Climate Progress

As I write this, the Democratic National Convention is getting underway in Denver. It will be an intense week of speeches, workshops and symposia about the issues facing American today, among them our energy and climate security.

While climate change is arguably the most complex problem the community of nations has faced, it isn’t the first time an American president has grappled with issues of global and moral consequence. John Kennedy led at a time the world seemed only a few minutes away from nuclear annihilation, and when Russia threatened to dominate space. Bobby Kennedy opposed the Vietnam War and confronted the issue of civil rights around the world.

What might they say if they were addressing the Democratic National Convention today? The following is compiled from their speeches decades ago. (All are from JFK except where designated):

(more…)

The gold medal goes to Steven Goddard of The Register. On Friday August 15, he published a scathing article, “Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered: There’s something rotten north of Denmark” attacking the National Snow and Ice Data Center plot of Arctic Sea Ice Extent (below) that I and pretty much everyone else on the planet use.

Based on some (mis)analysis too obscure for mortal men and women to follow, he concluded “The problem is that this graph does not appear to be correct”:

The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn’t even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss….

Unless you are a denier, you may not be surprised to learn the amateur denier was wrong and the country’s leading cryosphere scientists were right. But you might be surprised that Goddard issued an unequivocal retraction within days at the site of the original article:

(more…)

As always with Toles, don’t miss the small print.

Or at least 7 in 10 say they are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. That’s according to a new ABC News/Planet Green/Stanford University Poll released this month.

Yes, this headline appears very much a result of higher gasoline prices:

59 percent say they’re using less gasoline — driving less, using smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, carpooling, taking mass transit and the like.

Yet it goes beyond just gasoline:

60 percent, also say they’re cutting their consumption of power (and water).

Let’s dig in and run through some of the numbers -

(more…)

In his first TV ad, conservative billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens said “This Is One Emergency We Can’t Drill Our Way Out Of.” Although Pickens clearly still believes that, I’m sure he got beat up by his conservative Big Oil friends about how progressives were repeating “over and over again” to argue, correctly, as to how pointless offshore drilling is.

So in his new ad, here, Pickens says, “drill, drill, drill” even though it won’t solve the problem. Sad.

I interviewed Pickens for Salon and will be doing a big article on him later this week. The bottom line is that because he remains an uber-conservative at heart — he was a big funder of the Swift Boat ads — he simply cannot bring himself to support politically those who believe in his renewable energy vision.

Related Posts:

• Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb
• Five reasons Pickens is now as tiresome as Madonna and Britney
• A bone to pick with T. Boone Pickens

Catastrophic climate change is the primary preventable threat to the health and well-being of all Americans — as readers of this blog already understand and as pretty much everyone else will figure out in the coming years. Keeping total planetary warming as low as possible — ideally below 2°C, which it turn requires keeping atmospheric concentrations of CO2 below 450 ppm — will become the central organizing principle for all US energy, environmental, economic, and international policy over the next two decades, and will almost certainly remain so for the next two centuries.

While this is a long-term problem, “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment,” as IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri warned last fall. Beating 450 ppm is certainly not politically possible now, as I have argued in a long ongoing series (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 2: The Solution” for all the links). Indeed, the recent climate debate in the Senate makes it painfully clear that conservatives are prepared to go down with the climate ship (see “Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us“). The current oil drilling ‘debate’ only underscores how hopeless the climate situation is until progressives occupy the White House (see “Will the GOP’s cynical lies destroy the chance for serious energy and climate policy?”

That said, the next president is almost certainly going to pass some sort of climate legislation establishing a cap on greenhouse gas emissions that kicks in around 2015. Again, it won’t be easy to pass a serious bill, but if we had a president who was capable of truly inspiring people and who actually believes in government-led clean energy policies, then I think it will happen.

But — and this is where Biden comes in — even if that legislation is strong enough to put this country on the path towards rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the entire U.S. effort will certainly fall apart if the next president is not able to negotiate a serious international treaty that encompasses all major emitters. Yet it has become increasingly clear in recent months that achieving a serious, binding international treaty is even more politically implausible a task than passing serious, binding domestic legislation. And that is because Russia has emerged as a country that is likely to be every bit as much an obstacle as China and the United States currently are.

(more…)

Two heads are apparently not better than one — certainly not for fish and apparently not for the super-rich, either.

If you thought that the two richest Americans got that way by being green — or had suddenly become green because they are now giving their money to charitable causes — you were mistaken. The National Post reports that last week that the two gazillionaires “quietly flew into northeastern Alberta on Monday, where they took in the oilsands, apparently with awe.”

Who wouldn’t be awed by the “biggest global warming crime ever seen” — an investment so tempting even BP is selling out its environmental credentials to invest in? Who wouldn’t be awed by Canada’s version of liquid coal? Who wouldn’t be awed an environmental blight so unprecedented that last week a mutated two-headed goldeye fish was found downstream? George Poitras of the Mikesew Cree said,

People were in disbelief. Here they saw a fish that we suspect is very much linked to tarsands development and contamination of the Athabasca River. Our elders tell us that what happens to the animals and the fish is just a sign of what is going to happen to human life.

As for the other two exotic heads found in Canada last week, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), who made a presentation to the dynamic duo, said:

“They were exercising curiosity, basically saying, ‘Wow, this is neat.’ “

(more…)

Grist has a nice post here.

The California Energy Commission is considering a proposal by PG&E to require televisions sold in the state to meet a minimum efficiency standard. Why is a utility proposing its customers by more efficient appliances? Because California allows utilities to earn a return on investment from negawatts (see Energy efficiency, Part 4).

(more…)

Greenwire (subs. req’d) has also published a detailed list of who is advising McCain on energy and environment policies, which I am reprinting below the fold.

By contrast, McCain’s campaign relies on a small group of longtime friends and advisers. Campaign staff would not comment on why their advisory team isn’t as large as Obama’s, but sources say the staff’s size reflects how frequently the Arizona senator departs from the Republican Party line on environment and energy issues.

I know Woolsey, and he is certainly very solid on energy security issues. But he is the exception. Doug Holtz-Eakin is much more typical of the conservatives McCain is likely to find available to fill his administration. Like his boss, he doesn’t believe in clean technologies and he doesn’t believe in government efforts to promote them (see Campaign stunner: McCain “might take [new CAFE standards] off the books”).

“I’m not sure a McCain EPA would look any different than an Obama EPA,” quipped Brian Kennedy, a former House Republican leadership aide. “He might even bring Carol Browner back.”

That last quote would be laughable if it weren’t part of a targeted campaign of disinformation. Conservatives — including McCain himself — want the media and independents to believe McCain is liberal on the environment (see “Why McCain hates renewables but pretends he loves them” and “Memo to media: McCain doubletalks to woo conservatives and independents at the same time“). But his voting record makes clear he is a hard-core conservative, who happens to believe that global warming is almost as serious as scientists.

The GOP bench is exceedingly thin on genuine green Republicans — and none of them are conservatives. Anyway, here is his team: (more…)