If Congress fails to act, agency plans to proceed
Jim Tankersley / Tribune Washington bureau

Tags: climate change Environmental Protection Agency global warming

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday unveiled a detailed proposal for using the government’s regulatory powers to curb greenhouse gas emissions – reassuring foreign allies on the U.S. commitment to fight climate change and warning Congress that the administration will act on its own if lawmakers fail to address the issue.

The proposed regulations would apply to large-scale industrial sources of heat-trapping gases, including power plants, factories and refineries, but not to smaller sources, such as new schools, as some critics of the EPA action had feared.

The rules would force new – or substantially modified – industrial emitters to employ “best available control technologies and energy efficiency measures” to minimize greenhouse-gas emissions, a tougher standard than the one applied to many emitters now.

The EPA action, along with the formal unveiling of proposed legislation in the Senate, stoked optimism among environmentalists and others who have voiced concern that the chances for agreement at a global warming conference in Copenhagen could be reduced if leaders of other countries concluded the U.S. was not prepared to take the kinds of steps it has urged other developed nations to take.

“We are not going to continue with business as usual while we wait for Congress to act,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson told a climate conference in Los Angeles. She said the proposal “allows us to do what the Clean Air Act does best – reduce emissions for better health, drive technology innovation for a better economy, and protect the environment for a better future – all without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the better part of our economy.”

EPA officials unveiled the proposal as international climate negotiators gathered in Bangkok to prepare for global warming treaty talks in Copenhagen in December.

The EPA rules would mimic how the agency forces power plants and factories to install “scrubbers” and other means of limiting many types of air pollutants.

But it’s unclear exactly how that would apply in the case of greenhouse gases, which scientists blame for climate change. Researchers are still studying and have yet to deploy a commercial-scale method to capture and store carbon emissions from coal plants, for example.

The EPA proposal, which must now move through a lengthy process of comments and reviews, is likely to encounter legal challenges.

December 22, 2008

By Ed Gillespie

As the year draws to an end and President Bush enters his final month in office, there is much commentary about the Administration’s record over the past eight years. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories assail and distort the President’s record and recycle myths and unfounded allegations that have been leveled for the better part of his two terms. Historical accuracy requires a response to the litany of attacks leveled against President Bush, and while there’s not enough space to respond to all of them, here are five of the most egregious:

Myth 1: The last eight years were awful for most Americans economically and President Bush’s deregulatory policies caused the current financial crisis.

Reality:

President Bush’s time in office is ending as it began, with our economy under stress. The recession President Bush inherited as he entered office ran through the attacks of September 11, 2001, but during the recovery that followed, and due in no small part to the tax relief President Bush worked with Congress to provide, this country experienced its longest run of uninterrupted job growth – 52 straight months, with 8.3 million jobs created.

This reflected six consecutive years of economic growth from the Fourth Quarter of 2001 until the Fourth Quarter of 2007. From 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a remarkable gain of nearly 2.1 trillion dollars. This growth was driven in part by increased labor productivity gains that have averaged 2.5 percent annually since 2001, a rate that exceeds the averages of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In the same period, real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent, and there was a 4.7 percent increase in the number of new businesses formed. The current economic challenges, which the President and his Administration have responded to aggressively, threaten to reverse some of these gains – but the gains cannot be denied.

As for the current crisis, the President and his economic team have taken unprecedented actions to stabilize the financial sector and avert a collapse. While there are a number of causes of the housing and credit crises that are at the root of our current economic troubles, deregulation by the Bush Administration is simply not one of them. In fact, one of the circumstances that contributed to the crisis was the failure of the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which President Bush long tried to subject to greater regulation. In April 2001, three months after taking office, the President warned in his first budget that the size of the two GSEs were a “potential problem” that “could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting Federally insured entities and economic activity.” In 2003, the Administration began calling for a new GSE regulator, and over the next five years, the Administration continued to call for GSE reform only to be accused by Democrats in Congress of creating artificial fears and advocating for ill-advised proposals. By the time Congress finally acted in 2008 to provide the oversight the President requested, it was too late to prevent systemic consequences. Had the Administration’s initial reform proposals been adopted, some of today’s turmoil in our financial markets may have been averted.

Myth 2: President Bush’s tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy and were paid for by sacrificing investments in health care and education.

Reality:

There are not 116 million “wealthy Americans,” but that’s how many taxpayers benefited from the President’s tax relief. The across-the-board tax cuts provided tax relief to every American who pays income taxes, created a new bottom 10 percent bracket rate, doubled the child tax credit to $1,000, and actually increased the share of the Federal income tax burden paid by the top 10 percent of individual earners from 67 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2005. Furthermore, this Administration removed 13 million low-income earners from the income tax rolls completely.

The economic growth spurred by tax relief also spurred growth in Federal tax receipts. In fact, the Federal Treasury realized the largest three-year increase of revenue in 26 years, and tax receipts grew more than $542 billion between 2000 and 2007. And yes, much of that money went to investments in health care and education.

President Bush provided more than 40 million Americans with better access to prescription drugs by creating the market-based Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And it is one of the rare government programs that actually costs less than expected. Projected overall program spending between 2004 and 2013 is approximately $240 billion lower, nearly 38 percent, than originally estimated, thanks to the market-oriented principles included at President Bush’s insistence.

Despite the heated rhetoric over children’s health insurance (S-CHIP) legislation last year, estimates from a 2007 Federal survey show that the number of uninsured children under the age of 18 actually declined by 800,000 from 2001 to 2007. From 2007 to 2008, the number of people covered by affordable and portable Health Savings Account-eligible plans increased 35 percent. Additionally, since President Bush took office, more than 1,200 community health centers have opened or expanded nationwide, which has helped provide treatment to nearly 17 million people.

Federal spending on education has increased nearly 40 percent under President Bush. Additionally, Pell Grant funding nearly doubled during the Administration, which is expected to help more than 5.5 million students attend college in the 2008-09 school year, 1.2 million more students than were assisted by Pell Grants in the 2001-02 school year. This financial aid assistance also helps account for the fact that 66 percent of high school graduates from the class of 2006 enrolled in colleges, compared to 63 percent in 2000.

Perhaps more importantly, the President’s No Child Left Behind Act has delivered tangible results to students. Since the law was enacted, fourth-grade students have achieved their highest reading and math scores on record, eighth-grade students have achieved their highest math scores on record, and African-American and Hispanic students have posted all-time high scores in a number of categories, narrowing the gap between minority students and white students.

Myth 3: The President’s “go it alone” foreign policy ruined America’s standing in the world.

Reality:

Rarely can one see revisionist history occurring in the present, but this charge is nothing short of that. The United States acted with a multilateral coalition of partner nations to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq after he failed to comply with the will of the international community, including numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions. To ignore this fact is not only a distortion of history, but it is also an insult to the service members of our coalition partners who sacrificed their lives to contribute to the success we are now witnessing in Iraq. And in Afghanistan, approximately forty countries are currently deployed with American forces, including every one of our NATO allies.

The President also created a worldwide coalition of more than 90 nations to combat terrorist networks by sharing information, drying up their financing, and bringing their leaders to justice. To date, we have captured or killed hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders and operatives with the help of partner nations. Furthermore, the Administration established the Proliferation Security Initiative, which now includes more than 90 nations, and other multilateral coalitions to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The President successfully pushed for expanding NATO membership, generated international pressure on Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, and organized the Six-Party Talks, which have resulted in North Korea committing to give up its nuclear weapons and abandon its nuclear programs. Verifying North Korea’s commitment will be a challenge, but at the most recent Six-Party Talks meeting, there was strong consensus among the five parties that North Korea must submit to a comprehensive verification regime that accords with international standards.

U.S. ties in Asia have been strengthened over the past eight years, and the Administration has built strong relationships with China, Japan, and South Korea, among others. We have signed an historic civilian nuclear power agreement with India, reflecting a fundamental change in our relationship. Pro-American leaders have been elected in Germany, France, and Italy. Eastern European countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kosovo treasure their relationships with the United States, and no president has done more to improve health and security in the nations of Africa. We have also strengthened cooperation with Latin America, including initiatives with Brazil on biofuels and with Mexico and Central America on fighting organized crime. Finally, when the President took office, America had trade agreements in force with only three countries, versus 14 today – with three additional agreements approved by Congress but not yet in force and agreements with three countries that are awaiting Congressional approval.

Myth 4: The war in Iraq caused us to “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and with al Qaeda.

Reality:

Iraq and Afghanistan are two fronts in the same war, and while the success of the surge in Iraq has been visible, we have also had a quiet surge in Afghanistan. The U.S. has continuously and aggressively fought side-by-side with Afghans and our allies to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The United States has provided nearly $32 billion for security, political, and economic development assistance and the international community has provided more than $55 billion to Afghanistan since 2001.

An additional U.S. Marine battalion deployed to Afghanistan in November and they will be followed by an Army combat brigade of about 3,400 troops in early 2009. U.S. forces now total approximately 31,000, and are joined by nearly as many coalition troops. The United States and our allies are working with Afghanistan to help it nearly double the size of the Afghan National Army over the next five years, from 79,000 now trained to 134,000 in 2014.

We have also deployed Provincial Reconstruction Teams to ensure security gains are followed by real improvements in daily life, and we have helped local communities strengthen their economies and create jobs, deliver basic services, improve governance and fight corruption, and build or repair key infrastructure such as roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. More than six million children, approximately two million of them girls, are now in Afghan schools, compared to fewer than one million in 2001.

In this Global War on Terror, we do not have the luxury to fight on one battlefront at a time. To defeat the terrorists, we must fight them overseas so we don’t have to fight them here at home. Since 9/11, we have successfully captured or killed dozens of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives in two dozen countries, removed al-Qaeda’s safe-haven in Afghanistan and crippled al-Qaeda in Iraq, and disrupted numerous al Qaeda terrorist plots against the U.S., including a 2006 plot to blow up passenger planes traveling from London.

Myth 5: This Administration has been bad for the environment and ignored the problem of global warming.

Reality:

Given the liberal media’s failure to acknowledge this Administration’s true record on alternative energy, conservation, and climate change, it’s not surprising this charge has stuck. But here are some irrefutable data points: From 2001 to 2007, air pollution decreased by 12 percent, and fine particulate matter pollution is down 17 percent since 2001. Ethanol production quadrupled from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 6.5 billion gallons in 2007, wind energy production has increased by more than 400 percent, and solar energy capacity has doubled. In 2007, solar installations increased more than 32 percent and the U.S. produced 96 percent more biodiesel (490 million gallons) than in 2006. The Administration also provided nearly $18 billion to research, develop, and promote alternative and more efficient energy technologies such as biofuels, solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear, and hydrogen.

This Administration has improved and protected the health of more than 27 million acres of Federal forest and grasslands, protected, restored, and improved more than three million acres of wetlands, and established the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the world’s largest fully protected marine conservation area (nearly 140,000 square miles).

Much of the misperception about the President’s environmental record is born out of the President’s withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, which did not include the effective participation of major developing countries such as India and China. Instead, the President worked to address climate change by launching the Major Economies Process, which convened the leaders of the world’s major economies, both developed and developing, to work on ways to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy security without harming our economies or giving any nation a free ride. Finally, the President set the country on course to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions below projected levels by 2025 and invested more than $44 billion in climate change-related programs.

Some other items that are infrequently mentioned about the real record of the Bush Administration but are worth noting: Teenage drug use has declined 25 percent; in 2007, the violent crime rate was 43 percent lower than the rate in 1998; between 2005 and 2007, the chronically homeless population decreased approximately 30 percent; funding for veterans’ medical care has increased more than 115 percent; and as of 2005, the most recent abortion rate is at its lowest since 1974.

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

More on RCP: Gas Prices Shouldn’t Set Our Energy Policy

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/myths_and_facts_about_the_real.html at December 22, 2008 – 04:44:29 AM

Michael Doyle
McClatchy
October 5, 2008

WASHINGTON – A business-friendly Supreme Court will start another season Monday on familiar turf.

With a closely watched case involving cigarette advertising, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will resume the corporate focus that’s marked his three-year tenure. The cases may not sound sexy, but they can be crucial for companies and consumers alike.

“The question,” noted Robin Conrad, the executive vice president of the National Chamber Litigation Center, “comes down to who gets to regulate business.”

So far, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear some 41 cases for the 2008-09 term, which begins on the traditional first Monday morning in October. The National Chamber Litigation Center, the increasingly active litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has identified at least 16 of these as business cases.

The court typically hears about 75 cases each term, and some of the most important disputes may not have matured yet. The justices will continue adding cases through early next year.

Unlike recent years, the court hasn’t yet scheduled a Guantanamo Bay or obvious national-security case, though they might yet arise. The culture war issues, including abortion, bandied about by presidential candidates are nowhere to be seen yet, although there’s one case involving dirty words on television. Other high-profile disputes, including all-but-certain legal challenges to the new $700 billion financial bailout package, remain dormant.

“It’s going to take a while (for the bailout law) to get to the Supreme Court,” former Solicitor General Paul Clement predicted.

The pending business interests, meanwhile, revolve around high-dollar, dry-sounding issues such as pre-emption.

The term’s inaugural case, for instance, called Altria Group v. Good, will determine whether federal authority freezes out consumers from challenging cigarette advertising in state courts. A similarly themed case, Wyeth v. Levine, centers on state vs. federal authority over drug labeling.

The facts can be gruesome. Vermont resident Diana Levine lost her right arm below the elbow after the allegedly unsafe injection of a medicine. The implications may be sweeping. Nearly 30 groups – ranging from the California Medical Association to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, of California, and Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Florida – have filed friend-of-the-court briefs, known as amici curiae, in Wyeth.

“This case may win the amici sweepstakes for this term,” joked David Vladek, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

The pre-emption theme surfaces in different ways, though the core principle remains the same. As Conrad put it: Who gets to regulate?

In Altria, for instance, three Maine residents claim that the manufacturer of Marlboro Light and Cambridge Light cigarettes – the firm more commonly known as Philip Morris – deceptively advertised the cigarettes as essentially safer. The tobacco company and business allies including drug manufacturers argue that a federal cigarette-labeling law blocks smokers from taking action under state deceptive-practices laws.

Every Supreme Court term contains a surprise or two, but handicappers already are predicting some likely winners and losers. Count business among the probable winners. In the past two terms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has prevailed in 21 out of 31 cases in which it’s filed briefs.

“This is a court that feels comfortable with business,” said lawyer Beth Brinkmann, who’s argued numerous cases before the high court.

Individual case winners also might be predictable. Next Wednesday, for instance, the justices will hear in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council a challenge that some label as the Pentagon v. whales.

The Navy’s 3rd Fleet wants to use mid-frequency active sonar for training exercises off the Southern California coast. Environmentalists contend that the underwater sonar emissions disrupt whales, dolphins and other marine mammals. The legal question, one being closely watched by timber companies, builders and others, is when “emergency circumstances” can overcome a court’s injunction.

In a wartime case coming out of the often-reversed 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where a Navy victory is simultaneously a win for business interests, the odds appear set.

“For the whales, it’s not looking so good,” Georgetown law professor Lisa Heinzerling said.

August 24, 2008

By George Will

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama has made his economic thinking excruciatingly clear, so it also is clear that his running mate should be Rumpelstiltskin. He spun straw into gold, a skill an Obama administration will need in order to fulfill its fairy-tale promises.

Obama recently said he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.”

By 2012 he would “require” the economy’s huge energy sector to — here things become comic — supply half as much energy from renewable sources as already is being supplied by just one potentially renewable source. About 20 percent of America’s energy comes from nuclear energy produced using fuel rods, which, when spent, can be reprocessed into fresh fuel.

Obama is (this is part of liberalism’s catechism) leery of nuclear power. He also says — and might say so even if Nevada were not a swing state — he distrusts the safety of Nevada’s Yucca Mountain for storage of radioactive waste. Evidently he prefers today’s situation — nuclear waste stored at 126 inherently insecure above-ground sites in 39 states, within 75 miles of where more than 161 million Americans live.

But back to requiring this or that quota of energy from renewable sources. What will that involve? For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing. Obama seems to believe that if a particular outcome is desirable, one can see how to require it. But how does that work? Details to follow, sometime after noon, Jan. 20, 2009.

Obama has also promised that “we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.” What a tranquilizing verb “get” is. This senator, whose has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both — billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers, and billions more to bribe customers to buy these cars they otherwise would spurn.

Conservatives are sometimes justly accused of ascribing magic powers to money and markets: Increase the monetary demand for anything and the supply of it will expand. But it is liberals like Obama who think that any new technological marvel or other social delight can be summoned into existence by a sufficient appropriation. Once they thought “model cities” could be, too.

Where will the electricity for these million cars come from? Not nuclear power (see above). And not anywhere else, if Obama means this: “I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming — an 80 percent reduction by 2050.”

No he won’t. Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute notes that in 2050 there will be 420 million Americans — 40 million more households. So Obama’s cap would require reducing per capita carbon emissions to levels probably below even those “in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood.”

Regarding taxes, Obama says “we don’t want to return to marginal rates of 60 or 70 percent.” The top federal rate was 70 percent until the Reagan cuts of 1981. It has since ranged between 50 in 1982 and today’s 35. Obama promises that expiration of the Bush tax cuts will restore the 39.6 rate. He also favors a payroll tax of up to 4 percent on earnings above $250,000 (today, only the first $102,000 is taxed), most of which also are subject to the highest state income tax rates. When the top federal rate was set at 28 under Reagan, payroll taxes were not levied on income over $42,000, so the top effective rate of combined taxes was under 35. Obama’s policies would bring it to the mid-50s for many Americans, close to the 60 percent Obama considers excessive.

There never is a shortage of nonsensical political rhetoric, but really: Has there ever been solemn silliness comparable to today’s politicians tarting up their agendas as things designed for, and necessary to, “saving the planet,” and promising edicts to “require” entire industries to reorder themselves?

In 1996, Bob Dole, citing the Clinton campaign’s scabrous fundraising, exclaimed: “Where’s the outrage?” This year’s campaign, soggy with environmental messianism, deranged self-importance and delusional economics, the question is: Where is the derisive laughter?

Ben Lieberman

August 23, 2008

I f only drivers could avoid high gasoline prices as easily as Congress has avoided doing anything about them.

Gas has dipped below $4 a gallon for the first time in months, but prices are still uncomfortably high and likely will stay that way through November. Thus, the pain at the pump will remain a big election issue.

But now that members of Congress are home for the August recess and are asking voters to re-elect them, they’ll have to explain why the single best energy idea – expanding domestic oil production – isn’t even on the agenda.

Other measures – crackdowns on speculators, subsidies for alternative energy sources, tax hikes on oil companies, prohibitions on price gouging – have been subject to endless debate, leading to legislative proposals voted on by Congress. These ideas range from mildly useful at best to downright counterproductive at worst. Some, like the tax increases and price-gouging measures, are retreads of blunders that prompted shortages and gas lines in the 1970s. Thus far, none have passed.

A far better option is to open the vast oil-rich areas in the United States – both onshore and in our territorial waters – that inexplicably remain restricted despite skyrocketing prices. Polling shows that the public strongly supports opening the 85 percent of America’s offshore areas currently off-limits – areas believed to contain 19 billion barrels. The same is true for promising onshore regions such as Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a tiny portion of which is estimated to contain 10 billion more.

Those 29 billion barrels – and past experience suggests we’ll find far more – represents 48 years’ worth of current imports from Saudi Arabia.

Increasing domestic oil supplies is an indispensable part of a sound energy policy. Americans get this, even if some in Washington don’t.

Several bills, sponsored mostly by Republicans, seek to open these areas. Republicans also have sought to add these measures as amendments to other energy and non-energy legislation.

Not only has the House and Senate Democratic leadership opposed these efforts, but they have used every tactic in the book to keep them from coming to a vote.

Amazingly, they have even shelved appropriations bills – the ones politicians love to fill with pork-barrel spending in an election year – rather than see pro-energy amendments tacked onto them. Some say a government shutdown is possible, if Republicans insist that the bills needed to keep federal activities going also allow new drilling and if the Democratic leadership refuses to go along.

Many Republicans even tried to block the August recess and keep Congress in Washington until an agreement was reached on increasing domestic oil supplies. They failed, but some refused to go home anyway and continued making their case.

It should be emphasized that, although Republicans are leading this charge, it isn’t entirely a partisan issue. The strongly liberal Democratic leadership – Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and their like-minded colleagues – is at odds with a number of pro-energy Democrats who would join Republicans and put a domestic energy bill over the top.

This is why the leadership is stonewalling: They’re desperate to avoid a vote they know they would lose.

Pelosi, Reid and other critics of expanded drilling are not without their excuses: There isn’t enough new oil out there to make any difference, it will take too long to bring it to market, oil companies don’t need new places to drill because they’re deliberately under-producing in existing areas, and so on.

None of these claims have merit, but those who do believe them should be willing to say so in an open debate over a drilling bill, and then proudly vote no on that bill. Instead, they have gone miles out of their way to avoid that debate and vote.

The reality is that the liberal Democratic leadership is too beholden to environmental extremists whose “drill nowhere” absolutism takes precedence over pump prices, no matter how high they may go. And this position has never been more out of touch than it is now.

So Congress adjourned without adding a drop of new oil, and members are back in their states and districts where high pump prices remain a top concern. Don’t be surprised if constituents angry over paying $70 per tankful give their representatives an earful.

Democrats feeling pressure to lift ban

Richard Simon
Los Angeles Times
August 14, 2008

WASHINGTON – Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is considering legislation that would permit new offshore drilling as part of a broad energy bill, a response to growing anxiety within her party that Republicans are gaining traction with election-year attacks that Democrats aren’t doing enough to address high gasoline prices.

One proposal under consideration would let states decide whether to permit new energy exploration off their coasts while possibly maintaining the drilling ban off the Pacific coast, according to a House leadership aide who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations

Pelosi has long opposed lifting the drilling ban but has come under pressure from members of her own party – including freshmen in tough re-election campaigns – to allow a vote on offshore drilling. Adding to that, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama recently said that he would be open to limited offshore drilling if it was part of a broader energy compromise.

A vote is now likely to be held next month, after the House returns from its summer recess.

What exactly would be voted on was still being discussed Wednesday. Democrats are expected to insist that any bill include some of their priorities, such as the repeal of oil industry tax breaks and a requirement that utilities generate more electricity from cleaner energy sources. Those measures, which have drawn Republican opposition, could complicate passage of any measure.

Pelosi said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” earlier this week that she would consider a vote on offshore drilling, “but it has to be part of something that says we want to bring immediate relief to the public and not just a hoax” – part of a broader package that would likely include investment in alternative energy sources, releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and targeting speculation in energy markets.

Pro-drilling forces remained suspicious.

“Just because a bill comes to the floor with ‘offshore’ and ‘energy’ in the title doesn’t mean it’s a good offshore drilling bill,” said Brian Kennedy, a former House Republican leadership aide who is now with the Institute for Energy Research, a Washington research group that promotes free-market energy policies. “Speaker Pelosi is only going to schedule a vote on an offshore energy bill if she believes it would be politically perilous not to, and even then, it’s not going to have much energy in it.”

While President Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain have called for lifting the long-standing ban on new offshore drilling, Pelosi has called it an election-year “hoax” by oil industry allies. She has said it would provide no immediate relief from high gas prices and, even in the long run, have a negligible effect on energy costs at potential risk to the environment.

At least 31 Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors of legislation to permit new drilling 25 miles off the coast – or, if states object, 50 miles offshore. The number of Democratic supporters is expected to grow once lawmakers get an earful from their constituents about high gasoline prices, said Dave Helfert, a spokesman for Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, one of the bill’s chief sponsors.

The idea of letting states decide whether to permit drilling has gained support in the Senate, too. A bipartisan group of senators recently announced a compromise that would let Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia decide whether to allow drilling 50 miles off their shorelines.

McCain calls for 45 plants by 2030; Obama more wary

David Jackson
USA Today
August 6, 2008

WASHINGTON – John McCain’s visit to a Michigan nuclear plant Tuesday revives a debate over the promise and safety of nuclear energy.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee emphasized the promise, saying his plan to build 45 0nuclear plants by 2030 would help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and cut greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

“If we want to enable the technologies of tomorrow like plug-in electric cars, we need electricity to plug into,” McCain said after touring a nuclear plant about 30 miles south of Detroit.

Democrat Barack Obama is more cautious. While he says nuclear power should be part of U.S. energy plans, Obama said Tuesday the nation must find “safer ways to use nuclear power and store nuclear waste.” He said the focus should be on finding new energy sources.

A summer of record gas prices and tensions with oil-rich areas such as the Middle East, Venezuela and Russia has combined to make energy a top issue in the White House race.

The Three Mile Island accident in 1979 changed the political dynamics of nuclear power. No new plants have been approved since 1979, but those in development at the time gradually came online, said Steve Kerekes of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade group.

There were 69 commercial reactors in the U.S. three decades ago, according to the institute, and today there are 104. Nuclear power produces 19 percent of the nation’s electricity – a point McCain frequently makes on the campaign trail. Applications are pending for 18 plants.

John Keeley, a spokesman for the institute, said it is a lengthy process to get plants licensed and built. “We’re looking at an eight-to-nine-year time frame,” Keeley said.

In making the case for nuclear power, McCain often cites France’s reliance on such energy and plans by China, India and Russia to boost their capacity.

The Democratic National Committee and the League of Conservation Voters both noted that the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant that McCain visited had replaced one that had a partial meltdown in 1966. An abnormal level of radiation was not released at the time, and no one was injured, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Obama has criticized McCain for not having a plan to dispose of nuclear waste – other than to deposit it at the proposed Yucca Mountain storage site in Nevada, which the Democrat opposes. McCain, who voted for the site in 2002, has said he supports the facility about 90 miles from Las Vegas as long as it can meet federal environmental standards.

McCain’s plan for nuclear power, including eventual construction of 100 new facilities, is just one idea in a package that also calls for more oil drilling and tax breaks to developers of wind, solar and other alternative energy sources.

Obama’s energy plan includes a tax on companies that make “windfall profits” from soaring oil prices, drilling on stockpiled oil leases and $150 billion to step up research on biofuels and other forms of “clean” energy.

Related Topic/Question: What do the French do with their nuclear waste?

Recycling Nuclear Fuel: The French Do It, Why Can’t Oui?
by Jack Spencer
December 28, 2007

What if the government allowed you to burn only 25 percent of every tank of gas? Or if Washington made you pour half of every gallon of milk down the drain?

What if lawmakers forced us to bury 95 percent of our energy resources?

That is exactly what Washington does when it comes to safe, affordable and CO2-free nuclear energy. Indeed, 95 percent of the used fuel from America’s 104 power reactors, which provide about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, could be recycled for future use.

To create power, reactor fuel must contain 3-5 percent burnable uranium. Once the burnable uranium falls below that level, the fuel must be replaced. But this “spent” fuel generally retains about 95 percent of the uranium it started with, and that uranium can be recycled.

Over the past four decades, America’s reactors have produced about 56,000 tons of used fuel. That “waste” contains roughly enough energy to power every U.S. household for 12 years. And it’s just sitting there, piling up at power plant storage facilities. Talk about waste!

The sad thing is, the United States developed the technology to recapture that energy decades ago, then barred its commercial use in 1977. We have practiced a virtual moratorium ever since.

Other countries have not taken such a backward approach to nuclear power. France, whose 59 reactors generate 80 percent of its electricity, has safely recycled nuclear fuel for decades. They turned to nuclear power in the 1970s to limit their dependence on foreign energy. And, from the beginning, they made recycling used fuel central to their program.

Upon its removal from French reactors, used fuel is packed in containers and safely shipped via train and road to a facility in La Hague. There, the energy producing uranium and plutonium are removed and separated from the other waste and made into new fuel that can be used again. The entire process adds about 6 percent in costs for the French.

Anti-nuclear fear mongering has proved baseless. The French have recycled fuel like this for 30 years without incident: no terrorist attack, no bad guys stealing uranium, no contribution toward nuclear weapons proliferation, and o accidental explosions.

France meets all of its recycling needs with one facility. Indeed, domestic French reprocessing only takes about half of La Hague’s capacity. The other half is used to recycle other countries’ spent nuclear fuel.

Since beginning operations, France’s La Hague plant has safely processed over 23,000 tones of used fuel–enough to power France for fourteen years.

Their success has sparked plenty of interest abroad. The French company AREVA has already helped Japan with its reprocessing facility and is currently looking at the feasibility of building a similar plant in China.

The British, Japanese, Indians, and Russians all engage in some level of reprocessing.

Of course, there is still waste involved. But recycling produces much lower volumes of highly radioactive waste, and the French deal with it effectively–placing some waste in short-term, interim storage or preparing the rest for long-term storage in their version of Yucca Mountain.

All is not perfect in France. They are still working to open a permanent geologic storage facility. But the critical issue is that they have an organization to handle used nuclear fuel that allows their program to advance without being held hostage to the politics of geologic storage.

If the United States is serious about reducing CO2 and energy dependence, it must get serious about nuclear power and begin recycling used nuclear fuel.

A viable reprocessing capability not only would give the United States a valuable energy resource, it would reduce the amount of material going to Yucca Mountain. The U.S. has already produced enough waste to nearly fill Yucca’s legal limit of 70,000 metric tons–subsequent studies estimate that its actual capacity is about double that amount and some believe that it is even greater.

It would also put the United States back on the map as a leader in commercial nuclear technology, which today it is not.

Nuclear fuel reprocessing is a safe activity that should be part of America’s nuclear energy program. It can be affordable and is technologically feasible. The French are proving that on a daily basis. The question is: Why can’t oui? (This last line was my favorite part of the article – Kautzman)

Jack Spencer is a research fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.

First appeared in FoxNews.com

Scientists Mimic Essence Of Plants’ Energy Storage System

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2008) — In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan’s new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity — whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source — runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it’s easy to set up, Nocera said. “That’s why I know this is going to work. It’s so easy to implement,” he said.

Giant leap for clean energy

Sunlight has the greatest potential of any power source to solve the world’s energy problems, said Nocera. In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet’s energy needs for one year.

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a “giant leap” toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

“This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind,” said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. “The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem.”

Just the beginning

Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require a highly basic (non-benign) environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates.

More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality.

“This is just the beginning,” said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. “The scientific community is really going to run with this.”

Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.

Fri, Aug. 01, 2008

David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

 

Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report
July 28, 2008

Sometimes public opinion doesn’t flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. Gas at $3 a gallon didn’t change anybody’s mind about energy issues; $4 a gallon gas did. Evidently, the experience of paying more than $50 for a tankful gets people thinking we should stop worrying so much about global warming and the environmental dangers of oil wells on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska. Drill now. Nuke the caribou.

Our system of divided government and litigation-friendly regulation makes it hard for our society to do things, and easy for adroit lobbyists and lawyers to stop them. Nations with more centralized power and less democratic accountability find it easier: France and Japan generate most of their electricity by nuclear power and Chicago, where authority is more centralized and accountability less robust than in most of the country, depends more on nuclear power than almost all the rest of the nation.

In contrast, lobbyists and litigators for environmental restriction groups have produced energy policies that I suspect future generations will regard as lunatic. We haven’t built a new nuclear plant in some 30 years, since a Jane Fonda movie exaggerated their dangers. We have allowed states to ban oil drilling on the outer continental shelf, prompted by the failure of 40- or 50-year-old technology in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, though current technology is much better, as shown by the lack of oil spills in the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina.

We have banned oil drilling on a very small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is godforsaken tundra (I have been to the North Slope oil fields, similar terrain – I know) for fear of disturbing a herd of caribou – a species in no way endangered or scarce.

The ANWR ban is the work of environmental restriction groups that depend on direct-mail fundraising to pay their bills and keep their jobs. That means they must always claim the sky is falling. They can’t get people to send a check or mouse-click a donation because they did a good job, the restrictions they imposed on the Alaska pipeline in the 1970s have done a good job in preserving the environment or because clean air acts of the past have vastly reduced air pollution.

ANWR is a precious cause for them because it can be portrayed (dishonestly) as a national treasure and because the pressure for drilling there has been unrelenting. Democrats have enlisted solidly in their army, and they have also been able to recruit Republicans who wanted to get good environmental scorecards to impress enviro-conscious voters.

Now all that is in danger, because the pain of paying $60 for a tank of gas has persuaded most Americans to worry less about the caribou or the recurrence of an oil spill that happened 39 years ago. Democratic leaders are preventing Congress from voting on continental shelf and ANWR drilling or oil shale development because they fear their side would lose and are making the transparently absurd claim that drilling won’t lower the price of oil. They’re scampering to say that they would allow drilling somewhere – mostly in places where oil companies haven’t found any oil.

In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants and drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol.

On balance, of course, I prefer our system over the more centralized, less accountable systems of France and Japan (and Barack Obama’s Chicago). But it sure does have its costs.

But it also has its benefits: Public opinion, when it has changed as it has with $4 gas, has an effect. Environmental restrictionists like Al Gore have been selling a form of secular religion: We have sinned against Mother Earth, we must atone and suffer, there can be no argument, but we must have faith.

That was an appealing argument to many, perhaps most, Americans when gas was selling for $1.40. It has a much more limited appeal now that gas is selling for $4.10. The time may be coming when our lunatic environmental policies are swept away by a rising tide of common sense.

July 12, 2008

The last Texan to put so much of his money into a campaign was Ross Perot, who entertained the political world in 1992 with charts and rants of impending doom.

But his message about the budget deficit was serious, and he helped push the U.S. government into the black for a fleeting stretch of the late 1990s. Now comes T. Boone Pickens, an 80-year-old Texas oilman who is pushing, of all things, the power of wind. Pickens promises to be nearly as recognizable as the presidential candidates on TV this fall, which may be a tall order given Barack Obama’s fundraising prowess.

Like Perot, Pickens brings a serious message worth listening to.

The oilman-entrepreneur-takeover artist has sponsored nationwide ads with a clearer, more declarative energy proposal than either Democrat Obama or his Republican rival, John McCain, has offered. Obama would sink $150 billion into alternative energy research and raise car fuel standards. McCain would offer a $300 million bounty for the developer of a better electric car battery and favors more oil exploration. But each campaign has spent so much time attacking the other’s plan that it has muddied the energy debate and left a wide opening for Pickens’ straightforward, unifying message.

“It’s our crisis,” Pickens says in his new ads, “and we can solve it.”

Do not underestimate the power of can-do in this political moment. Most Americans are made aware of the problems facing the country every time they fill a gas tank, pay a light bill or worry about health insurance. Stipulate that no one in the government, Democrat or Republican, deserves an energy policy star over the last 35 years. Stipulate that expensive choices lie ahead. But quit pointing fingers and tell us how this can be fixed.

Pickens, a self-described oilman through and through, is an unlikely messenger for the moment. He’s gone from boom to bust and back, the Oil Patch’s equivalent of Al Gore. So Pickens embracing wind is tantamount to Nixon going to China. He says the country can’t “drill its way out of this problem,” that his plan is doable “with the right kind of leadership” and with “everyone pulling together.” Besides proposing a big wind-turbine construction plan, he wants Congress to either extend construction tax credits set to expire at year’s end or establish other incentives for new wind generation.

Oilmen may be the most despised romantics in the American West. But as big dreamers, they have rarely sold short on the possibility of America. Pickens is putting his money behind his idea, funneling big bucks to a TV ad campaign and building a $10 billion wind farm near Pampa, Texas.

His plan, available on www.pickensplan.com, is a relatively simple but big step. Over the coming decade, he wants to build enough turbines in the nation’s “wind belt” from Texas to North Dakota to provide more than 20 percent of the nation’s electricity needs. Pickens says that would free up enough natural gas to reduce foreign oil imports by 38 percent, ostensibly accelerating the trend to cars powered by something other than oil.

Such a plan would cost $1.2 trillion, he estimates, but it would allow the United States to keep at least a third of the $700 billion it annually sends abroad for oil. He says the potential is there. This is one of the windiest countries on the planet, and that’s no commentary on our perpetual campaigns. As the cliche goes, the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of wind.

Pickens’ Web site is Perotesque in its use of charts and chalk and Texas talk. On his explainer video, you half expect Pickens to mention crazy aunts or vow to get under the hood, as the bantam billionaire Perot often did in the ‘92 and ‘96 elections.

Wind is already catching on in flyover country, where gigantic trucks can be seen hauling massive components of the 1- to 3-megawatt turbines headed for hillsides and bluffs in the wind belt from Washington state to Texas.

About 50,000 Americans are now employed in the wind generation industry, but Pickens’ plan could boost that figure to 500,000, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Reaching 20 percent of the nation’s electrical needs through wind also would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent by 2030, something that could put power behind the 50 percent greenhouse gas reductions agreement at the just-concluded G-8 meetings in Japan.

Last year, I heard Pickens tell a class of high school graduates that he would trade all the money he ever made, all the fancy things he ever enjoyed, for their futures. He urged the 18-year-olds to learn from their failures as much as their successes.

This capacity to correct is an unheralded power of America. The nation’s energy thirst will have to be quenched by something other than oil, and soon. If it takes an oilman to push the politicians out into the wind, so be it.

Policy changes make it tougher to designate need for protection

Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post
March 23, 2008

WASHINGTON – With little-noticed procedural and policy moves over several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Controversies have occasionally flared over Interior Department officials who repeatedly overruled rank-and-file agency scientists’ recommendations to list new species, but internal documents also suggest that pervasive bureaucratic obstacles were erected to limit the number of species protected under one of the nation’s best-known environmental laws.

The documents show that personnel were barred from using information in agency files that might support new listings, and that senior officials regularly dismissed the advice of scientific advisers as President Bush’s appointees rejected or moved slowly on petitions to list imperiled plants and animals under the 35-year-old law. Officials also changed the way species are evaluated – by considering only their current range, not their historical range – and put decisions on other species in limbo by blocking citizen petitions that cause legal deadlines.

As a result, listings plummeted. During Bush’s more than seven years as president, his administration has placed 59 domestic species on the endangered list, almost the exact number that his father listed during each of his four years in office. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago.

In a sign of how contentious the issue has become, the advocacy group WildEarth Guardians filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking a court order to protect 681 Western species all at once, on the grounds that further delay would violate the law. Among the species cited are tiny snails, vibrant butterflies and a wide assortment of plants and other creatures.

“It’s an urgent situation, and something has to be done,” said Nicole Rosmarino, the group’s conservation director. “This roadblock to listing under the Bush administration is criminal.”

Developers, farmers and other business interests frequently resist decisions on listing because they require a complex regulatory process that can make it difficult to develop land that is home to protected species. Environmentalists have also sparred for years with federal officials over implementation of the law.

Nevertheless, former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton added an average of 58 and 62 species to the list each year, respectively.

One consequence is that the current president has the most emergency listings, which are issued when a species is on the very brink of extinction.

And some species have vanished. The Lake Sammamish kokanee, a landlocked sockeye salmon, went extinct in 2001 after being denied an emergency listing, and genetically pure Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits disappeared last year after Interior declined to protect critical habitat for the species.

Administration officials – who estimate that more than 280 domestic species should be on the list but have been “precluded” because of more pressing priorities – do not dispute that they have moved slowly, but they dispute the reasons.

Bush officials say they are struggling to cope with an onslaught of litigation, but internal documents and several court rulings have revealed steps the administration has taken to make it harder, and slower, to approve listings.

Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall said his agency, which decides on most proposed listings of endangered species and their critical habitat, has been hamstrung by a slew of lawsuits and has just begun to dig out. He told the House Appropriations interior subcommittee last month that his agency will make decisions about 71 species by Oct. 1 and an additional 21 species a year later.

“Lawsuits, starting in the early ’90s, have really driven things,” Hall said, adding that the administration has tried to keep species from declining to the point where they need to be listed. “I’m feeling pretty good we’re back on track to do the job the way it’s supposed to be done.”

In court cases, however, a number of judges have rejected decisions made by Hall’s agency and have criticized their slow pace. On March 5, a U.S. district judge in Phoenix ordered Interior to re-designate bald eagles in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert as threatened after the agency delisted the entire species last summer.

Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post
March 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – Diesel-powered locomotives, ships, ferries and tugboats will have to eliminate 90 percent of the soot and 80 percent of the nitrogen oxides in their exhaust by 2030 under tougher air-pollution standards issued Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Today EPA is fitting another important piece into the clean diesel puzzle by cleaning emissions from our trains and boats,” EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said, adding that the nation’s “diesel rule has reached its final stop on its journey to deliver cleaner air to all Americans.”

Over the past decade, pollution from diesel-powered cars, sports-utilities, trucks and off-road vehicles has been cut by a series of rules that curb emissions of fine particles and smog-causing chemicals.

Environmental groups, which had criticized the EPA this week for setting new limits on smog-causing ozone at a level higher than recommended by the agency’s independent scientific advisers, applauded Friday’s action.

“Our children, and our children’s children, will grow up in an era where diesel engines are no longer associated with these noxious black plumes of smoke,” said Janea Scott, a staff lawyer with the group Environmental Defense. She added that the reductions ordered by the EPA “are challenging but achievable.”

The new standards will yield $8.4 billion to $12 billion in health benefits and prevent 1,400 premature deaths annually by the time they are in full effect in 2030, Johnson said. He estimated that they will cost industry $740 million to implement.

The EPA accelerated its original proposed deadline for cutting nitrogen oxides by two years; the rules will take effect in 2014 for vessels and in 2015 for locomotives.

Exxon asks justices to overturn, reduce $2.5 billion damages

Plaintiff attorney Jeffrey L. Fisher speaks with the media after addressing the Supreme Court in the Exxon Valdez case. Associated Press (Associated Press )

David G. Savage
Los Angeles Times
February 28, 2008

WASHINGTON – Nearly 19 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill fouled Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Supreme Court debated Wednesday whether the world’s largest oil company must pay a record $2.5 billion in punitive damages.

The eight justices who heard the case appeared closely split, although several said they were looking for a way to reduce the size of the award. Justice Samuel Alito sat out the case because he is an Exxon stockholder. His stock holdings could prove costly to the company, since a tie vote would have the effect of affirming the $2.5 billion verdict.

No one disputed that the oil spill was an extraordinary disaster. The company’s lawyer began by describing it as “one of the worst environmental tragedies in U.S. maritime history.”

And no one disputed that Exxon was responsible for paying for the cleanup and for the losses suffered by fishermen, cannery workers and other Alaska residents. Exxon paid $900 million in cleanup costs, and a jury ordered it to pay $287 million to 32,000 Alaskans, many of whom lost their livelihoods when the fishing industry was destroyed.

At issue Wednesday was whether extra damages were needed to punish Exxon for corporate recklessness.

In 1994, a jury in Alaska imposed $5 billion in punitive damages, money that would go to the plaintiffs. Years of appeals followed, and the verdict was cut to $2.5 billion.

During this same stretch, the Supreme Court has been putting limits on punitive damages, believing the amount should be tied to the actual harm.

The case heard Wednesday is unusual because it apparently was the first before the Supreme Court involving punitive damages for an accident on the high seas.

Maritime law has shielded ship owners from being punished for damage caused by their vessels. This made sense during the era of sailing ships, said Justice David Souter. “In those days, when a ship put to sea, the ship was sort of a floating world by itself,” he said. It was gone and out of its owner’s control until months, or perhaps years, later when it returned to port.

Representing Exxon, Washington lawyer Walter Dellinger cited this principle of maritime law and urged the court to throw out the entire punitive verdict. He cited the case of the Amiable Nancy in 1818 as having a historic precedent shielding ship owners.

But his argument quickly ran aground. “It’s rather, I think, an exaggeration to call it a long line of settled decisions in maritime law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.

As a fallback, Dellinger argued that the $2.5 billion verdict was too high. He cited several federal laws that, for example, fine those who pollute the environment. Typically, these legal fines may total millions of dollars but not billions, he said.

He also urged the justices to keep in mind that it was an accident. “This was not an intentional act. It was not malicious. The company did not make one dollar of profit,” he said.

But Stanford law professor Jeffrey L. Fisher, representing the workers, said Exxon deserved to be punished for “putting a drunken master in charge of a supertanker.”

He said the jury heard testimony that Exxon officials knew Capt. Joseph Hazelwood was an alcoholic, and they had 33 reports that he had gone back to drinking. “Up and down the corporation, for three years, upper management was receiving reports that this man was drinking aboard the vessel,” Fisher said.

On March 24, 1989, Hazelwood had been drinking and left the bridge of the supertanker. The third mate left in charge failed to turn the giant ship in time, and it hit Bligh Reef. About 11 million gallons of crude oil were spilled.

Fisher said the captain was an agent of Exxon’s management. “It is perfectly appropriate to expose the corporation to punitive damages based on the reckless acts of such an individual,” he said.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia questioned why a corporation should be punished if one of its officials violates its corporate policy. Exxon had a firm policy against drinking.

Three other justices – Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen G. Breyer and Souter – said they saw a need to reduce the punitive damages.

“This is a very dramatic accident … but there are accidents every day,” Breyer said. He questioned whether “negligence or recklessness is now going to be not only imputed to the corporation but subject (to) punitives. … It will be a new world for the shipping industry.”

Kempthorne seeks compatibility with state laws

Richard Simon and Judy Pasternak
Los Angeles Times
February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON – In a victory for gun rights advocates, the federal government is preparing to relax a decades-old ban on loaded firearms in national parks.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Friday his department would suggest new regulations by the end of April that could bring federal rules into line with state laws concerning guns in parks and public lands. His announcement came in a letter to 51 senators who have written to him about the issue. A near majority of the Senate, including Democrats and Republicans from Western states, has backed a drive to repeal the ban, which has been in place in some parks for 100 years.

The proposed rule change might let visitors carry loaded weapons into national parks in states with few gun restrictions, such as Montana.

Gun rights advocates, notably the National Rifle Association, have said the ban infringes on their Second Amendment right to bear arms and their ability to defend themselves from predators, human and animal.

“If you’re hiking in the backcountry and there is a problem with a criminal or an aggressive animal, there’s no 911 box where you can call police and have a 60-second response time,” said Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association. “Here in Montana, we are very used to being able to provide for our own personal protection.”

Kempthorne’s decision to review the ban was hailed by the NRA. “This is an important step in the right direction,” said the organization’s chief lobbyist, Chris W. Cox.

On the other hand, the National Parks Conservation Association called Kempthorne’s action “alarming.” Tom Kiernan, the group’s president, said a loosening of the ban would be “a blow to the national parks and the 300 million visitors who enjoy them every year.”

His view is echoed by gun-control advocates and some rangers who say permitting firearms would be dangerous for visitors and wildlife and alter the national park experience.

“Parks have long been sanctuaries for both animals and people,” said Butch Farabee, a former acting superintendent at Montana’s Glacier National Park who is retired. “There need to be places in this country where people can feel secure without guns and know that the guy in the campground across the way does not have one.”

The federal government would not cede authority over firearms in national parks to the states, said Interior Department spokesman Chris Paolino, but would like to reflect the policies of host states. In drafting proposed new rules, Paolino said, the department also would take into consideration the ban on firearms in federal buildings.

“It’s important to note this is the beginning of the process,” Paolino added.

Weapons originally were prohibited in national parks to prevent “opportunistic poaching” of wildlife, said Frank Buono, a former assistant superintendent of California’s Joshua Tree National Park.

A 1908 Yellowstone National Park regulation, for example, required that visitors “having firearms, traps, nets, seines or explosives” surrender them at the entrance unless they received written permission from the park superintendent.

A similar policy was in effect at most parks for decades. Then the Reagan administration in 1983 required that visitors unload and store their firearms before entering most national parks.

Supporters of the repeal effort note that state gun laws currently apply to federal land managed by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and they see no reason why that should not be the case in national parks and wildlife refuges.

So far, half the Senate seems to agree. Nine Democrats and 41 Republicans have signed letters to Kempthorne calling on him to lift the gun ban. “We do not believe that allowing law-abiding citizens to transport and carry firearms – rather than forcing them to disassemble or store them in their trunks – will increase the chances that they will be tempted to violate prohibitions on discharge,” one group of senators wrote.

Advocates believe it is, foremost, an issue of ending an unconstitutional infringement on their right to bear arms. But they also contend that park visitors are “increasingly vulnerable” to crime.

“While park rangers now use bullet-proof vests and automatic weapons to enforce the law, regular Americans in states where conceal-and-carry law exists are denied the opportunity for self-defense,” Coburn said in “talking points” distributed by his office.

The National Park Service says there were 116,588 reported offenses in national parks in 2006, the most recent year data are available, including 11 killings, 35 rapes or attempted rapes, 61 robberies, 16 kidnappings and 261 aggravated assaults.

Supporters also believe that gun owners should be able to protect themselves against dangerous animals, dismissing arguments that firearms would ruin the park experience.

Officials at Glacier – which recorded 10 deaths from grizzly bear attacks between 1967 and 1998 – said the last attack was in 2005, when a bear mauled two hikers. One of the victims, Johan Otter, of Escondido, Calif., said the idea that a gun could have stopped the 400-pound bear that charged him is naive. “We only had, like, half a second between seeing the bear and the impact,” Otter said.

Organizations that represent current and retired park workers oppose a repeal, saying it not only would endanger visitors, rangers and wildlife but would change the character of the parks.

Bill Wade, executive council chairman of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, said, “How many of you would want to go out there if you knew that people were running up and down the Appalachian Trail with guns?”

Tugboats pull the crippled tanker Exxon Valdez toward Naked Island in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on April 5, 1989. Associated Press (File Associated Press )

Robert Barnes
Washington Post
February 24, 2008

WASHINGTON – When a federal jury in Alaska in 1994 ordered Exxon to pay $5 billion to thousands of people who had their lives disrupted by the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill, an appeal of the nation’s largest punitive damages award was inevitable.

But few could have predicted the incredible round of legal ping-pong that only this month lands at the Supreme Court.

In the time span of the battle – 14 years after the verdict, nearly two decades since the spill itself – claimants’ lawyers say there is a new statistic to add to the grim legacy of the disaster in Prince William Sound: Nearly 20 percent of the 33,000 fishermen, Native Alaskans, cannery workers and others who triumphed in court that day are dead.

“That’s the most upsetting thing, that more than 6,000 people have passed and this still isn’t finished,” said Mike Webber, a Native Alaskan artistic carver and former fisherman in the Prince William Sound community of Cordova. “Our sound is not healthy, and neither are the people. Everything is still on the surface, just as it was.”

“The bottom line,” said Tim Joyce, the mayor of Cordova, where half the town’s 2,400 full-time residents are parties to the suit, “is that there is still oil on the beaches. And this lawsuit still isn’t finished.”

The high court is scheduled to hear arguments Wednesday on whether punishment is excessive or even permitted under maritime law. The case, Exxon Shipping v. Baker, may turn, in the eyes of the justices, on a nearly 200-year-old precedent set when privateer ships sailed the oceans, or on the more recent provisions of the Clean Water Act.

An epic event
In Alaska, the lawsuit is seen as a test of justice and corporate responsibility, and its resolution is seen as critical to healing the scars left by an epic event that defines the state’s modern history, Republican Gov. Sarah Palin said in an interview.

“Every Alaskan life was affected by this,” said Palin, elected in 2006. “When I got in here, that was one of the first orders of business: to find out how in the world can this administration speak on behalf of all Alaskans who have been so adversely affected by this spill.”

Exxon officials contend that such sentiments ignore the facts of the case and note that the company already has spent more than $3.4 billion in compensation for losses, cleanup and fines.

“This case is about whether further punishment is warranted,” Exxon spokesman Tony Cudmore said. “We’ve spent $3.5 billion, which is a significant sum of money we think is adequate to deter anyone” from future wrongdoing.

But that figure no longer impresses Palin and others. When the jury awarded $5 billion in 1994, that represented a year of Exxon profits. An appeals court subsequently reduced the damages to $2.5 billion – “about three weeks of Exxon’s current net profits,” the plaintiffs told the Supreme Court in their brief.

“I’m a capitalist, I’m a conservative Republican, I am pro-development and pro-industry,” said Palin, who is herself a former commercial fisherman once party to the suit. “But consider what Exxon has made in terms of profits in all these years. The American judicial system came down with this judgment, and they’ve appealed and they’ve appealed and they’ve appealed.”

The award has been reviewed three times by a district judge and twice by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, with more than four years elapsing between one appeal and a decision.

“It’s a scandal how long it’s gone on,” said David Lebedoff, a Minneapolis lawyer and author who wrote a book about the five-month trial that led to the punitive damages award. He blames the 9th Circuit for not moving faster. “It’s absolutely inexcusable.”

PR, legal tactics
The passage of time is a worry for claimants, and they have responded with public relations and legal tactics unusual for Supreme Court cases. A newly created Web site details the continuing environmental damage to Prince William Sound and a commercial fishing industry that has not fully recovered.

News conferences and a vigil are planned before the arguments. The “ridicule pole” Webber carved from yellow cedar, depicting an Exxon executive with oil flowing from his mouth, is crated and on its way to Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford law professor who will argue the case for plaintiffs, has sent the court a DVD containing photos and footage taken at the time of the spill, video of Exxon executives acknowledging fault and an audiotape of the distress call made by what plaintiffs claim to be a clearly drunk Capt. Joseph Hazelwood reporting that the Exxon Valdez had hit Bligh Reef.

Fisher said it is important to remind the justices of the events of 19 years ago, and that the jury was punishing Exxon for “socially outrageous behavior.”

“One of the dangers for us is that outrage dissipates over time, and it is hard to get back to the place where the country was at that time,” he said.

Justices have extended the allotted time for oral arguments, and the briefs filed on both sides indicate that the events of the grounding might yet be explored again.

‘Relapsed alcoholic’
Some things are not in dispute. The Exxon Valdez left port late on the evening of March 23, 1989, loaded with 53 million gallons of crude oil. It strayed out of the shipping lane to avoid ice. Hazelwood instructed the third mate on when to make the turn back into the lane, and then left the bridge of the ship, a violation of regulations. Just after midnight, the crewman ran the nearly 1,000-foot tanker aground on the reef, and 11 million gallons of oil oozed into Prince William Sound.

The oil eventually spread more than 600 miles, an area plaintiffs contend would stretch from Cape Cod, Mass., to Cape Lookout, N.C.

They also charge that Hazelwood, an alcoholic, was drunk. They argue that he consumed at least five double-vodkas in waterfront bars before boarding the ship. They say Exxon knew that Hazelwood, once treated for his disease, had resumed drinking.

Courts have agreed. “Spilling the oil was an accident, but putting a relapsed alcoholic in charge of a supertanker was not,” the appeals court ruled in upholding the punitive damages.

Exxon’s lawyer in the case, Walter Dellinger, told the court in his brief that it is “hotly disputed” whether Hazelwood was drunk at the time of the accident, and points out that Hazelwood was acquitted by a state court jury of operating a vessel under the influence.

Whatever misdeeds were committed by Hazelwood, Dellinger argues, they were not the misdeeds of Exxon. “Imposing vicarious punitive liability on a ship owner, without requiring the jury to find that the ship owner directed, countenanced or participated in the conduct, was in conflict with almost 200 years of unbroken maritime law,” the brief argues.

The reference is to the court’s 1818 decision in “The Amiable Nancy,” in which it held a ship’s owner could not be held responsible for the plundering of its crew when it was miles out at sea.

Exxon also argues that the punishment for discharges of oil and other hazardous substances is governed by the Clean Water Act, and it does not provide for private punitive damages. Alternately, the company says punitive damages should not be allowed because of what Exxon already has paid, or they should at least be reduced.

Not surprisingly, the claimants reject all of those arguments. Exxon itself stipulated that Hazelwood was a “managerial agent” of the company, they argue, and that the jury found that both Hazelwood and the company had acted recklessly. They contend that the Clean Water Act claim is baseless, and that the award is justified.

Final judgment
Justice Samuel Alito Jr. owns Exxon stock and has recused himself from the case. That leaves eight justices to hear it, and an even split would mean that the award stands.

Around Prince William Sound, residents wait for a final judgment on the $2.5 billion award, which plaintiff lawyers say now stands at about $4.8 billion because of the interest earned while the suit proceeds.

“It’s painful for people to talk about this,” said Jennifer Gibbons, executive director of the environmental group Prince William Soundkeeper, “but they want closure.”

Officials say disabled craft full of toxic fuel

Peter Spiegel and Ben Dubose
Los Angeles Times
February 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration has decided to try to shoot down a failing 5,000-pound spy satellite, fearing its rocket fuel could turn into a deadly toxic gas if the spacecraft crashed in a populated area, officials said Thursday.

The unusual operation, to be carried out in the next several days, would be the first U.S. attempt to shoot down a satellite since Cold War-era military tests ended in the 1980s.

Pentagon officials plan to use the same ships and missiles that are part of the Navy’s nascent missile-defense system. Ships in the North Pacific plan to fire a tactical missile at the satellite when it reaches a low orbit of about 130 nautical miles over their general location.

Some experts theorized that the administration was influenced by concern that classified components on the intelligence satellite could fall into hostile hands. Denying that, Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said any sensitive instruments would burn on re-entry.

“Once you go through the atmosphere and the heating and the burning, that would not be an issue in this case,” Cartwright said at a news conference. “It would not justify using a missile to take it and break it up further.”

However, the government has never resorted to shooting down a disabled spacecraft or satellite, despite dozens of crashes and re-entries. Administration officials said this time is different because the satellite failed shortly after its launch in December 2006, leaving almost all of its 1,000 pounds of hydrazine rocket fuel frozen in the uncontrollable spacecraft.

Cartwright compared it to a bus, with only half of the craft likely to burn on re-entry. That means the fuel tank could survive if it is not destroyed by the missile strike. Normally, aging satellites – their onboard fuel mostly consumed – are steered into the ocean at the end of their life. But with the spy satellite’s power and communications inoperable, it is tumbling, unguided, to Earth.

Officials compared the effects of hydrazine fuel to chlorine or ammonia.

“It affects your tissues and your lungs – it has the burning sensation,” Cartwright said. “If you stay very close to it and inhale a lot of it, it could in fact be deadly.”

Experts on military satellites agreed that the dispersal of hydrazine could pose a serious health hazard, although even Cartwright said it probably would be spread over a space the size of only two football fields.

John F. Pike, a military analyst who specializes in space-based weapons and intelligence systems, said that under normal circumstances, dying satellites are guided into the Pacific Ocean, primarily so that foreign rivals do not get their hands on sensitive components.

“I’m not arguing that hydrazine isn’t a problem,” Pike said. “But they’re so concerned in normal circumstances about things falling into the wrong hands that I’m not sure I believe them.”

However, administration officials insisted public safety was the reason President Bush approved the plan to shoot down the satellite.

“This is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings,” said James F. Jeffrey, assistant to Bush and deputy national security adviser, appearing with Cartwright.

The satellite was operated by the National Reconnaissance Office, the intelligence agency responsible for the nation’s spy satellites. Officials would not comment on the satellite’s mission or its cost and could not estimate the cost of shooting it down.

U.S. officials harshly criticized China after learning last year that its military shot down an aging weather satellite. That incident recharged an international debate over space weapons and prompted a Pentagon review of the safety of U.S. orbiters.

Drawing a contrast with the more secretive Chinese operation, U.S. officials dispatched diplomats from around the world to explain their decision.

The officials also said the Chinese destroyed their satellite at a higher orbit than plans for hitting the U.S. spy satellite. China’s shoot-down left debris orbiting the Earth, while Pentagon plans call for hitting the spycraft just as it enters the atmosphere, so debris would re-enter and burn.

The Pentagon would not say which ship would be assigned the task. One Aegis cruiser, the Lake Erie, has conducted more extensive testing than other ships of the Standard Missile 3 – a defensive rocket that will be used to shoot down the satellite. The Lake Erie is stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The Pentagon will wait to take the shot until the shuttle Atlantis, currently docked at the International Space Station, returns to Earth, scheduled for Monday.

The Navy ships will be modified so the missiles can be used to shoot down the satellite, but Cartwright said those changes will consist of minor software modifications, meaning the shoot-down will be similar to missile-defense tests regularly performed in the Pacific.

“What we’re trying to do is match up that period in which the satellite looks most like a reentering missile,” Cartwright said.

Several Aegis-equipped cruisers and destroyers were deployed to the waters off the coast of North Korea in July 2006 when Pyongyang tested several medium- and long-range missiles, including the Taepo-Dong II, suspected to be capable of reaching U.S. bases in the Pacific.

None of the ships fired on the missiles, however, instead using radars to track and monitor the test.

The satellite shoot-down will give the Navy its first real-life, uncontrolled test of the Aegis-based system.

State of the Union Reflects New Focus on Money Matters
By Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 29, 2008; A01

President Bush told the American people last night that his strategy to stabilize Iraq is achieving results “few of us could have imagined just one year ago,” even as he sought to reassure the public that his new stimulus plan will stave off a recession that threatens to hobble the nation’s economy during the final year of his presidency.

Appearing before Congress for his seventh and last State of the Union address, Bush claimed vindication for his controversial decision a year ago to send a “surge” of about 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. “The enemy is still dangerous, and more work remains,” Bush acknowledged, but with a decline in the number of high-profile attacks, sectarian violence and civilian deaths, he said, progress is unmistakable.

“Some may deny the surge is working,” Bush said, “but among the terrorists there is no doubt. Al-Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, and this enemy will be defeated.”

Bush’s address highlighted the shifting priorities of an administration that had planned to focus its final year on the war and other international challenges but has found itself moving quickly in the past month to address the growing crisis in the economy. The past year has brought an increasing tide of bad economic news, culminating in last week’s global stock market panic over a collapsing housing market and other financial woes in the United States.

The president called on Congress to finish work quickly on a $150 billion stimulus package, urging lawmakers not to “load up” the initiative with measures beyond the tax rebates and business incentives he agreed to last week with House leaders. “That would delay it or derail it, and neither option is acceptable,” said Bush, who also repeated his long-ignored call to make permanent his early-term tax cuts.

The president avoided grim economic talk and instead described conditions as mixed. “In the short run, we can all see that growth is slowing,” he said. “America has added jobs for a record 52 straight months, but jobs are now growing at a slower pace. Wages are up, but so are prices for food and gas. Exports are rising, but the housing market has declined.”

Bush appeared in a cheery mood during his valedictory State of the Union. He chuckled at the partisan rites of the annual speech, in which Democrats and Republicans roared at different junctures, interrupting him with applause more than 70 times in the 53-minute address. His remarks, however, came amid a fierce political campaign season in which many voters are looking beyond the Bush presidency to his potential successors.

In a nod to the political realities, the president did not revive the kind of ambitious reforms on Social Security and immigration that animated his past State of the Union addresses. He offered instead a menu of familiar initiatives, mixed in with modest new proposals on education, social services and assistance for military families, that his aides said stand a reasonable chance of congressional passage before the political conventions start in late August.

One new plan would devote $300 million to new grants for low-income children to attend private schools. The president also proposed writing into law rules that require federal agencies to give equal consideration to religious-based groups providing social services to the poor.

Bush, whose administration has come under fire in recent years over the poor treatment of injured soldiers, also unveiled several initiatives aimed at boosting federal assistance to families of veterans and active service members. One proposal would give hiring preferences throughout the federal government to military spouses; another would allow troops and veterans to transfer unused GI education benefits to spouses and children.

Bush’s approach suggested that he remains undaunted by the low approval ratings that have characterized his presidency in recent years. “We have unfinished business before us,” the president said, “and the American people expect us to get it done.”

Democrats chose a centrist red-state governor, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, to respond to Bush’s address. She described the stimulus package as only a “temporary fix” and blasted Bush’s foreign policy for leaving the nation with “fewer allies and more enemies.” But her message also struck a conciliatory tone: “There is a chance, Mr. President, in the next 357 days, to get real results and give the American people renewed optimism that their challenges are the top priority.”

The top two congressional leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) offered faint praise for Bush. “We agree with the President that we must work together to make progress on our most pressing challenges,” they said in a statement. “Yet, tonight, the President offered little more than the status quo. At a time when our economy is on shaky ground and our leadership around the world is eroding, the status quo won’t do.”

Bush made clear to Democrats that he intends to employ fully the powers of the presidency until his final hours in office. He reiterated his demand that they approve new surveillance legislation by Friday, when a temporary wiretapping law is set to expire. He also said he will use his veto pen and administrative powers to try to rein in the proliferation of “earmarks,” the projects inserted by lawmakers into annual spending bills and totaling roughly $17 billion in the last budget.

Bush warned he would veto any spending bill that does not cut in half the number and cost of earmarks from the year before. He also said he will sign an executive order requiring agencies to ignore any earmark not included in the language of legislation. “The people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks,” Bush said.

Bush’s pledge was met with skepticism from many Democrats and even some in the GOP, who noted that the practice increased dramatically while Republicans controlled Congress. “The number of earmarks exploded under Republican leadership in the House, and for six years President Bush did nothing to slow their growth,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.).

In keeping with the traditional civility of the occasion, Bush was greeted warmly as he entered the House chamber. Among the lawmakers present were two of his would-be Democratic successors, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

The White House invited a customary mix of prominent and ordinary citizens to sit with first lady Laura Bush as a way of humanizing some of the broader themes of the president’s speech. Last night, the guests included a single mother from Tanzania who benefited from the U.S. global AIDS initiative; the co-chairs of his commission on health care for veterans; and several troops who served with valor in Iraq and elsewhere. Bush did not introduce any of the guests, as he and past presidents have done.

Bush devoted special attention to the two main issues that could shape long-term perspectives on his presidency: the souring economy and the war in Iraq.

On Iraq, Bush made clear he is not ready to accelerate a drawdown of U.S. forces, which are scheduled to return to pre-”surge” levels of 130,000 by mid-summer. He cited a warning from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, that pulling troops out too quickly risks the recovery of al-Qaeda in Iraq and an increase in violence.

“Members of Congress,” he said, “having come so far and achieved so much, we must not allow this to happen.”

Democrats challenged Bush’s upbeat portrait of conditions in Iraq. While even critics concede violence has ebbed because of the troop increase, many military experts are unsure whether this is a temporary phenomenon. And even senior U.S. military commanders are concerned that the military progress has not been matched by steps to forge a more lasting political accord.

Bush renewed his call to strengthen the No Child Left Behind Act, which set up a system of testing and other benchmarks for the nation’s schools, and urged Congress to ratify trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. He also promised that the United States will do “everything we can” to achieve a peace deal between Palestinians and Israelis, which has become a major goal in his final year in office.

Bush also proposed to contribute $2 billion over three years to an international clean-energy fund. He will seek additional funds from countries such as Britain and Japan, and a donors’ committee will dole the money out in the form of grants, loans and loan guarantees. The money would probably go to firms selling such things as energy-efficient coal plants and would help make those less expensive for buyers from developing countries.

Staff writers Paul Kane, Lyndsey Layton and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
December 25, 2007

You don’t have to be religious to qualify as a fundamentalist. You can be Al Gore, the messiah figure for the global warming cult, whose followers truly believe their gospel of imminent extermination in a Noah-like flood, if we don’t immediately change our carbon polluting ways.

One of the traits of a cult is its refusal to consider any evidence that might disprove the faith. And so it is doubtful the global warming cultists will be moved by 400 scientists, many of whom, according to the Washington Times, “are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis.” In a report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, these scientists cast doubt on a “scientific consensus” that global warming caused by humans endangers the planet.

Like most cultists, the true believers struck back, not by debating science, but by charging that a small number of the scientists mentioned in the report have taken money from the petroleum industry. A spokeswoman for Al Gore said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobile Corp. Exxon Mobile spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying, “the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.”

The pro-global warming cultists enjoy a huge money advantage. Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, noted in an EPW report how much money has been spent researching and promoting climate fears and so-called solutions: “In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $50 billion (U.S.) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one,” he wrote on June 18, 2007. The $19 million spent on research that debunks the global warming faith pales in comparison.

Also included in the Republican report are comments by Dutch atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes: “I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting – a 6-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number — entirely without merit. I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”

Oklahoma Sen. James M. Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the report debunks Mr. Gore’s claim that the “debate is over.” In fact, the debate hasn’t even begun because the global warming cultists won’t debate.

Despite numerous challenges, Al Gore has refused to debate the issue with any credible scientist who is a skeptic. Shouldn’t the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize be willing to debate such an important issue? What does he have to fear?

If his theory cannot stand up to scientific inquiry and skepticism, it needs to be exposed as a false religion and himself as a false prophet before he and his followers force us to change the way we live and alter the prosperous society that generations of Americans have built.

Gore and his disciples will still be living in their big houses, driving gas-guzzling cars and flying in private jets that leave carbon footprints as large as Bigfoot’s, while most of us will be forced to drive tiny automobiles and live in huts resembling the Third World. But hypocrisy is just one of many traits displayed by secular fundamentalists like Gore.

Before adopting any faith, the agendas of the people attempting to impose it, along with the beliefs held by them and their disciples, should be considered. Gore and company are big government liberals who think government is the answer to all of our problems, including problems they create. In fact, as Ronald Reagan often said, in too many cases government is the problem.

The secular fundamentalists who believe in Al Gore as a prophet and global warming as a religious doctrine are being challenged by scientists and others who disbelieve and who think we ought to be spending more time on developing new technology and energy sources for the future and not preaching gloom, doom and retreat. Let them debate the issue. If they won’t, we can only conclude that all they are spewing is hot air.

Lawrence Krauss and Chris Mooney
December 23, 2007

Whether the issue is global warming, embryonic stem-cell research, ballistic missile defense or the future of the world’s oceans, the same bass line thumps in the background: Sound political decision-making relies, more than ever before, on accurate scientific information.

As advances in science and technology continually transform our world, policymaking will inevitably depend more and more on accurate scientific and technical information. Which means that in order to be a successful world leader today, a politician must have an effective means of accessing and applying the latest science.

This fact – combined with the undisputed importance of scientific research and innovation to national prosperity and competitiveness – explains the recent emergence of a group called ScienceDebate2008. Under its auspices, scientists, university presidents, industry leaders, elected representatives and others have endorsed a call for the current U.S. presidential candidates to participate in a debate, or a series of debates, dedicated to issues in science and technology. More specifically, the candidates should answer questions about the environment, medicine and health, and science and technology policy.

Among those who have endorsed this appeal so far are 11 Nobel laureates (including former California Institute of Technology President David Baltimore and former National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus), former presidential science advisers John Gibbons and Neal Lane, Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman, retired Martin Marietta Chief Executive Norm Augustine, present and former presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and more than 50 others.

When you think about it, the need for a debate on science is incontrovertible. It would reveal which candidates are best equipped to tackle contentious science-based issues and it would help raise the level of scientific literacy across the board in this country.

A recent National Academy of Sciences’ report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” suggests that the United States may soon falter in the global economy without a concerted effort to ensure continuing technological innovation and competitiveness.

Today, South Korea, Singapore and China are producing a far higher percentage of science and engineering graduates than the United States. As Bill Gates has put it, “When I compare our high schools with what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.”

Test results released last week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reinforce the concern: U.S. students performed below the average of 30 countries in science and well below the average in math.

These dismaying facts present a fundamental challenge to our nation’s future, one that our next president must have a plan for overcoming.

In fact, it’s not going too far to say that science in its broadest sense – by which we mean “scientific thinking” – is crucial in every area of policymaking. Science requires a willingness to reject conclusions once they’re shown to be in error and it demands that all the data be considered, not just that which agrees with a priori opinions. A president capable of assessing scientific issues by weighing competing positions and evaluating the evidence supporting them could be expected to carry the same mode of reasoning into other policy arenas where it’s equally crucial.

That’s why we need to hear from all of the candidates about where they stand on specific science-related issues, on U.S. competitiveness and, finally, on the broad role of science in the policymaking process.

Our next president needn’t be a memorizer of facts, but he or she most definitely should understand how to critically analyze data and should embrace a broad empiricism in national and world affairs.

We’ve seen science form the basis of some of the thorniest public policy issues in recent history, from the fate of Terri Schiavo to the fate of evolution in schools and the fate of the Earth. A presidential debate on science would help voters determine who among the candidates is up to the task of dealing with whatever comes next.

Framework aims to produce treaty on warming by 2009

Activists dressed as polar bears demonstrate at the conference center where the negotiation of a post-Kyoto protocol is taking place during the UN Climate Conference in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. Associated Press (Associated Press)

Joseph Coleman
Associated Press
December 15, 2007

BALI, Indonesia – A U.N. climate conference adopted a plan to negotiate a new global warming pact today, after the United States suddenly reversed its opposition to a call by developing nations for technological help to battle rising temperatures.

The adoption came after marathon negotiations overnight, which first settled a battle between Europe and the U.S. over whether the document should mention specific goals for rich countries’ obligations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Upcoming talks, to be completed in 2009, may help determine for years to come how well the world can control climate change, and how severe the consequences of global warming will be.

European and U.S. envoys dueled into the final hours of the two-week meeting over the European Union’s proposal that the Bali mandate suggest an ambitious goal for cutting industrial nations’ emissions – by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

That guideline’s specific numbers were eliminated from the text, but an indirect reference was inserted instead.

The negotiations snagged again early today over demands by developing nations that their need for technological help from rich nations and other issues receive greater recognition in the document launching the negotiations.

The United States initially rejected those demands, but backed down after delegates criticized the U.S. stand and urged a reconsideration.

“I think we have come a long way here,” said Paula Dobriansky, head of the U.S. delegation. “In this, the United States is very committed to this effort and just wants to really ensure we all act together. We will go forward and join consensus.”

The sudden reversal was met with rousing applause.

In a U.N. process requiring consensus, both sides won and lost.

The broadly worded “roadmap” doesn’t itself guarantee any level of emissions reductions or any international commitment by any country – only a commitment to negotiate.

As for developing countries, the final document instructs negotiators to consider incentives and other means to encourage poorer nations to curb, on a voluntary basis, growth in their emissions. The explosive growth of greenhouse emissions in China, India and other developing countries potentially could negate cutbacks in the developed world.

The Bali conference had been charged with launching negotiations for a regime of deeper emissions reductions to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrial nations to cut output of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The United States is the only major industrial nation to reject Kyoto. President Bush has complained that it would unduly damage the U.S. economy, and emission caps should have been imposed on China, India and other fast-growing developing countries.

The Bush administration instead favors a voluntary approach – each country deciding how it can contribute – in place of internationally negotiated and legally binding commitments.

Earlier today, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had expressed frustration over the last-minute dispute concerning the Bali document and urged the more than 180 national delegations to swiftly adopt it.

The U.S. has come under intense criticism in Bali, including from former Vice President Al Gore, over the Bush administration’s opposition to mandatory emission cuts. But all parties acknowledged that negotiations cannot succeed without the involvement of the United States, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

For years, the rest of the world has sought to bring the Americans into the framework of international mandates. At this point, however, many seem resigned to waiting for a change in White House leadership after next November’s election.

In a series of landmark reports this year, the U.N.’s network of climate scientists warned of severe consequences – from rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction and other effects – without sharp cutbacks in emissions of the industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for warming.

To avoid the worst, the Nobel Prize-winning panel said, emissions should be reduced by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Panel’s report sees ‘irreversible’ effects

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, right, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Rajendra Pachauri present the panel’s synthesis report on climate change after the IPCC XXVII closing ceremony Saturday in Valencia, Spain. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Laurie Goering
Chicago Tribune
November 18, 2007

As concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere accelerate ahead of scientists’ projections, global warming is unequivocally under way, with potentially “abrupt or irreversible” effects looming, a Nobel Prize-winning United Nations panel on climate change reported Saturday.

The world still has time to avoid the most severe effects of climate change, however, if it can rapidly deploy existing and soon-expected new technology to cut carbon emissions, something that probably would require setting a price on carbon emissions to be effective, the Synthesis Report’s authors said.

Without such action, “unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt,” the report warns.

The document, a synopsis of three climate reports released earlier this year by the thousands of scientists who make up the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is intended as a succinct policy guide on the risks of climate change and the possible means to mitigate or adapt to it.

Policymakers, set to meet in December in Bali, Indonesia, are expected to use the report as their baseline to begin the tortuous process of trying to replace the expiring and largely ineffective Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions with a new and more effective world plan to slow climate change.

“We cannot afford to leave Bali without such a breakthrough,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in Valencia, Spain, after the report’s release Saturday. The potential consequences of quickening climate change are “so severe and so sweeping that only urgent global action will do,” he said. He called the problem “the defining challenge of our age.”

The report paints a grim picture of what the world might look like if policymakers – and in particular major polluters such as the United States, China and India – fail to act quickly to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“This report will have an incredible political impact,” said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s top climate change official. “It’s a signal that politicians cannot afford to ignore.”

Without action, rises in sea level will accelerate, forcing millions of people out of low-lying coastal regions. Worsening droughts, severe storms and water shortages will affect many regions of the world, and changing conditions are likely to put at least 20 to 30 percent of the world’s species – including virtually all its coral reefs – on the route to extinction, the report said.

Levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already are the highest in 650,000 years, the report said, and emissions are expected to grow 25 to 90 percent by 2030, even taking into account current efforts to cut them.

That suggests that if accelerating levels of emissions aren’t cut soon, the world could see catastrophic changes, including the complete melting of Greenland’s ice sheet and a worldwide sea level rise of 20 feet, within a few hundred years. Less dramatic effects would be widely noticeable by 2030 or even 2020, the report said.

Most at risk are the Arctic, which is on the path to being ice-free in late summer; sub-Saharan Africa, with little money or ability to adapt to predicted changes; low-lying small islands, which face inundation, and the huge river deltas of Asia and Africa, where tens of millions of people in low-lying areas face rising seas, storm surges, river flooding and risk becoming climate refugees, the report said.

Already, “there is high confidence that neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can avoid all climate change impacts,” the report said, noting that some changes, such as the melting of glaciers, are happening much faster than scientific predictions.

Lowering worldwide greenhouse gas emissions can be done at moderate cost but only if it is done quickly, the report said. That would require, among other things, quickly reorienting decisions on $20 trillion worth of energy infrastructure investment planned between now and 2030, and rapidly testing as many technologies to cut carbon emissions as possible.

Establishing a cost for emitting greenhouse gases – a “price of carbon” – could take advantage of market mechanisms to help drive emissions cuts, the report said, noting that the costs of inaction are likely to be much higher than the costs of acting now.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the climate panel, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore earlier this year, urged “a new ethic by which every human being realizes the importance of the challenge we are facing and starts to take action through changes in lifestyle and attitude.”

The United States opted out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing that the science was unproven and that the burden of mandatory emission cuts was unfair since it excluded fast-growing China and India.

Chief U.S. delegate Sharon Hays said doubts have been dispelled. “What’s changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening,” she said in a conference call late Friday. She did not indicate that Washington would abandon its policy of voluntary emission cuts.

Peter Baker
Washington Post
November 17, 2007

WASHINGTON – Maybe he’ll bring the slide show.

Former Vice President Al Gore plans to return to the White House after Thanksgiving, apparently for the first time since leaving office, to be honored by the man who beat him seven years ago.

President Bush will host five American winners of this year’s Nobel Prizes in the Oval Office on Nov. 26, including the winner of the Peace Prize, who fell 538 votes short of hosting the event himself. No word on whether the Supreme Court will be on hand to mediate in case of trouble.

The president regularly invites Nobel laureates for a handshake and photograph and decided this year would be no different, even if they include his vanquished rival from 2000. The Gore camp said the White House went out of its way to accommodate the former vice president’s schedule, even moving the event when there was a conflict with the first proposed date. Bush telephoned Gore on Friday to finalize the arrangements.

“The president wanted to call him and lock that in and make sure he’s going to be able to come,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. “He also offered his congratulations and said he looked forward to having him here.”

A Gore adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged the awkward nature of the event. “It’s unusual, that’s for sure,” he said. “But the conversations were good, and the White House has been very gracious about it.”

The situation is not entirely unprecedented. Bush invited Jimmy Carter to the White House to mark his Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, even though the former president had been lambasting the march to war in Iraq.

President Bill Clinton honored defeated challenger Bob Dole with the Presidential Medal of Freedom three days before taking the oath of office for the second time in January 1997.

But Bush and Gore, while together at events such as the opening of Clinton’s library in 2004 and Gerald Ford’s funeral last year, have never reconciled the bitterness from their showdown, and the adviser believes that Gore has not been back to the White House since leaving as vice president.

Gore has been a vocal critic of Bush’s policies, while the president has been dismissive of his former opponent’s work against global warming. Asked once whether he would see Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Bush had a curt response: “Doubt it.”

This could be the chance to change that. “I’m sure he would love to give the slide show to the president,” the Gore adviser said.

Americans must act now to alleviate shortages

November 15, 2007

The following editorial appeared Monday in the Dallas Morning News.

“I am sorry to say this, but we are headed toward really bad days,” a prominent energy economist told Time magazine last week. “Lots of targets have been set, but very little has been done. There is a lot of talk and no action.”

That was no alarmist talking. It was Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, an oil industry organization whose annual World Energy Outlook report is widely considered a reliable indicator of petroleum supplies. Released as the price of oil neared $100 a barrel, the 2007 forecast sent an urgent message to world governments: The days of cheap oil are probably over.

It’s not hard to understand why. The current daily supply of oil can barely cover world demand. With China and India rapidly industrializing, the International Energy Agency expects that the planet will require 116 million barrels daily by 2030 – an increase of more than 50 percent from today’s output – to slake its petroleum thirst.

Can increased production meet the expected demand? Depends on whom you talk to. Dallas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is one of the petroleum experts who believes that world oil production has peaked. If peak-oilers are right, there’s nowhere for the oil supply to go but down and nowhere but prices to go but up. Others, including the International Energy Agency, believe that the current shortage is critical but manageable with necessary adjustments in both production and consumption, as well as investments in research and development.

The permanent end of cheap oil not only would hit American consumers at the gas pump, but in just about every other way. Our consumer economy, for example, depends on the foreign-made goods shipped inexpensively from overseas manufacturers. The points of potential pain are endless. Moreover, there looms the threat of resource wars over dwindling supplies of a substance that no modern country can do without.

Now is the time to quit talking and start acting. Thoughtful Americans know that we can’t keep living like this forever. Our nation must start investing heavily in public transportation, domestic drilling and research into renewable energy sources and clean-coal technology.

Whether the world supply of oil has absolutely peaked or is not rising to meet demand because of human folly, there’s going to be a lot less of the black stuff around in the near future. And that’s going to hurt.

John R. Christy”);”>John R. Christy. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Nov 1, 2007. pg. A.19

I’ve had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don’t think I will add “0.0001 Nobel Laureate” to my resume.

The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat. But that’s another story.

Both halves of the award honor promoting the message that Earth’s temperature is rising due to human-based emissions of greenhouse gases. The Nobel committee praises Mr. Gore and the IPCC for alerting us to a potential catastrophe and for spurring us to a carbonless economy.

I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming — around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, “Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with ‘At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .’”

I haven’t seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.

Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we’ve seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.

One of the challenges in studying global climate is keeping a global perspective, especially when much of the research focuses on data gathered from spots around the globe. Often observations from one region get more attention than equally valid data from another.

The recent CNN report “Planet in Peril,” for instance, spent considerable time discussing shrinking Arctic sea ice cover. CNN did not note that winter sea ice around Antarctica last month set a record maximum (yes, maximum) for coverage since aerial measurements started.

Then there is the challenge of translating global trends to local climate. For instance, hasn’t global warming led to the five-year drought and fires in the U.S. Southwest?

Not necessarily.

There has been a drought, but it would be a stretch to link this drought to carbon dioxide. If you look at the 1,000-year climate record for the western U.S. you will see not five-year but 50-year- long droughts. The 12th and 13th centuries were particularly dry. The inconvenient truth is that the last century has been fairly benign in the American West. A return to the region’s long-term “normal” climate would present huge challenges for urban planners.

Without a doubt, atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing due primarily to carbon-based energy production (with its undisputed benefits to humanity) and many people ardently believe we must “do something” about its alleged consequence, global warming. This might seem like a legitimate concern given the potential disasters that are announced almost daily, so I’ve looked at a couple of ways in which humans might reduce CO2 emissions and their impact on temperatures.

California and some Northeastern states have decided to force their residents to buy cars that average 43 miles-per-gallon within the next decade. Even if you applied this law to the entire world, the net effect would reduce projected warming by about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, an amount so minuscule as to be undetectable. Global temperatures vary more than that from day to day.

Suppose you are very serious about making a dent in carbon emissions and could replace about 10% of the world’s energy sources with non- CO2-emitting nuclear power by 2020 — roughly equivalent to halving U.S. emissions. Based on IPCC-like projections, the required 1,000 new nuclear power plants would slow the warming by about 0.2 ?176 degrees Fahrenheit per century. It’s a dent.

But what is the economic and human price, and what is it worth given the scientific uncertainty?

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”

Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me.

—

Mr. Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Candidates Back Costly Proposals
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 6, 2007; A01

All of the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency are committed to a set of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that would change the way Americans light their homes, fuel their automobiles and do their jobs, costing billions of dollars in the short term but potentially, the candidates say, saving even more in the decades to follow.

Former senator John Edwards (N.C.), who from the outset has made global warming one of the three pillars of his campaign, explains his ambitious plan to Democratic primary voters in terms of sacrifice.

“I know what presidential candidates are supposed to do; they roll in here every four years and they promise you this, they promise you that. What I’m going to do is tell you the truth,” Edwards says at nearly every campaign stop. “It won’t be easy, but it is time for a president who asks Americans to be patriotic about something other than war.”

The strong medicine Edwards and his fellow candidates are selling — an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gases from 1990s levels by 2050 — tracks with a plan espoused by scientists. But it is a plan that will require a wholesale transformation of the nation’s economy and society.

In a speech yesterday in Iowa, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) said she plans to address climate change and the nation’s energy needs by launching an effort to require U.S. vehicles to average 55 miles per gallon by 2030 and providing $20 billion in “Green Vehicle Bonds” to help the auto industry transform to production of more efficient cars. Clinton estimated that by 2030, her plan would cut foreign oil imports by two-thirds compared with current projections.

“This is the biggest challenge we’ve faced in a generation — a challenge to our economy, our security, our health and our planet. It’s time for America to meet it,” Clinton said. “. . . I believe America is ready to take action, ready to break the bonds of the old energy economy and ready to prove that the climate crisis is also one of the greatest economic opportunities in the history of our country. . . . It will be a new beginning for the 21st century.”

According to energy expert Tracy Terry’s analysis of a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, under the scenario of an 80 percent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels, by 2015 Americans could be paying 30 percent more for natural gas in their homes and even more for electricity. At the same time, the cost of coal could quadruple and crude oil prices could rise by an additional $24 a barrel.

“I’d be the first to tell you: This is not necessarily the greatest political calculation,” Edwards acknowledged in an interview, adding that audiences tend to pause before expressing their support when he lays out his climate plan. “No matter what the politics are, there’s such a moral responsibility to address this issue. We’ve got to do it.”

In a Des Moines speech last month, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) predicted that new technology will ultimately bring rising energy costs back down. “But at least on the front end, there’s going to be some costs, and we can’t pretend like there’s a free lunch,” he told the crowd.

While Democrats are working to outdo each other on climate change — New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, for example, supports a 90 percent greenhouse gas reduction by midcentury — GOP presidential candidates remain more skeptical, to say the least. Former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.) stands by his commentary on National Review Online that warming on other planets has led some people “to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.”

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said in the wake of Gore’s Nobel Prize win that when it comes to global warming, “if we try to deal with it at too hysterical a pace, we could create problems.”

Among Republicans, only Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) — who began crusading against climate change after a heckler dressed as a penguin followed him around New Hampshire during his 2000 presidential bid — backs a specific, 60 percent cut in greenhouse gases by 2050. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee endorsed a mandatory carbon cap last month but has not laid out specifics.

The issue has turned into a Democratic primary litmus test, and many party strategists say it could be a way to win over in the general election suburban Republican women, who tend to place a high priority on environmental issues.

“It’s a huge issue. I’ve been stunned by this,” said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who found in a May poll that energy independence and global warming were cited as America’s most important domestic challenge by 29 percent of respondents, second only to health care. “I think this is a top-tier voting issue that has crossover appeal,” Greenberg said.

In contrast to 2000 and 2004, when Gore and John F. Kerry played down their environmental records, these Democratic candidates have already begun advertising on climate change. As of mid-October, energy and global warming issues were second only to Iraq in terms of ad topics. Friends of the Earth, which endorsed Edwards for his aggressive climate change policy, also began running radio ads in New Hampshire on his behalf.

Democrats have promised to ease the pain by taking the money that would come from putting a price on carbon, whether through a tax or auctioning off pollution credits, and investing it in technological research, job training, tax credits for consumers who buy cleaner vehicles and subsidies for those hit hardest by rising electric bills.

Several Democrats have even taken the unusual step of compensating for their campaigns’ sizable carbon footprints by contributing to groups that seek to reduce greenhouse gases by planting trees and funding clean-energy projects. Edwards gave $22,000 to NativeEnergy to atone for the emissions of his campaign’s travel. Clinton gave just under $11,600 to the same group to cover her campaign’s operations in April, May, June and July. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) paid $1,000 to CarbonFund.org for July, August and September, and uses a charter air company that offsets the carbon footprint of its flights.

Democrats’ boldness, however, could carry a political price. The eventual GOP presidential nominee is almost certain to attack Democrats over the huge costs associated with limiting emissions. “They will come at this hard,” said John Podesta, who heads the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and sees an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases as necessary.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who has just co-written a book on the environment called “A Contract With the Earth,” said either party could face serious consequences if they mishandle the question of climate change. A Democrat running on “litigation and regulation” could alienate voters, he said in an interview. “You can just calculate the costs,” Gingrich said.

“Then, Republican candidates are on the opposite extreme,” he added. “A candidate who’s anti-environment and denies global warming gets killed in the suburbs.”

Edward Parson, a University of Michigan law professor who worked in the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Bill Clinton, said that to reach the 80 percent goal by 2050, Americans would have to capture and store carbon emissions from every power plant in the country. “A world that gets to that big a reduction in greenhouse gases is a world where you’re paying more for energy,” he said.

Dodd, the one Democrat to back a carbon tax, has vowed to use the $50 billion that would be generated each year to fast-track research, development and deployment of renewable and energy-efficient technologies. He said Democrats will counter GOP attacks by making climate policy “part of the economic revival of the country.”

“We’re borrowing a billion a day to bring fuel from offshore,” he said in an interview as he campaigned in Iowa. As for the costs associated with confronting climate change: “People can complain about the price. I don’t know how you can think that price is as bad as what we’re paying right now.”

Staff researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.

James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
November 4, 2007

Al Gore and Newt Gingrich are very different figures, but they are both going through a similar process: They are becoming elder statesmen.

And how does one become an elder statesman, anyway? It’s an easy, two-step process: First, have something important to say and be tireless in saying it. Second, stop running for president, because then people will let their guard down; they will listen to the substance of your message, not worry about tracking your upward political mobility.

Oh, and a third thing: Optimism sells better than pessimism. So while the former Democratic vice president is getting most of the glory, worldwide, with his message of profound eco-repentance, it’s the former Republican House speaker’s message of practical problem-solving that is ultimately going to play better in America.

Everybody knows about Gore, of course. But most didn’t know of his interest in global warming until relatively recently. Yes, he has been thinking about the issue for decades, but when he got to the White House in 1993, he was relatively quiet; maybe his quietude had something to do with future political ambitions.

And so, for example, in 1997, when the U.S. Senate, including Barbara Boxer and Teddy Kennedy, voted 95-0 to reject the Kyoto international global warming treaty, Vice President Gore didn’t say much. With public opinion lopsided against the treaty, how could he speak up in protest — and still preserve his political viability for 2000?

In fact, Gore didn’t become his own emancipated man until he left the White House in 2001, finally free to argue for drastic action against greenhouse gases.

Yet, while Gore does a great job of telling us what we’ve done wrong, he’s less effective at outlining a plausible action plan that would solve the problem: reduce the world’s carbon dioxide, as opposed to just America’s CO2. The dilemma is that if we reduce and they increase, nothing is gained.

But, of course, Gore is out of office now, with no plans to run again. He can say what he wants, leaving others to admire him without having to worry about voting for him.

Meanwhile, Gingrich, who retired from Congress in 1998, has trod his own path toward greater environmental awareness. His latest book, “A Contract With the Earth,” co-authored with Terry Maple, former chief of the Atlanta Zoo, carries a friendly foreword from Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, one of the most important and influential biologists of the 20th century.

Yet, Gingrich is not Gore. He does not reach a final conclusion as to whether human beings are causing climate change — and thus many environmentalists will dismiss him. Yet at the same time, Gingrich wants to implement a green agenda, his way. He and Maples write, “We favor reducing carbon loading in the atmosphere as a bold forward step and positive public value.”

So what’s Gingrich’s alternative solution? First, nuclear power. And second, big prizes for inventors who come up with, for example, a workable hydrogen engine. As he points out, there’s a long history of offering prizes. Past awards have fostered advances in construction, navigation and aviation. So why not the environment?

More technology, more incentives — that’s Gingrich’s approach. And interestingly, in his post-presidential run mode, the Georgian is being well received, because people hunger for real solutions, not just feel-good or feel-bad rhetoric.

On Monday, Gingrich spoke at Johns Hopkins University, receiving an overwhelmingly friendly response.

Gore and Gingrich, enjoying their “elder” status, now must watch as their White House-hopeful juniors wrestle with their enviro-ideas. But here’s a prediction: Those who follow Gingrich’s techno-optimism will have an easier time than those who put on Gore’s hair shirt.

 

Oct 29, 2007 Issue

We all know that $30-a-barrel isn’t coming back. Just as we know that simply turning off a few lights won’t halt global warming. Yet the search for a low-emission, non-fossil-fuel source of energy has been a bit like “American Idol”: every now and then, another fresh-faced alternative-energy rock star wanna-be is eliminated. Wind and solar are nice and clean—but the sun doesn’t work 24/7 and the wind is fickle. Ethanol offers politicians the irresistible combination of grow-your-own energy independence and the potential to make primary voters in Iowa rich. But because it’s corrosive and soluble in water, it’s hard to transport ethanol over long distances through pipelines. Besides, to raise a crop sufficient to meet our gasoline thirst, we’d have to plant the entire continental United States with maize, leaving only a small corner of Delaware for bedrooms and a den.

As contestants are eliminated, it’s worth looking at the geezer in the bunch: nuclear power. Nearly 50 years after the Shipping port Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania became the first commercial power plant to hit critical mass, the New Jersey-based utility NRG last month filed papers seeking permission to build a nuclear power plant in Texas. This represents the first such new application since 1979, nuclear’s annus horribilis. Two weeks after the debut of the fear-inducing nuclear-disaster flick “The China Syndrome,”life imitated art, as the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. That effectively forestalled the creation of new nuclear power plants for a generation. The last reactor to come online was the Watts Bar reactor in Tennessee, in May 1996.

So what’s changed? Thirty years of safe operations have helped pave the way for NRG, and for a couple of dozen other possible plants in the works. Indeed, even as they’re mocked in popular culture—like on “The Simpsons”—the nation’s 104 commercial nuclear generating units have been quietly humming along without significant incident. “The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you that the nuclear industry is the safest place to work—safer than real estate and Wall Street,” former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman tells NEWSWEEK. (You remember her—she played the environmentalist in the first Bush term). Through the first half of this year, nukes provided 19.8 percent of U.S. electricity generation, about the same proportion as they did in 1990.

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More important, thanks to developments in the broader environment, many longtime critics are changing their tune. As a cofounder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore used to call nuclear energy “synonymous with nuclear holocaust.” But he now believes “nuclear is the cleanest, safest and has the smallest footprint” of any major energy-alternative source. He says that nukes are cheap and reliable, unlike alternative-energy sources like wind and solar. Neither do nuclear plants spew sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, like coal-powered plants do, or create massive volumes of CO2 emissions, like gas-fired plants do. The attitude of Moore, who co-chairs the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, an industry-backed supporter of nuclear energy, is virtually indistinguishable from that of David Crane, chief executive officer of NRG: “Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fueled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions—and most importantly in this age of climate change—no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.”

Another megatrend is working in nuclear’s favor: demographics. In 2006, an estimated 41.3 percent of the population was below 30. Which is to say that the percentage and number of Americans who remember the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl decline with every passing year.

To be sure—in any article dealing with alternative energy, there’s always a “to be sure” section—nuclear power has some serious problems. It takes a lot of money, and a long time to build new capacity. NRG says that if all goes well, its new nuclear units, which could power 2 million homes, may come online in 2014 and 2015. And investors aren’t eager to commit billions of dollars to controversial long-term projects that might never get built. The government is trying to help by providing risk insurance and streamlining the approval process.

 

Want to eliminate what otherwise will soon be the world’s second leading cause of death? Impose a global speed limit of 5mph.

By George F. Will

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:30 PM ET Oct 13, 2007

Economics is “the dismal science,” in part because it puts a price tag on the pleasure of moralizing. This is pertinent to the crusade, often masquerading as journalism, aimed at hectoring developed nations into taking “strong” actions against global warming. For such nations (developing nations have more pressing priorities), the question, plainly put, is: How much are they willing to pay—in direct expenditures, forgone economic growth, inefficiencies and constricted freedom—in order to have a negligible effect on climate change?

Zealots say fighting global warming is a moral imperative, so cost-benefit analyses are immoral. Like our Manichaean president, they have a simple fixation: Are you with us or not? But in his book “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg suggests that global warming, although real, is not apt to be severe; that many of its consequences will be beneficial, and that the exorbitant costs of attempting to substantially curtail it would squander resources that, put to other uses, could have effects thousands of times more ameliorative. He offers cautionary calculations:

The warming that is reasonably projected might be problematic, although not devastating, for the much-fretted-about polar bears, but it will be beneficial for other species. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment anticipates increasing species richness.

Global warming was blamed for 35,000 deaths in Europe’s August 2003 heat wave. Cold, however, has caused 25,000 deaths a year recently in England and Wales—47,000 in each winter from 1998 to 2000. In Europe, cold kills more than seven times as many as heat does. Worldwide, moderate warming will, on balance, save more lives than it will cost—by a 9-to-1 ratio in China and India. So, if substantially cutting carbon dioxide reverses warming, that will mean a large net loss of life globally.

How cool do we want the world to be? As cool as it was when the Arctic ice pack extended so far south that Eskimos in kayaks landed in Scotland? Just cool enough to prevent the oceans from inundating us?

The U.N.’s 2007 report estimates that by 2100, sea levels will rise about a foot—as much as they have risen since 1860. That will mean a number of local problems, not a planetary crisis. More people now live near coasts (which is why hurricanes have become more costly; they have not become more frequent or violent), but protecting people and property from the sea would be far less costly than attempting to turn down the planet’s thermostat.

In an example of what has been called titillating “climate porn,” we have been warned that warming might make malaria endemic in Vermont. Well. Malaria kills more than a million people a year worldwide and was endemic in parts of America’s South within living memory (which is why the Centers for Disease Control are in Atlanta). But Lomborg says malaria is “related strongly to economic development and weakly to changing climate.” Increasing prosperity and low-tech methods like mosquito nets, not controlling climate change, is the key to preventing 85 million malaria deaths by 2100.

Warming will help agriculture in some regions and hurt it in others, but even a net negative effect will be less injurious than current agriculture policies are. The farm bill currently taking odious shape in Congress will be a killer—literally. Rich countries subsidizing their agriculture limit the ability of poor countries to prosper—and become healthier—by selling their products in rich countries’ markets.

Recent loopiness about warming has ranged from the idiotic (an academic study that “associated” warming with increased Italian suicide rates) to the comic (London demonstrators chanting, “What do we want? Carbon taxes! When do we want them? Now!”). Well, you want dramatic effects now? We can eliminate what the World Health Organization says will be, by 2020, second only to heart disease as the world’s leading cause of death.

The cause is traffic accidents. The surefire cure is speed limits of 5mph. In 2008 alone, that would save 1.2 million lives and $500 billion in damages, disproportionately in the Third World, which will be hardest hit by increasing traffic carnage. But a world moving at 5mph would be, over the years, uncountable trillions of dollars poorer, which would cost some huge multiple of 1.2 million lives through forgone nutrition, education, infrastructure—e.g., clean water—medicine, research, etc.

The costs of such global slowing would be the medievalization of the world, so the world accepts the costs of velocity. There also are high costs of what Lomborg calls “impossibly ambitious and yet environmentally inconsequential” plans for inventing a “big knob of climate change” that we can give a twist or two, thereby making the climate “better” and making nothing worse.

Sums that are small relative to the cost of trying to fine-tune the planet’s climate could prevent scores of millions of deaths from AIDS, unsafe drinking water and other clear and present dangers. If nations concert to impose antiwarming measures commensurate with the hyperbole about the danger, the damage to global economic growth could cause in this century more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined. Nobel Peace Prize, indeed.

James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
October 19, 2007

The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed that mankind is suspended between two infinities – the infinitely large and the infinitely small. And so it is with two figures in the news: Al Gore wishes to speak for the planet, while Bill Cosby wishes to speak to the human heart.

And it’s revealing, given the liberal biases of our culture, that one man receives so much attention and the other man, so little.

Gore, former vice president-turned-pundit-movie star, has chosen, as his topic, the infinitely big. And he has been rewarded hugely: He just won the Nobel Peace Prize, on top of many other awards showered down on him by the elite culture, including an Oscar and an Emmy. So Gore will ascend into the jet stream of world renown – the same left-tilting empyrean occupied by such globetrotters as Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates.

In the meantime, closer to the ground, the comedian-turned-reformer Bill Cosby has joined with Alvin F. Poussaint of Harvard Medical School to write a book, “Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” which argues that many of the problems within the black community are self-inflicted, the result of a counterproductive culture of violence and victimhood.

Cosby has been making this point for years – and has been attacked by the left for years. Michael Eric Dyson, speaking for the liberal street-activism left over from the ’60s, wrote an entire book attacking Cosby’s “poisonous” view of black culture.

But Cosby and Poussaint have the cold terrible facts on their side: “In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Today that number is less than two out of six.” Yes, white racism exists, but it was worse a half-century ago. Something bad is happening within black culture, and Cosby and Poussaint are not shy about naming it: the celebration of violence and ignorance emblemized in the “gangsta” lifestyle.

The unyielding truth is that any group climbs into the middle class only by embracing middle-class values. This is a “conservative” fact of life that was once equally embraced by liberals, before they “progressed” on to “liberation” as a new goal.

But after decades of disaster, black thinkers such as Cosby and Poussaint – and before them, John McWhorter, Juan Williams and, yes, Clarence Thomas – are leading a moral renaissance among African Americans, which surely counts as the most hopeful social trend in our national life today. And yet with the remarkable exception of NBC’s Tim Russert, who bravely devoted the entire hour of Sunday’s “Meet the Press” to Cosby and Poussaint, the mainstream media seem little interested in this black renaissance.

Why is that? Perhaps because the liberal-leaning elites realize that they are losing the debate over poverty and uplift – the winners being those who speak for hard work, abstinence and delayed gratification.

No wonder the chattering classes, fleeing from their horror of such a “bourgeois” existence, have moved on to new, greener pastures.

But there’s a problem looming ahead for Gore and his many fans: how to radically reduce “greenhouse gases.” The environmentalists have their answer: some sort of global authority to restrict factories and cars – which would, not coincidentally, authorize them to rule the world. But maybe China won’t cooperate. Maybe the Chinese will watch as we shut down our factories – and they keep theirs open. And then who will win the next war? Not a war of polar bears and the Prius, but a real war of ships and airplanes.

If Gore wants to be constructive, he will figure out to how to reduce pollution – while still preserving American industry. If he could do that, he would truly earn the respect and admiration of all Americans.

But in the meantime, Cosby and Poussaint have taken on a challenge that we can win, because the struggle will take place within our own hearts.

By Bryan Walsh

Maybe it happened the day after Hurricane Katrina or the night Al Gore won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, but the first phase of the global-warming debate has ended. Even Skeptic-in-Chief George W. Bush recently convened a global-warming summit, where Condoleezza Rice told foreign diplomats that “climate change is a real problem–and human beings are contributing to it.”

But the climate wars are far from over, and there are still dissidents emerging to challenge the green mainstream. Unlike past skeptics, they accept the basics of global warming but question its severity and challenge the orthodox faith that Kyoto Protocol-style mandatory carbon cuts are the best way to save the planet. Call them the bad boys of environmentalism: gadflies like the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who just came out with the book Cool It, and rebel greens like the political consultants Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who detail their apostasy in Break Through. While their solutions may be flawed, the questions these contrarians raise about climate change are central as we shift into the next and more difficult phase in the debate: what should be done about it.

Lomborg is the right’s favorite environmentalist, and it’s easy to see why. Though he believes that the world is getting warmer and that humankind is causing it, Lomborg’s not too worried. Endangered polar bears? He insists that they’re actually thriving. Rising sea levels swamping coastal cities? Lomborg argues that floods won’t be biblical and that man-made defenses will be sufficient. The main effect of global warming, he writes, may be that “we just notice people wearing slightly fewer layers of winter clothes on a winter’s evening.”

The Dane’s grasp of climate science seems shaky at best. The polar bear is far from O.K.: the U.S. Geological Survey reported last month that two-thirds of the population will disappear by 2050 because of shrinking sea ice. But his main argument is still worth considering. Lomborg believes that it would be far too costly to reduce global carbon emissions enough to actually cool the climate. Since warming is coming no matter what we do and poor countries will suffer the most from it, we should instead direct scarce resources to helping those nations adapt to climate change. That means improving health-care systems and aiding economic growth so that poor countries are better prepared for calamities ahead, climate-related or not. Lomborg is correct to point out that if we’re so worried about the future famines and diseases and refugees of a warmer world, we might want to first do a little more for the hundreds of millions suffering from those catastrophes right now.

Americans Nordhaus and Shellenberger have backgrounds in both politics and environmentalism, and they mercilessly skewer the political mistakes of the green movement. For all the public attention climate change has won, U.S. greens have so far failed to achieve national political action on the issue–and the authors insist that won’t change as long as environmentalism remains wedded to what they call the “politics of limits.” Mandatory emission cuts alone won’t be enough to drive the kind of innovation needed to break the world of its fossil-fuel habit–and China and India will never sign on to caps that could limit economic growth. Instead, Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue for Apollo-program-style government investment in clean-energy research, on the order of $30 billion a year. It’s a smart, if not wholly original idea–not least because it would allow greens to frame climate change as an inspiring challenge, not just a pending catastrophe. And that’s a contrarian position that just might help win the climate wars.

Ex-VP, intergovernmental body jointly honored for global warming work

MSNBC staff and news service reports

Updated: 5:57 a.m. PT Oct 12, 2007

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OSLO, Norway – Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.

“I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said in a statement. “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

Gore won an Academy Award this year for his film “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on global warming, and had been widely expected to win the prize.

“His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change,” the citation said. “He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”

It cited Gore’s awareness at an early stage “of the climatic challenges the world is facing.”

Panel’s two decades
The committee also cited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”

The IPCC groups 2,500 researchers from more than 130 nations and issued reports this year blaming human activities for climate changes ranging from more heat waves to floods. It was set up in 1988 by the United Nations to help guide governments.

Climate change has moved high on the international agenda this year. The U.N. climate panel has been releasing reports, talks on a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate are set to resume and on Europe’s northern fringe, where the awards committee works, there is growing concern about the melting Arctic.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the Earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.”

Gore said he would donate his share of the $1.5 million that accompanies the prize to the non-profit Alliance for Climate Protection.

Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the prize committee, said the award should not be seen as singling out the Bush administration for criticism.

“A peace prize is never a criticism of anything. A peace prize is a positive message and support to all those champions of peace in the world.”

President Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol because he said it would harm the U.S. economy and because it did not require immediate cuts by countries like China and India. The treaty aimed to put the biggest burden on the richest nations that contributed the most carbon emissions.

The U.S. Senate voted against mandatory carbon reductions before the Kyoto negotiations were completed. The treaty was never presented to the Senate for ratification by the Clinton administration.

“Al Gore has fought the environment battle even as vice president,” Mjoes said. “Many did not listen … but he carried on.”

Fans and foes
Reaction to the award was immediate.

“He’s like the proverbial nut that grew into a giant oak by standing his ground,” Patrick Michaels, a scholar with the free market Cato Institute, said in a statement. “We can only hope that he can parlay his prize into a run for the U. S. presidency, where he will be unable to hide from debate on his extreme and one-sided view of global warming.”

British bookmakers once put 100-to-1 odds on Gore winning an Oscar, becoming a Nobel laureate and becoming president. He has now accomplished two of the three, and on Friday bookies slashed the odds to 8/1 from 10/1.

Gore, 59, has been coy, saying repeatedly he’s not running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, without ever closing that door completely.

FoxNews.com columnist Steve Milloy alleged that Gore “plays fast and loose with the facts to advance his personal agenda.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Gore ” inspirational in focusing attention across the globe on this key issue.”

Julia Marton-Lefèvre, head of the World Conservation Union, said that, “as Mr. Gore and the IPCC have clearly demonstrated, we can solve the grave dangers posed by climate change if we have the will. Let the Nobel Peace Prize become the embodiment of that will.”

“Al Gore made it okay to talk about global warming over breakfast and dinner tables all across America,” added Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “He made this unprecedented challenge understandable and the solutions accessible for millions of people.”

‘Question of war and peace’
The Nobel committee often uses the coveted prize to cast the global spotlight on a relatively little-known person or cause. Since Gore already had a high profile some had doubted that the committee would bestow the prize on him.

In recent years, the committee has broadened the interpretation of peacemaking and disarmament efforts outlined by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in creating the prize with his 1895 will. The prize now often also recognizes human rights, democracy, elimination of poverty, sharing resources and the environment.

Two of the past three prizes have been untraditional, with the 2004 award to Kenya environmentalist Wangari Maathai and last year’s award to Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which makes to micro-loans to the country’s poor.

Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, called climate change more than an environmental issue.

“It is a question of war and peace,” said Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. “We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa.” He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Kate Ravilious for National Geographic News

February 28, 2007

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist’s controversial theory.Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Get an overview: “Global Warming Fast Facts”.)Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures. In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun. “The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars,” he said. Solar Cycles Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun’s heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets. Mars and Earth, for instance, have experienced periodic ice ages throughout their histories. “Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance,” Abdussamatov said. By studying fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, Abdussamatov believes he can see a pattern that fits with the ups and downs in climate we see on Earth and Mars. Abdussamatov’s work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists. “His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion,” said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England’s Oxford University. “And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report.” (Related: “Global Warming ‘Very Likely’ Caused by Humans, World Climate Experts Say” [February 2, 2007].) Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that “the idea just isn’t supported by the theory or by the observations.” Planets’ Wobbles The conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet’s orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun. “Wobbles in the orbit of Mars are the main cause of its climate change in the current era,” Oxford’s Wilson explained. (Related: “Don’t Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says” [September 13, 2006].) All planets experience a few wobbles as they make their journey around the sun. Earth’s wobbles are known as Milankovitch cycles and occur on time scales of between 20,000 and 100,000 years. These fluctuations change the tilt of Earth’s axis and its distance from the sun and are thought to be responsible for the waxing and waning of ice ages on Earth. Mars and Earth wobble in different ways, and most scientists think it is pure coincidence that both planets are between ice ages right now. “Mars has no [large] moon, which makes its wobbles much larger, and hence the swings in climate are greater too,” Wilson said. No Greenhouse Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov’s theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet’s surface. He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth’s climate and virtually no influence on Mars. But “without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice,” said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin. Most scientists now fear that the massive amount of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the air will lead to a catastrophic rise in Earth’s temperatures, dramatically raising sea levels as glaciers melt and leading to extreme weather worldwide. Abdussamatov remains contrarian, however, suggesting that the sun holds something quite different in store. “The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040,” Abdussamatov said. “It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years.”

Leading the way

Western states take the initiative to fight global warming

Tri-City Herald
September 5, 2007

The following editorial appeared Thursday in the Tri-City Herald.

It’s more a leveling than it is a breakthrough, but the Western Climate Initiative is good news just the same.

In it, eight Western states and Canadian provinces have agreed to a regional goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent by 2020.

That’s not exactly a new goal. According to the Associated Press, it is an aggregation of goals set individually by the states and provinces and does not change any existing targets.

But by combining forces and agreeing on some minimal regional standards, the initiative members serve as pathfinders for other regions and the Canadian and U.S. national governments.

Members of the initiative are Washington, Oregon, Arizona, California, Utah, New Mexico, British Columbia and Manitoba.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski says the group is “leading the way for North America in adopting real measures and programs to combat global warming and to secure economic and environmental opportunity.”

It’s easy to understand why the West is out front. Dam operators, water district managers, farmers, conservationists and scientists are predicting dire water shortages in the region if the effects of global warming aren’t curbed.

Already, snowfall is diminishing and spring runoff is coming earlier. In the mid-Columbia, where much of the agricultural industry depends on melting snow in the Cascades to irrigate summer crops, the potential damage would be devastating.

Among the revelations before a Senate committee: The spring snowpack already has declined at nearly 75 percent of all weather recording stations in Washington, Oregon and California.

If trends continue, tens of thousands of irrigated acres could fall out of production in the West as water supplies tighten, the senators were told this summer.

The regional initiative’s aims include mandating use of renewable energy resources, imposing stricter standards on new power plants and buying alternative-fuel vehicles where practical. These are hardly radical ideas, and their costs shouldn’t be prohibitive.

Also important is that the initiative should help reduce the ever-popular notion that if one state undertakes something, those who oppose it need do nothing more than cross state lines to get a bargain.

Not any more – not in these states.

And the planet may just benefit. That, in the end, is the whole idea.