“The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” — Time Magazine A Project of Center for American Progress Action Fund
On Monday, a disastrous leak in one of the world’s largest pipeline systems gushed over 1 million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River, located in southwest Michigan. Think Progress has the story in this cross-post.
We’re starting a new (temporary) feature — a round-up of the latest news on the fossil fuel-funded Proposition 23 effort to repeal California’s clean energy and climate laws. We’ll also throw in some California-related global warming news, and a bonus NRDC video by the great Edward James Olmos.
Ohio coal company that backed Fiorina also gave to Prop. 23
Appalachian coal interests pump hundreds of thousands of dollars into political campaigns each election cycle, but hardly any of the money finds its way into California campaigns.
Back in early May, I interviewed experts on dispersants and oil spill clean up and wrote “Out of Sight: BP’s dispersants are toxic — but not as toxic as dispersed oil.”
Chemically dispersing oil spills “solves the political problem of visible oil but not the environmental problem,” Robert Brulle, a 20-year Coast Guard veteran and an affiliate professor of public health at Drexel University, told me. These dispersants “do not actually reduce the total amount of oil entering the environment,” as a 2005 National Academy of Sciences report on the subject put it. Nobody has any idea what will be the impact of massive exposure to these toxic chemicals on organisms that live on the bottom or feed off the bottom of the ocean.
In short: out of sight, out of mind. But not out of the body of marine life.
The dispersants seem to have done their job — and keeping oil off sensitive coastal habitats is a very good thing. But some in the media seem to have confused not seeing oil with not being harmed by it.
In fact, as Science reports, “Oil Contamination of Crab Larvae Could Be Widespread“:
Researchers have found droplets of oil inside crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico. Although preliminary, the findings represent the first sign of hydrocarbons from the Deepwater Horizon well entering the food web.
Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has more on the premature declaration of “Mission Accomplished”:
James Powell, Executive Director, National Physical Science Consortium, has produced an excellent YouTube video summarizing the evidence for anthropogenic global warming
Powell is a former college and museum president. “President Reagan and later, President George H. W. Bush, both appointed Powell to the National Science Board, where he served for 12 years.”
Great for sending to any septics you may know:
Solar-Power Industry Hits Magic Number
While some investors feel they’re still waiting for the sun to rise on the solar energy industry, it’s already high noon for some parts of the sector.
In some places in the U.S. today, solar photovoltaic, PV, technology—the iconic glass panels being deployed on home and business rooftops—already allows users to beat what their local utility charges for electricity generated from coal-fired power plants.
This is part of a series on the fossil fuel-funded Proposition 23 effort to repeal California’s clean energy and climate laws. Read previous posts on Prop 23’s economic impact, national repercussions, and funding from Texas oil companies.
In the California legislature, the loudest voice to kill the landmark clean energy climate change law AB32 has become Assemblyman Dan Logue (R-Chico). Described by Sacramento insiders as a “backbencher,” Logue has built a powerful coalition of former tobacco lobbyists and Texan oil companies to orchestrate Prop 23, an initiative to essentially rescind AB 32. But who is Logue?
During an interview earlier this month in Yuba City, California, Logue told the Wonk Room that he thinks that “the issue of global warming is not solved,” referring to climate change as a “scam.” Calling his repeal effort an “epic battle,” Logue claimed that the pro-Prop 23 forces would raise up to $45-50 million:
Our guest blogger is CAPAF’s Joshua Dorner. This is a Think Progress cross-post.
Following scandal after scandal, many donors have abandoned the Michael Steele-led Republican National Committee in favor of other right-wing groups preparing to attack Democratic candidates in this fall’s elections. The two biggest beneficiaries of the RNC’s woes appear to be American Crossroads, the “shadow RNC” setup by Bush operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, and the Republican Governors Association, currently chaired by Mississippi Governor and former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour. Despite their apparent strategic differences, these three groups still have one thing in common: massive infusions of cash from Big Oil. Over $4 million of oil-related cash has spewed into the three groups in the second quarter alone:
Scientists may have found the most devastating impact yet of human-caused global warming — a 40% decline in phytoplankton since 1950 linked to the rise in ocean sea surface temperatures. If confirmed, it may represent the single most important finding of the year in climate science.
The headlines above are from an appropriately blunt article in The Independent about the new study in Nature, “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century” (subs. req’d). Even the Wall Street Journal warned, “Vital Marine Plants in Steep Decline.” Seth Borenstein of the AP explains, “plant plankton found in the world’s oceans are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world’s oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.”
We’ve known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences — see “2010 Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.” And we’ve known those impacts might last a long, long time — see 2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.”
But until now, conventional wisdom has been that big ocean impacts might not be seen until the second half of the century. This new research in Nature suggests we may have much less time to act than we thought if we want to save marine life — and ourselves. The study concludes:
EPA determined in December 2009 that climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases threatens the public’s health and the environment. Since then, EPA received ten petitions challenging this determination. On July 29, 2010, EPA denied these petitions.
The petitions to reconsider EPA’s “Endangerment Finding” claimed that climate science can’t be trusted, and asserted a conspiracy that calls into question the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. After months of serious consideration of the petitions and of the state of climate change science, EPA found no evidence to support these claims.
The scientific evidence supporting EPA’s finding is robust, voluminous, and compelling. Climate change is happening now, and humans are contributing to it. Multiple lines of evidence show a global warming trend over the past 100 years. Beyond this, melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, altered precipitation patterns, and shifting patterns of ecosystems and wildlife habitats all confirm that our climate is changing.
That’s the EPA today in its “Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment.” See, there can be science-based denial after all! Nick Sundt has a good post on this, reprinted below:
The Washington Post has one of the best, short analyses of the climate bill’s death that I’ve seen in the status quo media. In the print edition, it’s titled “How Washington failed on climate change.”
The author, Stephen Stromberg, gets two thirds of the main blame about right. First, he notes, “With few exceptions, Republicans have behaved shamefully on climate issues in this Congress, opposing policies that their party embraced in the 1990s (think cap-and-trade). Yet none of them will pay a price in November, and many GOP challengers will benefit.” Second, he makes a good case that “The president had the political capital and the numbers in Congress to pass something big. He chose health care” over climate.
The irony is that Stomborg is “Deputy opinions editor of washingtonpost.com,” and he is strangely silent on the role of the media, which I think deserves much more blame than Obama (but less than the GOP). The dreadful media coverage simply creates little space for rational public discourse. The media has for a long time downplayed the importance of the issue, miscovered key aspects of the debate, given equal time to pro-pollution disinformers, and generally failed to inform the public. And the Washington Post itself is worse than most, which is why it won the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism.
Even Eric Pooley, author of the must-read political history of how we got into this mess, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth, leaves out the media in his listing of Murderer’s Row for the climate bill’s homicide at Yale e360:
Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported on coal baron Don Blankenship’s foray into the 2010 congressional elections in West Virginia, where he has contributed thousands of dollars to help elect coal-friendly Republicans. One of the candidates, Spike Maynard, previously served as chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and vacationed with Blankenship on the French Riviera while his company, Massey Energy, had millions of dollars in cases pending before Maynard’s court.
But Blankenship isn’t the only one with chips in the game. The Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky reports that several coal executives, including Blankenship, are pooling their money to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision loosening corporate campaign finance laws by forming a 527 group to help elect coal-friendly Republicans. Why a 527? Because according to the IRS, they can hide their activities until “next year, long after the Nov. 2 election.” From the report:
Academy Award-winning actress and New Orleans resident Sandra Bullock has severed her involvement in a campaign to call attention to the BP spill, after learning from ThinkProgress that it was a greenwashing effort by the oil industry.
New poll shows steady support for state’s climate-change law, while opposition to drilling shoots up
The state’s climate-change law, AB 32, has been a hot topic on the campaign trail this year — with the Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate branding it as a “job-killer,” as opponents of the law marshal support for a November ballot measure that would suspend implementation until the state’s unemployment rate drops to 5.5% for a year.
But despite the controversy over the 2006 law, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a new poll shows that two-thirds (67%) of California residents continue to back it — about the same level as last year.
George Schultz, former Ronald Reagan Administration Secretary of State, and Tom Steyer, CAP Board member, have teamed up as the co-chairs of Californians for Clean Energy and Jobs, the effort to fight Big Oil’s Proposition 23 on the California ballot this coming November. Prop 23 is Big Oil’s blatant attempt to destroy California’s landmark climate bill and supporting clean energy legislation.
What makes this unlikely partnership so significant is that in addition to his duties leading Californians for Clean Energy and Jobs, Schultz is also co-chair of the campaign to elect Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. Steyer, on the other hand, supports Jerry Brown, and is donating $5 million to fight Prop 23.
To complicate matters even more, the Whitman campaign thus far has chosen to stick with hardline republican talking points denouncing California’s clean energy law as a “job killer.” Whitman makes the following accusation on her campaign website:
Potential Utility-Scale Generation in the South
The dramatically scaled-back energy and oil-spill bill released by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday lacks both a carbon pricing mechanism and a renewable electricity standard (RES). While support for a RES increased as the chances of passing more substantive legislation dwindled, Reid insists that 60 votes for an RES simply do not exist in this Senate. That is particularly true for an RES that would actually push renewables beyond business as usual projections (see Chu: Proposed renewable standard is too weak).
Misplaced regional concerns routinely prevent Congress from passing a national renewable electricity standard. Southern lawmakers on both sides of the aisle claim that a RES would pose a disproportionate burden to their states, for example, perpetuating a myth that the South lacks clean energy potential.
A new study from Georgia Tech and Duke University, “Renewable Energy in the South: A Policy Brief,” dispels that myth, finding plenty of clean energy opportunities in the South—especially if Congress enacts a national renewable electricity standard (RES) or puts a price on carbon. With comprehensive policies to support renewable energy development and address climate change, the study reports, southern states can generate 15 to 30 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
With hopes of squeezing a national clean energy and climate bill out of the 111th Congress rapidly dimming, many are now asking whether the federal government can use its existing authority to reduce global warming pollution. One issue on which the Obama Administration has shown leadership is in using executive authority to reduce the emissions of the federal government itself (see here). CAPAF’s Sean Pool has the story.
Last week, the President upped his ante by announcing that the federal government would reduce carbon pollution from indirect sources, such as employee travel and commuting, by 13 percent by 2020. This goes above and beyond previous commitments made to reduce emissions from direct sources by 28 percent by 2020, under last year’s Executive Order 13514.
FoxNews had me on twice for the big snowstorms (during the hottest winter on record), but no invitations during the record-smashing heat waves hitting the nation and world. Go figure!
This is Roy Spencer’s much rejiggered UAH satellite data comparing 2010 lower trososphere temperatures (green) with average temps (blue) and record highs since 1979 (purple):
*It would appear we’ve set the all-time record high absolute temperature in the satellite dataset for the last week or two, but see John Christy caveat below.
NOAA’s annual State of the Climate Report for 2009 (video here) reports that “Past Decade Warmest on Record According to Scientists in 48 Countries“:
Global warming could be good for the planet, Koch says. “A far greater land area will be available to produce food.”
This is the big pull-out quote from a profile in New York Magazine of the billionaire polluter behind the Tea Parties, whose family outspends Exxon Mobil on climate and clean energy disinformation.
NY Mag gives Koch free rein to spread that disinformation, with not a single quote by any scientist disputing it. Of course, if conservatives continue to listen to Koch and the groups funded by him, like the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation — and block all efforts to get off our current emissions path — then we are headed towards very high concentrations of carbon dioxide, which will dramatically reduce the land available to produce food, even as we add another 3 billion mouths to feed (see “Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water“).
Rising sea levels will wipe out some of the world’s richest agricultural land, which is near the coast and deltas, while forcing more than 100 million people inland. At the same time, the inland glaciers will shrink sharply, reducing the flow of rivers to tens of millions of people in Asia. And then we have projections of moderate drought over half the planet (at 850 ppm). A NOAA-led study similary found permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe on our current emissions trajectory (and irreversibly so for 1000 years). Future droughts will be fundamentally different from all previous droughts that humanity has experienced because they will be very hot weather droughts (see Must-have PPT: The “global-change-type drought” and the future of extreme weather).
That’s why Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” But NY Mag doesn’t ask any such questions. It just reprints his nonsense without question. Brad Johnson of Wonk Room has more:
Wind Drives Growing Use of Batteries
The rapid growth of wind farms, whose output is hard to schedule reliably or even predict, has the nation’s electricity providers scrambling to develop energy storage to ensure stability and improve profits.
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