Political Climate Articles
Pennsylvania's Gas Wells Booming-But So Are Spills
As more gas wells are drilled in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale, more cases of toxic spills are being reported. Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's environmental officials fined Pennsylvania-based Atlas Resources after a series of violations at 13 wells, including spills of fracturing fluids and other contaminants onto the ground around the sites. And just last week the agency fined M.R. Dirt, a company that removes waste from drilling sites, $6,000 for spilling more than seven tons of drilling dirt along a public road.
The reports come on the heels of a string of other incidents that have killed fish in one of the state's most prized recreational lakes and released toxic chemicals into the environment.
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Pentagon review to address climate change for the first time
The Pentagon is addressing climate change for the first time in its sweeping review of military strategy.
The Pentagon is set to release the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) on Monday, along with the 2011 budget request.
In the review, Pentagon officials conclude that climate change will act as an "accelerant of instability and conflict," ultimately placing a burden on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), a key architect of Senate climate plans, was the first to draw attention to the significance of climate change in the QDR. Kerry said last week that the QDR will list climate change as a security problem that could claim U.S. lives.
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Kentucky greenhouse-emission growth is worst in nation, panel told
Kentucky's greenhouse gas emissions are increasing at twice the rate of the rest of the nation, according to a draft inventory prepared for state environment officials.
The Center for Climate Strategies found greenhouse gases - mainly carbon dioxide - rose 33 percent from 1990 to 2005, compared to 16 percent for the nation. Left unchecked, emissions are projected to increase to 62 percent above 1990 levels by 2030.
Those were among the numbers discussed Thursday as a newly designated Kentucky Climate Action Plan Council met for the first time. The group, which includes elected leaders and representatives of some of the top energy-using industries in Kentucky, has been charged with developing a plan by December to address the causes and likely consequences of climate change.
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Identity of Americans with Secret UBS Accounts May Remain Secret
A deal between the governments of the United States and Switzerland is on the verge of collapse, threatening to keep secret the identities of thousands of Americans who have stashed their money with the Swiss banking giant UBS in order to avoid paying taxes.
The deal, agreed to last August, would have revealed who held 4,450 accounts. However, just days ago, Swiss courts ruled that complying with the agreement would violate the country's laws. The Washington Post reports [1] that since August, only six accounts have been handed over, and then only after the account holders had consented.
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The First Rule of Fighting Climate Change: Don't Talk About Climate Change
Republican pollster Frank Luntz-the brains behind Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" and the man who coined politically potent phrases like the "death tax"-wants to help environmentalists in their push for legislation to combat climate change. His advice? Stop talking about climate change.
The environmental community is "fighting the wrong battle," Luntz announced on Thursday at an event to mark the release of a new report by his polling firm, The Word Doctors, outlining strategies to help marshal public support for a climate bill. "The least important component of climate change is climate change."
Luntz's report, "The Language of a Clean Energy Economy," finds that the majority of the public across the political spectrum is convinced that global warming is happening and caused at least in part by humans. But, Luntz says, talking about the problem won't win support for the legislation that would solve it. Among both Democrats and Republicans polled by his firm, addressing climate change was the least important reason to support a cap-and-trade policy.
So what should environmentalists say instead? Luntz suggests less talk of dying polar bears and more emphasis on how legislation will create jobs, make the planet healthier and decrease US dependence on foreign oil. Advocates should emphasize words like "cleaner," "healthier," and "safer"; scrap "green jobs" in favor of "American jobs," and ditch terms like "sustainability" and "carbon neutral" altogether. "It doesn't matter if there is or isn't climate change," he said. "It's still in America's best interest to develop new sources of energy that are clean, reliable, efficient and safe."
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Energy Measures May Go to Jobs Bill After Brown Win
Measures to spur green-energy jobs may end up in a new economic-stimulus bill after Republican Scott Brown's Senate victory in Massachusetts dimmed prospects for legislation to curb carbon-dioxide emissions.
Provisions to help homeowners reduce power use and make industry more energy-efficient may be shifted out of cap-and- trade legislation that's stalled in the Senate, said Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"Those Democrats who may have already been nervous about a vote on climate policy are even more nervous now," he said.
Brown, who on Jan. 19 won the Senate seat held by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy for almost 50 years, opposes the emissions-trading program that President Barack Obama says is needed to fight global climate change. Republican opponents say the cap-and-trade legislation would boost costs and cut jobs in an economy that already has a 10 percent unemployment rate.
"A large cap-and-trade bill isn't going to go ahead at this time," Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, told reporters in Washington yesterday.
Putting energy provisions into a bill to stimulate job creation instead "makes sense" because that's the Senate's next priority after health-care legislation, Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, said before Brown's win.
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Exxon-Xto Deal Forces Congress to Reconsider Natural Gas
With a $31 billion swipe of its virtual debit card, Exxon Mobil Corp. has started changing decades-old conventional wisdom in Congress that accessing the ocean of natural gas trapped under U.S. soil is merely a pipe dream.
Natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels, and electric utilities that burn it to generate electricity belch out half the amount of carbon dioxide emissions they produce when when they burn coal. Exxon's decision in December to purchase Fort Worth, Texas-based XTO Energy, one of the nation's largest gas producers, could mark a dramatic shift in the way Washington understands domestic energy supply. It also underscores the role that gas is likely to play in cutting industrial emissions, in the United States and in fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.
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Wiley Rein's David Weinberg discusses Obama admin's energy, enviro initiatives for 2010
As Democrats face an uphill battle to this year's midterm elections, which energy and environment initiatives will pass in 2010? During today's OnPoint, David Weinberg, chairman of the Environment & Safety Practice at Wiley Rein, discusses a new report focusing on the Obama administration's environment and energy plans for the year.
Weinberg explains why he believes cap and trade will not pass because of manufacturing states' concerns. He also discusses the administration's shift from favoring legislation to focusing on regulation.
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Too slow to save climate
NEW YORK - ABOUT two thirds of people believe their government and business leaders are not taking the rights steps or at the right pace to prevent global climate change, according to a joint Reuters/Ipsos international poll.
The survey of about 24,000 people in 23 countries, conducted in the lead up to, during and following the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December last year, found 65 per cent of respondents were not happy with the progress and actions to date to conserve the environment.
Only 35 per cent said their government and business leaders were doing the right thing - and only three countries would get passing grades on their environmental credentials from their citizens. These were China which received 86 per cent support from its people, India with 60 per cent support, and Turkey with 54 per cent.
'It's clear that global citizens are underwhelmed by the leadership shown by their own government and business leaders in tackling what they perceive to be a serious threat to the world and themselves,' said John Wright, senior vice president of public affairs from market research company Ipsos. 'The outcome of the recent climate conference in Copenhagen simply goes to reinforce any existing view that much of the backbone and courage that's needed on this issue is missing in action.'
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America 'imports' pollution from Asia
ASIA may be exporting more than just goods to the US. The world's emerging industrial hubs in the region seem to be sending harmful ozone towards North America.
Emissions of gases such as nitrogen oxides are the primary source of ozone in the troposphere. These gases are both health hazards and greenhouse gases. Satellite studies between 1996 and 2005 suggest that there was a decrease in emissions of such ozone precursors from North America and Europe but an increase from China and other parts of Asia.
As ozone levels remain higher than estimated in North America, Owen Cooper of the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, and colleagues decided to investigate. They used data collected between 1995 to 2008 by balloons and aircraft fitted with ozone-measuring instruments. The team also used computer models and meteorological data to retrospectively work out the movement history of pockets of air that had passed over Asia during those years.
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Bipartisan group of 1,198 state legislators urges Congress, Obama to pass climate and clean energy jobs bill
Earlier today, 1,198 state legislators sent a letter to President Obama and Congress calling for prompt enactment of "comprehensive clean energy jobs and climate change legislation." It calls for strong legislation in order to create jobs and increase national security while also protecting against the risks posed by climate change.
The letter, which has signatures of representatives from 49 states including over two dozen Republicans, was sent by the Coalition of Legislators for Energy Action Now (CLEAN), a bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers that formed in October 2009 to push for strong national climate action. These signatories include 76 majority and minority leaders in their state legislatures. Ironically, the one state whose legislators oppose any solutions, Louisiana, has already suffered more than most states from the impacts of climate change.
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Urban Heat Island Myth is Dead
Another climate change denier myth - this one a favorite of Anthony Watts and his "Watts Up With That" blog - has just bit the dust.
Many skeptics for years have sought to explain away decades of climate research by showing slides of weather station thermometers sited next to heating vents or surrounded by asphalt.
This much-touted "urban heat island effect" was supposed to trump all those fancy graphs and equations that egghead scientists were fixated on. Except it's not true.
A recent peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research looked at data from 114 weather stations from across the US over the last twenty years and compared measurements from locations that were well sited and those that weren't.
They did find an overall bias, but it was towards cooling rather warming.
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When Corporations Rule The World (thanks to the Supreme Court)
With its ruling in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Supreme Court has granted corporations even further unfettered access to destroy the fundamental Constitutional protections against corporate control of government. The Chamber of Commerce and ExxonMobil must be thrilled.
The title of David Korten's excellent 2001 book about the rise of corporate control in America popped into my head as I read the depressing news about the Supreme Court's gift to corporate America (as if they need another handout from U.S. taxpayers).
Corporations, Wall Street and other special interests can now spend as much as they want on commercials and literature to call for the victory or defeat of federal political candidates. Unlike previously acceptable "issue ads," candidates can now be mentioned by name, as long as there's no coordination with the candidates or campaigns.
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