Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

ewwww....why does the christian science monitor have "featured content" directly from the coal lobby? seriously, i mistakenly thought that they were a respected source of journalism! i realize that every newspaper is in deep shit right now, but "featuring" content straight from industry groups seems to break at least 3000 different journalistic codes simultaneously!

they want to provide insights on the future of fuel and power, ZS

At least Boxer and Sanders are trying toraise the issue.

It's James Hansen's tax and dividend scheme. I think it would be more politically palatable if instead of a per-capita dividend the bill just incrementally decreased the payroll tax (both employee and employer shares) - same general effect, except for the unemployed/retired, more closely matches the consumer burden of an increased carbon tax, and gets employers (and hopefully science literate Republicans) on board. Toss in a retiree heating oil subsidy if you're worried about Granny freezing.

great timing

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/a-blogs-adieu/

yep. it's the result of the NYT's announcement in January that it was disbanding it's environment desk. took a few months, but here we are. it's ok, though, fox news will continue covering the environment.

1) White House officials have indicated that Obama will approve Keystone XL. here's the line of reasoning:

The official dismissed environmental groups’ contention that building the pipeline would open up vast deposits of the Alberta tar sands, and so increase the emissions that cause climate change. “There have been thousands of miles of pipelines that have been built while President Obama has been in office, and I think the point is, is that it hasn’t necessarily had a significant impact one way or the other on addressing climate change,” the official said.

wow.

2) the long-awaited proposed rule from EPA to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants is going to be delayed. there's some concern that the proposal, as it was written, was not going to be defensible during the inevitable lawsuits. also obama and his administration doesn't really care about climate change. so it's a combo. shit sandwich on rye.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Carbon-Final.jpg

Lovely news to wake up to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Y8w1BOFnI

gotta love the guy at 0:30 and 1:00 in who argues

i read that X is not happening. in order to solve X, we need to rely on market solutions.

listen people, global warming is NOT HAPPENING. but if we're going to solve it, you bet your ass it would be best to let industry develop technology to get us out of this mess!

2:04 in, same thing

"i definitely think there's a free market solution that won't require any government intervention to solve this"

ok great i'm all ears lay it on me

this is a pretty sweet graphic imo:

http://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/01/1276_gigatons_CO2.png

(open it in a new tab if it's too small for you)

Still small. :\

Link to the original?

Also, wtf, guy at 2:55 is all, climate change is real, we should do something about it???

http://infobeautiful3.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/01/1276_gigatons_CO2.png

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-many-gigatons-of-co2/

sorry if that image link isn't working! it shows up perfectly on my computer at work and also at home

Honestly I think IiB could have done a better job with the material. At the very least run the C02 injections vertically, with the predicted consequences arranged accordingly, and run the Mauna Kea CO2 measurements as a layer underneath.

Tar Sands Pipeline oil spill today: http://gawker.com/5993053/tar-sands-pipeline-ruptures-spreading-oil-across-arkansas-town?post=58657647

Pegasus is a fairly small (20 in) pipe that transported Gulf coast crude and imports to Illinois for decades, until the midwest market was swamped by Canadian imports and the flow was reversed in 2006. The break likely has nothing to do with the direction in flow, just age. Exxon's actually one of the better operators in terms of maintenance investment (certainly compared to the former Amoco cowboys responsible for Alaska spills and Deepwater Horizon - bet BP regrets that merger).

haven't read it yet, but bill mckibben (author of the article that prompted this thread) has a new long piece in rolling stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411/

Thanks ZS. I'll have to save reading it for the morning though, lest it induces sleep-preventing angst.

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/chart4.png

notice the slight partisan leaning of the "politicians" chunk

Global warming can't be real because if it was, we'd have to change the way we do things, which could affect our economy.

Has Obama Already Given up on Climate Change? (Ryan Lizza, New Yorker):

...But the budget released this week makes it clear that Obama’s surprising appeal to Congress was an empty piece of rhetoric. The phrase “climate change” appears twenty-nine times in the new budget, but there is no new plan for Congress to take up in Obama’s otherwise ambitious legislative blueprint. There are some worthy energy initiatives that could achieve modest reductions in emissions, but the budget is silent on what Obama will do to aggressively reduce carbon pollution by the biggest emitters, like power plants and automobiles.

It is not as if Obama doesn’t have the power to act. On many issues the President is at the mercy of Congress. He can’t reform gun laws or the immigration system, or rewrite the tax code, without coöperation from the House and Senate. Climate change is different. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, backed by the force of a Supreme Court ruling, has the authority to reduce carbon pollution through regulation. In 2010, when White House negotiators were trying to pass cap and trade, they presented reluctant senators with a promise (some called it a threat): pass a comprehensive bill to deal with the problem or the E.P.A. would move forward on its own. Three years later, the Administration has still not acted on that ultimatum. And, ominously for those who care about tackling climate change, Obama’s new budget proposes to reduce funding for the E.P.A. by 3.5 per cent compared to the current year.

Yeah, but if he pushes too hard at that, how's he going to get a second term?

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/apr/13/climate-change-millions-starvation-scientists?CMP=twt_fd

"Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt."

This is an interesting analysis of our world economy in relation to the natural resources it consumes. Interested to hear Sanpaku's thoughts on it.

In 100 years (after most of the non-renewable resources are depleted), I think (or perhaps hope) Herman Daly will be more important than Paul Samuelson in the economics curriculum.

I haven't gotten to reading Ecological Economics, but went fairly deep into parallel books from outside the insular economics discipline (A Prosperous Way Down, Overshoot, practically everything referenced by Jay Hanson) when I was learning about peak oil a dozen years ago.

There are expensive but plausible replacements for most non-renewables; I think phosphorus may present the biggest challenge for humanity this century.

Also:

It is, in fact, the fate of all kinds of energy of position to be ultimately converted into energy of motion. The former may be compared to money in a bank, or capital, the latter to money which we are in the act of spending … If we pursue the analogy a step further, we shall see that the great capitalist is respected because he has the disposal of a great quantity of energy; and that whether he be nobleman or sovereign, or a general in command, he is powerful only from having something which enables him to make use of the services of others. When a man of wealth pays a labouring man to work for him, he is in truth converting so much of his energy of position into actual energy… The world of mechanism is not a manufactory, in which energy is created, but rather a mart, into which we may bring energy of one kind and change or barter it for an equivalent of another kind, that suits us better—but if we come with nothing in hand, with nothing we will most assuredly return.

- Balfour Stewart, 1883

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneconomic_growth

god i fuckin love this kind of econ shit, its been too long since college

Weird weather on the march: snow in Saudi Arabia

Congratulations folks, we finally did it!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/29/global-carbon-dioxide-levels

great article at tomdispatch about the epic fail of journalism, focusing on the failures of reporting leading up to and during the financial meltdown, and the continuous failure of global warming coverage. here's a bit from the global warming part:

Is the Press Too Big to Fail?

Now, on the great subject of our moment, the press repeatedly clutches for the rituals of detachment. Two British scholars studying climate coverage surveyed 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002 and found that most of them gave as much attention to the tiny group of climate-change doubters as to the consensus of scientists.

And if the press has, until very recently, largely failed us on the subject, the TV news is a disgrace. Despite the record temperatures of 2012, the intensifying storms, droughts, wildfires and other wild weather events, the disappearing Arctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute. The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites -- those high-minded talking-head episodes that set a lot of the agenda in Washington and for the attuned public -- were otherwise occupied.

All last year, according to the liberal research group Media Matters,

“The Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change... ABC's This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes… NBC's Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention… Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming ‘junk science’ on ABC's This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change… In four years, Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.”

George Will knows better:

Although electric cars are 40 percent powered by coal, that being the percentage of U.S. electricity generated by coal, Fisker was supposed to combat global warming, of which there has been essentially none for 15 years. As adult supervision returns, Washington may take seriously the bad news about its harebrained green investments and the good news that refutes the argument for more of them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-courts-finance-committee-give-obama-adult-supervision/2013/03/29/026c8190-add4-11e2-8bf6-e70cb6ae066e_story.html

i would wager that george will has talked more about climate change on the sunday morning shows than all scientists put together.

Fisker was supposed to combat global warming, of which there has been essentially none for 15 years.

This kind of verbal feint where someone drops a known lie into a sentence as an almost-aside makes me seriously want to murder people. Our local George Will-lite, Kevin O'Brien, does this shit. Makes me want to mail him anthrax.

An album by the band Anthrax, that is, JUST IN CASE FBI.

haha people are assholes non-shocker.

A recent study found that some conservatives would not choose an efficient lightbulb with an environmental message, even when they would choose the same bulb without the message.

Conservatives excel at cutting off noses to spite faces, film at 11.

Kind of would like to sign up for a Mars 500 type of deal atm tbh.

Like George Will, Charles Krauthammer is not convinced, and his column similarly gets syndicated everywhere I think:

from his declaration of war on global warming (on a planet where temperatures are the same as 16 years ago and in a country whose CO2 emissions are at a 20-year low)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-the-fall/2013/05/02/6fa564c4-b348-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Chait seems reservedly optimistic, but I don't want to get my hopes up:

And within the environmental world, it is essentially a given that Obama will enact some version of the NRDC plan. Dan Lashof, its lead author, told me, “We are hearing that they’re looking quite seriously at our proposal.” A “person familiar with the matter” told the Wall Street Journal, “You will ultimately see a proposal from EPA to regulate existing power plants.” A group of electric utilities has already circulated a paper predicting that the EPA will do just that.

New regulations would have to withstand a certain legal challenge from the energy industry—though, crucially, implementation would not have to wait as cases wind their way through the courts. The EPA’s authority has withstood several high-profile challenges before, because the law is so broadly written; on the other hand, the challenges to Obamacare remind us that precedent cannot fully predict the behavior of agitated conservative judges. Also like the Obamacare challenge, the legal fight will play out against the backdrop of political war. [...]

So the administration and its allies have been mobilizing for combat. It’s not insignificant that Obama chose Denis McDonough, who has a deep background in climate change, to be his second-term chief of staff, or that he promoted Gina McCarthy, who oversaw the rewriting of EPA regulations in his first term, to run the department. Democratic Senators are vowing to block any House Republican attempt to handcuff the EPA. Working in Obama’s favor is the fact that Americans, while disturbingly blasé about climate change, favor federal regulation of greenhouse gases by huge majorities.

Lashof predicted the following sequence of events. The agency will finish drafting its regulation scheme by the end of the year. It will then take about a year of public comments and revisions, at which point it will finalize its rule. That will be the end of 2014, just after the midterm elections. Another nine months to a year will be required to carry out the rule, which will get us to the end of 2015—and the international climate summit.

thanks for posting that! i meant to post it the other day, along with some of the discussion that chait's article generated.

grist's david roberts mostly agrees:

What I think has my friends upset, and where they differ, is Chait’s overall assessment: that Obama is therefore “the environmental president.” The question here is — as it is for every historical figure, but especially Obama, and especially on climate — compared to what?

Is Obama a success on climate compared to what needs to be done? Ha ha. No. Of course not. But then all world leaders fail that test. Chait says 17 percent carbon reductions by 2020 is greens’ “holy grail,” but it’s more like a moldy grail. We now know that much more is needed. For the U.S. to truly do its part, to achieve carbon zero by 2040 or so, would require massive systems change, an all-hands-on-deck wartime mobilization. Obama is not delivering that, or anything close, nor could he.

...The question for me is whether Obama has been a success compared to what was (and is) possible. And here, I’m with Chait: If he delivers ambitious regulations on existing power plants, then yes, Obama will be an overall success on climate and energy, even if he approves Keystone. Given the situation he inherited — a vertiginous economic crisis followed by persistent high unemployment, a Republican Party now single-mindedly devoted to nihilistic opposition, and a series of choke points like the filibuster that give a committed congressional opposition almost total veto power — he has accomplished a miraculous amount. (Remember universal health care? That was cool.)

joe romm does not:

The entire premise of Chait’s piece is that the failure to pass a climate bill isn’t fatal to Obama’s legacy because, near the end of his 8-year presidency, Obama is going to embrace tough carbon pollution standards for existing power plants along the lines of what the Natural Resources Defense Council has proposed (see here). Modified rapture!

Now I don’t think one can discount the fact that using the EPA to deal with carbon opens the door to significant delay through the courts. Worse, if the Republicans can ever figure out how to win the presidency again, they could slow, stop, or roll back the whole thing.

And why wouldn’t the GOP? Team Obama’s catastrophic climate silence — a silence his White House inanely imposed on much of the progressive and environmental establishment back in 2009 (see here) — coupled with his utter failure to push hard for a Senate vote, has turned a winning political “wedge” issue into something that is mistakenly perceived to be a political loser by much of the political establishment. His embrace of an “all of the above” energy strategy, which is to say no strategy at all, has legitimized a massive expansion of fossil fuel production — and export.

of course i'm glad that apparently the administration is planning on pushing new rules through EPA. but hearing the words "the environmental president" tossed around with respect to obama leaves a really sour taste. no sense in repeating the complaints for the millionth time. the environmental accomplishments that he has overseen have been great - improved MPG standards, the clean energy stuff in the stimulus, regulations on new power plants. but he still plays politics with the atmosphere (apparently not realizing that it's not an option), he still pukes up Frank Luntz-friendly "all of the above" rhetoric, he still refuses to say "climate change". we just passed 400 ppm. the 450 ppm limit that's often referenced as the scientific community's consensus figure of what is reasonably "safe" is out of date. that was the number that was being used back in IPCC 2007 days, but anyone that has even cursorily followed climate science over the last few years knows that 450 ppm is far too conservative.

and then there's the real possibility new EPA rules on existing power plants could be rolled back. the actions that the Obama administration now appear to be taking with respect to new regulation on existing power plants could have been put in place back in 2009. back then, in the golden days of the cap-and-trade legislation, the main argument against relying on EPA regulation to tackle climate change was the regulation could be rolled back if/when a republican president came into power. if they would have put them into place back then, in the early years of the obama presidency, at least there would have 7-8 years for the rule to play out. as usual, industry would have screamed that new rules would be the downfall of america and trigger the apocalypse, but the actual compliance to the requirements would cost a fraction of what they claim (as commonly happens with env. regulations, e.g., the acid rain program's regulation on NO2 and SOx in the early 1990s). but now, the rule would go out in the final year or two of the obama years (if we're lucky), and a new republican president could simply roll them back as soon as they install their stooges in the proper positions, before there's a chance for the rule to prove that it can implemented without armageddon.

also, the inevitable suing by industry and delays and appeals etc etc.

anyway, given that there's pretty much no possibility of carbon legislation right now (even though you'd think a carbon tax would be part of the discussion on a "grand bargain" on taxes/deficit/etc) , obv. regulation is the way to go. i'm just pissed they didn't do it earlier.

Twenty years of corporate-funded climate change denial in a country deeply wedded to cheap energy has pretty much poisoned the well for a political solution in the USA.