Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 109

Coal Billionaire Gives Big Boost To Jeb Bush

Coal billionaire Chris Cline claims to control “more than three billion tons of coal reserves in Illinois and Central Appalachia.” On Thursday, his lawyer told Bloomberg News that he also controls Jasper Reserves LLC, a shell company that gave at least $1 million to Right to Rise USA, the super PAC working to elect former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) president in 2016.

Cline has said he believes humanity benefits more from cheap energy than from overreacting to carbon emissions and sea level rise, according to a 2010 Bloomberg Markets profile. According to the piece, “Cline says he was so annoyed when his children’s teachers in Palm Beach, Florida, aired Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth that he asked them to distribute literature that showed that climate change may be caused by clusters of sunspots or the Earth wobbling on its axis, not just carbon.”

On June 1, the Washington Post reported that Bush attended a “closed door conference in Bristol, Virginia” with an array of coal company CEOs. A spokesperson for Bush was quoted in praising the coal titans as people “who are trying to grow the economy and create jobs, something being made more difficult by the excessive regulations and repressive policies of the Obama administration.” Cline was not one of the six CEOs reported to have organized the event.

Two weeks later, Bush told a New Hampshire town hall that he was “a little skeptical” of Pope Francis’ call for action to combat global climate change. “The climate is changing, whether men are doing it or not,” he told the audience.

Indeed, Jeb Bush has been all over the map on climate change. In 2009, he told Esquire he was skeptical that climate change was human-caused and “not a scientist.” In May, he opined: “I don’t think the science is clear on what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. It’s convoluted … And for the people to say the science is decided on this is just really arrogant, to be honest with you. It’s this intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it even.”

Bush has been consistent, though, in opposing government regulations to address the problem.

Cline, whose future profits depend heavily on the ability of the coal industry to avoid carbon emissions regulations like those announced Monday by the Obama administration, gave the camouflaged $1 million donation to Right to Rise on June 29. A day later, Bloomberg BNA quoted Bush as decrying the EPA’s Clean Power Plan as “irresponsible and ineffective.” According to a White House fact sheet, those rules will “avoid up to 3,600 premature deaths, lead to 90,000 fewer asthma attacks in children, and prevent 300,000 missed work and school days.”

Though federal law prohibits any coordination between federal candidates’ campaigns and “independent” super PACs, watchdog groups filed a complaint with the Department of Justice in May, alleging that Right to Rise USA and Bush’s team “are engaged in a scheme to allow unlimited contributions to be spent directly on behalf of the Bush campaign and thereby violate the candidate contribution limits enacted to prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption.” The Bush campaign has denied these allegations.

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Campaign FinanceClimate ChangeClimate Change DeniersCoalElection 2016Jeb BushSuper PACs

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Canada Wants To Ban The Tiny Plastic Microbeads Found In Toothpaste. Here’s Why.

Adding their name to a growing list of microbead opponents, the Canadian government recently announced that it would be moving toward a ban of the tiny plastic particles that are ubiquitous in personal care products.

The announcement, made last week, follows a scientific review of 130 papers, which found that microbeads “may have long-term effects on biological diversity and ecosystems,” according to the Toronto Star. These tiny particles, measuring anywhere from 0.1 micrometres to five millimeters in diameter, are most often used in lotions, makeup, toothpastes, and soaps, normally as an exfoliant.

When those products are washed down the drain, however, the tiny pieces of plastic don’t just dissolve. Instead, they pass through the filters in water treatment systems — too small to be detected — and into waterways, eventually gathering in large bodies of water and adding to the ever-growing amount of plastic trash in the oceans. When consumed by marine life, the microbeads can also make their way up the food chain, potentially ending up in the flesh of fish that humans eat.

On August 1, the government published an order to have microbeads listed as a toxic substance under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which would subject the particles to greater regulation. In addition, the government is hoping to pass regulations that would prohibit the manufacture, import, and sale of products that contain microbeads.

“Banning microbeads from personal care products will help us to continue protecting the environment for present and future generations,” Dr. K. Kellie Leitch, Canada’s Minister of Labour and Minister on the Status of Women, said in a press statement. “We will continue to take action to keep Canada’s lakes and rivers clean, and put the priorities of Canadians first.”

Canada joins a growing list of countries and states that have recently banned — or attempted to ban — microbeads. In January, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden jointly requested that the European Union ban microbeads from personal care products. In the United States, Illinois became the first state to issue a ban on microbeads last year. In May of this year, California joined Illinois in passing a statewide ban of products containing microbeads. Similar bans have also been proposed in Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, while states like New Jersey, Colorado, Maine, and Wisconsin have passed weaker bans allowing the use of biodegradable microbeads in personal care products.

Producers are also responding to the recent backlash against microbeads by voluntarily agreeing to phase them out of their products. According to the Economist, both Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive have agreed to stop using microbeads in their products, with Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson promising to follow suit by 2017.

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Iowa’s Kids Will Now Be Taught Accurate Climate Science In School

The state that will host the first-in-the-nation caucuses and a Republican presidential debate in January of next year will be teaching its kids mainstream climate science in school.

On Thursday, the Iowa State Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards, which set science and engineering educational expectations for public school kids. They are voluntary guidelines that allow states to decide if they want to provide standards that include the teaching of climate science and evolution.

This makes Iowa the 15th state to approve the standards, joining Arkansas (for middle school), California, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia.

“All Iowa kids will now have access to a world-class science education that includes learning the scientific evidence about human-caused climate change,” said Dr. Maria Filippone, a parent of an Iowa seventh-grader, according to a statement from the advocacy group Climate Parents. Filippone said learning about climate science “will help them develop solutions to the largest problem facing their generation.”

Iowa, a leader in clean wind power production, will play host to more than half a dozen Republican presidential candidates, many of whom have either denied the reality of climate change or questioned it.

Parents across the country have found different ways of talking about climate change with their children, and some start early. Now, instead of sporadic lessons in earth science classes, from grades 8-12, Iowa’s public high school students will now be learning about the evidence that leads the vast majority of scientists to the conclusion that human activity causes climate change.

Despite the unanimous vote, the acceptance of the standards did not come without a fight. A bill introduced by Iowa state Rep. Sandy Salmon would have stopped the NGSS from being implemented. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported that Salmon was concerned that the standards were developed outside of Iowa, that they covered evolution, and that the standards would “shine a negative light on human impacts on climate change.” The standards were in fact developed by science educators in 26 states, including Iowa, as well as the National Academy of Sciences.

The bill died in committee earlier this year.

“The focus is on promoting the politically controversial topics of climate change, which is a highly debatable topic, man’s impact on the environment, and evolution as a scientific fact,” Rep. Salmon said in May.

The push to get states to adopt the standards, rejecting the backlash from conservative politicians in many states, has been growing over the last several years. Last June, several organizations released the Climate Science Students Bill of Rights, which states that students have the right to, among other things, receive high-quality education “free from ideological or political interference,” that explores “the causes and consequences of climate change.”

In December, West Virginia’s state education board caught flak for passed the standards but altering them so that they cast more doubt on mainstream climate science. They backtracked in January, adopting the scientifically accurate standards.

Last year, Wyoming became the first state to reject the standards, and in fact banned schools from teaching that climate change was caused by humans. The legislature repealed the ban on the NGSS earlier this year, however, leaving the state’s Board of Education to adopt them if they so choose. Thus far they have not.

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Climate DeniersIowaNext Generation Science Standards

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The World’s First Floating Wind Farm

Two weeks after passing a law that completely re-envisions the country’s energy system, France is already making moves to bolster its wind potential by inviting companies to submit proposals for floating wind farms off both its northern and southern coasts.

On Wednesday, France’s environmental agency ADEME posted a tender document calling for proposals for wind farms comprised of between three to six turbines, with the capacity for at least five megawatts per turbine, at three sites in the Mediterranean and one site in the Bay of Biscay, off the southern coast of Brittany.

The call is part of a push by the French government to encourage the transition of France’s energy system from one that relies heavily on nuclear to one that produces at least a third of its energy through renewable technology. Monetary investments from the French government will come from the “Investments for the Future” program launched in 2010. According to Reuters, the government has made 150 million euros ($163.53 million) available for the project, a third as investment subsidies and two-thirds as loans.

To begin the bidding process for the project, companies will have to propose how much capacity they would want to build and specify what sort of feed-in tariff they hope to get for any electricity produced. According to the tender document, turbines must have a demonstrated lifespan of at least two years, though the government expects the projects — if chosen and constructed — to last at least 15 to 20 years. Projects will be selected not only on their technical merit and financial feasibility, but also the extent to which they would contribute to the growth of a floating offshore wind industry in France, Reuters reported. The tender will be open for submissions through April 4, 2016.

In early July, France Energie Eolienne (FEE) — the country’s largest wind lobby — released a statement calling for a robust, country-wide investment in wind energy. If France was to meet its goal of receiving 32 percent of its energy from renewable sources, as specified in the new energy law, FEE recommended that it needed to drastically increase its construction of wind turbines, including 21 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind power by 2030 — 15 GW from fixed farms and 6 GW from floating ones. It also recommended that France speed up the permitting process associated with wind construction, which in France can take two to three times as long as elsewhere in Europe.

France, which obtained just five percent of its power from renewable energy (excluding hydropower) in 2014, lags far behind its European counterparts in wind production. In 2014, the United Kingdom generated enough electricity from wind to power over 25 percent of U.K. homes, with the total percentage of the U.K’s electricity supplied by wind growing by 1.5 percent from 2013. And in December of 2014, Germany broke a countrywide record, generating more power from wind than ever before. Both feats pale in comparison to Denmark, however, which generated almost 40 percent of its overall electricity from wind power in 2014 — breaking a world record.

A big source of that wind power — and the reason that these records will likely be broken in 2015 — can be attributed to offshore wind farms. 2015 is already the biggest year on record for European offshore wind, with a total of 584 electricity-generating turbines coming online across the Netherlands, the U.K., and Germany in the first half of 2015, according to the European Wind Energy Association. Those turbines tripled the grid’s capacity compared to a year ago.

France currently has no offshore wind installed — fixed or floating — but has goals to increase their production to include six gigawatts of offshore power by 2020.

Both Portugal and Norway each possess a single floating turbine — Portugal also has plans to construct a 25-megawatt floating wind demonstration farm, as well. Yet the relatively new technology has not been deployed on an industrial scale in Europe, making France’s proposal unprecedented for the continent. Earlier this week, Japan installed a seven-megawatt floating wind turbine 12 miles off the coast of Fukushima, considered to be the largest floating wind turbine in the world.

The United States has been slower to implement any kind of offshore wind wind technology, let alone floating wind turbines. These turbines boast the clean-energy of a wind turbine without the potential logistical and aesthetic drawbacks of having a turbine so close to shore. Fixed offshore turbines need to be shallow enough that they can be driven into the ocean floor — the ideal depth is around 50 feet but fixed substructures can go up to three times as deep under current technology. Floating turbines aren’t hindered by the depth of the ocean floor, since they aren’t driven into the floor but anchored using concrete-blocks or other mooring systems. This makes them ideal for the west coast of the United States, which has a short continental shelf and a lot of deep water close to shore.

A Seattle-based power company has plans to install a 30-megawatt floating farm off the Oregon coast, though that project has been hampered by a lack of funding due to a stalled bill in the Oregon state legislature. For the time being, the United States’ sole floating wind turbine is located off the coast of Maine — a one-eighth-scale prototype installed in 2013.

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Climate ChangeFranceRenewable EnergyWind Energy

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16 States Think The EPA’s Emissions Rule Isn’t Legal And They Shouldn’t Have To Comply

The Clean Power Plan hasn’t been out a week yet, and 16 states have already formally requested that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) delay the rule.

The states, led by West Virginia, filed a letter with the department Wednesday asking for an “administrative stay” of the rule that requires all states to cut carbon emissions from stationary power plants. The finalized EPA rule calls for state-submitted plans by September 2018 (with an extension) and reductions beginning by 2022.

The rule gave states two extra years to submit their plans and to begin cutting emissions, over initially proposed timelines. If implemented on schedule, the rule will result in a 30 percent decrease in carbon emissions from the electricity sector, which currently accounts for roughly a third of emissions in the United States.

Wednesday’s letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy argues that the plan is not legal and that “absent an immediate stay, the [plan] will coerce the states to expend enormous public resources and to put aside sovereign priorities to prepare state plans of unprecedented scope and complexity.” The letter requests a response by Friday.

The EPA intentionally left broad flexibility in the implementation plans, which means the states must come up with their own ways of reducing carbon, but are allowed to use their discretion in how best to manage it — including a carbon tax, investments in renewable energy sources, and multi-state trading systems. In 2009, the EPA issued an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, which has led to this regulation under the Clean Air Act.

But while the fight to solve the climate crisis is a race against time, opponents to the CPP have identified various tactics to obstruct and slow the rule that would fatally delay it — and could make timely U.S. action on climate nearly impossible.

The letter is the first shot in what is expected to be a long salvo by states, industry, and congressional allies against the rule.

“This request is a necessary first step and prerequisite to confronting this illegal power grab by the Obama administration and EPA,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement. “These regulations, if allowed to proceed, will do serious harm to West Virginia and the U.S. economy, and that is why we are taking quick action to bring this process to a halt.”

West Virginia was joined by Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Many of these states receive more than 90 percent of their electricity from coal, the most carbon-intensive source of electricity generation.

All but one of these states — Arizona — also joined an earlier lawsuit that sought to invalidate the Clean Power Plan before it was even finalized. A D.C. Circuit Court found in favor of the EPA, but when the final rule is entered into the Federal Register, the states will be able to pursue legal action again.

An EPA spokesperson told The Hill that the rule is legal and falls within the agency’s discretion.

“These final guidelines are consistent with the law and align with the approach that Congress and EPA have always taken to regulate emissions from this and all other industrial sectors — setting source-level, source-category-wide standards that sources can meet through a variety of technologies and measures,” Melissa Harrison said.

The CPP has been touted as the most aggressive action against climate change the United States has taken, and it comes at a critical time, just months before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December. Scientists are increasingly saying that the world is nearing irreversible and catastrophic global warming. Reducing carbon emissions from power plants is a critical early step in helping the United States meet its overall goals — and could encourage other countries to act, as well.

Many states have reportedly already begun the planning process to begin to meet the goals of the plan.

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attorney generalcarbonClean Power PlanclimateCPPEnvironmental Protection AgencyEPAstatesWest Virginia

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The Ridiculous Responses Climate Deniers Had To Obama’s Climate Plan

When a president announces the most significant action ever on climate change, it’s going to raise some hackles among the opposition. Here are the greatest, and the lowliest, reactions to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a sweeping rule announced Monday requiring states to lower carbon emissions from their power plants.

The Republican field falls mostly into two camps. First is the “there is nothing happening” group. These are your classic climate deniers. Many of the Republican presidential candidates do not accept the scientific consensus that the climate is changing because of human activity. Denying climate change is occurring — much less that there is anything we did to cause it — makes it much easier to say we don’t need to address it.

The second group can be broadly described as “there is nothing we can do about it.” They believe that climate change is happening, and people may or may not be causing it, but American action is meaningless.

Classic deniers

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) falls into the classic deniers’ camp. He sidestepped questions about human-caused climate change at a candidates’ forum Monday night, but his campaign followed up strongly:

“Governor Walker believes facts have shown that there has not been any measurable warming in the last 15 or 20 years,” spokeswoman AshLee Strong told the Wisconsin State Journal.

If you don’t think that global warming is a real thing (which means you have sided against 97 percent of climate research), than putting in rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions probably doesn’t make much sense.

If there is no climate change, there must be another reason Obama pushed for a Clean Power Plan. Conspiracy theories work here. It’s unclear why a sitting president (or any president, for that matter) would spend years creating a program in an attempt to “destabilize the nation’s energy system,” but in Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) world, that’s not only a possibility, it’s reality.

“The President’s lawless and radical attempt to destabilize the nation’s energy system is flatly unconstitutional and — unless it is invalidated by Congress, struck down by the courts, or rescinded by the next Administration — will cause Americans’ electricity costs to skyrocket at a time when we can least afford it,” Cruz said in a statement.

This is not the first thing Cruz has called unconstitutional. He used the same word for Obama’s executive action on immigration. So was the Affordable Care Act. He has even found Supreme Court opinions to be “alien to our constitutional system.” Ironically, Cruz’s former Harvard law professor said in 2013 that some of Cruz’s actions have been unconstitutional.

Americans for Prosperity Oklahoma, a branch of the Koch-funded conservative organization, put an even finer point on Obama’s mission: “We’ll all be left to suffer while the President scrambles to carve out a legacy for himself, leaving a ruined economy in his wake,” AFP Oklahoma director John Tidwell said.

Climate change is happening but we shouldn’t do anything about it

The certainty of a ruined economic future was a recurring theme for CPP opponents. Keep in mind, some of the following people have spent millions in their home states to mitigate damage from extreme weather, which has been linked to climate change. Some of them even believe that climate change is an issue, which makes not doing anything about it deeply immoral.

Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, thinks the plan is going to cost a lot of money.

“Climate change will not be solved by grabbing power from states or slowly hollowing out our economy. The real challenge is how do we grow and prosper in order to foster more game-changing innovations and give us the resources we need to solve problems like this one,” he said in a statement.

The administration projects that it will decrease the average American electricity bill $85 a year by 2030.

Marco Rubio echoed his fellow Floridian’s comments, but just a tiny bit further into truly cynical. These policies “will do nothing to address the underlying issue that they’re talking about, because as far as I can see, China and India and other developing countries are going to continue to burn anything they can get their hands on.”

In other words, climate change might be a problem, but there is nothing we can do about it.

The people who aren’t running for anything but said amazing things

Then again, maybe climate change is real, but not a problem. Maybe global warming will continue, but it will allow us to farm in Siberia and make home heaters obsolete. That’s ostensibly the reasoning behind billionaire and GOP-funder Charles Koch, who told the Washington Post, “there has been warming. The CO2 goes up, the CO2 has probably contributed to that. But they say it’s going to be catastrophic. There is no evidence to that. They have these models that show it, but the models don’t work.”

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey was instrumental in the first round of court challenges, before the CPP was finalized, and he has already gloved up for the next round. On Monday, he told FoxNews that the plan is a “radical and illegal proposal.” According to an AP reporter, Morrisey has also linked Obama’s plan to drug use.

West Virginia attorney general says residents turning to drugs because Obama is shutting down their coal plants

— Josh Lederman (@joshledermanAP) August 3, 2015

Of course, coal companies jumped on board, including Morrisey ally Murray Energy. “This illegal rule will adversely restructure the electric power system in America and will force every state to radically change their energy policies,” the company said in a statement Monday. “It will dramatically increase the cost of electricity for all Americans, with no environmental benefit whatsoever.”

Arch Coal called the plan “ill-advised and poorly designed.”

Maybe it’s personal

Sterling Burnett, from the Heartland Institute, comes to that conclusion. “Obama must really hate coal miners and coal-fired power plant workers because he’s doing everything he can to put them out of work and in the food line,” he said.

University of Western Ontario mathematics professor Chris Essex, who has written extensively against what he sees as the bias in climate science, opted to go with an English lesson. “Power is a physical quantity, not something that is either clean or dirty. Dirty power has no more meaning than, and just as silly as, clean entropy, or dirty momentum,” Essex said. Perhaps he is unfamiliar with the current vernacular, which refers to power plants, power cords, and power outlets.

But while many politicians and pundits were talking electricity Monday, one presidential contender was notably absent from the conversation: Donald Trump spent the news cycle in a back-and-forth with Gawker about his phone number. Time will tell if the leading Republican candidate will weigh in on what will likely be one of the Obama administration’s most important acts.

One candidate managed to wrap Obama’s war on coal along with climate denial — and tie it all up with some terrorism rhetoric. Presidential candidate and former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee:

Obama’s carbon crusade shows he’s more committed to confronting American coal miners than Iranian clerics who chant 'death to America'. #EPA

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) August 3, 2015

UPDATE: An earlier version of this story mistakenly identified the organization Sterling Burnett is from. He works at the Heartland Institute.

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2016Clean Power PlanDonald TrumpJeb BushreactionRepublicansScott WalkerTed Cruz

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We Are Cecil The Lion, The Kochs Are The Dentist

How are the Koch brothers like the most infamous dentist in the world?

Charles and David Koch are bored billionaires looking for trophies. And they are after very big game, the biggest ever, in fact, since destroying a livable climate would kill off a large fraction of the animal life on the planet. And billions of humans wouldn’t fare that well either.

The anti-science, pro-pollution Kochs spend tens of millions of dollars hiring very expensive hunting guides to help lure these species from their protected areas. These guides include the Tea Party and leading climate science deniers and conservative politicians.

Like many big-game trophy hunters, the Kochs count on secrecy, though they have a vastly better public relations machine. When questioned they explain, like all big-game trophy hunters, that they are only doing what they are doing as part of an effort to help us all.

Why do they put in their cross-hairs Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which objectively represents the bare minimum the United States can morally do as part of a global effort to cut carbon pollution and preserve a livable climate? Charles Koch explained in a Washington Post interview Tuesday, “This is going to disproportionately hurt the poor.”

Yes, even as the Kochs put health care for the poor and a minimum wage for the working poor in their cross-hairs, the Post is happy to let Charles Koch’s faux concern for his victims go unchallenged.

The fact is the Clean Power Plan will actually lower people’s energy bills, according to multiple independent studies, including a Georgia Tech study, one from energy research firm Synapse Energy Economics and several from consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

And, as the EPA has explained, “The Clean Power Plan will lead to climate and health benefits worth an estimated $55 billion to $93 billion in 2030, including avoiding 2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths and 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children.” The poor also disproportionately suffer from asthma.

What about climate change? More than any two people on the planet, the Kochs are funding climate science disinformation and politicians who oppose any action whatsoever. Again, the Post allows the hunter to pretend to be concerned about his prey:

… they say it’s going to be catastrophic. There is no evidence to that. They have these models that show it, but the models don’t work …

So do we want to create a catastrophe today in the economy because of some speculation based on models that don’t work? Those are my questions.

Actually the models do work. The website Skeptical Science reviews the literature (here) concluding, “Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean” and “have made predictions that have been subsequently confirmed by observations.”

A 2012 study, “Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011,” confirmed that climate change is happening as fast — and in some cases faster — than climate models had projected. “The rate of sea-level rise in the past decades is greater than projected by the latest assessments of the IPCC, while global temperature increases in good agreement with its best estimates.” In particular, the oceans are rising 60 percent faster than the IPCC’s latest best estimates. The lead author said, “The new findings highlight that the IPCC is far from being alarmist and in fact in some cases rather underestimates possible risks.”

A June study finds that the oceans, where “90% of the earth’s energy imbalance is stored,” is warming faster than the latest IPCC’s models predicted. And a brand new study finds that “Climate models are even more accurate than you thought,” as climate expert Prof. John Abraham explained in the Guardian last week.

But Charles Koch says otherwise, repeating yet another long-debunked myth, “I mean I believe it’s been warming some. There’s a big debate on that, because it depends on whether you use satellite measurements, balloon, or you use ground ones that have been adjusted.”

Actually it doesn’t depend on which dataset you use. The U.K. Met Office compared all the different datasets (through the end of 2012) here and they yield quite similar results in terms of rate of warming per decade.

What shows Koch’s true ignorance of science is how he labels the surface temperature datasets as “ground ones that have been adjusted.” The satellite data has to be adjusted much more! And as a 2014 journal article by Prof. Abraham et al., “Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change,” explained, the complicated adjustments that have to be made to the satellite data have been done incorrectly for decades.

I know you will be shocked to learn that those incorrect adjustments — which were made by climate science deniers John Christy and Roy Spencer — just happen to all be in the same direction of underestimating actual warming:

Changes in UAH lower atmosphere temperature trend estimates, growing consistently warmer over time as cool biases and errors are removed. Created by John Abraham.

Needless to say, the Post doesn’t challenge any of this disinformation from Koch. Instead, the newspaper lets Koch get in this Orwellian statement:

But believe me, I spent my whole life studying science and the philosophy of science, and our whole company is committed to science. We have all sorts of scientific developments. But I want it to be real science, not politicized science.

Yes, Charles Koch, who with his brother has done more to smear real scientists, politicize climate science, and push disinformation, gets the last word claiming to be a champion of science.

That quote is eerily similar to one just made by Theo Bronkhorst, the professional hunter who led the “safari” that lured Cecil the Lion away from his preserve, which allowed U.S. dentist, Dr. Walter J. Palmer, to shoot the lion with a cross-bow (non-fatally), so that after two days of tracking, they could finally shoot, behead, and skin Cecil. Bronkhorst recently told SkyNews that the charges he faces from Zimbabwe were “frivolous,” adding,

“(Hunting) is an integral part of our country and it’s got to continue. If we do not use wildlife sustainably, there will be no wildlife.”

War is Peace!

While humanity is no Cecil the Lion, Homo sapiens is a photogenic and popular species, at least among homo sapiens. There should be mass outrage against the Kochs, but, of course, the dentist and his safari buddies don’t get the same kind of fawning media coverage or non-existent pushback that the Kochs do.

Anthropologist Richard Leakey wrote a book in 1995, “The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind.” Because of the vital dependence we have on the “ecosystem services” provided by the rest of nature, Leakey warned, “unrestrained, Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.”

So the Kochs have the biggest game of all in their sights. It’s time for everyone to speak out.

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5 Ways The Final Clean Power Plan Puts States At The Helm Of Their Energy Future

On Monday, the EPA released the final Clean Power Plan, which will achieve a 32 percent reduction in carbon pollution from the nation’s power plants from 2005 levels by 2030. To achieve that national reduction, the EPA established state-specific carbon pollution reduction goals that take into account each state’s electricity mix.

From the outset, the hallmark of the Clean Power Plan has been flexibility for states in determining how to meet those carbon reduction targets. In many ways, the final rule offers states even more options for complying with the plan. In the words of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, the final Clean Power Plan is “flexible, customizable, and puts states in the driver’s seat.”

Despite this new flexibility, some opponents of the Clean Power Plan continued to argue that the rule imposes rigid requirements on states. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, for example, accused President Obama of trying to “transform the EPA from an environmental regulator to a central planning authority for electricity generation.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page also referred to the Clean Power Plan as “central planning” and said the EPA is usurping the states’ role to “nationalize power generation and consumption.”

These and similar comments dramatically exaggerate the role of the EPA in implementing the Clean Power Plan. Here are five ways the final Clean Power Plan makes it easier for states to meet their carbon pollution reduction targets:

The final plan gives states more time to submit implementation plans.

Initially, the EPA proposed requiring all states to submit implementation plans by June 2016 with an option for a two-year extension in limited circumstances. As finalized, the Clean Power Plan requires states to submit a final plan or an initial submission by September 2016 but gives all states the opportunity to request an extension until 2018.
States have more time and leeway to shape their pollution reduction pathways.

The final Clean Power Plan extends the compliance start date from 2020 to 2022, giving states more time to plan and implement their pollution reduction programs. In fact, the extra two years may make it easier for states to invest in new renewable energy infrastructure rather than make a quick switch to natural gas. The EPA is also allowing states to set their own “glide paths” to reduce their carbon pollution over the 2022‐2029 interim compliance period — as long as they achieve the necessary pollution reduction goals. The EPA made this change in response stakeholder concerns that the proposed rule would require states to jump off a so-called emissions reduction “cliff” in 2020.
States have another option for multi-state collaboration.

The proposed rule opened up the possibility for states to form multistate markets to comply with the Clean Power Plan. The final rule provides another option for collaboration: states can craft implementation plans that allow power plants to trade allowances or credits with out-of-state power plants, without a formal interstate agreement. The EPA offers to provide states with support in tracking allowance and credit trading.
The final plan incentivizes early action on clean energy and energy efficiency.

The final Clean Power Plan includes a new Clean Energy Incentives Program, a voluntary “matching fund” to incentivize renewable energy and energy efficiency deployment before the 2022 compliance start date. Essentially, the EPA will offer allowances or emissions rate credits to states that build eligible renewable energy projects or implement energy efficiency programs in low-income communities. States can then use these allowances or credits to help meet their carbon pollution reduction goals.
The final plan provides states another tool to guarantee grid reliability.

Some stakeholders raised concerns that the draft Clean Power Plan would affect the reliability of the electricity grid. Even though experts released studies showing minimal risk, EPA’s final plan responds in good faith to these concerns to ensure a smooth transition to cleaner generation. In addition to giving states more time to craft implementation plans and comply with the rule, the EPA clarified that states can amend these plans if unexpected reliability challenges arise. The final rule also contains a “reliability safety valve” that a state can use — in extraordinary circumstances — for 90 days to provide reliability-critical generation that may conflict with the state’s pollution reduction plan.

The EPA finalized a rule that provides states with ample flexibility to comply without undermining the stringency of the rule itself. States now have the opportunity — and responsibility — to use that flexibility to develop implementation plans that chart a cleaner energy path.

Alison Cassady is the Director of Domestic Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress. You can follow her on Twitter at @ALCassady. Myriam Alexander-Kearns is a Research Associate with the Center for American Progress.

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World’s Glaciers Melting Faster Than Ever Before Recorded, Study Finds

A century’s worth of data.

That’s how much researchers looked at for a new study — which showed that the world’s glaciers are melting faster than scientists think they ever have before, and that even if global warming stopped today, they would continue to melt.

The observations show that “the rates of early 21st-century [glacial] mass loss are without precedent on a global scale, at least for the time period observed and probably also for recorded history,” according to the study from the World Glacier Monitoring Service, based in Zurich.

The study, published last week in the Journal of Galciology, looked at more than 5,000 measurements since 1850.

The melting is speeding up. Glaciers are now losing mass twice as fast as they were in the period from 1901-1950, three times as fast as in the period from 1851-1900, and four times as fast as in the period from 1800-1850, the researchers found.

And the glaciers will continue to recede, even if global temperatures stabilize, the study’s lead author, Michael Zemp, told Climate News Network. “Due to the strong ice loss over the past few decades, many glaciers are too big under current climatic conditions. They simply have not had enough time to react to the climatic changes of the past,” he said.

In other words, the Earth’s glaciers are melting to keep up with temperature changes that have already occurred.

“In the European Alps, many glaciers would lose about 50 percent of their present surface area without further climate change,” Zemp said.

Efforts to halt global warming at its current level have been met with mixed enthusiasm, particularly among congressional Republicans and the coal industry, who are currently proposing legislation and litigation that would avoid the carbon emissions reductions sought under the newly released Clean Power Plan. In December, world leaders will meet in Paris to discuss — and maybe set — carbon emission reduction goals to keep warming below the 2°C that is generally accepted to be the limit to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Glacial melt, which contributes to sea level rise, is one of those dangerous effects. Melting glaciers may even have a reinforcing effect on climate change, according to a study by climate scientist James Hansen, published last month. And rising sea levels will affect a wide swath of the global population. Three-quarters of the world’s large cities are coastal. Rising sea levels are correlated with increases in storm surge, erosion, and inundation, according to Anders Carlson, an Oregon State University glacial geologist and paleoclimatologist.

“It takes time for the warming to whittle down the ice sheets,” he said. “But it doesn’t take forever. There is evidence that we are likely seeing that transformation begin to take place now.” Carlson told ThinkProgress that “we are nearing one degree Celsius warming,” and that the “worst case scenario is what we are already on.”

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Lake Erie’s Enormous Algae Bloom Is Back

For the second year in a row, a harmful algae bloom is beginning to form in Lake Erie — and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted that this year’s algae bloom could rival that of 2011, the most severe bloom on record.

During that record bloom, close to 20 percent of Lake Erie was covered by a green-tinged algae — technically cyanobacteria, a type of aquatic bacteria that uses photosynthesis to create energy and thrives in warm conditions. In a 2013 Ecowatch report, scientists from Oregon State University called it “the cockroaches of the aquatic world.”

This is the same type of algae that disrupted the Ohio city of Toldeo’s water supply for three days last summer, prompting officials to issue a tap water ban. In large amounts, an algae bloom can produce a harmful toxin known as microcystin, which, if consumed, can cause dizziness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and liver damage. Boiling doesn’t kill the toxin — it just makes it worse.

“Last summer’s Toledo water crisis was a wake-up call to the serious nature of harmful algal blooms in America’s waters,” Jeff Reutter, senior advisor to Ohio State University’s Sea Grant program and Stone Laboratory, said at a NOAA press conference in July. “This forecast once again focuses attention on this issue, and the urgent need to take action to address the problems caused by excessive amounts of nutrients from fertilizer, manure and sewage flowing into our lakes and streams.”

In the years following World War II, factories dumped huge amounts of phosphorous-laced waste water into the Great Lakes, spurring algae blooms and widespread pollution. The Clean Water Act curbed some of that pollution, and for a time the health of the Great Lakes seemed to be on the mend. But industrial farming, which brings with it huge amounts of fertilizer runoff from corn and soybean operations, is at least partly responsible for a recent surge in algae bloom activity in the Great Lakes region. Of all the phosphorous that makes its way into the Lake Erie Basin, 61 percent of it comes from cultivated cropland.

But increased phosphorous from commercial agriculture might be just one factor in Lake Erie’s algae uptick. Timothy Davis, a NOAA research ecologist specializing in harmful algae blooms, told National Geographic that some of the recent increase in blooms “can be attributed to global climate change.” That’s because the bacteria responsible for the blooms thrive in warm temperatures — something that climate change is helping create.

Climate change is also predicted to increase the intensity of rainfall and flooding that occurs around the Great Lakes in the coming decades, something that could lead to more phosphorus from fertilizer being washed into waterways instead of absorbed into cropland. Phosphorous can also make its way into waterways from leaky septic tanks and aging stormwater and sewage infrastructure. An increase in precipitation could overwhelm this infrastructure — especially those which combine stormwater and sewage in the same system — pushing more nutrients from sewage into waterways where it can feed algae blooms.

Earlier this year, 18 international researchers published a study in Science arguing that human activity has already pushed the planet beyond four of nine environmental boundaries, making the planet less hospitable to life in the process. One of these boundaries that had been crossed was biogeochemical flows — nitrogen and phosphorus cycles that have been disrupted in large part due to fertilizer overuse and mismanagement.

“For the first time in human history, we need to relate to the risk of destabilizing the entire planet,” Johan Rockstrom, one of the study’s authors, told Reuters after the study’s publication. “We are at a point where we may see abrupt and irreversible changes due to climate change.”

So far, the 2015 algae bloom underway in Lake Erie hasn’t caused any public health scares — according to a report in Bridge Magazine, Toledo officials found small amounts of microcystin at the city’s water intake cribs, but the levels were not high enough to prompt a tap water ban. Still, some residents — frightened by the magnitude of last year’s bloom — are stocking up on bottled water, calling another bloom “inevitable.” The city has since installed an early warning system near its intake as well as a filtration system, leading some residents to express renewed trust in Toledo’s ability to handle algae blooms.

The Great Lakes aren’t the only place battling an increase in algae blooms, however. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent National Lakes Assessment, nearly one-quarter of all lakes sampled for cyanobacteria presented moderate or high risks to cyanotoxins like microcystin. Around the world, algae blooms are on the rise, popping up in places like Brazil, China, and Australia.

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