What I Did on My Summer Vacation…

(Note: Not actual whereabouts)

First Things First: Still on it. Climate Post will return in a week or two.

Oil Spills, Caucus Thrills

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: The BP oil spill today became the biggest such disaster ever in the Gulf, eclipsing the Ixtoc I spill off Mexico in 1979-1980, according to high-end government estimates. A federal judge last week struck down the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman instantly became an overnight “folk hero” to some in the Gulf. The Interior Department is developing a new moratorium, but has yet to share details. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has assumed the public mantle of leadership in the crisis, implicating the federal government response as a failure. This transparency only goes so far, though. Jindal last week vetoed a state bill that would have opened to the public all documents about the spill from his office.

“Destruction could be there”: Senate Democrats streamed out of a lively caucus meeting last week described alternately as “thrilling” and “inspirational.” Palpable skepticism of Democratic glee in a Hill story was reinforced several days later when 23 senators and President Barack Obama failed to replicate the same tone in a “much-hyped” meeting about possible climate-and-energy legislation. The bipartisan group cleared no smooth path forward. In the absence of a 60-vote majority on key climate policy points, the Democratic senate leadership could try and graft climate provisions into energy and oil-spill legislation. The Hill attributes to that all-seeing, all-knowing Washington force, “speculation,” predictions that the base bill will look a lot like the energy bill approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the key Republican who dropped his support for a climate bill, skipped the White House meeting but shows up in this weekend’s New York Times magazine, profiled as “This Year’s Maverick.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid characterized the problem this way: “The Democratic caucus realizes that we have a problem[.] We have a phenomenon here that if we don’t do something about, our planet’s destruction could be there. The security of our nation depends on a good energy policy.” Reid is facing re-election in November, against Republican and Tea Party challenger, Sharron Angle. Nevada’s unique role in the nation’s struggle over nuclear power reemerged this week when judges at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission prohibited the White House from rescinding an application to develop a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Reid had strongly supported the president’s move, which fulfilled a campaign promise.

Robert Stavins of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs writes of climate legislation, “Meaningful action of some kind is still possible, or at least conceivable.” He offers a quick reminder and explainer of the main policy instruments here.

Mannhunt ends: An investigative committee at Pennsylvania State University has dismissed misconduct charges leveled against meteorology professor Michael Mann. Mann was one of the climate researchers whose e-mail inbox was exposed last November when servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were hacked. People inside and outside climate science community have chewed over Mann’s work for a long time now, and this was not his first turn under bright lights. “Climategate” was a scale above previous discussions, as those inclined to see scientific conspiracy discovered a cache of material to quote out-of-context.

Accusations made of scientists during climategate are under scrutiny elsewhere. The Sunday Times of London retracted a Jan. 31, 2010 story that slammed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for allegedly basing projections about Amazon rainforests’ vulnerability to climate change on environmentalists’ advocacy materials. In fact, the research was conducted by established scientists and peer-reviewed. Elsewhere, the University of Virginia is fighting a request by the commonwealth’s attorney general for Michael Mann’s research material when he worked for UVA.

Heat stress in the Capital: Five senior citizens have died in the record-smashing hottest June in Washington, DC history. Four people passed away in homes without air conditioning; the fifth collapsed outside. The region’s temperatures averaged 80.6 degrees. On 18 days the mercury soared above 90, including an 11-day stretch in the last two weeks. The Washington Post runs a story about the heat deaths on the front of its Metro section, which seems like a reasonable place for it. It’s the kind of notice that newspapers have run for decades when heat or extreme weather reach tragic levels. But these days such notices are incomplete without discussing extreme local weather events in the context of our best understanding of climate change. March, April, May, and June 2010 have each broken global temperature records (2010 also claims the sixth warmest February, and the fourth hottest January). The more scientists focus their models into regions, or back in time, the less certain such models become. Under current projections, the number of days with a peak temperature above 90 degrees F “is expected to rise significantly, especially under a higher emissions scenario”—the scenario we are currently pursuing, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s 2009 report.

Trial by Tabloid: Police in Portland, Ore., have reopened an investigation into allegations that Al Gore “made unwanted sexual advances” toward a masseuse in October 2006. The National Enquirer broke the story. Gore has categorically denied any wrongdoing. One of two things will happen to this story: It will disappear or it will continue. Either way, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly over the last few years, climate change is not a phenomenon that has anything to do with the former vice president. This fact is intuitively understood abroad, particularly in the parts of the world where people don’t know Al Gore or they don’t know that he divides Americans into at least three groups: pro, contra, and “over the whole thing.” Some of the more piquant political commentators in the U.S. conflate the man with the cause, and the practice is unlikely to disappear soon.

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing”:

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Who Wants to Be a Climatologist?

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: Tuesday night Rolling Stone magazine unveiled to a limited audience its new article called “The Runaway General.” But when something “goes viral” in the Internet age, there’s no such thing as a limited audience. In the piece, General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, derides and criticizes the president, vice president, and other key senior members of the administration. It caused a media-wide storm and led to McChrystal’s resignation within about 36 hours. President Barack Obama replaced him with General David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command. The story has little direct bearing on climate developments, except that in scrambling to defuse the situation, the White House postponed a meeting about climate legislation between Obama and several Democratic and Republican senators. The meeting is likely to be rescheduled for next week, but supporters of action lamented the loss of several working days on what’s already a tight legislative calendar.

Parlor-vous Washington?: A policy approach favored by many environmentalists would set a national limit for greenhouse gas emissions and let the free market find the most efficient ways to meet it. A compromise approach floated this week and not immediately dismissed by the White House and others would limit the cap-and-trade element to the utility sector. (The approach championed by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lieberman would set up a utility-sector program in 2013, followed by heavy manufacturing three years later.) With legislation and the schedule to roll it out still in the works, some environmental and liberal groups are paying $11 million for an ad campaign supporting energy and climate legislation.

What is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) thinking? That’s what Darren Samuelsohn, who recently moved from GreenWire to Politico, asks in a piece about Graham’s evolving position on things energy and climate: “It’s become a bit of a parlor game in Washington to guess at Sen. Lindsey Graham’s true motivation for abandoning negotiations on comprehensive energy and climate legislation.” First, senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s initial decision to fast-track immigration policy before climate and energy first separated Graham from the issue. Second, the BP spill scuttled hopes that expanded offshore drilling, which Graham supports, would quickly bring together pro-climate policy Democrats and pro-domestic energy Republicans. Finally, Graham has suggested that climate be held until the next Congress and the Senate knock out an energy bill this year. Earlier in the week, Politico weighed in on John Kerry’s relationship with his Senate colleagues on the issue. Kerry brings enormous knowledge and passion to the issue, which several other senators interviewed in the story admire but can’t always agree with.

Blood and Gore and Sustainability: These are perilous times for climate policy. California will vote in November on whether to suspend its 2006 climate law. The G20 meets this week in Toronto, but with many issues considered more urgent than sustainability and climate change on the agenda. Still, many eyes remain on Washington. As Al Gore told Eric Pooley in Copenhagen last December: “If the Senate defeats the bill, that is an event horizon beyond which it is difficult to see.” Gore and his co-founder of Generation Investment Management, David Blood—a memorable byline if there ever was one—use real estate on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to make a case for sustainable capitalism, and the promise and peril of free markets. “For these reasons and others, markets lie at the foundation of every successful economy… At the very least, the last decade has clearly demonstrated that free and unfettered markets, as they are currently operating, have simply not been delivering optimal long-term results.”

The National Enquirer made a splash across scandal sheets and beyond about sexual misconduct allegations against Gore from 2006.

The U.N. Global Compact and Accenture have found a noteworthy increase since 2007 in the number of CEOs who believe sustainability should be built into the core of their businesses. Their report surveys 766 executives, 80 percent of whom claimed that the economic downturn increased their commitment to efficiencies, cost-saving, and new products that are believed to emerge with sustainable business. European executives make up more than half of the pool (439 people), followed by the Americas (156), Asia/Pacific (113), and Africa/Middle East (58). The broad goals, however, are tempered by the complexity of implementing them across business units, competing priorities, and the rest of the market lagging in its valuing of sustainability.

Ford, et al, and the Electric Car: The White House and electrically powered vehicles have a long, uneven history, going back at least to Sept. 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt’s carriage was accidentally rammed by one. (He escaped with slight injuries.) In 1976 both houses of Congress approved a $160 million plan to develop an electric car within five years, over President Gerald Ford’s veto. The president called the proposed effort “premature and wasteful.” I don’t know what happened to that program but personal observations and anecdotal evidence suggest it didn’t take off. The Gulf oil spill has led to renewed interest in some parts in a transportation sector fueled on something other than petroleum. The Obama administration this week agreed to support a bipartisan Senate bill that would spend $6 billion on new infrastructure and supporting programs in 15 test cities. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) said the measure could end up as an amendment to an energy (or energy-and-climate) bill this year.

American Climate Idol?: There must be a way to shrink the vast pool of climate-related sciences and scientists, so that non-specialists of any ideological stripe can agree on the expert thinking and information available… right? A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences digs through scientific literature to compile a portfolio of researchers who publish frequently about climate change and whose work is frequently cited—metrics for climate credibility. Of 1,372 scientists whose work qualified them as leading and active climate experts, 97 percent to 98 percent support the basic understanding of manmade global warming. Doubters have lower levels of “climate expertise and scientific prominence.” In the climatic blogosphere, fireworks ensued over whether the paper amounts to some kind of Bravo-style reality show, like Top Chef, to determine who is… “Top Climatologist!” Kidding aside, the paper is a methodical approach to a challenging issue: How to assign credibility and expertise in a culture that too frequently equates it with page hits.

Something to consider: Pictures of pelicans stained and paralyzed with oil have made the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and circulated around the Web. These protected animals have quickly become poster birds for the Gulf oil spill, iconic as they were already in coastal habitats. Their ecological value is matched by their evolutionary history. The struggle to prevent harm to pelicans in particular is brought home by a study in the Journal of Ornithology (via New Scientist). Research on a 30-million-year-old fossil pelican shows that their beaks virtually haven’t changed in that time. It suggests they reached an “evolutionary optimum”—but one not optimized toward living in a hydrocarbon stew.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Nothing shaking on ‘shakedown’ street

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: Congressional investigators have released material documenting troubles at the Deepwater Horizon site before it failed–and a culture of cost-cutting at BP that elevated catastrophic risk. Five days before the April 20 explosion, a BP engineer called it a “nightmare well which [sic] has everyone all over the place.” A detailed letter to BP chief executive Tony Hayward from two House Democrats details five missteps the company took when rushing to complete the Macondo well, including choosing a well design that has too few impediments to gas flow. Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) letter can be read here with key BP, Halliburton, and U.S. Minerals Management Service e-mails, including one BP officials conclusion of inadequate concrete “centralizers,” “who cares, its done, end of story, will probably be fine.”

President Obama delivered his first primetime address from the Oval hours then met Wednesday morning with BP executives. The 18-minute speech deployed military metaphors to illustrate the scale of both the federal government’s response effort in the Gulf and what’s needed to develop a clean-energy economy. The president prodded Congress to undertake comprehensive reform, but knows he faces strong opposition: ” So I’m happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party -– as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels.” The meeting between Obama, his staff, and BP ended with the oil giant agreeing to cancel its dividends this year and to seed an independent fund for Gulf damages with $20 billion.
Obama’s speech offered few specifics or incentives to the senators he’s asking to pass his comprehensive energy bill this year, a feat that becomes more difficult as weeks tick by. Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) wants to decide on a path forward in the Senate by July 4.
The heat on BP on Capitol Hill calls to mind a comment by Rep. Mike Oxley (R-Ohio) after the Enron and WorldCom fiascos: “Summary executions would get about 85 votes in the Senate right now”
“A Deep Well of Pessimism”: Shakespeare might look at the current state of U.S. politics, particularly on Capitol Hill and conclude, as Hamlet does, “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” If legislators think that a comprehensive energy and climate bill is infeasible this year, then that alone can make it infeasible. American politics and media don’t necessarily handle complexity well–particularly global warming–and climate policy has been growing more complex by the week. It’s a dynamic, volatile situation, and as Nicholas Institute Director Tim Profeta cautioned this week on the Web tv program Duke Office Hours, a “deep well of pessimism” among political leaders can make it so.
An Environmental Protection Agency analysis of the APA concludes that the (net-present) annual cost of the bill per U.S. family could fall between $79 and $146. That’s the Senate bill introduced last month by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). Those costs reflect a projected rise in energy prices, consequent changes in the price of other goods and services, wages, and returns to capital. (It’s a much lower figure than it would be if money raised by emissions allowances weren’t shared with households.) The estimate doesn’t estimate “the benefits of avoiding the effects of climate change,” making it a cost-effective analysis, not a cost-benefit analysis.
Flash Flooding Continues: Heavy rains killed 20 people in Arkansas this week and at least one person in Oklahoma. Andrew Freedman of the Capital Weather Gang explains how these events—and earlier deadly flooding in the Southeast—might or might not make sense in the context of climate change projections.
Reliably Rating Risks: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently launched a new “Index of U.S. Energy Security Risk” that weighs 37 criteria annually, including geopolitics, economics, reliability, and the environment. This year’s risk index is 83.7, with a baseline of 100. According to the Chamber’s metrics, the APA could help the U.S. attain greater energy security. That’s what Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trevor Houser of the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded in a recent Slate piece. The two calibrated a model to reproduce the Chamber’s results, which they were able to do better than 99 percent, and then fed the draft climate and energy bill into it. The risk index dropped eight percent by 2030 over a business-as-usual scenario. Levi and Houser surmise that energy conservation, alternative and nuclear power, and reduced emissions would contribute to the lessened energy security risk. (Levi has a thought-provoking piece on “energy security” here.)
Words, Words, Words: The oil spill and the politics surrounding it continue to enrich mainstream English with new phrases and idioms, documented memorably this week in a SFGate column by Mark Morford headlined, “Your tar balls are in my junk shot.”
The situation has kicked up a notch in the last few days with strong contributions from BP officials calling the Macondo a “nightmare well” that will “probably be fine.” BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg left a White House meeting with Obama and told cameras that the president is “frustrated because he cares about the small people. And we care about the small people.” The so-called “small people” of the Gulf states are not amused, even if the gaffe doesn’t top BP CEO Tony Hayward’s declaration in the weeks after the fatal accident that killed 11 men, “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I’d like my life back.”
Neither of those statements beats out the bipartisan feeding frenzy that ensued today when Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, apologized to BP’s Hayward, who was testifying at a hearing. Barton said he was sorry BP had to go along with the White House’s creation of a $20 billion independent escrow account to pay for oil-related Gulf damages. Say what you want about the fund as a policy measure; Barton did, calling it a “slush fund” and a “shakedown” of the oil giant that evades due process. Immediately, reporters told the world, and Democratic fundraisers blasted e-mail to their supporters. It’s been one of those days in Washington where everything is laid bare: the crass reporting on irresistible but inconsequential confections of news; the party-appartus exploitation of said inconsequential confection for fundraising; and finally, the backtracking and full apology. The latter is much more rare. Within hours, House Republican leaders John Boehner (Calif.) and Eric Cantor (Va.) made Barton retract his statement or sacrifice his high-ranking post. A GOP aide told the Daily Caller, “He was told, ‘Apologize immediately. Or you will lose your position immediately.’”
The hubbub comes the day after members of Congress released their financial disclosures, which the Washington Post perused for oil investments: 30 congressmen owned a total of between $9.5 million and $14 million in oil industry assets. (In a year-plus of Climate Post, this is the first time a personal disclosure is called for: My wife co-reported the story and interactive graphic.)
Trust but Verify: The president inoculated himself against memorable gaffes Tuesday night, but at the risk of not saying anything memorable at all. CNN runs an eight-paragraph account of what the head of an Austin language analysis company said about Obama’s Oval Office address. The factoids are interesting—Obama spoke at a 10^th grade level, used 19.8 words per sentence, and words contained 4.5 letters on average (all higher than normal). Still, I’m left wondering why “the CNN Wire Staff” either sought or found no one else on Earth to check to evaluate this analysis. Good for GLM head Paul Payack to have his press release rebranded as a CNN story without challenge, context, or question. Bad for CNN for failing journalism 101 and dressing up a “talking head” as a one-source story.
Meanwhile, on Earth: The past three months have been the hottest March, April, and May since record-keeping began, and—in an apples-to-oranges comparison—David Archer of RealClimate.org calculates that industry and deforestation are releasing heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere at a rate 5,000 times faster than the BP spill.
Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

The Senate Gives a Disapproving Look

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: U.S. senators rose one after the next in support of or opposition to a measure that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to declare heat-trapping gases pollutants. The piece in question, a “disapproval resolution,” was sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). In her floor speech, she skewered the Obama administration’s move to regulate greenhouse gases, saying that approach is too harsh in general, and particularly at such a economically sensitive time. Republicans thrashed the EPA’s endangerment finding, arguing mostly that added regulations would cause economic hardship. Several suggested that the day’s vote was not about the science, although it’s worth keeping in mind that EPA officials evaluated the vast scientific literature on climate change as a part of its decision-making process. Six Democrats voted with the 41 Republican senators against the resolution; it failed, 47-53.

The Murkowski resolution wasn’t necessarily expected to pass. But, as expected, it feeds the conventional wisdom that the Senate won’t be able to pass a bill this year. Wednesday Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters he would vote against the leading Senate energy-and-climate bill, which he helped write, because it doesn’t have strong enough provisions for offshore oil drilling. He’s suggested that his colleagues “start over and scale down your ambitions.” Earlier, he supported the idea to begin lowering emissions in the utility sector.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) entered the fray with legislation that would aim to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about half of the president’s target–17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Climate Post Book Club, Part IV: Given the ever-increasing repercussions of the BP oil spill, Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman’s American Power Act, Lugar’s Practical Energy and Climate Plan, Murkowski bill, and on and on and on, this is a great week for the world to lose itself in a political history book about climate change. However, until this week, there wasn’t one. On Tuesday, Hyperion published The Climate War by Eric Pooley. The author is deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, former managing editor of Fortune, and former national political correspondent at Time (where I first met him about a decade ago).

The Climate War profiles heavyweights in this saga–including two members of the Nicholas Institute Board of Advisers, EDF President Fred Krupp and Duke Energy Chairman and CEO Jim Rogers, among other leaders in the now years-long campaign to bring climate policy to Washington.

The director of the Nicholas Institute, Tim Profeta, rose to prominence during this period. As Sen. Joe Lieberman’s environmental policy adviser 10 years ago, Profeta and his counterpart Floyd Deschamps in Sen. John McCain’s office together spent the hot months of 2001 working on the Climate Stewardship Act, known informally as McCain-Lieberman. Pooley:

Profeta and Deschamps stayed up late drafting the bill, pilfering ideas and language from the acid rain cap-and-and trade program and ‘dreaming up big dreams for our little baby that lived in my computer,’ as Profeta recalled it. How were they going to create a new market and put the industrial economy on a carbon diet? There were a million vexing issues. They drew from academic papers written by economists at EDF, Harvard, Resources for the Future, and other think tanks, and did a good enough job that all of the major climate bills to follow would draw from their work.

Profeta’s work and the Nicholas Institute belong to and serve this very large, very consequential story.

The climate story is many things–overwrought, overhyped, misunderstood, ignored, underhyped, overblown, neglected, arcane, overpoliticized, a no-brainer, and endlessly fascinating. When I ask myself why I’m drawn to the topic (frequently), I always come up with the same answer: Climate change is an everlasting gobstopper, however long you chew it, there’s always more to chew over. But until this week, no traditional political journalist with Pooley’s pedigree has  chewed through the now 20-year (plus) history of U.S. climate politics. The book is beginning to make its media rounds: Andy Revkin at the New York Times‘ DotEarth blog; an excerpt about Rogers in Bloomberg Businessweek; a piece on Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel; Marc Gunther at GreenBiz.com; and Al Gore’s blog.

Remind me who has the cards?: Battles over climate policy are being fought on several fronts. Incoming U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres prefaced her tenure as lead convener and negotiator with a memorable foray into “expectations management.” She told reporters gathered for a briefing about talks in Bonn, “I do not believe we will ever have a final agreement on climate change, certainly not in my lifetime… If we ever have a final, conclusive, all-answering agreement, then we will have solved this problem. I don’t think that’s in the cards.”

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Obama Retrieves Climate, Energy Debate From Gulf

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: Just as discussion of climate change and clean energy dipped below the oil-stained surface of the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama yesterday tried to reach in and offer Climate Policy Resuscitation.  He delivered a broad address on the U.S. economy at Carnegie Mellon University, touring the financial crisis, health care reform, and the challenge to stay internationally competitive. He punctuated the speech with “an issue that’s on everybody’s minds right now,” the Gulf disaster, oil addiction, and the “energy quest.” Obama offered familiar tropes that environmentalists had been missing from him as his administration pursued the many other pressing matters on the agenda. He called for a gradual transition away from fossil fuels that includes “a careful plan of offshore oil production,” more natural gas and nuclear power, and the elimination of fossil-fuel industry tax breaks. He said he’d like to encourage the private sector to invest in a clean energy future, “And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.”

Obama emphasized that “the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months,” a cryptic statement that caused speculation into how presidential arm-twisting could change a debate recently stuck a mile under water.  Cost analyses of Senate climate legislation sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are expected in the next week or two. An unnamed senior administration official tells Politico that a “BP Spill Bill” is likely to envelope energy and climate measures.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, will unveil a climate bill next week that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions through better fuel economy and energy efficiency measures, and more nuclear power plants. His plan would encourage the phase out older, heavily polluting coal plants by 2020. Projected reductions under Lugar’s bill would be about half what the president has asked for, 17 percent below 2005 emissions levels by 2020. The administration sent the United Nations a report concluding that US emissions are expected to climb four percent through 2020. Hydrofluorocarbons, refrigerant chemicals that are potent greenhouse gases, are responsible for the bulk of the projected increase.

Commission Commissioned: Obama’s recently appointed a leadership team to investigate the oil rig explosion and aftermath. It has begun to fill out its roster. At the end of May the president named as chairmen former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and William K. Reilly, EPA chief in the George H.W. Bush administration and a founding partner of Aqua International Partners (Reilly is chair of the Nicholas Institute’s Board of Advisors). The commission is expected to add two experts who have worked on global warming, Donald Boesch, head of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science, and former Alaska Lt. Gov. Fran Ulmer. Boesch recently penned a short Washington Post piece, arguing that “I hope for Earth’s sake, that the winds will blow Congress out of its long-winded debate.” [The last two links, to Tom Toles' political cartoons, are Boesch's.]

At this hour, BP has managed to slice open a key pipe leading to the damaged well. The next step is to contain the flow by placing a containment vessel over it and drawing oil up to a tanker.Oil has licked beaches in Mississippi and Alabama, and now threatens the Florida Panhandle. The Society for Environmental Journalists has launched a useful aggregator for Gulf news, The Daily Glob. Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment has also put up a useful page here.

The administration may be steadying a bit after heightened criticism last week of its handling of the Gulf disaster (May 28 WP A1 headline: “Obama struggling to show he’s in control”). The White House took back control of the public focus this week, with the Carnegie Mellon speech and the opening of a Justice Department probe into potential criminal and civil charges.  Visiting the Gulf, Attorney General Eric Holder revealed that the investigation began several weeks ago, but didn’t elaborate. The acting head of the Minerals Management Service at the Department of Interior announced new requirements for offshore drillers, including renewed focus on waivers called “categorical exclusions” that allowed projects like BP’s Deepwater Horizon to proceed without full analysis according to the National Environmental Policy Act. The office has either extended or not extended its moratorium on deepwater permits to all drilling projects in the Gulf.

UNFCCC: Maybe We Can Crash at Your Place for a Few Days?: The U.N. climate secretariat is trying with difficulty to plan two weeklong meetings ahead of the 16^th Conference of Parties negotiations in Cancun because of inadequate funding.

For those playing the home game, the World Resources Institute just published a summary of national submissions to the U.N. earlier this year.

Near-universal policy uncertainty has not necessarily confused private-sector initiatives to address climate change. An Ernst & Young report, Action amid uncertainty: The business response to climate change, surveys global executive opinion and strategy. Seventy percent of the 300 leaders surveyed said they would increase their spending on climate-related programs between 2010 and 2012. Respondents represent 16 countries and 18 different industries.

Sustainability standards proliferate, with development of a high-profile new initiative announced this week. Greener World Media, publisher of GreenBiz.com, is partnering with UL Environment to create a global corporate standard, a kind of “LEED rating system for companies,” according to GWM founder Joel Makower. The partners have completed an advanced draft of their proposal, which will be unveiled later this year.

Events Fit Climate Projections Except Where They Don’t: More than 100 people have died in the Indian state of Gujarat, which is experiencing its hottest weather in a historical record, dating to the late 1800s… Forty thousand square miles of sea ice are now disappearing every day. According to the National Snow and Ice and Data Center sea ice has reached its lowest ever extent for this time of the year, and is projected to eclipse the previous annual low, set in 2007… New data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies suggest that 2010 is on track to be the hottest year yet, months after the World Meteorological Organization declared last decade the hottest on record. James Hansen released his monthly missive–commentary on avoiding perils of communicating climate science—and a draft (pre-peer-review) paper… North American snow cover is at an all-time low.

Small, South Pacific nations fear that rising sea levels will wash them from the map this century. A new research paper finds them to be more resistant than expected. Twenty-three of 27 islands under study have grown in size or not changed since the 1950s. Four have shrunk. Sea levels have risen 120 millimeters in the six decades under study. Coral reefs that surround the islands grow continuously, and can trap sediment close to shore.

The Week in Pictures: After another week in which worst-case scenarios coincided with on-the-ground reports, a little dark humor might be called for—at the media’s expense. Ever think no disaster however great is big enough for cable news types? So does does XKCD.com, the online but underground comic strip, here.

Courtesy XKCD

BP Oil Spill Washes up on Potomac Shores

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: Oil-spill updates continue to gush out of the Gulf and Washington at volumes difficult to estimate. BP initiated its risky “top kill” maneuver Wednesday and the Coast Guard reported cautiously this morning that the oil stream has abated. If the effort works, BP will begin to plug the well with concrete in the next day or so. President Barack Obama held his first press conference in 308 days this afternoon. He placed a moratorium on new deepwater drilling permits for six months and ordered the Interior Department to expedite its reforms of the key oil-industry regulatory office.

Blame has lapped up on the shores of the Potomac as crude sullies the Gulf coast, destroying livelihoods and wildlife. Obama spoke today after a week when scrutiny of the disaster led directly to the Department of Interior’s Minerals Management. A report from Interior’s inspector general accuses officials there of gross conflicts of interest and misconduct prior to 2007 (The report was commissioned before the accident but accelerated after.).

Acting IG Mary Kendall writes to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar [pdf], “Of greatest concern to me is the environment in which these inspectors operate—particularly the ease with which they move between industry and government. While not included in our report, we discovered that the individuals involved in the fraternizing and gift exchange—both government and industry—have often known one another since childhood. Their relationships were formed well before they took their jobs with industry or government.”  The report catalogs gifts, drug use, pornography, and fraternizing between the regulators and the regulated, including an incident when an MMS official interviewed for a job while on an inspection. The official found no violations and later got the job. Earlier today MMS chief Elizabeth Birnbaum was fired or quit—the President wasn’t sure–knocking one question off this list.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists have concluded that the disaster has unleashed between 17 and 39 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, making it far larger than the Exxon Valdez, previously the worst spill in U.S. history.

Nicholas Institute colleagues, led by Director Tim Profeta, held a wide-ranging panel on the oil spill, the state of energy legislation, and other issues in climate policy. View the second Nicholas Institute EnLIST webinar here.

Let the Investigations Begin: A BP official argued with oil rig engineers 11 hours before the April 20 explosion, about whether or not to drain drilling mud that protected the riser where the well meets the rig.  The BP official, Donald Vidrine, was supposed to appear today at hearings conducted by MMS and the Coast Guard but called in sick. Earlier hearings revealed that BP was a month and a half behind operations on the rig it was paying $533,000 a day to use. Check out MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in a report on how little safety questions and technology have changed in a generation.

Some journalists in the Gulf report heavy-handed treatment from BP staff and the local and federal officials who are working with them. BP and civic employees have restricted or prevented access to contaminated beaches and interfered with flyovers. A Mother Jones reporter, Mac McClelland, explains how tightly BP reins in local law enforcement personnel, and a CBS News crew was threatened with arrest.

Renewable Renewable Forecasting: A month before the 2008 election, the New York Observer depicted presidential candidates McCain and Obama respectively as the original Star Trek‘s impetuous hot-head Captain James T. Kirk and cool deliberator Mr. Spock. That caricature of the now-president is probably a good starting point to Christopher Beam’s questions to Slate readers this week: Why aren’t Democrats exploiting the spill emotionally?  Shouldn’t the oil spill “make comprehensive energy legislation more likely, if not inevitable” rather than less likely? He writes, “There would come a point, you’d think, when the oil spill was such an unmitigated disaster, environmentally and politically, that Republicans would set aside their ultimatums about drilling, Democrats would set aside their paranoia about it, and members of both parties would support alternative energy legislation. Not all of them. Just a handful would be enough.”  As for Obama, the New York Times’ Jeff Zeleny describes his demeanor this way: “‘Every day I see this leak continue I am angry and frustrated as well,’ Mr. Obama said, his words not rising with volume or intensity.” The narrative in the legacy media appears to suggest that the downside to having a president that doesn’t lose is cool is that he doesn’t lose his cool.

Before tempers elevated to the point where Obama called his first press conference, public management of the crisis took the president to Silicon Valley, where he visited thin-film solar panel maker Solyndra. In requisite remarks about clean energy, he also mentioned Tesla Motors’ $465 million loan from the Department of Energy and its work with Toyota to build electric cars. The San Jose Mercury News dangles this line into its piece about Obama’s Solyndra visit without elaboration: “The visit, Obama’s second to the Bay Area since becoming president, shone a spotlight on Solyndra, a Silicon Valley company that has tried to avoid publicity as it prepares for its initial public offering of stock.” Now, if you wanted to avoid publicity, would you invite the president over?

What will the future of renewable energy look like? Michael Levi of the Council of Foreign Relations picks up a World Bank paper that analyzes 116 projections for renewable energy growth conducted over 36 years. The trend: No discernible trend?

Meanwhile, Back in Low Gear…: The international climate conversation remains in a holding pattern. China reduced expectations, such as they are, for some kind of formal agreement in Cancun later this year, striving instead for a “positive result.” (Cleaning up before the guests come? Cancun mayor arrested for drug trafficking and money laundering.) Outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said that international talks in Bonn next week will try to graft parts of the December Copenhagen Accord into the formal U.N. process. Europe, left out of the key meeting between the U.S. and developing powers in Copenhagen, unilaterally upped its greenhouse gas emissions goals from 20 percent to 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The EU’s chief climate official is under fire for failing to crack down on fraud in the Continent’s carbon market.

Developed nations have chipped in $4 billion to slow deforestation, a half billion dollars more than they agreed to at the Copenhagen climate negotiations in December. By 2030, U.S. farmers could see more than $200 billion in gains as avoided deforestation removes unfair competition from the global market.

Greenland Moving up in the World: Scientists continue to study ice loss in Greenland, a much-watched field of research. A new paper in Nature Geoscience reports that territory’s land itself (call it Greenlandland) is rising an inch per year as the ice above it recedes.

The 2010 hurricane season begins June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts a very active hurricane season: “If the 2010 activity reaches the upper end of our predicted ranges, it will be one of the most active seasons on record.”

The oil spill lays bare the difficulty at the heart of communicating climate change risk: There’s no single company or administration to denounce and no poisonous gunk killing fisheries and suffocating ecosystems. Nations of the world would have addressed the problem long ago if greenhouse gas pollution rained back down as tar balls. One mile of highway driving spews a pound of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Imagine if all drivers threw a pound of trash out their windows every mile they drove. The trash would pile up. (Climate Post Trivial Pursuit!: Whose analogy is this? Can’t remember or find it.)

So… with the spill looking like it might be capped, we expect to return you soon to your regular invisible, odorless, slow-acting, and globally dispersed pollution concerns.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Defining Moment Still Seeks Definition

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman last week unveiled their draft energy and climate legislation, called the American Power Act, in a Senate committee room overstuffed with lobbyists, policy wonks, journalists and other observers. The bill’s authors must steer it through the “usual” complexity intrinsic to the climate debates, and now too through the political storms over immigration reform and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Economic modeling is expected to take another few weeks at executive agencies, although first impressions have emerged in the media and on the Web, including the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Time, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Natural Resources Defense Council, Covington & Burling, and the Center for American Progress. In the meantime, Kerry held a mini-launch event in Washington with T. Boone Pickens, the oil-and-gas financier turned energy policy activist.

Within the next three weeks senators are expected to vote on a measure that would nullify the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution probably will not pass, but she and colleagues are eager to voice disapproval of the White House’s energy policy, particularly as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decides how to proceed on the issue.

A new Pew Research Center poll has found that just 32 percent of Americans agree it is “very important” for Congress to act on climate change, compared with 81 percent on the economy and jobs, and 67 percent on U.S. energy needs.

To Cap or Not to Cap: The Deepwater Horizon blowout continues to absorb time and attention from many people in the energy and climate space. The prospect of major legislation typically prompts a suite of committee hearings on Capitol Hill. The last two weeks, hearings about the Gulf have dominated the schedule. President Barack Obama won the news cycle for a day last week by calling the testimony of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton executives a “ridiculous spectacle.” Democrats would like to raise the cap on oil spill liability damages, from $75 million to $10 billion, or, as Reid prefers, no limit at all. Republicans have opposed such measures.

BP has siphoned up to 5,000 gallons a day from the broken pipe, and in the next few days should be ready to try to halt the gusher by jamming it. The EPA slapped BP for deploying toxic dispersants over the oil slick at the surface, and on Wednesday asked the company to provide a list of alternatives–and to start using one within three days.

A live shot of oil streaming from the sea floor is now available here, after a request from Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Gusher from Climate Scientists: Markey’s committee held a hearing on science and climate politics today, which comes after  increased public activity in the scientific community. They’re aiming at critics who are unduly skeptical or dismiss the physical evidence of manmade climate change.

The National Research Council weighed in this week with three reports on climate science, mitigating against change, and adapting to impacts. In Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change, a panel led by Robert Fri of Resources for the Future argues for atypically strong policy measures. The researchers recommend that the U.S. abide by a strict carbon “budget,” to last from 2012 to 2050, a period when greenhouse gas emissions should drop between 80 and 50 percent below 1990 levels. The panel calls the recommendation “a significant departure from business as usual,” and bases conclusions in part on Stanford University’s Energy Modeling Forum. The implementation advice is pretty standard, even if the voice isn’t. The National Academy is saying here in no uncertain terms: “Adopt an economy-wide carbon pricing system.”

The reports came out a day after the price of a carbon dioxide emission permit on the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange fell 2.4 percent, to $2.05, on doubts that climate legislation will pass this year.

In Line With Predictions: Howard Kurtz, media critic of the Washington Post, recently brought national attention to how the national media missed the disastrous recent flooding in Nashville. But in doing so, he omitted the topic of global warming. Such floods are in line with climate change predictions. Kurtz quotes Mark Silverman, editor of the Tennessean: “In journalism, [Silverman] says, ‘everyone wants to have a villain. But there are no villains yet, except for Mother Nature.’” And, increasingly likely, except for unchecked industrial emissions and deforestation.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that last month was the warmest April on record, and the 34th consecutive April above the 20th century average. The 2010 January to April average was hotter than any similar period in the record.

Defining Moment Seeks Definition: This week the New York Times’ Tom Friedman stands out amid the cacophony of articles evaluating the Obama administration’s response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, mostly for putting forth this provocative argument: “No, the gulf oil spill is not Obama’s Katrina. It’s his 9/11 — and it is disappointing to see him making the same mistake George W. Bush made with his 9/11.” (If nothing else, the comparison is shocking to people whose primary association with 9/11 is mass murder.) Friedman writes that he’s disappointed with Obama for squandering momentum after a major event lays bare the dangerous core of our energy system. He laments that the president has offered no vision paramount to the problem, and has hidden his bullpen of science and policy advisors — Energy Secretary Steven Chu, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, chief science adviser John Holdren: “I know endangered species that are seen by the public more often than them.”

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

The Empiricist Strikes Back

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: Let’s first pause for a moment to recognize where we are. Three U.S. Senators took the mantle for climate and climate leadership in this Congress, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman. Over a series of many months, involving many colleagues, many industries, and many advocacy groups, they emerged with the seed of a new deal that might satisfy competing constituencies. The framework (reportedly) has something for everyone, a cost for emitting greenhouse gases, expanded nuclear power, and offshore oil exploration. Environmental groups, frequently splintered, circled their wagons to support the effort.

Then came two explosions, one political, one physical. In a surprise move last month, Senate leadership fast-tracked immigration reform ahead of energy. That caused Graham to step back from the climate legislation. And then came the Gulf oil disaster. What started out as an already ambitious climate effort is now engulfed with immigration politics and an intensified national fight over offshore drilling. That’s where we are. And yet…

…Uncertainty Springs Eternal: “Graham says ‘impossible’ to pass climate bill now” reads an online headline at the Washington Post (above an AP story). The finality of the statement promises to clear remaining doubt that the Senate will not be able to pass legislation in the wake of the oil spill. Some senators would never vote for a climate-and-energy bill without provisions for expanding offshore drilling. Some senators would never vote for a climate-and-energy bill with those provisions. Game, set, match, before immigration reform is even broached. Or vice versa–until you remember that in politics nothing is ever over.

Congress DailyAM: “Graham Says Climate Measure Has a Chance Over Time”
E&E Daily: “Graham says he could vote for energy bill, but oil spill requires a timeout”
Roll Call: “Graham Sees No Hope for Climate Bill This Year”

and, not to be discounted…

Greenwire: “Senate bill to be rolled out on Wednesday”

Here’s what Graham  said in a release after the E&E Daily story ran.

Fly on the Wall: Der Spiegel obtained “audio recordings of historical significance,” two 1.2 gigabyte sound files “that were created by accident” at the 15th Conference of Parties (COP-15) climate negotiation in Copenhagen last December. The magazine reconstructs an hour and a half of a meeting with 25 heads of state. The prime ministers, presidents, and other leaders gathered to discuss undercooked material hurriedly assembled by advisers and negotiators in the waning days and hours of the conference. “When has it ever been the case at an international conference that world leaders had to concern themselves with such minor details?,” Der Spiegel asks, and finds an answer from UN chief negotiator Yvo de Boer: “I don’t think anything like this has ever happened, and I’m not sure whether something like this will ever happen again.”

Some participants and observers at Copenhagen have charged that China obstructed discussions, most vividly by dispatching a diplomat to a heads-of-state meeting. In those tension-filled days, China was already undertaking what the New York Times reports as history’s largest six-month increase in greenhouse gas pollution by one country. The emissions trend prompted Premier Wen Jiabao to call a special cabinet session to address the nation’s energy binge and decline in energy efficiency. The jump is a taste of what’s ahead as Chinese consumers continue to electrify their lifestyle, and the economy moves from light to heavy manufacturing.

Every week there are stories about “bad China” (see previous paragraph) and “good China,” the emerging world leader in clean tech. “Good China” is frequently wielded as a rhetorical bludgeon in op-ed discussions. Here’s this week’s contribution, from Bruce Usher, an executive-in-residence at Columbia Business School.

Scientists Clear Their Throats: Political attacks on climate scientists continue. The Washington Post editorial page, host to George Will’s occasional column-length scientific errors, labels “a chilling assault” the Virginia Attorney General’s ferocious, ignorant queries into a climate scientist’s records when he was a University of Virginia faculty member. Politicians have a responsibility to investigate fraud. But Michael Mann’s case had been picked over for years, even before the e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia were released late last year. AG Ken Cuccinelli has accused Mann of defrauding Virginia taxpayers by receiving grants to study climate change. In heated rhetoric atypical of Post editorials on climate change, editors declare that Cuccinelli has “declared war on reality” and on free academic inquiry.

Scientists, who speak in nuance, not absolutes, have been slow to respond adequately to opponents in politics and elsewhere, who speak in absolutes, not nuance.  This week 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences howl into the stratosphere over public attacks on well-understood scientific observations, including:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A  snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.

(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human  activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.

(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

The lead author of this important and timely statement from 255 scientists published a new book this week, called Bottled and Sold. Peter Gleick is a leading global expert in water and climate change, and co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland. He recently answered the question, What’s “the best argument against global warming”?

A Nudge in the Other Direction?: Behavioral and social scientists continue to offer intriguing glimpses into how people understand, and misunderstand, climate and energy issues, sometimes peppered with tempting ideas to “nudge” change along. One result: People are more likely to cut electricity use if they’re told how much more they use than their neighbors. Such studies launched innumerable discussions, from academia to cocktail parties, and at least one company.  New research suggests limitations to this particular nudge: Liberals might go for it more than some conservatives. The latter ignore the peer pressure in greater numbers, or even increase energy use as an “act of defiance.”

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Mighty Winds A-Blowin’

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

First Things First: A high-stakes political drama unfolded after the Senate Majority Leader announced the body would consider immigration reform ahead of anticipated climate legislation. The surprise political move caused a key Republican to bolt the tri-partisan effort to craft a federal climate program. The episode has greatly intensified doubts that the U.S. will pass a climate bill this year.

Two developments in offshore energy this week competed for both attention and nothing less than–cue Carmina Burana–the future itself.

Tough Climate in ‘Battle Born State’: Nevada state politics sometimes have an outsized influence on federal energy debates. That’s been true since at least 1987, when Congress designated Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the geological storage site for America’s nuclear reactor waste.

With Nevadan Sen. Harry Reid in charge of the U.S. Senate, and now embroiled in a competitive re-election campaign, Nevada’s voice is speaking louder than ever. Last year, the White House eliminated funding to develop the Yucca Mountain facility. And state political pressures led to Reid’s announcement last week that the Senate will undertake an immigration overhaul before parsing climate legislation.

In response, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) threatened to pull out of intense, months-long work on climate policy with colleagues Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). Reports up to last weekend had cast the trio as upbeat, with momentum, as they negotiated with business and advocacy groups to support their effort.

Things fell apart Saturday when Graham released a blistering public letter on the matter, charging that the Democratic leadership put the immigration issue forward in “a hurried, panicked manner”:

This has destroyed my confidence that there will be a serious commitment and focus to move energy legislation this year. All of the key players, particularly leadership, have to want this debate as much as we do. This is clearly not the case. I am very disappointed with this turn of events and believe their decision flies in the face of commitments made weeks ago to Senators Kerry, Lieberman and me. I deeply regret that election year politics will impede, if not derail, our efforts to make our nation energy independent.

Graham pulled out of a Monday press conference when he would have released the bill he co-wrote with Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).

Strike That. Reverse It: Reid reversed himself on Wednesday, pointing out that it makes sense to pursue climate legislation first since there’s already a bill. That’s not the case for immigration, which exploded onto the scene after a new Arizona law empowered police to ask anyone for U.S. residency documents.

Despite the potentially mortal political damage inflicted on their effort, the three senators have released a description of their bill to the Environmental Protection Agency, where researchers will perform economic analysis on it in the next several weeks. The Los Angeles Times’ Jim Tankersley sees two implications for this move: It will provide useful input for senators, who need such an assessment before considering the bill; and it suggests that, in the absence of any other signals, it’s theoretically possible for the legislators to resolve their differences and get back to work. An energy-industry funded think tank, the Institute for Energy Research, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the bill from EPA, since it has not been released publicly.

Getting Down to Business (or at Least Trying): The legislative stasis frustrates new markets and companies deciding whether they should or must participate in said markets. Some investors have been hoping a federal bill will define a voluntary market for carbon credits. It works like this: There would be many opportunities for emission reductions beyond mandatory efforts. Voluntary actions would generate carbon credits that large industrial companies can buy to offset their emissions (hence the name “offsets”).

With the climate bill comatose, high-profile news media are beginning to, uh, focus in depth on what the policy actually is and how long it has been around (NYT, NPR).

A World of Indecision: Clearly, the U.S. Senate is currently having trouble introducing legislation, to say nothing of passing it. And enacting legislation may not be the only hurdle, if California is an example. A ballot initiative would, if passed, suspend the bill until unemployment, currently 12 percent, falls below 5.5 percent and stays there for a year. The leading gubernatorial candidate, Republican Meg Whitman, has said she would put central elements of the state’s 2006 climate law on hold for a year. (Democrat Jerry Brown would let it be.)

International negotiations look no more productive. Officials from the BASIC countries–Brazil, South Africa, India, China–met in Cape Town this week. They called for the completion of a legally binding global climate treaty by this year’s 16th Conference of Parties (COP) meeting in Cancun, Mexico, or at the latest COP-17 in Cape Town. The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported this week that “Chancellor Angela Merkel is quietly moving away from her goal of a binding agreement on limiting climate change to 2 degrees Celsius.” Climate Post doesn’t like to make predictions, but will offer the observation that the COP-16 website is still under construction.

Anyone looking for a sign of tranquility this week in the energy and climate space might have to look up the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The oversight agency identified more than half a dozen kinds of contracts that deserve additional regulatory scrutiny–but the Chicago Climate Exchange’s contract for carbon credits wasn’t one of them.

American Companies Offshoring Jobs: Nine years after it was first proposed, Cape Wind Associates has won federal approval to build 130 wind turbines about five miles off the coast of Cape Cod. The fight pitted seaside private landowners and Indian tribes against developers and environmental activists. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the project will usher in wind power development all along the East Coast.

The specter of windmills rising in Nantucket Sound offers an alternative image to those of an oil rig collapsing into the Gulf of Mexico. Federal and BP company officials upped their estimate of the oil leaking from the wreck, from 1,000 barrels a day to as much as 5,000 barrels. Satellites have captured dramatic images of the spill heading toward the ecologically delicate Mississippi Delta.

Dept. of Bad Timing: The Minerals Management Service, an office in the Interior Department, postponed its 2010 Offshore Industry Safety Awards event, planned for next week.

Breakthrough in Commuter Transportation Policy?: Big legislative initiatives mean one thing to Hill staffers and the armies of lobbyists, journalists, and other observers peeking over their shoulders: Togetherness. No one wants to miss anything important. Reporters can be particularly conscientious, like Darren Samelsohn of Greenwire, who is as close as any journalist to ticking climate-related events in the Capitol.  Wednesday John Kerry posted to his Twitter stream: “Maybe Darren Samuelsohn and I should start carpooling, he’s my shadow in capitol [sic].”

Climate Post Readers, Meet Climate Desk Readers…: Several weeks ago, a consortium of publications launched the Climate Desk, a collaborative exploration of “the impact–human, environmental, economic, and political–of a changing climate.” The project brings together journalists from the Atlantic, Wired, Slate, Grist, Mother Jones, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and PBS’s Need to Know. Climate Desk will now also pick up Climate Post when it publishes “Thursdays at three.”

Climate Post (about), just shy of its first birthday, began as an attempt to reconcile two realities: People like to be informed but have very little time, and climate change is a monstrously vast sea of complexity involving many overlapping, interlocking scientific disciplines, technologies, economics, human behaviors and social systems, diplomacy, and heaven knows, politics. We try to be one-stop shopping for all you interested-but-busy people.

We’re a project of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University. Click for more on Climate Post, the Nicholas Institute, and Duke University.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

On the Road

Earth Day has flung Climate Post away from the desk today. Back next week.

Why Isn’t the Keeling Curve More Famous?

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: IBM will ask its 28,000 suppliers to monitor and disclose their energy use, heat-trapping gas emissions, waste, and recycling. Spread across 90 countries, the suppliers are compelled to install software designed to help firms understand their impact–if they want to continue working with the computing and services giant. “Ultimately, if a supplier cannot be compliant with requirements on the environment and sustainability, we’ll stop doing business with them,” said IBM’s John Paterson.

In Washington, the policy community anticipates in the next week or so the first public draft of a new Senate climate and energy bill. The bill will not surface on Earth Day, April 22, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “We don’t want to mix messages here,” he said, “I’m all for protecting the Earth but this is about energy independence.”

Capping It All off: The New York Times declared “cap-and-trade” dead several weeks ago, only to quietly run a sort of non-correction correction last weekend. The draft Senate bill is expected to create a market in which regulated companies can buy and sell permits to emit heat-trapping gases.

Leaks from the Senate suggest that the bill, written by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Graham, and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), would impose limits on the industrial pollution of heat-trapping gases and allow regulated companies to buy and sell emissions permits. The utility sector would initiate the program in 2012, followed by heavy industry in 2016. The Senate bill will treat transportation fuels differently, requiring a “fee” levied after products are refined, and before drivers pump it into their vehicles. This sector-by-sector approach to climate policy has been greeted with some openness from a few Republican lawmakers, including Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.). Would new support offset a loss of support among Democrats angered by President Barack Obama’s recent announcement to expand offshore oil exploration?

When the troika introduces the bill, responsibility for moving it into the Senate goes to Majority Leaders Harry Reid. “His challenge could not be tougher,” writes Darren Samuelsohn in ClimateWire. Reid will try to navigate the bill to the Senate floor at the same time he’s juggling a new Supreme Court nomination, financial reform, and a rough re-election campaign. Graham and Kerry modestly disagreed on the possible implications for the climate bill of the Supreme Court confirmation process.

The Senate bill will reportedly also contain a provision that eliminates both the Environmental Protection Agency’s new greenhouse gas regulations, and state and regional climate programs. That would halt development of programs including the Western Climate Initiative. The WCI this week previewed a new analysis that projects an average price of about $33 to emit a ton of carbon dioxide in 2020. States could continue programs that improve energy efficiency or set renewable energy standards.

Down-to-Earth Business: Is most discernable “movement” in the environmental arena to be found this year in the private sector? Reuters finds supporting evidence. The still-tough economic climate encourages firms to cut waste and inefficiency, and sustainability offers a common approach. Strained consumer budgets discourage spending on premium “clean” products. (The consumers who are interested in shelling out a little bit more for a greener product might note that the EPA and Department of Energy’s Energy Star label just became stricter.) The trend calls to mind a catch-phrase of Gregory Unruh, a corporate sustainability expert affiliated with the Thunderbird School of Global Management: “Embed it and forget it.” He writes in his new book, Earth, Inc.: “We’ll reach the sustainability destination when we embed the principles that account for the biosphere’s sustainability to business practice in profitable ways” [pdf introduction].

Energy efficiency is the fastest path to sustainability for many companies, and by extension the least intrusive way for policymakers to push climate-and-energy goals forward. This week Nicholas Institute Senior Policy Associate Etan Gumerman co-authored an ambitious, widely received study with Professor Marilyn Brown of Georgia Tech that concludes smart policy should bring vast energy and financial savings. The modeling study shows that a suite of nine policies could result in $41 billion in energy bill savings, the creation of 320,000 new jobs, and a water savings of 8.6 billion gallons in 2020. “We looked at how these policies might interact, not just single programs,” Gumerman said. “The interplay between policies compounds the savings. And it’s all cost-effective. On average, each dollar invested in energy efficiency over the next 20 years will reap $2.25 in benefits.” The study was picked up by numerous major and trade media outlets across the country, and is available here.

Universities are stepping up their training of America’s future workforce. Engineering students increasingly seek programs that specialize in sustainability, drawn by renewed interest in industry and pushed by current and expected new government policies. US News and World Report writes, “Today’s engineering students are reacting to having grown up in environmentally ‘perilous times.’” [Duke's Pratt School of Engineering includes an environmental engineering initiative as one of its four academic pillars.]

In the Clear: A panel dismissed charges of scientific fraud and other accusations levied against researchers affiliated with the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Ron Oxburgh, an earth scientist, former defense adviser, and former Shell chairman, and colleagues pinged the climatologists for not consulting closely with top statisticians when they conduct their statistics-driven analysis of temperature records and proxy records. A statistician on the review panel said it was unlikely statistical errors undermine the basic science.

Cat Exits Open Bag: The Guardian publishes a memo detailing U.S. communications strategy in international climate talks. The document was found “on a European hotel computer and passed to the Guardian,” which doesn’t offer much of a clue for pinpointing who might have left it there. At the top of the list: “Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change.”

Genie Exits Bottle:A volcanic eruption in Iceland has grounded aircraft in the U.K. and Europe, but early reports suggest it’s too small to have a noticeable short-term cooling effect globally. Sulfate aerosols released in volcanic explosions tend to have a cooling effect on the atmosphere. One controversial idea to manage climate change is to mimic eruptions by spraying aerosols into the high atmosphere from aircraft. For more on this and other “geoengineering” ideas, see (both!) of two great new books on the topic, Hack the Planet, by Eli Kintisch of Science, and How to Cool the Planet, by Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone. I happily “blurbed” the former, and reviewed the latter recently in BusinessWeek.

Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are making previously obscure monthly data dumps from NOAA and NASA into regular conversation pieces among observers to the climate arena. The March numbers came out this week and zipped across blogs and news sites:

The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for March 2010 was the warmest on record at 13.5 deg C (56.3 deg F), which is 0.77 deg C (1.39 deg F) above the 20th century average of 12.7 deg C (54.9 deg F). This was also the 34th consecutive March with global land and ocean temperatures above the 20th century average.

It’s worth asking, particularly as Earth Day queues up next week, will climate data eventually make it big as an economic indicator?

Why Isn’t the Keeling Curve More Famous?: For a couple of weeks, I’ve had a tiny bee in my bonnet along these lines and I finally figured out why. It’s this sentence in the Washington Post review of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Solar (I mentioned this in this space two weeks ago). Here:

The subject, though, is hot. Whether or not carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere, there’s no denying that novelists are warming up to the subject. [Emphasis added]

Initially I was just hung up on how someone hoping to come across as an informed person, or who is supposed to be an informed person, could string together these words with a straight face. The larger problem is that this is just one signal–anecdotally reinforced elsewhere–that many smart, educated, successful people don’t know that carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere.

If Earth Day has any singular goal at all, and I’ve never been convinced, it should be this: Make the Keeling curve more famous. Deutsch Bank recently bought a huge billboard across the street from Madison Square Garden in New York City. It has a running tally of the tons of carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere, in the spirit of the famous National Debt Clock. But what would happen if instead it were the Keeling Curve? With other Keeling Curves in Times Square, at the New York Stock Exchange, in Parisian art installations, projected on clouds on Earth Day like the Bat signal. What do the neuroeconomists and behaviorists say about this? Is there a Keeling Curve app yet for the iPad?

What do you think?

Graph courtesy Scripps Institution

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Inspired by Congress’ Spring Recess…

Climate Post is catching up on other projects this week. Back next Thursday at three.

Read This. Read Now. Pay Nothing.

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: The Obama administration today finalized greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and light trucks first proposed last May. The practical upshot of the rules is a roughly 40 percent rise in fuel economy, to 35.5 miles per gallon, by 2016. The government said the measures would save owners about $3,000 in fuel over a vehicles lifetime, but add a grand on average to sticker prices.

Of Drills and Bills: Energy independence has attracted bipartisan support and high-level media interest at least since 1948, when the U.S. first became a net importer of oil. Calls for freedom from foreign energy sources (or for “energy security” among the more sober-minded) have grown particularly acute in recent years. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin popularized the chant, “Drill, baby, drill!” during the 2008 presidential campaign. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich contributed “Drill here. Drill now. Pay Less.” Democrats have weakened in their rhetorical opposition to domestic offshore oil exploration as these slogans took off.

Politics can do funny things to strident partisan positions. Obama’s announcement this week on off-shore drilling might not be any more surprising than President George W. Bush’s re-purchase of oil-and-gas-leases off the Florida coast, during his brother’s, Gov. Jeb Bush, re-election bid. (“At the time, Bush’s decision was hailed by some environmental groups.”) Blood and electoral politics run thicker than oil.

The question, squarely framed by the New York Times, is, Will Obama’s political jujitsu work? Howard Kurtz, media critic of the Washington Post, runs amused through the top papers’ takes, from the NYT’s “nobody-much-likes-it” to the Los Angeles Times’ “this-won’t-accomplish-much” to right-wing pundit Don Surber’s observation that “Still, it is an admission by Obama that Sarah Palin was right.” He repeats the last four words about 125 times over a full browser page.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a key architect of the climate-and-energy bill expected in mid-April, said yesterday that Obama’s drilling proposal is a “good first step,” echoing other calls from Senate Republicans that the sale of drilling leases be expanded to include the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the West Coast, and Alaska. Graham and Lieberman at the end of last week chatted with reporters about two elements of their developing climate bill. Utilities would participate in a market for carbon-emission permits, and the oil industry would have to pay a “fixed fee” for their carbon emissions. Last week 10 coastal Democratic senators sent a letter to Obama admonishing the administration against “unfettered” drilling. Watch to see if Obama’s drilling announcement this week is sufficiently fettered.

Traders to the Cause: The 2009 results of the EU’s Emissions Trading System are drawing scrutiny. Analysts attribute to reduced economic activity an 11.2 percent drop in EU industrial greenhouse gas emissions, a number that falls at the high end of expectations. Critics say industrial firms that receive pollution credits for free are benefitting from cyclical market dynamics, instead of permanently reducing emissions by deploying clean energy technologies. The decline in carbon prices, reflecting the recession and diminished outlook for a global treaty, have led to carbon trading firms’ disappearance from HSBC’s index of companies involved in climate solutions.

EU authorities have stepped up enforcement of about $6.75 billion in tax fraud they suspect within the trading system. Spanish police arrested nine people suspected of running a “carousel fraud.” In this scheme, traders buy credits in one EU country without paying a value-added tax, and sell them in another country at a price that includes the price of a tax.

It’s confusing enough without the outright accusations of fraud. An executive board that oversees a carbon-finance program set up by the Kyoto Protocol has suspended four auditors in a year and a three monts. The most recent companies penalized are carbon-market auditors in Germany and South Korea, who may now seek clarification on the market’s rules.

Against the backdrop of sagging carbon credit prices in Europe, a group of economists led by the Stockholm Environment Institute’s Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth Stanton in the U.S., suggests that target costs of greenhouse gas pollution are too low to effect the scale of change that many scientists call for.

More ‘Sunlight’ in Climate Science: The U.K. Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee issued findings from its investigation into climatologists’ behavior as documented in emails hacked out of University of East Anglia servers last fall. The Members of Parliament, as many others before them, found little or nothing in the episode to weaken the evidence that suggests industrialization waste is transforming the global climate. But they slammed the climate scientists as a group for secretive handling of data. The MPs heavily faulted the university itself for the scientists’ poor responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests. Phil Jones, who stepped down temporarily under fire as director of the UEA’s Climate Research Unit, was exonerated by the committee. Newspapers, such as the Guardian, tack on garden-variety “he-said, she-said” evaluations of the report.

Data’s Gotta Come from Somewhere: Obama’s 2011 budget proposes increased funding for NASA’s aging Earth observation infrastructure—62 percent more by the end of 2015. The investments would shore up data streams on ocean temperature, ice extent, ozone, and anthropogenic carbon emissions.

Satellite monitoring would be much easier if the risks of launching tin cans to space weren’t so high. NASA expects to rebuild its Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), after the initial model fell into far-southern waters. The OCO may be the best-named satellite ever. A triple pun, OCO is a normal acronym, a chemical diagram (carbon dioxide is a linear molecule, O=C=O), and a homophone of the Polish word for “eye.” This week Europe will launch its CryoSat-2, a device precise enough to measure changes in ice thickness within “a few centimeters” accuracy. The first iteration, CryoSat, was destroyed in a launch failure five years ago. This week’s most thought-provoking statement from a scientist occurs in the Nature story (see previous link) about CryoSat-2:

Technical problems with the rocket have already delayed the launch, which was originally scheduled for February. “I hope this time around probability is on our side,” says Duncan Wingham, CryoSat-2′s principal scientist, who will watch the launch from the European Space Operations Centre of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Darmstadt, Germany.

Beware of Dueling Headlines:

Green economy grows despite policy vacuum (DailyClimate.org)

Where have all the green jobs gone? (BBC News)

The truth is out there. Ernst & Young probes the renewables market in greater detail. A third of the jump in U.S. climate spending came from last year’s stimulus bill, according to a Congressional Budget Office report.

There’s Something up There… What do people think about climate change who rarely think about climate change? A minor indication came this week in a Washington Post book review of Ian McEwan’s new novel Solar (NB: The first paragraph of the review has an adult theme). The third paragraph addresses global warming:

The subject, though, is hot. Whether or not carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere, there’s no denying that novelists are warming up to the subject.

Perhaps I’m over-thinking this, but how is it intelligible to pose the question, even in a dependent clause, “whether or not carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere”? Certainly, there is carbon dioxide coming out of our tailpipes, smoke stacks, and melting permafrost. Maybe what’s accumulating in the air is something that has the same spectral and biochemical properties as carbon dioxide, but isn’t actually carbon dioxide.

At any rate, something that behaves identically to carbon dioxide is doing this. “Should” the author of the review (an editor) know that, even as a cute framing device, this dependent clause has negative communicative value?

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Stirrings in the Senate

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: President Barack Obama signed health care reform into law this week, exposing a rarely acknowledged political pre-existing condition among the pundit class: Despite the conventional wisdom, no matter how many years experience a given observer has had in Washington, whatever political party you favor–nobody ever really has any idea what’s about to happen. As Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said the other day about the current mood in Congress, “It was bad last week. It’s going to be bad this week. Who knows what it’s going to be like next week?”

Passage of a bill widely declared dead shores up the president’s and his party’s political capital and has prompted an uptick in violent, intimidating rhetoric among the Democrats’ political opponents in and out of the blogosphere. Supporters of the various climate mitigation approaches may feel emboldened, as if the conventional wisdom shouldn’t count them out either.

People at Work: Top White House advisers met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday to chart out a strategy to move climate legislation through the Senate. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are expected to release a draft of their bill in April, after the two-week spring recess that starts tomorrow. The troika has been shopping an eight-page proposal around influential lobbyists, such as the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, according to Politico. The effort by Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman has been the most visible effort by senators to address climate change, but other approaches will not be discounted. More specifically, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) will not be discounted. The pair has already written a bill, introduced last November, that would compel heavy industry–predominantly sellers of fossil fuels–to buy carbon emission permits, and trade them in a market. Auction receipts would be mostly re-distributed back to consumers. [Click here to download the Nicholas Institute's recent modeling study of Cantwell and Collins’ CLEAR Act.]

All eyes turned to Graham after health care passed. Reports circulated last week that he could walk out of climate-bill negotiations if Democrats passed healthcare reform through a procedural sidestep called the “reconciliation” process, which they did. With that bill now law, Graham vows to continue his work with Kerry and Lieberman (I-Conn.). Passing another major bill right after healthcare will take much more than Graham’s presence as a negotiator in a political environment that–however it strains the imagination–keeps finding ways to become more and more poisonous.

Many Democrats are eager to move on energy and climate legislation despite the political obstacles. Twenty two Democratic senators, including Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, wrote a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid supportive of a jobs and energy security bill. Ten senators from coastal states wrote a letter to Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman threatening to pull their support for the as-yet-unseen bill if it contains provisions for offshore oil drilling. NPR asks the question, whatever happened to broader GOP support for climate policy?

Whatever Happened to…: For what it’s worth, the president’s party continues to find encouragement for its climate policy from abroad. The US and international climate conversations merged in Washington this week when Connie Hedegaard, the Danish minister of climate and energy, visited, meeting with US climate envoy Todd Stern and chatting up the international importance of US legislation.

When two presidential candidates promised measures to address climate change, in the summer of 2008, confidence in America’s first-ever carbon market shot up to seven dollars a ton. But with international and domestic negotiations uncertain, prices for a ton of carbon on the Chicago Climate Exchange have dropped to ten cents. Among those hit hardest by the collapse in prices are farmers who earned carbon credits through “no-till farming.” When farmers deploy this practice, CO2 remains trapped underground if farmers refrain from turning it over. Good practices–and what constitutes “good practices” can be disputed– aren’t catching up with emissions trends. A report in Nature this week documents a global rise in emissions from soil.

Civil (Legal) War?: Newsweek profiles EPA administrator Lisa Jackson as a way to narrate for its general audience the inside-the-beltway machinations occurring in her agency and on the Hill. Legislators prefer (perhaps by definition) that such major changes in pollution laws go through Capitol Hill. “Jackson knew that threatening to act by executive fiat wouldn’t be popular. But she also knew it would get people’s attention, and maybe prod Congress to act,” writes Daniel Stone. Murkowski has led opposition to the EPA’s move in the Senate.

States too continue to hop on board the EPA litigation train. The federal appeals court in Washington wrapped together the petitions seeking to beat back the EPA’s endangerment finding. Sixteen states have joined the battle. Pennsylvania and Minnesota support the EPA’s finding, and 14 others oppose it: Alaska, Michigan filed separately, while Nebraska, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah acted together.

Carbon–It’s What’s for Dinner: Monday was World Water Day. National Geographic marks the event with a comprehensive cover package about this most personal of all environmental issues (You are mostly water). In the magazine’s leader, writer Barbara Kingsolver offers a lyrical perspective on our many worlds of water. Water is the ultimate commons. Earth has a finite amount of it, but an expanding global civilization. The essay glides toward mention of that seminal work, Garret Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Kingsolver writes: “Agreeing to self-imposed limits instead, unthinkable at first, will become the right thing to do. While our laws imply that morality is fixed, Hardin made the point that ‘the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.’ Surely it was no sin, once upon a time, to shoot and make pies of passenger pigeons.” Other articles–and photos, natch–look at desalination, California’s water, and the U.K. group WaterAid’s work in southwestern Ethiopia.

About 1,800 gallons of water go into the production of one pound of beef. The magazine has a nice online interactive graphic showing the “embedded water” in various products. Likewise, how much CO2 meat production represents came under scrutiny this week. A University of California, Davis, professor challenged a four-year-old report that found emissions from meat production represents 18 percent of the global emissions of heat-trapping gases. Frank Mitloehner told an academic conference that the report, called Livestock’s Long Shadow, included more variables in its calculation of meat’s carbon emissions than in the transportation sector emissions calculated by the IPCC. The apples-to-oranges comparison skews the result, making it look like meat production pollutes more. In the US, transportation contributes about a quarter of emissions, but pork and beef production add just three percent of the national total. An author of the report says of Mitloehner’s study, “I must say honestly that he has a point.”

Sea Is for Climate: Widescale production of batteries would focus attention on parts of the world not considered major players in the global energy economy. But a proliferation of batteries for transportation and stationary use might make Bolivia or neighboring Chile into the Saudia Arabia of lithium, a key ingredient batteries. The nearly 4,000-square mile salt flats, remains of an ancient sea, contain the world’s largest lithium deposits, waiting to power your electric car.

India and Bangladesh settled a longstanding dispute over a tiny island with two names by letting the rising Bay of Bengal swallow it whole. New Moore island (India) or South Talpatti (Bangladesh) stood just six feet above sea level. The waters have risen in temperature and height in recent years. The island, which was uninhabited, will continue to be uninhabited.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Poll Results Handily Explained by Whatever Bloggers Think

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: Another week of waiting for details of Senate legislation left little public grist this week. The Economist runs a climate package, which is worth reading. Beyond that, it’s a good time to take a step back.

Last week, Gallup released results of its latest global warming poll. They found that nearly half (48 percent) of Americans believe that the seriousness of global warming is “generally exaggerated.” That’s up from 41 percent in 2009 and 31 percent in 1997. The gap narrowed between people who believe climate change is anthropogenic or natural, 50 percent to 46 percent. Thirty-two percent of respondents think they will be affected by global warming, down eight points since 2008.

A Media Experiment: Gallup released its poll results here, and in the hours and days afterwards, journalists and bloggers plastered it throughout the Web. This speed and ubiquity recommend the poll as a kind of probe, to see what happens to information as it enters the Internet climosphere. The most visible conclusion is that the Internet is all too willing to provide an explanation for data that has no definitive explanation.

The poll results proliferated through the Web’s vast information vacuum with impressive speed if you’ve ever tried to make that happen on purpose. Gallup started more than 70 years ago. It is nearly synonymous with polling. At a time when independent, non-partisan institutions, namely traditional media, are under siege, it’s powerful reinforcement that independence is a good thing and worth protecting.

Other polls conducted in the last six months or so reveal a similar trend of declining interest or concern about environmental issues. The two most frequent explanations are the economic crisis and the organized public campaigns to discredit climate science. Pew Research made headlines last October with a poll showing a 14-point drop in the percentage of respondents who think there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming. American University researchers, working with Yale and George Mason universities, recently challenged perceptions of the under-35 crowd and climate. The study shows that young adults are split and on some metrics less engaged than the older generation. Wwviews.org has done some interesting work on deliberative polling.

A Media Circus: The second-least scientific of all investigations, a Factiva search, turned up a not-surprising small number of old-media articles about the poll. Some news organizations have, or used to have, policies that prohibit stories specifically about poll-number releases. Maybe it was seen as “manufacturing news.” The USA Today pins the 20-year low interest in environmental issues on economic hardship. Six of eight environmental issues, including climate, attracted record-low interest. The conservative Washington Times can’t resist an opportunity to make fun of Al Gore and recent winter weather. The Financial Times rounds up poll reaction on its blog, emphasizing the complexity of explaining changes in public views. Josh Nelson at EnviroKnow contributed this interesting partisan break down of Gallup data, which rhymes with Gallup’s own look at changing sentiments among U.S. conservatives.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the Internet is an invention optimized mostly for people who want to send each other cute pictures of their cats, whenever possible with funny nonstandard English captions attached. So instead of doing the useful thing, offering you snapshots of important things that happened in climate this week, I dived into the feline underbelly of the Web to see the shenanigans going on with the Gallup poll.

Stephen Rex is relieved that “Nearly Half Of All Americans Calling B.S. On Global Warming.” The professionals at ClimateGate.tv (tagline: “Arrest the Crimatologists”) paste in the Gallup release. Marc Morano, the former aide to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), runs an operation called Climate Depot that feeds a lot of the AGW ((anti-)anthropogenic global warming) blogosphere. This week he asks, “How could Americans show less concern?!” The least scientific of all investigations, the Google Blog search, turned up far fewer liberal posts that match the breathless, ad hominem, conspiracy-exposing tone of these conservatives blogs. Certainly, that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. Perhaps the garden-variety liberal recreational bloggers invoke their breathless, ad hominem, conspiracy-exposing outrage elsewhere. Or, maybe they’re too busy uploading pictures of their cats with funny captions.

What It All Means: At least two things are missing from the proliferation of Gallup data.

First, it would be helpful if more people understood how to contextualize poll questions. Jon Krosnick of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment pours over poll questions and data, and conducts surveys, too. He pays close attention to the wording of questions, and has a list of suggestions about how to write questions that will elicit more robust answers than others. For example, the “multi-barreled question” offers respondents too many options, confusing what they actually think. A recent Woods Institute/Associated Press poll found that amid the Climategate controversy, Americans’ trust in climate science dropped by five percent—from 80 percent in 2008 to 75 percent in 2009. Pollsters attribute the drop to shifting sentiments among Americans who are already disinclined to trust climatologists.

The other missing piece has to with climate science itself. By the standards of general public discourse, there are, egad, right answers to many questions (By the standards of science, there are many questions in spots where the public sees right answers). It’s not the pollsters’ job to point this out. Part of the problem is it’s not entirely clear whose job it is. American University’s Matthew Nisbet writes about the predicament climate scientists are currently in, as does Newsweek’s Sharon Begley. Many other professional communicators are limited by partisan affiliation, advocacy ties, or general busy-ness.

It’s clear from this week’s blog tour what online activists do with poll results. What do politicians do with them? There’s much conjecture. Politicians and staffs tend to be less than forthcoming on the issue. There’s been some formal study of the question. A quick literature dive dug up this précis, from a summary of Poll Use and Policymaking in the White House, 1993-2000, by Jeane Zaino:

The case analysis shows that polls are used in a variety of ways, not only to pander and craft rhetoric, but also to set parameters, legitimize, and develop an offensive strategy. The findings show that while polls are used in ways that result in responsiveness to the majority will, they are also used in ways that do not. Democratic officials not only act contrary to popular opinion, but polls aid in this endeavor. These findings suggest that while polls do not consistently undermine democratic government, neither do they necessarily facilitate it either. Consequently, those seeking a larger voice for the public in democratic affairs are cautioned against relying on polls as a primary linking mechanism.

Climate Post Book Club, Parts II and III: Here’s what’s really driving this whole post.

Sorting through books in the basement last weekend, I came across John LeCarre’s The Russia House, his 1989 thriller about a book publisher who becomes an accidental spy when handed a manuscript documenting how the Soviets faked having a nuclear arsenal for 50 years. Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer made starred in a movie based on it a year later.

One question struck me as sat down and flipped through the novel: Why didn’t The Russia House, which did very well, inspire a grassroots movement of Soviet-arsenal deniers to try and dismantle US-USSR negotiations on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)?

The last book I read was Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, which after the IPCC reports, might be the most influential book ever written about climate change. (Capsule review: Without addressing its unusual presence in the climate debates, State of Fear is a more devastating assault on the English language and the literary convention of the novel than on climate science.)

By the time State of Fear was published, in 2003 or so, partisanship and polarization had an extra 15 years to electronically cordon off right, left, green, and non-green communities from each other. The community of Crichton’s readers had already assembled for him. All he needed to do was strike a match. Judging by the results of all these polls, that task is just going to get easier and easier.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Uptick in Climate Denialism Halts Glacier Retreat and Lowers Sea Levels

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: “The absence of an actual bill” is one impediment to the Senate taking up climate legislation, the Hill reported earlier this week. The climate leadership troika of Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) continue to work behind the scenes to steer the many interests toward a common framework. Key business leaders and allied politicians are reportedly encouraged by movement away from the comprehensive approach that passed the House of Representatives last summer. The oil industry, which found the House bill rather expensive, is listening cautiously to a policy that would require them to pay a “carbon fee” rather than buy into an economy-wide fix. President Barack Obama met with 14 senators for more than an hour Tuesday to talk about their shared goals for viable climate legislation, despite a lack of agreement on details or White House demands.

Graham has threatened to walk away from climate (and immigration) legislation if the Democratic majority passes health care reform through a process called “reconciliation,” which circumambulates typical Senate procedure [CongressDaily, sub. req.].

Two “actual bills” would slow or kill the Environmental Protection Agency’s new regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Two West Virginia Democrats, Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Nick Rahall, have co-authored a bill that would freeze the agency’s move for at least two years. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced a bill that would undo the EPA’s ruling that greenhouse gas emissions pose public harm.

The international negotiation process stumbles forward, toward its year-end COP-16 meeting in cheery Cancun, Mexico. Please do check out the, uh, planned agenda, participants, and guiding documents, here. India and China this week formally signed up for the Copenhagen Accord, the non-binding, vague document to emerge from the Copenhagen COP-15 meeting in December. The developing giants agreed to be “listed” among the Accord countries, rather than “associated” with them, a lesser affiliation reflecting the current difficulties and confusion.

Not Dead Yet: If there’s an enduring legislative metaphor from 20^th century cinema, it’s the classic moment from the absurd comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when a man wheels his cart through a Plague-stricken town, telling residents to “Bring out your dead!” The newest body on the cart suddenly exclaims, “I’m not dead yet,” to which he’s told, “You’ll be stone dead in a moment.” The farce ends when the near-deceased is knocked over the head with a club.

In a hyper-partisan atmosphere, with an election approaching, with health care reform absorbing the Senate, and financial and immigration reform not far behind, conventional wisdom holds that climate legislation in the Senate this year is analogously “not dead yet.” (Disclaimer: The conventional wisdom says a lot of things.) The Chicago Tribune documents the rise of climate-science skepticism in the GOP. Read the story from the bottom-up, and you’ll learn that Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) recently chatted with his new colleagues Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) about their climate bill, which would limit national emissions, compel big polluters to purchase credits for each ton they’re allowed to emit, and dispatch all the proceeds back to consumers.

The Nicholas Institute this week released a modeling study of Cantwell and Collins’ CLEAR Act. Senior Research Economist Eric Williams compares results to the Energy Information Administration’s analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House of Representatives last summer. The synopsis: The Cantwell bill’s cost to emit a ton of carbon grows from $21 in 2012 to $55 in 2030, a 5.5 percent annual rise. Market demand for carbon credits pushes the price to the maximum allowed under the legislation—called a “price ceiling”—in every year of the program. Net greenhouse gas emissions, including a companion greenhouse gas-reduction program, might result by 2030 in a 16 percent to 19 percent drop below 2005 levels, far short of Cantwell’s target. That’s compared to EIA’s prediction of a 34 percent net drop under the (now politically dead) House climate bill.

We Have Met the Emitter, and He Is Us: Everything about climate change is hard. This week’s reminder came from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published an analysis of national responsibility for emissions based on trade, rather than emissions within borders. Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science conclude that goods and services traded internationally account for nearly a quarter of industrial carbon emissions. Given the amount of manufacturing in and exporting from China, it’s no surprise that its trade partners are “responsible” for nearly as high a percentage of emissions from the world’s largest national polluter.

Oh, Scientific Community… We Know You’re Trying: Never underestimate the incompatibility of traditional media and scientific discourse. The Washington Post this morning ran a slim article on an inside page that deserves full quotation by headline and lede:

Is it fair to introduce to readers an ambitious new oversight project by saying what it will not do? Isn’t that a little bit like headlining the article, “Scientists Too Dim to Focus Review on What You and I Know the IPCC’s Problem Is”? It’s not that this is a particularly egregious article—it’s not like it’s the post-Murdoch-takeover Wall Street Journal‘s news page—but what would be so terrible if conventional journalists added in more explanation into their stories? Regular Post readers are likelier to know that the Himalayas will still be there in 2036 than they are to know just how well-understood the basics of climate change are. If you posit the latter, this headline and lede are less than coherent.

Scientists and science writers have begun to fight back against the misinformation and disinformation campaigns against them. But they’re still bleeding. A new Gallop poll shows that half of Americans think climate change is overblown—48 percent, up from 41 percent last year.  Recent work by the authors of last year’s Six Americas study, shows that the number of respondents who are “dismissive” of climate change is has jumped from 7 percent to 16 percent since 2008.

Adaptation, Already in Progress: From Malawi comes this horrifying story of how extreme meteorological patterns can take individual lives. Unusually heavy rain on a house of unbaked mud brick caused a roof collapse that killed a mother, father, and two children in Lilongwe. A Malawi government report to the UN documented that in the last 20 years there have been enough droughts and floods to “clearly show that there are large temporal and spatial variables in the occurrence of climate-related disasters and calamities.”

In Hampton Roads, Virginia, a planning director has the difficult political task of corralling 16 cities and counties into a discussion of adaptation to rising sea levels, when many constituents posit that climate change risk assessments are wrong, made-up, or overblown.

Problem Solved!: The Boston Globe takes up the “competitive conundrum” of clean energy technologies. That’s a snazzy way of saying that new technologies are more expensive than infrastructure from the last century, such as coal, oil, gas, and nuclear. Without a cost breakthrough—either in the form of a scalable energy invention or a functioning government policy—the 21^st century energy economy can’t get started.

I can’t help but wonder if the wrong companies are on the case. Shouldn’t Starbucks (which more than doubled the price of coffee), Apple (whose iPod delivers a tenth the sound quality of analog music at four times the cost), and AT&T (more dropped calls) get to work on making expensive-but-clean tech a style-driven phenomenon? How do you put lipstick on an electron?

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Climate Bill + Climategate = Bill ‘Climate’ Gates!

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: Recent political difficulties for the president and key colleagues in the Senate have not removed energy and climate issues from the White House and Majority’s agenda. Obama told business executives yesterday that the U.S. economy must start “to put a price on carbon pollution.” He touted his White House’s activities on energy efficiency, nuclear power, solar, and oil drilling, but reiterated his pre-election call for a comprehensive policy: “The only certainty of the status quo is that the price and supply of oil will become increasingly volatile; that the use of fossil fuels will wreak havoc on weather patterns and air quality.” Obama made news about a year ago at the Business Roundtable, site of yesterday’s remarks, when he reminded everyone that he preferred a market-driven climate policy that auctioned “carbon credits” to polluters rather than a policy that gives them away.

The climate leadership troika in the Senate–John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman–continues to spar with the conventional wisdom that the Senate doesn’t have the momentum to take on climate right now, particularly when health care is still unsolved. They continue to find a compromise approach to legislation that would put a price on carbon.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that the agency will implement its new greenhouse gas regulations slowly, with smaller qualifying firms not needing to regulate until 2016. The largest firms would comply before 2013. Jackson emphasized these dates in a letter to eight Democrats from coal-producing states who expressed concern about the rules. The EPA’s actions are of concern to the majority of Republican senators, 35 of them, and three moderate Democrats. That’s the size of the group that supports Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution to turn back the EPA’s rules. The agency faces legal challenges elsewhere, most prominently from the US Chamber of Commerce and the states of Texas, Virginia, and Alabama.

EPW ranking member Sen. James Inhofe released a GOP report into the UEA e-mail controversy, and will pursue further investigations into whether climate scientists violated any federal laws. The report can be accessed here [pdf]. Readers can read around the professional literature to evaluate its conclusions here, or for the more industrious, here.

Best-Thing-Ever-ism: Nothing will ever break your heart like new large-scale energy technology. That’s because there’s so much is possible but we haven’t yet been able to either close the carbon loophole that would make them economically competitive, or scale up the true “game changers.” There’s a messianism that accompanies many new technologies. This week saw some seductive new ideas that promise to be the energy sector’s latest Best! Thing! Ever!

“Where will the US get its electricity in 2034?” That’s the headline of a Scientific American interview with the head of Black & Veatch, an analysis firm that just published a report answering this question in two words: natural gas. The head analyst gave this assessment of how surveyed players in the power market understand the problem of pricing carbon: “Looking at the survey and what’s going on in the industry, regardless of people’s personal or political opinions they want to move towards a lower carbon footprint for the power sector. A lack of legislation right now in some corners creates more concern.”

“We believe we’ve developed a new type of nuclear reactor that can represent a nearly infinite supply of low-cost energy, carbon-free energy for the world.” That’s what the head of TerraPower, a firm developing an advanced nuclear reactor that uses depleted fuel. The project has the backing of Bill Gates, who gave a recent talk about the technology.

A start-up clean energy company with a brightening name and marquee backing launched publicly this week. For eight years, Bloom Energy has quietly developed and tested its solid oxide fuel cell, which uses natural gas to generate electricity for eight to ten cents a kilowatt hour. Independent estimate put the price at 13 to 14 cents a kilowatt hour, higher than the U.S. average of 11 cents. Google, Wal-Mart, and Bank of America are beta-testing units. The company’s founder, KR Sridhar has raised $400 million and expects that customers can earn back their investment in three to five years. Earth2Tech.com has a useful overview of what’s known about Bloom’s technology, with further links.

Seething Is Believing: If you’re reading this, it’s likely because you’re inclined to read something like this. That’s a glib reduction of research conducted by the Cultural Cognition Project, anchored at Yale Law School and recently discussed by NPR’s Christopher Joyce and Reason‘s Ronald Bailey. This very interesting research observes with precision just how deeply people are inclined to accept facts that reinforce what they already believe. The report itself can be found here. Researchers tracked how individuals’ opinions about global warming and other topics change as they are given more and more information about a topic. This example is relevant to a central topic in climate policy:

In another experiment, people read a United Nations study about the dangers of global warming. Then the researchers told the participants that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial pollution. Many in the individualistic group then rejected the climate science. But when more nuclear power was offered as the solution, says Braman, “they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious problem.”

It turns out global warming is a serious problem. After weeks or months of public confusion over what IPCC errors and the UEA e-mails mean in the big picture, dispassionate media commentators are beginning to step in and do what they are supposed to do: Filter spam out of the public discourse. That’s not something mass media are particularly good at, given their bent toward “exaggerating denialism.” Long gone are the days when a newspaper editorial could sway an election. This week a couple of the heavyweights weighed in with some clarity on the climate confusion, none more notable than the Washington Post’s Monday editorial. The paper’s op-ed editor distinguished himself last year by running several factually incoherent columns by George Will, including this one on Sunday. In this episode, Will demonstrates his ability to rip fragments from elsewhere as a stand-in for science journalism. Bill Chameides, dean of Duke’s Nicholas School, handily dismantles the problem here.

This week’s ed board effort is a fine, mature piece analyzing what non-experts can hang on to amid activists’ polemics on every side. The ed board hit particularly hard Virginia, whose attorney general last week challenged the EPA’s current effort to regulate greenhouse gases: “To see Virginia’s newly elected attorney general join in this know-nothingism is an embarrassment to the state.” The New York Times ran an editorial relatively upbeat about international climate policy negotiations, given the recent exit of chief UN negotiator Yvo de Boer. (de Boer revealed this week that his new job at accounting giant KPMG was lined up before Copenhagen in December.)

Andrew Revkin, of Pace University and the New York Times’ DotEarth blog, invited readers this week to go “Back to Basics on Climate and Energy,” an attempt to find common ground amid all the bad vibes.

Ideally, the “climate scandals” of 2009-2010 will result in a stronger general understanding of climate science that allows the U.S. policy conversation to occur with greater intellectual honesty from however many sides you think there are.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Melting Ice Makes Slippery Slope

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: Several high-profile exits from the climate conversation—Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) from the Senate; BP, Caterpillar, and ConocoPhillips, from USCAP; and chief climate negotiator Yvo de Boer from the U.N.—were widely reported this week. None of these stories carry as much long-term significance as the under-reported-on difficulty of many major English-language public information sources to communicate both that potentially dangerous climate change is underway and that professional researchers have enough confidence, despite uncertainties, to attribute it to human activity.

This problem is giving leaders an opportunity to shut down climate policy discussions.

Climate science and the policies designed to address it will never be understood and appreciated by the public quite as well as, say, pairs figure skating is. It’s for the best, really. But, if verifiability and accuracy are qualities that we would like to see in leaders from every sector of civic life, then–as consumers and producers of public information products–maybe we should set a baseline, and point out when something smells funny. So, for today, I’d like to loosen Climate Post‘s standard format, and share my own reaction to this WSJ piece.

It smells funny.

This Next Section, This Second One, Here, Is Fake; I Made it all up: The spate of recent controversies about climate research has given fresh voice to a group of scientists who question the mainstream view on two points: that human activity is warming the planet at a slow, imperceptible pace; and that human societies and institutions will be able to adapt. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in his occasional e-mailed newsletter, “At the rate world policymakers are chasing Titanic-like policies down to the bottom of the rising Atlantic ocean, our grandchildren, perhaps even our children will curse our generation as the most murderous and selfish of any in the four billion year history of life on Earth.”

Hansen’s is one voice in a coordinated chorus who are taking advantage of recent climatological observations—rising average ocean temperatures, retreating mountain glaciers, earlier spring blossoms—to promote to a wider audience the same criticisms of what they call “mainstream, slow-warming suicide science” that they have advocated, with great difficulty, in smaller circles for some time.

In the economics and policy sphere, Hansen’s concerns are echoed by the Anti-Refrigerator Forum of the American Renewables Foundation (ARF-ARF), a group of liberal economists from prestigious institutions who want to outlaw residential and commercial refrigeration in the U.S. because cooling chemicals, hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, are powerful heat-trapping gases and refrigeration causes high carbon emissions. “It’ll be the refrigerators that march us up nine degrees Celsius,” said Akaky Akakievich, chairman of the ARF-ARF…

Okay, Back to ‘Reality,’ However Defined, and Non-Fiction, Here: That’s what an article might look like that attempted to take ideas from the (left) fringe of climate policy and pump them up into a credible movement claiming to know something no one on Earth knows: How and how quickly industrial emissions and land-use changes might change the planet’s life-support systems. It would be a disservice to write an article like that, at least without emphasizing where the critics’ extreme predictions for the future deviate from the consensus expectation: something in the vicinity of three degrees C of warming, from a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels, over several decades.

To be charitable, what the Journal has done is overlook the likelihood that its readership doesn’t understand the first thing about manmade global warming: that there is manmade global warming. This is understood at a much higher confidence level than newspaper reporting on external security threats to the US. Even if that’s still not nearly as high as we’d like.

The article is a novelty story, but is not presented as such.

What Seems to Be the Problem?: The problem seems to be that credibility-killing IPCC errors and the University of East Anglia e-mails easily cause confusion among things that should not be confused. Climate science, most visibly in the IPCC reports, might be thought of as cascading tiers of knowledge, arranged from scientists’ high to low confidence in it. It is a vast enterprise, and not all observations have equal weight. The Journal gives equal weight to all things climate science. This sounds like a benign mistake, but given what these misunderstandings (disunderstandings?) are doing to our ability to have a rational policy discussion, it’s potentially dangerous.

The WSJ piece looks at four familiar voices—Bjorn Lomborg, John Christy, Richard Lindzen, and Willie Soon—plus a retired Columbia University climatology professor whose last name means “puppet” in Russian. They each dispute either that global warming is mostly manmade or that cutting emissions is a way to respond. (Lomborg, the only person quoted who is not a research scientist, says, “It’s important to say that the scandals we’ve had don’t change the fundamental point that global warming is man-made and we need to tackle it.”) The story is pegged to Texas’ decision to challenge the US Environmental Protection Agency’s move to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The article’s logical fallacy is the hasty generalization, with a smattering of the slippery slope, and some straw men thrown in for good measure. Now don’t get me wrong. The IPCC’s error about the Himalayan glaciers is horrifying generally and to an extent personally embarrassing. An elementary mistake about Dutch geography undermines the IPCC’s credibility on other unfamiliar simple things. The UEA emails have shown that there needs to be more openness in scientific research. But check out the key line in the article:

It’s too soon to tell whether the critics’ views will force the scientific community to revisit the prevailing view of man-made climate change. Many of their colleagues remain resolute in their stance that global warming is caused mainly by humankind.

It’s fallacious to construct an article on the premise that Lomborg, Christy, Lindzen, Soon, and Kukla have data or ideas that could wipe out the basic physics and environmental science that underpin manmade climate change. The question is wrong. There are no dumb questions, perhaps, but there are wrong questions and this is one of them. The reason that “colleagues remain resolute” is because they have so much data to support their arguments. Could they be wrong? Of course they could be wrong (kind of…). Is that a Mack truck accelerating toward us on the highway? Of course it might not be. But let’s get out of the way until whatever it is passes, shall we?

The media privileges virtually anything anyone says over what the data say. But the data matta! This creates a stylistic conundrum for writers. No sane publication would ever start an article on this topic thusly: “This week in Washington, atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed and emitted electromagnetic radiation at wavelengths between, roughly, 12 to 15 microns. That’s the reliably demonstrated fact from which science’s robust understanding of manmade climate change flows, an understanding challenged by the same four people whose views are contradicted by the evidence in geophysics…”

Zzzzzzzz. The media’s bias isn’t against a political faction, but against boredom.

Punchline: The headline of the story is correct: “Climate-Research Controversies Create Opening for Critics.” They are creating openings. It’s true–but only because editors and reporters are showing at best a lack of rigor.

Winds of Change at Wall Street Journal?: The Wall Street Journal‘s ownership has transferred to News Corps, which owns and operates Fox News and other politically charged news outlets in the U.S. and other parts of the Anglo-speaking world. The paper recently shut down its “Environmental Capital” blog, for the stated reason, one WSJ staff member told me, that it wasn’t getting enough page hits.

There are still, thankfully, at least a handful of prominent reporters who understand climate change from soup to nuts. Their work, and quite frankly, their jobs, becomes more significant as widespread, impoverished mass communication dramatically and rapidly undermines climate policy of any kind at home and abroad.

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.

Snow Is Unequivocal

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

First Things First: Attention turned this week to the Mid-Atlantic snowstorms and how to understand (and misunderstand) them, and also to how the climate science community—namely the IPCC—might prevent mistakes in process and print that have harmed its reputation in recent months.

Three feet of snow have disabled the capital region. The federal government has been closed all week and still is today, Thursday. The political world is still shoveling it out (literally). This leaves two stories of consequence in the week’s spotlight—ones that always lurk in the background: How hard it is to communicate advanced climate science to policymakers and the public, and how hard it is to communicate basic climate science to policymakers and the public.

“Eyes + Snow = Science“: Scientific controversies and errors are increasingly giving political cover to policymakers who would rather not deal with the issue, for any available reason. And the snow has reminded everyone that climate is easy enough to dismiss even without recent black eyes to the scientific community.

Political culture generally won’t bear a chain of causality longer than two links. That’s why so much opportunistic rhetoric this week focused on either of these chains: Global warming equals no snow; or snow equals no global warming. Much of the country finds it politically expedient to anthropomorphize climate science into a certain familiar persona and then beat it like it’s a piñata. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) wrote over Twitter, “It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) built an ice castle that he described as the former vice president’s new home. That’s a fine rhetorical approach for an audience that doesn’t know or care that climate change has nothing to do with Al Gore. Rush Limbaugh ridiculed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for announcing its new information service, Climate.gov, over teleconference rather than a live press conference, due to snow.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the energy committee, observed that the snow makes climate legislation more difficult politically.

In reality, climate change has a causality chain not of, say, two links but of n variables, where n=…  oh, you get the point. And the warming, famously, is unequivocal.

What Comes Down Must Have Gone up: Warmer air holds more moisture. When the temperature drops below freezing, this increased moisture will produce more snow—in this case more than the region has ever recorded. Time‘s Bryan Walsh turns in a concise review. Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC caused a stir by talking about the snow and global warming in the same broadcast. The New York Times makes sure in a lead to reinforce the myth of “two sides” in the climate debate. For thoughtful explorations of the possible relationship between the historic snowstorms and global warming, check out Jeff Masters’ WunderBlog post, “Heavy snowfall in a warming world,” or the Washington Post‘s Capital Weather Gang.

One space to watch is Climate.gov, the NOAA-led initiative to provide various levels of information and responsiveness to Americans’ questions about global warming.

And not that it matters for anything but the box scores, January was the third hottest month globally in 32 years of satellite monitoring.

Opening the Book on ‘ClimateGate’: The Guardian has undertaken an important exercise, publishing a 30,000-word “manuscript” about the pilfered University of East Anglia climate e-mails. The publication leaves the matter an open book, inviting readers to contribute their own observations and insights. More on this initiative once I’ve finished reading it.

New Paneling?: The IPCC was created before the World Wide Web opened vast sources of scientific material to the public. It’s older than the post-cold war era. University of East Anglia professor Mike Hulme, a past IPCC participant, writes in Nature (sub. req.), “It is not feasible for one panel under sole ownership— that of the world’s governments, but operating under the delegated management of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) — to deliver an exhaustive ‘integrated’ assessment of all relevant climate-change knowledge.”

Critics of every persuasion are suggesting how the IPCC should prevent errors large and small, published and procedural, in its fifth assessment report. A collection of opinions in Nature recommend breaking the monolithic United Nations-sponsored edifice into three panels producing shorter, more regular reports; creating an organization akin to the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct transparent scientific, regional, and policy assessments; protecting the layers of review in the current system; and opening the process up to Wikipedia-like community gardening.

Joe Romm of ClimateProgress.org likes to hold feet to the fire. He provides a rather thorough roasting of this New York Times effort to explain the IPCC’s woes.

Cryogenic Politics: The momentum for meaningful climate policy that grew for two years before Copenhagen has come largely to a halt domestically and internationally. The Center for Public Integrity’s Marianne Lavelle continues to track the scale of lobbying efforts in the climate arena. With the president’s original approach to climate legislation flailing, opponents are turning attention elsewhere. Lavelle finds “overt and covert” support for Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution against EPA regulation of heat-trapping gases. The piece documents some activities of the farm, small business, and utility sectors.

The climate backlash continues in the states. California conservatives are pushing for a November referendum on the state’s first-in-the-nation climate law. Advocates have raised about $600,000 to pay staff to gather signatures. Gov. Jan Brewer of neighboring Arizona issued an executive order to drop her state’s participation in the Western Climate Initiative. In Utah, the House Natural Resources Committee last week approved a resolution that states, “[C]limate alarmists’ carbon dioxide-related global warming hypothesis is unable to account for the current downturn in global temperatures.” New York University’s Tyler Volk tried to persuade legislators there to follow the carbon.

The vocabulary of the international policy conversation is changing. “Legally Binding? It’s So 2009″ boasts a ClimateWire story published at NYTimes.com. Negotiators surveyed by the news service suggest that more than a legally binding treaty what the community of nations needs to see is successful and demonstrable actions at home to curb pollution. Trevor Houser of the Peterson Institute for International Economics made the rounds this week with an analysis of nations’ commitments under the Copenhagen Accord.

It’s a Washington truism that if a campaign’s message doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, it will lose. No one has ever managed to reduce global warming, let alone what to do about it, to a successful bumper sticker. And the archipelago of groups that self-identifies as the environmental movement is urged from friendly quarters to re-examine its path forward. Longtime environmental leader Gus Speth delivered the John H. Chaffee Memorial Lecture in January, saying, “The world needs a new environmentalism in America… America has run a 40-year experiment on whether mainstream environmentalism can succeed, and the results are now in.”

Trick Question, Tricky Answers: Last week I posed a query that I then thought about rigorously this weekend while shoveling about 1,000 cubic feet of snow off the driveway and street:  “Have you personally experienced global warming? And how do you know that, exactly?”

The scientifically appropriate answer to first question is, “No.” It makes about as much sense as asking a much-talked-about rookie major league baseball player after a game if he or anyone can say with certainty that his pop fly to deep right field is a reliable index of his future 20-season career batting average.

On the other hand is the increasingly accepted argument, glibly paraphrased, “But come on.” Winter precipitation of increased intensity is predicted for this region. You evaluate the evidence as deeply as you think necessary, or have time for, and make the call.

A few readers did make the call. Alex Smith, who works for Radio Ecoshock in Vancouver, wrote in, “Here in Vancouver, Canada, we have a convoy of trucks hauling snow from the Coastal mountains to our local ski hill for the ‘green’ 2010 Winter Olympics. Turns out, we just had the warmest January on record. All our local snow melted, just weeks before the ski jump and snow board competitions.”

Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, wrote, “You HAVE to be kidding.  Do you know what it costs to insure my home here in the Florida Keys?  How hard is it to get property insurance? [...] Yes, Virginia, there really is global warming.  Just ask any insurance company — and those who pay them who live in the Keys.”

Yes, Virginia—and Maryland, and the District, and Delaware, and Tasmania…

Eric Roston is Senior Associate at the Nicholas Institute and author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. Prologue available at Grist. Chapter about Ginkgo biloba and climate change available at Conservation.