Political Climate
Chart of the Day: Cutting the Deficit
Ah, the American public. God love 'em. The Economist asked if they'd rather tackle the federal deficit by cutting spending or raising taxes, and the runaway winner was cutting spending, by a margin of 62% to 5%. So what are we willing to cut? Answer: pretty much nothing.
As you can see, there wasn't one single area that even a third of the country wanted to cut back on. Except - hold on there! Down in the middle of the table. There is one area that everyone's willing to trim: foreign aid. Good 'ol foreign aid. A category that, as Roger McShane dryly points out, "makes up less than 1% of America's total spending."
Beyond that, there were only four areas that even a quarter of the population was willing to cut: mass transit, agriculture, housing, and the environment. At a rough guess, these areas account for about 3% of the federal budget. You could slash their budgets by a third and still barely make a dent in federal spending.
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Conservative leader Sarah Palin blames 'Gore-gate' for "this snake oil science stuff."
Ex-gov still proud of her efforts to kill off the polar bears
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has called Palin a conservative leader on energy issues. She has also emerged as a conservative thought leader on climate science.
Yesterday, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SLRC) 2010 - "the most prominent Republican event outside of the Republican National Convention," Palin launched into another anti-science diatribe. Here's the video (via TP):
PALIN: We should create a competitive climate for investment in renewables and alternatives … none of this snake oil science stuff that is based on this global warming, Gore-gate stuff that came down where there was revelation that these scientists, some of these scientists were playing some political games. I sued the Feds over this, I sued the Feds over this as Governor for some bogus listing on the ESA, just about got run out of town, of course, by the environmentalists. But now we feel a little bit vindicated because we're realizing through Gore-gate that there was some snake oil science involved in the data collection there.… We invented the Internet, unless that was just another Gore-gate thing too.
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Analysis: Strong carbon cap would cut Iran's petrodollars by over $100 million a day
A strong cap on carbon would significantly cut the flow of petrodollars to Iran's hostile regime, a ThinkProgress analysis shows.
The economic and political strength of Iran's dictatorship is a threat to the national security of the United States and the world, and its nuclear ambitions threaten to destabilize the Middle East. Yesterday, diplomats from "six world powers have met for the first time to discuss imposing new sanctions on Iran for its failure to suspend work on its controversial nuclear program," but negotiators have not yet figured how to achieve President Barack Obama's goal of being "consistent and steady in applying international pressure."
Iran, "which holds the world's second-biggest oil and gas reserves and supplies about 4.5 percent of the world's oil production," uses its oil power "as a strategic asset." One mechanism to control the flow of petrodollars to Iran - whose oil production is worth $120 billion a year at current prices - is for the United States to control its appetite for oil. ThinkProgress has found that a carbon cap that reduces global warming pollution by 80 percent by 2050 would mean Iran would lose approximately $1.8 trillion worth of oil revenues over the next forty years - over $100 million a day [as the figure shows].
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Green economy grows despite policy vacuum
But industry leaders warn that a clear national policy is needed to drive broader investment.
SAN FRANCISCO - The green economy continues to show almost remarkable signs of vitality, business leaders say, despite the near-total collapse of global talks, stalemate in Washington, D.C., and polls showing decreased urgency to tackle global warming.
Driving the industry, investors say, are consumer interest in the environmental and economic benefits of energy efficiency, corporate sustainability mandates and essentially a bet that at some point there will be a price on carbon emissions.
"Although there was definitely a loss of momentum for green business after Copenhagen, many sustainability initiatives are not in response to regulation," said Marc Gunther, editor of Greener World Media, publisher of GreenBiz.com and the annual State of Green Business report.
Two companies that track clean-tech investments see signs of robust growth on the horizon. Nick Parker, co-founder of the Cleantech Group, a San Francisco-based outfit that tracks and advises green investments, estimates the sector could be a $3 trillion economy within 10 years. Last year private investment in clean-tech totaled $5.8 billion, according to Cleantech.
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Uninformed Limbaugh Wonders 'Where Was The Union' At Non-Union Mine Disaster
Last Friday, Rush Limbaugh asked why a coal miner union didn't protect the 29 miners who were killed when Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV, exploded under unsafe conditions:
Was there no union responsibility for improving mine safety? Where was the union here? Where was the union? The union is generally holding these companies up demanding all kinds of safety. Why were these miners continuing to work in what apparently was an unsafe atmosphere?
There's a simple reason the union didn't protect the miners: the Upper Big Branch Mine, like nearly all of the mines under Massey CEO Don Blankenship's control, is non-union. In fact, the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) "tried three times to organize the Upper Big Branch mine, but even with getting nearly 70 percent of workers to sign cards saying they wanted to vote for a union, Blankenship personally met with workers to threaten them with closing down the mine and losing their jobs if they voted for a union."
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Coal: Back to the Future?
In the House debate over climate and energy legislation last summer, coal got a big slice of the pie. A $60 billion slice to be exact, in the form of subsidies to develop carbon capture technology (a.k.a. "clean coal"). But much of the coal industry spent millions of dollars in attempts to torpedo the legislation. On Wednesday, a House panel put the leaders of some of the country's biggest coal companies on the hot seat, grilling them about what exactly they see as the future for their industry in what is almost inevitably going to be a carbon constrained world.
The hearing comes as coal is getting more scrutiny in Washington. There is, of course, the increased attention to mine safety in the wake of last week's tragedy in West Virginia. And the Environmental Protection Agency also recently announced new guidelines governing the controversial practice of mountaintop removal. Meanwhile, the threat of greenhouse gas regulations through either Congress or the EPA looms in the distance, with the Senate expected to take up debate of a bill in the coming weeks.
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Companies tell Congress they need more time to clean coal
WASHINGTON-Coal will keep fueling national and world energy needs for decades to come, but that doesn't have to mean a dirty-power future, coal-industry executives told a House committee today.
Many environmental advocates have contended that technology to trap greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired power plants is years away and will come only at a tremendous cost.
But executives of Peabody Energy, Arch Coal and the Rio Tinto mining company, along with the head of the Ohio Coal Association, told lawmakers that clean-coal technology must be developed before steep penalties on emissions are put in place by federal regulators or climate-change legislation.
"We can provide a safer and cleaner path for coal in the future," said Gregory H. Boyce, chief executive officer of St. Louis-based Peabody Energy, the world's largest private-sector coal company. "Deployable (clean-coal) technology should be available before legislation. We need to take the time to get this right."
The chair of the select committee on energy independence and global warming, Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., warned the executives that their industry needed to stop trying to kill off climate-change legislation. Markey also mentioned the tragedy at Massey Energy's coal mine in West Virginia, saying that "we owe it to the fallen miners and their families" to scrutinize mine safety rules.
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Big Coal's "Stealth Mode" Campaign to Kill the Climate Bill
The coal industry includes companies that profess to support climate legislation but are in fact operating behind the scenes in "stealth mode" to deny climate science and thwart needed action on climate change.
Consider two of the coal companies that keep their heads down and yet still do a lot of damage: Peabody Energy Company, the world's largest private-sector coal producer, and Arch Coal, the second largest U.S. coal producer.
Peabody claims to support climate legislation, but it has been identified as a key figure in opposition to climate legislation.
* In 2008, USA Today wrote that "Peabody is perhaps the staunchest opponent of stringent regulations to cap greenhouse gas emissions."
* In 2006, the New York Times wrote: "Much in the way that Exxon Mobil influences discussion of climate issues in the oil industry, Peabody is a backer of industry-supported organizations that seek to prevent mandatory reductions in global warming emissions and promote demand for coal." The Times also noted that [Peabody Chairman and CEO Gregory] Boyce had chaired a federal advisory panel that produced a controversial report proposing exemptions to the Clean Air Act to encourage greater use of coal.
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How Senator Vitter Battled the EPA Over Formaldehyde's Link to Cancer
When Sen. David Vitter persuaded the EPA to agree to yet another review of its long-delayed assessment of the health risks of formaldehyde, he was praised by companies that use or manufacture a chemical found in everything from plywood to carpet.
As long as the studies continue, the EPA will still list formaldehyde as a "probable" rather than a "known" carcinogen, even though three major scientific reviews now link it to leukemia and have strengthened its ties to other forms of cancer. The chemical industry is fighting to avoid that designation, because it could lead to tighter regulations and require costly pollution controls.
"Delay means money. The longer they can delay labeling something a known carcinogen, the more money they can make," said James Huff, associate director for chemical carcinogenesis at the National Institute for Environmental Health in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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New Date Set For Senate Climate Bill
Looks like a Senate climate bill will not be unveiled the week of Earth Day after all. The new goal for Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., and Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn., to publicly release a potential deal is April 26, sources said.
Earlier this week, Graham explained why the bill would not be released on Earth Day, April 22. "One, we're not ready," he said. Second, he said, the message "had been driven by global warming policy" but is now domestic energy policy, job creation and cleaner air. "We don't want to mix messages here. I'm all for protecting the Earth but this is about energy independence," he said.
Also important to their message and their effort to secure 60 votes is having some business leaders on board by the time they release a draft proposal. Kerry is giving industry officials a phone briefing this evening, a source said. A group of industry and business officials gathered earlier this week to assess the situation and many expressed continued reservations, sources said.
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CUTTING CARBON... BY LAW.
Tax day, the anti-holiday, the day every taxpayer in the US dreads, has come and gone. The paperwork that states our income, or lack there of, has been sent by the April 15 deadline to the Feds so that they can tax us according to the law.
We live in a system that encourages us to make as much money as possible, yet we're punished through higher and higher taxes as we do so. Increasing our monetary intake and building wealth is supposed to be a good thing but our system of taxation discourages it.
The waste, the emissions, the trash, or the garbage of our society and economy, are inherently a bad thing, yet there is little in our system that stops us from being more wasteful. Taxing the leftovers of consumption, instead of one's income, would encourage taxpayers to waste less. Want to cut your tax burden? Emit less and cut your waste.
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It's not the weather
Why can't we rally around a paradigm shift on energy policy? And why can't media get the story straight?
DALLAS – The climate-denying machine had scored yet another undeserved point in what has become a strangely combative and, quite frankly, unbalanced public debate over what most experts believe is now confirmed: Specifically, our planet is under unsustainable stress and its recovery can only begin when public attitudes toward energy generation, consumption, and conservation advance.
The latest distraction came after researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was caused "mostly by human activities."
I see in this the results of a carefully executed campaign by fossil fuel executives to dissuade the public appetite for energy reform. By shrewdly peddling deceptive information to confound and confuse the public's understanding of what is already a complicated subject, the intellectual exchange of ideas has been compromised, and Americans' tentativeness toward climate action has, regrettably, increased.
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Bolivian villagers want compensation as glaciers melt
For the Incas, and most of the Andean civilisations, snow-capped mountains were divinities to be honoured, as they supplied water.
But now it seems those gods are losing their powers. Researchers say that the glaciers are in dramatic retreat across the Andes due to rising temperatures.
In the small village of Khapi, below the stunning - and still snow-covered - Mount Illimani, the sense of anxiety is profound.
An idea has taken root there - that those who have caused the snow to retreat and the waters to slow should be brought before an international court.
What they want is an international court of environmental justice, an idea that is being pushed by Evo Morales, Bolivia's president.
"We are very worried because we have no water. Half the people of this community have already left. Those who remain are struggling with the lack of water," says Max, an elderly Aymara Indian who chews coca leaves as he speaks in heavily-accented Spanish.
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Bolivia climate change talks to give poor a voice
Groups on frontline of global warming head to alternative summit in city of Cochabamba
Rafael Quispe is gearing up for his trip. He packs a small leather bag, puts on his black poncho, an alpaca scarf sporting the rainbow-coloured, chequered Andean indigenous flag and his black hat. "This will be an important gathering, a very important gathering. It is about saving our Mother Earth, about saving nature," he says.
Quispe, an Aymara indigenous leader, is heading for Bolivia's central city of Cochabamba for the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, the grassroots alternative to last year's ill-fated UN talks in Copenhagen.
At least 15,000 people from worldwide indigenous movements and civil-society groups, as well as presidents, scientists, activists and observers from 90 governments, are expected to attend what is being called the "Woodstock" of climate change summits.
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