Political Climate Articles
GOP Fairy Tales
Back in the day, one of the key Republican arguments against the estate tax was that it forced hardworking, salt-of-the-earth children of small farmers to sell the family plot in order to pay their taxes after dad died. It was a sad story, but with one problem: no one could find even a single small farmer who had been forced to liquidate in order to satisfy Uncle Sam's voracious maw. Even the American Farm Bureau Federation was eventually forced to admit that it couldn't come up with a single example, and a few years later the Congressional Budget Office estimated that under the now-current exemption level, only a tiny handful of small farms were likely to owe any estate tax to begin with - and of those, only about a dozen lacked the assets to pay their taxes. And even those dozen had 14 years to pay the bill as long as the kids kept running the farm. In other words, the story was a fraud from beginning to end.
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Strengthening America's Security
Identifying, Preventing and Responding to Domestic Terrorism
Aliou Nasse, a Senegalese Muslim immigrant who sells photographs of New York in Times Square, saw smoke coming from an unattended SUV parked beside his stall the evening of May 1. He alerted a nearby police officer. The car turned out to be packed with gasoline cans, propane tanks, and other components of a homemade bomb that would have created a fireball and killed and wounded many if it hadn't malfunctioned.
Nasse's story is a reminder of the critical role Muslims in America have played and must continue to play in fighting domestic violent extremism, said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) at a panel yesterday co-hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the National Security Network. Ellison and several experts discussed how cooperation among government, law enforcement agencies, and the Muslim American community can prevent future violent incidents, such as those attempted by Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber.
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ExxonMobil gave $1.5M to climate disinformation groups last year, breaking its pledge to stop funding denial machine
ExxonMobil gave $1.5 million to climate deniers and industry front groups known for working to create doubt about global warming, attacking the integrity of climate scientists, and protecting the status quo for polluters, according to a front-page story in the Times of London today.
Contrary to its stated commitment to stop funding climate denier groups, the Exxon funding spigot remained as open as the BP gusher, continuing to pollute the media landscape with oil-soaked misinformation designed to cripple international action on climate change.
Greenpeace's ExxonSecrets project has documented the nearly $25 million spent by ExxonMobil since 1998 to fund climate denier groups.
Exxon-funded groups used their latest infusion of oil money to create a media frenzy over the "Climategate" non-scandal and other efforts to derail progress towards an international agreement to fight climate change at the COP-15 talks in Copenhagen last winter.
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General in Iraq under Petraeus on urgent need to pass climate and clean energy jobs bill
Warns of dangers, high costs of inaction
A national television ad released Monday July 19th by Vote Vets reminds us why clean energy reform is so crucial to our national security. The ad, running in North Dakota, Arkansas, Virginia, and West Virginia, reminds us that our dangerous addiction to oil is a threat to our troops and national security:
Brigadier General Steven Anderson (Ret.), Chief of Logistics in Iraq under General David Petraeus, featured in the ad, warns us of the dangerous costs of our addiction:
Our troops are getting killed moving fuel we wouldn't need if our military was more efficient - and our enemies know we're hooked on their oil…. That's why breaking our addiction must not only be a military priority, but America's mission, and why the Senate needs to pass a clean energy climate plan.
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Big oil showdown in California: Economists agree, don't block AB 32!
Yesterday more than 100 economists with expertise in California energy and climate issues signed an open letter warning against delaying the implementation of clean energy policies. The 118 economists support the policies created under Assembly Bill 32, or AB 32 that will "stimulate innovation and efficiency," "help the state become a technological leader in the global marketplace," "improve our energy security, create new business opportunities and more jobs," and "provide immediate benefits to the health and welfare of residents by reducing local pollutants."
AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act that was signed into law in 2006, is under threat from Proposition 23, a Big-Oil funded ballot initiative to repeal the law under the guise of a saving "jobs" (see Battle over California climate law pits polluters against clean energy economy). But as the economists point out, Big Oil's job-killing argument couldn't be farther from the truth.
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Iraq War Veterans Join Environmentalists in the Oiled Gulf of Mexico
Robin Eckstein has a closer relationship than most of us to the long supply chains that brings oil from the well to the wheel. In 2007 she was an Army truck driver in Iraq, shipping fuel from Baghdad International Airport to the forward bases of American operations. The U.S. military is an oil-thirsty machine, and it was the job of troops in logistics, like Eckstein, to keep the occupation fueled. That meant driving miles every day in a fuel convoy through some of the most dangerous streets in the world.
"Every day when we left the airport, I was thinking, time to roll the dice," she said. "Would it be insurgents, an IED, something else? We were just a big, slow, vulnerable target."
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Energy Secretary Emerges to Take a Commanding Role in Effort to Corral Well
WASHINGTON - Energy Secretary Steven Chu may hold a Nobel Prize in physics, but he has no training in geology, seismology or oil well technology. Nevertheless, he has stepped in repeatedly to take command of the effort to contain BP's runaway well, often ordering company officials to take steps they might not have taken on their own.
In early May, he suggested using gamma ray imaging to determine the condition of the well's blowout preventer, a move no one at the company had considered.
A few weeks later, he overruled some BP officials and ordered the company to stop the "top kill" effort, citing "very, very grave concerns" that it could backfire.
He insisted in late June that a tighter cap be installed on the leaking riser. And on Tuesday, over the strenuous objections of top BP officials, he ordered a 24-hour delay in plans to conduct a pressure test on the well, saying that more safety precautions and analysis were necessary.
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Kerry Emanuel calls Climategate "the latest in a series of coordinated, politically motivated attacks ...
...that represent an aggravated assault on scholarship" Slams Lindzen, Singer and Happer as liars
MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel has been at the forefront of trying to explain many aspects of climate science to the public, especially in his field of expertise - hurricanes. He has written a good essay on the hacked emails, " ‘Climategate': A Different Perspective," originally published at the National Association of Scholars [NAS] website. Near the end, he notes:
While the climategate email authors are castigated for not being paragons of virtue, the sins of others go unremarked. In the summer of 2009, a one-page letter was sent to Congress, signed by one actual climate scientist and six physicists with little or no background in climate science, three of whom were retired. Among other untruths, it contained the sentence, referring to evidence of anthropogenic global warming, "There is no such evidence; it doesn't exist." I confronted the sole climate scientist among the authors with this statement, and he confessed that he did not hold that to be the case. Last I checked, lying to Congress was a federal crime.
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Military Greenhouse Gas Emissions: EPA Should Recognize Environmental Impact of Protecting Foreign Oil, Researchers Urge
ScienceDaily (July 21, 2010) - U.S. military operations to protect oil imports coming from the Middle East are creating larger amounts of greenhouse gas emissions than once thought, new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln shows.
Regulators do not currently attribute these emissions to U.S. gasoline use -- but they should, the authors say.
UNL researchers Adam Liska and Richard Perrin estimate that emissions of heat-trapping gases resulting from military protection of supertankers in the Persian Gulf amount to 34.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year. In addition, the war in Iraq releases another 43.3 million metric tons of CO2 annually.
"Our conservative estimate of emissions from military security alone raises the greenhouse gas intensity of gasoline derived from imported Middle Eastern oil by 8 to 18 percent," said Liska, UNL assistant professor of biological systems engineering, and coordinator of the Energy Sciences minor. "In order to have a balanced assessment of the climate change impacts of substituting biofuels for gasoline, a comparison of all direct and indirect emissions from both types of fuel is required."
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Securing Foreign Oil: A Case for Including Military Operations in the Climate Change Impact of Fuels
Military operations are major industrial activities that use massive amounts of fuel and materials that significantly contribute to climate change. In this article, we assert that military activity to protect international oil trade is a direct production component for importing foreign oil-as necessary for imports as are pipelines and supertankers-and therefore the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from that military activity are relevant to U.S. fuel policies related to climate change. Military security for protection of global maritime petroleum distribution is part of the acquisition process, but in addition, recent Middle Eastern wars may also be related to securing petroleum reserves.
A component of U.S. motor fuel policy has been to encourage the development of biofuels as substitutes for petroleum, both to reduce dependence on foreign oil and to reduce GHG emissions. To qualify for this substitution under the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), specific biofuel types must reduce GHG emissions by set amounts from 20 to 60 percent compared with gasoline. The EISA legislation demands evaluation of not only direct life cycle emissions from biofuels, but also all potentially significant indirect emissions. Yet the gasoline emissions against which this is compared consist only of direct life cycle emissions, which to this point have not included emissions due to the military component of transporting foreign oil to the United States. These military emissions are analyzed here to determine their contribution to the life cycle GHG emissions from gasoline production. This analysis builds on a recent estimate that emissions from military security raised the GHG intensity of U.S. gasoline derived from Middle Eastern imports by twofold compared with direct emissions.1
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Overcome by Heat and Inertia
This city just endured its hottest June since records began in 1872, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So did Miami. Atlanta suffered its second-hottest June, and Dallas had its third hottest.
In New York, the weather was relatively pleasant: only the fourth-hottest June since 1872. Then again, New York is on pace for its hottest July on record.
Yet when United States senators and their aides file into work on Wednesday, on yet another 90-degree day, they may be on the verge of deciding to do approximately nothing about global warming. The needed 60 votes don't seem to be there, at least not at the moment.
Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and President Obama may still find a way to cobble together the votes, as they did on health care and financial regulation. Perhaps they can somehow persuade moderate Republicans to support a market-based limit on power plant emissions - a policy that power plants themselves seem open to.
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Climate Uncertainties Tied to Economies of US States:
California, Pacific Northwest and Colorado Achieve Positive Net Impacts; Other States Languish
ScienceDaily (July 22, 2010) - A climate-change study at Sandia National Laboratories that models the near-term effects of declining rainfall in each of the 48 U.S. continental states makes clear the economic toll that could occur unless an appropriate amount of initial investment -- a kind of upfront insurance payment -- is made to forestall much larger economic problems down the road.
Why tie climate change to economics?
"Absent any idea of costs, the need to address climate change seems remote and has a diluted sense of urgency," study lead George Backus said.
The Sandia study uses probability techniques familiar to insurance companies. Tables place dollar estimates on the effects of climate change in the absence of mitigation or other policy initiatives over the 2010-2050 time period.
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Big oil companies lobby against U.S. national security interests, try to weaken Iran Sanctions Act
The recent revelations about BP's alleged role in pressing for the release of convicted Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi in order to secure valuable oil concessions in Libya provides a potent reminder of the influence oil companies and other major corporations exert over foreign policy. New evidence uncovered by ThinkProgress shows that America's own oil giants are also trying to shape U.S. foreign policy to protect or enhance their own profits, even if it puts American security at risk.
Lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Senate this week show that the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Halliburton lobbied the House, Senate, and various executive branch agencies on the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act during the first half of the year as the bill was being debated in the Senate.
Big Oil's interest in weakening the law is obvious. Among other things, the new law, signed by President Obama on July 1, imposes significant new sanctions on individuals and corporations "that directly and significantly contribute to Iran's ability to develop petroleum resources" and that sell more than $200,000 in fuel or other refined petroleum products to Iran. The new sanctions are important because "although Iran is the second-largest oil producer in the world, it lacks refining capacity and relies on foreign suppliers for nearly 5 million gallons of gasoline a day." In addition, the country's energy industry is "a huge source of revenue for the Iranian government and a stronghold of the increasingly powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps," which "oversees Iran's nuclear and missile programs."
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U.S. funds efforts to turn CO2 emissions into products
Can industrial CO2 emissions come in handy? The Department of Energy is betting these carbon dioxide emissions, a culprit of climate change, can be turned into useful products such as fuel, plastics, cement and fertilizers.
DOE announced Thursday $106 million in Recovery Act funding for six corporate projects that will research the potential to use CO2 as an inexpensive raw material.
"These innovative projects convert carbon pollution from a climate threat to an economic resource," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement, citing President Obama's broader plan to build a clean energy economy.
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The world (futilely) waits for U.S. leadership on climate
"If we look at the Indian scene and look at the actions being taken by state and central governments, it's a little bit difficult to understand why it is so difficult to get strong legislation passed domestically in the United States," said Arabinda Misrah, director of the Climate Change Division at The Energy Resources Institute in India, at a CAP panel discussion on Thursday.
Misrah was joined by climate experts from around the world, who described continuing and ambitious efforts to reduce carbon emissions in Europe and the developing world and expressed confusion and dismay at the U.S. Senate's inability to move such legislation forward, as this CAP cross-post explains.
The panel agreed that convincing action from Congress is necessary to persuade governments and private actors worldwide that significantly reducing emissions is both necessary and possible.
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Vets vs. Big Oil: Prop 23 in California
Over the past year, VoteVets.org has worked hard to represent the overwhelming majority of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who not only see our dependence on oil as a security threat, but believe that we need to pass clean energy legislation -- even going so far as to say they are in favor of "cap and trade" (and yes, they were polled using that term).
While Washington haggles and delays, California has taken the lead. California being on the cutting edge of environmental technology and tough regulation is nothing new. Very often the state has led the way for the rest of the nation. From being the first in the nation to regulate tailpipe emissions from cars, to introducing the widespread use two-way catalytic converters before the rest of the nation, to leading the way in fuel efficiency standards, very often California sets the pace for the rest of the United States.
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