Fossil CO2 impacts will outlast Stonehenge and nuclear waste

Every few years, people need to be reminded that carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion lasts...

Oval Office lights connected to mountaintop removal

When President Barack Obama's staff turns on the lights to the Oval Office this week, a signal will be sent from the Potomac Energy Company to the Chalk Point Generation Station, where the coal-handling facility service of the power plant will shovel in coal that has been strip-mined from the clear-cut, toppled-over, and exploded mountains of West Virginia.

At least, in theory.

In effect, President Obama and his administration are now connected to one of the most tragic environmental and human rights disasters in American history -- the employment of mountaintop-removal mining methods in Appalachia that have eliminated over 470 mountains and adjacent communities, 1 million acres of hardwood forests, and 1,200 miles of streams from our American maps.

This includes Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, the last great mountain in a historic range that has been on the forefront of the clean-energy movement. Citing the unique wind potential of Coal River Mountain, local citizens and coal miners have pushed for an industrial wind farm that would provide 200 jobs, enough megawatts for 150,000 homes in the area, and $1.7 million in tax revenues. Last week, however, as Obama visited a wind-turbine parts factory in Ohio, the first bulldozers arrived to clearcut the forest and open the way for the next mountaintop-removal tragedy.

What do you expect from a party that wants to be more like Sarah Palin?

You can indeed fool some of the people all the time -- if those people are conservatives.

Rasmussen Reports made headlines last month reporting that 41 percent of Americans blame global warming on human activity, down from 46 percent, two years ago. The conservative pollster gleefully noted:

Al Gore's side may be coming to power in Washington, but they appear to be losing the battle on the idea that humans are to blame for global warming.

It is, however, the details of the poll that are the most telling. In January 2009:

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats.

This compares to December 2006 result:

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats say human activity is the cause while 51% of Republicans identify long-term planetary trends as the culprit.

That's right. Slightly more Democrats now understand that humans are the primary cause of global warming, whereas substantially more GOP voters -- a full one-sixth -- have been duped into thinking long-term planetary trends are the cause.

Why the growing divergence?

The false hope of a hydrogen economy is on its death bed

The ChiPs are down for the hydrogen highway cul de sac -- literally. The future Ponches and Jons of the California Highway Patrol won't be policing the hydrogen highway.

The false hope of a hydrogen economy is on its death bed. This dream was embraced and elevated by President Bush, who said in his January 2003 State of the Union address:

With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free.

I have explained at length many times why the first car of child born in 2003 -- or the last car, for that matter -- will not be a hydrogen fuel cell car, most notably in my best selling book, The Hype About Hydrogen [Note to a picky semantic people: The book was not a best seller, but it was the best-selling of all of my books]. Maybe my best (and certainly my most widely read) paper available online [PDF] is "The car and fuel of the future," published by Energy Policy back in 2005. It is still worth reading if you want to understand why plug in hybrids, not hydrogen fuel cell cars, are the car of the (near) future.

The last vestiges of a hydrogen economy are collapsing. First, we had Honda's new FCX Clarity, which the company optimistically billed as "the world's first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production." If so, the Clarity has demonstrated to the world how distant the whole enterprise is (see here, here and here).

Now Greenwire ($ub. req'd) has a long story on the collapse of another one of the few remaining pieces of the dream, "Has Schwarzenegger's hydrogen highway gone bust?" excerpted below:

Grist pulled no punches in covering all of George Bush's dirt

  A movie no one would make.   Imagine that back in 1999 you were a Hollywood studio executive and...

Next stop for Obama team: EPA's endangerment finding

Stopped EPA from blocking California's effort to regulate tailpipe GHG emissions. Check!

Stopped a new coal plant. Check!

The next "stop" on the Obama Climate Action Train is the "endangerment finding" so the EPA can finally put a stop on greenhouse gases.

In Massachusetts [vs. EPA], the Supreme Court found that greenhouse gases (GHGs) are "pollutants" under the Clean Air Act; that EPA must determine whether GHGs emitted from new motor vehicles do or do not endanger public health or welfare, or supply a reason for not making this determination; and that, if EPA makes an "endangerment finding," it must issue regulations.

The key question: Can elevated levels of GHG concentrations be reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare? Does the Pope buy papal indulgences carbon offsets?

This is not a tough call for a President who just said: "climate change, which, if left unchecked, could result in violent conflict, terrible storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe." And for 1,000 years! Indeed, he campaigned on this very issue (see the October 16 post, "Obama to declare CO2 a dangerous pollutant").

In an email to EPA employees [PDF], Administrator Lisa Jackson wrote of "five priorities that will receive my personal attention" -- the first of which is "Reducing greenhouse gas emissions":

As Congress does its work [on global warming legislation], we will move ahead to comply with the Supreme Court's decision recognizing EPA's obligation to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.

Greenwire ($ub. req'd) has the full story:

The Fair Food Foundation crumbles under weight of the Madoff Ponzi scheme

For a couple of years, there has been lots of buzz in the sustainable-food world about the Fair Food Foundation...

Tufts study: Corn subsidies are a sop to HFCS industry, but don't alone make bad food cheap

I have a complex and much criticized view of farm subsidies. 

On the one hand, I acknowledge that the "commodity program" embedded in the Farm Bill is a back-door sop to agribusiness giants like meat titan Tyson and grain-processor Archer Daniels Midland. By encouraging farmers to produce as much corn and soy as possible even when prices are low, subsidies push down the price of commodity crops -- and fatten the profits of the firms that buy them.

On the other hand, I disagree with sustainable-food activists who claim that subsidies are the root of our food-system problems. Take them away, I've argued more than once, and you'd still have a food system that mainly produces junk churned out by a few big companies. Plus, rather than campaigning to end subsidies, I think we should be pushing to redirect them to more useful purposes: like rebuilding local and regional food infrastructure.

A study just released by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts illustrates my point. The authors -- veteran Tufts researcher Tim Wise, plus Alicia Harvie -- look at the effect corn subsidies have had on consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, the U.S. food industry's favorite sweetener.

They essentially pose two questions: 1) Do HFCS producers benefit from the subsidy program?; and 2) Can the rise in obesity/overweight and diabetes rates be tied to corn subsidies through HFCS?  Their conclusions might surprise you.

The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates

Once again, three climate activists who are not terribly good at debating agreed to participate in a decidedly unscientific format against people who mostly make stuff up. And what a shock, it had a bad outcome -- although this one seems to be partly a result of gaming the vote as much as anything else.

In 2007, it was the now-infamous climate science debate, broadcast by NPR on the proposition "Global warming is not a crisis." The pro-science side lost to the anti-science make-stuff-up side (Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen, Philip Stott) on that one.

So you can imagine what happened when the debate proposition moved over to economics, "Major Reductions in Carbon Emissions Are Not Worth the Money" -- especially with the 'pro' (i.e. delayer) side handled by three world-class economist-loving liars make-stuff-uppers: Bjorn Lomborg, Peter Huber, and Stott (details here, transcript here [PDF] and, for true masochists, NPR audio here).

(Note No. 1 to all pro-climate-action debaters: It is very hard to win a staged debate with people who make stuff up. It is next to impossible to do so if they are skilled debaters. And you are guaranteed to lose if it isn't a one-on-one debate. Why? The only way to out-debate somebody who makes stuff up is to call them out on it. And if they keep doing it, you have to keep calling them out. Even the most skilled debater has difficulty publicly questioning the honesty and integrity of opponent again and again (which is why you rarely see anyone attempt it). But you'll never convince an audience that multiple 'experts' are making stuff up.)

The final result of this absurdly unscientific and meaningless activity was preordained. It was also so bogus that even the organization that put on the pointless debate actually acknowledged in its own press release (here) that part of the audience (the conservatives, of course) gamed the system: