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Our own Mary Logan is blogging pretty regularly.  Please check it out.  It's excellent:  http://prosperouswaydown.com/

New Yorker Blasts Obama

 EXCELLENT ARTICLE from the New Yorker!

Storms Brewing

by Elizabeth Kolbert June 13, 2011

When President Barack Obama arrived in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29th, the sun was shining. He toured one of the neighborhoods that the previous week’s tornado had destroyed, then spoke at a memorial service for the dead. (By late last week, the official toll was a hundred and thirty-eight people.) At the service, the President’s tone turned brooding. “The question that weighs on us at a time like this is: Why?” he said. “Why our town? Why our home? Why my son, or husband, or wife, or sister, or friend? Why?” Such questions, the President went on, cannot be answered, as “these things are beyond our power to control.”

Obama’s visit to Joplin was the third that he had made in a month to the site of a weather-related disaster. In mid-May, the President met with Memphis residents who had been left homeless by the flooding of the Mississippi River, and, not long before that, he toured sections of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that had also been flattened by a tornado.

Meanwhile, even as the President was consoling the bereaved in Joplin, residents in Vermont were bailing out from record-high water levels around Lake Champlain; Texas was suffering from a near-record drought that could cost the state more than four billion dollars in agricultural losses; and officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were forecasting that the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season, which formally began on June 1st, would once again be “above normal.” (The 2010 season was tied for the third most active on record.)

The news from abroad was, if anything, more worrisome. Last week, the Chinese government estimated that more than four million people were having trouble finding drinking water, owing to a drought along the Yangtze River. The French agricultural minister warned that an exceptionally hot, dry spring would reduce that country’s wheat harvest. And in Colombia more than two million acres of land have been submerged after almost a year of nearly continuous rain. “Over the past ten months, we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” the director of Colombia’s meteorological agency, Ricardo Lozano, said.

For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.
What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change—there’s always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence—the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth. As the cover of Newsweek declared last week, “weather panic” is the “new normal.” The larger problem is that this “new normal” won’t last. Each additional ton of carbon dioxide that’s spewed into the atmosphere contributes to further warming, thus increasing the risk of violent weather. The day after the President visited Joplin, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, in Paris, announced that, despite the economic slowdown, global CO2 emissions last year rose by a record amount, to almost thirty-one billion metric tons. “I am very worried,” Birol said. “This is the worst news on emissions.”

When Obama took office, he appointed some of the country’s most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration, and it seemed for a time as if he might take his responsibility to lead on this issue seriously. That hope has faded. The President sat on the sidelines in 2009 and 2010 while congressional leaders tried to put together majorities in favor of climate legislation.

Since the midterm elections, Obama has barely mentioned climate change, and just about every decision that his Administration has made on energy and the environment has been wrong. In March, the Administration announced that it would be opening up new public lands in Wyoming for coal mining. In April, the White House delayed plans to impose stricter controls on the mining technique known as mountaintop removal. In May, the Administration put on hold rules aimed at cutting pollution from power plants at places like paper mills and refineries. Also in May, the President announced plans to increase domestic oil production by speeding up permits to drill off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. “Is Obama’s call for more drilling bad messaging masquerading as cynical policy—or vice versa?” the liberal blog Climate Progress asked.
 
Of course, it almost goes without saying at this point that the President’s potential opponents next November are all worse on the issue. Tim Pawlenty, who, as governor of Minnesota, took some commendable actions on climate change, has now renounced them, saying that everyone “has got some clunkers in their record.” Much the same holds for the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, minus the commendable actions. National Journal has summed up the situation this way: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe.”

It would have been insensitive for the President when he visited Joplin, or Memphis before that, or Tuscaloosa before that, to have turned the conversation to climate change. Grieving relatives and displaced families aren’t the right audience for a discussion of energy policy. It should be noted, too, that tornadoes are very tough to predict, and no one yet knows whether this year’s unusually deadly season is the start of a new pattern, or just an aberration.
But, now that the immediate crisis has passed, the President needs to stop asking the kind of questions that can’t be answered and start addressing those that can. Obama knows—and, indeed, has stated as much—that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future.

Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them. It may be beyond our power to control the climate, but we can determine it. This is precisely what we’re doing right now, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: TOM BACHTELL

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/06/13/110613taco_talk_kolbert#ixzz1Ob84cX3V

GOP Denial

From TPM

Every Single GOPer On House Energy Commitee Won't Say Climate Change Is Real

Thirty-one Republicans on the House Energy And Commerce Committee -- the entire Republican contingent on the panel -- declined on Tuesday to vote in support of the very idea that climate change exists.

Democrats on the panel had suggested three amendments that said climate change is a real thing, is caused by humans and has potentially dire consequences for the future. The amendments came on a Republican bill to block the EPA from offering regulations to mitigate the results of global climate shifts. The global scientific community is in near unanimous agreement that climate change is real, and that humans contribute to it.

None of the 31 Republicans on the committee would vote yes on any of the amendments (Rep. Marsha Blackburn [R-TN] declined to vote on one.) The committee's 21 Democrats voted yes on all three.

Though the result may seem shocking to supporters of climate legislation, activists say this is pretty much what they expect from the GOP these days. There was a time when members of the mainstream GOP were ready to offer their own solutions to climate change. But in the tea party age, those Republicans are few and far between at best, observers say.

Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." How true...

News from Costa Rica: Wow: Some enlightened Policy!

I just learned something interesting -- about some enlightened policy in Costa Rica. From ICE (the government owned electric monopoly): As consumption goes up, so does the rate. The first 200 KWh sells for $0.13. From 200-300 is $0.24. Everything above that is $0.33/KWh. They actually want you to use less! And not just paying lip service to it, but building it into their pricing structure. If you want to be wasteful, you will pay!!

Then, to top it off, they have net metering, and run the meter backward at the highest rate! Unlike some US utilities that buy it back at wholesale...

And, unlike almost everything else that is imported here, they waive import duty on solar PV so material costs are relatively low. And installation labor is cheap. I was just quoted $4.65/Watt installed cost for 5-20 KW systems.

80% of the country's electricity comes from hydro. A few years ago it was 100%. As demand goes up, they have to fire up extremely expensive oil-fired power plants at $0.85 KWh to make up the difference. Two years ago when climate change brought about a 2-week delay in the rainy season, the country had rolling blackouts. It is not in ICE's interest to have to build new fossil-based generation capacity just as oil production is peaking.

How nice to see some enlightened policy -- something besides drill baby drill. Hope the CIA, the Bushes, the WTO and CAFTA don't screw it up!

Alternative energy companies are thriving here. Here's a link to a nice 'Bill Reduction Tool' by one of them.

A fantasy or a breakthrough that changes everything?

Organism Makes Diesel Fuel With Sun, Water, CO2

Posted on: Tuesday, 1 March 2011, 06:30 CST

Biotechnology company Joule Unlimited said on Monday that it can produce the fuel that runs some cars and jet engines using its genetically-engineered organism that secretes diesel fuel or ethanol wherever it finds sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company said it can control the organism to produce the renewable fuels on demand and at unprecedented rates, and can do so at costs comparable to the lowest-cost fossil fuels.

The breakthrough could mean "energy independence," the company said.

"We make some lofty claims, all of which we believe, all which we've validated, all of which we've shown to investors," Joule CEO Bill Sims told the Associated Press (AP).

"If we're half right, this revolutionizes the world's largest industry, which is the oil and gas industry," he said.

"And if we're right, there's no reason why this technology can't change the world."

However, the task is not yet complete, and not everyone is convinced the company can deliver on their claims.

More...

Why we can't just pay for some carbon credits

I'm concerned with the reductionist, narrow thinking that leads us to believe that we can actually solve the problems that we are now facing. We have delayed too long, and the problems are now something to adapt to rather than to solve, as JM Greer suggests. My comments below were originally addressed to Charles Wohlforth after he gave a lecture to the Complex Systems Group at UAA on climate change. Cindee said to post them, so I have.

Einstein said that problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them, thus inferring that one needs to think at a larger scale to solve problems. I listened to your talk yesterday and wondered what solutions could come out of a focus on climate change? Carbon credits? Tax credits for hybrids? The former is just a way for corporations to make money off of green initiatives, and a way to give lip service to green behaviors, for a problem that is long-term and secondary (sink pollution) to the real problem. The latter is just a way to churn more corporate profits while allowing business as usual (BAU) to continue. Arguably the embodied energy and use of rare metals in electric (or hybrid) cars, in addition to the costs to run them in terms of using more even higher quality (costly) batteries and/or electricity which is mostly derived from other non-renewable fuels (coal and recently natural gas) is another chimera.

So what is the bigger scale problem that Wohlforth failed to mention in his discussion? His graph plotting the correlation of GDP with CO2 emissions was accurate, but again fails to take a long enough time perspective at the larger scale. What causes CO2 emissions? A better graph would encompass the era of the entire industrial revolution with its population growth plotted against growth in the use of fossil fuels. The real issue is a population in massive overshoot due to 200 years of copious surplus energy in the form of non-renewable fuels.

Given the issue of peak oil, climate change models are probably not even accurate. Meteorologists are notoriously uneducated regarding peak oil, and fail to incorporate a plateau and fall in fossil fuels production starting in about 2005. Climate models extrapolate increasing oil production, while even the EIA is currently (and finally) predicting something different.

Peak oil is going to impact us much faster than climate change, and is a bigger, more imminent threat, as witnessed in the violent responses recently in Egypt. I do not believe that it is a coincidence that Egypt stopped exporting oil last year for the first time, and is now vulnerable through the need to import oil. Energy flows through all of our systems and is essential to our complex society--the take home being that physics tells us that a society with less oil will be less complex. How that loss in complexity plays out is the problem that we need to be addressing now through science.

If you think that the converging crises that we are facing can be addressed by global warming policies, then you're just not thinking on a grand enough scale regarding our problems.

How to talk about the coming changes to planet Earth?

Carolyn Baker in her blog SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER, wrote an outstanding entry this week called "Paradox: Lynchpin of the Long Evergency"  which should be required reading for all of us in the Transition Movement. 

Because some of us in our transition group have been dancing around this issue, this particular paragraph was important to me.

For me, it is crucial to acknowledge and name the collapse of the current paradigm as such. To avoid the word, tip-toe around it in fear of “scaring people,” or cosmetically alter the unraveling of industrial civilization, is essentially tantamount to celebrating a rebirth while ignoring that a death occurred. To deny death while focusing only on transformation reveals the level of denial in which we are steeped and profoundly insults masses of human beings around us who are terrified of the future because no matter how much we prattle about “potential,” “opportunities,” or “resilience,” they are terrified in the marrow of their bones of what the future holds. They do not need us to fluff pillows and bring them a cup of tea, but to validate what they already know is so, even if they are kicking and screaming with all their might against what they know—and to provide them with support for talking about their fears. Every human knows in their gut when someone or something around them is dying because whether we acknowledge it or not, we are connected with everyone and everything on levels which humanity has only begun to understand.

I hope you get a chance to read the whole article.