Political Climate News
5th District candidates united against cap and trade
EDMOND — EDITOR'S NOTE: This is one of several stories on the Republican 5th Congressional District debate put on at the University of Central Oklahoma Thursday. To learn more about global climate change, visit the NASA Web site at climate.nasa.gov.
Republicans campaigning for the 5th Congressional District at a recent debate appeared unified on at least one topic — they described man-made global warming as a myth.
"Cap and trade is a sick joke perpetuated by a bunch of global warming mystic hooligans that believe the globe is warming up and it was caused by man," said Rick Flanigan of Bethany at the University of Central Oklahoma last week.
Cap and trade is an environmental policy to lower emissions causing pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. President Barack Obama has placed cap and trade as key to his environmental agenda of reducing climate change. The government caps the limit of certain emissions that cause air pollution to reduce what many scientists say contributes to global warming.
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16 'Endangerment' Lawsuits Filed Against EPA Before Deadline
Industry groups, conservative think tanks, lawmakers and three states filed 16 court challenges to U.S. EPA's "endangerment" finding for greenhouse gases before yesterday's deadline, setting the stage for a legal battle over federal climate policies.
Filing petitions yesterday were the Ohio Coal Association, the Utility Air Regulatory Group, the Portland Cement Association, the state of Texas and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Another was filed by a coalition that includes the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the American Petroleum Institute, the Corn Refiners Association, the National Association of Home Builders, the National Oilseed Processors Association, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, and the Western States Petroleum Association.
The lawsuits ask the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review EPA's determination that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. That finding -- released in December in response to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling -- allows the agency to regulate the heat-trapping emissions under the Clean Air Act. Observers expect the court to consolidate the petitions.
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Nobelist Chu on IPCC and emails
On his optimism for a climate bill: "There are half a dozen to a dozen" GOP Senators in play.
First, the main findings of IPCC over the years, have they been seriously cast in doubt? No....
On balance if you look at all the things the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of experts convened by the United Nations to advise governments in responding to global warming] has been doing over the last number of years, they were trying very hard to put in all the peer-reviewed serious stuff. I've actually always felt that they were taking a somewhat conservative stand on many issues and for justifiable reasons….
They should be able to say that this is serious science and take a somewhat conservative view. If you look at the climate sceptics, I would have to say honestly, what standard are they being held to? It's very asymmetric. They get to say anything they want. In the end, the core of science is deeply self checking.
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Climate policy and jobs: What economists know
I. Addressing Climate Change Can Lead to Net Job Growth in the United States
Many economists believe that due to the global downturn, the US will experience high rates of unemployment (>6%) for a number of years to come. However, a steady shift toward climate protection will likely boost net job growth in the US:
* Reduced oil imports would create jobs. Reducing oil imports can save hundreds of billions of dollars each year on imported oil. Rather than send this money abroad, it can be spent at home, creating jobs. We have the potential to create 900,000 new jobs in the US for very $100 billion decrease in oil imports.
* Carbon solutions invest in labor intensive domestic jobs and domestic resources. The solutions to climate change—ranging from renewable energy, to high-speed rail, to smartgrid investments, to sustainable biofuels—depend more on domestic resources, and also use more labor per dollar invested, than do fossil fuel alternatives. One recent study suggested that a switch towards carbon-reducing investment could create 1.7 million near term jobs (Pollin et al. 2009).
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CO2 Capture and Storage Gains a Growing Foothold
The drive to extract and store CO2 from coal-fired power plants is gaining momentum, with the Obama administration backing the technology and the world's first capture and sequestration project now operating in the U.S. Two questions loom: Will carbon capture and storage be affordable? And will it be safe?
On a placid bend of the Ohio River in West Virginia sit two coal-fired power plants. The Philip Sporn Plant boasts four boilers from the 1950s, surrounded by mountains of coal and a series of man-made lakes to contain the toxic residue of its coal-burning. A faint haze emanates from its main smokestack, the only visible sign of the thousands of tons of acid-rain-forming sulfur dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen oxides, and climate-warming carbon dioxide it emits each day, a consequence of the plant's complete lack of pollution-control technologies. The 1,100 megawatts of electricity it produces will never benefit from such controls, as they are too expensive to install on the multiple small boilers, according to the plant's owner, American Electric Power.
But just beyond Sporn's waste ponds stands the steaming cooling tower of American Electric's Mountaineer Power Plant, which burns 12,000 tons of coal a day to produce steam in a single massive boiler and generate up to 1,300 megawatts of electricity. Roiling white water vapor billows out of its 100-story smokestack, a visible sign of the scrubbers and other technology that remove as much as 98 percent of the plant's sulfur dioxide emissions and 90 percent of its nitrogen oxides.
And to top it off, since October, an oversized chemistry set employs baker's ammonia (ammonium carbonate) to strip more than 90 percent of the CO2 from a small portion of the Mountaineer plant's waste gas and turn it into ammonium bicarbonate. Heat and pressure in another part of the carbon-capture machine turn that back into baker's ammonia, delivering a nearly pure stream of CO2 gas that is compressed into a liquid and pumped into two wells that drop 1.5 miles beneath the earth. There, the captured CO2 is stored permanently between grains of rock.
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Covering Climate Change
In late November, a few weeks before world leaders gathered in Copenhagen to negotiate a climate treaty, thousands of personal e-mail messages and documents were stolen from a University of East Anglia private server. The unknown hackers revealed how some distinguished climate scientists doubted select data, avoided the occasional information request, and disdained climate change deniers.
The stolen files were posted on various conservative websites, and skeptics quickly circulated the conversations as evidence that climate change is all a fraud. Within two weeks, print, broadcast, and radio news worldwide reported on the scandal, known as Climategate. CNN aired Global Warming: Trick or Truth? on the same day as the United Nations climate summit opened. The attempt at objectively reviewing both scientists' and skeptics' arguments resulted in no conclusion. Again, not taking any stances, reporter Tom Foreman told the host.
Midway through the Copenhagen summit, five Associated Press reporters reviewed the hacked files themselves. They read 1,073 e-mails one by oneabout 1 million words in total-and concluded that scientists "stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data, but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked." The impressive amount of time and resources that the AP invested for the story served the public good, but given the dire straits affecting most newsrooms, it was quite possibly the only news organization that could afford to do so.
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World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental damage, report estimates
Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment
The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world's biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found.
The report comes amid growing concern that no one is made to pay for most of the use, loss and damage of the environment, which is reaching crisis proportions in the form of pollution and the rapid loss of freshwater, fisheries and fertile soils.
Later this year, another huge UN study - dubbed the "Stern for nature" after the influential report on the economics of climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern - will attempt to put a price on such global environmental damage, and suggest ways to prevent it. The report, led by economist Pavan Sukhdev, is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage.
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Investigations of Stimulus Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Below is a list of cases in which stimulus money has gone to contractors under investigation or with serious violations in their past. It also includes problems found in inspector general reports. We'll be updating this regularly - so if you have new information about a case or have one we should add, e-mail us. Related article
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Stimulus funds for clean energy largely unspent
Only 63,000 of the jobs directly created or saved by the stimulus bill last year were clean-energy jobs. That number should rise, economists say.
Making a "tremendous down payment on the clean energy transformation" of the United States was a top priority of the Obama administration's economic stimulus package – but, despite some notable accomplishments, it remains mostly a promise at this point.
Most of the funds from the stimulus still haven't been spent, and the clean-energy down payment is a long way from being completed. Its impact so far on those jobs has only been lightly felt in pockets across the nation, economists and others watching its impact in their regions say.
"It's fair to say the stimulus is a down payment, but I wouldn't call it a tremendous down payment at this point," says Joan Fitzgerald, an expert on economic development at Northeastern University in Boston, who has analyzed the stimulus's impact on the wind-power and other clean-technology industries.
Overall, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or stimulus bill, has seen $263 billion spent of the $787 billion available by the end of last year. As a result, the US economy is now employing about 1.5 million to 2 million more workers, the President's Council of Economic Advisors recently reported – and other independent economists agree.
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