Political Climate Articles
La. Police Doing BP's Dirty Work [Video]
Everyone knows by now that BP is still blocking press access to oil-spill sites even though they're not supposed to anymore. I've been blathering about it for weeks, and it's been all of three days since four contractors wouldn't let me through the Pointe Aux Chenes marina outside Montegut, Louisiana. And though as of June 16 the federal government was saying helicopters could fly reporters as low as 1,500 feet around spill sites, on June 17 I was on a helicopter that was prohibited from flying below 3,000 feet (and whose pilot flipped silent birds at the "military guys" coming over the radio and hassling him about being in the area at all). But a Louisiana sheriff's deputy* pulling over a video camera-wielding private citizen because the head of BP security wanted to ask him some questions is a whole other level of alarming.
Last week, Drew Wheelan, the conservation coordinator for the American Birding Association, was filming himself across the street from the BP building/Deepwater Horizon response command in Houma, Louisiana. As he explained to me, he was standing in a field that did not belong to the oil company when a police officer approached him and asked him for ID and "strongly suggest[ed]" that he get lost since "BP doesn't want people filming":
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'We Got that Deleted': Canada's Oil Sands Lobby Twisting Washington's Arm
US politicians bend to foreign-backed pressure to soften climate bill.
As U.S. senators debate some of the most sweeping climate change laws in American history, a powerful lobbying effort led by Canadian officials and huge oil firms may be winning big concessions.
Their goal is to keep Alberta's generous "oil sands" reserves flowing south through pipelines. It's a crucial and stable energy supply for the U.S., but one often lambasted for high carbon emissions, strip-mined landscapes and giant ponds of toxic sludge.
Any attempt to close the spigot is fought by an informal coalition that includes Albertan diplomats, Big Oil lobbyists and Canadian cabinet ministers.
A key architect of that effort, Tom Corcoran, whose lobby group has some of the biggest oil companies in the world as members, details later in this story how past battles have been waged and won, and why he can say: "We've been successful."
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G20 summit drops clean-energy pledge
Toronto - The leaders of the world's 20 most powerful developed and developing states (G20) on Sunday dropped a pledge to invest in climate-friendly energy generation from their final summit statement.
Climate change topped the world agenda last year, but was eclipsed after the relative failure of a massive summit in Copenhagen in December. The G20's decision further tones down international pledges to invest in the fight against global warming.
Earlier drafts of the statement for the summit, which brought together the leaders of key states such as China, India and the United States, said that G20 members "reiterate our commitment to ... investments in clean energy."
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Harvard's Cooper says U.S. is on wrong track in policy talks - Video
As the Senate weighs its climate and energy policy options, a new study out of Harvard University evaluates the European Emission Trading System to better understand how a cap-and-trade system would work in the United States. During today's OnPoint, Richard Cooper, a professor of international economics at Harvard University and author of the study, explains which elements of the ETS he believes should be dropped from Senate proposals. He also discusses the successes of the European ETS.
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BP Slick Reached Mississippi While Haley Barbour Went Fundraising In Washington
June 26 NASA satellite imagery shows long ribbons of oil have entered the Mississippi Sound.
As significant amounts of oil from the BP disaster moved past Mississippi's barrier islands this week, Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) partied in Washington DC to raise money for Republicans. On Wednesday, boats were skimming oil near the Petit Bois Island at the Mississippi-Alabama border. Barbour decided to attend to his duties as a political fundraiser:
Barbour on Thursday held Washington fund-raisers for the Republican Governors Association, which he heads, and for one of his political action committees, which is raising money for GOP congressional candidates. His fund-raising is receiving some national media attention and feuling speculation that he is already gearing up for a run for president in 2012.
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Oil's biggest critics are mostly silent
FORTUNE -- The BP oil spill in the Gulf is shaping up to be the worst environmental crisis in American history. Climate change activist groups have every reason to stand on a soapbox and tout their message about the dangers of oil now, while Washington and the world are listening. But for the most part, they haven't.
The alternative energy community is willing to peddle all of the advancements it is making to increase clean energy production, but it won't go so far as to say, "Let's use the spill as a wake up call and get serious about renewables." President Obama said earlier this month that the BP crisis is "the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now." But that call to action has been embraced only as more fodder for political mudslinging.
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UVa lawyers: Investigation by Cuccinelli 'unlawful'
Lawyers for the University of Virginia on Tuesday denounced an investigation by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli into a former climate change scientist as "unlawful" and an "impermissible intrusion on academic and scientific speech and research."
Cuccinelli, a Republican and prominent climate change skeptic, is seeking to subpoena a trove of documents, correspondence and data related to the research activities of former UVa climatology scientist and global warming expert Michael Mann.
Cuccinelli has said he is investigating the possibility that Mann defrauded Virginia taxpayers when he sought four federal research grants and one state grant totaling $466,000 while working at UVa between 1999 and 2005.
Mann became a target of Cuccinelli's probe after the so-called "climategate" scandal, in which thousands of e-mails by climate change researchers — including Mann — were leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Great Britain and posted on the Internet. Critics claim the e-mails are evidence that the climate science community manipulated climate change data.
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Thatcher becomes latest recruit in Monckton's climate sceptic campaign
Monckton's use of Britain's former PM illustrates that climate denialism is about politics, not science
Climate change sceptics last week co-opted Margaret Thatcher into their lobbying campaigns, illustrating once more the strong ideological streak that drives their efforts.
Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley has posted, on the blog operated by former TV weatherman and prominent "sceptic" Anthony Watts, a personal account of his influence on Lady Thatcher's views about climate change during the 1980s. Thatcher shocked the UN in 1989 with a call to action on man-made global warming, but has since made sceptical public statements about anthropogenic climate change.
As we have come to expect, Viscount Monckton's recollection of events makes for interesting reading.
He begins with the claim that: "I gave her advice on science as well as other policy from 1982-1986, two years before the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] was founded", pointing out that the prime minister's policy unit at that time had just six members and that he was "the only one who knew any science". Monckton then goes on to suggest that "it was I who – on the prime minister's behalf – kept a weather eye on the official science advisers to the government, from the chief scientific adviser downward".
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Bachmann: 'I Don't Want The United States To Be In A Global Economy'
BachmannSpeechThis past weekend, President Obama attended the G-20 Summit on international economic cooperation in Toronto, which ended with a declaration calling for member countries to work "to ensure a full return to growth with quality jobs, to reform and strengthen financial systems, and to create strong, sustainable and balanced global growth." Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), however, fears that the 20 countries were really working to set up "a one world government."
In an interview on Scott Hennen's radio show today, Bachmann claimed that the purpose of the G-20 was to "bind together the world's economies." Neglecting the already interconnected nature of the global economy, Bachman declared that "President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy":
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Gingrich: "It's an act of egotism for humans to think we're a primary source of climate change."
And yet more pro-pollution falsehoods: "There's no evidence in American history that regulations ... work to create a better future."
Grist dissects former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in an interview.
Gingrich has long been an just another anti-science conservative eco-fraud pretending to care about the environment who adopted the anti-regulation, pro-technology approach suggested by GOP strategist, Frank Luntz, and popularized by his protege, George Bush (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: "Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah" and "Eco-fraud Gingrich has always opposed clean energy, climate action").
The only "news" Gingrich makes is that he keeps fooling the media with his poll-tested disinformation.
Here's some of the nonsense he told Grist:
Q. What is your position on climate change? How much of a threat do you think it poses?
A. It's an act of egotism for humans to think we're a primary source of climate change. Look at what happened recently with the Icelandic volcano. The natural systems are so much bigger than manmade systems. I am very dubious about claims that we know precisely what's going to happen. And I'm very suspicious of the use of those claims to create much larger governments with much greater bureaucratic controls over our life.
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Republicans demagogue against market-oriented climate measures they once supported
Meanwhile, the blame pre-game show begins
Now that the Grand Oil Party has been overrun by anti-science extremists, even "reasonable" members of the GOP have to demagogue against the most moderate, market-oriented, business-friendly climate policies they once supported:
* Flashback: Carly Fiorina said cap-and-trade "will both create jobs and lower the cost of energy"
* The gold medal for climate flip-flopping goes to Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who now calls cap-and-trade a "disaster" three years after endorsing it
And now that it's clear we're not going to get an economy-wide cap and trade bill, Grist has assembled a collection of the Senate "GOP's most notable flip-floppers" on the issue:
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Sen. Bennett: "I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas."
Says of GOP, "ideology and a demand for absolute party purity endangers our ability to govern once we get into office."
Back in October, Steven Hayward, "the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute" wrote: "The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining."
A similar point was just made by Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) — or made that should be Sen. Bob Bennett (RUT). TP has the story:
Last month, Sen. Bennett came in a distant third behind two other GOP candidates vying for the three-term senator's seat at the Utah Republican Party's nominating convention in Salt Lake City. His defeat was heralded as a Tea Party victory and prompted Utah's other GOP U.S. senator, Orrin Hatch, to say tea partiers "don't have an open mind" and "won't listen." Yesterday, Bennett had some harsh words for his party and its future:
"As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas," Bennett told The Ripon Society.
"Indeed, if you raise specific ideas and solutions, as I've tried to do on health care with [Oregon Democratic Sen.] Ron Wyden, you are attacked with the same vigor as we've seen in American politics all the way back to slavery and polygamy; you are attacked as being a wimp, insufficiently pure, and unreliable."
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A New Direction for Climate Negotiations
The Copenhagen climate summit ended six months ago in what was widely seen in the clean tech and environmentalist communities as a major disappointment. Now, six months later, at the conclusion of yet another climate negotiation in Bonn, Germany, optimism for a climate agreement this year is no brighter than in those dark days of December. Nonetheless, the outlines of a pragmatic new approach are beginning to emerge.
As the founder of an investment business focused on the opportunities that will arise from the transition to low-carbon energy, I was hoping that Copenhagen would mark a decisive response that would signal the transformation of the world's carbon-reliant energy systems toward cleaner, more secure infrastructure. European delegations committed wholeheartedly to a single-track objective: a legally binding international treaty with legally binding reduction commitments for all industrial countries, which, let's face it, is a very compelling goal. But the Europeans just did not pick up the signs that were there long before the conference in Denmark. Neither the United States nor China - the world's largest emitters - were going to sign such an agreement.
The United Nations climate regime, heavily influenced by the European view of the capacity of international law to order and direct behavior worldwide, is now seriously challenged. We have no option but to commit to a multilateral process. It is the most intelligent way to respond to a global collective action problem. And yet we must critically analyze the model for international agreements that the world has been following during the past two decades. In Copenhagen, we had not one, not two - but three! - negotiating documents. Now we are managing all three, and the latest approach, known as the Copenhagen Accord, is gaining in political power.
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