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- Energy and Global Warming News for October 23: New poll finds climate action support; Chamber accelerates lobbying
- Watch Obama's big clean energy speech live at 12:25 ET today
- Hunters and anglers rally for climate bill — they see first-hand the impact of human-caused global warming
- Inhofe's climate change-denying Copenhagen 'truth squad' expands to a 'truth squad of three.'
- That Wolf Will Come Back to Bite You
- No wonder polling shows more people don't know the scientific evidence that humans are warming the Earth has grown stronger. Revkin stunner on NPR: "I've made missteps. I've made probably more mistakes this year in my print stories than I had before."
- Confusion in Senate regarding allowance allocation
- NRC: Burning fossil fuels costs the U.S. $120 billion a year — not counting mercury or climate impacts!
| Posted: 23 Oct 2009 10:30 AM PDT New survey finds US and 37 others demand more aggressive climate action The first-ever deliberative global survey of citizen opinion, World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) has found that people from diverse backgrounds in the US and worldwide overwhelmingly want faster action, deeper GHG emissions cuts and stronger enforcement than either US climate legislation proposals or Copenhagen treaty conference preparations are currently contemplating. Among the survey's findings:
These views were echoed across 37 other countries on six continents. Global results showed participants wanted more aggressive action than their delegates to Copenhagen envision, including:
By contrast, in current policy negotiations these goals are either much less ambitious or absent altogether. Preparations for Copenhagen and Congressional debate on climate change legislation are both following a similar pattern of lowering ambitions and expectations, focusing on limited areas of current agreement and incremental steps, and deferring more contentious issues of targets, timetables, funding and enforcement until later. "We are hearing from climate policymakers that it will take more time to do things right, that we have to meet people where they are instead of imposing radical reforms from above," said Dr. Richard Sclove, the US advisor to WWViews. "But these results show the people are way ahead of the policymakers. If Congress and Copenhagen delegates want to act in accordance with citizen views, they have to do far more and go far faster, not scale back and slow down." As Chamber loses members, its lobbying accelerates While a number of its members left because of its stance on climate change, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was pouring record amounts into lobbying efforts. The chamber spent more than $34 million on lobbying in the third quarter, with a portion of that money paying for advocacy on energy and climate legislation. "This represents an increase of 260 percent above what it spent on lobbying during the second quarter, and an increase of 12 percent above what it spent during the first three quarters of 2008," wrote Michael Beckel on a blog of the Center for Responsive Politics. The release of the lobbying data came during a crazed week for the chamber, which witnessed an environmentalist activist group called the "Yes Men" holding a fake press conference on climate policy in its name (Greenwire, Oct. 19). That followed departures of companies like Apple Inc. and Exelon from the chamber in recent months because of their disagreements with the group's stance on global warming. In a statement earlier this week, Thomas Collamore, the chamber's senior vice president for communications and strategy, said, "The U.S. Chamber believes that strong climate legislation is not incompatible with the goals of improving our economy and creating jobs." WaPo: We can afford to save the planet Here is the good news on the climate front: The Europeans have ratcheted down their emissions targets, the Chinese are getting serious about solar power and energy efficiency, and Washington is lumbering toward a carbon cap. These are steps toward the long-held goal: cutting global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. Such cuts would stabilize the thickness of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide blanket surrounding the planet at 450 parts per million (ppm) and, we've been told, ensure that the global average temperature increase would not exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from 1990 levels. The bad news? Turns out that 450 ppm is so 2005. In the past four years, climate scientists, led by NASA's James Hansen, have dramatically altered the goal. To avoid the collapse of the continental ice-sheets and a dangerous rise in sea levels, many scientists are now saying we have to get down to 350 ppm, and quickly. This means what was already a heroic (and to many, impossible) target has become mind-boggling. Reaching 350 ppm would require a 97 percent reduction in emissions, entailing a complete conversion to renewable energy systems by mid-century, with the world economy virtually free of carbon emissions. Such a goal is far more demanding than any of the leading policy proposals under discussion. Game over? No. It's just time to rethink what is possible. A climate change bill will get top billing Friday with a critical meeting among Democratic leaders to set a timeline for debate, a major speech by President Barack Obama and release of a crucial impact study by the Environmental Protection Agency. Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, the lead sponsor of a Senate climate bill, plans to meet with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday to set a timeline for committees to finish work on the legislation – possibly as soon as Thanksgiving. And Environment and Public Works Chairwomen Sen. Barbara Boxer said she plans to release new sections of the climate bill that she co-authored with Kerry on Friday. The release of her bill comes as the EPA is set to release a study of the economic impact of the Senate version of the global warming legislation. While Democratic senators make their push in Washington, Obama will deliver a speech on clean energy and climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The flurry of activity around a bill that has suffered on the back burner during the health care debate gives environmentalists hope that the Senate could make substantial progress on a bill before international climate talks scheduled for December in Copenhagen. White House encouraged by climate bill status The White House is encouraged by progress on a climate change bill in the Senate and is working to advance it even if a December deadline passes, an aide to President Barack Obama said on Thursday. Carol Browner, Obama's top adviser on climate and energy issues, told Reuters that White House officials were reaching out to Democratic and Republican senators in an aggressive push to move the bill forward. "There have been some bipartisan conversations that we find very encouraging," Browner said in an interview. "We are going to continue to do everything in our power to keep this moving." If a law is not passed by the time U.N. talks on a global warming pact begin in December in Copenhagen, the United States would still have a strong position on the issue in the negotiations, she said. "Wherever we are in the process, we will be able to manage in Copenhagen." Browner, who has expressed doubts that a bill would become law by December, said U.S. negotiators would stress Obama's domestic initiatives on climate change and renewable energy since coming into office. "We'll have been in office by the time we get there, what, 10 months? And yet if you look at what we've accomplished, its quite significant," she said. European countries and environmentalists want Washington to do more to encourage the Copenhagen talks. Obama's presence at the talks would help. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he would go and called on other world leaders to attend, too. But Browner said the time was not right to make that call. "As the president himself has said, it's just too early to make that decision," she said. UK Foreign Secretary accuses public of climate change apathy The Foreign Secretary accused the public yesterday of lacking a sense of urgency in the face of the potentially devastating consequences of climate change. David Miliband said that people had grown apathetic about the issue when they needed to be galvanised into action before the Copenhagen climate change summit in December. "For a lot of people the penny hasn't dropped that this climate change challenge is real and is happening now," he said. "There isn't yet that feeling of urgency and drive and animation about the Copenhagen conference." Mr Miliband and his brother, Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, were opening an exhibition at the Science Museum in South Kensington designed to illustrate the potential impact of world temperatures increasing by 4C. Current models predict that this could happen by 2060 if no action is taken. He stood by the Government's hard-hitting public information broadcast to promote the Government's Act on CO2 initiative. China and India agreed Oct. 22 to coordinate their efforts on climate change. The two countries are at one in holding developed countries responsible for taking the lead in cutting emissions. As the largest carbon emitter, China is being watched particularly closely in the approach to the December Copenhagen summit on climate change to see what position it will adopt. Common Position China's carbon emissions are said to have surpassed those of the U.S. in 2007, making it the world's largest contributing country and a key participant at the U.N. Climate Summit in Copenhagen this December: –On Sept. 22, President Hu Jintao said China would cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per unit of GDP by a "notable margin" by 2020. This has raised expectations that China might make a commitment to mandatory emissions cuts. –On Oct. 14, Vice Premier Li Keqiang stressed the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities," which replicated the standard position on climate change from the mid-1990s. Entering into a five-year agreement yesterday, China and India are making common cause on climate change, which will add to the weight developing countries will have at Copenhagen. The two sides maintain that: –developed countries carry primary responsibility for cutting emissions; –caps should not be imposed, because development is their priority; and –developed countries should provide financial and technological resources to industrializing countries to help them control emissions. |
| Watch Obama's big clean energy speech live at 12:25 ET today Posted: 23 Oct 2009 08:52 AM PDT Click here for MIT live webcast. Or you can watch it at www.whitehouse.gov/live. |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2009 07:35 AM PDT
People who spend a lot of their time outdoors are more likely to see the obvious — the climate is changing and invasive species like the bark beetle are ravaging the West. That's a key point of this piece in the NYT blog, Green Inc:
It's great to see a broader group of the population starting to engage in what will be the central issue of our time. But then, for outdoorsmen and -women, the changes driven by human emissions are all-but-impossible to miss:
If we don't act fast enough, human-caused climate change will wipe out the majority of species on land and sea, and turn a livable climate into "Hell and High Water." |
| Inhofe's climate change-denying Copenhagen 'truth squad' expands to a 'truth squad of three.' Posted: 23 Oct 2009 06:47 AM PDT From Think Progress Last month, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) announced that he would travel to Copenhagen in December to act as a climate skeptic "truth squad" during international climate change treaty negotiations. "I think somebody has to be there — a one-man truth squad," Inhofe said on CSPAN. Today, on Bill Bennett's radio show, Inhofe revealed that his delegation has expanded to "a truth squad of three":
Listen here: When Inhofe first announced his plans for a "truth squad," TPM's Eric Kleefeld remarked, "It's nice to see how seriously foreign policy is taken these days — when a member of the political minority will send his own delegation to an international conference, in order to undermine the government and tell other countries that they can't work with the United States." Now it's at least two members of the political minority. |
| That Wolf Will Come Back to Bite You Posted: 23 Oct 2009 06:30 AM PDT |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2009 04:30 PM PDT UPDATE: Yes, bad coverage by big media, including the NYT's Revkin, is one reason there has been a modest decline since April 2008 in the number of Americans who know that there is solid (in fact, overwhelming) evidence the Earth is warming and humans are the primary cause (see here). Big media "did" the global warming story in 2006 and 2007 when Gore's movie came out and then throughout 2007 when the IPCC released its four major summary reports. Looking for a new angle, the NY Times and others played up the global cooling myth. Now couple that with a ramped up disinformation campaign from the deniers who keep repeating the global cooling myth and continued lame messaging from the scientific community (see "Why scientists aren't more persuasive, Part 1") and a progressive community filled with people who have been persuaded by bad analysis that they shouldn't even talk about "global warming" (see Messaging 101b: EcoAmerica's phrase 'our deteriorating atmosphere' isn't going to replace 'global warming' — and that's a good thing). That's a recipe for an underinformed public. I have serious doubts whether major journalists should be blogging very much. It conflates different roles, which can be confusing to the reader, and I've always thought that the media's blogging was inherently lower quality journalism but still imprinted with the credibility of the journalist and his or her media organization (see "What exactly is the difference between journalism and blogging?"). Today's remarkble NPR interview of top NY Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin underscores my doubts and introduces yet another major problem I hadn't considered — sagging quality of the print reporting as a result of too much time spent blogging. Or, in Andy's case, he's apparently doing the same amount of blogging but more print reporting. Revkin says "I've been in print more, but I haven't slowed down on the blog." The impact:
You aren't the only one who is frustrated, Andy! The published articles reach a vastly larger audience. I'd gladly do without every one of Andy's posts at his blog, many of which are quite informative — in return for his not repeatedly screwing up the facts and the framing of those facts in just one recent story, see "NYT's Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation." I suspect (or, at least, hope) that if he had had more time to get the facts right, he might not have written that story at all or it would have completely reframed it. And yes, if you check the sentences I said were wrong or misleading, he went back and changed every single one of them — although the change to the key opening sentence was just adding one word, "relatively," which is quite inadequate:
That is still very misleading, with the phrase "relatively stable for a decade" not actually based on scientific data and the phrase "may even drop" not supported by the recent scientific literature, including the work of the one person Andy cites, Mojib Latif (see "Exclusive interview with Dr. Mojib Latif, the man who confused the NY Times and New Scientist"). [I still haven't seen the print edition of that story -- if someone can find it and send me the PDF, I'd love to see it. I think my blog post was too late to correct the print story.] Let me end with a general statement I made after the terrific journalist James Fallows made some errant statements on climate (see "James Fallows, Physics for Future Presidents, Al Gore, blogging journalists, and what will become of hockey sticks on an ice-free planet?"):
FINAL NOTE TO MEDIA: Time for you to go back to the basics of reporting the science. You might stop the blogging and start with this story — 18 leading scientific organizations send letter to Senators affirming the climate is changing, "human activities are the primary driver," impacts are projected to worsen "substantially" and "If we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, emissions of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced." Related Posts:
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| Confusion in Senate regarding allowance allocation Posted: 22 Oct 2009 04:15 PM PDT
The above quote is from a May analysis of the Waxman-Markey clean energy and climate bill by Harvard University's Robert Stavins — who is certainly not anyone's idea of a progressive economist (see here and here), although he is obviously one of the country's leading economic experts on cap-and-trade. Some commenters here and elsewhere have described the allocation distribution in the climate bill as a big giveaway to polluters. The most credible progressive experts I know on energy economics dispute that description (see "Preventing windfalls for polluters but preserving prices — Waxman-Markey gets it right"). Today, Stavins posted "Confusion in the Senate Regarding Allowance Allocation," which notes:
Unlike Stavins, I think it's worth excerpting most of (rather than just linking to) what he wrote back then:
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| Posted: 22 Oct 2009 01:01 PM PDT
As the Senate gears up to discuss clean energy legislation this fall, the Senate may have—despite its awareness—another healthcare debate on its hands. If we cannot direct our use of energy towards those forms that do not carry hidden burdens, we better hope that Americans have good health insurance. The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, recently found that our current level of energy use is costing us a lot more than our environment—it is also costing us our health. In the newly released "The Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use," the NRC explores the external costs of energy, costs that are certainly not factored into its market price. Requested by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the report reveals that there are substantial "hidden" costs to our energy production and use, primarily reflected in damages to human health. The report monetizes these unseen energy costs at $120 billion annually by tracing the full cycle of our energy use—extraction, development, deployment, and waste. These costs result in the death of 20,000 people each year—10,000 due to coal alone. The NRC reports that most of the "hidden" costs of energy are attributed to coal-fired electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation—they extract an annual toll of $62 billion and $56 billion, respectively. In reporting its cost figures, the NRC only included the estimates for the non-climatic costs imposed by our energy use, specifically those costs related to health, agriculture, and built infrastructure. Although other pernicious side-effects of our energy use—such as ecosystem disruption, other pollutants (like mercury), and national security risks—impose costs to Americans, these environmental costs were examined in the report but were excluded from the final cost figures. (Note: this actually made the reported costs much clearer due to the panoply of possible monetary values the NRC calculated for these other damages). The conclusion is resoundingly clear: our current energy use has implications for much more than debates about the climate. The punch line? Coal-fired power plants and motor vehicle transportation account for roughly $118 billion of non-climatic damage to the U.S. each year. Natural gas, which accounts for 20% of our nation's electricity generation and the "vast majority" of heating demands, only costs us a little over $2 billion dollars annually in unseen costs (also note that the Energy Information Administration projects that the market price of natural gas will be 14.6 times lower than that of oil through 2030). Comparatively, the report shows, renewable energy (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.) costs us very little in external damages. With a tremendous renewable energy potential and an abundant untapped supply of natural gas, the U.S needs to—and can!—reduce these hidden energy costs by generating clean energy that does not obscure the real costs of its production and use. Jonathan Aronchick, an intern for the Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress. Related Posts: |
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