Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

My publisher and I still haven’t come up with a title that works.  The problem is that there are a great many books on climate and/or clean energy solutions coming out right now many with similar sounding titles.

I do think this collection of blog posts accomplishes what I try to do on my blog — save readers time, cut through the crap and focus on what’s important in climate science, solution, and politics (with a hefty dose of old-media critiques).  The trick is it making that all clear in a few, catchy words.

I prefer figures of speech — The Hype About Hydrogen is my best-selling book.  And don’t worry too much about the subtitle — it will explain what the book covers, and I have a pretty good idea for that, but don’t want to thwart any of your creativity by putting out any ideas right now.

If we end up choosing your suggestion (or something very similar), you’ll get free copy of the book (woo-hoo) and you can write a guest blog post!  For similar sounding suggestions, the earliest entry wins.  You can build on someone else’s idea — in fact, that’s usually how the best title is ultimately found.

Enter as many suggestions as you want.  Do use Google to check whether the title is sufficiently original.

Coal industry knew of fraudulent letters

A coal industry association waited until several weeks after a major House vote on climate legislation to let lawmakers know that letters sent to them opposing the bill were fraudulent, according to a congressional investigation.

The American Coalition for Clean Coal knew before the June cap and trade vote that these letters — purported to be from minority and senior citizen groups concerned about the legislation — were fraudulent. The letters were sent to several politically vulnerable House lawmakers in the days before the vote. The bill barely passed the House in late June, approved by just a seven vote margin.

But the association and its contractor, The Hawthorn Group, did not inform lawmakers that the letters were fake until weeks later, according to an investigation by the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

“Some here today will claim these letters can be attributed to a temporary employee, when, in fact, this fraud chiefly resulted form a systemic lack of oversight and quality control, mixed with a substantial disregard for the facts,” said Chairman Ed Markey, select committee, in a Thursday hearing about the letters.

The letters were sent out by Bonner & Associates, a subcontractor hired by Hawthorn for their expertise in grassroots campaigns.

The coal association spent nearly $10 million over the past 18 months on lobbying efforts supervised by Hawthorn and Bonner. In the three months before the vote, ACCCE paid Hawthorn $975,000 for activities related to the climate bill.

Critics say the campaign is a classic example of astroturfing, or using fake grassroots campaigns to influence policymakers, in this case pushing them to modify or kill the legislation.

Officials at the coal association say they never communicated with Bonner & Associates directly. But, the senior account official at Hawthorn charged with managing grassroots advocacy efforts for the coal group is married to Paul Bailey, the senior vice president for federal affairs at ACCCE.

Bailey joined the association in February and was given a “specific directive” to assure that he “he would not have authority to authorize or evaluate Hawthorn’s activities,” according to the documents.

Jack Bonner, the president of Bonner and Associates, said the letters were the result of “one rogue temporary employee” who acted without the knowledge of anyone at the firm. The employee worked at the firm for seven and a half business days, said Bonner, and was immediately fired upon discovery of the forged letters.

“While we take full responsibility for what happened and recognize that there were quality control and human resources improvements that needed to be made, we have learned that it is difficult to defend against a person bent on committing fraud,” said Bonner.

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Report slams low-carbon tar sand “myth”

Capturing and storing some of the carbon that would be released in the processing of Canada’s tar sands may not clean the industry up. To turn the vast but dirty resource into useable oil, Canada will have to spew vast amounts of greenhouse gases.

That’s the conclusion of a new study on the potential of so-called carbon capture and storage technology to reduce carbon emissions from tar sands operations.

The Athabasca tar sands of north-eastern Alberta, Canada, hold more than 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil, second only to Saudi Arabia’s reserves. However, the oil is in the form of tarry bitumen that requires a great deal of energy to extract and turn into usable oil – some three to five times as much as conventional crude. The greenhouse gases released during the processing of tar sands make it an environmentally disastrous proposition.

No wonder, then, that the government of Alberta is putting much emphasis, and billions of research and development dollars, into carbon-capture technologies that aim to remove carbon dioxide released by the tar sands industry and store it safely underground.

But a new analysis (PDF) published this week by a UK consumer cooperative and the UK branch of environmental group WWF suggests that carbon capture will be too little, too late. Using the oil industry’s own best-case estimate – that 30 per cent of carbon emissions could be captured by 2030 and 50 per cent by 2050 – the analysts note that this falls far short of the reduction needed to make tar sands oil compare favourably with conventional crude.

Kudos to New Scientist for calling the “biggest global warming crime ever seen” by their real name, “tar sands” — see Memo to Obama: CCS won’t make tar sands clean. Memo to all: They ain’t “oil sands”.  See also Canadian bishop challenges the “moral legitimacy” of tar sands production.  For more on the report, see here.

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The error-riddled book Superfreakonomics got the economics dead wrong, too, as Nobelist Krugman and others have noted.  Now Harvard Business Review weighs in on how they got the business side wrong.  I’m reposting an HBR piece by Andrew Winston, co-author of the best-seller Green to Gold and the author of the new book Green Recovery.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s SuperFreakonomics has certainly gotten a lot of people worked up. The point of contention is a chapter about global warming which makes the case that Al Gore and others are getting us way too worked up about the climate problem because the only way to solve it is to convince people to “put aside their self interest and do the right thing even if it’s personally costly.”

The authors go on to explain their solution — geoengineering — which purportedly isn’t going to require us to cut back on our energy use or rethink the way we do business. But what they have completely failed to address — and what the (ahem) lively discussions on the topic have missed as well — is what the benefits of tackling climate change might be, instead of just the costs.

The authors have missed a major economic issue: the process of shifting our economy to a low-carbon one has enormous upsides completely aside from the benefits to climate balance.

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Solar Industry Takes on Coal and Oil Lobbies

A solar industry leader smacked down the oil and coal industries on Tuesday, calling for renewable energy proponents to open their wallets to level the playing field in Washington.

“The full promise of solar power is being restrained by the tyranny of policies that protect our competitors, subsidize wealthy polluters and disadvantage green entrepreneurs,” said Rhone Resch, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, according to prepared remarks for a speech he is to give at the opening of the Solar Power International conference.

The event, being held in Anaheim, Calif., is the solar industry’s biggest annual get-together in the United States, and is usually a celebration of the industry’s breakneck growth of recent years.

But Mr. Resch said that with the fossil fuel industry devoting tens of millions of dollars to defeat climate change legislation now before Congress, the solar industry needs to start throwing its weight around Washington.

“How our country proceeds on climate change will permanently shape the market for solar,” he said in his remarks.

Oil and coal interests “are spending millions of dollars on lobbying, P.R. and advertising, and much of it is financing a deliberate effort to discredit our industry,” Mr. Resch added. “At the end of the day in Washington, good intentions won’t stand a chance against millions of dollars and intense political pressure. We have relied on good will long enough, and if that’s the only arrow in our quiver, we will lose.”

Actually, the solar industry is coming off quite a successful year in Washington, winning a slew of tax breaks, incentives and loan guarantees for solar energy development.

But Mr. Resch said fossil fuel industries received $72 billion in federal subsidies between 2002 and 2008 while the solar industry scored less than $1 billion. “Taxpayers are forced to subsidize companies like ExxonMobil, companies that are the richest in the history of the world,” he said.

His solution: Start playing the influence game, raising big money for politicians and mobilizing constituents to pressure Congress to support the solar agenda. “In 2008, the oil industry contributed $22 million to political candidates, the utility industry $21 million,” said Mr. Resch. “The solar industry: $138,000. We cannot compete with the entrenched energy interests unless we step up our game.”

In an interview Monday evening, Mr. Resch said the new aggressiveness reflects the solar industry’s continued growth, even in a deep recession. He noted that attendance at the Solar Power International conference has doubled since 2007, with 25,000 people expected in Anaheim this week.

“We need to take a different role in our advocacy, in our relationships in Washington and our ability to influence directions that affect the outcome of our economy,” he said.

White House steps up climate efforts

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