As Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I see a lot of fanfare applauding increased oil production in the U.S. and the increase is truly remarkable. We are producing nearly 2 million more barrels of oil a day than government (EIA) experts had predicted ten years ago. But here’s what is truly astounding: We are consuming over 5 million barrels less in oil a day than had been predicted in 2003. So, there is no question we are making dramatic strides in the oil sector, but we are doing twice as well on the conservation side of the ledger than we are in production.

Oil conservation lacks the sizzle that energy production enjoys. After all, you don’t see people striking it rich by taking a train to work, by driving an electric car, or converting their business’ fleet to run on natural gas. What’s worse, not only does it lack sizzle, some public figures say oil conservation isn’t even a serious approach to energy policy. Vice President Cheney famously said conservation is a “sign of personal virtue, but … not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

But as a nation, in order to continue to improve our energy security, insulate our economy from high oil prices, and address climate change, we will continue to accomplish a lot more by using less oil than by producing more oil. It’s less exciting than an oil geyser, but the opportunity is simply much bigger. Increasing oil production in the U.S. helps our energy security and our economy, but increasing domestic production is often described as the healer of all wounds. Unfortunately it is not.

If it were, oil prices would not be so stubbornly high. Oil is traded in a worldwide market, so our increased production has been drowned out by increased demand elsewhere. But thanks to increased fuel economy standards, investment in public transportation, and a burgeoning market in alternative fuel vehicles, Americans do not need nearly as much oil to achieve mobility as once predicted. And we have a lot more improvement to do. After all, we use twice as much oil per capita as the United Kingdom and Germany and a third more than Australia.

Despite our exceptional prowess in drilling for oil, we simply cannot drill our way out of our problems. To address climate change, drive down prices, and truly end the world’s dependence on energy from unstable parts of the world, we need to use a lot less oil. The good news is that we have gotten off to a great start.

When 97 percent of Greenland’s ice experienced at least some melting in July 2012, scientists wondered if it was a one-time phenomenon. Now a new study in Geophysical Research Letters indicates it is a sign of things to come and by 2025, there is a 50-50 chance of it happening annually.

Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8, 2012 (left) and July 12, 2012. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed. Credit: NASA.

It’s not clear what the effects of such melting will be: the majority of Greenland’s ice loss, which has accelerated significantly over the past decade, comes from glaciers shedding more ice into the sea, and moving faster toward the sea, not from melting snow and ice at higher elevations of the ice sheet.

Nevertheless, such widespread melting indicates an overall warming in the region that could threaten the ice more generally, adding significantly to the threat of sea level rise.

The 2025 projection is based on two factors, according to lead author Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The first is a series of temperature measurements going back to 1950 at the Summit research station, at the highest — and on average, the coldest — point on the Greenland ice sheet. The mercury has been rising more or less steadily there for that entire time, with the fastest increase, of about .22° F per year, coming since 1992. “That’s six times faster than the global average,” McGrath said in an interview.

The highest parts of the ice sheet still remain below the freezing mark virtually all the time, but when unusual weather conditions set in — an especially warm air mass, or as in the case of the 2012 melting, an influx of clouds just thin enough to let sunlight through but thick enough to block heat from escaping — the thermometer can sneak above 32°F. “Only an hour above freezing is enough to start the surface melting,” McGrath said.

Another factor that went into the analysis involved what’s known as the equilibrium line — the altitude where the snow is neither piling up year to year nor shrinking. Over the past 20 years or so, that transition zone has been gradually moving up the ice sheet by about 115 feet every year, on average— another indication that temperatures on the frozen island are warming.

It was this second effect that led McGrath and his colleagues to launch their study. “When our research camp was established, it was put as close as possible to the equilibrium line,” McGrath said.  “If they put it any lower, it would melt out every year, and if it was higher, it could get buried in snow.”

But when the team returned for the summer season in 2009, he said the surface had melted so much that “it was falling apart. It looked like someone had dropped a bomb on it.”

They relocated the camp, and things were fine in 2010, but the following summer it had melted out again. “That led us to look at things in more depth,” he said.

The findings broadly agree with earlier research by other groups. “This is clearly an interesting paper, although I think it’s dangerous to pinpoint such a specific date as 2025,” said Marco Tedesco, a glaciologist at City University of New York, who produced some of that research.

To Tedesco, there’s too little emphasis on how Greenland’s ice would respond to a variety of scenarios for emissions of greenhouse gases, the primary reason for the planet’s overall warming over the past half-century.

Tedesco also felt that the new paper didn’t look hard enough at some of the feedback mechanisms between the ice sheet and the atmosphere that could arise as melting ice gives rise to more clouds, for example.

Nevertheless, he agreed, the overall message is entirely consistent with what others have found: Greenland’s ice is under assault by rising temperatures, and whether or not 2025 will represent a milestone, the consequences over coming decades could be catastrophic.

– Michael D. Lemonick, reposted with permission from Climate Central

Related Posts

• Science Stunner: Greenland Ice Melt Up Nearly Five-Fold Since Mid-1990s
• JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050
• Greenland Ice Sheet Melt Nearing Critical ‘Tipping Point’
• Greenland Ice Sheet “Could Undergo a Self-Amplifying Cycle of Melting and Warming … Difficult to Halt,” Scientists Find

An infographic from the International Displacement Monitoring Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council of populations displaced by climate change and extreme weather disasters. [The Guardian]

More than 32 million people fled their homes last year because of disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes – 98% of displacement related to climate change. Asia and west and central Africa bore the brunt. Some 1.3 million people were displaced in rich countries, with the US particularly affected. Floods in India and Nigeria accounted for 41% of displacement, according to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council.

The House plans to vote today on a bill forcing the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, while the Obama Administration issued a firm statement “strongly opposing” the bill. [Washington Post]

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is refusing to approve new disaster aid for the tornadoes that just hit his state without offsetting cuts elsewhere. [HuffPo]

China has reportedly committed to a hard cap on its carbon emissions by 2016, which could spur the U.S. and other nations to a serious accord in 2015. [Independent, Renew Economy]

New Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz committed to energy efficiency legislation and improved standards, saying, “I have never seen a credible solution to the climate risk mitigation challenge, to reach the kinds of goals we need to reach, without the demand side playing a very, very important part in that.” [The Hill]

Moniz will also delay approval of 20 liquefied natural gas export facilities while he studies the effect exports will have on the domestic market. [Washington Post]

The Energy Information Agency expects an extension of renewable energy production tax credits to significantly expand clean energy capacity and generation. [Today in Energy]

Most Americans think the U.S. should do something about climate change and develop clean energy, according to a new Yale/GMU poll. [LA Times]

The Great Barrier Reef has already lost half its coral, and Australia’s contributions to coal consumption — along with other forms of pollution — are threatening to destroy what’s left. [Spiegel]

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk says he will likely pay back the loan it received from the Department of Energy not in 2022, but… today. [Bloomberg]

The Energy Department’s Better Buildings Challenge has voluntarily encouraged more than a billion dollars in efficiency investments to cut waste and save millions per year for dozens of companies and more than a hundred partners. [USA Today]

The airplane Solar Impulse is in the air again, looking to break another distance record from Arizona to Texas. [CleanTechnica]

One last blast of Alaska winter today, hopefully? This is what “Grad Blast” means in Alaska! We’ll move our graduation b-b-q indoors and watch the mini-blizzard from ’round the fireplace. (Global warming my gluteus maximus.)

When Palin was running for national office, she advocated capping carbon emissions and said man’s activities contribute to global warming. Over the last half decade, she has swung back to rejecting climate science and embracing carbon emissions:

Aug. 2008: Asked about global warming, said “I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.”

Sep. 2008: Told Charlie Gibson: “I believe that man’s activities can certainly be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change.”

Oct. 2008: Said during the vice presidential debate that she supported capping carbon emissions.

May 2009: Forced to cancel an appearance at White House Correspondents’ dinner because of a flooding disaster caused by an “unusually warm spring thaw in Alaska.”

Nov. 2009: Asked Rush Limbaugh, “Are we warming or are we cooling?”

Dec. 2009: Attacked climate scientists in a Washington Post op-ed, then said she would not debate Al Gore on climate change because “they don’t want to listen to the facts. They don’t want to listen to some reasonable voices in this.”

Feb. 2010: Asserted that climate science is “snake oil” and said “man-made global warming hysteria isn’t based on sound science.”

Apr. 2010: Dismissed “this snake oil science stuff that is based on this global warming, Gore-gate stuff

Jun. 2010: In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, said “I chant, ‘drill, baby, drill,’ because it will help make the country energy independent.”

May 2011: At a motorcycle rally, exclaimed: “I love that smell of the emissions!”

Jan. 2012: In the middle of last winter, took to Facebook to ask, “What global warming?”.

Apr. 2012: Celebrated Earth Day by calling, yet again, to “drill, baby, drill.”

Palin is an entertainer now rather than a public servant and so her opinions alone do not merit much consideration. Yet her joking asides that cold weather means that climate change is not happening are representative of a larger skepticism and confusion about the link between climate and weather.

Essentially: climate is a trend, while weather is a data point. Lots of data points make up a trend. The trend thus far has been that of frankly shocking warming. In December, we saw the 333rd month in a row global temperatures exceeded the long-term average. Both the science and the evidence tell us that humans have a lot to do with this. Carbon emissions are rising — and recently hit the highest levels humans have ever seen.

But what about the fact that some parts of the U.S. have recently seen cold temperatures? In fact, it is entirely possible that the cold weather is partially driven by climate change.

The Arctic has recently been warming twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. Paired with melting sea ice, this can cause extreme weather “such as drought, flooding, cold spells, and heat waves.” Some studies suggest this causes a “blocking” weather pattern arises over somewhere like Greenland, which slows down the jet stream and alters weather patterns. This is what appears to be happening this spring.

The blocking pattern slowed down weather patterns and allowed them to tap into more cold air. This brings cold into the continental U.S., allowing the Arctic to warm dramatically.

Though some parts of the U.S. have been colder than, for instance, last year’s extremely warm spring, climate change makes itself apparent in unusual ways. In March, the bulk freighter “Federal Hunter” docked in Duluth, Minnesota. It was the earliest such arrival in the port’s history, as the St. Lawrence Seaway’s is usually frozen over that early in the season. This year, Duluth residents saw their first “saltie” before April 1.

At a ceremonial event to mark the rebuilding of the Jersey Shore boardwalk post-Hurricane Sandy, Christie responded to a question from WNYC/New Jersey Public Radio about how the state could have better prepared for the consequences of climate change:

Well, first of all, I don’t agree with the premise of your question because I don’t think there’s been any proof thus far that Sandy was caused by climate change. But I would absolutely expect that that’s exactly what WNYC would say, because you know liberal public radio always has an agenda. And so since I disagree with the premise of your question I don’t feel like I have to answer the rest of it.

Of course, this isn’t about whether Sandy was “caused” by climate change. It’s about whether climate change and sea level rise are making such storms more frequent and much more destructive (see links below) — and that is something we can plan for.

Christie is already one of the few Republican leaders that acknowledge human activity causes climate change. Even so, he still casts it as a second-tier issue. “Maybe in the subsequent months and years, after I get done with rebuilding the state and getting people back in their homes,” he told reporters in February, “I’ll have the opportunity to ponder the esoteric question of the causes of the storm.” He even acknowledged climate change is real in the same speech where he announced that he was pulling New Jersey out of a regional compact aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Contrast Chrstie’s words with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), who said, “We have a one-hundred year flood every two years now.” Still, both governors make the case for greater greater resiliency, even though Christie does not directly reference climate change. The different responses also characterize the gulf in NY and NJ preparations for climate change. According to a report from WNYC, New Jersey overlooked climate change warnings before Sandy, which resulted in it losing over one-quarter of its public transit fleet. Meanwhile, New York had consulted scientists on climate change-related incidents, and lost 19 of its 8,000 rail cars.

What Christie fails to grasp is the impact climate change is having on his constituents today, including coastal flooding, powerful storms, sea level rise, and drought. Extreme weather has also cost taxpayers $136 billion in the last three years, with Sandy’s toll alone at $60 billion.

Related Posts:

• How Arctic Ice Loss Amplified Superstorm Sandy — Oceanography Journal
• How Does Climate Change Make Superstorms Like Sandy More Destructive?
• Yes, Climate Change Contributed To Superstorm Sandy

“The news helicopter from kfor.com caught this image of the shocking near-total destruction of a huge area of Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20, 2013.” Via Masters.

Tom Karl, the director of the National Climatic Data Center, explained in a 2011 email:

What we can say with confidence is that heavy and extreme precipitation events often associated with thunderstorms and convection are increasing and have been linked to human-induced changes in atmospheric composition.

Insured losses due to thunderstorms and tornadoes in the U.S. in 2012 dollars. Data and image from Property Claims Service, Munich Re.

Tornadoes “come from certain thunderstorms, usually super-cell thunderstorms,” explained climatologist Dr. Kevin Trenberth in an email today, but you need “a wind shear environment that promotes rotation.” Global warming may decrease the wind shear and that may counterbalance the impact on tornado generation from the increase in thunderstorm intensity.

Trenberth, the former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, notes:

The main climate change connection is via the basic instability of the low level air that creates the convection and thunderstorms in the first place. Warmer and moister conditions are the key for unstable air.

The climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10% effect in terms of the instability and subsequent rainfall, but it translates into up to a 32% effect in terms of damage. (It is highly nonlinear). So there is a chain of events and climate change mainly affects the first link: the basic buoyancy of the air is increased.  Whether that translates into a super-cell storm and one with a tornado is largely chance weather.

After April 2011 saw records set for most tornadoes in a month and in 24 hours — “The Katrina of tornado outbreaks“ — I examined the climate/tornado link in great detail here, looking at the data, the literature, and expert analysis. That piece concluded:

1. When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.
2. Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.

Early March 2012 saw what was likely “the most prolific five-day period of tornado activity on record for so early in the year,” as meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters put it.

Then we had an unusually long “tornado drought” from May 2012 to April 2013, which has now come to a stunning end, punctuated by the devastating Moore, Oklahoma tornado yesterday:

A massive, mile-wide supercell tornado ripped through the suburbs of Oklahoma City, destroying homes, schools and other buildings. The tornado was on the ground for some 40 minutes, according to the National Weather Service (NWS), and police reported that an occupied elementary school was in the path of the cyclone. Early estimates had winds on the ground near 200 mph, which would have made the cyclone an F4 or higher. Witnesses said the damage was like something out of an atomic bomb strike, and there are at least 24 people dead, including many young children, with a toll that could eventually be far higher.

Masters says “the Moore tornado likely to be one of the five most damaging tornadoes in history,” which is particularly tragic because Moore had “previously experienced the 4th costliest tornado in world history, the notorious May 3, 1999 Bridgecreek-Moore EF-5 tornado.”

You can donate to the American Red Cross disaster relief here.

Below is an extended review of the scientific literature along with some analyses from this year and last year by leading experts.

BACKGROUND ON THE SCIENCE

For decades, scientists have predicted that if we kept pouring increasing amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we would change the climate. They specifically predicted that that many key aspects of the weather would become more extreme — more extreme heat waves, more intense droughts, and stronger deluges.

As far back as 1995, analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (led by Tom Karl) showed that over the course of the 20th century, the United States had suffered a statistically significant increase in a variety of extreme weather events, the very ones you would expect from global warming, such as more — and more intense –precipitation. That analysis concluded the chances were only “5 to 10 percent” this increase was due to factors other than global warming, such as “natural climate variability.” And since 1995, the climate has gotten measurably more extreme.

Multiple scientific studies find that indeed the weather has become more extreme, as expected, and that it is extremely likely that humans are a contributing cause (see “Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment” and links therein).

Beyond that, as Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explained here in 2010: “There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms.” He told the NY Times, “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”

Trenberth elaborated on this in a must-read 2012 article, “How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change.”

And the latest science says that shockingly rapid loss of Arctic ice is also likely driving an increase in extreme weather.

Munich Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, issued a news release in 2010, “large number of weather extremes as strong indication of climate change,” which noted:

Munich Re’s natural catastrophe database, the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally there has been a more than threefold increase in loss-related floods since 1980 and more than double the number of windstorm natural catastrophes, with particularly heavy losses as a result of Atlantic hurricanes.

The rise in natural catastrophe losses is primarily due to socio-economic factors. In many countries, populations are rising, and more and more people moving into exposed areas. At the same time, greater prosperity is leading to higher property values. Nevertheless, it would seem that the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge as set out in the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report.

Here is their data:

I have tended to focus on the extreme weather events for which the causal chain is clearest and which will do the most damage to the most people in the foreseeable future. Dust-Bowlification is probably at the top of that list (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming“).

But tornadoes are among the most visibly and viscerally destructive events — though I do find it interesting how much media coverage these tornadoes have gotten compared to, say, Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge aka Nashville’s ‘Katrina’. So it was inevitable that scientists would be asked the obvious question of whether recent remarkable outbreaks are connected to human-caused climate change — and they were indeed remarkable.

Many scientists have weighed in on the climate-tornado link. Two of the people who have done more research and publication on extreme weather and climate change than most are Trenberth and Karl, now director of NCDC. I emailed Karl for his thoughts and here is what he wrote me in 2011:

Best info we have on the relationship between a warmer world and severe convective storms that can produce tornadoes is in the 2008 Synthesis and Assessment Report of the US Global Change Research Program. Chapter three of that Weather and Climate Extremes Assessment indicates that several studies do show that environmental conditions favorable for convection are more likely with more greenhouse gases, but results are not conclusive.

We now have improved resolution models running at our Oak Ridge Supercomputer thanks to the Stimulus funding. We may be able to make more definitive statements (one way or the other) after these get analyzed over the next few years. Meanwhile, we know that La Nina years tend to have a greater chance of severe outbreaks. So as usual, there are natural factors that have to be considered, and any human made factors would be confounded within these naturally occurring events making our attribution much more difficult.

Joe, what we can say with confidence is that heavy and extreme precipitation events often associated with thunderstorms and convection are increasing and have been linked to human induced changes in atmospheric composition.

You can find that 2008 Report here. I wrote about it here (see Sorry, deniers & delayers, Even Bush Administration says human emissions are changing the climate).

Trenberth made clear to me in an extended 2010 interview that he was dismayed by the media coverage of extreme weather, especially extreme deluges, that made no mention whatsoever of global warming:

I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.

I emailed Trenberth in 2011 to check his quote in ThinkProgress. And I again checked with him in 2012. He stands by the quote with the clarification he had added of the context:

It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.

The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With global warming the low level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level air is 1 deg F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.

Just because attribution is difficult doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes. Equally important, when discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented:

There are lots of posts from 2011 on this. Stu Ostro, Weather Channel Senior Meteorologist, wrote in his May 2011 post, “The Katrina of tornado outbreaks“:

The atmosphere was explosively unstable with summerlike heat and humidity, interacting with a classic wind shear setup as a strong jet stream and upper-level trough crashed overhead”….

The atmosphere is extraordinarily complex, and ultimately what’s happened the past month is probably a combination of influences, including La Nina, other natural variability, and anthropogenic global warming.

Here is how meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters put it May 31, 2011:

In summary, this year’s incredibly violent tornado season is not part of a trend. It is either a fluke, the start of a new trend, or an early warning symptom that the climate is growing unstable and is transitioning to a new, higher energy state with the potential to create unprecedented weather and climate events. All are reasonable explanations, but we don’t have a long enough history of good tornado data to judge which is most likely to be correct.

Here is how Masters put it in 2012:

Last year’s tornado season was incredibly severe, and we are off to one of the worst early-season starts to tornado season on record now in 2012. However, it is too soon to ring the alarm bells on climate change being responsible for this. The tornado data base going back to 1950 doesn’t show an increasing trend in strong tornadoes in recent decades. While climate change could potentially lead to an increase in tornadoes, by increasing instability, it could also decrease them, by decreasing wind shear. I’d need to see a lot more bad tornado years before blaming climate change for the severe tornado seasons of the past two years. One thing that climate change may be doing, though, is shifting the season earlier in the year. The 5-day total of tornadoes from February 28 – March 3 will probably break the record of 131 set in 1999 for the largest tornado outbreak so early in the year. Warmer winters, and an earlier arrival of spring due to a warming climate, will allow tornado season to start earlier–and end earlier. This year’s early start to tornado season is consistent with what we would expect from a warming climate. I have a more extensive article on this subject that has just been published by Weatherwise magazine….

Then we have the study The Effect of Climate Change on Tornado Frequency and Magnitude:

There is an obvious increase in tornado frequency between 1950-1999. This could be due to increased detection. Also this could be due to changing climatic conditions. Looking at the raw data we have seen that there are generally less tornadoes in El Nino years compared to La Nina Years. But, since we were unable to get climate data, we were unable to see if the change in the frequency was due to climate factors.

Our data has failed to show a strong correlation in increase in tornado frequency and magnitude during El Nino and La Nina events.

The jury is out.

A NYT blogger directed us to this chart:

There is no apparent trend in the strongest tornadoes (F5 is the most destructive). The NYT blogger quotes Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory:

The primary changes appear to occur ~1975, most likely as a result of the retrospective rating process that assigned ratings to tornadoes prior to the near-real-time ratings that began when the [National Weather Service] adopted the F-scale operationally in the mid-1970s, and ~2000, for reasons that aren’t completely clear, but are likely due to an increased emphasis on examining construction details and policies that changed the nature in how the ratings are created for the strongest tornadoes. Both have lead to a decrease in probability of a tornado being very strong, given that it’s strong. It’s possible that there’s a meteorological component, but the reporting practice changes are large enough that I don’t think we can pull a physical signal out, even if it’s fairly large.

So it may simply be that the data is simply is too confused by the reporting practices for analysis to draw any strong conclusions. That doesn’t mean the question shouldn’t be asked or that scientists shouldn’t give their best answer.

In general I do think it’s best to avoid statements like “global warming is to blame for” or “global warming caused” or “this is evidence of global warming,” especially in regards tornadoes.

Finally, while tornadoes will continue to grab the headlines wherever they flatten cities and take lives, it is virtually certain that other extreme events — and ultimately the permanently changed climate — will cause the greatest harm attributable to human emissions of greeenhouse gases.

The population hasn’t even acclimatized to the climate change we’ve had already — in part because the GOP and the fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign have obfuscated efforts to inform the public.

We’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half-century. If we keep listening to the disinformers, we are on track to warm nearly 10 times that this century (see literature review here). In short, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Or, as one commenter put it:

“Mother nature is only warming up.”

And yes we need to improve housing for those in tornado alley. That’s a great thing for blogs that don’t focus on climate to write about. Just as obviously we need an aggressive strategy for reducing carbon pollution. that also supports real adaptation.

DeSmogBlog notes that the Bureau of Land Management’s recently-released rules governing fracking on federal lands ”will adopt the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model bill written by ExxonMobil for fracking chemical fluid disclosure on U.S. public.” It uses a voluntary online chemical disclosure database that has “truck-sized” loopholes, most notably that it’s voluntary — editors.

By Frances Beinecke via NRDC

When I talk to people who live near fracking operations, they often ask me the same question: “What is this doing to my drinking water?” Homeowners have shown me jugs of water from their kitchen sinks that look like rusty mud. One man said he could light his tap water on fire after energy companies put a drill pad in his neighborhood. Others tell me they worry their water is causing health problems for their families.

People across the country share these concerns. From Pennsylvania to Texas to Colorado, residents see wastewater pits leak, smell chemicals in the air, or read the scientific research showing that fracking can contaminate water supplies and pose a host of other threats. No one should have to live with these dangers: we all want to keep our drinking water safe from dangerous chemicals and reckless industrial activity.

And yet the federal government just released draft rules for fracking that fail to protect people from harm. Instead the rules protect the oil and gas industry from having to follow strong public health and environmental standards.

There is a lot at stake here. The Bureau of Land Management’s draft rules would cover fracking on public lands, including millions of acres of wild landscapes and private property where the federal government owns mineral rights. An enormous amount of land is involved, but also water.  The weak rules in the draft need to do more to protect the water supplies for millions of Americans. Residents of Denver, Washington, DC, and Santa Barbara, for instance, live downstream of public lands where fracking could or already does occur.

Would you want your tap to run brown? Would you want to serve toxic water to your family?

Ordinary citizens have a hard time forcing energy companies to keep our water and air clean. We count on the government to do that job. Yet when it comes to fracking, states have proven ill equipped for the job. Only about half of the 30 states with fracking, for instance, require companies to report which chemicals they use in fracking fluids. And in most of the states with disclosure rules, companies can withhold information they deem confidential without any justification or oversight.

The federal government hasn’t been much better. The oil and gas industry has won exemptions from critical sections of our nation’s most basic environmental laws – the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Now the Bureau of Land Management has issued woefully inadequate rules for fracking on public lands. The current draft rules are even weaker than a previous draft leaked several months ago, and they read like an industry wish list.

They could exempt huge tracts of state and tribal lands from the safeguards. They offer only weak chemical disclosure requirements that would make it hard for homeowners or medical professionals to find out all the chemicals being used in fracking operations. And they ignore key areas of health and environmental concern like the huge wastewater pits have been known to leak toxic and radioactive materials.

Surely America can do a better job of holding industry accountable for its actions. Fracking is already moving full steam ahead on our public lands. Now is the time to enact strong standards, not issue giveaways to oil and gas companies.

The Obama Administration should be a leader in establishing safeguards that protect public health and the environment. And the industry—which is drilling in our backyards, near our schools, and in our natural treasures—should accept these stronger safeguards. Americans deserve to know their water is safe from fracking chemicals.

– Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC, reposted from NRDC Switchboard with permission

Yet, some people still think the PTC should be eliminated. Most interestingly, Exelon — the large Midwestern utility and power plant operator — has made ending the PTC its number one lobbying priority, claiming that the credit distorts markets. This would be scary. Fortunately, it’s not true.

The truth is that Exelon hopes to slow or halt expansion of wind power projects that can affect the bottom line of their nuclear power plants in the Midwest, and to achieve that objective they’re blaming wind and the PTC for market phenomena like negative pricing that are almost always caused by inflexible generation technology and transmission constraints.

This post will summarize Exelon’s position on the PTC, show where it falls short, and then point out that Exelon is more concerned about competition from wind power, in general, than the Production Tax Credit.

Why does Exelon say the PTC is distortionary?

Exelon’s argument hinges on two fundamental ideas. First, that the PTC causes negative prices; and second, that negative prices are bad for wholesale electricity markets.

Digging into this argument requires a little knowledge of how power markets work. In much of the country — including where Exelon’s nuclear plants are located — power is sold in competitive markets, at a “clearing price” set by an auction process. In general, the clearing price is set by the most expensive marginal resource needed to meet demand at a given time. This price is then given to all the generators providing electricity at that time. (For more on this, see Wind Power Helps to Lower Electricity Prices.)

Importantly, all power plants bid prices that reflect not just their fuel expenses and other operating costs, but also forgone revenues. For example, coal plant owners can sell the coal ash for industrial uses, and they take these lost sales into account when deciding how much they should charge for power from the plant. Wind power is exactly the same, only one of its lost benefits is a tax credit.

The Production Tax Credit offers eligible wind generators a tax credit worth $23 per megawatt hour for the electricity they produce. Since the fuel costs for wind power are zero and operational costs are low, wind turbines can theoretically offer to sell their power at a negative price (that is, they can make money even though they’re paying someone to take their power).

Where Exelon goes wrong is when they draw policy conclusions from these facts. Exelon believes that these negative prices are bad for wholesale electricity markets because they discourage investment in new generation. And, because all power plants operating get the same price, a negative price can force nuclear power plant owners to pay someone to take their power.

Where Exelon loses the plot

Exelon’s explanation of negative prices is generally correct, but it’s also incomplete. First, we need to look at how often wind is setting the power price.

Exelon’s nuclear power plants are located in the PJM Interconnection, which covers parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia. In the PJM territory, there are actually two electricity markets resources compete in, the “day-ahead” market and the “real-time” market. The vast majority of transactions occur in the day-ahead market, since forecasts for the following day’s electricity are generally accurate enough that grid operators can gauge what they need and when. Real-time markets are where transactions occur to account for the differentials that may arise in the course of the day, and they account for a much smaller percentage of total transactions.

Day-ahead markets are where the vast majority of baseload power — like coal and nuclear — compete. And rightly so; because they cannot ramp up and down as easily, they need a predictable schedule instead of relying on real-time market signals. Revenue from the day-ahead market is the bread-and-butter of these power plants.

So how often did wind set the clearing price in the day-ahead market, thereby usurping potential revenue from these baseload providers? Not once (see page 62). Wind never set the clearing price in the day-ahead market in 2012. So, even if wind power was bidding a negative price, and if negative prices were bad, it still wouldn’t matter to Exelon’s nuclear plants. The real-time market is a slightly different story, but still nothing to raise alarms. In this market, wind that could bid below $0 only accounted for 0.5 percent of all dispatchable offers in 2012 (see page 55). Coal and gas, on the other hand, accounted for 89.2 percent of all clearing prices. The idea that the PTC has contributed more to changing market dynamics than, say, cheap natural gas is unsupported by any of the available data.

And yet, negative prices do show up in the day-ahead market. So if not from wind, where do they come from?

One possible answer is that when you have generation that cannot ramp down located far away from users, negative prices occur.

This is particularly true in the region that Exelon points to most frequently, the Northern Illinois Hub. What you see there is lots of generation (Exelon’s nuclear plants and then a few wind farms) that are isolated from demand by limited transmission. Since nuclear plants cannot just “shut off” they have to run with or without demand. This is called being “non-dispatchable.” Making matters worse for Exelon, now those nuclear plants are joined on the “island” by wind plants that further cut into their profit margins. The problem isn’t that wind is setting negative prices; it is that cheap wind power is taking revenue from more expensive nuclear power plants.

The second part of Exelon’s argument is that negative prices are inherently bad. Is this right? No. Negative prices are actually sending the right economic signal about market conditions at that time. When there are excess, non-dispatchable resources in one place and high demand in another — it is time to build transmission to relieve that condition. Alternatively, you could have less generation on the island, which is essentially the tact that Exelon is taking.

The real story is that Exelon doesn’t like competition from wind

Exelon is obviously a sophisticated company, so they likely understand all of this. And, they’re likely not arguing against the PTC for the fun of it. In fact Exelon owns some wind plants themselves, and it is very probable that what they are really opposed to is cheap wind power owned by other companies located in regions where it hurts the bottom line of their power plants. Our conclusion is that Exelon is much more concerned with competitive wind power than the alleged market distortion from the PTC.

First of all, Exelon is not opposed to all Production Tax Credits — just those for wind. The Production Tax Credit for nuclear, for example, is totally fine by them (see if you can spot their opposition to the $18 per megawatt hour production tax credit for nuclear here, but don’t look for too long). They also aren’t opposed to the other kinds of credits that power plants cash in, such as coal plants selling ash. The only difference between these power plants and wind power is that wind has zero fuel costs, while these others do not.

Second, the arguments above clearly show that the clearing prices in day-ahead markets where nuclear power is making their money are not influenced by wind, and that in fact the combination of cheap natural gas and transmission constraints are probably to blame. And yet, Exelon is focused on the PTC instead of focusing on transmission or natural gas. The massive stake Exelon now holds in cheap natural gas generation through its acquisition of Constellation; combined with the money they make off transmission constraints driving prices up elsewhere, probably explain part of their choice. It is an easier target to take wind out of the competition than it is to help pay for the transmission to accommodate it.

To understand how misguided these attacks on the PTC are, it helps to go through a little thought experiment. Given the arguments above, imagine the PTC expires tomorrow. What would happen? Day-ahead prices would still occasionally be negative, since power plants would still be islanded away from users who need energy. Prices in the real-time market would still occasionally be zero, since wind can set the clearing price when demand is very low. Cancelling the PTC wouldn’t address any of the concerns Exelon put on the table — the only difference is that less wind would get built next year, and the year after that. Less wind being built means that the Exelon generators already in existence have less competition from cheap alternatives.

When you look at it this way, Exelon’s argument actually supports what CAP has long argued: The PTC is effective in getting more wind power built. The difference is that we think this is a good thing, while Exelon disagrees. Given the economic and environmental benefits of wind power, we’re confident that we’re on the right side of that argument.

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives should pass a bill aiming to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, but some House Democrats are trying to offer amendments to clarify the true nature of the project. [The Hill]

The House is expected to easily pass a Keystone XL pipeline approval bill this week with bipartisan support, but liberal Democrats that oppose the project will try to land some punches too.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) wants a floor vote on an amendment requiring that oil transported through the Canada-to-Texas oil sands pipeline — and any refined products made from it — remain in the U.S. …

Holt’s export ban amendment is one of several submitted thus far to the House Rules Committee, which will meet late Tuesday afternoon to decide which amendments will receive votes on the floor the next day. …

And a separate amendment from Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.) requires that prior to the pipeline approval taking effect, TransCanada must “disclose its campaign contributions and other electioneering expenditures over the previous five years to the public,” a summary states.

A good brief summary of what can be said about tornadoes and climate change (hint: it’s complicated). [Grist]

Chris Christie says there is no “proof” that climate change helped cause Superstorm Sandy. [WNYC]

Pakistan, facing extreme heat and electric blackouts, is turning off air conditioning in public building and directing civil servants to not wear socks. [Guardian]

Governor Sean Parnell of Alaska told the Chamber of Commerce that Alaska would contribute $50 million to model how much oil is in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to better lobby the federal government to permit oil companies to “recover” oil from the refuge. [LA Times]

Ernest Moniz gets sworn in as Energy Secretary today. [The Hill]

The United States and European Union have decided to negotiate a settlement among a set of antidumping cases with China involving solar panel exports. [Bloomberg, New York Times]

Organizing for Action, the successor to the Obama campaign, has listed dozens of climate deniers in Congress and is asking supporters to “call them out.” [Organizing for Action]

The Post reports on the “impatient” Obama supporters who want action on climate change, do not see enough executive action, and are planning protests of OFA meetings. [Washington Post]

Yes, we’re definitely over 400 parts of carbon dioxide per million parts of air in the atmosphere now. [LA Times]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is criticizing green groups for suing the EPA for failing to meet a regulatory deadline or requirement. [The Hill]

The largest wind farm on tribal land will proceed in Oklahoma, with Cherokee Nation, Kaw Nation, Otoe-Missouria Tribe, Pawnee Nation and Ponca Nation expecting $16 million in revenue over 20 years. [Sustainable Business]

Electric plug-in car sales have passed 100,000, according to EV America, with the market approaching 48 percent growth. [EarthTechling]

Two years ago, the Washington Post’s Editorial Page Editor wrote that “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.” Apparently it is a delusion the Post is happy to spread. Below is a fact check of the seven worst parts of Smith’s piece:

Integrity of Climate Science

Smith opened with a general appeal for a clear discussion of the facts: “Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate evaluation of policy options.”

However, with a look at his record, Rep. Smith did not have such a clear discussion in mind. After he became chair of the science committee, his first move was to schedule a hearing that aimed to take issue with the science of climate change. He has criticized “the idea of human-made global warming.” More dangerously, he has made headlines for authoring legislation that would politicize research conducted by the National Science Foundation. Of course, there is strong, 97%-grade consensus on human-caused climate change in the scientific literature, as a recent study confirmed.

Keystone Claims

With the House set to vote on Wednesday to force the approval of the Keystone tar sands pipeline, Rep. Smith argued that opposition to the Keystone tar sands pipeline hurts the economy and would not decrease carbon emissions. He said the “State Department has found that the pipeline will have minimal impact on the surrounding environment and no significant effect on the climate,” and would create “more than 40,000 U.S. jobs.”

This just isn’t true. The Environmental Protection Agency submitted a public comment on the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project’s carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Additionally, tar sands oil extraction is not inevitable because transporting it by rail is not feasible — the pipeline is really their only option. Smith’s claims about 40,000 jobs are also quite inflated. The project would create just 35 permanent jobs, along with 51 coal plants’ worth of carbon dioxide each year.

U.S. Emissions

Smith went on to argue “that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas.”

In fact, annual U.S. carbon emissions rank just behind China’s, despite having only a quarter of China’s population. The U.S. is by far the world’s biggest contributor to global concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, since that depends on cumulative emissions.

Despite advances in energy efficiency and renewable energy, the United States remains a significant part of overall global carbon emissions. Domestic coal use is on the rise again in the U.S., and coal exports reached a record high last year, beating the record set in 1981. America is also the world’s number one fossil fuel subsidizer.

Recent Warming

Rep. Smith made the case that “global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is simply not the case. The overall trend line shows continued warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record. Every year of the decades of the 2000′s was warmer than the average temperature in the ’90s.

Superstorm Sandy

The Chair of the House Science Committee called out “unscientific and often hyperbolic claims” about the impacts of a warming climate. He cited experts that ostensibly claimed that Superstorm Sandy had nothing to do with climate change.

However, experts in the field explain that climate change makes hurricanes and Nor’Easters like Superstorm Sandy more powerful and more destructive. The experts that Rep. Smith tried to cite mainly focused on research saying that climate change has not increased the frequency of hurricanes. Climate scientists pointed to the link between climate change and the increased strength and intensity of storms.

It is not just the increased ocean and atmospheric temperatures that can make storms more intense, however. A recent article in Oceanography Journal found that the melting and receding Arctic ice also amplifies storms like Sandy.

Fixing the Problem

Smith said that the EPA “proposed emissions standards that virtually prohibit new coal-fired power plants.” He goes on to say that regulating carbon emissions from power plants will “raise both electricity rates and gas prices — costing jobs and hurting the economy.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is required to regulate carbon because the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. EPA regulations actually help the economy and create jobs. Every $1 invested in the economy yields $10 in benefits.

The U.S. can do much more than it currently is to reduce carbon emissions, and doing so will actually be a boon to the economy. The EPA could help cut carbon emissions 17 percent by the end of the decade by regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.

Slowing Down Progress

Smith concludes that we are “pursuing heavy-handed regulations” on climate change and urges everyone to “take a step back from the unfounded claims of impending catastrophe and think critically about the challenge before us.”

There have been thousands of experts thinking critically about the reality of climate change, and their overwhelming conclusion is that emissions need to be reined in. Not eventually, but right now.

A 2012 World Bank climate report concluded: “A 4°C [7°F] world can, and must, be avoided” to avert “devastating” impacts. The IMF chief warned in February: “Unless We Take Action On Climate Change, Future Generations Will Be Roasted, Toasted, Fried And Grilled”

Continuing to kick the can down the road could be dangerous in the extreme. Millions displaced. Drastically warmer weather. Tropical diseases. Extreme drought that leads to wildfire conditions.

Smith may benefit from protecting the biggest carbon emitters — he has accepted more than half a million dollars from the oil and gas industry — but the rest of the country, and the world, cannot afford to wait.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, New York City’s flagship public television station, WNET, has dropped the richest man in New York, carbon pollution billionaire David Koch, from its board of trustees. Days before the monthly board meeting on May 16, Koch’s name was removed from the WNET website. Koch had been a board member since 2006. Koch has been funding WNET since 1986.

The severance of Koch’s longstanding relationship with WNET — which not only serves the New York City area but also produces national programs such as Charlie Rose, Nature, and Great Performances — comes at a time of increasing tension between Koch’s anti-regulatory, climate-polluting industrial empire and the educational mission of public television.

The inherent conflict between Koch’s conspiratorial, anti-science ideology and the public interest with has come under attention in recent months. After Superstorm Sandy struck, WNET’s Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers ran shows on the tragic consequences and threat of greenhouse pollution for the New York region. More recently, reports of Koch Industries’ interest in the newspaper holdings of the Tribune Company have spurred nationwide protests.

Koch also was featured in the November 2012 PBS documentary Park Avenue, which contrasted the extreme wealth of Koch’s residence at 740 Park Avenue with the stark poverty less than a mile north in East Harlem. In the documentary, a former doorman noted that Koch, with a net worth of about $45 billion, gives only $50 holiday tips.

On May 16, the evening after Koch left the WNET board, the station ran a major live town hall on Superstorm Sandy. Broadcasting from New Jersey and New York City, the NY/NJ/Long Island affiliates under WNET management broadcast a two-hour show that talked repeatedly about the major threat posed by climate change in rising sea levels and more frequent storms of increased intensity — threats which Koch’s Cato Institute denies.

In anticipation of today’s piece on the Kochs in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, Koch Industries issued a conspiratorial rant accusing her of running a “left-leaning” “smear” campaign, in coordination with “MSNBC, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, Huffington Post and more”:

Jane Mayer’s Agenda

As campaigns and attacks against Koch Industries and its shareholders go, the one led by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has been consistent, if nothing else – consistent in its left-leaning bias, baseless accusations, and numerous inaccuracies.
Since lobbing her opening salvo against us in an August 2010 article that was riddled with biases and inaccuracies and based on research by a ThinkProgress blogger, Mayer has authored nearly a dozen screeds attacking Koch Industries, Charles Koch and David Koch. Her latest submission, soon to be published, will be another attempt to smear us while advancing her partisan agenda. We don’t precisely know the content of her story. However, based on her questions to us, we believe it will be an attempt to promote a fleeting PBS show that aired six months ago – one on which she collaborated and in which she appeared. The show attacked David Koch and Charles Koch, with Mayer making an appearance as an interviewee.
We also believe Mayer will work hard to make the case that should Koch purchase the Tribune newspapers, as is rumored, we would use those papers to advance a particular agenda. This assertion, of course, is made with no basis in fact or history to support such a claim.
Mayer’s tale about us will likely be promoted in all the usual places – MSNBC, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, Huffington Post and more.
Once we see it, we will fact check it and set the record straight here on KochFacts.

Koch is still on the board of trustees of WGBH, the prominent Boston-based PBS affiliate which produces major series such as Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow, and the science show NOVA.

Note: Forecast the Facts members are participating in the campaign to discourage the Tribune Company from selling its papers to the Koch brothers.

Update: “Mr. Koch resigned from our Board of Trustees as of Thursday, May 16th to concentrate on his other obligations,” WNET communications director Kellie Castruita Specter informed Forecast the Facts in an email response.

(Credit: Robert F. Bukaty, AP)

Fishing is a profession often passed down from one generation to the next. Many lobstermen in Maine fish the same bottom their fathers and grandfathers fished, and the same holds true of fishermen father offshore as well. Yet increasingly, anecdotal evidence has suggested that the old faithful fishing spots are no longer quite so reliable.

In northern regions these shifts could lead to conflicts over fishing rights and access to traditional fishing grounds. In the tropics, the problem could be more dire. As our oceans warm, species may not be able to adapt at all, leaving tropical oceans with severely depleted fish stocks and some of the most vulnerable human populations with a distinct shortage of a vital protein source.

Much of this scarcity of native species can be attributed to overfishing, a practice now largely halted in U.S. waters thanks to strict new science-based management tactics implemented as a result of a 2006 reauthorization of the law that governs our fisheries. But increasingly, both scientists and fishermen have been eying climate change as a reason some fish are showing up in new places and the catch fishermen are accustomed to finding have been surprisingly slow to rebuild.

A new study published this week in the journal Nature puts some peer-reviewed punch behind what up until now was a common-sense theory. Most fish have a preference for a certain water temperature range, and because they are mobile creatures, as water warms due to climate change, fish populations are on the move toward the poles. The study found:

Except in the tropics, catch composition in most ecosystems 
slowly changed to include more warm-water species and fewer cool-water species. In the tropics, the catch followed a similar pattern from 1970 to 1980 and then stabilized, likely because there are no species with high enough temperature preferences to replace those that declined. Statistical models showed that the increase in warm-water species was significantly related to increasing ocean temperatures.

This latest research builds on the authors’ 2009 study that stated:

…climate change may lead to large-scale redistribution of global catch potential, with an average of 30–70% increase in high-latitude regions and a drop of up to 40% in the tropics.

This trend could have dire implications for both fishermen and fish.

As U.S. fishermen are increasingly operating under management systems that set the total amount of fish they can catch based on their historic landings, this kind of habitat shift can lead to complex management conundrums. If a fisherman from Massachusetts is suddenly catching more summer flounder (which prefer warmer water) and less winter flounder (which prefer colder water) but his catch allocation was set based on his history of catching winter flounder, his business will not last.

Meanwhile the New Jersey fisherman’s boat may not be equipped to catch the species that will replace summer flounder in his waters so he will either have to move with the fish into an area where he may not be permitted to fish, or invest in new gear and face the possibility of learning a new fishing method entirely. Neither is an attractive option.

In tropical regions, particularly in less-developed countries, the results could be much worse. Fish is the primary source of protein for more than three billion people on the planet, many of them in less-developed tropical countries. But in their case, the fish that migrate out of their waters won’t be replaced by anything. This is not a question of parsing out a different mix of fish. It will result in a complete loss of a major food source.

And if it’s bad for the people who depend on the fish for protein, it’s worse for the fish themselves. As Daniel Pauly, one of the new study’s authors put it in an interview with NPR on Wednesday, “imagine a reef fish that is driven by temperature into North Carolina or the Delaware coast. That reef fish will not find reefs. It’s like you having to move, but you cannot take your furniture with you, or your house.”

The challenge of rebuilding today’s depleted fish populations is already a herculean one for fishery managers to address. Unfortunately, it now appears they’re going to have add the complexity of tomorrow’s warming and acidifying oceans to the equation.

But a low sensitivity would mean that aggressive action to reduce CO2 emissions starting now would have a modestly higher chance of keeping total warming below 4°F and averting the worst impacts. That’s the point of New Scientist‘s article, “A second chance to save the climate” on a new sensitivity study in Nature Geoscience:

“If we are lucky and the climate sensitivity is at the low end, and we have a strong agreement in 2015, then I think we stand a chance to limit climate change to 2 °C,” says Corinne Le Quéré of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK. “But there’s a lot of ifs.”

If this new study is accurate, then near-term surface warming might be less than expected. But as the lead author Oxford’s Dr. Alexander Otto told the BBC, “We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn’t.”

The researchers say the difference between the lower short-term estimate and the more consistent long-term picture can be explained by the fact that the heat from the last decade has been absorbed into and is being stored by the world’s oceans.

Recent studies make clear the ocean is warming quite fast, as (see “Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms” and here). If, as many climatologists believe, some of that ocean heat is released to the surface in the next decade or two, that would reverse the recent slowdown in the rate of surface warming.

Also, many other recent studies find that the climate is more sensitive than we expected:

• Last Time CO2 Levels Hit 400 Parts Per Million The Arctic Was 14°F Warmer!
• Observations Support Predictions Of Extreme Warming And Worse Droughts This Century

Indeed, the new study does little to eliminate the confusion about sensitivity. The media continue to conflate and confuse climate sensitivity with how much warming will we subject our children and countless future generations to (see here and below).

Another related source of confusion is conflating “climate sensitivity” — which generally refers to the change in the global surface temperatures (absent major feedbacks) — with how sensitive the climate itself is to changes in temperature.

For instance, our climate models wildly underestimate what’s happening in the Arctic right now:

Arctic sea ice is melting much, much faster than even the best climate models had projected (actual observations in red). The reason is most likely unmodeled amplifying feedbacks. The image (from Climate Crocks via Arctic Sea Ice Blog) comes from a 2007 GRL research paper by Stroeve et al.

And considerable recent research suggests that our climate in turn is much more sensitive to Arctic ice loss than we ever thought:

• Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’
• NOAA Bombshell: Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather
• How Arctic Ice Loss Amplified Superstorm Sandy — Oceanography Journal

Finally, since the media keep misreporting the issue, here once again are the four factors that determine how much warming we are going to inflict on future generations:

1. The so-called “equilibrium climate sensitivity” – the sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor. The ECS, which is typically the focus of modeling studies like the new one discussed above, is how much warming you get if we suddenly adopt a super-aggressive effort to cut carbon pollution and only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm — and there are no major “slow” feedbacks.  We know the fast feedbacks, like water vapor, are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and Skeptical Science piece here).
2. The actual CO2 concentration level we hit, which on our current emissions path is far, far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).
3. The real-world slower (decade-scale) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100“).
4. Where they live — since people who live in the mid-latitudes (like most Americans) are projected to warm considerably more than the global average.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2007 that equilibrium climate sensitivity was in the range of 2.0-4.5C. The new study has a similar range, 0.9-5.0C.

Actual warming this century on our current emissions path is all but certain to be catastrophic, even if ECS is closer to 2°C than 3°C or more.

Related Posts:

• “Memo To Media: ‘Climate Sensitivity’ Is NOT The Same As Projected Future Warming, World Faces 10°F Rise

(Source: Suncor Energy Inc., BLM)

The Canadian government has nearly doubled its spending to promote the Keystone XL pipeline to $16.5 million, up from $9 million a year ago.

This dramatic spending increase is a result of an increased lobbying effort the government is planning, which includes high-profile ad buys and dispatching a series of officials to reiterate talking points that the pipeline will increase U.S. energy security and provide us with thousands of home-grown jobs.

Their expanded lobbying efforts include Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper traveling to New York City to speak with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and participate in roundtables with American business leaders. During his Q&A session with the CFR, Mr. Harper advocated for approval of the pipeline, insisting it would add “almost nothing globally” to carbon emissions.

Harper’s claim just isn’t true — extracting crude from the oil sands is an incredibly energy intensive process that emits 3 to 4 times more greenhouse gases than producing conventional crude oil, making it one of the world’s dirtiest forms of fuels. Approving Keystone would more than double the production of carbon-intensive tar sands by 2024, leading to an increase in greenhouse gases equivalent to adding 8 million cars on the road every year. Without the pipeline, tar sands production is expected to fall flat by 2020.

Harper also said the US should not “turn up” its nose at the potential of 40,000 construction jobs nor the prospect of being able to reduce its dependence on oil shipped in from overseas.

Again, Harper is just avoiding the facts — the State Department released a draft environmental impact statement earlier this year that found the pipeline would directly only create “3,900″ temporary construction jobs. After construction is complete, the operation of the pipeline would support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts.” The State Department’s report, which was written by a private consulting firm with links to the pipeline’s owner, also made clear that at least some of Keystone’s oil will be refined and exported in response to “lower domestic gasoline demand and continued higher demand and prices in overseas markets.” The pipeline will add nothing to U.S. energy security and is simply a way for the oil industry to sell refined fuel at higher prices available overseas.

In addition to winning America’s approval of the pipeline, Canadian officials are fighting against a European Union plan that would label tar sands as more polluting than crude oil. According to Reuters, the EU’s executive commission developed a Fuel Quality Directive as part of a plan to cut greenhouse gases from transport fuel that would single out Alberta’s oil sands as more polluting than conventional crude oil, a move that Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said is unfair and could damage Canada’s bid to find new export markets.

Dr. James Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, accused the Canadian government of acting as the industry’s tar sands salesman and “holding a club” over the UK and European nations to accept its “dirty” oil. “Oil from tar sands makes sense only for a small number of people who are making a lot of money from that product,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “It doesn’t make sense for the rest of the people on the planet. We are getting close to the dangerous level of carbon in the atmosphere and if we add on to that unconventional fossil fuels, which have a tremendous amount of carbon, then the climate problem becomes unsolvable.”

While Canada may be ramping up their bid to receive approval of their pipeline, the bottom line is that Keystone is a gateway to a huge pool of carbon-intensive fuel, most of which must be left in the ground if humanity is to avoid a devastating climate impacts that may be beyond any plausible plans of “adaptation.”

Credit: Community Alliance with Family Farmers

After this year’s dismal snowpack survey predicted a serious water shortage for huge swaths of California’s farmland, some farmers are investigating an ancient technique called “dry farming.” As the Sacramento Bee highlighted last week, farmers in the Central Valley, which supplies a quarter of the American food supply, have started experimenting with conserving reservoir water and relying only on rainwater to sustain crops.

Dry farming is risky, as it requires farmers to gamble on rainfall, trap it in the soil, and sustain it for long dry spells. Much of the state experienced record low rainfalls in the past year. And climate change threatens to reduce precipitation even more. But immediate concern over the valley’s fast-depleting groundwater stores has prompted farmers to take the risk — with some success.

According to a study by the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a 250-acre vineyard practicing dry farming in Napa has conserved roughly 64,000 gallons of water per acre each year. About 2,000 out of half a million acres of vineyards are dry-farmed.

Dry-farming, a common practice for centuries, seemed to dwindle in popularity in the past few decades as farmers relied more on surface irrigation. But proponents of the practice swear that dry-farmed crops, while smaller than their conventional counterparts, have more concentrated nutrients and stronger flavors due to lower water absorption.

The past year’s record low rainfall has left California farmers desperate for solutions. Bracing themselves for droughts that will only grow longer and more severe with climate change, farmers are looking for water-conserving alternatives to currently unsustainable practices. Besides dry-farming, farmers are adopting more efficient irrigation systems, creating water storage areas like on-farm ponds, and developing drought-resistant crops.

Farmers were hit hard by last year’s dry growing season, with yields in corn-heavy states plummeting to 30-year lows. The nation’s wheat and livestock supplies have also been decimated over the past year. The USDA has been forced to bail out drought-stricken farmers by buying up millions of pounds of meat. As a result, food prices are sky-high and many experts fear a global food shortage.

Related Post:

• Oxfam Warns Climate Change And Extreme Weather Will Cause Food Prices To Soar

America cannot solve a global problem by itself. But as Mr. Obama rightly observed in his inaugural address, the United States, as both major polluter and world leader, has a deep obligation to help shield the international community from rising sea levels, floods, droughts and other devastating consequences of a warming planet.

The prospects for broad-based Congressional action putting a price on carbon emissions are nil. The House is run by people who care little for environmental issues generally, and Senate Republicans who once favored a pricing strategy, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have long since slunk away. Meanwhile, Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee have spent the last two weeks trying to derail Mr. Obama’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency — a moderate named Gina McCarthy. Ms. McCarthy has served two Republican governors (Mitt Romney was one) but is considered suspect by the right wing because she wants to control carbon pollution, which is driving global temperatures upward.

Hence the need for executive action. Yet we are now four months into Mr. Obama’s second term, and there is no visible sign of a coherent strategy. … As this page has noted, it is possible to adopt a robust climate strategy based largely on executive actions. The most important of these is to invoke the E.P.A.’s authority under the Clean Air Act to limit pollution from stationary industrial sources, chiefly the power plants that account for almost 40 percent of the country’s carbon emissions. …

He can hasten the development of less-polluting alternatives to older-generation refrigerants and other chemicals. He can order the Energy Department to embark on a major program to improve the efficiency of appliances and commercial and residential buildings, which consume a huge chunk of the country’s energy supply. And he can ramp up investment in basic research.

All of this will take time, which is why it is important to get started.

Heatwave deaths in New York City could spike 22 percent in the next decade. [Guardian]

Elizabeth Kolbert on Keystone: “The pipeline isn’t inevitable, and it shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s just another step on the march to disaster.” [New Yorker]

Extreme drought stretching from Texas to Kansas and beyond could be here for longer than expected as aquifers dry up and groundwater disappears. [New York Times]

Deforestation continues to sweep across Southeast Asia. [Yale Environment 360]

On Friday, Rep. Lois Capps introduced legislation to create a national plan to assist medical professionals with health issues linked with climate change, allowing additional research and tracking of diseased and environmental health indicators. [The Hill]

Gas prices rose 11 cents over the last two weeks. [Time]

The Coast Guard is taking a look at why Shell’s Arctic drilling barge ran aground off an island in Alaska. [Washington Post]

One solution to “range anxiety” for electric cars could be a battery swapping system, which is something Tesla Motors appears to be examining. [Gas 2]

Iceland recently became the 100th nation to deploy wind power. [Renewable Energy Focus]

When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.

Yes, unchecked warming is likely to prove the greatest scandal in U.S. history.

Certainly it’s the one that will ruin the lives of the most people, far more than Watergate did if our government doesn’t act to expose what’s going on and work to put an end to it — before it puts an end to our stable climate:

Scandalous: Projected warming this century (in red, via recent literature) if humanity allows current carbon pollution trends to continue compared to the temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013).

I know it’s not one of the scandals the major media are now obsessed with 24/7, but that is business as usual for the MSM, as Klein notes:

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

It was Watergate and the fame it brought Woodward and Bernstein that inspired so many journalists to enter the field. But now that post-modern cynicism reigns supreme –which is to say, much of the media acts as if their really is no objective truth or over-arching public interest — fame alone seems to drives the media.

And so this scandal goes largely unreported (see “Silence Of The Lambs 3: Media Coverage Of Climate Mixed In 2012, But Still Down Sharply From 2009“) or misreported (see “False Balance Lives“).

Fortunately for the media, having largely missed the chance to report the scandal when it might have had some positive impact on the outcome, they’ll have plenty of time to become famous reporting on its consequences (see Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen

On Wednesday night, Minnesota State Representative Glenn Gruenhagen (R-Glencoe) took to the House floor to talk about climate change and renewable energy.

Using sources such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Gruenhagen told his colleagues that climate change is a “complete United Nations fraud and lie…. The latest facts from CPAC show that in the last sixteen years there’s been no global warming.”

While it is common practice among climate skeptics to claim that the Earth is no longer warming, the fact is global temperatures are rising. 2010 was the hottest year on record and every year of the 2000s was warmer than 1990s average. Over 30 million people were displaced by climate-related extreme weather events in 2012, and it is increasingly likely millions more will be displaced in the near future.

Watch the speech here, courtesy of theuptake.org:

Gruenhagen made his speech the same day a new survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers found a 97 percent consensus that global warming is happening and humans are the cause and just a few days after it was reported that atmospheric C02 levels reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human existence

Indeed, Minnesota residents are feeling the very real impacts of climate change. The MinnPost reports that three 1,000 year floods have occurred in the state in the last eight years as a result of shifts in rainfall patterns. Extreme drought is occurring not just in Minnesota but almost every state, and climate change is having cumulative stress on the Great Lakes. Rising levels of water vapor in the warming atmosphere are spiking heat indexes and associated health warnings.

Gruenhagen aside, the majority of lawmakers in Minnesota have recognized the importance of enacting policies to address climate change and in 2007, implemented one of the highest renewable energy standards in the nation – laws which require electric utilities companies to produce a portion of their electricity from wind, solar, and other renewable sources. Indeed, Minnesota ranks seventh in the nation in overall wind energy capacity and lawmakers in the state recently agreed to a solar energy standard.

At the federal level, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) recently attacked climate deniers on the Senate floor saying, “If 98 out of 100 doctors tell me I’ve got a problem, I should take their advice. And if those two other doctors get paid by Big Snack Food, like certain climate deniers get paid by Big Coal, I shouldn’t take their advice.”

China’s energy mix was 9.4 percent renewable as of 2011, and the Sichuan project is part of the country’s effort to boost itself to 15 percent by 2020. Hydroelectric power is anticipated to make up most of that increase.

The environmental ministry acknowledged that the project is massive enough to damage the local ecology, negatively effecting certain rare fish species and plant life. The dam’s developers have promised to try and offset those effects with “counter-measures,” and the project still requires the approval of China’s ruling cabinet.

To be built over 10 years by a subsidiary of state power firm Guodian Group, it is expected to cost 24.68 billion yuan ($4.02 billion) in investment.

The ministry, in a statement issued late on Tuesday, said an environmental impact assessment had acknowledged that the project would have a negative impact on rare fish and flora and affect protected local nature reserves.

Developers, it said, had pledged to take “counter-measures” to mitigate the effects.

Right now the title for China’s tallest dam goes to the Xiaowan project, at 292 meters, while the tallest dam in the world is currently Tajikistan’s Nurek dam, at 300 meters. The Sichuan dam will top 314 meters when all is said and done.

China has been at the forefront of hydroelectric development for a while now, with an enormous number of dams either constructed, in the works, or in the planning stages. Even individual projects can be of tremendous scale, providing in at least one instance an electrical capacity equal to nearly half of Britain’s entire national grid, and preventing 200 metric tons of carbon emissions each year. As of 2010, worldwide hydroelectric capacity was 850 to 900 gigawatts, meaning about one-fifth of the world’s electricity — and half the electricity for almost two thirds of the world’s countries — comes courtesy of hydropower. Though that use varies widely: the United States and Europe have developed 70 and 75 percent of their hydroelectric potential, while Africa has only taken advantage of 7 percent.

At the same time, the large bodies of water and massive landscape alterations that are part and parcel of large dam projects mean hydroelectricity can come with unusually significant downsides. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei province, for example, caused significant ecological damage, increased the risk of landslides, flooded a number of archeological and cultural sites, and displaced 1.3 million people. And the constricted water flow can hurt downstream populations that rely on the rivers for their fresh water supplies.

Meanwhile, climate change itself is also making hydropower less reliable, as altering weather patterns dry up some river flows, boost others, and generally make the future availability of water flows more difficult to predict.

One answer to those challenges could be small scale hydropower. Studies suggest there’s as much as 30 gigawatts of unused potential for such projects in the United States. These set-ups generally provide 10 kilowatts to 30 megawatts a piece, and don’t require damming rivers. (Or they can be built into already existing dams, the vast majority of which are not hydroelectric.) Unfortunately, regulatory red tape is in many ways the major hurdle to taking advantage of small scale hydro.

First, on Wednesday a study came out that found 97% consensus on human-caused global warming in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. It was by our friends at Skeptical Science, John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli.

Then on Thursday, President Obama tweeted the study to his 31,000,000 (!) followers:

So how does the ever-shrinking Washington Post report the story? With the headline, “Obama tweet gets Australian researcher 31.5 million followers on Twitter.” #FAIL

And just to be clear that the WashPost is in fact as confused and innumerate as their headline suggests, the story asserts:

That tweet, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, led 31,541,507 people to decide to follow Australian climate change researcher John Cook on Twitter.

The Herald didn’t, however, make such a transparently silly claim. Their headline read, “Obama gives Aussie researcher 31,541,507 reasons to celebrate.”

Ten seconds on the interwebs will reveal that Cook has 6,560 followers. But then we’ve suspected for a while that the Washington Post doesn’t employ any fact checkers. Nor does it have a single editor who understood enough about social media to realize instantly that the headline — and hence the story — must be wrong.

No wonder the MSM is collapsing in the face of the new media onslaught. Note: As of Saturday morning, the story is still uncorrected.

This afternoon, the Department of Energy approved the second application for a facility to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) worldwide. Today’s approval to export up to 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day goes to Freeport LNG Expansion, on Quintana Island in Texas, for 25 years. The approval process now moves to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions (FERC), so the company is not in the clear yet.

Several companies have received nearly two dozen permits from DoE to export LNG to countries with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement (FTA), but the approval process has been much slower for permits to export to non-FTA countries. 19 facilities that want to export LNG to non-FTA countries are still under review by the Energy Department — including a joint project between ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum.

The natural gas industry is booming in the United States, largely due to the practice of fracking, which opened up large parts of the country to extraction previously thought uneconomical to drill. Natural gas can be transported via pipeline across land, but when companies want to export the fuel overseas, they have to use ships. Since natural gas (mostly methane) in gas form would require a large ship to transport, it must be cooled and liquefied before it can be exported across an ocean.

In the last decade, companies built facilities to import natural gas because the U.S. expected lower production than what fracking actually allowed. Once the shale gas boom sharply increased domestic production, they have tried to turn those import terminals into export terminals. Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass terminal, the first facility to receive DoE approval to export to non-FTA countries, is one example of this.

The reason for the delay of such applications is due to opposition largely from the chemical industry, which fears that exports will lead to an increase in the price of natural gas (which it uses for industrial purposes), and those who care about carbon emissions and the environment, who point out that the U.S. still does not know the consequences that exports will have on carbon emissions.

Congressman Ed Markey, running for John Kerry’s old senate seat in Massachusetts, said today that “The Department of Energy still doesn’t even know what the impact of natural gas exports will be on domestic businesses and consumers, but they are approving more exports anyway.”

If the U.S. is increasing exports, it becomes even more critical to ensure that the natural gas obtained through hydraulic fracturing is as safe as possible, with zero fugitive emissions. Yesterday the Interior Department released draft fracking rules, and there are some easy ways (5 in fact) to make the rules adequately protect Americans and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is one thing to argue for weak safeguards to give Americans access to “cheap energy” — it is another to argue for weak rules that poison the air and water to export the energy to other countries.

The net climate effects of LNG exports depend largely on the energy currently used by the importing country — what the gas will replace. Coal-heavy economies that replace their coal with natural gas should see lower emissions, but this transition could threaten more valuable transitions to renewable energy.

The Energy Department said in today’s approval that “the exports proposed in this Application are likely to yield net economic benefits to the United States.” Left unsaid is the fact that the more fossil fuels left in the ground, the easier it is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which would benefit the economy in myriad ways.

Since last November’s Presidential election, immigration reform with a road map to citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country has been gaining momentum. On April 16 the bipartisan Senate “Gang of 8″ introduced their immigration bill, and diverse groups such as organized labor, evangelical Christians, and business leaders have lent their support for reform.

Just last month, the board of the Sierra Club, the oldest environmental organization in the United States voted to add their voice to the movement, officially supporting immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship. In doing so they joined other well-known environmental leaders like Bill McKibben and Van Jones.

Immigration reform and environmental protection are progressive issues that are in alignment, as the Sierra Club’s support illustrates: immigrants are affected by climate change and care about the environment, and the environmental movement is in turn strengthened by the inclusion of immigrant voices.

Here are the top five things you need to know about immigrants and the environment:

1. Immigrants are already a part of the environmental movement. Immigrants and people of color have long been key players in the environmental justice movement, which has been fighting back against environmental injustice that has disproportionately affected communities of color and low-income communities. Environmental justice organizations, for example, often speak out against polluting and toxic businesses, like power plants and fuel tank facilities that are sited in or near communities of color. But while immigrants have been active in the more localized environmental justice movement, they need to have a larger role in the overall environmental movement which has all too often been criticized for a lack of diversity. In a recent Grist post, One America board member Sudha Nandagopal wrote, “… we don’t just need to add diverse faces to the crowds at environmental protests. We need inclusive strategies and a diversity of ideas. Communities of color must be equitable partners in identifying problems, crafting solutions, and pushing for change.”
2. Immigrants have a big stake in the health of the planet. Historically, immigrants and people of color have borne a greater share of environmental burdens in their communities and at their jobs. According to the Sierra Club, 43 percent of Latino voters either live or work near a toxic site (such as a power plant, refinery, highway or factory.) This figure has increased by close to 10 percent since 2008, showing a dangerous uptick in the number of Latinos potentially exposed to dangerous environmental conditions, and the need among this community for a cleaner, healthier planet.
3. Immigrants tend to lead low-carbon lifestyles. More than half of all immigrants live in large metropolitan areas, which have some of the lowest per capita emissions in the U.S. In fact, CAP analysis has found that cities with the lowest carbon footprint had an average immigrant population of 26 percent, while the 10 highest per-capita carbon emitting cities have an average immigrant population below 5 percent. In addition to living in big cities, immigrants are almost three times more likely to take public transportation and nearly two times more likely to carpool than native-born residents.
4. Immigrants are helping to drive the green economy. Immigrants are leading new businesses in the green and high-tech industries, having launched 40 percent of publicly traded, venture-backed companies and nearly half of private, venture-backed startups. Additionally, immigrants occupy many “green-collar” jobs (blue-collar jobs in the green goods and services industry) and use their skills to advance energy efficiency, clean energy and sustainability. Green-collar employment includes jobs in wind turbine manufacturing, solar power project construction, home weatherization, solar panel installation, etc.
5. Immigrants support environmental policies. A recent poll found that 7 out of 10 Latino voters support environmental protections while 9 out of 10 feel a sense of “moral responsibility” when it comes to protecting the environment. A similar study of Asian American voters in California found that 3 out of 4 are extremely or very concerned about environmental issues, and 7 out of 10 believe that environmental regulations “provide an important benefit to society and protect health, air and water.” Immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries represent more than 60 percent (over 24 million residents) of the U.S. foreign-born population and these polls indicate that they can be strong advocates for environmental protections.

In coming out in support of immigration reform, Sierra Club President Allison Chin stated, “By establishing an equitable path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in America today, we can empower those in our society who are most vulnerable to toxic pollution to fully participate in our democracy, fight back against polluters and demand public health protections and clean energy solutions.” The intersection of environmentalism and immigration reform will continue to benefit and strengthen both movements.

Dave Roberts at Grist is (eternally) puzzled that folks don’t seem to know that. Since eternity is a very long time — only slightly longer than the lifetime of some CO2 molecules in the air — I’ll repost his key points:

1. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Mass v. EPA that CO2 qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
2. In 2009, EPA issued an endangerment finding that deemed CO2 a threat to public health. Once those two things happened, a cascading series of of legal obligations was set into motion.
3. First, EPA must regulate “mobile sources” of CO2 under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act. That’s what it did with its new auto mileage standards.
4. Then, EPA must regulate “stationary sources” of CO2 underSection 111 of the Clean Air Act. First it will issue standards on new power plants. It issued a draft regulation last year, but it missed a deadline in April for issuing the final rule (for which some green groups are suing it). Supposedly it has delayed release of the final regulation so it can do more work to protect the rule against legal challenge.
5. Then, EPA must regulate existing stationary sources — in the case of CO2, primarily power plants — under Section 111(d). That rule, the 111(d) rule, is the one EPA keeps telling journalists it has “no current plans” to develop, and no surprise, since it’s got its hands full working on the rule for new power plants.

That is from Roberts’ post, “Once more, with feeling: EPA is required to regulate carbon from existing power plants.”

Roberts opines:

Again, this series of executive actions is prescribed by statute. EPA is not “bypassing” Congress, or going around it, or in any way exceeding its authority. It is not even acting on Obama’s discretion, not really. It is simply carrying out the will of Congress, as embodied in the Clean Air Act….

The Savvy Washington Insiders of the political press don’t understand or care about policy, they only care about court intrigue, so they are suckers for the daft conservative narrative that EPA regulation of carbon is some quasi-dictatorial power grab that Obama is contemplating. Now, as usual, they’re busy being amateur Sun Tzus and gaming out whether and how he will screw enviros over.

Who knows, maybe enviros — and the planet — will get screwed in the end. It’s usually a safe bet in D.C. But whatever happens, rules on carbon from power plants are coming. On that, Obama has no choice.

So again, EPA is required to regulate carbon from existing power plants. Or, rather, EPA is required to regulate carbon from existing power plants!!!

(Credit: NY Times)

Gina McCarthy finally got a vote.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing yesterday to vote on McCarthy’s nomination to be the next EPA Administrator. This came after a week of obstruction from the Republican members of the committee, who boycotted the scheduled vote last week.

As one of the most highly-qualified nominees to lead the Environmental Protection Agency in its history, McCarthy has understandably won plaudits from Republicans like Senator James Inhofe and energy industry titans like American Electric Power. She has been dubbed the “green quarterback” in President Obama’s administration as well as former Governor Mitt Romney’s. Indeed, McCarthy was approved by the full Senate in 2009 for her current position leading the Office of Air and Radiation by a voice vote.

Carol Browner, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, expressed hope that McCarthy would receive a similar vote before the full Senate:

I commend the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works for approving the nomination of Gina McCarthy. Not only is she a seasoned civil servant with decades of experience, she is clearly a bipartisan nominee, having worked as an environmental adviser for both Republican and Democratic governors. The Senate already confirmed her once for her current role at the EPA, and I hope they move forward expeditiously with her current confirmation so that she can continue her lifelong work of protecting children and families from air pollution and other hazards.

The ranking member of the committee, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), outlined five “requests” prior to last week’s scheduled vote, and cited dissatisfaction with EPA’s responsiveness to those five requests as the reason all committee Republicans boycotted last week’s vote. These five questions mainly involve transparency issues: two have been fully satisfied and are moot at this point. In fact, each have been answered, and the reasonable requests fulfilled.

What are the points of contention? The only things EPA will likely not do is:

• release the full data behind air pollution studies that reveal personal medical information — EPA has released the rest of the data
• adopt an industry-backed “cost-benefit” analysis for its regulations in place of several comprehensive cost-benefit analyses that take environmental and health factors into account
• give corporations and industry parties the right to join all EPA settlement talks in lawsuits against the agency for violating the law as “intervenors,” allowing industries that pollute illegally sit in on talks about the response to their own illegal activities

Requests to do any of these things are far beyond the scope of a confirmation vote. EPA and Gina McCarthy have acquiesced to all reasonable demands from Senate Republicans. Vitter essentially said so during yesterday’s hearing:

Our key focus has been these five key transparency requests … The good news is that as of last night there has been meaningful progress in terms of our five key transparency requests and that’s why we’re here today, to recognize that progress and to urge additional progress.

In response to the progress made as of last night, I’m sending a letter today to the acting administrator Bob Perciasepe and to Gina McCarthy. And I just want to read relevant parts of the letter. ‘Dear Acting Administrator Perciasepe and Assistant Administrator McCarthy … Because these steps forward were significant, we want to thank you and acknowledge progress including by moving forward with the committee markup of Gina’s nomination…. Should major additional progress be made in all of the five categories over the next two weeks, I will strongly support handling the McCarthy nomination on the senate floor without a cloture vote or any 60 vote threshold. Should all of our requests in the five categories be granted, I will support the McCarthy nomination.

Given that McCarthy and EPA have complied with all reasonable demands, Vitter’s own words would suggest that Gina McCarthy deserves an up-or-down vote without obstruction. Her qualifications, experience, and poise certainly suggest she deserves unanimous approval. The importance of the work that lies ahead of the EPA in the next four years demand a strong, qualified leader like Gina McCarthy.