Elijah Zarlin, CREDO: Obama’s Keystone XL embarrassment

by Elijah Zarlin, Senior Campaign Manager for CREDO, May 9, 2013

  

Obama’s Organizing for America recently launched a campaign criticizing members of congress for failing to listen to scientists on climate change.

The email headline blared, “Watch this embarrassing video of climate deniers in congress – and say you are ready to hold them accountable.”

It certainly is embarrassing (and worse) that members of congress still callously fly in the face of the science and the urgent danger of our rapidly heating planet. And we certainly should hold them accountable for it.

Yet it is an open question whether President Obama himself will do exactly the same thing – deny the scientists who are unequivocally clear on the need to keep carbon in the ground – when it comes to his decision on the Keystone XL pipeline.

If he does, it will be even more embarrassing for our president.

The first, loudest, and most visual embarrassment will be how he is held accountable. Not with an online petition, but with tens of thousands of his best supporters sitting in and getting arrested in protests across the country. Nearly 60,000 people have already signed the Keystone XL Pledge of Resistance – committing, if President Obama’s State Department issues a draft approval of Keystone XL, to engage in peaceful and dignified acts of civil disobedience targeted at President Obama, his administration, and other supporters of the toxic pipeline.

We expect this to grow to 100,000 people pledged by the summer – 100,000 of President Obama’s best supporters not organizing around his second-term agenda, but instead protesting his catastrophic decision on Keystone XL.

It will be embarrassing for the president to side against his own EPA, which gave widespread criticism of the State Department’s recent environmental impact statement on KXL, and instead side with oil-industry contractors paid by TransCanada to write the report.

 It will be embarrassing for the president to make a decision that flies in the face of the cold, hard economic facts on Keystone XL – that this export-focused pipeline won’t decrease our reliance on overseas oil; that it won’t reduce gas prices; that it will in fact increase oil prices in the Midwest; that it will produce, according to the oil-industry contractors themselves, all of 35 permanent jobs; and that the biggest economic impact of this pipeline will be its negative impacts, including the virtually guaranteed spills (still exempted from the spill recovery tax – a fact that will not change in this congress) and the catastrophic contribution to the heating of our planet. 
But the biggest embarrassment for the president from approving Keystone XL will be his show of weakness. This decision is President Obama’s and his alone. We know that he aspires to do something about it. His 2025 fuel-efficiency standard is his administration’s proudest environmental accomplishment – the projected benefits of which will be slashed nearly in half by approving Keystone XL.

If President Obama approves Keystone XL he will go down in history as the president who lost a pivotal negotiation to himself.

Unlike the Republicans in congress, for whom proud ignorance and callously self-serving actions have become the hallmark of their jury-rigged and gerrymandered-safe majority in the House, President Obama was elected on the promises of change – including change from “the tyranny of oil,” and hope – including hope for a future in which “the rise of the oceans began to slow, and the planet began to heal.”

Approval of Keystone XL would be an embarrassing and cynical betrayal to everyone who stood with the president in 2008 and 2012. But if the past actions of this administration are any indication, President Obama will try to court some imagined middle ground, an all-of-the-above compromise that produces net zero environmental gain.

But there are a few months left, and we can still work, and hope. An inspiring leader once said, “In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” It sure would be embarrassing to have to take those words back.

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Elijah Zarlin is a Senior Campaign Manager for CREDO, a progressive activist organization with over 3 million members nationwide. Previously, Elijah served as a Senior National Email Writer on President Obama’s 2008 election campaign.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-a-environment/297973-obamas-keystone-xl-embarrassment

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Will Future Generations Call Obama The ‘Environmental President’ Or An Abject Failure?

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, May 9, 2013

It’s tempting to grade the President on a curve, but future generations won’t – if we destroy the livable climate they’ll need to feed 9 billion people

“History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic politics….  A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster.”  – George Kennan, 1951.

Readers have asked my opinion of Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine column: “Obama Might Actually Be the Environmental President.” His sub-heading tells the tale:

His climate-change policy has been an abject failure, says Al Gore and just about everyone else. They’re wrong. Here’s why.

No.

It’s quite safe to say that, at the very least, it is wildly premature to say Obama hasn’t been an abject failure and pretty safe to say that he is — at least from the perspective of future generations and history’s judgment. That was the point of my election night post, “Obama Wins Reelection, Now Must Become A Climate Hawk To Avoid Dust-Bin Of History, Dust Bowl For America.”

While I usually agree with Grist’s inimitable climate hawk, Dave Roberts, I’m not down with, “Seems to me Chait mostly gets it right.” Like Chait, Roberts wants to grade Obama on a curve, “The question for me is whether Obama has been a success compared to what was (and is) possible.”

As I’ll discuss below, I think Obama is a failure on those grounds, too. But it can’t be repeated too often that Obama’s legacy will be determined primarily by whether we avert catastrophic climate change.

If we don’t, then Obama — indeed, the entire political system, the media and the intelligentsia, heck, all of us — will be seen as failures, and rightfully so. As a 2012 PricewaterhouseCoopers report makes clear, anything other than aggressive efforts to slash carbon pollution starting ASAP likely means 7°F  to 11°F warming globally by 2100 (with more warming next century). That would cause substantially higher warming over most of the U.S. It would leave much of the “breakbasket of the world” (and indeed much of the world’s arable and habitable land) in Dust Bowl conditions much worse than this nation has ever known. By mid-century, the nation and the world will be engaged in a desperate multi-decade effort to figure out how to feed nine billion people on a planet whose carrying capacity has been gutted.

If we don’t stop climate catastrophe, then calling Obama the “environmental president” because of all his other, well-documented environmental accomplishments is like, well, the old line, “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

The point of Kennan’s quote above is that history doesn’t grade us on a curve. And in this case, we’d be graded for a millenium of multiple, simultaneous, ever-worsening, irreversible disasters foisted on future generations because we were too greedy and myopic to devote even a small fraction of our wealth to getting off of carbon a few decades sooner than we were forced to anyway! Not exactly “the greatest generation.”

Here is the only curve future generations will grade us on if we allow it to happen, if we destroy the stable climate of the past 11,000 years that enabled modern civilization:

Temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013) plus projected warming this century on humanity’s current emissions path (in red, via recent literature).

But even if we ignore Kennan and take the narrow, short-term perspective — which, it must be pointed out, is the kind of thinking that has gotten us into this mess — and try to imagine what Obama could have done differently, he still can only get an incomplete (that could convert to a D at best, and an F- in most plausible scenarios).

The entire premise of Chait’s piece is that the failure to pass a climate bill isn’t fatal to Obama’s legacy because, near the end of his 8-year presidency, Obama is going to embrace tough carbon pollution standards for existing power plants along the lines of what the Natural Resources Defense Council has proposed (see here). Modified rapture!

Now I don’t think one can discount the fact that using the EPA to deal with carbon opens the door to significant delay through the courts. Worse, if the Republicans can ever figure out how to win the presidency again, they could slow, stop, or roll back the whole thing.

And why wouldn’t the GOP? Team Obama’s catastrophic climate silence — a silence his White House inanely imposed on much of the progressive and environmental establishment back in 2009 (see here) — coupled with his utter failure to push hard for a Senate vote, has turned a winning political “wedge” issue into something that is mistakenly perceived to be a political loser by much of the political establishment. His embrace of an “all of the above” energy strategy, which is to say no strategy at all, has legitimized a massive expansion of fossil fuel production — and export.

No, I’m not overselling what one man can achieve — I’m simply not ignoring the damage done by an entire administration grotesquely indifferent to — and incompetent at — climate messaging. As Prof. Robert Brulle, one of the country’s leading experts on the environmental movement, put it, “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.”

We are on the brink of losing yet another full 8 years that could have been used to inform the American public about what’s happening now, the bad stuff coming that we can’t stop, and what needs to be done now to avoid the really catastrophic stuff we can.

Churchillian leadership on climate may not be a sufficient condition for avoiding the climate catastrophe, but it is almost certainly a necessary one.

Given that climate change is in fact an existential threat to the nation and modern civilization, I also don’t think that we can ignore the myriad other failures by Obama beyond his failure to use the bully pulpit. Here are four: 

• Pushing health care reform first when the climate bill was already moving and far more important for the future of the nation and the world.
• Pushing health care reform in such an incompetent fashion it took a full year, lost public support for that reform and sweeping pieces of legislation in general, energized the opposition, and generally further poisoned a poisonous political atmosphere.
• Failing to insist that the climate bill be able to be passed through the reconciliation process, which requires only 51 votes and prevents a filibuster — in retrospect, this was almost certainly the single biggest strategic mistake (though not Obama’s alone). Note that this would mostly likely have required team Obama to not insist health care be able to pass through reconciliation.
• Never keeping Democratic Senators in line, and, for instance, never making clear that there was definitely going to be a vote on the climate bill, as they knew there would be for health care. This allowed moderate Democrats to publicly bad-mouth the bill and say that there was no path to 60 votes, which essentially sent the message to moderate Republicans crucial to the bill’s passage that they would be taking a massive political risk supporting any bill.

Again, the net effect of the political incompetence and the messaging failure has been to turn the issue of the century into a virtual non-issue, which in turn has allowed the major media to all but ignore it, too.

But let’s imagine Obama gets a spine, fixes the EPA rules for new power plants, and then adopts rules for existing power plants that lead to a 17% (or greater) reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020 (versus 2005 levels), which is what he offered before the 2009 global talks in Copenhagen. Obama would still need to undo the damage done to the international negotiation process by his climate silence and failure to pass a climate bill.

Avoiding catastrophe requires a global deal with teeth in 2015 — otherwise America’s modest “reduction” in carbon emissions will mean nothing. I put “reduction” in quotes because when you factor in our trade deficit with China (and others) in manufactured goods, it just turns out we’ve been outsourcing our CO2 emissions. Over the past two decades, we have been buying more and more of our products from coal-intensive China — and, on top of that, we’ve been selling China our surplus coal!

Yes, America’s coal use is dropping, but don’t worry, the “environmental President” has overseen the largest increase in U.S. coal exports in history (see “2012 U.S. Coal Exports Reach Record High“)!

One final point — on the Keystone XL pipeline. Killing it may not be a sufficient condition for the “environmental President” to lead the way on preventing a climate catastrophe, but it is almost certainly necessary one.

“Approving the pipeline would be a deep self-inflicted wound on the Obama administration, greater than anything else he has done,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club and a leader of the antipipeline movement. “This was not inherited from the Bush administration and it can’t be passed off to his successor. It really is Obama’s alone. Whatever damage the decision would do to the environmental movement pales in comparison to the damage it would do to his own legacy.”

Of course, IF Obama could approve Keystone but still achieve serious domestic reductions AND a global deal that put the world onto a non-catastrophic path (i.e near 2°C total warming or less), then history might still judge him the “environmental president.” But on that path, the Keystone pipeline would be a superfluous waste of resources (at best), since it is a gateway to one of the many huge pools of carbon-intensive fuel most of which must be left in the groundon the 2C path.

The fact that our hypothetical Obama could, if he uses EPA authority in a serious fashion, go to the world’s other big emitters and commit to meeting his 17% pledge is a necessary minimum condition to achieve a climate agreement — but it is not sufficient. Obama needs some moral standing, he needs to be able to demonstrate to the world the U.S. understands that far deeper cuts are needed post-2020 and that means not sticking new spigots into huge, dirty carbon pools like the tar sands.

If Obama truly were the “environmental president” then Keystone would be a very, very easy decision for him.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/09/1972341/future-generations-obama-environmental-president-abject-failure/

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Please tell Home Depot to stop selling bee-poisoning neonicotinoid pesticides

Stop selling the bee poisoning neonicotinoids

Scientists studying the massive global bee die-off have unearthed a slew of evidence on the devastation across the food chain caused by the most widely-used pesticide on Earth, neonicotinoids. Once they enter the water supply, neonicotinoids wipe out dragonflies, snails and other waterborne life. The few hardy species that survive are left so toxic that they're killing birds -- and Lowe's and Home Depot are putting this toxic product right in our back yards.

The European Food Safety Authority just imposed a two-year ban on neonicotinoids. It's a bold step taken to avert a new Silent Spring. With up to a third of all honeybees vanishing each winter, beekeepers are saying that we are "on the brink" of not being able to pollinate all our crops.

Lowe's and Home Depot still stock their shelves with neonicotinoid pesticides, spreading the ecosystem-destroying toxin to homes and gardens across the United States. As consumers, we need to demand that these retailers pull the devastating pesticides from the shelves.

Tell Home Depot and Lowe’s to stop stocking neonicotinoids. 

Bayer and other pesticide manufacturers are shoveling cash at lobbyists in order to continue selling their poisonous products. But we're not here to protect corporate profits, we're here to protect our ecosystem to ensure our future. The first thing we need to do is take this devastating toxin out of our own neighborhoods.

One of the reasons these pesticides are so toxic is that they don't simply coat the surface -- neonicotinoids are absorbed into the plant itself. Honeybees that stop by later to pollinate the crops quickly accrue a lethal dose in their systems as they wander from flower to flower. The neurotoxin scrambles their system of navigation and other critical parts of the bee's brains. Even when it doesn't kill the bees outright, neonicotinoids alter immune system function in bees, making them more vulnerable to parasitic infections that are spreading through bee populations like wildfire.

Major retailers don't care what type of pesticides they sell, only what type of pesticides their customers will buy. If we send Lowe's and Home Depot, the nation's two largest home-and-garden superstores, a loud, clear message, we can get these toxic products off their shelves and out of our back yards -- and get smaller retailers around the country to follow suit.

Tell Home Depot and Lowe’s to get rid of the bee-killing neonicotinoids. 

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"Mass loss of Greenland's glaciers and ice caps 2003–2008 revealed from ICESat laser altimetry data," by T. Bolch et al., GRL 40 (2013); doi:10.1002/grl.50270

Geophysical Research Letters, 40(5) (16 March 2013) 875-881; doi:10.1002/grl.50270

Mass loss of Greenland's glaciers and ice caps 2003–2008 revealed from ICESat laser altimetry data

1. T. Bolch^1,2,*, 
2. L. Sandberg Sørensen³, 
3. S. B. Simonsen^4,5, 
4. N. Mölg¹, 
5. H. Machguth^1,6, 
6. P. Rastner¹, and 
7. F. Paul¹

Abstract

The recently finalized inventory of Greenland's glaciers and ice caps (GIC) allows for the first time to determine the mass changes of the GIC separately from the ice sheet using space-borne laser altimetry data. Corrections for firn compaction and density that are based on climatic conditions are applied for the conversion from volume to mass changes. The GIC which are clearly separable from the icesheet (i.e., have a distinct ice divide or no connection) lost 27.9 ± 10.7 Gt a⁻¹ or 0.08 ± 0.03 mm a⁻¹ sea-level equivalent (SLE) between October 2003 and March 2008. All GIC (including those with strong but hydrologically separable connections) lost 40.9 ± 16.5 Gt a⁻¹ (0.12 ± 0.05 mm a⁻¹ SLE). This is a significant fraction (~14 or 20%) of the reported overall mass loss of Greenland and up to 10% of the estimated contribution from the world's GIC to sea level rise. The loss was highest in southeastern and lowest in northern Greenland.

http://0-onlinelibrary.wiley.com.library.hct.ac.ae/doi/10.1002/grl.50270/abstract

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"Contrail ice particles in aircraft wakes and their climatic importance," by Ulrich Schumann et al., GRL (2013); doi:10.1002/grl.50539

Geophysical Research Letters, in press; doi:10.1002/grl.50539

Contrail ice particles in aircraft wakes and their climatic importance

1. Ulrich Schumann^1,*, 
2. Philipp Jeßberger¹, and 
3. Christiane Voigt^1,2

Abstract

Measurements of gaseous (NO, NO_y, SO₂, HONO) and ice particle concentrations in young contrails in primary and secondary wakes of aircraft of different sizes (B737, A319, A340, A380) are used to investigate ice particle formation behind aircraft. The gas concentrations are largest in the primary wake and decrease with increasing altitude in the secondary wake, as expected for passive trace gases and aircraft-dependent dilution. In contrast, the measured ice particle concentrations were found larger in the secondary wake than in the primary wake. The contrails contain more ice particles than expected for previous black carbon (soot) estimates. The ice concentrations may result from soot induced ice nucleation for a soot number emission index of 10¹⁵ kg^-1. For a doubled ice particle concentration in young contrails, a contrail cirrus model computes about 60% increases of global radiative forcing by contrail cirrus because of simultaneous increases in optical depth, age and cover.

http://0-onlinelibrary.wiley.com.library.hct.ac.ae/doi/10.1002/grl.50539/abstract

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"Detecting human influence on extreme temperatures in China," by Qiuzi Han Wen et al., GRL (2013); doi:10.1002/grl.50285

Geophysical Research Letters, 40(6) (28 March 2013) 1171-1176; doi:10.1002/grl.50285

Detecting human influence on extreme temperatures in China

1. Qiuzi Han Wen^1,*, 
2. Xuebin Zhang², 
3. Ying Xu³, and 
4. Bin Wang¹

Abstract

This study compares observed and model-simulated spatiotemporal patterns of changes in Chinese extreme temperatures during 1961–2007 using an optimal detection method. Four extreme indices, namely annual maximum daily maximum (TXx) and daily minimum (TNx) temperatures and annual minimum daily maximum (TXn) and daily minimum (TNn) temperatures, are studied. Model simulations are conducted with the CanESM2, which include six 5-member ensembles under different historical forcings, i.e., four individual external forcings (greenhouse gases, anthropogenic aerosol, land use change, and solar irradiance), combined effect of natural forcings (solar irradiance and volcanic activity), and combined effect of all external forcings (both natural and anthropogenic forcings). We find that anthropogenic influence is clearly detectable in extreme temperatures over China. Additionally, anthropogenic forcing can also be separated from natural forcing in two-signal analyses. The influence of natural forcings cannot be detected in any analysis. Moreover, there are indications that the effects of greenhouse gases and/or land use change may be separated from other anthropogenic forcings in warm extremes TXx and TNx in joint two-signal analyses. These results suggest that further investigations of roles of individual anthropogenic forcing are justified, particularly in studies of extremely warm temperatures over China.

http://0-onlinelibrary.wiley.com.library.hct.ac.ae/doi/10.1002/grl.50285/abstract

Open-access pdf file:  http://0-onlinelibrary.wiley.com.library.hct.ac.ae/doi/10.1002/grl.50285/pdf

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"The impact of radiosonde data over the ice-free Arctic Ocean on the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere," by Jun Inoue et al., GRL 40 (2013); doi:10.1002/grl.50207

Geophysical Research Letters, 40(5) (16 March 2013) 864-869; doi:10.1002/grl.50207

The impact of radiosonde data over the ice-free Arctic Ocean on the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere

1. Jun Inoue^1,2,3,*, 
2. Takeshi Enomoto^1,4 and 
3. Masatake E. Hori^1,2

Abstract

We investigated the impact of radiosonde data from the ice-free Arctic Ocean obtained by the Japanese R/V Mirai during a cruise in the fall of 2010 on the AFES-LETKF experimental ensemble reanalysis version 2 (ALERA2) data set. The reanalysis used radiosonde data over the ice-free region. Compared with observations, it captured Arctic cyclogenesis along the marginal ice zone, including a tropopause fold, very well. Without the observations, a 5 K cold bias in air temperature was found, suggesting that radiosondes over the Arctic Ocean are vital for reproducing the change in tropopause variability. As a consequence of including the Arctic radiosondes, a tropopause height difference formed and persisted after cyclogenesis, increasing the subpolar jet in ALERA2 by 3% at 65–70° N. The air temperature in the whole troposphere north of 70° N showed a cooling in the 2 weeks after cyclogenesis, whereas a warming was observed in the lower stratosphere, reflecting the regional impact of the intensive radiosonde observations. A remote response of the radiosondes over the Arctic Ocean to the midlatitudes was discussed by focusing on the density of observing network and seasonal march of atmospheric circulations. Our results demonstrated that the high-temporal radiosonde observations over the Arctic Ocean can help reduce uncertainty in reanalyses and numerical weather predictions throughout the northern half of the Northern Hemisphere for weeks afterwards.

http://0-onlinelibrary.wiley.com.library.hct.ac.ae/doi/10.1002/grl.50207/abstract

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