Political Climate Articles
Perry leads Texas GOP fight against climate bill
DALLAS -- While the U.S. Senate considers a climate bill aiming to dramatically slash air pollution linked to global warming, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and other Republican leaders in the state that leads the nation in greenhouse gas production are watching closely - and objecting loudly.
Perry, backed by powerful business and industry groups, for months has been denouncing the measure, saying it would cripple the vibrant Texas economy and the heavy-polluting oil, gas and chemical industries it depends on. The governor plans to keep up his campaign against legislation he claims would lead to massive job cuts, industries fleeing overseas and more expensive energy for everyone.
"The bill does not help the environment," Perry said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It seems like it's more about controlling than it is on having a real impact on the environment."
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Inhofe trashes generals who advocate for bipartisan clean energy legislation: They crave "the limelight."
The national security threat posed by unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is great (see "NYT: Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security" and "Veterans Day, 2029"). The threat is so clearcut that even the Bush Administration's top intelligence experts were raising the alarm (see "The moving Fingar writes"). Yet, Senator James "the last flat-earther" Inhofe (R-OIL) is now attacking the generals pointing out the national security threat, as Think Progress reports in this repost.
inhofe1In testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, retired Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn articulated a national security argument for passing clean energy legislation. "Continued over reliance on fossil fuels, or small, incremental steps, simply will not create the kind of future security and prosperity that the American people and our great Nation deserve," McGinn warned.
In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member of the Senate environment committee, argued that McGinn and other generals who are advocating for clean energy reform (like Wesley Clark, Stephen Cheney, Brent Scowcroft, etc) are simply doing so because they crave "the limelight":
NYT: Senator Boxer is chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee,on which you are the ranking Republican. She and her fellow Democrats have lately suggested that global warming could be a threat to national security by destabilizing developing countries.
INHOFE: That's the most ludicrous thing. They looked around and they found, I think, five generals to testify before the committee. Well, that's 5 generals out of 4,000 retired generals that say that. There are a lot of generals who don't like to be out of the limelight. They'd like to get back in.
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Fiscal Stimulus Works
Though flawed and unpopular, Obama's stimulus package has helped bolster the recovery.
On Feb. 13, at the urging of President Barack Obama, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The Act created the largest U.S. fiscal stimulus package since the Second World War, amounting to $787 billion (approximately 5% of U.S. GDP). To be disbursed over three years, it was introduced at a time of extreme stress in the U.S. economy, as reflected by:
--real GDP contracting at a quarterly annualized rate of approximately 6.5%;
--payroll cuts exceeding 600,000 per month; and
--financial markets under extreme stress and an equity market in the midst of a major decline.
Since then, these metrics have dramatically improved, although job losses continue. The most crucial U.S. political and economic debate in the coming months--in the context of calls from some Washington lawmakers for a "second stimulus' ahead of the November 2010 mid-term congressional elections--is to what degree government spending has helped avert further job cuts and an even more prolonged recession.
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Energy, transportation and agriculture groups build 'access' to fence-sitting senators
A group of U.S. senators who could determine the fate of a climate bill received more than $20 million in campaign contributions over the past two decades from energy interests with a direct stake in pending legislation.
Electric utilities poured at least $4.2 million to the 27 lawmakers, who are considered "fence sitters" on a global warming bill, according to an E&E analysis of potential votes. The oil and gas sector pumped $5.8 million to the group over the past 20 years.
Transportation companies and their associated unions gave some $6 million combined, while forestry companies and agricultural interests doled out more than $2 million. Environmental groups donated $315,000 over the same time frame.
Many senators insist that such contributions do not buy their votes, even though many have meetings with donors.
"What you really buy with money is access. The lawmaker's door is open," said Al Cigler, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas.
E&E analyzed the contributions using Federal Election Commission data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The numbers represent money funneled through an entity's political action committee or via its individual members or employees. Under federal law, interest groups and unions are banned from donating directly from their treasuries.
The $20 million tally reflects donations from the top 20 sectors giving to each senator. It did not include money from leadership PACs, which allow politicians to collect money to donate to other politicians.
With Democratic leaders scrambling to find a legislative blueprint on climate change that attracts 60 votes to block a filibuster in the U.S. Senate, the group of 10 Republicans and 17 Democrats likely will determine the outcome of an ultimate package in Congress. The House passed a bill in June establishing a mandatory cap on heat-trapping gases….
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Why are Hadley and CRU withholding vital climate data from the public?
No, not the stuff in the stolen emails — although the University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) have yet another statement out I'll excerpt below. It notes "Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate researchers, sceptics and the public for several years."
No, the vital climate data that the Hadley Center and CRU are withholding from the public is the warming taking place in the Arctic (see "What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?"). And that missing data is why NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies data are almost certainly superior to CRU's data "developed in conjunction with Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office."
Remember, "there are no permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on Earth that has been warming fastest," as New Scientist explained (see here and here). "The UK's Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations." Thus it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK's Hadley Center says.
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Congressman McCotter cites experience of cavemen (in 1000 BC!) to deny manmade global warming
The emails may give the anti-scientific ideologues in Congress something new to talk about, but fundamentally it's their anti-scientific ideology that long ago determined their position on the gravest threat to the health and well-being of future generations:
* Inhofe on why global warming isn't real: "God's still up there."
* Lobbyist Dick Armey's Gospel of Pollution (GOP): 'As an article of Faith,' it is 'pretentious' to believe in global warming
* Rep. Shimkus: "Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood." Rep. Barton: "I wish I had another dozen John Shimkuses on the committee."
* Rep. Barton: Climate change is 'natural,' humans should just 'get shade'
* House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical."
As an aside, to the extent that the hacked emails induce conservatives to focus their attacks on the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill on global warming science, I rather think that is a net positive for the overall debate because it just leads them to make nutty statements, like Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), who is a leading Member of the disinformed, as this Think Progress repost makes clear:
Last night on Fox News' Red Eye, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) explained to host Greg Gutfeld why he does not believe that human activity is causing global warming. McCotter, who is the chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, a GOP group charged with helping Republican lawmakers come up with legislative ideas, has used his global warming denials as a pretense for fighting to block cap-and-trade proposals.
Environmental groups have declared that McCotter is a "Caveman Congressman." The satirical Caveman Energy Caucus website notes that lawmakers like McCotter have "chosen OLD energy when they voted no" on Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation. Ironically, as he explained his backwards denial of settled climate change science, McCotter cited the experience of his cavemen namesake to note that the melting of glaciers had a positive effect:
MCCOTTER: Remember, the people who talk about the melting of the glaciers and others, imagine if you were in a peninsula around 1,000 BC or so or earlier and your name was Tor and you're out huntin' mastodon. And you didn't notice that the glaciers were melting and leaving the devastating flooding in its wake that became the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan.
So I think what we have to do is go back in history and look at this and realize that the Earth has been here a long time and they've selected periods of time and say somehow this proves there's a manmade global warming occurring is absolutely wrong. We have to look at the different periods of history, we have to look at the different effects, and then we have to have direct empirical data to correlate between man's activity and the effect on the planet, and that is yet to be proven and highly doubt that it's going to be any time soon.
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Canada's About-Face on Climate
Tar Sands and a Tough Business Lobby Pull Ottawa Far from Copenhagen
Montreal -- When world leaders met on Sept. 22 at the United Nations headquarters in New York for a critical summit on climate change, one head of state of a major oil-producing country notably declined to speak and generally appeared to be missing in action.
While the United States' Barack Obama, China's Hu Jintao, and Japan's Yukio Hatoyama seized the stage, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper made only a brief stop and was soon back home, at a media event in suburban Ontario. There, in the town of Oakville, he declared that his corporate tax cuts had successfully lured back from the U.S. the headquarters of the giant Tim Hortons donut franchise. For the moment anyway, global warming could wait. It was time to bite into a double-glazed.
For Canadians, Harper's lack of interest in the U.N. summit was unremarkable. His policies are firmly rooted in the deep conservative politics of Alberta, the oil-rich western province that is home to many of Canada's most ardent climate change deniers, some of whom are Harper's closest allies. These include Harper adviser and University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper as well as the Calgary-based denier organization The Friends of Science. Canadians recall a 2002 fundraising letter in which Harper launched an attack on "the job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto Accord," referring to the 1997 treaty that tried to put controls on carbon emissions. He called the treaty "essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations." And along with his cabinet members, he has made reference to "so-called greenhouse gases" and the "hypothesis" of climate change.
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Byrd chides coal industry for 'fear mongering'
Sen. Robert Byrd on Thursday issued a long statement with an unusually stern message for the coal industry and its attempts to counter opposition to mountaintop removal mining.
Byrd, D-W.Va., says the coal industry needs to stop using "fear mongering, grandstanding and outrage as a strategy" and instead help stave off global climate change and curb the mountaintop method.
"As your United States Senator, I must represent the opinions and the best interests of the entire Mountain State, not just those interests of coal operators and southern coalfield residents who may be strident supporters of mountaintop removal mining," Byrd said in both the written statement and audio recording released Thursday.
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