The Biggest Climate Victory You Never Heard Of

The fight against coal in the U.S. has achieved great success due to activists' passion and commitment. 

By Mark Hertsgaard, originally published at Al Jazeera

Coal is going down in the United States, and that's good news for the Earth's climate. The US Energy Information Administration has announced that coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive conventional fossil fuel, generated only 36 per cent of US electricity in the first quarter of 2012. That amounts to a staggering 20 per cent decline from one year earlier. And the EIA anticipates additional decline by year's end, suggesting a historic setback for coal, which has provided the majority of the US' electricity for many decades.

Even more encouraging, however, is the largely unknown story behind coal's retreat. Mainstream media coverage has credited low prices for natural gas - coal's chief competitor - and the Obama administration's March 27 announcement of stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. And certainly both of those developments played a role.

But a third factor - a persistent grassroots citizens' rebellion that has blocked the construction of 166 (and counting) proposed coal-fired power plants - has been at least as important. At the very time when President Obama's "cap-and-trade" climate legislation was going down in flames in Washington, local activists across the United States were helping to impose "a de facto moratorium on new coal", in the words of Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, one of the first analysts to note the trend.

Another surprise: most of these coal plants were defeated in the politically red states of the South and Midwest. Victories were coming "in places like Oklahoma and South Dakota, not the usual liberal bastions where you'd expect environmental victories", recalls Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign, which provided national coordination for the local efforts. The victories in Oklahoma were particularly sweet, coming in the home state of Capitol Hill's leading climate denier, Senator James Inhofe.

Of course the activists had help: the falling cost of natural gas and a decline in electricity demand following the 2008 financial collapse made coal vulnerable. But it was grassroots activism that turned this vulnerability into outright defeat, argues Thomas Sanzillo, a former deputy comptroller for the New York state government who has collaborated with Beyond Coal. "If the activists hadn't been there talking to government regulators and newspaper editorial boards and making the case that coal was a bad bet," Sanzillo explains, "the plants would have gone forward, because the utility companies would say, ‘We can handle the costs,' and those [government] boards are often good ol' boy boards."

How Energy Drives The World

The Energy Wars Heat Up

By Michael Klare, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Conflict and intrigue over valuable energy supplies have been features of the international landscape for a long time.  Major wars over oil have been fought every decade or so since World War I, and smaller engagements have erupted every few years; a flare-up or two in 2012, then, would be part of the normal scheme of things.  Instead, what we are now seeing is a whole cluster of oil-related clashes stretching across the globe, involving a dozen or so countries, with more popping up all the time.  Consider these flash-points as signals that we are entering an era of intensified conflict over energy.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict -- all tied to energy supplies -- that have made news in just the first few months of 2012:

Payola For The Most Profitable Corporations In History

And Why Taxpayer Shouldn't Stand For It Anymore

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Along with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.”  Last week, for instance, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez proposed ending some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry with a “Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act.”  It was, in truth, nothing to write home about -- a curiously skimpy bill that only targeted oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas, and you won’t be surprised to learn that even then it didn’t pass.

Still, President Obama is now calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz -- even at those stops where he’s also promising to “drill everywhere.” And later this month Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a much more comprehensive bill that tackles all fossil fuels and their purveyors (and has no chance whatsoever of passing this Congress).

Whether or not the bill passes, those subsidies are worth focusing on.  After all, we’re talking at least $10 billion in freebies and, depending on what you count, possibly as much as $40 billion annually in freebie cash for an energy industry already making historic profits.  If attacking them is a convenient way for the White House to deflect public anger over rising gas prices, it is also a perfect fit for the new worldview the Occupy movement has been teaching Americans. (Not to mention, if you think about it, the Tea Party focus on deficits.) So count on one thing: we’ll be hearing a lot more about them this year.

But there’s a problem: the very word “subsidies” makes American eyes glaze over. It sounds so boring, like something that has everything to do with finance and taxes and accounting, and nothing to do with you. Which is just the reaction that the energy giants are relying on: that it’s a subject profitable enough for them and dull enough for us that no one will really bother to challenge their perks, many of which date back decades.

By some estimates, getting rid of all the planet’s fossil-fuel subsidies could get us halfway to ending the threat of climate change. Many of those subsidies, however, take the form of cheap, subsidized gas in petro-states, often with impoverished populations -- as in Nigeria, where popular protests forced the government to back down on a decision to cut such subsidies earlier this year. In the U.S., though, they’re simply straightforward presents to rich companies, gifts from the 99% to the 1%.

If due attention is to be paid, we have to figure out a language in which to talk about them that will make it clear just how loony our policy is.

Start this way: you subsidize something you want to encourage, something that might not happen if you didn’t support it financially. Think of something we heavily subsidize -- education. We build schools, and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we’ve raised. The theory is: young people don’t know enough yet. We need to give them a hand when it comes to further learning, so they’ll be a help to society in the future. From that analogy, here are five rules of the road that should be applied to the fossil-fuel industry.

Climate Change Disappears From Keystone XL Pipeline Debate

Mining and using tar sands oil creates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. But that's rarely mentioned anymore. 




By Lisa Song, originally published at InsideClimate News

When President Obama traveled to Cushing, Okla. last week to declare his support for building the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline, he stressed that the pipeline and other oil infrastructure projects would be done "in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people."

But missing from the speech—and from most recent discussions of the controversial project—was any mention of climate change or the greenhouse gas emissions associated with mining Canadian tar sands.
Climate change was once front and center in the pipeline debate, with federal agencies as well as environmentalists weighing in with their concerns.

In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency noted in its analysis of the State Department's draft environmental review of the Keystone XL that a comprehensive evaluation would have to consider the tar sands industry's greenhouse gas emissions, which the EPA calculated on a well-to-tank basis to be 82 percent greater than conventional crude oil.

"Alongside the national security benefits of importing crude oil from a stable trading partner, we believe the national security implications of expanding the nation's long-term commitment to a relatively high carbon source of oil should also be considered," the EPA wrote.

A year later, the EPA wrote in comments on the State Department's second draft that it was "concerned about levels of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with the proposed project, and whether appropriate mitigation measures to reduce these emissions are being considered."

The EPA asked the State Department "to identify practicable mitigation measures" for the "entire suite" of greenhouse gases associated with operation of the Keystone XL.

In a statement issued in November, the State Department said that any decision on whether the pipeline is in the national interest should consider "all of the relevant issues," such as "environmental concerns (including climate change), energy security, economic impacts, and foreign policy."

Over the past year, the pipeline's opponents have focused their campaign on protecting the fragile Nebraska Sandhills, and climate change has taken a back seat in the debate. But environmentalists have long warned that the pipeline would lock in the United States to a particularly dirty form of oil that would further exacerbate global warming.

One of the most-quoted lines has come from climate scientist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who calls the tar sands a "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet."
Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, said the Keystone protest has always been driven by "the fear that the tar sands will help destabilize the climate."

"Our colleagues in Nebraska did a great job of highlighting their concerns about the Ogallala aquifer and the Sandhills, but for those of us in the other 49 states, global warming was the single biggest reason for this fight," McKibben told InsideClimate News in an email on Friday. "Which is why it would have been nice for the president to say something about it [in Cushing], considering he was standing in the state that just went through the warmest summer any American state has ever recorded."

President Obama gave his speech against a backdrop of steel pipes at the Stillwater Pipe Yard, which is owned by TransCanada, the Alberta-based company that wants to build the pipeline. The president's stop in Cushing was part of a nationwide tour to publicize his administration's "all of the above" energy strategy.

Republished with permission of InsideClimate News, a non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers energy and climate change—plus the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are shaped.

Republican Gasbags

Rising gasoline prices are being viewed with glee by Republicans who see it as a vehicle to undermine the President's economic agenda, energy policies and political prospects.

Laura Clawson lays out the Republican perspective:   

First off, prices should be rock bottom at all times, because it is the God-given right of Americans to use the maximum possible quantity of fossil fuels, the retail cost of which should therefore not reflect their true costs. Second, the way to keep prices at rock bottom is through the aforementioned "drill, baby, drill" strategy. Third, President Obama is a wild-eyed environmentalist-socialist who is coming between Americans and their God-given right to more oil, and therefore everything is his fault.

Accordingly, Republicans plan to use the fear of rising gas and oil prices to support for their push for increased domestic production and to challenge Obama's blocking of construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

 Clawson points out that Republicans are conveniently ignoring that we have been "drilling, baby, drilling," with domestic crude production on the rise since 2009.  Indeed, "the number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad­rupled in the past three years."

And, as Robert Reich helpfully explains, rising gas prices have nothing to do with offshore drilling or the Keystone XL.  There are three causes of the increase.  First, "on the supply side, is Iran’s decision to cut oil exports to Britain and France in retaliation for sanctions put in place by the EU and United States." Second, "on the demand side, is rising hopes for a global economic recovery – which would mean increased oil consumption."

But, as Reich explains, neither of these would matter much if it weren't for the third cause:  "overwhelming bets of hedge funds and other money managers that oil prices will rise on the basis of the first two reasons."  

How come Republicans aren't railing against speculators.  Reich suggests it might have something to do with the fact that "hedge funds and money managers are bankrolling the GOP as never before."  

Could be.

The Great Carbon Bubble

Why The Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet -- as we shall see -- it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology.

Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history -- 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data -- statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet -- you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to... deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

Why The GOP Loves Keystone XL

By Mike Ludwig, cross-posted from Truthout

Senate Republicans announced a bill on Monday that would allow Canadian oil company TransCanada to begin construction of its proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would run 1,700 miles from Canada to Texas.

The bill's top sponsors - Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), John Hoeven (R-North Dakota), David Vitter (R-Louisiana) - are the same lawmakers who authored a provision in the payroll tax cut extension in December that required President Obama to approve or deny the pipeline within 60 days.

Blaming the deadline, President Obama rejected a permit for the project earlier this month because the State Department had recently decided to push back its final decision another year to allow officials in Nebraska time to explore alternative pipeline routes that avoid environmentally sensitive areas and a large freshwater aquifer.

Lugar's bill would allow TransCanada to begin construction in other states while Nebraska works to find an alternate route.

Obama said the rejection was not based on "merits" of the project, and in the past week, the president unveiled plans  to expand domestic oil and gas production that include leasing 38 million underwater acres in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told ABC news that the House would attach similar pipeline approval legislation to an infrastructure and jobs bill that will be introduced next week.

What Has Occupy Accomplished

By Fuzzyone

A friend with whom I have been debating the merits of the Occupy movement asked me what I thought about this New Yorker Talk of the Town piece by Jane Mayer.  In it she discusses the campaign that led to the delay, and one hopes eventual abandonment, of the Keystone XL pipeline.  At the end of the piece she has a condecending reference to the Occupy Movement:

Yet the Occupy movement could do worse than to learn from the pipeline protest. The difference between the focussed, agenda-driven campaign fought by the environmentalists and the free-form, leaderless one waged by the Occupiers, the historian Michael Kazin says, is that the environmentalists grasped the famous point made by Dr. King’s political forebear, Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

But Mayer, of whom I am generally a fan, misses a fundamental point. She notes that on November 6 12,000 people encircled the White House to protest the pipeline.  The turn out exceeded expectations and was far more than participated in earlier protests at the end of August.  Mayer does not explain the difference and while she rightly lauds Bill McKibben for organizing the anti-Keystone actions, she neglects to mention this: before the November protest McKibben sought the support of the Occupy Movement and that the very environmentalists leading the protest were also aligned with Occupy.  (A McKibben piece on the issues appeared right here back in October.)

This is, in part, the impact of the Occupy Movement.  It has awakened, energized and empowered people who are frustrated by the way in which big money has shut them out of decision making in this country and that awakening has the potential to revitalize activism in this country.  Energy may need direction to have its fullest effect, but first you have to create it.

Mitt Romney Might Not Be Crazy But He Is Still A Wing-Nut

Donkey Hotey

Mitt Romney is touted as the most rational and intelligent, and least extreme and toxic of the silly collection of GOP presidential hopefuls. Also giving Romney relatively more credibility is the fact that the extreme radical wing of the Republican Party (perhaps a redundancy) doesn't trust him.  None of this, however, means Romney is anything close to a moderate voice, and his election as President of the United States would be an unmitigated disaster.

The New York Times on Sunday had a long piece on the methodology of Romney's private equity firm by which he made his fortune.  The article described the "unintended human costs and messy financial consequences behind the brand of capitalism that he practiced for 15 years," which propelled companies towards bankruptcy and led to "waves of layoffs."

I previously noted the troubling fact that Romney's legal adviser is none other than Robert Bork, whose radical interpretation of the Constitution either reflects or is shaping Romney's views.

After the most recent debate, Romney made clear that he is with the pro-torture crowd, with aides asserting that Romney does not believe waterboarding is torture, but that he "is not going to spell out" what forms of enhanced interrogation he would employ.

Romney's views on abortion have, shall we say, "evolved" over time.  What is relevant is his current position.  According to his spokesperson, Gail Gitcho:  Romney supports "a Human Life Amendment that overturns Roe vs. Wade and sends the issue back to the states. Mitt Romney is pro-life, and as he has said previously, he is supportive of efforts to ensure recognition that life begins at conception. He believes these matters should be left up to states to decide."

He has also gradually "morphed" into a climate change denier, stating recently: "we don't know what's causing climate change," and "the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us."

And, as Politico reports, Romney is relying on former President Bush's energy advisers:

Already on board the Romney train are Jim Connaughton, who ran Bush’s White House Council on Environmental Quality for all eight years; former Assistant Energy Secretary Andy Karsner; former EPA air chief Jeff Holmstead; and former EPA congressional affairs liaison Edward Krenik.

This is not a good sign.  Christopher Mims at Grist writes:  "Connaughton and Holmstead, especially, have made it their lives' work to cripple the EPA and block its new rules. They've done it from the inside as government officials and from the outside as lobbyists and businessmen, and they know better than anyone else what works when you're trying to tear down America's already kinda lax environmental regulations."

It sure appears that demeanor aside, Romney fits comfortably alongside the other Republican candidates for President.  This should be quite discomfiting for all of us.

Tar Sands Victory Shows That Climate Change May Be An Election Issue After All

In his introduction at Tom Dispatch to Bill McKibben's piece below, Tom Englehardt says that the movement McKibben and 350.org spearheaded to stop the Keystone XL pipeline "gained traction in our Occupy Wall Street moment" and is a harbinger:  "Sooner or later, Americans are going to wake up to climate change, just as they have this year on the issue of inequality, and when they do, watch out.  There will be political hell to pay."

Obama’s Positive Flip and Romney’s Negative Flop

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election, which may effectively kill the project, makes it clear that other issues will weigh in -- and that, oddly enough, one of them might even be climate change.

The pipeline decision was a true upset.  Everyone -- and I mean everyone who "knew" how these things work -- seemed certain that the president would approve it. The National Journal runs a weekly poll of “energy insiders” -- that is, all the key players in Washington. A month to the day before the Keystone XL postponement, this large cast of characters was “virtually unanimous” in guaranteeing that it would be approved by year’s end.

Transcanada Pipeline, the company that was going to build the 1,700-mile pipeline from the tar-sands fields of Alberta, Canada, through a sensitive Midwestern aquifer to the Gulf of Mexico, certainly agreed.  After all, they’d already mowed the strip and prepositioned hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pipe, just waiting for the permit they thought they’d bought with millions in lobbying gifts and other maneuvers. Happily, activists across the country weren’t smart enough to know they’d been beaten, and so they staged the largest civil disobedience action in 35 years, not to mention ringing the White House with people, invading Obama campaign offices, and generally proving that they were willing to fight.

Tar Sands Action To Give White House Group Hug And Demand He Reject The Keystone XL Pipeline

Denying the permit for a brutally stupid, money-grab like the Keystone XL pipeline is a no-brainer,  right Mr President?” -- Julia Louis-Dreyfus

This Sunday, November 6, thousands of people will join hands and encircle the White House to urge President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.  This will demonstrate the powerful support to reject the pipeline – and the serious consequences for his re-election if he doesn’t.

Of course, the consequences for the planet would be far more dire.  As explained by the Tar Sands Action campaign:

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would carry tar sands oil, some of the dirtiest fuel on the planet, over 1,700 miles from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline risks a BP-style oil spill over one of America’s largest sources of fresh drinking water, the Ogallala Aquifer. The nation’s top climate scientist, NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, says that fully exploiting the tar sands could mean “game over” for the climate.

Tar Sands Action campaign released this video of Julia Louis-Dreyfus laying out he challenge to the President to "make the right call."

Will Obama’s Enviro Betrayals Cost Him in 2012?

By Mark Hertsgaard, cross-posted from his website

[Mark ghostwrote this editorial for The Nation]

“If he didn’t mean it, he shouldn’t have said it.”  Referring to President Obama, environmental activist Bill McKibben was saying this a lot during the sit-ins he recently led outside the White House to urge Obama to block a climate-killing tar sands pipeline to run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.  Two weeks of protest resulted in 1,253 arrests, making it the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of US environmentalism.  It concluded September 3, one day after Obama made one of the most fateful—and shameful—decisions of his presidency: ordering the EPA to delay new regulations on ozone emissions because the rules pose undue “burdens” on corporate polluters.

McKibben was urging Obama to live up to his 2008 pledge that in his presidency the rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet begin to heal.  Of course, some might claim the standard to which McKibben is holding Obama is politically naïve.  Candidates for president routinely make promises they don’t keep.  But voters aren’t stupid.  What matters is why a candidate breaks a promise: is it because he won’t deliver, or he can’t?  If a president falls short because of circumstances beyond his control or insurmountable opposition, voters can understand and even forgive—if the president puts up a fight.  But if a president fails because of mistakes or weakness—if he is not seen as a strong leader—it leaves voters confused, demoralized and open to alternatives.

Obama has thirteen months to persuade voters that they should blame not him but the GOP for his presidency’s shortcomings.  He has much less time to convince the thousands of activists nationwide—who do the grunt work of getting out the vote—that he’s worth their sweat and sacrifices one more time.

It’s no secret that Obama is far from closing either deal, and the tar sands pipeline and ozone regulations demonstrate why.  Yes, the president has done some good things on the environment; the fuel efficiency standards he pushed through this year, for example, will significantly lower air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.  But he has done bad things as well, including opening vast tracts of the West to coal mining and providing much more funding to nuclear and fossil fuel than to green alternatives.

Obama’s ozone decision, however, has provoked particular outrage, for four reasons.  First, by ordering the EPA to delay the promised ozone regulations, the president repudiated science; the independent panel of experts advising the EPA were unanimous in recommending the tougher regulations, which would reduce incidence of child asthma and avoid 12,000 deaths a year.  Second, Obama’s order was possibly illegal. The Clean Air Act expressly forbids the government to consider the economic impacts of its regulations; public health is the sole criterion (a stipulation upheld in 2001 by the Supreme Court, with none other than archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia writing the opinion). EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who has described the existing regulations as “not legally defensible,” has now been undercut by her boss, raising questions about whether she—the administration’s strongest environmental voice—will resign. Third, in making his announcement, Obama channeled the antigovernment mantra of the Chamber of Commerce, citing “the importance of reducing regulatory…uncertainty,” thus buttressing the discredited argument that regulation costs jobs. Fourth, Obama blatantly double-crossed environmentalists, who were suing the EPA over these regulations when Obama took office. His aides persuaded them to drop the suit because Obama’s EPA would soon strengthen the regulations.

Overriding the EPA in this manner sets an ominous precedent for the tar sands decision, which Obama is scheduled to make by year’s end. Bear in mind, as the president likes to say, that both decisions are his alone; he can’t blame Congress for tying his hands. The EPA has twice lambasted reports by the State Department that absurdly claim that the Keystone XL pipeline—projected to transport the dirtiest fossil fuel on earth across 1,700 miles of North America, including the crucial Ogallala aquifer—would have “no significant environmental impact.” Citing the EPA’s estimate that the tar sands in Alberta, if burned, would emit 82 percent more greenhouse gases than conventional fossil fuels, McKibben has called the pipeline “a fuse to the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet,” behind Saudi Arabia. The claim that the tar sands will reduce US dependence on petro-dictators is just as dubious. One of the refineries the pipeline will supply in Texas is half-owned by Saudi Arabia’s state oil company.

Mainstream voices tell progressives unhappy with Obama to grow up: your whining threatens to elect a Republican in 2012, who would be much worse. But they are the ones who aren’t savvy. Fear of the dark side will cause most of the Democratic base to give Obama their votes, but it will not be enough to persuade them to give up their evenings and weekends to get out the vote for him, to sway independent and undecided voters. It’s a normal reaction. If Obama approves the pipeline, explains Courtney Hight, his Florida youth-vote director in 2008 who was arrested in the protest outside the White House, “it is just human nature that the resulting disappointment will sap the enthusiasm that drove us to work so hard last time.”

Obama still has time to bring his message into line with the stirring vision he conveyed in 2008. Perhaps, however, he thinks he can win without a strongly motivated base, relying instead on the powers of incumbency, not least the enormous amounts of money he is raising. If he chooses that course and it fails, spare us any prattle about unsophisticated progressives being at fault. A defeated Obama will have no one to blame but himself.

Occupy The White House: Stop The Keystone XL

Bill McKibben writes that while an energized left may have brought Obama to the party in 2008, once he got there he didn't want to dance with us, "he wanted to dance with Larry Summers."  

Tom Engelhardt explains that "there is already a kind of “occupy” movement forming, in particular to protest the proposed 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline that is to bring the dirtiest “tough oil” from Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico."  McKibben has been at "the forefront of the environmental “occupy” movement" and reports on it from the front lines.

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

For connoisseurs, Barack Obama’s fundraising emails for the 2012 election campaign seem just a tad forlorn -- slightly limp reminders of the last time ‘round.

Four years ago at this time, the early adopters among us were just starting to get used to the regular flow of email from the Obama campaign. The missives were actually exciting to get, because they seemed less like appeals for money than a chance to join a movement.

Sometimes they came with inspirational videos from Camp Obama, especially the volunteer training sessions staged by organizing guru Marshall Ganz. Here’s a favorite of mine, where a woman invokes Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez and says that, as the weekend went on, she “felt her heart softening,” her cynicism “melting,” her determination building. I remember that feeling, and I remember clicking time and again to send another $50 off to fund that people-powered mission. (And I recall knocking on a lot of New Hampshire doors, too, with my 14-year-old daughter.

It’s no wonder, then, that I’m still on the email list. But I haven’t been clicking through this time. Not even when Barack Obama himself asked me to “donate $75 or more today to be automatically entered for a chance to join me for dinner.” Not even when campaign manager Jim Messina pointed out that, though “the president has very little time to spend on anything related to the campaign… this is how he chooses to spend it -- having real, substantive conversations with people like you” over the dinner you might just win. (And if you do win, you’ll be put on a plane to “Washington, or Chicago, or wherever he might be that day.”)

Not even when deputy campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon offered to let me “take ownership of this campaign” by donating to it and, as an “added bonus,” possibly find myself “across the table from the president.” Not even when Michelle lowered the entry price from $75 to $25 and offered this bit of reassurance: “Just relax. Barack wants this dinner to be fun, and he really loves getting to know supporters like you.” Not even when, hours before an end-of-September fundraising “deadline,” Barack himself dropped the asking price to three dollars. God, have a little self-respect man!  Three dollars?

Here’s the thing I’m starting to think Obama never understood: yes, for most of us the 2008 campaign was partly about him, but it was more about the campaign itself -- about the sudden feeling of power that gripped a web-enabled populace, who felt themselves able to really, truly hope. Hope that maybe they’d found a candidate who would escape the tried-and-true money corruption of Washington.

Five Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Solyndra

By Dave Johnson, cross-posted from Campaign For America's Future

Oil-backed conservatives have been absolutely ecstatic over the collapse of American solar-power company Solyndra and the rise of China as the dominant country in green energy, because they think they can turn this into a story that makes President Obama and government look bad. It also gives them a bonus opportunity to attack alternatives to coal and oil.

So is there really a "scandal" behind what happened to Solyndra? Or is this just one more conservative smear, made up from whole cloth and spread around conservative outlets, talk radio and FOX News, hoping the "mainstream media" will be tricked into propelling the propaganda out to the public?

The Smear Machine

When Bill Clinton was president, conservatives developed and refined a "smear machine" technique of making up accusation after accusation after accusation (after accusation after accusation), repeating them endlessly and hysterically in conservative-funded outlets, and working to get major media outlets to pick up and repeat them. Unfortunately they were often successful at driving phony smears into the public arena. Even though the stories were invariably refuted after investigation, by the time each smear was refuted many, many more were circulating. After a while people began to believe "where there's smoke there's fire."

One such story that major outlets repeated involved the supposed "sale" of an Arlington cemetery plot for campaign contributions. When it was proven to be nothing more than a false smear, the repetition in major outlets was justified "because it's just the sort of thing he might have done."

In the 2004 presidential election we saw the process repeated with the "Swift Boat" smear that turned around Sen. John Kerry's lead in the polls. It was entirely a made-up lie, but the mainstream media picked it up and propelled it.

Since President Obama's election, right-wing media outlets have again been engaged in creating a constant stream of negative and destructive "stories" that try to turn the public against the president, Democrats in general and government itself.

We have been told that the President is secretly a Muslim terrorist, was not born in the United States and therefore is an illegitimate president and is a "socialist" out to destroy our way of life. They have claimed he raised taxes when in reality he cut taxes, that he "tripled the deficit" when in reality he cut the deficit from the $1.4 trillion hole Bush left us in, that his stimulus plan "created zero jobs" when in reality it turned around a rapidly-deteriorating economy, that he has dramatically increased spending when in reality he did not—all in an attempt to turn people against him and against the idea that government can be a force for good. (See Three Charts To Email To Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law.) Accusation after accusation has been shot down.

The Phony Solyndra Solar Scandal

By Dave Johnson, cross-posted from Campaign For America's Future

Well here's a surprise: conservatives and oil interests are pushing deceptive and destructive stories about President Obama and clean energy. Imagine that! Their intent (as always) is to turn people against President Obama, clean energy, national energy policy, stimulus to help the economy, and government in general. It's what they do. Here is some information to help you push back on the latest whipped-up, anti-green, anti-government, anti-Obama "scandal."

Solyndra

Solyndra was a startup solar-power equipment manufacturer based in Fremont, California that went bankrupt at the end of August. The company's solar collectors used a special tubular internal design that let it collect light from all directions, and were made with a copper-indium-gallium-diselenide (CIGS) thin film that avoided using then-expensive silicon. It was one of several companies that received assistance from the government, in an attempt to push back on China's strategic targeting of green-energy manufacturing.

The company, partly backed by the conservative Walton family had received a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. The loan, which was originally pushed by the Bush administration, was 1.3% of the DOE portfolio.

The economy tanked and cut demand, and at the same time Solyndra could not compete with subsidized companies located in China as they rapidly scaled up. So Solyndra ran out of money. Conservatives and oil interests are using the bankruptcy as a platform to attack green energy and the idea of green jobs in general, solar power in particular, President Obama as always, stimulus funding and the idea of developing a national strategic industrial policy to push back on China and others who have their own national policies to win this key industry of the future.

Conservative Attacks

Conservative are accusing the Obama administration of corruption in choosing Solyndra to receive a government loan guarantee. The typical conservative-outlet story follows a template of Glenn-Beckian accusations that someone "connected to" Obama has "ties" to something. When you hear the phrasing "has ties to" you should understand this as code-speak for "has nothing to do with but can be made to appear to have some sinister involvement if you twist the wording a certain way."

Farm Baby Farm (Organically)

Organic Farming = Energy Security

by Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, originally published at PAN's website, on

With gas prices well over $4/gallon, conversation with my neighbors frequently turns to the vulnerability of our fossil-fuel-based economy and to the future of our planet. The good news I can share today is that organic farms — besides being good for the soil, environment and our health — are proving to be much more energy efficient than conventional systems.
The latest evidence comes from Canada. York University recently completed a comprehensive analysis of 130 studies comparing energy use and global warming potential of the two farming approaches.
Researchers found that organic grain growers in Canada’s prairie region had 50% lower energy use than conventional growers, primarily from the elimination of chemical nitrogen fertilizer in their operations. Meanwhile, organic dairy farmers were 64% more energy efficient (and also emitted 29% less greenhouse gases) than conventional farmers.

These findings shake up the concept that ‘bigger’ is always better. Higher crop yields, bigger equipment, less genetic diversity, and more fertilizer and pesticides do not equal a more energy-efficient operation. - Rod MacRae, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University

One more reason to get serious about sustainability. So what's the next step? 

Incremental vs. Transformative Change

Connecting the dots for us, authors of the U.S. National Resource Council’s (NRC) 2010 report, Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century, have just published a succinct re-cap of their findings in the May 6 issue of Science.

Their main message is a wake-up call:

Achieving sustainable agricultural systems will require transformative changes in markets, policy, and science.

Incremental changes are good and necessary, they explain. These include specific practices and technologies that address shortcomings in mainstream conventional agriculture. However, the narrow, technological fix approach is “inadequate to address multiple sustainability concerns.”

What we also need is a “transformative approach that builds on an understanding of agriculture as a complex socioecological system.” This approach requires “whole system redesign”. Examples include organic farming, alternative (grass-fed) livestock production, mixed crop-livestock systems and perennial grains (see Green Land Blue Waters for a great example). As you can imagine, all this is music to my systems-thinking, agroecologist's brain!

These transformations are not so many utopian dreams, but rather firmly within our grasp. NRC’s scientists make the argument that as we already have many successful examples of these innovative systems on the ground, we should realize that the problem is not fundamentally technological or scientific. Rather, it is a problem of market structure, policy incentives, funding priorities and engagement by a well-informed public.
Luckily for us, transformative action is at hand if we want it. Now is the time to get involved in building a visionary 2012 Food and Farm Bill.

Take action >> If you haven't called your Senator yet this week, urging her/him to protect green payments to farmers who are conserving our soil, water and biodiversity, here’s your chance. The issue is live right now in Congress. Please call!

Shutting Down California Nukes

Norman Solomon has been a true progressive voice on politics and the media.  He has written books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005), and for many years penned a nationally syndicated "Media Beat" column. He has also been a North Bay political activist, most recently as a leader of the region’s Green New Deal commission and the national Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.  Now he is running for Rep. Lynn Woolsey's Marin-Sonoma County seat in Congress.  Solomon, paraphrasing Paul Wellstone's famous comment about representing the democratic wing of the Democratic Party, says that he will represent the progressive wing of the Progressive Caucus.  He has already been endorsed by Blue America, and you can donate to his campaign by clicking the Blue America badge on the right panel of the blog.  You can also learn more about Norman and his campaign here.  Below is his latest article on the importance of closing nuclear power plants in California, which he has allowed me to cross-post here.  As Howie Klein points out, this piece will not endear him to the utility companies that are funding the so-called liberals running against him for the nomination.

It's Time To Close California's Nuclear Power Plants

by Norman Solomon, originally published on Huffington Post, April 28, 2011 

The facts all point to this "inconvenient truth" -- the time has come to shut down California's two nuclear power plants as part of a swift transition to an energy policy focused on clean and green renewable sources and conservation.

The Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo and the San Onofre plant on the southern California coast are vulnerable to meltdowns from earthquakes and threaten both residents and the environment.

Reactor safety is just one of the concerns. Each nuclear power plant creates radioactive waste that will remain deadly for thousands of years. This is not the kind of legacy that we should leave for future generations.

The Oil Company Gusher

By Robert Reich, originally published on his website, April 28, 2011.

Exxon-Mobil’s first quarter earnings of $10.7 billion are up 69 percent from last year. That’s the most profit the company has earned since the third quarter of 2008 — perhaps not coincidentally, around the time when gas prices last reached the lofty $4 a gallon.

This gusher is an embarrassment for an industry seeking to keep its $4 billion annual tax subsidy from the U.S. government, at a time when we’re cutting social programs to reduce the budget deficit.

It’s specially embarrassing when Americans are paying through their noses at the pump.

Exxon-Mobil’s Vice President asks that we look past the “inevitable headlines” and remember the company’s investments in renewable energy.

What investments, exactly? Last time I looked Exxon-Mobil was devoting a smaller percentage of its earnings to renewables than most other oil companies, including the errant BP.

In point of fact, no oil company is investing much in renewables — precisely because they’ve got such money gusher going from oil. Those other oil companies also had a banner first quarter, compounding the industry’s embarrassment about its $4 billion a year welfare check.

Good Energy In California

My friend, Peter Miller, Senior Scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote following article, originally published at California Progress Report.  



A Golden Future For A Renewable State

by Peter Miller, April 18, 2011

While Congress stalls on America’s clean energy future, California is already making renewable energy the resource with which we’ll power our way to the future. Just last month, the California Legislature passed the 33 percent Renewable Portfolio Standard with broad bipartisan majorities. This legislation increases the share of renewable energy supplied by electricity providers to 33 percent by 2020. California lawmakers who supported the bill were no doubt listening carefully to their constituents who resoundingly defeated Proposition 23 last November, sending a strong signal that they want to move forward with a clean energy future now.

A national poll from Pike Research shows that support for renewable energy sources is extremely high with 75 percent or more people having a favorable view of solar and wind energy. And a recent California survey also found that over 90 percent of Californians approve of wind and solar energy as sources of electricity for the state.

It’s not surprising that there is broad support for renewables in California and a growing consensus for clean energy in the rest of the country. With more than 12,000 cleantech companies in California, clean energy programs including the 33 percent RPS will create thousands jobs over the coming years and spur billions of dollars of investments in infrastructure projects, contributing to the state’s economic recovery.