We Can't Wait for Politicians to Embrace Clean Energy

Politicians in Washington are years away from embracing a massive investment in clean energy. We must start an energy revolution ourselves.

Conventional wisdom among environmentalists today says it would be unwise to pass a major climate change bill too soon. As long as the Bush veto looms and Republicans retain the filibuster club in the Senate, any climate change bill that passes through that birth canal is likely to be a stunted, shriveled thing. Better to wait until a strong bill can be passed than establish a weak policy now.

But energy is supposed to be different. President Bush has admitted that America is "addicted to oil," and he is a big booster of technology as the solution to global warming. At his major economies meeting on climate change in September, Bush called for an international fund to help developing nations finance clean-energy projects to stem climate change. But when he refused to offer a funding commitment or any other mechanism to implement the plan, international delegates turned up their noses and said they would wait till 2009 to engage the US on climate.

You might expect that Bush would be more willing to put his money where his mouth is where the US is concerned, but that does not seem to be the case.

Both houses of Congress passed energy bills last summer. The Senate, in particular, made a big effort to produce a bi-partisan consensus. Environmentalists are calling the new energy bill "a down payment on efforts to combat global warming." But President Bush has not come out in support of either the House or Senate version of the bill.

Meanwhile, getting both houses of Congress to sit down and reconcile what are two very different bills has been difficult. In early September, Democrats sent discouraging signals about any bill passing this session. Perhaps they heard from their constituents, because by the end of the month, Senator Reid was promising to appoint conferees soon. It was to have been last week and has now been postponed until after the Senate gets back from its Columbus Day recess. On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with other Democrats to discuss bringing an energy bill directly to the floor.

There is no question that public support for clean renewable energy is at an all time high. This is showing up at the state level where 31 states have now passed some sort of mandate to produce energy from solar, wind and other renewable sources. The National Governor's Association is proceeding to coordinate programs as best it can in the vacuum of federal energy policy. At an NGA forum on renewable energy, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (a Republican) said, "Energy is the defining issue of our time. The public is way ahead of the politicians ... there is enormous running room for policy makers to make significant advances ... there's an urgency to this issue, and none of us, Democrats, Republicans, politicians and the public have acted as urgently as we need to."

With such strong public support, why have the Democrats found it so difficult to produce an energy bill?

Cars, Coal and Nukes

One problem has been Michigan Rep. John Dingell, who chairs the House energy committee. Backing the position of Detroit automakers, Dingell refused to allow any increase in CAFE fuel mileage standards.

And while the House bill has no CAFE increase, the Senate bill lacks a Renewable Energy Standard (RES). The House passed an RES requiring utilities to generate 15 percent of their power from renewable sources (mostly solar, wind and biomass) by 2020. The US is one of the few nations left that has not adopted such a standard, but Bill Wicker, on the staff of Senate energy committee Chair Jeff Bingaman, said that the Republicans "blocked every effort" to include a national RES in the Senate energy bill.

Matt Letourneau, energy policy aide to Sen. Pete Domenici, the ranking member of the Senate energy committee, said that a national RES would be unfair to some regions of the country that don't have abundant renewable resources, particularly the Southeast. He said the standard is too high and it is "not possible" to get 15 percent of the region's power from renewable energy.

But Scott Sklar, a solar energy lobbyist, said that there is plenty of renewable energy in the Southeast. "The Southeast is biomass rich and solar rich. Solar could provide 5-6 percent of the region's power, wind, 1-2 percent, and biomass, 10-15 percent. The waste biomass from Hurricane Katrina alone could provide power for 30 years." Utilities can also substitute up to 4 percent of the target with increases in efficiency.

Lynn Hargis, a former attorney with FERC, who now works for Public Citizen monitoring energy regulation, said that the real problem is giant utility companies in the South like Duke, Entergy and Southern Company that want to make huge profits selling cheap coal-generated power in unregulated markets.

The Senate bill also includes loan guarantees of up to 50 billion dollars for nuclear power. Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen calls that "an unprecedented financial obligation" and says that inclusion of those loan guarantees in a final bill would "overwhelm any benefits" from the other provisions.

Analysts say that loans to build nuclear plants are distinctively "sub-prime" with the risk of utilities defaulting running well over 50 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Taxpayer billions wasted on boondoggle nuke plants are taxpayer billions that can't be spent putting solar panels on roofs or developing better batteries for electric cars.

Scott Sklar is less concerned about the loan guarantees. He says that any energy bill able to get past a Republican filibuster and a Bush veto will include loan guarantees for nuclear power, so there's no point in fighting it. He predicts that the Democrats will pass an energy bill by January or they "won't survive" the pressure from constituents, and that the bill will include lighter versions of the RES and CAFE standards along with renewed production tax credits for solar and wind power.

But if the RES and CAFE provisions are watered down even more than the current versions, what will that do to our climate policy down payment?

A new analysis released by Environmental Defense shows that if we do nothing, US greenhouse gas emissions will rise 35 percent by 2030. If all of the best provisions from both House and Senate versions pass and are vigorously implemented, emissions would climb only 4 percent above today's levels by 2030. But because many of the provisions allow flexibility, if they are not implemented aggressively, they will allow emissions to grow 22 percent by 2030.

Combine this flimsy "down payment" with the sub-prime nuke loans, and you don't end up with much value. We need to do a lot better than this if we are going to prevent the worst ravages of global warming and hang on to our planetary home.

Scott Sklar says it is possible that Democrats could produce a final energy bill that is stronger than both current versions, but they would have to "ram" it through.

Democratic leaders could bypass a formal conference committee and strike a bicameral deal to put an energy bill directly on the floor in both houses at once. Nancy Pelosi indicated on Wednesday that she would pursue that option. A strongly progressive energy bill might not survive a Bush veto, but at least it would energize the progressive constituency that is ready for a real energy revolution.

Struggle Behind the Scenes

Meanwhile, a series of skirmishes over coal between utilities, politicians, agencies and environmental groups is taking place right now.

Two weeks ago, Rep. Henry Waxman sent a letter to the US EPA objecting to their permitting of a coal-fired power plant in Deseret, Utah. Waxman said that the recent Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court decision requires EPA to address the coal plant's greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The Sierra Club is following up with a lawsuit.

On September 14, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo subpoenaed five of the country's largest energy companies, demanding that they disclose the financial risks of their greenhouse gas emissions to shareholders.

Some environmental groups are targeting banks that invest in coal power plant construction. Rainforest Action Network is planning protests at Citi Group and Bank of America branch offices around the country on November 16. "We're going upstream," said a RAN spokesperson. "Without bank financing, utilities can't actually build any of those plants."

Peter Montague of Environmental Research Foundation reports that since the beginning of 2006 at least two dozen new coal-fired plants have been cancelled. Montague says, "A small but effective citizen's movement has managed to box in Big Coal."

Politicians are starting to declare themselves against coal. Barack Obama released his energy and global warming plan this week, saying he would oppose all new coal-fired generation that did not include carbon capture and storage technology.

Just last week, Tampa Electric Co., a Florida utility, announced it was canceling plans to build a coal plant with carbon capture and storage because of uncertainties around the technical feasibility. Florida is one state that has been very clear that it won't allow any new coal-fired generation without carbon capture and storage. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that it will take ten years of testing for the technology to mature, if we start today. But today there is not even one demonstration plant anywhere in the world that incorporates the complete cycle of carbon capture and storage.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid also opposes new coal plants and has introduced a far-reaching bill (S. 2076 -- the Clean Renewable Energy and Economic Development Act) that limits the federal financing of power transmission lines to those that carry at least 75 percent renewable energy. It applies the same standard to new power lines crossing federal land. This would keep Big Coal out of some of the new energy corridors that may be established under the Energy Policy Act (EPACT) of 2005.

But King Coal is hardly down for the count.

In early September, FERC designated a set of new national power corridors in the Northeast under the EPACT. State regulators and environmentalists are suspicious about the location of the corridors which seem designed to funnel cheap coal power from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast -- where states have already committed to reducing greenhouse gasses, but power demand is high. Under the EPACT, federal regulators can override state concerns. Environmental Defense is considering a lawsuit.

Power to the People

Michael Peevey, the president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said in a recent opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle that the old energy paradigm, where large centralized generators convert fossil fuels to electricity which is sent over transmission lines to homes and businesses, is over. Solar, he says, is a "disruptive technology" that is changing everything. He says the California Solar Initiative passed last year is on track to power one million homes by 2017.

And in California, it is not just homes getting powered; it is also people who are getting empowered.

Van Jones, an environmental and social activist and cofounder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, was interviewed on the radio program Living on Earth last week about the impact of solar jobs on the American workforce:

There's a wonderful program, which I just can't stop bragging on, called 'Solar Richmond,' where they got a modest amount of money, got 20 guys -- you know low-income African American, Latino, Phillipino, one African-American woman. For nine weeks these guys got up, this young woman got up, every morning. They had to be there at nine o'clock. They had to learn these skills. Nine weeks later they did their first installation. There were local TV cameras there, solar employers were there saying, 'Hey, we need workers.' And you know, the look on these young people's faces. Often these are the young men who are always seen as the villains and yet here they are, nine weeks later, African American, Latino, with the baggy pants, the hair or whatever, but they've got their work boots on, they've got their orange jerseys on, and they're doing this work. And they are the ecological heroes.

One of the stupidest news stories on energy I've seen was a piece on CNN Money last week that said economists were "split" on whether renewable energy would create millions of new jobs. The article quoted experts at the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley affirming that installing solar arrays, building wind farms and producing biomass would create at least a million new jobs, not vulnerable to offshore outsourcing. To counter them, the article quoted the chief economist at a Manhattan consultancy, who said it would be unrealistic to count on job gains in the solar sector since the technology hasn't taken off yet and there is no way of knowing if it ever will. "You certainly don't want to move all sorts of money into an area that's not going to be viable," he said.

Sadly, there are still too many people like this brain-dead economist running things in this country. And there are still too many unfortunates living in the past, like the auto workers who have given up almost everything to hang on to production lines making Detroit Dinosaurs -- those gas guzzlers no one will want in a few years time when oil supply peaks and gas prices shoot up to the moon.

The future belongs to "Solar Richmond," and all we are waiting for now is for those who think they are in charge to catch up with rest of us so we can build this beautiful new future together.

Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor.

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Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again

When people wonder how the United States ended up in today’s nightmarish predicament, a big part of the answer is that the right-wing message machine and the mainstream U.S. news media distorted reality at key moments about key people, perhaps most notably Al Gore during Campaign 2000.

by Robert Parry

That ability to twist reality has been a major focus of our reporting at Consortiumnews.com over the years [See, for instance, “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”] Much of this work is reprised in our new book, Neck Deep.

But even now – when the consequences of the news media’s earlier “war on Gore” can be measured in the horrible death toll that has followed the Bush presidency – it appears that little has changed.

Lies and distortions about Al Gore remain an easy political commodity to sell, as we have seen in the renewed assault on Gore in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

As the news spread about the Nobel Committee’s recognition of Gore’s work publicizing the threat from global warming, both the right-wing media and major news outlets geared up to hype criticism of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in a ruling by an obscure English judge.

Hours before the Nobel Prize announcement, the Washington Post ran a news story quoting High Court Judge Michael Burton as detecting “nine errors” in the documentary and asserting that the alleged mistakes “arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis.”

Burton ruled that English schools could show the film but only with a cautionary advisory for students.

Burton’s ruling became a cause celebre for the American Right’s powerful media, which used it to discredit both Gore and the movement seeking to stop global warming. Mainstream news outlets, such as CNN, quickly fell into line, citing Burton’s ruling almost every time Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was mentioned on Oct. 12.

Right-wing Internet postings soon added the word “significant” between the words “nine” and “errors,” albeit without quotes around those three words together.

Lo and behold, on Oct. 13, the Washington Post ran a snarky editorial about Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize claiming that Burton’s ruling had found “nine significant errors” – now put together in quotes. The editorial faulted Gore for “factual misstatements and exaggerations.”

For his part, Gore has sought to play down the significance of Burton’s ruling, much as he tried to finesse press misstatements about him during Campaign 2000. Rather than confronting false quotes then about him claiming to have “invented the Internet” and to be the one who “started” the Love Canal clean-up, Gore tried to make light of the misunderstandings so he wouldn’t be further bashed as “defensive.”

Similarly now, Gore’s spokesman Kalee Kreider cited the positive side of Burton’s ruling, saying Gore was “gratified that the courts verified that the central argument of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is supported by the scientific community.” [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2007]

However, like the “invented the Internet” canard and the press misquotes about Love Canal, Burton’s ruling quickly became the supposedly definitive judgment in dismissing the Gore documentary as the “Inconvenient Untruth.

Who Is Judge Burton?

Yet, regardless of where the Post editorial writers lifted the phrase “nine significant errors” – clearly not from their own news story – the more significant question should be: Why is Judge Burton suddenly the arbiter of truth on the complicated subject of global warming and on Gore’s lectures about the topic.

Burton, in his early 60s, is best known as an “employment appeal tribunal judge.” Though his career has attracted little public notice, he earned praise from the far-right, anti-immigrant British National Party for issuing a ruling in 2005 that applied the nation’s Race Relations Act “to cover the racial rights of White people.”

Hailing what it called Burton’s history-making ruling, the BNP said, “This now means that any organisations or companies that discriminate against a member of the British National Party are guilty of anti-white racism.” [BNP statement on Aug. 10, 2005]

Burton’s criticisms of Gore’s power-point presentation also read more like quibbles than anything “significant.”

At one point, for instance, Gore shows a photo of flooding on a Pacific island and in reference to rising sea levels states, “That’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”

Gore’s brief remark doesn’t spell out exactly which islands he was referring to or whether the evacuations were permanent or temporary.

But Burton took Gore to task over the sentence. As recounted by the Telegraph (U.K.), Burton’s ruling states that “An Inconvenient Truth” claims that low-lying Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming” but that there is no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.

While Gore’s single sentence could be criticized as imprecise or confusing, Burton is not entirely correct either.

The leaders of Tuvalu, a string of islands between Hawaii and Australia, announced in 2001 that they had no choice but to abandon their island-country because of rising sea levels and asked permission to relocate all 11,000 inhabitants to New Zealand. [See article by the Earth Policy Institute, Nov. 15, 2001.]

Since then, New Zealand has agreed to a plan for the gradual evacuation of Tuvalu and other Pacific islands facing environmental catastrophe. [See report from Friends of the Earth International.]

Evacuation Begun

Contrary to Burton’s ruling, the evacuation of Tuvalu already has begun, according to travel reporter Janine Israel in a 2004 story about the expected loss of these picturesque islands to potential tourists.

“Over recent decades, the remote Pacific nation [of Tuvalu] has been beset by frequent floods, cyclones, and rising sea levels.” Israel wrote. “Tuvalu’s 10,500 inhabitants have already begun the dreaded process of evacuating to New Zealand, which has agreed to accept 75 Tuvaluans per year as environmental refugees. …

“Tuvalu has been given 50 years before it sinks beneath the waves. Although the melting of glaciers and icecaps is partly responsible for the rise in sea level, it is also due to the warming of the seawater, which expands when heated.

“And it isn’t alone. Other low-lying island nations are at the frontline of climate change. Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Palau, Vanuatu, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Republic of the Marshall Island, Tokelau, and the Republic of Maldives are all gearing up for a Noah’s Flood. For intrepid travelers, these are the countries to visit before they slip off the map for good.”

Given this unfolding tragedy, Burton’s querulous point would seem to be finicky at best.

Judge Burton also blasts Gore for supposedly suggesting that “in the near future” a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland.

“This is distinctly alarmist,” the judge wrote, arguing that sea levels may indeed rise that much “but only after, and over, millennia” and the idea that the melting would occur “in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus,” the Telegraph reported.

But in “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore never said the 20-foot rise in sea level would occur quickly or even at all.

Referring to Antarctica’s giant ice cap, Gore said, “If this were to go, sea levels world wide would go up 20 feet.” A similar rise could result from the complete thawing of Greenland’s ice cover, Gore said.

“If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of west Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida,” Gore said as slides showed what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would do to coastlines around the world.

While Burton’s ruling fits with the characterization of Gore’s comments as popularized in the right-wing news media, it doesn’t match up with what Gore actually said.

Gulf Stream

Judge Burton also puts words in Gore’s mouth in other alleged “errors.” For instance, he notes that Gore’s documentary refers to the danger of global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor,” which powers the Gulf Stream that moderates temperatures in Western Europe.

Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. agency which shared the Nobel Prize with Gore, Burton said it’s “very unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor would shut down, though it might slow down.

Again, however, Burton is adopting a contentious interpretation of Gore’s comments. Gore refers to the shutting down of the Ocean Conveyor in a historical context, when a vast reservoir of North American ice melted and flooded into the North Atlantic, causing a disruption of the Gulf Stream and an ice age in Europe.

Gore’s description of this historic event suggests that something similar could occur if the Greenland ice cap melted, but again Burton is exaggerating Gore’s comments before attacking them.

Similarly, Burton asserts that Gore claimed that two graphs – one representing CO2 levels and the other global temperatures – showed “an exact fit.” The judge ruled that while there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.”

But what did Gore actually assert and where did the judge get the words “an exact fit”?

In that segment of the film, Gore doesn’t use the phrase “exact fit,” although he does joke that a sixth-grade classmate who once asked a teacher if the continents of Africa and South America ever “fit together” might have a similar comment about the two graphs.

Gore then states, “The relation is actually very complicated but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and it is this, when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer because it traps more heat from the sun.”

While there are legitimate questions about the precise correlation between past changes in CO2 and earth temperatures, Burton ignores Gore’s admission that “the relation is actually very complicated” and instead puts the words “exact fit” into Gore’s mouth.

Judge Burton plays a similar trick regarding Gore’s references to the destruction from Hurricane Katrina and other powerful storms. Burton claims that there is “insufficient evidence” to support Gore’s supposed claim that global warming caused Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans.

But Gore never makes that direct connection. He does show footage of extreme weather from around the globe, which many scientists believe has been made worse by rising temperatures, but Gore never specifically attributes Katrina or the other examples of flooding to global warming.

Again, Burton has set up a straw man and knocked it down.

Disappearing Snow

Burton faults Gore, too, for attributing the disappearance of snow caps on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming. The judge ruled that scientists haven’t established that the receding of ice and the worsening of droughts are primarily attributable to human-caused climate change.

Regarding Lake Chad, Burton said “it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability,” the Telegraph reported.

While Burton is entitled to his scientific opinions, Gore’s concern that warming temperatures have reduced snow cover and contributed to faster evaporation of water is not a particularly controversial point of view.

Burton’s other cited “errors” are even more trivial. Gore is taken to task for saying that polar bears have been drowning because they face swims of up to 60 miles through open ice. Burton asserts that the confirmed cases show four bears drowning during storms, though he acknowledges that it makes sense to expect future drowning-related deaths of bears if ice caps continue to melt.

Gore’s last “error” supposedly was to warn that coral reefs were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. While agreeing with Gore that rising temperatures could increase coral bleaching and fatality, Burton ruled that it was difficult to separate the impact of climate change from other problems, such as pollution.

[For the full list of Burton’s alleged “errors,” see Telegraph (U,K.), Oct. 11, 2007.]

In other words, Burton appears to be a quirky judge who is prone to quibbling over minor nuances. But the larger significance of Burton’s ruling – as it is now championed by right-wing and mainstream U.S. news outlets – is that the vilification of Al Gore is not likely to cease, even with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize.

That also should be a cautionary lesson to Democrats seeking the White House. The political/media dynamic of Washington has changed little since Campaign 2000. The powerful right-wing news outlets still can make little controversies big and big controversies little.

Plus, major news outlets, like CNN and the Washington Post, continue to fall into line.

The Washington insider community also shows no serious readiness to reexamine its failures in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency and the devastating Iraq War, which now even retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of coalition forces, calls a “nightmare with no end in sight.”

It’s all so much easier to continue making fun of Al Gore.

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