The environment in the news wednesday April 6, 2011

Obama Announces 2012 Presidential Campaign. Should Greens Care?
Treehugger, 4 April 2011, Brian Merchant
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/04/obama-announces-2012-presidential-campaign-greens-care.php

After all, the environment is one of the areas where he's disappointed most deeply -- along with failing to close Guantanamo, the failure to make any meaningful progress towards addressing the climate issue is among the most glaring on his record.

But the disappointments don't stop there -- he also opened up vast expanses of US waters to offshore drilling (right before the BP spill to boot), is still steadfast in support for funding nuclear power, doesn't really have a problem with fracking, and keeps alluding to coal's long term future. Most recently, he authorized the leasing of more federal lands for coal mining. Generally speaking, his vision on energy is a pretty feeble mishmash of the status quo, despite talk of a renewable power 'moonshot' in his State of the Union.

He has accomplished plenty, too, however, though talk of Obama being the 'greenest president ever' was almost certainly premature. His upgraded CAFE standards for automobiles was likely the single greatest federal act to reduce emissions in US history. The stimulus bill he fought for got the ball rolling again for funding cleantech research and renewable power deployment. High speed rail will be of vital importance for sustainably connecting America's urban hubs as gas prices continue to skyrocket and congestion chokes our roadways. And under his watch, the EPA took up the historic challenge of mobilizing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions -- though Obama has so far seemed all too willing to compromise away the terms on which it will do so.

And there are other shortcomings and achievements, to be sure. But suffice to say that Obama hasn't turned out to be the champion that many hoped he would be -- he had an opportunity to lead the nation in fighting climate change and creating green jobs. Instead, he hasn't even effectively communicated the threat global warming poses at all, and concern regarding the issue has slipped to new lows under Obama's watch.

However, as is so often the case with our good ol' two-party system, the best reason for greens to care about Obama's campaign is the prospect of what would happen if he lost. The Republican party has, to an amazing degree, conformed to a pervasive anti-regulatory sentiment, and shrouds itself in disbelief that climate change is even occurring.

The presidential contenders play out like a who's who of environmental opponents -- there's Newt Gingrich, who, though prone to rampant flip-flopping, is currently calling to do no less than kill the EPA altogether. Sarah Palin doesn't believe in climate change either, and is one of the most popular oil industry cheerleaders in the nation. She has also been known to support the shooting of wolves from helicopters, but I digress. Mitt Romney, who appears to have few ideas of his own, would be certain to toe the anti-climate party line. So too would Tim Pawlenty, a one-time climate action proponent who has pivoted all the way to climate denial in a bid to earn the trust of the GOP base. Needless to say, it's a pretty grim lot, as far as green is concerned.

And given what the GOP leadership in Congress is attempting to achieve right now -- gutting the EPA's budget, rolling back parts of the Clean Air Act, preventing an attempt to reign in the carbon pollution of the nation's biggest emitters, expanding offshore drilling even further, and so forth, I'd be far from optimistic that the next four years would be good for the environment if one of the above Republicans were to win the nation's highest office.

We're in an ugly spot indeed, one where climate action looks pretty untenable at the federal level. And who knows? If the economy boots up and Dems retake the House, say, in 2014, there's always the hope that Obama could use his last four years in office to get tougher on climate, with amped up legacy concerns replacing nagging reelection considerations.

So, to answer to my own question is this: Yes, we should care. Even if it's getting harder for some of us to do so.

Climate-change deniers can't handle the inconvenient truth
The Seattle Times, 4 April 2011, Paul Krugman
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2014684370_krugman05.html?prmid=op_ed

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Professor Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate-skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Muller reported that his group's preliminary results find a global-warming trend "very similar to that reported by the prior groups."

The deniers' response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly. But first, let's talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held since the GOP retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these people?

My favorite, still, was Ron Paul's first hearing on monetary policy, in which the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing Abraham Lincoln as a "horrific tyrant" — and for advocating a new secessionist movement as the appropriate response to the "new American fascialistic state."

The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week's hearing weren't of quite the same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One was the lawyer's declaration that the EPA can't declare that greenhouse-gas emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making this up.

Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of "analogies to the alarm over dangerous man-made global warming" — presumably intended to show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental regulation.

But back to Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: He has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as "exaggerators," and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous emails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist website, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself "prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong." But never mind: Once he knew that Muller was going to present those preliminary results, Watts dismissed the hearing as "post normal science political theater." And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Muller as "a man driven by a very serious agenda."

Of course, it's actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody who's been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would accept a result confirming global warming. But it's worth stepping back for a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you're going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you'll be doing a great deal of damage.

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: As Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

But it's terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that's what it is — has probably ensured that we won't do anything about climate change until catastrophe is already upon us.

So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the GOP; actually, the joke is on the human race.