Climate Progress

… you probably won’t love Cheatneutral — but you will still laugh out loud!

Climate Progress is all about conserving energy. So to save you that and time, here’s a quick round-up of some articles worth pointing out:

The Real News About Global Warming — An opinion piece by Bill McKibben. Things may not be moving as quickly as preferred through Congress and the White House, but there is growing momentum.

The Inconvenient Truth, Part II — Tom Athansiou. “You’ve probably seen the movie; you’ve certainly heard about it. So you already know the first part of the inconvenient truth: we’re in deep trouble. And one good thing about 2006 is that this ceased to be a public secret. We not only know that the drought is spreading, the ice melting, the waters beginning to rise, but we also know that we know. And this changes everything.”

Ending Oil Dependence — David Sandalow, The Brooking Institution. Published in January, Sandalow’s piece calls for a transformation of our auto fleet, fuel supply, oil diplomacy, and climate policies. Aimed at the 97% of our transportation that still depends on petroleum, the study also specifically recommends a federal cap-and-trade program and more R&D into clean energy technologies.

And finally, give your eyes a rest and hear Climate Progress on EcoTalk and Treehugger Radio.

Climate change broke onto the big screen - and then made the summer concert line-up - but it may have brought political action to a new level at the Academy Awards, where Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio announced the event’s having gone green.

Political issues have traveled the Oscar road before, but this year the event’s production went out of its way to act in tune with the message, even passing out carbon offsets in lieu of gift bags!

Years ago the phrase ‘global warming’ began to scare people, and so ‘climate change’ became more common. While making the announcement to go green and then accepting the Oscar for best documentary, Gore referred to our climate crisis.

What our planet and our way of life face is a crisis, and it really shouldn’t be a political issue except that the political arena seems to be the only one not moving forward fast enough on the issue.

For the climate problem above our heads, part of the answer is below our feet. Increasing attention has been aimed at geothermal energy as an abundant and clean energy source, but the federal budget is deaf to all the commotion.

And we really do mean commotion. On March 1 there will be a briefing on Capitol Hill to review geothermal energy and its potential. One featured speaker will be the chair of a recent MIT report on geothermal energy, which concluded “that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.” Other speakers includethe head of the Geothermal Energy Association (which also released a recent study), the owner of a geothermal project in Alaska, and the former DOE Geothermal Program Director.

In spite of the enormous potential of geothermal energy, the Bush administration has proposed zeroing out the geothermal energy program for two years running.

Outside the White House, geothermal energy is enjoying a popularity surge (evident everywhere from Capitol Hill, demonstrated above, to the New York Times and even the blogosphere). A piece of Grist commentary underscores that with what it costs to build one clean coal-fired plant, you could invest in 15 years of geothermal energy.

Although plumper budgets would pay off, we mostly need something like an Extreme Home Makeover to rearrange the use of our money and our world’s heat.

Global warming makes droughts longer and stronger–and more likely. That has been a major theme of this blog (just plug “drought” into the search engine). Business as usual greenhouse gas emissions may lead to desertification for a stunning 30% of the Earth’s surface! And now we learn:

Severe water shortages are likely to constrain future expansion of population, agriculture and industry in the south-western US, the fastest growing part of the country, according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences.

A 2005 study led by the University of Arizona, with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey, examined a huge three-million acre die-off of vegetation in 2002-2003 “in response to drought and associated bark beetle infestations” in the Four Corners area (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah). This drought was not quite as dry as the one in that region in the 1950s, but it was much warmer, hence it was a global-warming-type drought. The recent drought had “nearly complete tree mortality across many size and age classes” whereas “most of the patchy mortality in the 1950s was associated with trees [greater than] 100 years old.”

Most of this tree death was caused by bark beetle infestation, and “such outbreaks are tightly tied to drought-induced water stress.” Healthy trees defend themselves by drowning the tiny pine beetles in resin. Without water, weakened, parched trees are easy meals for bugs.

The authors warn that the recent drought in the Four Corners area “may be a harbinger of future global-change-type drought throughout much of North America and elsewhere, in which increased temperatures in concert with multidecadal drought patterns” cause unprecedented changes in ecosystems. In a 2005 talk I attended, climatologist Jonathan Overpeck noted that this study, together with the recent evidence that temperature and annual precipitation are headed in opposite directions, raises the question of whether we are at the “dawn of the super-interglacial drought.” [See slide 6]

The increased risk of severe drought we are seeing today was predicted back in 1990 by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Their model also suggested that, in the second half of this century, severe drought, which was already occurring with about 5 percent frequency by 1990, will occur every other year-and more frequently in the West.

It is, of course, purely an ironic coincidence that severe droughts (and wildfires) have hit Oklahoma and Texas, Wyoming, Australia, and China–states and countries with political leaders (or former leaders) opposed to climate action. But it is no coincidence that severe droughts are on the rise. We are changing the climate and much worse is to come if we don’t take action soon

These days, a key rite of passage for a major political issue is a concert–and at last the global spotlight is shining on climate change.

Now set to follow in the tracks of, and even ‘dwarf’, the Save Tibet, Farm Aid, Live8 and Live Aid concerts is “SOS” - a concert to advocate action, not just awareness, on climate change.

The concert is slated for July 7th and will be a series of performances in London, Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, Washington, DC, Cape Town and Shanghai. So far, it’s a star-studded event, featuring more than 100 big names like the Foo Fighters, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sheryl Crow, and Snoop Dog.

Speaker Pelosi is encouraging Congress to pass climate and energy legislation by July 4th, hopeful to declare the holiday Energy Independence Day. These next spring months look to be pretty crucial in rallying political and popular support for climate action.

But even after July, we need to make sure the spotlight doesn’t fade - and may the events’ production and travel set a carbon neutral example!

At last, some of the nation’s biggest newspapers have been making a big deal of energy efficiency and conservation.

Over the weekend the Washington Post ran an article on California’s ambitious and profitable efforts by utilities. The Post’s article followed an energy series by the Wall Street Journal on cutting energy use and costs.

Two of the WSJ pieces worth highlighting are”How to Cut Energy Costs” (subs. req’d), which provides options for saving energy and money around the house, and “The Bottom Line” (subs. req’d), whose content overlaps with the Post’s piece.

All three pieces overlap in that their bottom line is that energy conservation is literally at your fingertips, with just the flip of a switch, and energy savings are as equally tangible. Mechanisms differ, but many utilities are climbing on board to maintain profits and avoid unnecessary construction costs.

Irony is no stranger to our posts derived from the U.S. Drought Monitor, and again, this case is no exception.

The monitor reveals severe to extreme drought covering most of the state of Wyoming (for at least the last three months), the home of none other than Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney represented Wyoming for just over a decade on Capitol Hill (in the House) and his career is sturdily rooted in the coal and petroleum businesses he backed in Wyoming, before becoming CEO of Halliburton.

In some form or another, Cheney has contributed his share of greenhouse gases, to say the least. If only he would realize how his actions and policies have threatened his community with longer and stronger droughts.

In the end, adherence to the norm of balanced reporting leads to informationally biased coverage of global warming. This bias, hidden behind a veil of journalistic balance, creates . . . real political space for the U.S. government to shirk responsibility and delay action regarding global warming.

–Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, 2004

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.

–Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954

If we do not avert Hell and High Water, global warming will be the news Story of the Millennium. In a world where sea levels are risingma foot or more every decade for centuries, our coasts are ravaged by superstorms, and we face endless mega-droughts, global warming won’t be the most important story–it will be the only story.

If we do avert catastrophe, global warming will still be the Story of the Century. Starting very soon, and for many decades to come, the top news will focus on the country coming together to embrace an aggressive government- led effort to preserve the American way of life by changing everything about how we use energy–on a scale that dwarfs what the nation achieved during World War II.

While the media has begun providing more coverage of global warming, that coverage is still a long way from adequately informing the public about the urgency of the problem and the huge effort needed to avert catastrophe. The media’s miscoverage of global warming makes it much less likely that the country will act in time, and it is a key reason why only a third of Americans understand that global warming will “pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime,” according to a March 2006 Gallup Poll.

We don’t have any Edward R. Murrows today, at least not on the climate issue. What we do have is a declining number of science reporters, and only a handful of those are dedicated to covering climate. Worse, the media has the misguided belief that the pursuit of “balance” is superior to the pursuit of truth–even in science journalism. The result is that global warming and its impacts are systematically underreported and misreported.

We had a record-melting 2006, which is going down as the sixth warmest year for the globe and the warmest for the United States. Meanwhile, predictions place 2007 as the warmest, thanks to the combined forces of El Niño and global warming.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit in the UK, describes what we are facing:

El Niño makes the world warmer and we already have a warming trend that is increasing global temperatures by one to two tenths of a degrees celsius per decade. Together, they should make 2007 warmer than last year and it may even make the next 12 months the warmest year on record.

El Niño is not a sole scapegoat for the warm weather, nor an excuse for inaction on greenhouse gases. El Niño combines with global warming and does not replace or disprove the realities of climate change.

2007 is upon us, and it is utterly crucial that we bear in mind the relationship between global warming and El Niño so as not to lose sight of the component we control. The heat is on to put into practice the polcies and technologies necessary to fight anthropogenic warming.