest ever levels, spiking from 1000 parts per million to 3000 ppm. The end of the Triassic period was marked by one of the largest mass-extinction events in Earth’s history.

Habitable conditions for humanity, hundreds of millions of years later, are very different. Carbon dioxide levels, which had been below 300 ppm for the last 650,000 years and was stable at 280 ppm during the rise of human civilization, have skyrocketed since 1800 because of our burning of coal, oil, and natural gas to 388 ppm, a nearly 40 percent rise.

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Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), chair of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, announced that top Obama officials will testify next week on the immediate need for clean energy legislation. Speaking at an event on building a clean energy economy hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rep. Markey said that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson will testify in hearings on the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, beginning on Tuesday, April 21.

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told attendees that “significant harm to human well-being is already occurring” from global warming — including agricultural impacts from monsoon changes in China, greater floods “on practically every continent,” increased drought and soil drying, increased wildfires, worse air pollution and heat stress, and timber losses from Alaska to Colorado due to pest explosion — and “worse is yet to come.”

The MIT event is being webcast live.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the first member of Congress to weigh in on George F. Will’s egregiously mendacious “global cooling” columns. In a Huffington Post column, Kerry delivers a withering critique of one of his “favorite intellectual sparring partners,” stepping up to the plate on behalf of science and scientists everywhere, including Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and White House Science Adviser John Holdren:

Dragging up long-discredited myths about some non-existent scientific consensus about global cooling from the 1970s does no one any good. Except perhaps a bankrupt flat earth crowd. I hate to review the record and see that someone as smart as George Will has been doing exactly that as far back as 1992. And it’s especially troubling when the very sources that Will cites in his February 15th column draw the exact opposite conclusions and paint very different pictures than Will provides, as the good folks at ThinkProgress and Media Matters for America have demonstrated so thoroughly.

Stephen Chu “is no Cassandra,” Kerry explains. “If his predictions about the effects of our climate crisis are scary, it’s because our climate is scary.” To be fair to Cassandra, her predictions of the fall of Troy were right — what would make Dr. Chu different is if the American people listen to him, instead of the George Wills of the world. Which is why Senator Kerry took up Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s challenge and calls on Will for a public battle of the minds:

I know George Will well, I respect his intellect and his powers of persuasion — but I’d happily debate him any day on this question so critical to our survival.