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Archive for October, 2008
Obama’s Loss Traced to Joe Romm
Friday, October 31st, 2008When you see kids out trick-or-treating tonight …
Friday, October 31st, 2008
… please consider these lines from deep inside the latest posting from the nation’s top climate scientist:
… the most serious effects will be visited upon the young and the unborn, the generations that bear no responsibility for the problem. The most important effects, I believe, will be those that are irreversible for all practical purposes, specifically (1) extermination of species, and (2) ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise. If we continue business-as-usual energy policy, using more and more fossil fuels, it is likely that we will have:
(1) rapid climate change that will combine with other pressures on species to cause the rate of extinction of plants and animals to increase markedly, leading in some cases to ecosystem collapse, snowballing extinctions, and a more desolate planet for future generations.
(2) meter-scale sea level rise this century, and ice sheets in a state of disintegration that guarantees future sea level rise in the 10-meter-scale, with a continual reworking of future global coastlines out of humanity’s control.
I would add that the planetary desolation our continued inaction would leave our children includes the loss of the inland glaciers that provide fresh water for a billion people and desertification across one third of the globe (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction“).
The time to act is now.
Hansen et al: We must phase-out coal emissions by 2030 and stabilize at or below 350 ppm
Friday, October 31st, 2008In a few days, James Hansen and several other leading climate scientists will release a major new study, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” in the Open Atmospheric Sciences Journal. You can read a first draft of the study and my commentary on it here: Hansen (et al) must read: Get back to 350 ppm or risk an ice-free planet. Hansen has just put online a draft press release and FAQ (reprinted below).
First, though, Hansen responds to those of us who were critical of his earlier statement that “neither presidential candidate ‘gets it’, based on their enthusiasm for ‘clean coal’ and ‘carbon cap and trade.’ No Naderite he, says, the NASA scientist: “The vice presidential choices should jolt even the most jaded and somnolent into getting their fannies to the polls, if they retain any concern about life and the planet left for our children.”
Back to the draft press release, which warns:
Humanity must find a path to reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide, to less than the amount in the air today, if climate disasters are to be averted, according to a study to be published in Open Atmospheric Science Journal by a group of ten scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and France. They argue that such a path is feasible, but requires a prompt moratorium on new coal use that does not capture CO2 and phase-out of existing coal emissions by 2030….
… if coal emissions were thus phased out between 2010 and 2030, and if emissions from unconventional fossil fuels such as tar shale were minimized, atmospheric CO2 would peak at 400-425 ppm and then slowly decline.
The authors conclude that “humanity today, collectively, must face the uncomfortable fact that industrial civilization itself has become the principal driver of global climate…. [T]he most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is Herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.”
I reiterate that if you agree with Hansen’s analysis of climate science and its implications for concentrations and emissions, then a CO2 price — whether imposed by a tax as Hansen recommends or achieved through a cap-and-trade — is simply beside the point.
Game changing Obama gaffe?
Friday, October 31st, 2008
Obama makes a slight gaffe when, instead of saying “Hello, Tallahassee,” he says “John McCain is clearly the better candidate.”
TALLAHASSEE, FL–In a campaign gaffe that could potentially jeopardize Sen. Barack Obama’s White House bid, the Democratic presidential nominee told nearly 8,000 supporters Tuesday that, if elected, he would be a terrible president.
The blunder, captured by all major media outlets and broadcast live on CNN, occurred when the typically polished Obama fielded a question about his health care policy. Obama answered by saying he would give small business owners a tax credit to help them provide health care for their employees, and then added, “Now, I’m not completely certain that my plan would work because, overall, I think I would make a bad president.”
According to sources, before those on hand could fully process what Obama had said, the Illinois senator continued to stumble, claiming that, were he to win the general election, he’d have absolutely no idea what to do.
“My youth and inexperience would definitely make me an awful president,” said Obama, whose seven-minute misstep was further exacerbated when he called himself “no expert” on the economy. “To be perfectly honest, I’d be worried about putting me in charge of the most powerful military in the world because I’m not any good when it comes to making important decisions. Also, I’m not sure how much I care about keeping this great nation of ours safe.”
“I’m an elitist, I hate Israel, and I want to lose the war in Iraq,” Obama concluded, and then, seemingly unaware of the magnitude of his blunder, smiled, gave a thumbs-up to the stunned crowd, and urged his supporters to get out and vote on Nov. 4.
The most absurd greenwashing ad in history
Friday, October 31st, 2008When you watch this staggering piece of deception, just remember:
- McCain’s old climate bill with Lieberman has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that he is the Senate’s leading greenwasher with a record that is as strongly anti-renewable as that of global warming denier Senator James Inhofe. McCain voted with Inhofe and against clean energy a staggering 42 out of 44 times in the past two decades.
- McCain’s climate plan from a few months ago is infinitely weaker than the McCain-Lieberman bill Obama is seen endorsing in the ad footage (see “McCain’s reliance on unlimited offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“).
- It now appears McCain won’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Fortunately, the ad seems so desperate I can’t actually see it winning any votes. Indeed, it shows bipartisanship on the part of Obama.
And on the very positive side, it helps make clear that whoever wins the presidency has a genuine mandate to take regulatory action on climate.
Bush makes final push to worsen warming, make our children dumber, and sicken all Americans
Friday, October 31st, 2008UPDATE: The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has released “a report detailing the frightening possible major regulatory rule changes the Bush administration could make in its final days.”
Until January 21, nobody in this country is safe from the lemming-in-chief. Unsatisfied with blocking all serious national and global action on climate change, the Bush administration is intent on leaving the next president with a variety of pollution-accelerating regulations that will be difficult to reverse quickly. As the Washington Post reports today:
The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.
The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.
Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.
Once such rules take effect, they typically can be undone only through a laborious new regulatory proceeding, including lengthy periods of public comment, drafting and mandated reanalysis.
The Post article is titled, “A Last Push To Deregulate.” Given the financial and economic havoc wreaked upon this country by deregulation, this headline may well be the epitaph for the Bush administration.
While this blog focuses primarily on the climate impact of increased emissions, the facts are clear that allowing more pollution increases cardiovascular illness and lowers developmental scores for children (see “Study: If you want smarter kids, shut coal plants“).
So what are the Bushies actually doing in their final orgy of destruction?
Nature: “The values of scientific enquiry … suggest a preference for one US presidential candidate.”
Friday, October 31st, 2008One of world’s leading scientific journals, Nature, has made a presidential endorsement, which I print below in its entirety:
The election of a US president almost always seems like a crossroads, but the choice to be made on 4 November feels unusual, and daunting, in its national and global significance.
Science and the research enterprise offer powerful tools for addressing key challenges that face America and the world, and it is heartening that both John McCain and Barack Obama have had thoughtful things to say about them. Obama has been more forthcoming in his discussion of research goals, but both have engaged with the issues. McCain deserves particular credit for taking a stance on carbon emissions that is at odds with that of a significant proportion of his party.
There is no open-and-shut case for preferring one man or the other on the basis of their views on these matters. This is as it should be: for science to be a narrow sectional interest bundled up in a single party would be a terrible thing. Both sides recognize science’s inspirational value and ability to help achieve national and global goals. That is common ground to be prized, and a scientific journal’s discussion of these matters might be expected to stop right there.
But science is bound by, and committed to, a set of normative values — values that have application to political questions. Placing a disinterested view of the world as it is ahead of our views of how it should be; recognizing that ideas should be tested in as systematic a way as possible; appreciating that there are experts whose views and criticisms need to be taken seriously: these are all attributes of good science that can be usefully applied when making decisions about the world of which science is but a part. Writ larger, the core values of science are those of open debate within a free society that have come down to us from the Enlightenment in many forms, not the least of which is the constitution of the United States.
On a range of topics, science included, Obama has surrounded himself with a wider and more able cadre of advisers than McCain.
Obama pledges cooperation with McCain on climate change
Thursday, October 30th, 2008An intriguing story from Greenwire (subs. req’d):
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said yesterday on a late-night comedy show that global warming cannot be solved without participation from Republicans, and he pledged to work with his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, on the issue no matter who wins the White House on Tuesday.
Appearing on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Obama cited climate change as an issue on which he and McCain could find common ground after this year’s bitter presidential campaign concludes.
“I hope that after the election, however way it turns out, that we can work together, because some of the problems are ones that we’re not going to be able to solve with one party just trying to dictate a solution to the problems,” Obama said via satellite from Sunrise, Fla., where his campaign held one in a series of rallies in the battleground state.
The Illinois senator then brought up climate change.
Corporate Watchdog Radio Interview
Thursday, October 30th, 2008What pollsters can learn from climate modelers
Thursday, October 30th, 2008Pollster.com has an interesting piece on the confusing disparity among all of the polling being done for this election. In particular, “likely voter model design depends significantly on judgments that pollsters make about how to model the likelihood that any voter sampled will actually turn out and vote in the election.”
The author, Clark A. Miller, an Associate Professor at Arizona State University, notes that “the trials and tribulations of climate modelers — and also their approaches to addressing skepticism about their judgments — offer three useful insights for pollsters working with likely voter models”:
Yes, Barack Obama gets energy efficiency
Thursday, October 30th, 2008If I could know only one thing about a presidential candidate’s understanding of energy, it is whether they get that energy efficiency is the “first fuel.” If efficiency is not the cornerstone of their energy independence and climate strategy, they will fail. It’s that simple (see “Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution, Part 1: The biggest low-carbon resource by far“).
How delightful, then, to see Obama use valuable time in his expensive half-hour political infomercial — his closing economic argument to millions of Americans — to tout McKinstry, a company that does energy efficiency retrofits.
Now efficiency is far less visually sexy than wind turbines or solar panels. That’s why anti-cleantech greenwashers from, oh, I don’t know, say Arizona and Alaska, invariably use renewable energy company backdrops — the visuals overwhelm any factual debunking of their policies that the media might do (assuming for the moment we had a media that actually ever did that kind of debunking).
So you know the candidate is serious about energy in general and efficiency in particular when they visit an energy efficiency company and then tell the nation about it:
Boxer says she’ll let President Obama lead on greenhouse gas bill
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008Okay. The chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee didn’t quite say that, at least not directly. But E&E PM reports (subs. req’d):
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) expects to take her cues on climate in the 111th Congress from the next president.
The chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee told reporters here today that the next administration — whether led by a Democrat or a Republican — will likely set the pace when it comes to moving a greenhouse gas reduction bill through the House and Senate.
“It all depends on what the president wants,” said Boxer, in response to a question on whether she would reintroduce her own bill. “If the president wants the same bill back, we do it.”
Her plan is to reach out to the next administration “the day after Election Day” to talk principles on climate legislation, she said. Whether the chief executive is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) matters little on global warming, she added, as she expects “a friendly administration either way.”
But would she have said that if Obama weren’t 6 points ahead in the polls? After all, McCain’s proposed climate plan is far, far weaker than Boxer’s (see “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“). And even that assumes climate regulation remains a priority for McCain (see “Palin shocker: McCain won’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions“). Fortunately, the point should be moot in 6 days. Here’s the rest of the story:
The American Enterprise Institute: Still crazy with denial and delay after all these years
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008Conservative think tanks remain oblivious and impervious to the facts. They cling to global warming denial and delay even in the face of the remarkable advances both in scientific understanding about global warming and in clean technology solutions.
We have seen that the Cato Institute remains intellectually bankrupt on both the urgency of the climate problem and the availability of cost-effective solutions. The Competitive Enterprise Institute actually runs ad campaigns aimed at destroying the climate for centuries.
Now Kenneth Green, resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, has weighed in with a speech Monday to the International Oxygen Manufacturers Association (!) betraying a willful ignorance of science and technology.
On the technology front, he simply asserts with no evidence whatsoever that:
No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly.
ClimateProgress readers know that statement is utterly false (see “An introduction to the core climate solutions“). As do all those who believe in science. The latest multi-year synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature by the world’s top scientists and technologists — signed off by every major government including the Bush Administration — says that we have the needed technology today or are in the process of commercializing it and that the economic cost of strong action will be at most 0.1% of GDP per year, far less than the cost of inaction (see “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly“).
But Green asserts “My science is value-neutral–I just try to figure out what the science really says, and look past the hype.” Actually, it is very easy to figure out what the science really says — just read the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But that, of course, would shatter his carefully crafted ideologically-driven worldview.
Instead, Green — how’s that for an ironic name? — distorts climate science with these amazing anti-scientific assertions about “the state of the science”:
Palin shocker, Part 1: McCain won’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
It’s time to stop trying to guess whether the latest McCain campaign gaffe revision on global warming means the Arizonan has walked away from his previous support for mandatory government control of greenhouse gases. He has.
That should have been clear from McCain’s repeated rejection of the word “mandatory” to describe his program, his choice of a global warming denier for vice president, and his failure to even mention global warming during his acceptance speech. Most recently, his chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said on Sunday that McCain does not agree with the Supreme Court decision that labels carbon dioxide a pollutant and requiring EPA to regulate it. He labels Obama’s decision to obey the Supreme Court decision “a draconian regulatory approach.”
Now the McCain campaign has decided to eliminate the ambiguity entirely in the desperate and erratic final days of his campaign. In her big greenwashing energy speech at an Ohio solar energy company, Palin was as blunt as possible in her prepared (and delivered) remarks:
Palin to deliver greenwashing energy speech Wednesday
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008The NYT Caucus Blog reports:
I guess it is mavericky to give an energy speech using the greenwashing backdrop of a popular clean energy technology your ticket has always opposed (see “Anti-wind McCain delivers climate remarks at foreign wind company“).
Remember, McCain has a record that is as strongly anti-solar and anti-renewable as that of Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the global-warming denier from the U.S. oil-patch (see here). McCain voted with Inhofe and against clean energy a staggering 42 out of 44 times in the past two decades.
Why does McCain vote against solar and other renewables even though he comes from a state that could supply the country’s electricity needs by itself with solar energy? Because, as he asserted last year, he believes that solar is among the “clean technologies [that] don’t work.” Similarly, Palin said in August:
Alternative-energy solutions are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop.
That’s right. She’s appearing at a solar energy company even though she thinks alternative energy would take more than 10 years to develop.
If conservatives like McCain had succeeded in the mid-1990s and shut down all clean energy R&D at the Department of Energy (DOE) where I worked, the kind of second-generation thin film solar technology that Xunlight has commercialized would never have happened, because it was the DOE that helped usher that technology into the market.
As for Palin’s specific remarks, no doubt she will repeat and expand upon the multiple lies and distortions she made in her acceptance speech:
The intellectual bankruptcy of the Cato Institute
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.” So the French statesman Talleyrand supposedly said of the pre-revolution monarchy. The words apply equally well to that bastion of libertarianism, the Cato Institute.
Over the years I have debated one of their senior scholars, Jerry Taylor, many times. He is probably the craftiest debater that the delayer/inactivist side has. But since, like all delayers, his positions are frozen in stone by his ideology, those positions inevitably become farther and farther disengaged from the reality of a (climate) changing world and hence less and less compelling. That is most clearly evident in my latest debate with him, online at Google’s new Knol site (aka the would-be Wikipedia killer).
My original post is “Jumpstarting the Transition to Clean Energy.” Taylor’s rebuttal is here. You see the typical rigid libertarian worldview sprinkled throughout:
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that global warming is a serious problem and that reducing emissions is cheaper than adapting to climate changes. Neither argument is persuasive to us….
It’s not altogether obvious to us that oil is becoming scarcer…. Regardless, if and when oil begins to disappear — or more accurately, if and when market actors believe the oil scarcity is on the horizon — oil prices will go up accordingly and the market will adjust without any need for government assistance. So while “peak-oil” arguments come and go with the related booms and busts in oil markets, there is no need for a policy argument about oil depletion.
In short, global warming isn’t a problem, and peak oil, if it ever occurs, is self-correcting. What a blissful world the Cato folk live in. Either problems don’t exist or the all-powerful, all-knowing free market will fix them. Now you might think that recent events would cause Cato scholars to at least slightly temper their blind faith in the power of greed to set all things right. But you would be wrong. Indeed, the most jaw-dropping paragraph in Taylor’s “rebuttal” is the last one:
China to invest $280 billion on 30% expansion in rail network “as a stimulus measure”
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 
China will invest nearly $A445 billion (US$ 280 billion) in its overburdened rail system as a stimulus measure aimed at blunting the impact of the global financial crisis.
The investment is part of plans to extend the country’s railway network from the current roughly 125,502km to nearly 160,900km by 2010, Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post reported.
The Beijing News quoted a rail official as saying that, while the network needed extending, the massive investment was also intended to help lift the nation’s economy as it suffers amid the global woes.
“New rail investment will become a shining light in efforts to push forward economic growth,” railway ministry spokesman Wang Yongping said.
I hope Democrats in Congress are paying attention. Yes, spending money on roads and bridges may be a faster stimulus package, but this country needs to make the transition to greater rail-based transit. Seems like we may be able to learn a thing or two from the Middle Kingdom.
Note to media: Credit crunch kills dirty stuff, too
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008Last week I noted the glee with which the media used the global recession to shoot the clean-energy wounded (see “Global recession? Must be time for the media’s alternative-energy backlash“). Now Greenwire reports “Credit crunch scuttles W.Va. coal-to-liquids project” (subs. req’d, excerpted below):
Citing the lingering credit crunch, mining giant Consol Energy Inc. and the Texas gasification company Synthesis Energy Systems Inc. are halting a joint venture to convert coal to methanol and gasoline in West Virginia.
Obviously the crash in oil prices played a role too. The wide-ranging WSJ energy/environment blog has now covered the story, too. And given their well-known obsession with balance (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP“), I can hardly wait for the stream of stories on this from the big print media giants. [Cut to sound of crickets chirping.]
Here are more excerpts from the Greenwire story:
Federal land warming up to geothermal
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008Last week, Department of Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced an initiative to move forward on potentially developing 190 million acres of Federally-owned or managed land for geothermal energy generation.
The initiative is quite a reversal for the Bush Administration, since this past summer the government attempted to freeze solar applications in order to work through a procedural environmental assessment (interpreted as a delay tactic to most, and the moratorium was scratched after public uproar).
Now at least the government has put together a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for leasing land to develop geothermal generation, and once enacted, the government will begin to identify and more closely examine sections of federal land.
Climate Progress considers geothermal among the more promising renewable energies, particularly because it could contribute to baseload power (as an MIT study found in 2007).
As the press release for Kempthorne’s announcement notes, geothermal development in the U.S. is making good progress, but there’s room for much more:
An Alaskan politician corrupted by Big Oil — the wages of petro-socialism
Monday, October 27th, 2008Big Oil corrupts — the definitive “Dog Bites Man” story:
The monthlong trial revealed that employees for VECO Corp., an oil services company, transformed Stevens’ modest mountain cabin into a modern, two-story home with wraparound porches, a sauna and a wine cellar.
The Senate’s longest-serving Republican, Stevens said he had no idea he was getting freebies.
Hmm. An Alaskan politician who simply expects the big money boys to buy them tens of thousands of dollars in stuff — where have we heard that before?
What’s funny is that Alaska has built their its economy around petro-dollar socialism, huge handouts from Big Oil. And yet the most famous Alaskan politician has the gall to accuse her opponents of being socialists, saying “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” Now that is projection.
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