Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Muted Optimism on Copenhagen Climate Talks U.S. News & World Report


Global warming Cherry Hill Courier Post

Global warming
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Climate Progress


Climate Progress


Veterans Day, 2029

Posted: 11 Nov 2009 10:03 AM PST

This post is an update of Memorial Day, 2029.

resource_wars_cover.jpgThe two worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and sea level rise, Hell and High Water.  But another impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly than either of those: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don't leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.  As the NYT reported in August:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

The world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide — possibly even a world beyond 400 ppm — crosses carbon cycle tipping points that threaten to quickly take us to 1000 ppm.  It is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs. It is a world of a hundred Katrinas, of countless environmental refugees — hundreds of millions by the second half of this century — all clamoring to occupy the parts of the developed world that aren't flooded or desertified.

In such a world, everyone will ultimately become a veteran, and Veteran's Day and Memorial Day will fade into obscurity, as people forget about a time when wars were the exception, a time when soldiers were but a small minority of the population.

So when does this happen?

Thomas Fingar, "the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst," sees it happening by the mid-2020s:

By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change "could be the straw that breaks the camel's back," Fingar said, while the United States will face "Dust Bowl" conditions in the parched Southwest….

[Glad to see somebody serious understands what is coming (see "Sorry, delayers & enablers, Part 2: Climate change means worse droughts for SW and world")].

He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.

Significantly, the UK government's chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a similar scenario in a March speech to the government's Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, "A 'perfect storm' of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions," as the UK's Guardian put it.

You can see a five-minute BBC interview with Beddington here. The speech is now online. Here are some excerpts:

We saw the food spike last year; prices going up by something in the order of 300%, rice went up by 400%, we saw food riots, we saw major issues for the poorest in the world, in the sense that the organisations like the World Food Programme did not have sufficient money to buy food on the open market and actually use it to feed the poorest of the poor.

So this is a major problem. You can see the catastrophic decline in those reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we're not growing enough food, we're not able to put stuff into the reserves….

So, what are the drivers? I am going to go through them now very briefly.

First of all, population growth. World population grows by six million every month — greater than the size of the UK population every year. Between now and… I am going to focus on the year 2030 and the reason I am going to focus on 2030 is that I feel that some of the climate change discussions focusing on 2100 don't actually grip…. I am going to look at 2030 because that's when a whole series of events come together.

By 2030, looking at population terms, you are looking at the global population increasing from a little over six billion at the moment to about eight billion….

… you are going to see major changes but particularly in the demand for livestock — meat and dairy….

… By 2030, the demand for food is going to be increased by about 50%. Can we do it? One of the questions. There is a major food security issue by 2030. We've got to somehow produce 50% more by that time.The second issue I want to focus on is the availability of fresh water…. The fresh water available per head of the world population is around 25% of what it was in 1960. To give you some idea of this; there are enormous potential shortages in certain parts of the world… China has something like 23% of the world's population and 11% of the world's water.

… the massive use of water is in agriculture and particularly in developing world agriculture. Something of the order of 70% of that. One in three people are already facing water shortages and the total world demand for water is predicted to increase by 30% by 2030.

So, we've got food — expectation of demand increase of 50% by 2030, we've got water — expectation of demand increase of 30% by 2030. And in terms of what it looks like, we have real issues of global water security.

…. where there is genuine water stress [in 2025 is] China and also parts of India, but look at parts of southern Europe where by 2025 we are looking at serious issues of water stress….

So, water is really enormously important. I am going to get onto the climate change interactions with it a little bit later but water is the one area that I feel is seriously threatening. It is so important because a shortage of water obviously interacts with a shortage of food, there are real potentials for driving significant international problems — what do you do if you have no water and you have no food? You migrate. So one can have a reasonable expectation that international migration will occur as these shortages come in.

Now, the third one I want to focus on is energy and, driven by the population increase that I talked about, the urbanisation I talked about and indeed the movement out of poverty…. For the first time, the demand of the rest of the world exceeded the demand of energy of the OECD….. Energy demand is actually increasing and going to hit something of the order of a 50% increase, again by 2030.

Now, if that were not enough… those are three things that are coming together. What will the world be like when that happens? But we also have, of course, the issue of climate change. Now, this is a very familiar slide to you all but we are shooting for a target of two degrees centigrade, a perfectly sensible target. There is enormous uncertainty in the climate change models about that particular target. It is perfectly reasonable to say 'shouldn't we be shooting for one degrees centigrade or, oddly enough, it is perfectly reasonable to say 'shouldn't we be shooting for three degrees centigrade', the only information we have is really enormously uncertain in terms of the climate change model.

Shooting for two seems a perfectly sensible and legitimate objective but there are enormous problems. You are talking about serious problems in tropical glaciers — the Chinese government has recognised this and has actually announced about 10 days ago that it is going to build 59 new reservoirs to take the glacial melt in the Xinjiang province. 59 reservoirs. It is actually contemplating putting many of them underground. This is a recognition that water, which has hitherto been stored in glaciers, is going to be very scarce. We have to think about water in a major way….

The other area that really worries me in terms of climate change and the potential for positive feedbacks and also for interactions with food is ocean acidification….

As I say, it's as acid today as it has been for 25 million years. When this occurred some 25 million years ago, this level of acidification in the ocean, you had major problems with it, problems of extinctions of large numbers of species in the ocean community. The areas which are going to be hit most severely by this are the coral reefs of the world and that is already starting to show. Coral reefs provide significant protein supplies to about a billion people. So it is not just that you can't go snorkelling and see lots of pretty fish, it is that there are a billion people dependent on coral reefs for a very substantial portion of their high protein diet.

… we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we've got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That's when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Some of this can be avoid or minimized if we act now. Some of it can't. But if we don't act strongly now, then by Memorial Day 2029, many of the global conflicts will either be resource wars or wars driven by environmental degradation and dislocation (see "Warming Will Worsen Water Wars). Indeed that may already have started to happen (see "Report: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Trigger Darfur Crisis).

For one discussion of the kind of wars we might be seeing, albeit for the year 2046, here is a three-part radio series on Climate Wars.

Fortunately, veterans and security experts and politicians of all parties have begun working together to avoid the worst.  In the op-ed announcing their breakthrough Senate climate partnership, Senators Graham (R-SC) and Kerry (D-MA) said one of the key reasons they joined forces to pass climate and clean energy bill is that "we agree that climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security."

A key leader on climate and energy security has been the conservative Virgina Republican, John Warner, who is pushing hard to pass the clean energy bill — because he is a former Navy secretary and former Senate Armed Services Committee chair and because he is a former Forest Service firefighter now "just absolutely heartbroken" because "the old forest, the white pine forest in which I worked, was absolutely gone, devastated, standing there dead from the bark beetle" thanks in large part to global warming.

Warner's is "trying to build grass-roots support for congressional action to limit global warming," as Politics Daily reported.  "He is traveling the country to discuss military research that shows climate change is a threat to U.S. national security." Here is part of PD's interview:

PD: Does the responsibility fall to us to respond to the consequences of climate change?
JW: Not exclusively, but we're often in the forefront of response to these things. We're the nation with the most sealift. The most airlift. We have more medical teams which are mobile, more storehouses of food and supplies to meet emergencies. And throughout our history, from the beginning of the republic, America's always had to respond to certain humanitarian disasters.
PD: What are some examples of destabilization due to climate?
JW: One clear case of it is Somalia. [In the early 1990s] the prolonged drought began to tie up the economy, the food supplies. There was a certain amount of political and economic instability. Where you have fragile nations . . . a serious climactic problem will come along, with a shortage of food or water, and often those governments are toppled. And then they fall to the evils of . . . terrorism or others who try to exploit these fallen governments. You saw it in Darfur. You saw it in Somalia. This political instability and weakness is given the final tilt by a problem associated with climactic change.

Our choice today is clear.  We can continue listening to the voices of denial and delay, assuring that everyone ultimately becomes a veteran of the growing number of climate-related conflicts.

Or we can launch a WWII-scale effort and a WWII-style effort to address the problem as Hansen and I and others have called for.  That is our most necessary fight today.

Related Posts:

Maryland county draws a "car-free blueprint for growth"

Posted: 11 Nov 2009 07:58 AM PST

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2009/11/10/PH2009111020036.jpg

Montgomery County redefined the way it will grow in the next two decades when lawmakers endorsed a plan Tuesday that encourages development where residents can easily live a car-free lifestyle.

The County Council, after weeks of intense debate over the county's growth policy, unanimously agreed to give developers discounts to build dense developments near transit stations as long as they also construct bike paths and walkways, put shops and other amenities nearby, and use environmentally friendly construction methods.

I don't do a lot of local area reporting, but this front page (!) Washington Post story, "Montgomery draws a car-free blueprint for growth," seemed newsworthy.  The picture above is of the Rockville Pike corridor, and anyone who has driven around Rockville knows it is as car-centric as anywhere in America.

The county is working to change that:

Most suburban growth plans — including Montgomery's, until Tuesday — discourage development in congested areas, including those near public transit, and encourage construction in more sparsely populated communities, on the theory that new developments should arise where traffic is still tolerable.

But Montgomery's new plan takes a different tack, one that smart-growth advocates say is long overdue. With the population nearing 1 million, the Washington suburb is substantially larger than the big city to its south but is still managing growth as if everyone can hop in a car and quickly get where they want to go.

The county's growth policy is revisited every two years. The new plan could boost efforts to redevelop the jumbled White Flint area along Rockville Pike and provide new impetus to build a "science city" spearheaded by Johns Hopkins University west of Interstate 270 near Gaithersburg….

The council also endorsed a plan from County Council member Roger Berliner (D-Potomac-Bethesda), whose district is likely to be the epicenter of much of the urban-style growth, to use development fees to improve a transit system that commuters say is increasingly inadequate….

Planners predict that 200,000 people are likely to move to the county in the next 20 years, bumping the population to more than 1 million. To find a way to house the expected newcomers and get them to and from work, the Planning Board had recommended that developers get discounts and rewards if they are willing to idle their properties for a few years and to build denser development and taller buildings, up to 300 feet in some areas, near the county's Metro stations.

The Planning Board has also tried to make improving transit an ironclad condition of much new development.

When the board approved the proposed science city in July, members were adamant that it could not be built unless the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway bus or rail system is funded and built. Funding transit, however, is up to federal, state and local lawmakers, all of whom are struggling with massive budget shortfalls, so the Planning Board can advocate for but not create it.

As the price of oil returns to and then exceeds its previous records, funding for bus or rail systems will become a bigger and bigger priority state and federal level, so it is important for local planners to start designing for that.

And while I'm not certain the phrase "car-free" is a fully accurate description of what Montgomery County is pursuing, they deserve kudos for this smart growth plan.

Related Post:

News ads for clean energy and climate bill from Vote Vets and League of Conservation Voters

Posted: 11 Nov 2009 06:45 AM PST

If you want to help keep the Vote Vets ad on the air, click here.

And this is the new LCV ad to "stop Big Oil's bid to kill clean energy legislation":

If you want to help LCV put that ad on the air, click here.

In "Act of Despicable Hubris," coal front group ACCCE exploits veterans groups to push dirty energy agenda

Posted: 11 Nov 2009 05:09 AM PST

You may recall from September that the dirty coal group's 14th forgery impersonated American veterans, whereas real vets support strong action on climate and clean energy — as does GOP Senator John Warner, former Armed Services Committee chair. The coal industry is still up to its dirty tricks, as made clear in this Think Progress repost.

accce-whoThe American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) — a front group of big utilities and coal companies — is no stranger to fraud. During the summer's House debate on cap-and-trade legislation, lobbyists working on behalf of the coal group sent forged letters to members of Congress, and lied under oath about it. Now, ACCCE is trying to exploit Veterans Day by misrepresenting veterans groups in an email to supporters:

With Veterans Day around the corner, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on all the military personnel who are involved in ensuring our country is protected.

Energy security is one issue that has become increasingly important to our veterans. In fact, national veterans groups Votevets and Operation Free are urging the government to become more energy independent and less reliant on foreign oil.

We can do this by using the abundant domestic fuels we already have. With more than 250 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves, the United States has more coal than the Middle East has oil.

The letter implies that VoteVets and Operation Free support ACCCE and its dirty energy agenda, but the the two groups are actually vocal backers of clean energy legislation. VoteVets excoriated ACCCE for citing them in the email, writing that VoteVets "will never advocate the continued use of carbon based fuels" and that ACCCE is trying "to hijack America's Veterans" in "an act of despicable hubris."

Operation Free — a veterans group which is dedicated to fighting climate change — was also quick to condemn ACCCE. In a blog post, Operation Free wrote that the email "dishonors Veterans day" and is "insulting to all of the Veterans who are fighting to protect America's national security by supporting clean, American power."

Will ACCCE acknowledge their continued misrepresentation and apologize for using Veterans Day as a prop to support an agenda that many veterans oppose?

Related Posts:

Must-see video of Sen. Kerry grilling AEI's Kenneth Green: "You just can't just throw that stuff out there."

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 04:53 PM PST

Senator Kerry:  Has your study been peer reviewed?
Kenneth Green:  No, I don't work in the peer review literature, Senator. I don't work for a university.

Steven Hayward, the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently said, "The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining."  He may have had in mind his AEI colleague Kenneth Green, whose lack of knowledge on climate was laid bare for all to see by Sen. John Kerry in today's Finance Committee hearing:

I don't know what is more revealing and embarrassing for Green and AEI — that Green couldn't actually name a single peer-reviewed study in his defense or that when Kerry calls him on it, his only defense is an appeal to authority — his own "opinion" (!):

Green:  All I can say, Senator, is that I read the IPCC reports, the science of climate change report in its totality cover to cover, I follow the latest journals, my doctoral degree is in environmental science and engineering.  I daresay I'm capable of understanding the literature and forming my own opinion. I –

Kerry (interrupting):  Has your study been peer reviewed?

Green: Pardon me?

Kerry: Has your study been peer reviewed?

Green: No, I don't work in the peer review literature, Senator. I don't work for a university.

That is uber-weird.  Green seems to be suggesting (falsely) that you have to work for a university to write peer reviewed research.  Play the video.  It sure sounds that way — otherwise the second sentence is a pure non sequitur.

Kerry: So, you don't submit your studies for any peer review?

Green: Ah, no.

Kerry: You realize that there are something like two or three thousand studies all of which concur which have been peer reviewed, and not one of the studies dissenting has been peer reviewed?

Green: That's not correct, Senator.

Kerry: Show me a peer reviewed study.

Green: I'll send you a list.

Kerry: Please, because nobody else has.

Green: I'll be glad to.

With the help of AEI's staff, Green will probably be able to find a handful of now-debunked peer-reviewed studies that "support" his position, but it remains telling that he couldn't name a single one when asked in a public forum.  Kerry called his bluff, and Green folded.

Here's the early part of the exchange:

Green:  Canada, for instance, can agree to a target and if they don't do anything they can't be sued into government compliance.  The U.S. is unique in the status it gives treaties, when we sign a treaty, we live up to it.  Other countries can sign treaties and not live up to them.  That is a fundamental difference that makes the U.S. hesitant to embrace treaties as a general role, and I think wisely because treaties have a very high status in American law that is not necessarily reflected in the other countries.

Kerry:  Well, actually Dr. Green, that's not entirely true. (Laughs a little)  I'm sorry.

(Republican senator demurs in the background)

Well, let me tell you why it's not, Senator:  I was at the treaty signing which we ratified unanimously in the U.S. Senate — the 1992 framework convention, which George Herbert Walker Bush negotiated, and it's been 18 years since, and we haven't done a thing to meet it.   In last 8 years emission in U.S. in green house gasses went up 4 times faster than in the 1990s.  So that's the reason we're talking about the need to move to a mandatory reduction — because we didn't, and nobody else did, either.  A few people tried, here and there.  So you just can't just throw that stuff out there and say we do it, they don't, blah blah blah.

You don't accept that you have to hold it at 2 degrees.  You may know something that thousands of other scientists don't.  You know, they won a Nobel Prize; you and I didn't.   And they won it for their work that said you got to hold it at 2 degrees Centigrade.

The G 20 … said we have to hold it at 2 degrees Centigrade.  Maybe you know something we don't about where the tipping point is.  But I got a lot of scientists that I respect, who's life work — from John Holdren who's now the science advisor to the president, to Jim Hansen over at NASA and a bunch of others — who tell us that we have a ten year window to meet the standard of keeping the temperature from rising over 2 degrees Centigrade, or you reach a tipping point….

All of the evidence is coming back faster and to a greater degree than they predicted underscoring the predictions they made.  At some point you have to step back and say these guys are making sense because what they said is going to happen is happening and it's happening faster and at a greater risk.

If this had been a boxing match, the referee would have stopped it.  Here's more:

Kerry: Every most recent scientific update, and I get them periodically.  I ask them to come in and say what's happening; is it less than, what's the rate?  And without exception they look at me and say "Senator, I can't even talk about some of the things that are happening today publicly because people won't believe it."  Like columns of methane rising out of the ocean floor that you can light a match to and it will explode and burst into the open air because the permafrost is melting.

We just voted $400 million to move Newstalk, Alaska, to move it inland because of what's happening in terms of the ice melt.  There's some 400 villages threatened.  Ask Lisa Murkowski, or Mark Biggouch about what's happening in Alaska.

All I can say to you is that we have to employ the Precautionary Principle here.  If I've got a few thousand scientists over here and you and a few others over here, the weight is pretty heavy to say to me that as a public person I ought to implement the precautionary principle.  And if I have chief executives like Jeff Immelt, Lou Hay, and Chad Holliday of Dupont and a bunch of other people who run Fortune 500 companies telling me, "Senator, we have to price carbon.  And we want certainty in the market place," I'm going to listen.

Unless you can give me an overpowering reason why those guys are all wrong, and I don't think you have….

Green:  All I can say, Senator, is that I read the IPCC reports….

He may have read them, but he didn't get anything out of them.

Green's lame defense of himself is no surprise since he regularly spouts stuff like, "No matter what you've been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly" — from a 2008 speech AEI later removed from their website (excerpts here).  And last month, he weirdly compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals.

Kudos to Senator Kerry for exposing this American Enterprise Institute "expert."

CAP's Russell Sterten helped with this post.

Supermodel: Why I Took It Off For Climate Change

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 01:52 PM PST

Our guest blogger is supermodel Cameron Russell, a junior at Columbia University and the organizer of the "Supermodels Take It Off For Climate Change" video for the 350.org movement.  This is a Wonk Room repost.

Right now, preventing catastrophic climate change is just about the most important thing any one of us should be working on right now. 350.org organized a worldwide day of action which took place on October 24. The goal of their effort was to educate and generate attention around the setting of a 350 parts per million CO2 target goal for the meeting to be held in Copenhagen in December. I know something about getting attention and decided to contribute to their effort.

In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.

The whole "Supermodels take it off for climate change" project happened from start to finish in a little under two weeks and 300 phone calls–who knew production was so complicated! All the girls — Rachel Alexander, Shannon Click, Hanne Gaby, Olya Ivanisevic, Alla Kostromicheva, Heidi Mount, Crystal Renn, Rianne Ten Haken, and Nicole Trunfio — are my friends and loved shooting the video for a good cause, so that part was relatively easy to pull together. But let me tell you who was really responsible.

Indirectly there are three people responsible for this video: Tibor Kalman, Bill McKibben, and Robin Chase:

My all-time hero Tibor Kalman showed the world the ability of mass media to convey serious images and create real discussion (think 90's Benetton advertisements of people with AIDS). Climate change, which is often seen as very political or scientific, needs to be made a people's issue. My hope is that this ad helps re-brand environmentalism.

Bill McKibben, advocating scientist James Hansen's target of 350 ppm CO2 to avoid catastrophic effects from climate change, leads the 350 movement — a widely successful environmental action campaign that remains in close touch with science and politics.

Finally Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and Goloco, is my mom and raised me in a household that didn't drive when it could be avoided, bought used clothes and almost nothing else, and led our family and friends by example showing us that it doesn't matter how much you have. She also taught us to appreciate our personal and unique strengths, skills and experience, and figure out how to put them to good use.

There were at least 26 other people directly involved in making it. Eleven other models donated their free time, a precious day off for these top girls who work nearly every day from their late teens to as late as their early 30's. Some of them have professional lives outside of modeling too. Cystal Renn just put out a book called Hungry about her transformation into a plus size model — it's been incredibly successful and earned her a spot on Oprah. Nicole is the host of Bravo's "Make Me a Supermodel" show. Heidi is the proud mother of two year-old Liam.

Then there was a whole team of people that made the girls look amazing: a stylist, Shandi Alexander, and her two assistants, a hairdresser, Kevin Ryan, and his two assistants, and two make up artists, Jesse Lawson and Fara Homidi, who all donated their free time as well. Then there was our amazing director Damani Baker, the three guys who assisted him, and Andrew Zuckerman who took still photos. There was my co-prodcuer Alex Vlack who also let us use his studio and turn his office into a wardrobe room. Finally there was Christana Tran and Heather Hughes who work at Women and Supreme model management that helped provide designer clothing and coordinate models.

Obama will go to Copenhagen — if he can seal a deal

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 01:27 PM PST

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday he would travel to Copenhagen next month if a climate summit is on the verge of a framework deal and his presence there will make a difference in clinching it….

"If I am confident that all of the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we are on the brink of a meaningful agreement and my presence in Copenhagen will make a difference in tipping us over edge then certainly that's something that I will do," Obama told Reuters in an interview.

I had written back on October 9, after the Nobel Peace Prize announcement, that it looks like Obama will be going to Copenhagen after all.

The only question is whether there will be enough progress to motivate him to come.  Reuters notes that the President remains optimistic n spite of the too-slow movement in the Senate:

Obama, who has faced resistance from opposition Republicans and even some fellow Democrats to setting caps on greenhouse gas emissions, acknowledged that the U.S. Senate would not pass climate change legislation before Copenhagen.

Delays in the U.S. Congress have rankled European allies and added to questions about how significant the deal that emerges from Copenhagen will ultimately be.

But Obama insisted he remained optimistic that the December 7-18 summit could yield a "framework" agreement.

"I think the question is can we create a set of principles, building blocks, that allow for ongoing and continuing progress on the issue and that's something I'm confident we can achieve," he said.

Finally, it has been obvious for a while that a framework deal between the U.S. and China was key to enabling both domestic and international action (see "Does a serious bill need action from China?").  The Administration has been pursuing it aggressively for a while (see "Exclusive: Have China and the U.S. been holding secret talks aimed at a climate deal this fall?").

Now the president has publicly stated he expected such a framework deal to be achieved this month:

Obama made clear he considers his talks with Chinese leaders during an Asia tour later this month to be crucial in clearing remaining obstacles to some kind of accord.

"The key now is for the United States and China, the two largest emitters in the world, is to be able to come up with a framework that, along with other big emitters like the Europeans and those countries that are projected to be large emitters in the future, like India, can all buy into," he said.

"I remain optimistic that between now and Copenhagen that we can arrive at that framework," he added.

If he succeeds, then I do think Copenhagen will achieve what is needed to advance the prospects for international deal, the President will come and a global framework will be agreed to — with a follow-on global meeting set for six months later — then the U.S. Senate and then the entire Congress will pass a climate bill, and we will finalize the international agreement by the end of next year.

We have met the deniers, and they are us Grist Magazine


Op-Ed Columnist Trucks, Trains and Trees New York Times


Gore outlines his solutions for planet peril (photos) San Francisco Chronicle


Climate Progress


Climate Progress


Energy and Global Warming News: Each extra year of climate inaction adds $500 billion to final cost — IEA

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 10:11 AM PST

Cost of extra year's climate inaction $500 billion: IEA

The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.

At United Nations climate talks in Barcelona last week negotiators from developed countries said the world would need an extra six to 12 months to agree a legally binding, global deal to cut carbon emissions beyond a planned December deadline.

The IEA, energy adviser to 28 industrialized countries, said the world must act urgently to put greenhouse gases on a track to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Every year's delay beyond 2010 would add another $500 billion to the extra investment of $10,500 billion needed from 2010-2030 to curb carbon emissions, for example to improve energy efficiency and boost low-carbon renewable energy.

"Much more needs to be done to get anywhere near an emissions path consistent with … limiting the rise in global temperature to 2 degrees," said the IEA's 2009 World Energy Outlook. "Countries attending the U.N. climate conference must not lose sight of this."

What needs to be done?  See "Must-read IEA report explains what must be done to avoid 6°C warming" and "IEA report, Part 2: Climate Progress has the 450-ppm solution about right."

Here's more from today's story:

U.N. talks meant to agree a deal in Copenhagen in December to extend or replace the existing Kyoto Protocol have struggled to overcome a rich-poor rift on how to split the cost of curbing carbon emissions, for example from burning fossil fuels.

Developed countries accept that they have to take the burden of cutting carbon emissions, but want developing nations to accept binding actions too under a new treaty.

Poor countries want financial help to implement carbon emissions cuts and prepare for unavoidable global warming, including droughts, floods and rising seas.

The IEA report estimated that the world needed to invest an extra $197 billion annually by 2020 to make the necessary emissions cuts in developing countries, compared with a global total of $430 billion by then.

"The Copenhagen conference will provide important pointers to the kind of energy future that awaits us," it said.

To continue present trends of energy demand and burning of fossil fuels "would lead almost certainly to massive climatic change and irreparable damage to the planet," it said.

To implement swinging carbon cuts, on the other hand, would require a huge shift in the world's energy system.

That would raise, for example, the share of non-fossil fuels to 32 percent of total primary energy in 2030, from 19 percent in 2007. The share of the internal combustion engine in new car sales would fall to 40 percent by 2030 from more than 90 percent under current trends.

Report: Extreme weather will be seen on Yangtze

Increased droughts, floods and storms will hit China's Yangtze River Basin over the next few decades, the result of rising temperatures globally, according to a report released Tuesday.

Climate change will trigger extreme weather conditions along the country's longest river, but strategies can be taken to control it, said the report, issued by the environmental group WWF-China. The group was originally known as the World Wildlife Fund.

In the past two decades, the temperature in the river basin area has risen steadily, which has led to a spike in flooding, heat waves and droughts, the report said. It is the largest assessment yet on the impact of global warming on the Yangtze basin area, which is home to 400 million people.

Data collected from 147 monitoring stations along the 700,000-square-mile (1.8 million-square-kilometer) area showed temperatures rose by 0.59 degree Fahrenheit (0.33 degree Celsius) during the 1990s. Additional findings show that between 2001 and 2005, the basin's temperature rose on average another 1.28 degrees Fahrenheit (0.71 degree Celsius).

"Extreme climate events such as storms and drought disasters will increase as climate change continues to alter our planet," said Xu Ming, the lead researcher on the report, which included expert contributions from the China Academy of Sciences, the China Meteorological Administration and other academic institutions.

The report identifies key areas that will be affected: from agriculture to various ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, wetlands and coastal regions.

Crops such as corn, winter wheat and rice will see clear declines in production, with rice crops alone dropping between 9 percent to 41 percent by the end of the century, it said. Natural habitat such as grasslands and wetlands have receded steadily in recent years while rising sea levels triggered by global warming will make coastal cities such as Shanghai more vulnerable.

Countermeasures include strengthening existing infrastructure, such as river and dike reinforcements, transport and power supply systems, the report said. Other steps include adjusting cropping systems and switching to hardier strains.

"Adaptation is a must for large developing nations" such as China, which is particularly vulnerable to climate change because of its large population and relatively low economic development, said James Leape, director general of WWF-International.

"The report is a reminder that while the whole world rises to meet the challenge of climate change, we must prepare for impacts that are already inevitable," he said.

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

In particular they question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production.

Now the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.

JR:  This is an odd story, since EIA joined the peak oil camp over a year ago:

U.S. eyes deal with China on climate change monitoring

The United States hopes to reach agreement with China during President Barack Obama's visit on how to record and monitor countries' efforts to fight global warming, a top State Department official said on Tuesday.

The comments by Robert Hormats, undersecretary for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, offered some insight into the types of deals Obama will be hoping to strike when he visits China next week.

Obama told Reuters in an interview on Monday that Washington and Beijing needed to work together on the big issues facing the globe, and that climate change would be a key part of his November 15-18 trip to Shanghai and Beijing.

Hormats held out the likelihood of concrete deals on energy cooperation and global warming, with an eye to ensuring the two powers have more common ground when they go into key global talks on the issue in Copenhagen next month.

"I think we need out of this visit real progress on climate change, … how we can record internationally the kind of things we're doing domestically and how we can follow up and monitor one another for what we're doing," Hormats, the State Department's top economic official, told university students in Beijing.

China is considered the world's biggest annual emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activity.

Energy agency warns of falling investment

The global financial crisis has led to a dangerous drop in energy investment around the world which could choke off the nascent economic recovery, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

The warning from the Paris-based agency comes just a month ahead of the major UN climate conference in Copenhagen, where world leaders hope to agree on so-called climate finance to help developing countries cut emissions by switching from fossil fuels to cleaner energy such as wind and solar.

The EU has said that there should be a euro100 billion ($150 billion) annual package of public and private finance by 2020 to help poorer nations develop green industries and adapt to climate change.

The IEA, a policy adviser to 28 mostly industrialized oil-consuming nations, estimates that the financial and economic crisis is responsible for a $90 billion drop in global oil and gas investment this year, a 19 percent cut from 2008.

"Falling energy investment will have far-reaching and, depending on how governments respond, potentially serious consequences for energy security, climate change and energy poverty," the IEA said in its annual World Energy Outlook report.

The resulting drop in oil and electricity supplies could "undermine the sustainability of the economic recovery," the IEA warned.

Britain unveils nuclear energy expansion plans

Britain set out plans Monday to speed up the planning process for big wind farms and new nuclear power plants and named 10 sites where reactors could be built.

Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said new nuclear plants, combined with cleaner coal plants and more renewable energy, would help Britain to secure its energy supplies and cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

About 20 percent of Britain's electricity was generated from existing nuclear power reactors in the second quarter of 2009, but all except one of them is due to shut by 2025.

Previous attempts to build new nuclear plants have been delayed by the exhaustive planning process. It took six years and cost 30 millions pounds ($50.33 million) to secure planning consent to build the Sizewell B reactor in southern England.

Under the new proposals, decisions on plants bigger than 50 megawatts, or 100 megawatts for offshore wind, will be cut to one year.

"The current planning system is a barrier to this shift (to low carbon)," Miliband said.

"It serves neither the interests of energy security, the interests of the low carbon transition, nor the interests of people living in areas where infrastructure may be built, for the planning process to take years to come to a decision."

The list of possible new nuclear power stations includes Kirksanton, a site in Cumbria, northern England, proposed by German utility RWE which is not close to any existing nuclear facilities and overlaps a small wind farm.

The government rejected EDF Energy's Dungeness power station on the south coast of England as a possible site for new reactors because of environmental and flooding concerns.

But it approved EDF sites at Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk where the French energy giant plans to build four reactors.

"It means we can prepare to take the next steps in our plan for a multi-billion pound investment in the UK," EDF Energy Chief Executive Vincent de Rivaz said in a statement.

"It is in the public interest for the UK to build at least 15 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity which would be sufficient to meet at least 30 percent of our electricity demand by 2030.

Merkel wants climate action from US, China, India

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Tuesday for the U.S., China and India to make substantive pledges of action against global warming in order to prevent the failure of next month's climate summit in Copenhagen.

"A failure of the world climate conference in Copenhagen would set back international climate policy by years," Merkel said in a speech to parliament outlining her new government's agenda. "We cannot afford that."

Merkel said the European Union has put forward a clear position on fighting climate change, and "we now expect contributions from the USA and countries such as China and India."

"A substantial political agreement is essential and the condition for an internationally binding … protocol for the time after 2013," she said.

Sen. Inhofe explains he's going to Copenhagen so that when Sen. Kerry says "Yes. We're going to pass a global warming bill" then "I will be able to stand up and say, 'No, it's over. Get a life. You lost. I won!' "

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 09:22 AM PST

Thousands and thousands of climate science advocates — including me — will be in Copenhagen next month trying to advance an international deal that gives the world a chance to avoid catastrophic global warming.

And then there will be the man even the Washington Post calls "the last flat-earther," Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL).  Why is he going?  The Ada Evening News reported Monday:

Inhofe said he still intends to attend the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference.

"I'm always the spoiler at this thing. Last night I was on the Larry Kudlow show. He said, 'Inhofe is the one-man truth squad going to Copenhagen.' So when Barbara Boxer, John Kerry and all the left get up there and say, 'Yes. We're going to pass a global warming bill,' I will be able to stand up and say, 'No, it's over. Get a life. You lost. I won,' " Inhofe said.

Sadly, the U.S. Constitution restriction — "No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years" — applies only to physical age.  The senior junior-high-school Senator from Oklahoma is proof of that.  What's next for Inhofe?  Perhaps during the Senate floor debate he plans to say "La, la, la, la, I can't hear you"?

Inhofe makes other equally revealing nonsense statements in the interview:

"The far left is trying so hard to get a cap-and-trade now," Inhofe said

Yes, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are the "far left" — see Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman "will be working closely with the White House" to develop separate tripartisan climate bill to get 60 votes; Graham rebukes fellow Republicans saying, "The green economy is coming!"

That statement just shows you how far, far, far right Inhofe is.

Inhofe said the Committee on Environment and Public Works passed the John Kerry—Barbara Boxer global warming bill without any Republican votes.

"We set up the rules of the Environment and Public Works Committee way back in 1970—a long time ago. The rules say that you can't report a bill out of the committee to go to the floor of the Senate unless there are two members of the minority there," Inhofe said. "What we did was I told all of the Republicans not to go so they couldn't have an official mark-up."

It's good that he finally admitted the truth that the GOP claim this was all about waiting for more EPA analysis was as bogus as everyone thought.  He just wanted to kill the bill.  But since that bill isn't going to the floor, his whole effort was wasted.

The entire article makes clear that Inhofe channels Groucho "Whatever it is, I'm against it" Marx.  It opens:

Although the healthcare bill made it through the House of Representatives on Saturday, United States Senator Jim Inhofe said it would face a harder road in the Senate.

"We will kill it in the Senate," Inhofe said. "I think the main thing I want to get across is it doesn't really matter because it (the healthcare bill) is not going anywhere."

That's The Audacity of Nope.

Ironically — or is that "tragically"? — if we don't have a climate bill, future generations are going to need a lot better health care:

The article ends with even more irony:

Inhofe said he has secured many funds for Ada, including $440,000 for a water tower for the city, $500,000 for the Ada Public Works Authority to treat Ada's wastewater/sewer system, $250,000 for the Wintersmith Dam along with other funds for the city.

Imagine that — Inhofe has brought in more than $1 million for water-related projects for the city.

Well, Ada is going to need those projects even more if the nation and the world actually listens to Inhofe and fails to take serious action on climate and clean energy, since on our current emissions path most of Oklahoma is projected to turn into a permanent dust bowl in the second half of this century.

Two years ago, Science (subs. req'd) published research that "predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest" on our current emissions path — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas and Oklahoma to California.  The Bush Administration itself reaffirmed this conclusion in December (see US Geological Survey stunner: SW faces "permanent drying" by 2050.)

But hey, the newspaper's website notes it has been "Serving Ada, Oklahoma since 1904."  So it'll be able to rerun those old Dust Bowl stories — for a long, long time (see NOAA stunner: Climate change "largely irreversible for 1000 years," with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

h/t Media Matters.

Baucus supports a climate bill and knows it will pass Congress, but Senate Finance Committee calls on polluter lobbyists to attack clean energy yet again

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 07:08 AM PST

Senate Finance Committee

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) knows that his state's trees are being ravaged by warming-driven pests now and that Montana faces 175% to 400% increase in wildfire burn area if we don't reverse course sharply and soon on greenhouse gas emissions.  That's why he supports strong climate action and said last week, "There's no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation."

Bizarrely, though, his Finance Committee will hold an utterly missable hearing today on the "future of jobs" under clean energy legislation that has a witness list stacked with fossil-fuel-industry-funded polluters and deniers.  Wonk Room has the story, excerpted below:

Appearing before the committee are four industry or conservative lobbyists and one coal-industry union lobbyist, Abraham Breehey. The only economist to testify will be Margo Thorning, a lobbyist for the anti-tax American Council on Capital Formation. Also testifying is Carol Berrigan, a nuclear industry representative, Van Ton-Quinlivan of Pacific Gas & Electric, and American Enterprise Institute fellow Kenneth Green.

Green regularly spouts anti-scientific nonsense like, "We're back to the average temperatures that prevailed in 1978….  No matter what you've been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly" — from a 2008 speech AEI later removed from their website (excerpts here).  Last month, Green weirdly compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals.

One could point out that Berrigan's organization, the Nuclear Energy Institute, is not satisfied that clean energy legislation will spur nuclear energy through free-market competition, but is demanding massive subsidies and tax breaks as well.

One could point out that ACCF and AEI have received millions of dollars in funding from Exxon Mobil alone, or that Thorning refuses to reveal her methodology and Green has tried to buy climate scientists for $10,000 a pop.

Instead, let's just note that tomorrow's testimony will likely rehash the talking points that these witnesses have delivered time and again for the past ten years. Other than Ton-Quinlivan, who is appearing for the first time before Congress, the witnesses are regulars on the Hill, testifying a combined 20 times on climate and energy policy since 2002. Thorning has been the most frequent guest over the years, and this will be Green's fifth time testifying since June.

Margo Thorning:

Kenneth P. Green

Carol Berrigan:

Abraham Breehey

If the Finance Committee is really trying to learn something new about whether reforming our pollution-based energy infrastructure would create new jobs, one would think they could have put a little more effort in witness selection.

Precisely.

Related Posts:

Can't teach an old car company new tricks — not even when it's under new management

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 06:03 AM PST

Despite promises to fast-track development of three electric car models using federal loan dollars to prevent its bankruptcy, Chrysler announced yesterday that it will instead disband the engineering team responsible for the projects.

For decades Chrysler has relied on selling gas hogs like trucks and minivans to turn a profit. As the producer of five out of the top 10 most polluting, inefficient passenger vehicles in America, Chrysler has not surprisingly seen its sales plummet by half in the last few years of volatile gas prices. So the plans to become a leader in the electric vehicles market introduced under pre-bailout CEO Bob Nardelli seemed like a welcome change of direction for this old industrial giant.

However, Chrysler's new CEO Sergio Marchionne, who took leadership of the company after the government-brokered merger with Fiat, is himself personally skeptical of electric vehicles, stating that E.V.'s will only account for one to two percent of overall production by 2015 – a mere 60,000 vehicles.

The announcement that Chrysler's electric vehicle program, ENVI, would be scrapped came amidst optimistic projections in the company's brand new 5-year plan. "Some of you have [assumed] that we are losing money," said Marchionne, "this is not true." The 5-year plan promises repayment of the $12.5 billion bailout money by 2015, resting these projections on questionable assumptions that the company would double its sales by 2014, and grow revenue by 20% each year for the next five years. "Today is the first day of the new Chrysler."

Unfortunately, the "new Chrysler" is going to be one that produces about half a million fewer electric vehicles by 2014 than it promised in its application for the $12.5 billion federal bailout it received from taxpayers. Not only will this slow the growth of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on US roads, it will also have negative supply-chain effects on suppliers of critical components, such as battery manufacturer A123.

These are the technologies that Chrysler promised American taxpayers when it sent its CEO to Washington begging for money to avoid its collapse. To renege from the agreement is unethical at best and downright dubious at worst. As recently as August, Chrysler received $70 million more in federal funds from DOE to support the development of a fleet of 220 test vehicles, which has now been scrapped.

Meanwhile, virtually every other major US automaker is putting a serious down payment on commercializing an electric drive or hybrid vehicle – from small start ups like Tesla, Fiskar, and Coda to giant mega brands like Honda, GM, and Toyota. GM plans to have the first U.S. plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, the Volt, on the market next year. GM estimates that it could get 203 miles per gallon.

Maybe Chrysler's departure from electric vehicles is a sign of an early industry "shake out," where companies without a competitive advantage tip their hat and exit the market when they foresee an inability to compete. But with more efficient fuel economy standards to contend it seems unwise for a company struggling to define its future to be turning its back on electric drive technology.
– Sean Pool

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Road to Copenhagen, Part 6: Tragedy of the commons vs. action by the uncommon

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 06:55 PM PST

Members of Congress are the custodians of a sacred trust: to protect the vitality and integrity of the extraordinary experiment the Founders began.  For example, the debate about climate change isn't just about polar bears and energy prices. It's about whether a free people will be a responsible people, a capitalist economy will be a caring economy and a democracy will protect the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone, even those not yet born.

Some of this sacred trust is codified in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Some is unwritten and implied. And although the Constitution dictates that we keep government and religion separate, there are places in public policy where secular values and moral values overlap. Stewardship of nature and its resources – called "creation care" in religious circles – is one of those places.

Government's stewardship responsibility is recognized in the body of laws past congresses developed once we realized that burning rivers, poisoned water, dangerous air, carcinogenic fish and toxic wastes were not in the national interest.  In the  landmark National Environmental Policy Act, for example, Congress declared:

It is the continuing responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable means, consistent with other essential considerations of national policy, to improve and coordinate Federal plans, functions, programs, and resources to the end that the Nation may . . . fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations . . .

Some legal experts believe public officials have a fiduciary duty to protect the commons – the air, soil, water and forests on which we all depend.  Prof. Mary Wood at the University of Oregon law school champions the idea of an "atmospheric trust doctrine" under which government officials are held legally responsible for failing to reduce carbon emissions. According to research commissioned by the Presidential Climate Action Project and conducted by the University of Colorado Law School, that type of legal accountability doesn't exist in federal statutes today. But Wood argues that the common law trust principle underlies the statutes, and the courts should enforce it:

Such litigation rests on the premise that all governments hold natural resources in trust for their citizens and bear the fiduciary obligation to protect such resources for future generations. The courts have the ability to enforce this fiduciary obligation to reduce carbon at all levels of government…

Two-thirds of the greenhouse gas pollution being emitted by the United States is in compliance with government-issued permits, Wood says.  That means government is not fulfilling either its fiduciary or its moral responsibility in regard to climate change and its profoundly destructive impacts. Yet in past court cases, Wood says, we can find the seeds of an atmospheric trust doctrine. For example, in a 1982 case involving a railroad and the State of Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled:

The State can no more abdicate its trust over property in which the whole people are interested…than it can abdicate its police powers in the administration of government and the preservation of peace…

The Philippines Supreme Court, whose opinions might be less important to us in other countries if the court weren't discussing a global issue and basic morality, said it even better in a ruling about logging in an ancient forest:

These basic rights need not even be written the Constitution for they are assumed to exist from the inception of humankind…(or else) the day would not be too far when all else would be lost not only for the present generation, but also for those to come – generations which stand to inherit nothing but parched earth incapable of sustaining life.

On stewardship, the faith and environmental communities have found common ground and common cause in urging governments to address climate change. Among the scores of signatories to the Interfaith Declaration on Climate Change, for example, are the Dalai Lama and Herman Daly, Greenpeace and the World Council of Churches, Bill McKibben and representatives of the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Baha'i, Quaker, Buddhist and Hindu traditions.

Scientists, academics and religious leaders also have found common ground, expressed in the statement a group of leading religious and science leaders sent to President Bush and Congress in January 2007. One of the scientists, Harvard's Eric Chivian, explained:

We (science and religious leaders) share a very deep reverence for life on earth, whether that life was created by God or evolved over billions of years, it exists, is sacred to all of us, and is being endangered by human activity. It doesn't matter if we are liberals or conservatives, Darwinists or Creationists, we are all under the same atmosphere and drink the same water and will do everything we can to work together to solve these problems.

Last Thursday, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, addressed an eclectic gathering of religious leaders at Windsor Castle in London, telling them "you are the leaders who can have the largest, widest and deepest reach" in educating people about climate change. The Economist covered the meeting and reported:

People close to Mr. Ban say he is frustrated by the reluctance of politicians to stake political capital in next month's Copenhagen meeting; perhaps spiritual leaders are his last hope.

Will morality or politics-as-usual prevail on the issue of global warming? In Congress, the fate of climate legislation is being played out in a contest between morality and money. That brings us back to money-changers in the temple of democracy.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that 2,225 lobbyists from energy companies now are working the Hill to influence climate legislation, outnumbering environmental lobbyists nearly 5 to 1.  Spending by lobbyists is on record pace this year, with the oil, gas and utility industries outspending alternative energy industries 10 to 1. In other words, the dominant army of lobbyists represents companies that produce and burn carbon-intensive fuels, protecting their perceived right to pollute and to profit from it.

Meantime, new data from the Federal Election Commission indicates that oil and gas interests already have contributed $6.3 million to candidates for federal office in the 2010 election cycle, with the election still a year away. Electric utilities have contributed about the same; coal interests have contributed more than $850,000.  It's safe to assume, I think, that the fossil energy sector is not hoping to elect a Congress that will favor a rapid transition away from the fossil-energy era.

Secular law makes this legal. In my opinion, moral law does not.

The climate debate in Congress is testing our morality as a nation, as well as the faith so many other people in the world have in the integrity of American leadership.  It's a test we should not fail.  The members of Congress who don't get this, don't deserve to be there.

– Bill Becker

Voters in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri overwhelmingly support action on clean energy and global warming

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:22 PM PST

The new polls also found that large majorities believe global warming is a serious or very serious threat.

Polling from 3 key states — and 5 key districts — finds strong support for the climate and clean energy bill.  Every major recent poll has come to the same conclusion (see Swing state poll finds 60% "would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill" and Independents support the bill 2-to-1).  Perhaps that's why E&E News found "At least 67 senators are in play" on climate bill.

In the new polls, likely 2010 voters were asked:

"Congress is considering an energy plan that has two key parts. One part would require factories and power companies to reduce their emissions of the carbon pollution that causes global warming by 17% (20% in MO) by the year 2020 and by 80% by the year 2050. The other part would require power companies to generate 15% of their power from clean energy sources like wind and solar by the year 2025. Would you favor/oppose this entire plan?"

The results:

  • 75% of voters in Michigan favor.
  • 68% of voters in Ohio favor.
  • 67% of voters in Missouri favor.

And this matches every recent poll:

The same question was asked in five swing House district and the result was the same:

  • 61% of voters in Florida's 2nd district support.
  • 69% of voters in New Mexico's 2nd district support.
  • 63% of voters in Ohio's 16th district support.
  • 70% of voters in Virginia's 5th district support.
  • 68% of voters in Washington's 8th district support.

This new polling was done August through October by "by The Mellman Group, a leading Democratic firm, and Public Opinion Strategies, a leading Republican firm" for The Pew Environment Group

"Our surveys consistently find that voters across these three states and five congressional districts support efforts to address global warming and require the use of more clean energy sources," said Mark Mellman, president of The Mellman Group. "These voters see global warming as a serious threat that is happening now and favor action to reduce carbon emissions."

It is worth adding that "all respondents heard this argument summarizing the opposition's strongest case":

Opponents of the plan say this cap and trade plan is nothing more than a hidden $2,000 per year tax on average families.  This proposal puts a tax on companies which will be passed on to all Americans forcing them to pay more every time they drive, buy groceries, or flip on a light switch. This backdoor tax will make our struggling economic situation worse, costing us hundreds of thousands of jobs and making it harder for average families to survive the recession. And, people in the Midwest and South who rely more on coal will end up paying significantly more for energy. It makes no sense to hurt our own economy as long as China, India, and others continue to build polluting coal plants.

And "after hearing strongly worded messages from both sides," voters still strongly supported the climate and clean energy bill.

You can find details on the 8 polls here.  The polling reveals the strongest arguments for the climate and clean energy bill and has some interesting implications for messaging, which I will cover in a later post.

Related Post

Breaking: EPA sends CO2 endangerment finding to White House

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:13 PM PST

http://www.labelident.com/images/product_images/info_images/1017_0_w76.jpg

Reuters reports:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has sent its final proposal on whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to human health and welfare to the White House for review, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Reuters on Monday.

The EPA's final finding, if it follows the agency's earlier assessment and is approved by the Office of Management and Budget, would allow the EPA to issue rules later to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, even if Congress fails to pass legislation to cut U.S. emissions of the heat-trapping gases that contribute to global warming.

For background, see New EPA rule will require use of best technologies to reduce greenhouse gases from large facilities when "constructed or significantly modified" — small businesses and farms exempt.

Here's more:

"We sent the final proposal over to OMB on Friday," Jackson said in an interview at her EPA headquarters' office.

She said the OMB has up to 90 days to review the proposal, but the EPA would like a quicker timetable.

"We've briefed them a couple of times. So we're hoping for an expedited review," Jackson said.

Along with its final endangerment finding, the EPA also sent to OMB the agency's final finding on whether cars and trucks "cause or contribute to that pollution," Jackson said.

Such a finding would allow the federal government to regulate tailpipe emissions by increasing vehicle mileage requirement.

Jackson said the government is facing a "hard deadline" of next March to let automakers know of any required increases in fuel economy standards that would affect vehicles built for the 2012 model year.

It remains vital that the administration pursue this less-than-perfect approach in case Congress fails to pass the climate and clean energy bill.

Related Post:

El Niño-driven sea surface temperatures still soaring. Hottest decade poised to get even hotter

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:01 AM PST

Last week I noted "El Niño-driven sea surface temperatures are soaring. Forecast: Hot and then even hotter."

They are still soaring.  NOAA's National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center has a good animation of tropical Pacific SST anomalies:

http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/sstaanim.gif

The warming in the Nino 3.4 region of the Pacific is typically used to define an El Niño — sustained postive sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies of greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean.

Nino Regions

Two weeks ago the anomaly was 1.1°C.  Last week it was 1.5°C.  This week it's 1.7°C, as seen in this figure from NOAA's latest weekly update on the El Niño/Southern oscillation, "ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions":

Nino 11-09-09

If this value is maintained for any length of time, this would be a pretty strong El Niño, as this historical graph of the 3-month running mean SST departures in Nino 3.4 region show:

ENSO 10-27

Technically, we aren't in a "full-fledged" El Niño episode yet.  NOAA says, historically, that requires the the 3-month running mean SST departure to exceed 0.5°C "for a period of at least 5 consecutive overlapping 3-month seasons."  As you can see on page 26 of the weekly report, they can't make that official until the end of this month.

For the rest of us, it's increasingly clear that this will be at least a moderate El Niño, and many models are forecasting it will last past the winter and through the spring.

And it bears repeating that back in January, NASA had predicted:  "Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance."

It still seems likely.  And that will be on top of the hottest decade in recorded history by far.

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Nuclear fast-track plans unveiled BBC News`


Climate Progress

Climate Progress


Is Superfreakonomics author Levitt again denying the 'unequivocal' scientific evidence for global warming?

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:12 AM PST

Is calling global warming a religion the same thing as denying global warming science?

While the authors of Superfreakonomics, which is riddled with basic scientific errors, have started to issue some retractions, they continue to embrace self-contradictory denial of the basic science.

In mid-October, economist Steven Levitt wrote a blog post titled, "The Rumors of Our Global-Warming Denial Are Greatly Exaggerated," which asserted:

Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve.  Where we differ from the critics is in our view of the most effective solutions to this problem.

Then in another red-herring-filled post from last month, "The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz," Levitt asserted that "we believe" it is "TRUE" that "The Earth has gotten substantially warmer over the past 100 years."  And he writes of that statement — that "fact" — (and 5 others), "It is our impression that none of the six scientific statements above is at all controversial among climate scientists."

Duh.  In fact, the most recent survey of the scientific literature signed off on by every major government in the world, including the Bush Administration, concluded "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal."

Unfortunately for the Superfreaks, their book is once again searchable on Amazon, so everyone can confirm it contains the following sentence — the very first one I criticize them for in my original debunking when I broke the story of their error-riddled book:

Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.

That is a staggeringly anti-scientific statement.  It should be retracted.  It should certainly not be repeated, as Levitt is now doing on his blog!

Note that they didn't say something like "belief in climate solutions" is a religion."  And they didn't even say, "the theory of human-caused global warming is a religion" — which, in any case, they presumably don't believe given that they say they believe rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon.

No, to Levitt and Dubner, "global warming" itself is a religion.  Except, of course, it isn't.  Again, actual observations show that "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal."

The only reason I am bringing this up again is that Levitt has doubled down on this piece of anti-scientific nonsense.  As a eagle-eyed reader pointed out, Levitt blogged last week:

Is Climate-Change Belief a Religion?

By Steven D. Levitt

Actually, yes, at least if you live in the United Kingdom.

So what is it, Levitt?

You can't simultaneously claim you understand that warming of the climate system is an uncontroversial statement of scientific fact — and then keep repeating the claim that global warming and belief in climate change is a religion.

As University of Chicago Geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert has charged, Levitt is guilty of "academic malpractice in your book."

And for the record, climate change belief is not a religion even in the UK.  It remains a scientific understanding there and everywhere else.

The particular case and the ruling are convoluted — no doubt in part because the judge was the same one who issued that confused ruling on Al Gore's movie (see here).  I would welcome any experts on British law posting here — and would certainly recommend reading the Guardian piece and an excellent dissection on Salon by Andrew Leonard.  As the Guardian notes:

In today's ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton decided that: "A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations."

… The written ruling, which looked at whether philosophy could be underpinned by a scientific belief, quoted from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and ultimately concluded that a belief in climate change, while a political view about science, can also be a philosophical one.

At least in Britain, science can apparently drive moral imperatives that are protected by the law.  As the winner of the lawsuit put it:

I'm delighted by the judgment, not only for myself but also for other people who may feel they are discriminated against for their belief in man-made climate change. This is a huge issue and the moral and ethical values that I have in relation to the imperative to do something about it, but crucially underpinned by the overwhelming scientific consensus, mean that to have secured protection in this way is, I think, a landmark decision … It's a philosophical belief based on my moral and ethical values underpinned by scientific evidence and that's the distinction [with it being a religious belief] I think. The moral and ethical values are similar to those that are promoted and adopted by many of the world's religions. But one of the key differences I think is that mine is not a faith-based or spiritual-based belief: it is grounded in the overwhelming scientific evidence and it's the combination of that scientific evidence with the moral and ethical imperative to do something about it that is distinct from a religion.

Levitt, of course, is beyond such nuanced understanding.

He made an anti-scientific statement in the book, and notwithstanding certain half-hearted walk backs, he clearly stands by the statement.

Is calling global warming a religion the same thing as denying global warming science?  You be the judge.

Energy and Global Warming News for Noverber 9: Can offshore winds spin in U.S. market? Exelon boss thinks Senate will act on climate bill by spring; Climate bill will save households money — ACEEE

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 08:37 AM PST

http://wiki.ggc.usg.edu/mediawiki/images/0/08/Cape-wind-power-farm-b1.jpg

Can offshore winds spin a market for American-made turbines?

Middle Eastern oil is one energy dependency. Another, looming in the future, could be a growing array of wind turbines, situated along the Eastern Seaboard, manufactured by European companies and feeding electricity to nearby American cities. That's what government and industry experts are trying to avoid — a new addiction.

The effort here to roll out an offshore wind industry is accelerating, but major gaps are still stopping turbine builders from opening U.S. facilities that could supply East Coast states with homemade blades, towers and nacelles. Experts expressed confidence in the United States' ability to establish a strong offshore wind manufacturing sector, and also anxiety about the steps that aren't being taken to get there.

The United States has yet to plant its first turbines in the seafloor, while Europe widens its lead, adding 1-megawatt every day on average, according to its industry group. Europe's offshore winds now produce a total of 1,471 megawatts, the amount of electricity produced by a very large coal-fired power plant.

"If we don't get on the ball and do it, the Europeans are going to do it," Bob Thresher, a wind power expert with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said of turbine manufacturing. "They'll gain all the experience, and they get the privilege of selling us all their equipment. So sitting on our butts and doing nothing is just gonna cost us."

To people like Thresher, the United States needs to hurry up and allow someone to build the first wind facility in the ocean. That, in all likelihood, would be Cape Wind, a 130-turbine project proposed 5 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. It has been stuck in regulatory quicksand for eight years — a signal that has not helped to attract manufacturers or financing sources.

"They need to see there's a critical mass of megawatts that are sort of in the pipeline or committed," Greg Watson, the top renewable energy advisor to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, said of parts builders. "You're not going to make a commitment to build a manufacturing facility unless you have some sense that there's going to be a workload, or an anticipated number of projects."

"We've had some frank discussions" with manufacturers, he added. "They might give you a quote that they need to see five or six more Cape Winds in the pipeline."

Others say the bar is higher. Jim Lanard, managing director of Deepwater Wind, which has three offshore projects proposed in Rhode Island and New Jersey, said manufacturers want to see a decade-long outlook promising that 1,000 turbines will be installed.

"Instead of sending our dollars to countries that export oil, we're now going to send our dollars to countries that export offshore wind equipment," Lanard warns. "It's billions of dollars being sent overseas. That's thousands of jobs."

Exelon boss Rowe thinks Senate will act on climate bill by spring

Exelon Corp. Chief Executive John Rowe, speaking last week after Senate action on a cap-and-trade bill aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, sounded upbeat as ever.

Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted the discussion, prompting Committee Chair Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to push through the so-called Kerry-Boxer bill on an 11-1 vote without a single Republican present. Democrats from Southern and coal-producing states got no chance to amend the measure, as they wanted, and the tactics alienated GOP moderates.

Speaking before the Economic Club of Chicago, however, Rowe delivered the same sunny talk as ever, saying a consensus has emerged for a cap on carbon, and a market mechanism for regulating it.  "At that level of generality, there is strong support for a bill," he said. "There is a very good chance we will see action either this fall or next spring."

As the nation's top nuclear-power producer, Exelon has a lot to gain from cap-and-trade. But some stalwart supporters are starting to worry, as here, and its enemies here smell blood. Even the phrase "cap-and-trade" is being viewed as a political liability.

Rowe is undaunted: "Most other solutions are simply more expensive for the economy than cap-and-trade," he said. "You have to put a cap on it, you have to put a price on it, and you get the marketplace to work."

Or — as appears increasingly likely — the Environmental Protection Agency could be writing the rules for controlling emissions. And if that happens, forget about the "marketplace" working.

Climate bill will save households money — ACEEE

Cannons are firing in the battle to explain what cap and trade will cost, and one group thinks it has pierced the hull with its latest estimate.

According to a report released last month by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, climate legislation won't just have a low cost. Once the energy efficiency programs kick in, it says, the average household would actually save more than $300 a year, and the economy would gain 1 million net jobs.

See study here.  See also "New EPA analysis of Waxman-Markey: Consumer electric bills 7% lower in 2020 thanks to efficiency — plus 22 GW of extra coal retirements and no new dirty plants.

Strengthen the bill, the report says, and the benefits multiply. In the best case, households save triple the original amount, and the economy gains two and a half million jobs.

The finding differs vastly from the growing body of cost studies that have become a political turf war in the climate debate.

In June, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that House-passed climate legislation, H.R. 2454, would cost the average household $175 a year — a cost the administration likened to buying a postage stamp a day.

"It depends on how you write the bill," said Paul Werbos, a legislative fellow for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.). Werbos said his remarks were made on his own behalf, not the senator's.

"If you write a carbon bill the wrong way, you're going to make it a job killer. If you write it the right way, you're going to create a lot more jobs than you lose," he said.

Skip Laitner, senior economist at ACEEE and the author of its October study, echoed Werbos' sentiment. He said that if climate legislation only raises energy prices and consumers don't respond by making more efficient choices, then the economy will suffer.

Laitner and other efficiency boosters, however, have said most of the cost analyses of climate legislation have only focused on the cap-and-trade policy, not on the host of other programs, like energy efficiency, that the legislation includes.

When the price of electricity goes up, consumers and businesses can make choices to use less energy, Laitner said at the Capitol Hill briefing. The more a climate bill incentivizes these choices — through utility programs and building codes, for example — the less the bill costs, and the more jobs result from building in that efficiency.

The result: a report that finds the bill won't come with a price tag, but that it will bring a net gain.

Warming of Sino-Japanese ties with green fight

Forty-two projects related to energy-saving and environmental protection were signed between China and Japan on Sunday.

The effort to deepen cooperation in tackling environmental change and the economic downturn comes ahead of the climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, next month.

Vice-Premier Li Keqiang called for cooperation on key projects and strengthening technological cooperation at the fourth Sino-Japan Energy-saving and Environment Protection Forum in Beijing Sunday.

"Japan has a lot of experience in solving energy and environmental issues, while China has put years of effort into forming its energy saving industry. China's potential market and Japan's technology complement each other," said Xie Zhenhua, deputy minister of the National Development and Reform Commission.

The two sides have worked together in building recycling eco-cities and personnel training, Xie said. About 300 Chinese experts were sent to Japan for training, while more than 300 Japanese experts came to China to help nurture local talent.

The Chinese central government has arranged 58.1 billion yuan ($8.5 billion) to support 10 major energy-saving and emission reduction projects, including sewage treatment and industrial pollution control. China will also help qualified environmental-friendly companies expand their financing channels, Xie said.

Masayuki Naoshima, Japan's minister of economy and trade, said in the near future Japan can assist China with water treatment and carbon emissions control.

China pledged to "strengthen efforts in intellectual property protection" to create a healthy environment for technology transfers, said Chen Jian, deputy minister of commerce.

API hires Sen. Durbin's nephew for government affairs post

The American Petroleum Institute has hired Martin Durbin, a top lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council, to be the oil industry trade group's executive vice president of government affairs.

Durbin, who has worked for Democratic lawmakers, will have his hands full as the industry aims to influence — and in some cases thwart — congressional and White House energy initiatives.

Durbin — the nephew of Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the chamber's No. 2 Democrat — will join API next month.

"I know he will proudly represent the interests of the thousands of companies and the millions of employees in the oil and natural gas industry, and stand up for policies that promote jobs and affordable energy," API President Jack Gerard said in a statement yesterday. Gerard, who once ran the chemical industry group, worked with Durbin there.

API also issued a statement from Durbin: "I will work hard to ensure that policymakers in both houses and parties understand the industry's perspective on key policy issues, and that they appreciate the industry's many contributions to America's economy and society."

Durbin is coming to API as lawmakers are considering climate and energy legislation that will have major implications for the institute's members. The group opposes the major House and Senate cap-and-trade bills, alleging they would raise fuel prices and cost jobs.

Refiners in particular allege the plans provide an unfairly small number of free emissions allowances to the sector and warn that they would create a competitive advantage for foreign refineries and thereby increase reliance on imported fuels.

At the same time, the group is fighting White House proposals to eliminate tax incentives for domestic production. The industry is also pushing the Interior Department to offer more offshore areas for leasing following the lapse of decades-long outer continental shelf leasing bans last year.

China Pledges $10 billion to Africa

China offered African governments a multibillion-dollar package of financial and technical assistance on Sunday, stepping up a courtship that already has gained Beijing wide access to oil and minerals across perhaps the most resource-rich continent in the world.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao pledged to grant African countries $10 billion in low-interest development loans over the next three years, to establish a $1 billion loan program for small and medium-size businesses, and to forgive the remaining debt on certain interest-free loans that China previously granted less-developed African nations.

Besides the financial assistance, Mr. Wen also promised to form a partnership to address climate change in Africa, including the building of 100 clean-energy projects across the continent. Beijing will also remove tariffs on most exports to China from the least-developed African nations that do not have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and sponsor an array of other programs in health, education, culture and agriculture.

The gestures are likely to further cement China's good relations with many African nations, and may help address rising concern in some quarters that China is merely replacing Europe as a colonial power.

China's focus on extracting oil and minerals from Africa has drawn some criticism from African scholars, and labor and safety conditions at some Chinese-run mines and smelters have set off outcries by African workers. Some critics say that the flood of low-cost Chinese goods into African cities has displaced products once made by local workers.

China lower risk than UK for green investors, claims Deutsche Bank

Britain's claim to be a world leader in green energy investment has been called into question by an authoritative new study that will embarrass ministers as they prepare to launch an important climate change initiative tomorrow.

A report from Deutsche Bank says that the UK does not have the right climate change strategy to attract international investment and is lagging behind other countries, such as Germany, France and China.

Britain's energy strategy lacks the level of transparency and certainty required to encourage investment, according to Deutsche Bank's study on the best places to do business. It comes as ministers prepare to launch six draft national policy statements on energy and climate change policies tomorrow.

"What investors want is transparency, longevity and certainty – TLC – in policy regimes to mobilise capital," said Kevin Parker, global head of Deutsche Bank's asset management division, which is based in New York.

"Many major emitters such as the US and the UK do not have enough TLC in their policy frameworks. Our rankings show that China has a lower risk for climate change investors, as does Germany, but the research also shows that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, they have demonstrated their ability to deliver scale."

The Department of Energy and Climate Change said its host of new initiatives to streamline planning and ensure the building of new infrastructure, such as clean coal plants, is proof of its positive commitment to moving to a low-carbon economy.

"You will have seen [from] the recent announcement from RWE and E.ON about spending £15bn and creating thousands of jobs here in new nuclear plants that investment does seem to be coming," said a DECC spokesman.

But Deutsche Bank says Japan and Australia are among the countries that represent lower risk profiles than the UK because they have more comprehensive and integrated government plans.

Memo to PBS's NewsHour: You can do better than "carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas thought to contribute to global climate change."

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 07:29 AM PST

So I'm watching an otherwise interesting story on "efforts to convert algae into clean fuel," by the otherwise very solid Tom Bearden of PBS's NewsHour.  Then, boom, he drops the media's favorite wishy-washy hedge:

Wells also produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas thought to contribute to global climate change.

C'mon.  I think we are at least one decade, if not two decades or more, passed a time when the words "thought to" are justified.

Note to Beardon:  Why exactly do you think it is called a greenhouse gas?

This hedge remains all too common in the media — see Memo to Wall Street Journal: You can do better than "greenhouse gases, which are believed to contribute to climate change."

As I wrote in that earlier post, this hedge is especially pointless and misinforming because of the second hedge — "contribute to."  All but the most extremist deniers of the basic climate science accept that carbon dioxide contributes to global climate change.

So perhaps the NewsHour might catch up with the scientific understanding and write some variation of:

… carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that causes the global climate to change.

And people wonder why the public is still underinformed on this subject.

Related Posts:

Global Ponzi scheme metaphor of the month

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 05:40 AM PST

The California Highway Patrol say a man stole a car to make a court appearance on a previous auto theft charge.

Patrol investigator Chris Linehan says he arrested Samuel Botchvaroff Tuesday as he sat inside a stolen 2000 Range Rover at the Vallejo courthouse. The 24-year-old Botchvaroff had just left his arraignment on auto theft charges stemming from an Oct. 31 arrest.

Linehan said the Range Rover's LoJack system helped him locate the vehicle, which had been stolen from Oakland earlier Tuesday morning.

Authorities say Botchvaroff told officers his car had been impounded, and he had no other way to get to his arraignment.

He was booked into Solano County Jail on suspicion of auto theft and possession of stolen property.

Okay it doesn't have a lot to do with global warming directly, but for some reason, when I first read the story, I immediately thought of this:  "Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?"

Road to Copenhagenm, Part 5: Awesomely audacious leadership vs. nattering nabobs of negativism*

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 05:34 AM PST

We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of the power of a positive vision of an abundant future…

Rob Hopkins, "The Transition Handbook"

During his 10 months in office, President Barack Obama and his team have assembled an impressive list of accomplishments on energy and climate policy.  Some might conclude the President has done about all he can do with the powers of his office.

One would be wrong. What energy and climate security require — what the future of the American Dream demands — is audacious big-picture ideas that capture the imagination, stir the emotions, speak to the souls, rally the support and win the involvement of the American people. That's been lacking so far in the President's climate leadership.

I suspect there is a sizeable segment of the American people waiting to be engaged, waiting to have their imaginations triggered, waiting to understand what a new energy economy looks like and what they can do to build it.  I'm not saying that citizens can't act without top-down leadership. Indeed, as President Obama hinted recently in his "Grab a Mop" speech, there's fundamental unfairness, guaranteed stasis and more than a little buck-passing when we citizens stand on the sidelines, some expecting the White House to do everything, others protesting it is doing far too much.

In regard to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, each of us is capable of grabbing a mop and mopping. It's as easy as turning off the lights. But there is tremendous motivation in knowing that we're part of a mop uprising, a society-wide mopping mission, with a common understanding of why we're mopping.  Dedication to visions and common causes is what got us through World War II, landed us on the moon, secured the legal rights of women and minorities, and built the interstate highway system.

The leader who first steps forward to communicate a clear vision of a sustainable world and who stirs us to act as a nation — he or she will be a leader for the ages.  That's because the climate challenge isn't just about the weather. It's about a fundamental reordering of our species' relationship with nature. It's about ending an epoch of mankind as megalomaniac. It's about accepting our dependence on natural systems and other countries.

If interdependence sounds like Gaia-speak, then think of the swine flu pandemic; the global recession; food riots; and climate change itself.  It really should not take islands disappearing under the sea to convince us that no man is an island.

If we must fight a war of ideas to win support for sustainable human society, then so be it.  Unless America has lost its soul, that war would be no contest. On one side is the army of hope, fighting for a future that is more secure, moral and genuinely prosperous, where resource conflicts and extreme poverty are distant memories.

On the other side is the Army of No, the foot soldiers of a "no-can-do" society, the paid purveyors of fear, the scalp-hunters and character assassins, rumor mongers, professional dividers and the false prophets of a "business as usual" world that no longer is possible. They use scare words like Hitler, socialism and taxes.  They tell us that in a low-carbon society our showers will go cold, our beer will go warm, our jobs will disappear, and our energy bills will bankrupt us.

None of that is true, of course, and it appeals to the worst in us. But we are still a can-do nation. We can build a low-carbon economy that is a low-cost economy. We can have hot showers and cold beer without heating up the atmosphere. We can send our kids off to college rather than sending them to die in oil wars. We can build a new economy and achieve a new and improved American Dream. It's damned un-American to suggest we can't.

To accomplish those things, we need big changes motivated by big ideas we can understand and believe in. Here for an encore are a few I've proposed in the past:

A National Clean Energy Surge: In a speech to a conference in Appalachia last week, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers proposed that the United States become the most energy-efficient nation on the planet.  If the chief executive of the country's third-largest carbon polluter can embrace that big idea, then the White House and the rest of us surely can.

President Obama pointed out during his campaign that 21 countries are more energy-efficient than the United States. We gave up our leadership long ago in key renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar power. That doesn't bode well for our economy, our carbon emissions, or our international competitiveness.  The President should set specific stretch goals to improve energy efficiency in every sector of the U.S. economy and to make America the world's leading consumer and producer of renewable energy.

The Administration has taken a number of steps toward that goal, some small and some more significant:   new efficiency rules for vehicles, major new funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program, a directive that new federal buildings require zero-net-energy by 2030, to cite just a few examples. President Obama should bundle up these efforts along with the money in the stimulus bill and the incentives contained in recent energy bills, for an unprecedented campaign that engages every red-blooded American in making our nation the cleanest and most resource-efficient on the planet.

Energizing Rural America: Rural America has a central role to play in our sustainable future. It will be the nation's principal supplier of low-carbon energy.  Farmers, residents and rural small businesses will flourish with new jobs, new income and new tax base from green energy production.

Food and fiber will grow alongside wind farms and solar farms. Feedlots and landfills will capture methane to help power the rural economy.  Farmers will grow feed-stocks for cellulosic ethanol on land considered marginal for conventional crops. Farm equipment will run on locally grown low-carbon fuels. Carbon-conscious tillage and forestry management will be a new source of farm revenues in a cap-and-trade economy.

In Congress this year, prominent elements of the farm lobby have fought against this vision, worried that fuel and fertilizers will cost more when we put a price on carbon. But that would only be true if farmers continue relying on carbon-intensive fuels and products, fail to adopt more fuel-efficient equipment and agricultural practices, and decide not to offset higher fossil energy prices by capturing the new income opportunities in green energy. Even then, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the Waxman-Markey bill would reduce annual net farm income only 0.9 percent in the short-term.

That's a very small price to pay to avoid agriculture's real parched-earth scenario: climate-induced drought, extreme weather, changed growing patterns, and more pests and plant diseases.

One year ago, the Presidential Climate Action Project gave Obama's team a policy agenda for rural America's dynamic role in a new energy economy. Among its ideas are re-missioning the Cooperative Extension Service, rural electrification programs and other applicable federal farm programs to retool rural communities and farms.  In the past, rural areas have been the economically distressed stepchildren of the industrial economy. In the future, they will be the powerhouse of our new energy economy.

The Future We Want: Despite the strange box-office appeal of apocalypse, we're in danger of becoming emotionally battered these days by Hollywood's versions of civilization's collapse. The Eleventh Hour, The Day After Tomorrow and now 2012 threaten to scare the living optimism out of the American people.

Understanding the terrible consequences of inaction is important.  Conservatives use fear as a tool to resist change; climate activists use it to urge change. The problem is, by focusing on collapse with too little counter-focus on what we can build, we are in danger of creating the future we fear.

I believe we are poised for hope. We want hope. We hope for hope. Hope is what got President Obama elected; it should be the foundation on which he rallies us to build an historic legacy at this turning point in the American story. Fifty or 100 years from now, the history books will not say much about health care reform. They will have a great deal to say about what we did or did not do about climate change.

We see trace evidence of our latent hope in the UN's Hopenhagen campaign, the America 2050 project of the Regional Plan Association in New York, and in the viral video of a yes-we-can speech by Drew Jones of the Sustainability Institute. There's The Future We Want, in which I and several colleagues will use state-of-the-art communications techniques to show the American people what a sustainable society will be like, and to involve them in designing it.

Legally, the President of the United States has limited power, only what Congress has delegated, the courts have ruled or precedent has established.  Emotionally, President Obama has enormous power to inspire. He has a special gift for that, but he has not yet fully used it to enlist us in building a sustainable 21st Century society.

– Bill Becker

* Thanks to the late William Safire for this newly appropriate phrase.

List of Accomplishments: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ william-s-becker/ dressing-for-copenhagen_b_325070.html

Grab a Mop speech: http://www.grabamop.com/

Stretch goals: http://climateprogress.org/ 2009/ 05/ 02/ the-next-100-days-green-fdr/ #more-6201

Farm lobby: http://www.economist.com/ world/ unitedstates/ displayStory.cfm?story_id=14700744

PCAP ag policy agenda: http://www.climateactionproject.com/ docs/ pcap/ Chapter_5_Agriculture_11_10_08.pdf

Hopenhagen: www.hopenhagen.org

America 2050: http://www.america2050.org/about.html

Drew Jones video: http://livingclimatechange.com/ index.php/ 2009/ 10/ simulating-climate-hope/

Future we want: www.futurewewant.org

Arctic ice reaches historic seasonal low; "We are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere."

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 11:20 AM PST

The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished….

"I would argue that, from a practical perspective, we almost have a seasonally ice-free Arctic now, because multiyear sea ice is the barrier to the use and development of the Arctic," said Barber [Canada's Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba].

Arctic 11-09

The latest tracking of Arctic sea ice extent from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows that we've hit the record low Arctic sea ice extent for this time of year.  In a post last week, "Warm winds slow autumn ice growth," NSIDC noted "October 2009 had the second-lowest ice extent for the month over the 1979 to 2009 period."

average monthly data from 1979-2009 for October

As Reuters noted in their remarkable piece on Canadian cryosphere scientist David Barber, "Scientists link higher Arctic temperatures and melting sea ice to the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming."

Duh.

Here's more on what Barber found in a recent expedition:

"We are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere," he said in a presentation in Parliament. The little that remains is jammed up against Canada's Arctic archipelago, far from potential shipping routes….

Barber spoke shortly after returning from an expedition that sought — and largely failed to find — a huge multiyear ice pack that should have been in the Beaufort Sea off the Canadian coastal town of Tuktoyaktuk.

Instead, his ice breaker found hundreds of miles of what he called "rotten ice" — 50-cm (20-inch) thin layers of fresh ice covering small chunks of older ice.

"I've never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic … it was very dramatic," he said.

"From a practical perspective, if you want to ship across the pole, you're concerned about multiyear sea ice. You're not concerned about this rotten stuff we were doing 13 knots through. It's easy to navigate through."

Rotten ice — good term.  That's what human emissions of greenhouse gases have done to the Arctic, covered it in rotten ice.

Photo

Reuters photo caption: "Broken Arctic sea ice as seen from a window in from a U.S. Coast Guard C130 flight over the Arctic Ocean September 30, 2009."

Scientists have fretted for decades about the pace at which the Arctic ice sheets are shrinking. U.S. data shows the 2009 ice cover was the third-lowest on record, after 2007 and 2008.

An increasing number of experts feel the North Pole will be ice free in summer by 2030 at the latest, for the first time in a million years.

"I would argue that, from a practical perspective, we almost have a seasonally ice-free Arctic now, because multiyear sea ice is the barrier to the use and development of the Arctic," said Barber.

Fresh first-year ice always forms in the Arctic in the winter, when temperatures plunge far below freezing and the North Pole is not exposed to the sun….

The Arctic is warming up three times more quickly than the rest of the Earth, in part because of the reflectivity, or the albedo feedback effect, of ice.

As more and more ice melts, larger expanses of darker sea water are exposed. These absorb more sunlight than the ice and cause the water to heat up more quickly, thereby melting more ice.

Barber said the ice was now being melted both by rays from the sun as well as from below by the warmer water.

For more on this well known positive feedback (see "What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?)

Scientists are also seeing more cyclones, which pick up force as they absorb heat from the warmer water. The cyclones help generate waves that break up ice sheets and also dump large amounts of snow, which has an insulating effect and prevents the ice sheets from thickening.

After a long search, Barber's ice breaker finally found a 16-km (10-mile) wide floe of multiyear ice that was around 6 to 8 meters (20-26 feet) thick. But as the crew watched, the floe was hit by a series of waves, and disintegrated in five minutes.

"The Arctic is an early indicator of what we can expect at the global scale as we move through the next few decades … So we should be paying attention to this very carefully," Barber said.

We should be paying close attention, since this positive feedback is linked to another, even more dangerous one (see "Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss").

I asked NSIDC director's Mark Serreze for a comment on this article, and he wrote me:

Dave Barber's observations give the sort of on-the-ground confirmation of the situation that lends confidence to predictions that we're headed towards a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean.  Dave's been up there looking at sea ice conditions for many years. He knows what he's talking about.

NSIDC Research Scientist Walt Meier also replied:

This is an interesting article. To some extent Dave's statement depends on how you define multiyear year. Certainly the older ice (e.g., >5 years) is virtually gone and there's very little 3-4 year-old ice.  However, the past couple years, each summer has retained a fair amount of first-year ice (which ages into second year, and now third year ice). So there is some build-up of what you would term "young" multiyear ice. In theory, that ice could eventually stabilize or even increase (for a time) the multiyear pack. On the other hand, multiyear is constantly moving out of the Arctic as part of the natural drift. So, much of the "young" multiyear ice may be gone before it can mature into older ice.

The most interesting thing in the article is that the old multiyear ice is so broken up now. Even if there is a considerable amount, it is all in broken (or even rotten) floes of ice and not a largely consolidated pack like it used to be. That is a significant change in the character of the ice cover beyond the basic changes in extent and age distribution.

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