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New York Times creates dedicated environmental reporting team

This is extremely kick-ass news: The New York Times is creating a dedicated unit of eight reporters, with their own full-time editor, to cover environmental stories.

Columbia Journalism Review has all the details:

That editor is Erica Goode, a former behavior and psychology reporter turned Health editor who has been at the Times since 1998 and spent her last year in Baghdad covering the Iraq War. Her impressive team comprises Andrew Revkin and Cornelia Dean from Science, Felicity Barringer and Leslie Kaufman from National, Elisabeth Rosenthal from Foreign, Mia Navarro from Metro, and the Washington bureau's Matthew Wald, who writes for the paper's Energy Challenge series (another multi-department project).

Lou Dobbs works to make CNN viewers less informed

Will you look at the monumental, paleolithic, mind-boggling idiocy that's appearing on CNN in prime time?

Amazing. But there's more:

"Advocates of global warming." They're called scientists, you neanderthal. Christ. What year is it?

Illinois leg. and gov. hoodwinked by 'clean coal'; will Obama be as susceptible?

Impeachment notwithstanding, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D) signed a bill this week that will send another $18 million down the "clean coal" rabbit hole in Illinois.

The delusional symbolism couldn't be more obvious. In fact, the Chicago Tribune captured the carbon truth of the story:

Lolcats go green!

(More animals)

ZapRoot takes on 'clean coal'

The anti-coal bandwagon grows ever larger:

The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target

A U.S. climate bill should set a target of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent to 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. That conclusion is based on the latest science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA, among others, but it also involves matters of timing and U.S. cap-and-trade design. To achieve its goals, domestic climate legislation should limit the use of both international and domestic offsets.

The United States has the technology and resources to reduce its emissions levels substantially below 1990 levels by 2020, and having already lost much of its credibility in the international community by failing to act, there is no time to lose in adoption of binding targets to avoid the risks of dangerous impacts of global warming.

That is the executive summary of a new report I have written for the Center for American Progress (Full report here [PDF]). I have changed my thinking on the 2020 target a bit in the past year for three reasons:

1. Scientific observations and analysis in 2007 and 2008 make clear the pace and threat of climate change has accelerated (see Nos. 8, 7, and 3 here).
2. We must try to keep open the option of going much lower than 450.
3. Politicians insist on effectively watering down their 2020 targets with rip-offsets.

The full report is reprinted below:

Coal industry front group touts benefits of strong emissions regulations

You may have thought the coal industry would never sing the praises of environmental regulations. But now that the clean coal carolers have moved on, the ACCCE (American Coalition for Clean Coal Euphemisms?) is singing a different tune.

In an analysis titled "77 Percent Cleaner," the ACCCE makes one of the strongest cases I have recently seen for EPA regulations:

Over the last 35 years, America's coal-based electricity providers have invested more than $50 billion in technologies to reduce emissions. Due to investments like these, our coal-based generating fleet is more than 77 percent cleaner on the basis of regulated emissions per unit of energy produced.

The calculations are based on five pollutants: carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter. The data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reflects the environmental performance per unit of energy produced. That is, the relationship of emissions per billion kilowatt-hours. From 1970 to 2005, the value for that ratio fell from 30,510 short tons per billion kilowatt-hours to just 6,970 short tons per billion kilowatt-hours -- a reduction of 77.15 percent.

If the coal industry is publicly bragging about reducing regulated emissions, then it is obviously endorsing those regulations. And if the industry is bragging about the investments it had to make because of those regulations, then it is implicitly stating it is prepared to make further, large investments to achieve new regulatory requirements.

The ACCCE even includes a nice figure that makes the case for strong greenhouse regulations:

The energy impact of web searches is very low

Some myths are hard to kill. The Times Online "reports":

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research ...

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. "Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power," said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon.

The overhyping of the internet's energy use goes back a decade, pushed by two right-wing deniers, Mark Mills and Peter Huber. They were actually using their easily-refuted analysis to argue against climate restrictions -- I kid you not. In this 1999 press release [PDF] from the laughably-named denier group, the "Greening Earth Society," Mills says:

While many environmentalists want to substantially reduce coal use in making electricity, there is no chance of meeting future economically-driven and Internet-accelerated electric demand without retaining and expanding the coal component.

I ended up writing a major report debunking this myth and then testifying in front of the Senate Commerce committee [PDF] (i.e. John McCain) and the House [PDF] on the subject. Jon Koomey and others at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) did even more work debunking this nonsense (click here for everything you could possibly want to know on the subject).

There are actually two mistakes in the Harvard calculation. The first, which was the focus of my research, is the big picture issue. What is the net energy consumed by the internet? I argue the internet is a net energy saver -- and a big one -- since it increases efficiency (especially in things like the supply chain) and dematerialization (it uses less energy to research online than in person). The fact that U.S. energy intensity (energy consumed per dollar of GDP) began dropping sharply in the mid-1990s is but one piece of evidence that internet- and IT-driven growth is less energy intensive.

I, for instance, am able to work at home and telecommute thanks to the Internet and a broadband connection. That saves the energy consumed in commuting and a considerable amount of net building energy: Most people's homes are an underutilized asset, which consume a great deal of energy whether or not they are there.

The other mistake just involves the more narrow question of how much energy is consumed by Googling. Wissner-Gross says it is 7g of CO2 per search. My LBNL colleagues say that is way too high, and Google itself has rebutted that analysis with their own, which I reprint here:

Newt Gingrich is an idiot

This short video should utterly discredit Newt Gingrich:

Then again, if nothing has discredited this dimwit yet, it's hard to see what could.

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That's why we've launched Grist Local: Seattle, a weekly email featuring event listings, sustainable business profiles, and other news about the green scene in the Emerald City. You can get it zapped straight to your inbox every Wednesday for the low, low price of free! (And worth every penny.)

In fact, if you sign up now, you'll get your very first Grist Local email bright and early tomorrow (fresh off the presses). Here's a sneak peak: