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

Sorry, that pun was the best I could do on short sleep.

As Kate Sheppard wrote in Mother Jones:

Oliver North is using climate change denialism to fundraise for his non-profit group Freedom Alliance. In a six-page stream-of-consciousness fundraising letter, North warns of the “liberty killing ‘Cap and Trade’ boondoggle” that socialists are plotting in response to the “phony climate ‘crisis.’ ” The solution? Write him a check.

Climate change would appear to have little connection to Freedom Alliance’s stated mission, which is “to advance the American heritage of freedom by honoring and encouraging military service, defending the sovereignty of the United States and promoting a strong national defense.” And it’s not clear which roles on North’s resume—his past notoriety in the Iran-Contra scandal or his current gig as a Fox News host and commentator—best qualify him to weigh in on climate science.

Nevertheless, in his letter and a petition sent to supporters, North mashes together all manner of wacky climate change denier talking points.

UPDATE:  Below is a repost of Brad Johnson’s analysis on Think Progress, which notes that at one point, North attacks wind farms as “virtual bird eating machines”:

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Okay, we knew that Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin is one of those anti-scientific idealogues, having said back in August 2008, “A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.”  And then in a September 2008 CBS interview, she jumped the shark polar bear entirely, saying, “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate.” Seriously.  As this Think Progress repost shows, Palin’s thinking hasn’t really evolved, so to speak….

Yesterday, former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) reminded radio host Rush Limbaugh that she doesn’t believe in man-made global warming. Palin, on a nationwide tour to promote her new book, Going Rogue, questioned the “snake oil science involved” and complained about the “shady science right now.” Palin said that she thinks any changes are “in a lot of respects, cyclical”:

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Conservative ideologues have increasingly made opposition to bipartisan action on global warming a litmus test for Republicans seeking national office (see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy” and”Part 3: RNC Chair Steele withdraws support for Rep. Kirk over his vote on climate and clean energy bill“).  Apparently this litmus test doesn’t just include embracing ideological positions on policy, but also on science.  The best example of that is Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), who is widely seen as a top-tier candidate for the 2012 presidential nomination.  Pawlenty already earned a “Full Flop” from PolitiFact because of his complete reversal of position on cap and trade policy — from strong support to strong opponent.  As Think Progress reports, he clearly deserves another for his politically motivated questioning of basic climate science.

Speaking to the Economist recently, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) told reporters that he questions the science underpinning climate change. Pawlenty explained that while the earth might be warming, it is unclear “to what extent that is the result of natural causes.” As ThinkProgress has noted, Pawlenty has veered sharply to the right to appease a right-wing, tea party base. Although the tea party movement demands strict adherence to far right positions, as a Democracy Corps study shows, much of the movement sees political issues through a prism that is simply divorced from reality.

In appeasing the tea party base, Pawlenty not only dismisses the stark reality that human-caused carbon emissions are the largest contributor to climate change, but he also sacrifices his own credibility. Over the course of the last three years, Pawlenty has gone from an outspoken proponent of clean energy to a Glenn Beck pandering climate change denier:

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Question of the day:  Will GM ultimately pay back all of the taxpayers’ loans?

The NY Times story has one of the true glass-is-half-full headlines of our times:

G.M., Citing Progress, Reports Loss of $1.15 Billion

But these days, you take good news where you can find it, and the rest of the story is certainly a pleasant surprise:

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Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) knows that his state’s trees are being ravaged by warming-driven pests now and that Montana faces 175% to 400% increase in wildfire burn area if we don’t reverse course sharply and soon on greenhouse gas emissions.  That’s why he supports strong climate action and said last week, “There’s no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation.”

Bizarrely, though, his Finance Committee will hold an utterly missable hearing today on the “future of jobs” under clean energy legislation that has a witness list stacked with fossil-fuel-industry-funded polluters and deniers.  Wonk Room has the story, excerpted below:

Appearing before the committee are four industry or conservative lobbyists and one coal-industry union lobbyist, Abraham Breehey. The only economist to testify will be Margo Thorning, a lobbyist for the anti-tax American Council on Capital Formation. Also testifying is Carol Berrigan, a nuclear industry representative, Van Ton-Quinlivan of Pacific Gas & Electric, and American Enterprise Institute fellow Kenneth Green.

Green regularly spouts anti-scientific nonsense like, “We’re back to the average temperatures that prevailed in 1978….  No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly” — from a 2008 speech AEI later removed from their website (excerpts here).  Last month, Green weirdly compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals.

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Members of Congress are the custodians of a sacred trust: to protect the vitality and integrity of the extraordinary experiment the Founders began.  For example, the debate about climate change isn’t just about polar bears and energy prices. It’s about whether a free people will be a responsible people, a capitalist economy will be a caring economy and a democracy will protect the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone, even those not yet born.

Some of this sacred trust is codified in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Some is unwritten and implied. And although the Constitution dictates that we keep government and religion separate, there are places in public policy where secular values and moral values overlap. Stewardship of nature and its resources – called “creation care” in religious circles – is one of those places.

Government’s stewardship responsibility is recognized in the body of laws past congresses developed once we realized that burning rivers, poisoned water, dangerous air, carcinogenic fish and toxic wastes were not in the national interest.  In the  landmark National Environmental Policy Act, for example, Congress declared:

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Reuters reports:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has sent its final proposal on whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to human health and welfare to the White House for review, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Reuters on Monday.

The EPA’s final finding, if it follows the agency’s earlier assessment and is approved by the Office of Management and Budget, would allow the EPA to issue rules later to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, even if Congress fails to pass legislation to cut U.S. emissions of the heat-trapping gases that contribute to global warming.

For background, see New EPA rule will require use of best technologies to reduce greenhouse gases from large facilities when “constructed or significantly modified” — small businesses and farms exempt.

Here’s more:

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Contrary to reports from many in the media, the prospects for a climate bill are as good as ever now that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has finished its work.  E&E News makes that clear in a series of interviews with key Senate swing votes,”Senate moderates see an opening now that EPW gridlock is history” (subs. req’d):

Baucus insisted that the bill would cross the finish line, which would require both Senate passage and a successful conference with the House. “There’s no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s going to be this year. Probably next year.”

As I had noted last week, while the media was quick to jump over some seemingly negative statements from the Montana Senator, in fact it was clear from his words that Baucus will be voting for the final bill.

While many key moderates made clear they would not vote for the Boxer-Kerry bill that EPW voted out of Committee yesterday, everyone realizes that the process is going to start anew with Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman, who “will be working closely with the White House” to develop a separate bipartisan climate bill that can get 60 votes.

And contrary to some reporting, the EPW process has not undermined prospects for the new bipartisan bill:

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Since 2001, the Senate has debated at least eight energy or global warming bills where there was no analysis by EPA, Congressional Budget Office or the Energy Information Administration completed in advance of Committee deliberations.

Our guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and energy team interns Jaren Love and Michael McGovern.  This is a Wonk Room repost.

Senate Republicans are demanding lengthy economic analyses of progressive clean energy policy, despite having spent careers voting for and against major energy legislation without such delay. This week the Republican members of the Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted its debate on the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733), claiming that the Environmental Protection Agency’s analysis of the economic impacts was not sufficiently thorough. Before they launched their boycott, committee ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Sen. George Voinovich demanded a “full analysis” that satisfied their particular requirements:

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In a mid-day press conference with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) that followed a meeting with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said:

We think we have a good team here to help create a dual track which we want to emphasize is done with the full consent and support of Sen. Boxer and of other senators involved in this process including the Majority Leader, Harry Reid.  We will be working very, very closely with the administration and fully respectful of all of the efforts made by each individual committee with jurisdiction in this area. and there are six of them. I happen to be chair of one. But there are five others. And they’re all equally important in their contributions to this.

Our effort is to try to reach out to broaden the base of support beyond the six committees of jurisdiction. And we’re going to do that working very closely with the chairs of those committees as well as with members across the Senate. The key here is to really negotiate once in a sense, not negotiate with ourselves and not negotiate just in the Senate and then not have the White House also at the table.

So we just completed a meeting with Secretary Chu, talking about his department’s parameters that might and might not be acceptable with respect to this legislation. We’re meeting this afternoon, the three of us, with Secretary Salazar and with Carol Browner who, as we all know, is the point person for the White House on this topic. We will be working closely with the White House over the course of the next weeks with a few to trying to pull together what ultimately could be presented to Sen. Reid and the leadership as a piece of legislation that we hope could get the 60 votes necessary to pass or more, and we would hope it would be more.

Brad Johnson at Wonk Room has Graham’s remarkable remarks and this video:

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Arianna Huffington posted “Obama One Year Later: The Audacity of Winning vs. The Timidity of Governing.  HuffPost asked for replies.  Mine is here and below.  I welcome your thoughts.  My bottom line:  On climate and clean energy policy, he has been anything but timid!

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues:  global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change — Hell and High Water — then all Presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so.

In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in the year since he was elected is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives.  Three game-changing accomplishments stand out:

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The GOP’s approach to climate and clean energy policy has remained the same for decades — obstruction and obfuscation (see “Senate GOP propose 25% ‘Do-Nothing’ energy tax on Americans“).  Now, led by James “the last flat-earther” Inhofe, they are trying to stall climate legislation as long as possible, on the flimsiest of excuses, presumably because they want to make sure that there is no Senate vote on the bill before Copenhagen.

The excuse this time is that EPA supposedly hasn’t issued a full analysis of the bill — even though EPA has issued an analysis of the bill (see “EPA releases economic analysis finding cost to U.S. households of under $10 a month, bill consistent with global effort to stabilize at 2°C warming“) pointing out that it has only moderate differences from the heavily-analyzed House bill (Waxman-Markey), none of which would significantly affect the economic conclusions.

The best evidence this excuse is just a pretense is that the GOP never accepted the conclusions of the EPA’s detailed analysis of the House bill (see “New EPA analysis of Waxman-Markey: Consumer electric bills 7% lower in 2020 thanks to efficiency“).

TP reports on the GOP delaying tactics:

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Our guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, a CAP Senior Fellow who lives in Colorado.  In the TV grab, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Glenn Beck deny global warming.

In his book “Crossing the Next Meridian,” University of Colorado law professor Charles F. Wilkinson called the timber, mining, grazing and water development interests who for too long dictated how our western public lands should be managed the “lords of yesterday.”

Western lawmakers with their politics still stuck in a 19th-century time warp continue to do the bidding of the lords of yesterday, who now include big energy interests. Witness the letter 16 House and Senate Republicans sent to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar protesting his secretarial order creating a Climate Change Response Council that is designed to coordinate efforts among Interior agencies like the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to cope with the impacts of climate change. The new council, the lawmakers said, represents an end-run around Congress and could be used to stifle oil and gas development and other activities on western lands on behalf of “special interest groups with narrow agendas”:

Businesses in the West are worried about potential court challenges and administrative action. These new rules will allow special interest groups with narrow agendas to block all existing and future activities on federal lands in the name of climate change.

Of course, the “special interest groups” these politicians attack are the Western people, with the “narrow agendas” of preserving their land and way of life against the ravages of uncontrolled development and runaway global warming.

Leading the charge in this effort to ignore the new realities of a changing climate is Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), one of the Senate’s leading opponents of legislation to regulate carbon pollution. Barrasso represents Wyoming, the nation’s top coal producer, and is the chair of the recently formed Senate Western Caucus, a latter-day reincarnation of the 1970s “Sage Brush Rebellion” that fought federal oversight of Western lands, according to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Barrasso has previously temporarily blocked the Obama administration’s choice to head the air office at the EPA, fought the establishment of a CIA climate change center, and accused the EPA of “silencing” a dissenting voice to its finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health.

Salazar, whose department oversees public lands comprising about one-fifth of the U.S., most of it in the West, issued his order on climate change planning in mid-September. It sets up a council made up of senior officials to coordinate the department’s response to climate change, and establishes eight regional climate change response centers and a network of conservation cooperatives to work with states, localities and the public in developing strategies to cope with global warming impacts.

Barrasso and his co-signers see this as a conspiracy to get through administrative fiat what the Obama administration may not be able to get through climate legislation. “These regulations will hit the Western United States the hardest,” they charge in their letter. “Westerners will suffer from higher energy and fuel costs or simply be put out of work.”

If Barrasso et al. are genuinely worried about the western U.S. being hard hit, they should take a closer look at what climate change is already doing to the region. In the state of Wyoming alone, a mountain pine beetle epidemic spurred by climate change had claimed 1.2 million acres of forest by the end of 2008, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Elsewhere in the West, declining snowpack and earlier spring runoff will mean the Colorado River, the lifeblood for some 25 million Westerners, will be unable to meet demand as much as 90 percent of the time by mid-century, according to a recent study.

This was a Wonk Room repost.

A major denier group has started running falsehood-filled ads going after Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the conservative gamechanger who just made a climate bill likely.  As Media Matters explains in their ad fact check:

Using false oil industry talking points, the Big Oil funded American Energy Alliance produced an ad attacking Sen. Lindsey Graham for his willingness to work with Democrats on clean energy jobs legislation.  Contrary to the allegations made in the ad, legislation increasing our investment in clean energy technologies would create jobs in every state and help America become more energy independent, all for less than a quarter a day.

Now Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP) are pushing back with their own ad:

The inside-the-beltway GOP and conservative leadership have strayed far from their original roots with their single-minded determination to stop all efforts to preserve a livable climate.  The photo and Goldwater quote above come from the REP website (as does the photo/quote below).  Here is REP’s news release that goes along with this ad:

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Ken Ward, Jr., the best journalist in West Virginia, has been following the landmark Senate climate and clean energy hearings at his blog, “Coal Tattoo:  Mining’s Mark on our World.”  I’m excerpting his latest piece.

But then there was Preston Chiaro, (above) chief executive for energy and minerals at Rio Tinto, a huge worldwide coal company and the second largest coal producer in the United States, who told lawmakers:

Unmanaged climate change is a threat to our assets, our shareholders, and our employees, and also to civil society and political institutions in many of the countries in which we operate and across the globe.

Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., was kind enough to read into the record part of today’s Gazette story, “Climate bill adds more sweeteners for coal industry. In it, I took a first cut at trying to describe some of the changes that were added to the bill to help coal, in response to efforts by, among others, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va.

Coal Tattoo readers know that some folks in the coal industry — such as United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts and American Electric Power President Michael Morris – are taking a much more progressive stance on the climate bill than others, such as Massey Energy President Don Blankenship, who wants the issue to just go away.

But Rio Tinto’s testimony was a real eye-opener …  for example, as far as the Boxer-Kerry bill’s tougher near-term emissions reductions, Chiaro said:

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When we last left the most vociferous intellectual leader in the conservative movement, he was being widely condemned for telling NY Times environment reporter Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself?” Limbaugh’s remarks were far beyond the pale even for his brand of extremism.

Yesterday, Limbaugh closed his show with a mention of this incident (audio here):

(music up)…Another excursion into broadcast excellence gone, in the blink of an eye. The fastest three hours of media. You remember last week I had a little fun with this New York Times guy Revkin who seriously considered the carbon limiting implications of limiting childbirths to one per family and I suggested show us some leadership on this. I mean you’re always telling everybody else to not have any go ahead and show us how it works. Die and save the planet. And he was profoundly offended by this and I’m told wants an apology…. (music up, end)

In the comments section of his blog, Revkin takes an Uber-optimistic spin on what looks to me like another slap in the face:

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The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works launches a full week of hearings this week on the climate and clean energy bill.  You’ll certainly want to tune in (at the EPW website) for first hearing Tuesday, 9:30 ET to hear:

• Energy Secretary Steven Chu;
• Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood;
• Interior Secretary Ken Salazar;
• U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson; and
• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff.

Wellinghoff in particular may be the best Obama appointment you never heard of, who said in April of new nuclear and coal plants:  “We may not need any, ever.” I’ll repost the full witness list for Wednesday and Thursday at the end.

First, however, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), EPW chair, has a great piece on HuffPost on “Telling the Whole Story on Global Warming” — on making sure that we don’t just talk about the cost of action but also talk about the cost of inaction:

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