Somehow, the potential collapse of our civilization as well as global ecosystems isn’t a good enough argument for Republican Teabaggers, beholden to their dirty energy corporate masters, to take action in the global warming arena. For a few paltry thousand of dollars per Representative and Senator, but millions upon millions in slick advertising, dirty energy interests have delayed and obstructed meaningful national efforts to clean up our act before it’s too late. All too often, Republican Teabaggers use the “economic destruction” talking point to convince the public that we just. can’t. take. action.
Just how “destructive” would action actually be? Far less expensive than doing nothing, to be honest. Action won’t be free. But inaction will be many times more destructive to our economy. And after spending much, much more money, societies would likely unravel and global ecosystems would likely collapse. That’s how absolutely stupid Republican Teabagger efforts to delay action on global warming is: it will cost us more and we could end up with broken societies and a planet that’s harder to live on. Or, we could take some action now and our societies will stay strong and our planet will remain mostly inhabitable. Beyond being able to live and do so in a civilized society, taking action would actually make economies stronger, something that should easily resonate in today’s world.
A repost of Think Progress’ Brad Johnson over at Climate Progress has the details. Here is the big picture:
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is the carbon trading program of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, which went into effect in 2008. There are governors’ races in all these states except New Jersey and Delaware.
“Overall, there have been nine auctions held by RGGI since 2009, in which electric utilities and some investment firms have bought emissions allowances. And those auctions have raised some $729 million for a range of emissions-reduction and energy-efficiency programs — benefiting both homeowners and industrial users — as well as financing an occasional raid to balance a state’s general budget,” said Stateline’s Rob Gurwitt.
The U.S.’s first carbon trading market has been up and running successfully for a couple of years. The Republican Teabagger candidates across the northeast are against any such program, of course. They would much prefer we continue to shovel as much of the public’s hard-earned money into the bottomless pits of profit of private dirty energy corporations while socializing the costs of pollution back onto the public.
Instead of shutting this successful market down, it should be expanded across the country. Aren’t Republican Teabaggers in favor of letting markets have their freedom? If this were going to fail, wouldn’t it have done it already? Hopefully the good citizens of these states don’t agree that we should all wait until global warming’s effects are in full force because if we do, it will be too late to act.
The Obama administration’s original drilling moratorium was rejected by a lower court. The administration appealed to the 5th Circuit of the Court of Appeals. Unreported in corporate media circles,
Judges Jerry Smith and Eugene Davis, both of whom are assigned to yesterday’s panel, attended expense-paid junkets for judges sponsored by an oil-industry front group. The third judge on the panel, Judge James Dennis, has not received any free trips from the oil industry, but he is heavily invested in oil stocks with investments that may total as much as $305,000.
Do you want to guess how the court ruled? The moratorium was rejected, of course, while litigation continues.
Why did these judges allow themselves to even hear the case? All three have some degree of bias due to their past activities and investments. Industry literally owns at least two branches of our federal government. Despite our money paying their salaries and benefits, unelected officials cannot help themselves but to rule in favor of industries they invest in.
Human-forced climate change has already many effects that are visible today. An article that appears in today’s Science introduces another candidate: trees in the Western U.S. are living only half as long as they did 50 years ago. In the climate most of us grew up in, western forests acted as carbon sinks. Their growth “scrubbed” carbon from the atmosphere. Climate change has introduced conditions that are drier than normal; severe drought has ensued across the region. As a result, trees are growing less and dying earlier than they used to. That could result in less carbon being removed from the atmosphere, creating yet another positive feedback loop in the climate system.
Researchers focused on what’s called “background” mortality – trees dying from events that do not include infestations of insects like the mountain pine beetle currently afflicting the West, which is identified as “abrupt” mortality. They studied 76 plots where trees were at least 200 years old. They were undisturbed by logging (harder to do every year), bark beetle epidemic or wildfire. Trees being studied in Colorado were largely wiped out by the mountain pine beetle epidemic currently moving across the state’s forests, itself a trend linked to climate change. Temperature data in the research plots (across the entire West) showed an increase in every season of the year. The warming and drought conditions we’ve experienced in Colorado has also made its presence felt across a much larger region.
Our forests are suffering from multiple coincident effects of a warming planet and regionalized drying. Direct human pressures such as increased population in the inter-mountain West and hundreds of years of logging aren’t helping matters. Efforts need to be made today to decrease our forcing on the climate system. Carbon emissions need to be drastically reduced so that concentrations in the atmosphere can be reduced later this century. If forests are unable to play their historic role of a carbon sink, those efforts become all the more critical. Unfortunately, it will likely increase their cost, something environmentalists cited regularly during the past eight years’ of climate inaction.
[Update]: While reading the article again, something important popped out at me. The authors note the following:
From the 1970s to 2006 (the period including the bulk of our data; table S1), the mean annual temperature of the western United States increased at a rate of 0.3° to 0.4°C decade -1, even approaching 0.5°C decade -1 at the higher elevations typically occupied by forests.
So between 1.2°C and 2°C warming has already occurred since the 1970s. That means the forests of the future are in for bad times. If we could somehow magically stop emitting greenhouse gases today, the climate system would still get warmer for the next 100+ years due to the forcing “in the pipeline”, as climatologists refer to it. The climate system hasn’t fully responded to the gases emitted in the last 5, 10, or 50 years.
Of course, no such magic is going to occur. Emissions will have to stop increasing (stabilize) then start decreasing. Which means there is plenty of additional forcing (warming) that will occur. The 2007 IPCC assessment relied on models that didn’t demonstrate the warming that has already occurred very well. Policy decisions based on that report would therefore be poorly suited for the task we face.
[2nd Update]: NPR’s Science Friday discussed this paper with one of the researchers today. The segment can be found here.
The rate at which Greenland’s ice sheets are losing mass has dramatically increased compared to rates in the 20th century, according to a new Geophysical Research Letters article. From the abstract:
We find that the ice sheet was losing 110 ± 70 Gt/yr in the 1960s, 30 ± 50 Gt/yr or near balance in the 1970s–1980s, and 97 ± 47 Gt/yr in 1996 increasing rapidly to 267 ± 38 Gt/yr in 2007.
The 2007 number is just astounding. Quantifying it is important for other research.
Gov. Bill Ritter has sent a letter to the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service requesting a larger portion of an upcoming federal allotment of forest health funding. Citing Colorado’s ongoing drought and recent record fire years coupled with an expected explosion of human-forest interfaces in the next 20 years, Ritter made the argument that the current average of $6 million per year in funding wasn’t sufficient. From his letter:
Regional Forester Rick Cables estimated the costs of addressing these concerns on national forests to be nearly $40 million dollars in fiscal year 2009 alone – a calculation that does not include any support to address equally critical needs on state and private lands.
Climate Progress had a good post up the other day regarding geothermal power‘s advances recently. Though not as robust as solar or wind, geothermal is slowly gaining popularity and accessibility. Some quick numbers: “manufacturers shipped 63,682 geothermal heat pumps (GHP) in 2006, a 33 percent increase over the 2005 total of 47,830″ (from U.S. Energy Information Administration). I’m glad to see an increase, but 64,000 GHPs is still quite a small number out of the total number of households nationwide. Geothermal is part of the solution to reduce our fossil fuel usage.
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bonddad explains why he thinks the U.S. is currently in a recession, despite the lack of “official word” from up-high. Personal incomes, job growth, industrial production and two major export markets are all in the mix. I’ve thought we were in a recession for a while and bonddad’s explanation provides additional reasoning why that is.
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In news that should shock no one, big-time inflation is still around. Inflation hit 5.6% in July, up from 5% in June. The last time inflation was that high? During the previous Bush’s administration. Like father, like son, goes the old adage. About the only thing that might hold this inflation in check? The recession. How wonderful! We have prices increasing at rates our incomes can’t keep up with, and that’s if we can keep our jobs. Thanks for the awesome economy, Republicans!
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John McCain hasn’t polled better than 44% support during this race. 44% isn’t going to get him elected President, especially when Barack Obama continually garners 47-49% support and has never trailed McCain. Yet the corporate media would have you believe they’re continually tied and Barack is the candidate with all the problems. Without explanation, pundits are holding a 10% bar up for Obama and criticizing him for not reaching it. Reality has a well-known liberal bias. That will be on display this November when McCain loses.
I wrote to Sen. Salazar a short time back requesting that he take and encourage others to take seriously the threat that climate change poses to the world. Beyond taking it seriously, I encouraged the Senator to push measures now before Congress that could begin the shift toward dealing with this crisis. I got a response back and show part of it below:
The Senate is currently considering several pieces of climate change legislation. I believe a cap-and-trade system is the best and most flexible way of guaranteeing that the lowest cost measures for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are adopted first. At the same time, we must be careful to design this policy so as not to place our industries at a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace and simultaneously encourage other countries to voluntarily reduce their carbon emissions.
Cap-and-trade systems do indeed ensure low cost measures are adopted first. But it’s like buying a little fire extinguisher when your house is already on fire: it’s too little, too late. What Sen. Salazar and other business first, last and always policy-makers aren’t fully recognizing is that other countries will begin working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. If the United States waits for those other countries to establish their methodologies, we’ll be behind the curve and will permanently lose marketplace share – globally. This country should do the heavy lifting and hard work to develop emission reduction strategies now, so that when other countries decide they want to join the process, we can export services and ideas to them at a profit.
Sen. Salazar is under sway of business interests who more or less want to continue under a ‘business as usual’ attitude, one that emphasizes short-term profits. Groups and governments that plan for the long-term with respect to climate change will come out of the 21st century in much better condition that they entered.
Solutions ready for today’s market are being held back by corporate welfare give-aways that unfairly prop up the fossil fuel industry. It might make their balance sheets look good today, but the price to society will be terrible tomorrow. Needless to say, Sen. Salazar’s response is discouraging and unacceptable. We need policy makers that are prepared for 21st century problem-solving, not those who cannot move away from 20th century thinking.
A Clean Air Group is suing Xcel over alleged pollution standards. Total estimated cost if guilty? $400 million. Even if Xcel is guilty, there’s no way they’ll end up paying that much money. A settlement is much likelier.
Climate Progress’ take on Bush’s ‘discussion’ of energy during the SOTU.
“The Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming.” So says the American Geophysical Union. Any solution? “Mitigation strategies and adaptation responses will call for collaborations across science, technology, industry, and government.” Not going to happen with the Neandertals currently pulling the levers. 2009 and 2010 will be too late. Get ready for a vastly different planet.
