Sunday, September 27, 2009

Climate Progress

Climate Progress


Breaking: Murkowski amendment to undermine the Clean Air Act is dead — for now

Posted: 24 Sep 2009 10:03 AM PDT

Senate leaders indicated that while there will be a debate on the Murkowski amendment, it will not come to a vote.

Her effort to undermine the Clean Air Act, to fiddle while Alaska burns has failed.  But she will likely come back to offer this amendment in the future.  EPA action through the CAA remains an imperfect and politically unreliable tool for achieving short-term, medium-term, and long-term emissions reductions — and no tool at all for achieving an international climate treaty (see "The dangerous myth that the EPA's endangerment finding can somehow stop dangerous warming if the climate bill dies").

Climate science activists need to focus on passing the comprehensive energy and global warming bill to create jobs, increase America's energy independence, reduce pollution, and preserve clean air and clean water for future generations.  And who knows, if she has any intellectual consistency and any interest in stopping her home state from being ravaged, maybe the Senator from Alaska will vote for the final bill — see Murkowski calls for tougher energy bill: "Climate legislation must have more immediate environmental benefits" than Waxman-Markey!

UPDATE:  Here is the EPA letter against the latest version of the Murkowski amendment.

Glenn Beck proves he's a brainless frog, warning (?) "Barack Obama has galvanized the country…. He's forced us to think!"

Posted: 24 Sep 2009 08:32 AM PDT

To prove a point known only to him, Fox News commentator Glenn Beck throws a frog in boiling water (maybe).  It's not entirely clear from the video that Beck actually did what he said he did:

"You know the old saying, if you put a frog into boiling water, he's going to jump right out, because he's scalding hot, but if you place the frog in lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, it won't realize what's happening and die?"

Once and for all people, this assertion is a myth.  As Wikipedia puts it, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz "demonstrated that frogs will indeed remain in slowly heated water, but only if their brain is removed" — see "Turns out humans are not like slowly boiling frogs … we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs."

Now if anyone on the planet is proof that our species is like slowly boiling brainless frogs — that we should drop one of the sapiens, and, provisionally put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo "sapiens" sapiens — that would be Glenn "Almost everyone who does believe in global warming is a socialist" Beck.

But here's the ironic thing about Beck's rant — his big complaint against Obama here is that, yes, "he's forced us to think":

Barack Obama has galvanized the country, because of the sheer size of the bills he's proposed, and the number of the bills, the urgency he's placing on the bills. He's forced us to think! And get involved! We have — not like John McCain, been boiled slowly — we have been tossed quickly into boiling water, and don't forget what happens! What happens when you throw 'em in! When you throw 'em in, frogs into boiling water![throws frog in, nothing happens]

Okay…forget the frog. [pause] I swear I thought they jumped right out. But they don't.

As HuffingtonPost notes, "Beck apparently palmed a rubber frog."  Indeed Beck then says:

"Forget about the Republicans, because most of them are fake. Forget about the Democrats, because most of them are fake. And forget about the frog, because it was fake!"

Forget about Beck.  He's all too real — but brainless.

I kind of like a President who makes us think.  Lord knows, nobody would ever have accused our previous president of having done that….

"You know the old saying, if you put a frog into boiling water, he's going to jump right out, because he's scalding hot, but if you place the frog in lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, it won't realize what's happening and die?"

Will last company to leave the Chamber's Boardroom please turn off the lights!

Posted: 24 Sep 2009 07:07 AM PDT

http://www.davidmcfarlane.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/image/lightswitch.jpgOn Tuesday, PG&E Corp. quit the US Chamber Of Commerce over its "extreme position on climate change." Now New Mexico power company PNM has given up seat on the Chamber's Board of Directors, issuing this statement:

We strongly disagree with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's position on climate change legislation and particularly reject its recent theatrics calling for a 'Scopes Monkey Trial' to put the science of climate change on trial. We believe the science is compelling enough to act sooner rather than later, and we support comprehensive federal legislation to  meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect customers against unreasonable cost increases.

Again, they would seem to be leaving the Chamber's Board because it has been overrun by climate science deniers and disinformers (see "Are Chamber President Tom Donohue's Ties to Union Pacific Railroading the Companies that Support Climate Policy?" and "Chamber admits calling for 'Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century' was dumb — but it still apes the deniers").

NRDC's Pete Altman notes that on Monday "Nike circulated this statement regarding their serious disagreement with the US Chamber for its recalcitrant position on climate policy":

"Nike fundamentally disagrees with the US Chamber of Commerce's position on climate change and is concerned and deeply disappointed with the US Chamber's recently filed petition challenging the EPA's administrative authority and action on this critically important issue.

Nike believes that climate change is an urgent issue affecting the world today and that businesses and their representative associations need to take an active role to invest in sustainable business practices and innovative solutions to address the issue. It is not a time for debate but instead a time for action and we believe the Chamber's recent petition sets back important work currently being undertaken by EPA on this issue.

Nike helped to found BICEP, a coalition of businesses supporting congressional action to address strong U.S. climate and energy legislation. Nike has worked to address its own environmental footprint through the development of more sustainable products, energy efficiency programs and emission reductions."

NRDC's Altman, who has been doing terrific work on the Chamber, further notes:

Why is the Chamber so hard-headed in the face of all these companies that want to move forward? It is interesting to note – as I have earlier this week - that US Chamber President and CEO Tom Donohue serves on the board of Union Pacific, which earns a significant portion of its revenues from hauling coal.

Mr. Donohue has earned a significant revenue of his own from Union Pacific – over $1.1 million in cash over the last ten years and $3.8 million worth of stock. But that comes at a price, as Union Pacific puts some heavy handcuffs of gold on its directors:

"Directors may not engage in any conduct or activities that are inconsistent with the Company's best interests or that disrupt or impair the Company's relationship with any person or entity with which the Company has or proposes to enter into a business or contractual relationship."

Gee, what happens when the US Chamber of Commerce must choose a policy position and some of its members have interests that are "inconsistent" with Union Pacific's?

It is time to turn the lights out on the unenlightened folks at the Chamber.

Ex-Sen. Warner (R-VA) criticizes Murkowski's Amendment to delay action on climate

Posted: 24 Sep 2009 06:53 AM PDT

Former Democratic Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia today rebuked a draft amendment proposed by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, that would limit the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources such as power plants. Warner said Murkowski's goal of giving Congress more time to pass a climate bill misses the point.

So the National Journal reports on Murkowski's proposal to fiddle while Alaska burns.  GOP Senator John Warner, former Armed Services Committee chair, supports strong action on climate and clean energy — since it is a matter of protecting our national security.

"Simply putting off an inevitable decision not only sacrifices American leadership but — equally important — it sacrifices our ability to get on board with… what I believe would be the greatest wealth-creation sector and job-creation sector in the next quarter century," Warner said. The two politicians both made remarks today at a two-day energy conference hosted by the Council on Competitiveness in Washington.

Murkowski, ranking member on the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee, spoke before Warner about her proposal. "My amendment has clearly caused a little bit of controversy out there, so I think it's worth a second here to clear the air in terms of what it does and doesn't do," Murkowski said. "It would not stop the EPA from regulating indefinitely. It simply gives Congress a year to debate the climate policies and determine what is the best approach at reducing emissions."

Still, Murkowski expressed her discontent with the EPA's authority to regulate emissions at all: "I think the only approach worse than taking up what the House has done would be to allow the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide from all sources."

Yeah, Senator, so what exactly do you propose to do to stop your state from melting in burning?

Related Post:

Toles on the boiling frog

Posted: 24 Sep 2009 05:58 AM PDT

Hell and High Water hits Georgia

Posted: 23 Sep 2009 02:03 PM PDT

Once-in-a-century drought followed by once-in-a-century flooding — Hell and High Water — that's something larger and larger swaths of this country will need to get used to, especially if their Congressional reps keep opposing action on climate change.

Douglas county Georgia was "hit by 21 inches of rain in a 24-hour period from Sunday to Monday, knocking out the drinking water supply to most residents, and forcing others to boil their water," the NYT reports.  "As much as 15 to 20 inches of rain pounded counties around Atlanta for more than 72 hours."

On Tuesday, Reuters reported "a state climatologist said this was the worst [flooding] in 100 years in some parts of Atlanta.."  Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution listed the records set.  Here are just a few:

Among the flooding records, a nearly 90-year-old mark was broken Monday when the Chattahoochee River reached 29.61 feet near Whitesburg, west of Palmetto. The old record was 29.11 feet, set on Dec. 11, 1919.

Downstream, the Chattahoochee on Tuesday beat another nine-decade record near Franklin, reaching 29.97 feet. The new record bested a Dec. 15, 1919 mark.

The largest jumps came at Utoy Creek, near Atlanta, where the water level surged to 27.54 feet, nearly 11 feet over the May 2003 record of 16.86 feet, and Sweetwater Creek at Austell, where Tuesday's crest of 30.17 feet topped the previous record of 21.81 feet set in 2005.

I have called this type of rapid deluge, "global warming type" record rainfall, since it is one of the most basic predictions of climate science — and its an impact that has already been documented to have started (see below).

And on top of the direct storm-related deaths, it is a broad threat to human health.  As the AJC reported yesterday:

The record rains of the past few days flooded out sewage treatment plants in Fulton, Cobb and Gwinnett counties, dumping millions of gallons of untreated sewage into local waterways.

So, water already polluted by oil and gasoline, trash, pesticides and other ground contaminants will also be carrying debris and bacteria from human waste….

The damaged plants around metro Atlanta continue to dump untreated, or not-fully-treated sewage into floodwaters that then end up rising into homes and businesses.

The main reason I am writing about Georgia's once-in-a-century flooding, though, is that just a short while ago, the region was hit by a once-in-a-century drought (see "And the drought goes on").  This is the climatic whipsawing of Hell and High Water.  Here is how things looked in October 2007:

As the New York Times reported back then:

For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water….

The situation has gotten so bad that by all of [state climatologist David] Stooksbury's measures — the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, inches of rain — this drought has broken every record in Georgia's history….

And no, far be it from me to say that current flooding is caused directly by global warming.  Wouldn't want to earn the wrath of the deniers and delayers who rush from house to house removing the batteries from the smoke detectors.

But funny how we are seeing these wild swings from extreme drought to extreme flooding more and more, just like those pesky climate scientists warned — see, for instance, my June post, AP, Washington Times: "Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency":

Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 48 people and left 405,000 homeless.

Flooding is common in the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving some fruit trees entirely submerged.

The surprise isn't just the record flooding, it's that the flooding followed record droughts:

Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud.

Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency.

The BBC also got the story right in May, "Experts say global warming may be behind the wild climate swings that have brought periods of unprecedented droughts and flooding to the Amazon in recent years."

Interestingly, the same exact swings in extreme weather hit Louisiana in 2005, as I wrote in my book Hell and High Water:

While the U.S. suffered a record-smashing hurricane season that deluged southern Louisiana with rain in the summer of 2005, "the eight months since October 1, 2005 have been the driest in 111 years of record-keeping" in southern Louisiana, the U.S. National Climatic Data Center reported in July 2006.

What makes the AP and the Washington Times story on Brazil so unusual is not only that the Times is a right-wing newspaper, but that the story continues with an extended discussion of the climate issue:

… climatologists say the world should expect more extreme weather in the years ahead. Already, what happens in the Amazon could be affecting rainfall elsewhere, from Brazil's agricultural heartland to the U.S. grain belt, as rising ocean temperatures and rainforest destruction cause shifts in global climate patterns.

"It's important to note that it's likely that these types of record-breaking climate events will become more and more frequent in the near future," Mr. Nobre [a climatologist with Brazil's National Institute for Space Research] said. "So we all have to brace for more extreme climate in the near future: It's not for the next generation"…

"Something is telling us to be more careful with the planet. Changes are happening around the world, and we're seeing them as well in Brazil," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said this month on his radio program….

Duh?

And for completeness' sake on the subject of "global warming type" record rainfall, let's run through some of the literature one more time.  Regular readers can skip the rest of this post.

In 2004, the Journal of Hydrometeorology published an analysis by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center that found "Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow, and heavy and very heavy precipitation have increased during the twentieth century."

They found (here) that over the course of the 20th century, the "Cold season (October through April)," saw a 16% increase in "heavy" precipitation events (roughly greater than 2 inches [when it comes as rain] in one day), and a 25% increase in "very heavy" precipitation events (roughly greater than 4 inches in one day)– and a 36% rise in "extreme" precipitation events (those in the 99.9% percentile — 1 in 1000 events). This rise in extreme precipitation is precisely what is predicted by global warming models in the scientific literature.

In fact, the last few decades have seen rising extreme precipitation over the United States in the historical record, according to NCDC's Climate Extremes Index (CEI):

An increasing trend in the area experiencing much above-normal proportion of heavy daily precipitation is observed from about 1950 to the present.

Here is a plot of the percentage of this country (times two) with much greater than normal proportion of precipitation derived from extreme 1-day precipitation events (where extreme equals the highest tenth percentile of deluges, click to enlarge):

cei-4-08.gif

Even the Bush Administration in its must-read U.S. Climate Change Science Program report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, acknowledged:

Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing…. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense….

It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases.… The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming.

In the future, with continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity.

In short, get used to it..

If you are a journalist wondering what is a reasonable way to talk about this, one of the best recent examples comes from a New York Times story on Australia made possible by our friend Andrew Revkin:

The firestorms and heat in the south revived discussions in Australia of whether human-caused global warming was contributing to the continent's climate woes of late — including recent prolonged drought in some places and severe flooding last week in Queensland, in the northeast.

Climate scientists say that no single rare event like the deadly heat wave or fires can be attributed to global warming, but the chances of experiencing such conditions are rising along with the temperature. In 2007, Australia's national science agency published a 147-page report on projected climate changes, concluding, among other things, that "high-fire-danger weather is likely to increase in the southeast."

The flooding in the northeast and the combustible conditions in the south were consistent with what is forecast as a result of recent shifts in climate patterns linked to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research.

That's how it is done.

And no, I'm not say that the media should link every extreme weather event the way Revkin did. But when we have "worst on record" type events, or 100-year floods — and especially ones that last more than a day and hit a broad area — then I think the reporter has an obligation to include the issue.

Related Posts:

NYT's Green Inc. blog wins worst headline of the day

Posted: 23 Sep 2009 12:39 PM PDT

I like the Green Inc, blog.  Indeed, CP routinely cites their work, especially in the news Roundup, including today.  But what exactly is one to make of this headline:

Inhofe Pans Obama Climate Speech

This isn't even "dog bites man," which now that I think about it, doesn't seem to happen that much anymore.  I mean, when was the last time you heard about a really serious dog bite?  Heck, that'd be news, unlike, say, the fossil Senator who asserted "global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public" dissing Obama's big UN speech on climate.

No, this headline is more like, "Study: Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful To Monkeys":

Energy and Global Warming News for September 23: Smart meters cut energy use 20%, avoiding need for new fossil generation

Posted: 23 Sep 2009 11:59 AM PDT

Photo

"We're looking at building a new gas-fired generation plant, but this solution would mitigate the need to build the size power plant that we had anticipated."

Tell me again why we need a new coal plant in North Carolina?  Efficiency is cheaper, cleaner, and smarter.  The caption for the figure: "Residents in a smart grid pilot project in North Carolina can manage their electricity usage online."

N.C. smart grid pilot cuts usage 20%

A smart grid pilot project in Fayetteville, N.C., has resulted in an initial 20 percent decline in average electricity consumption, according Consert, a Raleigh, N.C. technology company.

Those numbers are based on the first month of the project, a joint effort between Consert and I.B.M. that installed energy management systems for 100 residential and business customers of the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, the local utility.

Consert attached controllers on hot water heaters, air conditioners and pool pumps and then let customers go online and set targets for their monthly electricity bill. Smart meters and a wireless communications system provide real-time electricity consumption data to allow the utility to cycle appliances on and off to achieve the savings and help it manage peak demand.

The customer sets up a profile detailing when they wake up in the morning, go to work, return home and what temperature they'd like in their home.

"The consumer can say 'I want my utility bill to be not to be greater than $200 a month,' and then we'll look at their past bill history to see if that's achievable and ask what they want to do to achieve their goals," said Jack Roberts, Consert's chief executive.

The company's software takes into account the customer's billing history, local weather conditions and other factors to manage the home's appliances. Mr. Roberts said Consert can control up to 256 devices but expects most savings will come from appliances such as air conditioners and water heaters.

"One of the things that was a bit of a surprise to us was how much pool pumps and hot water heaters contributed to peak demand," said Mr. Roberts, who noted that one household had reduced electricity use by 50 percent. "On an August afternoon you're less likely to notice that your pool pump is off for three hours than that your air conditioner is off for 10 minutes," he said.

The Consert system, which is based on IBM software, would allow the Fayetteville Public Works Commission to selectively reduce demand among its 80,000 customers without having to, say, shut off everyone's air conditioners at the same time.

Utilities typically spend hundreds of millions of dollars building so-called peaking power plants that provide electricity when demand spikes, and otherwise sit idle for most of the year.

Keith Lynch, an executive at the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, said the utility hopes the Consert system will help it to cut such capital costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"We're looking at building a new gas-fired generation plant, but this solution would mitigate the need to build the size power plant that we had anticipated," he said.

Storing CO2 in soil should be on U.N. agenda: Gore

Developing emissions markets to encourage farmers in poor countries to store more carbon dioxide in soil should be a key topic on the U.N. climate talks agenda, global warming activist Al Gore said. "I think that soil carbon conservation and recarbonizing of soil must be the next stage in this negotiating process," former U..S. Vice President Gore told reporters on the sidelines of a climate conference at the United Nations.

Agriculturists can store more carbon in soil through techniques such as no-till farming that leaves crop residue on the ground instead of plowing it up and releasing the carbon into the atmosphere, or through crop rotations.

Gore said that if a clear signal on carbon storage in soil emerged from the 190-nation U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen in December, it would serve as a "very important measure" to help get developing nations to participate in helping to slow climate change. Rich and poor countries aim to hammer out a new global deal at the Copenhagen meeting on how to slow global warming and deal with its consequences, but talks have stalled on how to share the burden.

China's coal-fired power stations 'among the least efficient in the world'

Turning China into the world's manufacturing centre has given us a bountiful supply of dirt-cheap goods but is proving an environmental disaster. Chinese industry is overwhelmingly dependent on coal for its energy and China's coal-fired power stations are among the least efficient in the world.

Britain's coal plants are typically 35-40 per cent efficient, meaning that 35-40 per cent of the energy in the coal that they burn is turned into electricity and 60-65 per cent is lost in heat up the chimneys. China's power stations are less than 25 per cent efficient. With more than 70 per cent of its electricity coming from coal, China has one of the worst scores of any country for carbon intensity, a measure of the amount of carbon emitted for every unit of GDP.

Britain likes to boast that it has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 21 per cent since 1990. But we have achieved this by closing energy-hungry factories and exporting manufacturing — and emissions — to China. However, while China now has the highest carbon dioxide emissions in the world, its per capita emissions are still only half that of Britain and a quarter of the level in the United States. China points to this difference when rejecting calls for it to set a target for cutting overall emissions.

Given that President Hu has already made clear that China would not sacrifice economic growth in the quest to prevent climate change, the best that could be hoped for from December's Copenhagen climate summit is a cut in China's carbon intensity. President Hu's pledge yesterday to cut that intensity by a "notable margin" was promising, even if he failed to set any specific figure.

Nations Appear Headed Toward Independent Climate Goals

Several world leaders on Tuesday gave the most decisive indication in months that they will work to revive floundering negotiations aimed at securing a new international climate pact. But the vision that President Obama and others outlined at the United Nations climate summit — in which countries offered a series of individual commitments — suggests that a potential deal may look much different from what its backers originally envisioned.

Initially, many climate activists had hoped this year would yield a pact in which nations would agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions under the auspices of a legal international treaty. But recent announcements by China, Japan and other nations point to a different outcome of U.N. climate talks that will be held in December in Copenhagen: a political deal that would establish global federalism on climate policy, with each nation pledging to take steps domestically.

"Many of the jigsaw pieces of an agreement lie across the board, but we have to put them together," said British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Edward Miliband, adding that negotiators are looking for a solution in which "every country is satisfied that every country is taking action" on climate change.

The world's biggest carbon emitters took pains Tuesday to highlight what they have already done to curb their footprint and what they will do in the future. Obama recounted how his administration has made major investments in clean energy, set new fuel economy standards for vehicles and pressed for House passage of a bill to cap emissions and allow companies to trade pollution permits. Less than an hour after he spoke, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had finalized rules requiring facilities that emit the equivalent of 25,000 metric tons of carbon or more annually to report their pollution to the agency each year.

Refitted to Bury Emissions, Plant Draws Attention

Poking out of the ground near the smokestacks of the Mountaineer power plant here are two wells that look much like those that draw natural gas to the surface. But these are about to do something new: inject a power plant's carbon dioxide into the earth.

A behemoth built in 1980, long before global warming stirred broad concern, Mountaineer is poised to become the world's first coal-fired power plant to capture and bury some of the carbon dioxide it churns out. The hope is that the gas will stay deep underground for millennia rather than entering the atmosphere as a heat-trapping pollutant. The experiment, which the company says could begin in the next few days, is riveting the world's coal-fired electricity sector, which is under growing pressure to develop technology to capture and store carbon dioxide. Visitors from as far as China and India, which are struggling with their own coal-related pollution, have been trooping through the plant.

The United States still depends on coal-fired plants, many of them built decades ago, to meet half of its electricity needs. Some industry experts argue that retrofitting them could prove far more feasible than building brand new, cleaner ones. Yet the economic viability of the Mountaineer plant's new technology, known as carbon capture and sequestration, remains uncertain.

The technology is certain to devour a substantial amount of the plant's energy output — optimists say 15 percent, and skeptics, 30 percent. Some energy experts argue that it could prove even more expensive than solar or nuclear power.And as with any new technology, even the engineers are unsure how well it will work: will all of the carbon dioxide stay put?

Environmentalists who oppose coal mining and coal energy of any kind worry that sequestration could simply trade one problem, global warming, for another one, the pollution of water supplies. Should the carbon dioxide mix with water underground and form carbonic acid, they say, it could leach poisonous materials from rock deep underground that could then seep out.

Sen. Brown: Climate bill can't pass without aid to manufacturers

Climate change legislation won't even get 50 votes in the Senate if possible harms to manufacturers in the bill aren't addressed, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Tuesday. Temporary assistance will be needed to prevent American manufacturing jobs from relocating to India and China in order to address Rust Belt lawmakers' concerns about the climate bill, Brown said in a conference call organized by the liberal Campaign for America's Future.

"I don't think there's any way we get to even 50 votes if we don't deal with manufacturing in the climate change bill," Brown told reporters. "I do know for sure that there are a number of us who understand that manufacturing is so important to this country that if we don't do manufacturing right, our standard of living will continue to decline. "We need some sort of border equalization — temporary, not permanent — until the Chinese and others move in the direction they need to on this issue," Brown added.

Among lawmakers' concerns is a sense that climate legislation in the U.S. would provide manufacturers with an incentive to relocate production overseas, where not only would they enjoy lower labor costs, they would also face far less stringent environmental regulations.

Brown called on President Barack Obama to get more aggressive on the regulatory imbalance on climate change and a number of other trade agreements during this week's G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. "Leaders in Pittsburgh should go to lengths to not concern legitimate government intervention with protectionism," he said. "The public has already lost confidence in trade agreements and the way we approach globalization."

US tops $1 bln in stimulus for clean energy projects

The US government has spent more than one billion dollars on private sector renewable energy projects from the massive economic stimulus program passed seven months ago, officials said Tuesday.. At a meeting of a group of clean energy developers and manufacturers at the White House Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced 550 million dollars in new awards through the Recovery Act.

The awards for 25 projects brings the total to more than one billion dollars awarded to date "to companies committed to investing in domestic renewable energy production," the Treasury and Energy departments said in a joint statement. The milestone spending number is a fraction of the 787-billion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act enacted on February 17, a package of tax cuts and spending aimed at pulling the world's biggest economy out of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Under the Recovery Act, the renewable energy awards are made from a program that provides cash assistance to energy producers in place of a tax credit totaling 30 percent of the qualifying cost of the project — thus spending one federal dollar for every two private dollars invested in a project. The officials said that the federal stimulus spending in green energy was attracting billions of dollars of additional capital towards projects in the US.

Reid files for cloture on Interior-EPA spending bill

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday moved to speed debate on the bill funding environmental agencies for 2010 even as contentious amendments loom on regulation of greenhouse gases.

Reid's cloture motion comes as Republicans are attempting to use the annual Interior Department, U.S. EPA and Forest Service spending bill as a vehicle for broader policy debates including climate change, offshore drilling and the Obama administration's use of policy "czars."

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, criticized the decision to invoke cloture on the bill, saying it would prevent senators from debating important issues. "I sure don't think we're ready," she said. "I understand there's been well in excess of 70 some odd amendments out there — amendments of some real substance. So I think it's a little premature."

Murkowski is one of several senators planning to use the measure to limit the Obama administration's authority to regulate greenhouse gases. She may introduce an amendment that would prohibit EPA from regulating heat-trapping emissions from stationary sources like power plants and industrial facilities for one year.

Biodiversity a bitter pill in 'tropical' Mediterranean Sea

Two weeks ago, a group of marine biologists from Israel's National Institute of Oceanography set sail from the country's central coast. Under a full moon, with the lights of hectic Tel Aviv a band on the horizon, they cast their nets into waters that have sustained civilization for millenia in the Levantine Basin, the eastern branch of the Mediterranean Sea.

They had a rich catch that night on the research vessel Shikmona, according to Bella Galil, a senior scientist at the institute. Spilling from the nets were pucker-faced dragonet fish, sprawling octopuses and brown crabs, snapping their claws. On the examination table, it seemed a display of the sea's bounty. Unfortunately, it was another sea's bounty.

Almost all of the species Galil found that night were natives of the Indian or Pacific oceans. Lured by warming waters and a newly improved route through the Suez Canal, tropical marine species have enacted a slow march into the Mediterranean, displacing native species and disrupting ecosystems.

"We are open to this caravan of alien species," Galil said. "When we trawl the southern Levantine Basin, about 80 percent of the fish we catch are of Red Sea origin. This," she added, "is unprecedented."

U.S. says working on G20 pact to cut fossil fuel subsidies

The United States is still working toward an agreement with G20 partners to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, a top White House adviser said ahead of this week's G20 summit. Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser and top G20 aide to President Barack Obama, said the United States was hoping to reach an agreement about the issue at the Pittsburgh summit on Thursday and Friday.

"We've put on the table the desirability of reaching an agreement to phase out fossil fuel subsidies," Froman told reporters in remarks embargoed for release on Wednesday. "We're working with the rest of the G20 to see if we can forge an agreement that would make a significant contribution in that direction." Froman declined to flesh out the U.S. ideas by including a timeframe or identifying which countries were targeted.

A source familiar with the proposal said earlier this month it would seek to phase out subsidies in five years. The proposal — which could rankle G20 states with big fuel subsidies like China, Russia, and India — argues non-G20 members should end subsidies by 2020, the source said.