Climate Progress

The first (and hopefully last) song ever inspired by Newt Gingrich — and the only song I am aware of that actually disses alternative energy — certainly makes the list, even if it hadn’t debuted on the Sean Hannity show:

All together now:

Drill here, drill now
How ’bout some oil from our own soil that belongs to us anyhow
No more debatin’ we’re tired of waitin’ everybody shout out loud
Drill here, drill now

A classic case of poetic license undercutting the message. The debate concerned coastal drilling, not “oil from our own soil.” I for one am still waiting to hear from Warner EMI about whether they will pick up my newly recorded single, “Cruel Hoax.”

This certainly wins Aaron Tippin the prize for one of the most poorly timed songs in history, as the Democrats rolled over on the issue within days, and now people are talking about $50 oil (see “Q: Will we see $3 gasoline before $5?“). That’s life in Realityville. The full lyrics have also been nominated for the most unintentionally funny country song of the year:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to know what the U.S. southwest faces in the coming decades if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends quickly, just look to Australia:

David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the drought affecting south-west Western Australia, south-east South Australia, Victoria and northern Tasmania “is now very severe and without historical precedent”.

Dr Jones said Victoria had had “the driest multi-year period on record, but also by far the hottest….”

He said temperatures were running at about one degree “above any previous comparable drought. That is substantially hotter, and that one degree is a global warming signal.”

He said the data suggests that for every one degree of warming, there is a 15 per cent decline in run-off, or river flow, in the Murray Darling Basin….

He said a similar drying pattern had been observed in Europe’s Mediterranean, and the south-west in the USA….

The highlighted point is key. Previously, droughts around the world were either cold-whether droughts or warm-weather droughts. In the future, virtually all droughts will be hot weather droughts, which are obviously the worst kind.

He said the current dry was at the extreme end of what the climate models had predicted.

Most of the major predicted climate impacts the planet is now experiencing are at the extreme end of what the models had predicted (see “Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part I“).

Here is more on Australia’s astonishing drought:

Read the rest of this entry »

John McCain famously said of his VP pick, “She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.” Almost as famously, Palin turns out to know almost nothing about energy, and what she does know is mostly wrong (see “Sarah Palin is the fungible candidate“).

The AP reported Thursday that Palin doesn’t even know “whether the government bans oil exports — especially from her state’s North Slope fields”:

A questioner at a town hall-style meeting in Wisconsin said he had heard that at least 75 percent of the oil drilled in Alaska was being sold to China and said, if true, he would like to know why.

“No. It’s not 75 percent of our oil being exported,” Palin said, suggesting some of Alaska’s oil, in fact, may be going abroad but not that much.

“In fact,” she added, “Congress is pretty strict on, um, export bans of oil and gas especially.”

Uhh, no. As the AP explains:

Read the rest of this entry »

A: It certainly looks that way.

When I first posed this question in August, I began my answer:

A: “Who knows?” and “It doesn’t really matter.” Much higher gasoline prices that are sustained for a long, long time are now inevitable. The fundamentals in the oil market are that we are in the beginning stages of peak oil. Supply can no longer keep up with demand, which has kept soaring even in the face of record prices.

In August, I had assumed that things had gotten as grim under President Bush as they could get. My bad. I did, however, point out:

In the short-term, I suppose it is possible that we can go back to $3 gasoline, although that would probably require a deep global recession, and prices would only stay low for the extent of the downturn.

But I didn’t think that would actually happen, as evidenced by my 401K. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of supply and demand mean prices are inevitably headed much higher in the medium term. A figure from a new CIBC report makes that clear:

[Note: This is total world production of crude oil (excluding natural gas liquids).]

Even in the face of the staggering rise in oil prices of the last few years, production has barely budged. What about demand? As I noted in August, despite a sharp drop in US oil consumption, “global consumption rose by roughly 500,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) during the first half of 2008.” And that led me to the obvious conclusion that only much, much greater demand destruction can stop the inexorable rise of oil prices. And that obviously requires much higher prices than what we’ve seen in the first half of this year.

That conclusion remains true for the medium-term, but there is another way to get serious demand destruction in the short term — a major global economic slowdown. Given that people have started to use the D-word to describe where our current mess is headed, oil prices can clearly go lower and stay there awhile. If we assume, optimistically, that we avoid a true depression and only end up with a major recession, then the WSJ Environmental Capital blog has a good summary of new price projections:

Read the rest of this entry »

ClimateProgress was down for several minutes about an hour ago. Sorry about that.

I unexpectedly received a large surge in traffic when people really started Digging this post: The truth-telling ad ABC won’t let you see — and what you can do about it.

But my excellent IT folks got right on the case and quickly told me they “dropped a ‘cache’ in front of the site so that every user isn’t reloading the page every time they view it, which appears to have resolved the problem.”

I guess this proves that you can have too much of a good thing.

By the way, if you haven’t joined Digg yet, and haven’t Dugg one of my posts yet, this would be the time to do it. It is a great site for quickly finding the best, most popular posts on the web. Just click here.

A contest to explain something that isn’t true — what a novelty. If I were running a contest, it would be, “What is a carbon cap and why should it not cover the transportation sector?” But I digress.

So I get an e-mail from the Environmental Defense Fund asking me to direct my readers to this video/graphics competition:

Explain to America how a carbon cap will solve our oil addiction

Many scientists, economists, environmentalists and business leaders agree that a cap on carbon emissions is the best way to cure our addiction to oil. But, quickly and vividly explaining how a cap will solve our energy problems is a challenge.

We need your help conveying this concept to the American people in a clear, brief, convincing and memorable way to stick in the public’s consciousness-like the well-known shot of an egg frying that depicted “your-brain-on-drugs.”

Actually, I don’t really know any scientists, economists, environmentalists, and business leaders who think a carbon cap is the best way to cure our addiction to oil. It is possible I hang out with the wrong crowd. But I think it is more likely that they all understand something I’ve written about on my blog many times — a carbon price is a lousy way to drive oil savings.

In fact, it is all but inconceivable that a carbon cap will solve our oil addiction (see “Peter Barnes’ Cap & Dividend plan is fatally incomplete“):

Read the rest of this entry »

That remarkable headline comes from a story in Zhang Qi (China Daily):

With just two exceptions, China has officially halted all of its coal-to-liquids (CTL) projects due to environmental and economic concerns.

In a notice posted on its website on September 4, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said that, apart from two projects operated by the Shenhua Group, none could go ahead before receiving official approval, because CTL is “a technology-, talent- and capital-intensive project at an experimental stage with high business risks.”

The Chinese have been exceedingly erratic on their plans for liquid coal (see, for instance, “China sells its soul for liquid coal” and “China reins in liquid coal“). Let’s hope this current cessation is not just due to the sharp drop in oil prices, which is certainly only a short-term phenomenon.

More highlights from the article:

Read the rest of this entry »

As the old Paul Simon song says, “Still crazy after all these years.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) had a televised debate yesterday. He was asked about his 2005 comment that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and about whether John McCain is a “victim” of the hoax or a “perpetrator.” Inhofe’s amazing answer on McCain:

People are afraid of some of the environmentalists out there because they pour all the money into campaigns and, consequently, we have a lot of people who fall in that category, and some of them are Republicans.

Yeah, McCain is afraid of environmentalists — that’s why he has a voting record on clean energy and the environmental that is indistinguishable from Inhofe’s! (see “The greenwasher from Arizona has a record as dirty as the denier from Oklahoma“). And that’s why McCain flip-flopped on off-shore drilling — to get all that environmentalist money for his campaign (see “Why did McCain sell out to Big Oil? Ask Charles Keating“).

You can watch Inhofe’s full reply here:

Yes, Inhofe still stands by the hoax comment and loves to push the well-debunked global cooling myth:

Read the rest of this entry »

The current Consumer Reports has a quiz to help educate readers about those benign-sounding industry-funded front groups. As CR writes, “You think Americans for Balanced Energy Choices tout solar power? Nope.”

Match the groupswith their mission (click to enlarge, answers below):

Even better, CR has set up a website with the Center for Media and Democracy, Full Frontal Scrutiny:

Read the rest of this entry »

So ABC will take millions of dollars from oil companies to run misleading energy ads, but they refuse to run one truthful ad from the Alliance for Climate Protection’s Repower America:

Oil company ads — check. Ads from Republicans filled with lies about drilling — check. Some of the most outrageous and lascivious TV shows on prime time — check. Truth-telling ad — too risky. Here are the words too shocking for the American public to hear:

Read the rest of this entry »