Saturday, August 22, 2009

Climate Progress

Climate Progress


American flags not welcome at oil astroturf rally; Iraq & Afgahnistan veterans denounce 'Oil Dependence Tour'

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 05:44 AM PDT

Wonk Room details the unpatriotic Astroturf rallies.

At a "grassroots" rally organized by the American Petroleum Institute in Houston on Tuesday, activists bearing American flags were turned away. Oil company employees were bused in to the "Energy Citizens" gathering to hear billionaire Drayton McLane Jr. attack President Barack Obama's clean energy agenda as an economy-destroying energy tax. However, grassroots tea-party activists told Public Citizen Texas that they and their American flags were refused entry to the company picnic:

ACTIVIST: They said, "We won't let you have an American flag either." They said they won't let you have this, and then the guy touched this, the American flag.

ANOTHER ACTIVIST: I got an email from Freedomworks saying, "Come, it's free, free food," doodah doodah. And then I get here and they say, "Well, it's against fire code to let people in the door." And then, they let all these people in. Granted, one of the people was Drayton McLane. He's got more money than God, so, I guess…

Watch it:

The activists explained that they were invited by Dick Armey's Astroturf organization Freedomworks, one of the participating organizations in the new Energy Citizens coalition.. While the activists were locked out, employees of the public corporations Chevron, Anadarko Energy, Halliburton, ConocoPhillips, and others were "invited to participate" and bused to the event on company time.

At the company picnic, Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane defended his billionaire lifestyle, saying, "We need to preserve this way of life." Inheriting much of his wealth, McLane made billions by selling his grocery business to Wal-Mart. In January 2008, McLane received the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service for showing a "deep concern for the common good beyond the bottom line." National Black Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Harry Alford, who recently accused Barbara Boxer of racism, was also a featured speaker.

Grist has details on the veterans organizing against these "oil dependence rallies":

A new coalition of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is hoping to counter the oil industry–backed "Energy Citizens" rallies with its own call to pass a climate bill and end dependence on fossil fuels.

Under the name of Operation Free, the group aims to rally other vets to the cause. "We're a coalition of leading veterans and national security organizations who recognize that climate change is a major threat, and support fast, bold action," reads its website. "It is time for Americans to rise to the challenge, and we're taking on the fight."

In a call with reporters on Thursday, Operation Free members argued that dependence on foreign energy sources and threats posed by climate change put American military personnel and national security at risk.

"As a former U.S. Army captain and a veteran of Iraq, I understand firsthand how our dependence on foreign oil is a threat to national security," said Jon Powers, chief operating officer at the Truman National Security Project, a sponsor of Operation Free. "We're looking to Washington to take this threat seriously and come up with policy that reduces the threat to national security."

Maine State Rep. Alex Cornell du Houx, an Iraq War veteran and Operation Free's campaign coordinator, said that his time in Iraq made him realize the hazards of being dependent on other nations and on a single major energy source like oil. He criticized the American Petroleum Institute, which is organizing the "Energy Citizens" rallies: "It is really disheartening how a front group is watering down any meaningful debate," he said.. "The Energy Citizens is making America less secure."

Operation Free's first major event will be in Washington, D.C.., on Sept. 9 and 10, when 100 veterans will come to the capital to lobby for a Senate climate and energy bill. The group is also spreading its message through the internet and in-person outreach, as well as through partnerships with national security organizations and other nonprofits.

The Operation Free website uses military terminology to try to engage support. "Mission: Secure America with Renewable Energy," declares the site, asking volunteers to "enlist" in the cause and "deploy in support of Operation Free."  Each page prominently features a photo of a hand holding a gun with an oil fire burning in the distance.

Kevin Jones, an Iraq veteran, student at the University of Missouri, and vice president of the Mizzou Student Veterans Association, said he would see oil and fuel trucks in Iraq "lined up, one right after another." "It's disheartening to know that we're so dependent on a source like that," said Jones. "There are brand new, renewable sources available right here."

Operation Free is supported by the the National Security Initiative, VoteVets.org, VetPAC, and the Truman National Security Project.

Joe Klein on the GOP: "How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? … How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?"

Posted: 20 Aug 2009 03:25 PM PDT

[I'd love readers answers to the two headline questions posed by Klein. ]

death panels illo

When I get back from vacation, I'll blog at length about what the White House's dreadful messaging on health care says about the likelihood they'll improve their dreadful messaging on the climate and clean energy bill.

But Time magazine's Joe Klein — a generally moderate/centrist columnist — has written perhaps the definitive piece on what the health reform "debate" says about the Republican establishment, in a piece titled, "The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists."  As Wikipedia explains:

Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Moral nihilists assert that morality does not exist, and subsequently there are no moral values with which to uphold a rule or to logically prefer one action over another.

I have previously made this point about the willful immorality of beltway conservatives/Republicans on climate change:

Klein shows it is a broader phenomenon.  I'll excerpt him at length since the GOP scorched-earth strategy on healthcare certainly foreshadows the fall debate we'll see on climate:

… Given the heinous dust that's been raised, it seems likely that end-of-life counseling will be dropped from the health-reform legislation. But that's a small point, compared with the larger issue that has clouded this summer:  How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?

I'm not going to try. I've written countless "Democrats in Disarray" stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right's "government takeover" disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees' unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party..

It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush's presidency has been obliterated.. The party's putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard's William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama's political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative — which Kristol quashed with his famous "Don't Help Clinton" fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo's end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the "death panel" canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.

A striking example of the prevailing cravenness was Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has authored end-of-life counseling provisions and told the Washington Post that comparing such counseling to euthanasia was nuts — but then quickly retreated when he realized that he had sided with the reality-based community against his Rush Limbaugh-led party. Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner for President according to most polls, actually created a universal-health-care plan in Massachusetts that looks very much like the proposed Obamacare, but he spends much of his time trying to fudge the similarities and was AWOL on the "death panels." Why are these men so reluctant to be rational in public?

An argument can be made that this is nothing new. Dwight Eisenhower tiptoed around Joe McCarthy. Obama reminded an audience in Colorado that opponents of Social Security in the 1930s "said that everybody was going to have to wear dog tags and that this was a plot for the government to keep track of everybody … These struggles have always boiled down to a contest between hope and fear." True enough. There was McCarthyism in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But there was a difference in those times: the crazies were a faction — often a powerful faction — of the Republican Party, but they didn't run it. The neofascist Father Coughlin had a huge radio audience in the 1930s, but he didn't have the power to control and silence the elected leaders of the party that Limbaugh — who, if not the party's leader, is certainly the most powerful Republican extant — does now. Until recently, the Republican Party contained a strong moderate wing. It was a Republican, the lawyer Joseph Welch, who delivered the coup de grâce to Senator McCarthy when he said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Where is the Republican who would dare say that to Rush Limbaugh, who has compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?

This is a difficult situation for the President. Cynicism about government is always easy, even if it now seems apparent that it was government action — by both Obama and, yes, George W. Bush — that prevented a reprise of the Great Depression. I watched Obama as he traveled the Rocky Mountain West, holding health-care forums, trying to lance the boil by eliciting questions from the irrational minority that had pulverized the public forums held by lesser pols. He would search the crowds for a first-class nutter who might challenge him on "death panels," but he was constantly disappointed. In Colorado, he locked in on an angry-looking fellow in a teal T shirt — but the guy's fury was directed at the right-wing disinformation campaign. Obama seemed to sag. He had to bring up the "death panels" himself.

This may tell us something about the actual state of play on health care: the nutters are a tiny minority; the Republicans are curling themselves into a tight, white, extremist bubble — but there may be enough of them raising dust to render creative public policy impossible. Some righteous anger seems called for, but that's not Obama's style. He will have to come up with something, though — and he will have to do it without the tiniest scintilla of help from the Republican Party.

Same goes for actual state of play on climate change, except failure on that legislation will bring all of humanity GOP-style annihilation and a literally scorched Earth.

[For readers of the post-"Happy Days" generation, "jumped the shark" denoted the point "at which the characters or plot veer into a ridiculous, out-of-the-ordinary storyline."]

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The AP gets the bark beetle story right

Posted: 20 Aug 2009 01:23 PM PDT

What a pleasure it is to see a first-rate story on one of the major impacts of human-caused climate change in recent years, "Beetles, wildfire: Double threat in warming world."  Even the photo caption is spot on:

As far as the eye can see, it's all infested," forester Rob Legare said, looking out over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley. The spruce bark beetle, 6 millimeters (.25 inch) long, has devastated the forests of southwest Yukon, aided by warmer summers that speed up its reproductive process and warmer winters that don't kill off beetle larvae as in the past. Scientists warn that global warming will spur insect infestations and wildfires in the world's northern forests.

We've had a number of bad national stories (from the supposedly liberal media!):

Whereas the local, conservative media got the story right:

Of course, the journal Nature understands the science, as a 2008 article made clear: "Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change." So does the Canadian media: "Climate-Driven Pest Devours Canada's Forests."

Here's what the AP reports:

"As far as the eye can see, it's all infested," forester Rob Legare said, looking out over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley.

Beetles and fire, twin plagues, are consuming northern forests in what scientists say is a preview of the future, in a century growing warmer, as the land grows drier, trees grow weaker and pests, abetted by milder winters, grow stronger.

Dying, burning forests would then only add to the warming.

It's here in the sub-Arctic and Arctic — in Alaska, across Siberia, in northernmost Europe, and in the Yukon and elsewhere in northern Canada — that Earth's climate is changing most rapidly. While average temperatures globally rose 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century, the far north experienced warming at twice that rate or greater.

In Russia's frigid east, some average temperatures have risen more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with midwinter mercury spiking even higher. And "eight of the last 10 summers have been extreme wildfire seasons in Siberia," American researcher Amber J. Soja pointed out by telephone from central Siberia.

Along with shrinking the polar ice cap and thawing permafrost, scientists say, the warming of the Arctic threatens to turn boreal forest — the vast cover of spruce, pine and other conifers blanketing these high latitudes — into less of a crucial "sink" absorbing carbon dioxide and more of a source, as megatons of that greenhouse gas rise from dead, burning and decaying wood.

American forest ecologist Scott Green worries about a "domino effect."

"These things may occur simultaneously," said the researcher from the University of Northern British Columbia. "If the bark beetles kill the trees, you'll have lots of dead, dry wood that will create a really, really hot fire, and then sometimes you don't get trees regenerating on the site."

Dominoes may already be falling in western North America.

From Colorado to Washington state, an unprecedented, years-long epidemic of mountain pine beetle has killed 2.6 million hectares (6.5 million acres) of forest. The insect has struck even more devastatingly to the north, in British Columbia, where clouds of beetles have laid waste to 14 million hectares (35 million acres) — twice the area of Ireland. It is expected to kill 80 percent of the Canadian province's lodgepole pines before it's finished.

Farther north, in the Yukon, the pine beetle isn't endemic — yet. Here it's the spruce bark beetle that has eaten its way through 400,000 hectares (1 million acres) of woodland, and even more in neighboring Alaska, in a 15-year-old epidemic unmatched in its longevity and extent.

"It's a fingerprint of climate change," Aynslie Ogden, senior researcher for the Yukon Forest Management Branch, said in Whitehorse, the territorial capital. "The intensity and severity and magnitude of the infestation is outside the normal."

Hiking through the wild and beetle-ravaged Alsek valley, Legare, the Yukon agency's forest health expert, explained how the 7.5-millimeter (quarter-inch) insect does its damage.

"Usually the female bores into the tree first, followed by the male, and then they mate and they both excavate a main egg gallery which runs parallel to the wood grain," he said.

The hatched larvae, just beneath the outer bark, then feed via perpendicular galleries they bore around the tree, cutting off nutrients moving through the phloem and killing the plant. Its needles turn reddish, later gray, and eventually wind topples the dead wood.

Winter spells of minus-40-Celsius (minus-40-Fahrenheit) temperatures once killed off larvae, but those deep freezes now occur less often. And warmer summers enable some beetles to complete their reproductive cycle in one year instead of two, speeding up population growth.

Years of summer drought, meanwhile, weakened the spruces' ability to extrude sticky pitch, to trap and expel beetles. Because the snow-streaked peaks of the 5,000-meter-high (15,000-foot-high) St. Elias range blocks moisture from the Pacific, a mere 250 millimeters (10 inches) of precipitation falls each year. Even a slight shortfall stresses the trees.

The Yukon has experienced smaller, briefer beetle outbreaks in the past, fed by patches of fallen trees left by road construction. But "what makes this infestation different" is that climate change is a primary cause, said Legare.

As he spoke, smoke from dozens of fires, some nearby in the Yukon, some in distant Alaska, wafted over a landscape already bleak with dead forest.

In an authoritative 2007 assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U..N.-sponsored scientific network, cited multiple studies linking the spread of wildfires to warmer, drier conditions.

This June, in the latest such study, as early flames flared in California's wildfire season, Harvard scientists said the area burned in the U.S. West could increase by 50 percent by the 2050s, even under the best-case warming scenario projected by the IPCC.

In Siberia, "fire has been increasing, and there's an earlier fire season," Soja, of the U.S. National Institute of Aerospace, reported from the Sukachev Institute of Forestry in Krasnoyarsk. "For most of Siberia, temperatures are increasing more than in North America."

In Canada, area burned is double what it was in the 1970s, despite greater firefighting capacity and some recent favorable weather, said Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher for the Canadian Forest Service.

He cited three key reasons: warmer temperatures are drying the forests, lengthening the fire season and generating more lightning, cause of the worst wilderness fires.

Flannigan worries, too, that future fires smoldering through the carbon-heavy peatlands that undergird much of the boreal region would pour unparalleled amounts of carbon dioxide, the main global-warming gas, into the skies, feeding an unstoppable cycle.

"The bottom line is if you get more fire, you get more emissions, which contributes to further warming, which contributes to more fires," he said in an interview from Ontario.

"The concern is that things may happen more rapidly than we anticipate. Even our most pessimistic scenarios may not be pessimistic enough."

Back here in smoky gray southwest Yukon, where things are happening, the 1,400 native Champagne-Aishihik people feel it most. The stricken forest's fallen trees are keeping them from traditional fur-trapping rounds, the streams seem warmer without thick cover overhead, and the fishing is off.

Their oral tradition tells of great change in the past, said the group's land manager, Graham Boyd. "They're now wondering what changed to have had this happen."

What's changed extends beyond Champagne-Aishihik lands to the rest of the Yukon, where forester Legare in his travels finds other insects — the northern spruce engraver, the aspen leaf miner, the willow miner — gaining an upper hand in unusual places in unexpected ways.

"Weird things, unprecedented things are happening," he said.

Over the top of the world in Siberia, they're girding for an upsurge in the highly destructive Siberian moth, a caterpillar that devours forests of pine, spruce, fir and larch.

"The moth loves warm and dry, and that's what's happening," said Nadezda M. Tchebakova, Soja's Siberian research partner. At the same time, she said from Krasnoyarsk, "the frequency and severity of fires should increase."

As the Yukon warms and burns, its foresters hope for at least an early warning on one immediate threat, the mountain pine beetle. They have set traps at the British Columbia border to alert them if the non-native insect moves northward.

"The Yukon pines probably don't have natural defenses. They may be uniquely susceptible to this pest," said ecologist Green. "Then you'll have the potential for fires in large areas of dead trees. With the needles still on them, they literally explode with fire."

Of her Yukon woodlands, Ogden said, "It's the right forest, the right climate type, and we expect the climate to warm. My sense is it" — the pine beetle — "is almost inevitable."

Kudos to the AP.

As Nature noted last year:

Insect outbreaks such as this represent an important mechanism by which climate change may undermine the ability of northern forests to take up and store atmospheric carbon, and such impacts should be accounted for in large-scale modelling analyses….

"The beetle will eat itself out of house and home, and the population will eventually collapse."

Hmm. "Eat itself out of house and home." Does the bark beetle sound like any other species we know? Finally, the species formerly known as homo sapiens sapiens is no longer alone in its self-destructive quest to destroy its habitat.

"He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."

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Peaking Duck: Beijing's Growing Appetite for Climate Action

Posted: 20 Aug 2009 10:34 AM PDT

CAP's Julian Wong has a follow up to "China softens climate rhetoric, commits to emissions peak (again), shows flexibility on Western reductions."  In the photo, Chinese Vice Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission Xie Zhenhua shakes hands with Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher look on.

China's climate change envoy, Yu Qingtai, made headlines when he declared in a news conference earlier this month that "there is no one in the world who is more keen than us to see China reach its emissions peak as early as possible."

Now all eyes are focused on the United States and China—the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters—with just four months to go to the U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen, where nations will negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Attendees at the most recent round of U.N.. climate talks in Bonn, Germany may have left the meetings with a pessimistic sense that we're a long way off from a global agreement. But interesting developments are unfolding in China outside of these U.N. meetings that bring a more hopeful message.

China already committed in a declaration last month with 15 other large emitting countries at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate in Italy to peak global and national emissions "as soon as possible." That provision lacks a precise timetable and is laden with the caveat that of the "overriding priorities of developing countries," but it is the statement of intent that the Chinese are clearly taking seriously.

Then just last week, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of the more prominent government think tanks, published an extensive 900-page report that has gained notable attention in both the Chinese and Western press for advocating the notion that China can feasibly aim to peak its carbon emissions by 2030. The report is advisory in nature and by no means represents official policy, but it is the latest in a series of overtures by prominent Chinese academicians to set emissions peaking pathways. Hu Angang, a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing and a prominent policy adviser for the Chinese government, has also advocated for China to aim for peaking carbon emissions in 2030. He Jiankun, deputy head of the State Council's Expert Panel on Climate Change Policy, has projected that China's emissions are more likely to peak at 2035. Additionally, a different report by CAS released earlier this year called for peaking between 2030 and 2040.

Setting the timing of emissions peaking alone without considering the trajectory of the emissions pathway—especially the height of the peak—may not be helpful in determining whether such measures go as far as the climate science requires. But the broader significance of such discussions at the top-levels of the Chinese government, especially at this critical juncture in the run up to Copenhagen, should not be missed. China's willingness to be a constructive player in the international climate change negotiation process is there; it just needs to be acknowledged and encouraged.

China's willingness is not just talk, but is backed up by concrete actions. We have discussed previously many of the actions China is taking, including its current five-year plan that boasts some of the most ambitious energy efficiency and renewable energy targets in the world. And today, the Climate Group has launched a report entitled "China's Clean Revolution II: Opportunities for a Low Carbon Future" that provides a similarly compelling narrative of how China, despite the current global economic downturn, is making hefty investments to accelerate a tectonic shift from grey to green in sectors such as transportation, industrial energy efficiency, wind, solar, geothermal, and urban design. The transition won't be easy, nor will it happen overnight, but there should be little doubt about the Chinese leadership's intent and resolve to reorient its carbon-intensive economy toward a more sustainable path.

China may announce its next five-year plan as early as this year, and many expect that it will contain even stronger commitments and perhaps incorporate some measure of carbon reductions in the form of benchmarks for reducing carbon intensity. China's State Council, led by Premier Wen Jiabao, last week laid down the objective of incorporating climate change considerations into "the medium and long-term development strategies and plans of government at every level." Also, Sun Qin, the vice chief of the National Energy Administration said he expects the government to complete a comprehensive plan for new and low-carbon energy development by the end of the year. A low-carbon strategy will be a central thread in China's ongoing economic development strategy.

China is also hinting at increased flexibility in the negotiation process. Su Wei, director-general of the climate change office within the National Development and Reform Commission, China's main economic planning agency, has signaled a change in tone, saying, "China will not continue growing emissions without limit or insist that all nations must have the same per-capita emissions. If we did that, this earth would be ruined." China maintains its hard line that developed countries are historically responsible for climate change, but climate envoy Yu has also backed off somewhat from China's previous demands that all developed countries commit to 40 percent reductions in carbon emissions by 2020, saying that, "[a] concrete figure has to be decided by the negotiations; we will get a result in Copenhagen."

All these developments in China are encouraging considering also that South Korea and Mexico, two other non-Annex I countries—developing countries as defined in the U.N. climate treaty process—recently indicated a willingness to enact carbon emissions caps for 2020. This underscores the need for reciprocal action from the United States.

The United States Congress must first move swiftly to enact comprehensive energy and climate legislation to show its own commitment to climate action. We should also properly acknowledge the progress that China and other countries have made in mitigating climate change. One way which we at the Center for American Progress have articulated before is the "carbon caps equivalents" approach, which would quantify the unilateral domestic green measures undertaken by, for example, China, in terms of the effective emissions reductions that such measures yield, and then aggregate those reductions into a single figure that can be compared to proposed emissions reductions targets of other countries

The United States must build upon the modest but significant milestones of U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu's visit to Beijing, where the foundations for a joint research center on clean energy were laid, and the recent Strategic & Economic Dialogue in Washington, D.C., where both countries agreed formally for the first time to engage each other on climate change.

The United States must muster political and financial resources to engage China on the joint acceleration of clean-energy technology development and deployment. Such a bilateral effort will send a message to the rest of the world that the two largest emitters are ready to rise to the challenge and lead the way forward towards a global agreement in Copenhagen.

Julian L. Wong is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress.  This post was first published here.