Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

I have great respect for Scientific American and have even published a couple of articles in it in my career.  So it was quite disappointing to see this pop-up when I visited ScientificAmerican.com yesterday from two different computers:

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Highly profitable oil and other large companies are increasingly turning to U.S. universities to perform their commercial research and development. Investigative reporter Jennifer Washburn has the story in this major new CAP report (big 220-page PDF here).

The world’s largest oil companies are showing surprising interest in financing alternative energy research at U.S. universities. Over the past decade, five of the world’s top 10 oil companies—ExxonMobil Corp., Chevron Corp., BP PLC, Royal Dutch Shell Group, and ConocoPhillips Co.—and other large traditional energy companies with a direct commercial stake in future energy markets have forged dozens of multi-year, multi-million-dollar alliances with top U.S. universities and scientists to carry out energy-related research. Much of this funding by “Big Oil” is being used for research into new sources of alternative energy and renewable energy, mostly biofuels.

Why are highly profitable oil and other large corporations increasingly turning to U.S. universities to perform their commercial research and development instead of conducting this work in-house? Why, in turn, are U.S. universities opening their doors to Big Oil? And when they do, how well are U.S. universities balancing the needs of their commercial sponsors with their own academic missions and public-interest obligations, given their heavy reliance on government research funding and other forms of taxpayer support?

The answers to these three questions are critical to energy-related research and development in our country, given the current global-warming crisis and the role that academic experts have traditionally played in providing the public with impartial research, analysis, and advice. To unpack these questions and help find answers, this report provides a detailed examination of 10 university-industry agreements that together total $833 million in confirmed corporate funding (over 10 years) for energy research funding on campus.

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The greatest crisis we confront in the 21st Century is not a future environmental crisis predicted by computer models, but a human crisis today that is fully within our power to solve. For too long, too many have been focused on the wrong end game.

For everyone who has voiced a 2050 greenhouse gas goal, we need 10 people and policy bodies working toward the goal of broad energy access. Only once we have a growing, vibrant, global economy providing energy access and an improved human condition for billions of the energy impoverished can we accelerate progress on environmental issues such as a reduction in greenhouse gases.

That would be Gregory H. Boyce Chairman and CEO of Peabody Energy, “the world’s largest private-sector coal company.”  Last week he “outlined a multi-step plan to eliminate energy poverty and inequality by unlocking the power of coal to advance energy security, generate economic stimulus and create environmental solutions.”

Yes, the power of coal needs “unlocking.”  Poor, imprisoned, climate-destroying coal — can anyone set it free from its rampant growth curve?

Boyce can relax.  For everyone who has voiced a 2050 greenhouse gas goal there are 10 people funded by the corporate polluters to shout them down, spread disinformation, or lobby against serious action (see “Dirty Money“).

The rest of us, however, can’t relax because here is the “Peabody Plan”:

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X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.

On Sunday, I wrote about how Lindsey Graham had drunk the tar sands Kool-Aid: “It is less carbon intensive than oil we find in California,” extraction “really blends in with the natural habitat.”

David Sands of the Government of Alberta pointed out in the comments that CERA had done a study supporting the view that that the tar sands were not overly carbon intensive.  Unsurprisingly, that analysis turns out to have multiple flaws, as NRDC scientist and former EPA analyst Simon Mui explains in “Tar Sands: Why Alberta Has A Credibility Problem” (reposted below).

In fact, EPA’s unusually blunt July letter to the State Department sharply criticizing their draft Environmental Impact Statement on the 1,700 mile pipeline to bring dirty tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast states:

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Who are you going to believe:  Lindsey Graham or your own lyin’ eyes?

In an amazing interview with Canada’s The Globe and Mail, “U.S. senator sold on the oil sands,” the once-serious, but now utterly incoherent Senator from South Carolina visits what some have rightly called the “biggest global warming crime ever seen,” and pronounces it A-OK:

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BP is an extreme greenwasher (see “Should you believe anything BP says?”).  Its lies to the public, government, and itself have had catastrophic consequences (see The three causes of BP’s Titanic oil disaster: Recklessness, Arrogance, and Hubris).

So naturally, when students in California return to school this fall, they will have a brand new environmental curriculum developed, in part, by BP.  Think Progress has the amazing story:

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CAP’s Joshua Dorner exposes the latest Big Oil effort to dupe the public in this TP cross-post.

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I’m very interested in your thoughts on the matter since you are the target audience for the ads that appear here.

Many readers were upset when they saw the BP greenwashing ads on Climate Progress over the weekend — I reprint one well-thought-out email below.  Here’s the story of how they made it back onto CP.

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While on vacation, I missed reposting this Brad Johnson piece from Wonk Room:

In a letter to BP America CEO Lamar McKay, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) are demanding that BP disclose its “spending on corporate advertising and marketing relating to the the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and relief, recovery, and restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.” Their request follows the efforts of Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) to get answers about BP’s massive greenwashing campaign, which includes months of full-page advertisements in national and regional newspapers, radio spots, television commercials, and Internet ads on websites including ThinkProgress.org. Outside estimates of the scope of the greenwashing campaign managed by BP’s public relations firm Mediashare are in the tens of millions of dollars, the Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson reports:

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This is a Wonk Room cross-post.

At an exclusive coal industry retreat this month, a top West Virginia politician bemoaned the negative image of the state’s coal industry in the wake of this year’s Upper Big Branch disaster that killed 29 miners. Looking for a silver lining, Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick (D-WV) contrasted the death toll from mining coal to the deaths from drug overdoses in McDowell County, West Virginia’s poorest. In a stream-of-consciousness speech during the annual West Virginia Coal Association membership meeting in White Sulphur Springs, Helmick complained that “we” — the coal industry and its political allies — “don’t give the press signs” to put coal’s deadly toll into context:

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Last year an industry front group that distributed a coloring book on the “advantages” of coal: “Let’s Learn About Coal.” TP has the latest industry plans to target American youth –  not counting their pollution, that is (See “If you want smarter kids, shut coal plants“). (more…)

Last July I discussed another ExxonMobil deceit: They are still funding climate science deniers despite their public pledge to “discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Even though the UK’s Guardian and other media outlets pointed out the ExxonMobil lie last year, they continue to fund anti-science disinformers. Desmogblog’s Brendan DeMelle has the story in this repost.

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UPDATE:  Full speech is here and below.

John Podesta, the head of an influential center-left think tank here in DC,  whose many alumni populate the Obama administration, gave a keynote speech at a forum this morning about the “Greening the Oil Sands” put on by Canada 2020. Podesta said that he didn’t want to be the “skunk” at the party, but he still managed to drop quite a stink-bomb into a gathering otherwise focused on promoting the environmental measures underway in Alberta.

That’s how Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine covered the speech.

The subject is timely because of the role of one particularly dirty and reckless oil company (see BP stand for “back to petroleum” — oil giant shuts clean energy HQ, slashes renewables budget up to $900 million this year, dives into tar sands).   Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has more on the speech in this repost:

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ExxonMobil anxiously grasps its gigantic but unsustainable gold mines, pumps cash (much of it from your wallet to places far away), pours GHGs into the atmosphere, pushes its publicity machine, and doesn’t seem to comprehend the relationships between a healthy climate and the lives of our grandchildren.  They try to confuse you in the process.  Their actions delay the creation of millions of jobs and our ability to author a healthier future.  And that’s putting it politely.

ExxonMobil will be holding its Annual Meeting of Shareholders this week, on May 26 in Dallas.  If you get your news from the status quo media, you might not have a full picture of the company (see NYT suckered by ExxonMobil in puff piece titled “Green is for Sissies”).

Guest columnist, frequent commenter, and former Chevron employee, Jeff Huggins paints a poignant portrait of the petro-giant.

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