Edglings

by Todd Gregory, cross-posted from Media Matters

The Muppets. SpongeBob SquarePants. Dr. Seuss. Beloved icons of childhood entertainment in America, or subtle forms of anti-business indoctrination that brainwash your kids into hating capitalism?

Thank goodness we have Fox to ask these questions.

Lou Dobbs sounded the alarm again tonight on his Fox Business show:

DOBBS: Now, an “Unmentionable” — a story you won’t hear anywhere in the liberal national media, or nearly all of the national liberal media. Hollywood is once again trying to indoctrinate our children. Two new films out this year, plainly with an agenda, plainly demonizing the so-called “1 percent” and espousing the virtue of green-energy policies, come what may.

The first, Dobbs said, is an animated film called The Secret World of Arrietty, and the second is Universal Pictures’ computer-animated version of the 1971 Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax.

The graphic that aired during a clip of the movie declared, ” ‘Lorax’ Movie Pushes Anti-Industry Message”:

Dobbs found the message of these two movies reminiscent of President Obama’s recent speeches on taxes. For support, he played clips of Obama, complete with an “Indoctrinating Our Children” graphic:

Dobbs then said, “The president’s liberal friends in Hollywood [are] targeting a younger demographic using animated movies to sell their agenda to children.”

As Dobbs asked his panel about “this sort of insidious nonsense from Hollywood,” the graphic read, “Tree-Hugging Dr. Seuss Character Featured In New Universal Movie”:

The position that Fox is ultimately espousing when it whips up this paranoia is that any pro-environment lesson for kids is a form of “indoctrination.” Fox reacts in a different manner when people deliver conservative messages to young people.

This piece was originally published at Media Matters for America.

President Obama should use the strategic petroleum reserve to lower gasoline prices

by Daniel J. Weiss

Americans are rightly concerned about rising oil and gasoline prices. On February 21 oil closed at $106 per barrel, while the average gallon of gas in the United States cost $3.59. Bloomberg reports that prices could continue to rise:

While gas prices tend to rise through the first half of the year, this is the earliest the average price per gallon has breached the $3.50 mark. If this pace continues, the national average should hit $4 a gallon by May, if not sooner.

This is not good news for consumers or for the economy. High oil and gasoline prices slow economic growth and take a real toll on families’ already-strained budgets. They are difficult to lower in the short run because it is very hard to promptly increase oil supplies. Meanwhile, demand for gasoline does not decrease even as prices increase because most people cannot quickly and significantly reduce the amount they drive.

There is one proven tool for temporary reductions in oil and gasoline prices that can forestall reduced economic growth and help middle-class families: selling oil reserves from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

President Barack Obama plans to speak about high oil and gasoline prices today in Florida. He will remind Americans that oil production is up and consumption is down, which means that families are saving money on fewer gasoline purchases even though prices are rising. The payroll tax cut extension will provide an average of $40 more per paycheck and will also help ease some of the strain of higher gasoline prices. It is unlikely the president will announce the sale of reserve oil during the speech, but it remains an option if prices continue to climb.

Why are oil and gasoline prices so high?

Oil and gasoline prices are rising now for a myriad of reasons. Growing demand from China and India has boosted consumption, and Libyan production has yet to return to its prewar level of 1.6 million barrels per day. Pat Garofalo of ThinkProgress reports that the price is going up “despite lowest [U.S.] demand [for oil] since 1997.” He cites Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service, who says that speculators are helping to drive up oil prices:

Much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers. “We’ve seen about $11 billion of speculative money come in on the long side of gas futures,” [Kloza] says. “Each of the last three weeks we’ve seen a record net-long position being taken.”

Another major source of high prices is Iran’s threat to cut off oil exports to Western nations that are pressuring it to abandon its nuclear weapons program. On February 19, for instance, Iran announced that it would stop sales to England and France. Although these two nations buy very little Iranian oil, fear that Iran would stop supplying other, more dependent countries boosted the spot price for oil by $3 per barrel overnight. This was also partly driven by speculators taking advantage of fears about future production cuts. And since the price of oil accounts for nearly 80 percent of the price of a gallon of gas, this cost jump will boost gasoline prices too.

What can we do about high oil and gasoline prices?

There are very few policy measures that can rapidly reduce oil and gasoline prices, but selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to oil companies can help. The reserve was created in 1975 as a hedge against serious oil supply disruptions such as the Arab oil embargo of 1973–1974. It has a capacity of 727 million barrels of oil and is currently 96 percent full with 696 million barrels.

Presidents have the authority to sell reserve oil under the following circumstances described in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act:

Drawdown and sale of petroleum products from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve may not be made unless the President has found drawdown and sale are required by a severe energy supply interruption or by obligations of the United States under the international energy program.

(2) For purposes of this section, in addition to the circumstances set forth in section 3 (8), a severe energy supply interruption shall be deemed to exist if the President determines that -

(A) an emergency situation exists and there is a significant reduction in supply which is of significant scope and duration;

(B) a severe increase in the price of petroleum products has resulted from such emergency situation; and

(C) such price increase is likely to cause a major adverse impact on the national economy.

There have been reserve oil sales under every president since 1991.

• President George H. W. Bush sold reserve oil before the first Iraq war in anticipation of supply disruptions that did not materialize.
• The Republican Congress required two sales of reserve oil in 1996 to reduce the federal budget deficit.
• President George W. Bush sold oil in 2005 after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita disrupted production in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Last year President Barack Obama sold 30 million barrels of reserve oil to offset the disruption of Libyan oil production during its civil war. Our partners in International Energy Agency, or IEA, nations sold 30 million barrels of their reserve oil, as well. (The IEA is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to responding to physical disruptions in the supply of oil, as well as serving as an information source on statistics about the international oil market and other energy sectors.)

Reserve oil sales reduce oil and gasoline prices. (see chart below) For instance, last year the administration announced its sale of SPR oil on June 23 with completion on September 30. The IEA sale occurred during this time too. From the time of the announcement to the time of final sale, the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil dropped by 17 percent, while the price of gasoline fell by 6 percent. Such a decline would reduce $4 per gallon gasoline to $3.76 per gallon.

There is also a legitimate concern about adequate oil reserves in case of a severe Iranian supply disruption, but we have ample supplies in the SPR to withstand it. Iran exports 2.2 million barrels of oil per day worldwide, and none of it comes to the United States. The United States could replace these Iranian exports to other nations for 60 days, and our reserves would still be 80 percent full. And after completely offsetting a 180-day disruption in Iranian oil supplies, the SPR would still be 40 percent full.

Iran has also threatened to cut off the Strait of Hormuz through which 17 million barrels of oil travel every day. This is about one-fifth of worldwide consumption. There is enough oil in the SPR that the United States could replace this oil for three weeks, and its reserves would still be half full. The bigger challenge in that scenario is that the SPR can release no more than 4.4 million barrels per day.

Conservative proposals won’t help

In response to rising oil and gasoline prices, conservatives will trot out a number of tired measures that could benefit Big Oil but won’t provide relief to consumers such as:

• Approve the Keystone XL pipeline to bring dirty oil sands from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. Time magazine concluded that, “Keystone would have little immediate [price] effect.”
• Expand offshore oil drilling into currently protected areas along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, though it will take up to seven years to produce any additional oil. The Energy Information Administration found that this would have little impact on prices or supply.
• Drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, even though it would take 10 years to produce any oil.
• Suspend the 18-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax, which would reduce funds for badly needed highway repair and transit projects. This would also cost jobs.
• Waive the summer pollution reduction requirements for gasoline in metropolitan areas with severe smog problems. This would reduce gasoline costs by only a few cents per gallon but would increase smog that harms children, seniors, and others.

Obama adopted long-term measures to reduce oil and gasoline costs

President Obama has overseen a growth in oil supply and a reduction in demand—both of which can reduce prices. Since 2009 there has been a significant increase in U.S. oil production. It now produces a majority of its oil for the first time in 15 years. The Houston Chronicle reports that:

The number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quadrupled in the past three years to 1,272… Including those in natural gas fields, the United States now has more rigs at work than the entire rest of the world.

This domestic production improved our energy security and reduced the amount of money we send overseas for foreign oil. But the aforementioned factors have kept prices high.

As significantly, the president modernized fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles for the first time in more than two decades. By 2025 cars and light trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas and will save more than 2 million barrels of oil per day. The improved standards will also save drivers $8,200 in lower gasoline purchases over the life of their vehicle compared to 2010 standards.

High gasoline prices impose real costs on middle- and low-income Americans. President Obama’s plans to increase oil production while improving fuel economy for vehicles will provide real relief. For immediate relief from high gasoline expenses, however, history shows that selling a small amount of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will lower prices.

Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress. This piece was originally published at the Center for American Progress website.

The EPA can’t be used as a scapegoat for plant closures that have been informed by many different economic drivers.

by Dan Bakal, reposted from Ceres

When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its Mercury and Air Toxics Rule (MATS) in December, a handful of utility companies that rely heavily on coal-fired power plants claimed the rule would lead to power plant retirements.  Yesterday’s publication of the final rule in the Federal Register has set off a new round of criticism as the clock starts ticking on any last-minute legal or legislative actions to undermine the rule.

Take, for instance, FirstEnergy’s recent announcements that it will retire nine of its older coal-fired power plants by September 1, 2012.  In its statements, FirstEnergy blamed the EPA’s Mercury rule for forcing the retirements. Not only is the company blaming the EPA for the retirements, it is also placing potential layoffs and grid reliability issues at the EPA’s door. This decision poses an important question:  if these retirements are because of the EPA rule, why is FirstEnergy retiring the nine plants which are located in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland in 2012, rather than waiting until 2014, when these older plants would actually have to come into compliance?

In their news release, FirstEnergy states:

“We recently completed a comprehensive review of our coal-fired generating plants and determined that additional investments to implement MATS and other environmental rules would make these older plants even less likely to be dispatched under market rules. As a result, it was necessary to retire the plants rather than continue operations.”

Upon closer inspection, however, it’s fairly easy to see that this decision wasn’t based primarily on EPA rules; it was based on current economics, including the following:

• These Eisenhower-era plants are on average 58 years old and have rarely been used since 2010. (They have an average capacity factor of 36.5%.)
• A slower economy, energy-efficiency programs and mild weather have reduced demand for power.
• Today’s historically low natural gas prices, which are not expected to increase much any time soon, mean it is more expensive to produce power using coal-fired plants than natural gas plants. (The process of converting a coal plant to natural gas is complex, but is also a project that is fully achievable within the EPA’s timelines.)

So when a plant is already over half a century old, underutilized and inefficient during those occasions when it is used – it probably makes better business sense to retire it rather than making the investments to convert it to natural gas or retrofit it with pollution controls to comply with EPA clean air rules.  Sure, the MATS rule may have played some role in the decision-making process, but these plants were on a clear path toward retirement in the near future.

In contrast, my previous blog post discussed a report that details positive statements made by 30 power companies indicating that early investments in their power plants have put them in a good position to comply with EPA’s new air pollution rules.

The report notes that these companies represent 50% of the nation’s coal-fired power plants, and eleven of the 15 largest coal-based electric power companies. Across the fleet, about 50% of coal plants are very well controlled with scrubbers and other pollution control systems.  So, let’s do the math:

• 70% of the nation’s electric generating facilities are not affected by EPA’s MATS rule because they rely on natural gas, nuclear, or other non-emitting energy sources.
• 15% of the nation’s electric generating facilities are coal plants that are already complying or well on their way to comply with the MATS rule.
• This means that 85% of the nation’s electric generating fleet is unaffected by the rule or ready to comply.

The fact is that coal-fired electricity imposes significant costs on society and these costs need to be incorporated into the cost of doing business. This is precisely what the EPA rule aims to accomplish.

With yesterday’s inclusion of the EPA’s final MATS rule in the Federal Register, we are close to the culmination of a rule that has been anticipated for decades. Petitioners have already begun to file suit against the law, and members of Congress have threatened to force a vote under the Congressional Review Act that would vacate or delay the rule.

But these stall tactics don’t change the basic facts: those companies that have anticipated and prepared for the rules are ready to comply with the rules in a timely fashion.  Those companies that instead choose to close older plants, are evaluating a host of factors, and ought not to use EPA as a scapegoat for decisions that have been informed by many different economic drivers.

A recent analysis by Susan F. Tierney, Why Coal Plants Retire:  Power Market Fundamentals as of 2012, takes a closer look at these market drivers.  Tierney, managing principal of the Analysis Group, is a power industry expert who has conducted numerous studies on electricity reliability.  I’ve put Tierney’s white paper on the top of my weekend reading pile and look forward to having more to say about her findings in my next post.

Dan Bakal is director of Ceres’ Electric Power Program. This piece was originally published at Ceres.

Marking the one-year anniversary of the Solyndra investigation, the Republican National Committee released an infographic on President Obama’s supposed “insider deals.”

But after 187,000 documents, 10 hearings, and multiple independent media investigations concluding there was no evidence of political “pressure” to approve the loan guarantee, Republicans show no signs of ending the political games around Solyndra. In response to the RNC, Climate Progress created its own infographic that puts the politics-infused investigation into perspective:

And if you hadn’t seen it, here’s the RNC’s version:

Related Post:

• It’s the One-Year Anniversary of House Solyndra Investigation, But the Traditional Gift of Paper Seems Superfluous

Other stories below: Global warming means tough choices for West Virginia; Judge’s Ruling Complicates Hydrofracking Issue in New York

Chinese Tier-2 Modules Offered Below $1/W

Prices for crystalline-silicon (c-Si) solar photovoltaic (PV) modules fell below the $1/W mark in January 2012, and in some cases well below even that, marking the first time that global average prices have fallen below this milestone, according to IMS Research.

Economist: Global Warming Means Tough Choices for WV

A hotter planet, an economist visiting West Virginia said, is just something that will be a part of the lives of young people today.

“The reality is, especially for young people in their 20s or 30s, a hotter planet is just going to be a defining feature of their world,” said Eban Goodstein, director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, who spoke Feb. 22 as part of the ongoing “Energy: Who’s Got the Power” speaker series at the University of Charleston. “That means more floods, more droughts and there is going to be a lot of pressure on the coal industry as a consequence.”

That could be bad news for a state accustomed to raking in profits from the very resource — coal — that is catching a lot of the blame for global warming.

“Despite the politics of the moment the science is clear — that’s what’s causing the problem. That and gasoline,” Goodstein said just before speaking at the University of Charleston event. “So, I think folks in West Virginia have just got to sort of accept those facts. You can obviously fight them for a while, but they’re going to catch up with you, and find a new way forward.”

Another Executive to Face Charges in Mine Disaster

A U.S. attorney charged a former Massey Energy Co. mine superintendent Wednesday with conspiring to obstruct federal regulators before a 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners, in a move that signaled a widening criminal investigation.

Booth Goodwin, the U.S. attorney in Charleston, W.Va., charged Gary May, 43 years old, a former superintendent at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., with violating federal mine laws to conceal safety hazards and prevent inspectors from slowing coal production.

Judge’s Ruling Complicates Hydrofracking Issue in New York

A state judge’s decision this week supporting the rights of individual towns to determine whether to allow hydraulic fracturing has added a new wrinkle to the fight over the natural gas drilling process in New York.

Parties on all sides are trying to figure out what the ruling will mean, but a consensus emerged on Wednesday that there will be further court challenges and delays over when, how and where the process, known as hydrofracking, will be allowed in the state, and by whom.

Officials of natural gas companies voiced concern that such local restrictions could render more areas of the Marcellus Shale off-limits to drillers in a state that is already proposing strict regulation of where the industry will be allowed to operate.

Rahm Emanuel: Chicago Coal Plants Must Clean Up, Activists Call for their Closure

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has put Chicago’s two coal power plants on warning: Either present a plan to clean up their pollution or risk being shut down by the city within the next two years.

Various politicians, community groups and others have been pushing for more than a year to shut down the Crawford and Fisk plants — owned and operated by Midwest Generation — because they say the plants come with serious health consequences for the Little Village and Pilsen communities located nearby them.

As the Associated Press reports, Alderman Danny Solis (25th) and Dr. Ravi Shah of the Doctor’s Council of the Service Employees International Union of Illinois on Wednesday are among those who have spoken out against the plants. According to Shah, the coal-fired power plants such as theirs are the largest generators of the greenhouse gases associated with respiratory problems.

Trade Battles Buffet Europe’s Green Efforts

During the past decade, the European Union blazed a green trail with a series of laws mandating a low-carbon economy and promises to set an example for other parts of the world.

That now seems like another era.

A succession of economic crises has pushed European governments to pare subsidies to clean-energy sectors like solar power and has undermined initiatives in other areas like energy efficiency, where member states balked at binding targets.

The E.U. Emissions Trading System — the Union’s flagship climate policy, which requires industries to acquire emissions permits — has been battered by extreme volatility, tax fraud, recycling of used credits, suspicions of profiteering and online attacks.

A Harsh Winter for China’s Wind Industry and Its Leading Company: Sinovel

The Year of the Dragon has gotten off to an inauspicious start for the Chinese wind industry and in particular, Sinovel Wind Group Co. (Sinovel), China’s leading wind turbine manufacturer.

NY Times Andrew Revkin Walks Back Some of His “Overstated” phrases about Peter Gleick — Or Does He?

The media loves he-said, she-said stories. Those have the most narrative drama and require the least amount of actual judgment on the part of reporters or editors. Just relate the core facts and then slap some opposing quotes and you are done!

And so we have the Washington Post‘s story on the Heartland affair, “Climate scientist admits duping skeptic group to obtain documents.”

Of course the piece had to quote Heartland Institute President Joseph L. Bast. But recall that several leading climate scientists slammed Heartland last week for “spreading misinformation” and “personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals.” Bast himself told Climate Progress last year, the “ecological impact” of mining and burning fossil fuels is “not negative”!  And remember his 2006 quote on second-hand smoking that “no victim of cancer, heart disease, etc. can ‘prove’ his or her cancer or heart disease was caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.”

Surely one representative of the misinformers is more than enough in any serious news article on climate. But no, the WashPost actually quotes the long-debunked Richard Lindzen to close its piece — please, put your head vises on for this one:

Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has questioned whether climate change will cause effects as severe as some predict, said he has been struck by “the viciousness” of his opponents. But Lindzen feels obligated to keep questioning what Gleick and others say about climate change impact “because they’re lies, it’s that simple. What would you do if people were truly misrepresenting things, and it has consequences for society?”

The WashPost quotes Lindzen attacking others for telling lies and misrepresenting things?  Here are RealClimate scientists debunking a “series of strawman arguments, red-herrings and out and out errors” by Lindzen. Then we have climatologist Kevin Trenberth explaining that the flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got”.  Here is The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder debunking Lindzen, “Global warming denialists have been re-discredited”

How could the Washington Post run those head-exploding quotes from Lindzen?

But they are sober stuff compared to Lindzen’s crocodile tears about how he’s been “struck by ‘the viciousness’ of his opponents?” Last year, he smeared his one-time close friend climatologist Kerry Emanuel:

Emanuel “would tell me that he really felt that it would be a mistake not to take advantage of the issue … there is funding … it could benefit the department,” Lindzen said in an interview. “I always took a more moralistic view. There has to be a foundation.”

Lindzen is the last guy any serious newspaper should be quoting on this subject — for Emanuel’s response to this “pure fabrication” by Lindzen, as he called it, see here.

In addition to two misinformers, the Post led the piece off with a confusionist:

“My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved,” Gleick wrote in a post on his Huffington Post blog.

Gleick’s admission “is the latest in an escalating spiral of polarizing warfare between self-described ‘Climate Hawks’ and so-called Climate Deniers,” which leaves the majority of scientists and the public “caught in the crossfire,” American University professor Matthew C. Nisbet, who studies the issues, wrote in a blog entry.

[Pause to clean up grey matter because your head vise wasn’t strong enough.]

You can see Nisbet’s biases in his word choice.  Climate Hawks are supposedly “self-described” whereas Deniers are “so-called.” This is just a subtle restatement of false balance. In fact, many deniers are ”self-described” (see here). Lindzen himself is!

“I actually like ‘denier.’ That’s closer than skeptic,” says MIT’s Richard Lindzen.

And I don’t know of any climate scientists who describe themselves as “Climate Hawks.”

Nisbet is someone who spends far more time criticizing climate science advocates than he does deniers. That’s his right, but the WashPost shouldn’t be quoting him as if he were some unbiased honest broker. Indeed he is a widely refuted confusionist — see Leading expert withdraws name fromClimate Shift report, explains how key conclusion that environmentalists weren’t outspent by opponents of climate bill “is contradicted by Nisbet’s own data.”

In that report, Nisbet tried to blame the polarization on Gore, but as Prof. Robert Brulle explained: “The discussion of Al Gore ignores basic scholarship on the climate denial efforts, and supports an ideological position that is not grounded in an empirical analysis.” Many of the leading social science researchers in this country agree with Brulle’s conclusion, including McCright and Dunlap and Krosnick (see here).

Nisbet has made clear whom he blames for the polarization, despite what the social science literature and polling data say. He downplayed the role of the deniers and false balance in the media, causing Brulle to say, “I think this conclusion is bogus.” He is not the guy to turn to for some independent assessment of “polarizing warfare.”

REVKIN REPLIES

Yesterday, I excerpted part of NYT blogger Andrew Revkin’s piece on Gleick and said he should retract his overstatements about Gleick.

Revkin replied today in a head-exploding way. He wrote:

First, I will not retract the post I wrote on Gleick’s confession, as demanded by climate campaigner Joe Romm in a piece yesterday on Heartland, Gleick and me.

I didn’t demand he retract the whole piece, as anyone can see, just the overstatements about Gleick. Still, face-saving move, I get it.

Then Revkin did in fact retract some of the overstatements:

I will acknowledge that certain phrases, written in haste, were overstated. Gleick’s reputation and credibility are seriously damaged, not necessarily in ruins ordestroyed.

Duh. Awesome. But here’s the amazing part. Revkin didn’t go back into the original post and make the changes. At least as of 7:40 pm EST — 7 hours after the acknowledgment of error — the now-acknowledged overstatements were still there!

Oh well, lesson not learned.

Then Revkin proceeds to rewrite some history about some earlier errors of his.  I pointed out Revkin has made countless mistakes that he has never formally retracted or apologized for [see, for instance, “NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation”].  He writes:

Romm’s claim that my news story on a recent lack of warming was wrong doesn’t acknowledge the sequence of scientific papers since that time….

Uhh, no. My claim his story was wrong was based on my identification of several errors — including a factor of 10 (lowball) mistake in the temperature rise in the past 10 years!

Now here’s the thing. If you check the sentences that I said were wrong or misleading, he went back and changed every single one of them in his online story for the Times — but without indicating that he made the change and without mentioning who had pointed out his errors.

So he can lecture someone else about admitting mistakes.

I critique Big Media so much because they have 10 to 100 times my readership and occasionally they fix their mistakes, even if they have a hard time admitting it.

Bizarrely, Revkin quotes some blogger who can’t count asserting I devoted only 27 words in my post to saying “Gleick was wrong.” But I reprinted Gleick’s entire mea culpa. All told, I devoted nearly 400 words to describing Gleick’s errors and agreeing with Gleick’s assessment that he committed a serious lapse of my professional judgment and ethics.

But again, I was quite confident that Big Media would overhype that part of the story. My aim is to put some perspective into the issue and criticize those who have the credibility and audience of Big Media. In this case, Revkin walked back some of his statements, sort of, so I stand by my post.

Finally, Revkin ends his piece this way:

I’m not proud of any errors, but I do make them. It’s enormously creditable that Peter Gleick has owned up to his terrible error in judgment.

The only people I see out there in the climate fight who – as far as I can tell — never admit to an error are people with agendas from which they can never stray. They’re perfect.

Obviously only the deniers — the rejectionists — never change their views as the facts change and never admit they were wrong.

I suppose Revkin wants folks to think he is talking about a certain climate blogger, but as a scientist who has written literally millions of words on this subject in the past few years, it would be impossible not to make mistakes and I admit them regularly — see, for instance, ironically enough, my post about whether you should cancel your subscription to the New York Times.

Aside from the errors common to all bloggers, I’d add that I have made two big errors in my two decades working on this issue. I have consistently underestimated the timing and speed of climate impacts and the level of greenhouse gas emissions that would likely cause catastrophic warming. In the 1990s, I was actually a 550 ppm guy! Now I’m a 450 ppm guy and I still may be too high! There’s also a mistake I’ve made in my approach to blogging that I’ve worked to fix in the last year or two. But I think I will leave that for a separate post.

NOTE: ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself to be Gleick. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the 2012 Climate Strategy document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

See also “CAPAF General Counsel Responds To Heartland Institute.”

Fox shows yet again it has a hard time with hard data

by Shauna Theel, cross-posted from Media Matters

In a segment falsely blaming Obama for rising gasoline prices, Fox News’ America’s Newsroom aired the following chart yesterday. It shows three data points — including the vague “last year” — plotted nonsensically on the x-axis:

“Last year” refers to gas prices last February; Fox’s chart omitted what happened in the 13 months between February 2011 and last week. Here’s how Fox’s source, AAA, displays the data (green line):

This piece was originally published at Media Matters for America.

EIA figures show the massive boom in China’s coal consumption through 2010. Coal use increased another 9.7% in 2011

Energy consumption figures just released by the Chinese government underscore that coal use is booming at a record pace in China.  And China was already the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

In 2011, China’s coal consumption increased by 9.7%, the most year-over-year growth seen since 2005. The country also saw a substantial increase in natural gas consumption, which climbed by 12% in 2011. The figures, released this week by the National Bureau of Statistics, show just how much work needs to be done in order to de-carbonize China’s rapidly growing energy system.

There are a few positive trends to report, however. Overall energy consumption per unit of GDP declined another 2% — continuing the 19.1% decline in energy intensity since 2005. In addition, solar installations increased by an astonishing 547% and wind installations grew by 48% last year.

Non-fossil fuels — solar PV, solar thermal, wind, and hydro — now account for 9.4% of China’s primary energy consumption. Officials expect renewables to make up roughly 11.4% of consumption by 2015 and energy intensity to decrease another 16% by 2015. China is also in the process of rolling out provincial greenhouse gas trading programs in an attempt to decrease emissions 45% by 2020 compared to 2005 levels.

These developments are promising, but they still don’t stop China’s rapid growth in emissions. Assuming a business-as-usual approach to energy development, the International Energy Agency projects that by the mid-2020s, China’s emissions will double those in the United States.

Related stories:

• The Deniers’ Fantasy World: EIA Projects 40% Rise in CO2 Emissions by 2035
• Interactive Graphic: China’s Explosive Consumption of Coal

Global Ice Loss from 2003-2010 Could “Cover the Entire United States in One and Half Feet of Water”

Changes in ice thickness (in centimeters per year) during 2003-2010 as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, averaged over each of the world’s ice caps and glacier systems outside of Greenland and Antarctica. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Colorado

This piece was reposted from the NASA website

In the first comprehensive satellite study of its kind, a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team used NASA data to calculate how much Earth’s melting land ice is adding to global sea level rise.

Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), the researchers measured ice loss in all of Earth’s land ice between 2003 and 2010, with particular emphasis on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.

The total global ice mass lost from Greenland, Antarctica and Earth’s glaciers and ice caps during the study period was about 4.3 trillion tons (1,000 cubic miles), adding about 0.5 inches (12 millimeters) to global sea level. That’s enough ice to cover the United States 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) deep.

“Earth is losing a huge amount of ice to the ocean annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change,” said University of Colorado Boulder physics professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study. “The strength of GRACE is it sees all the mass in the system, even though its resolution is not high enough to allow us to determine separate contributions from each individual glacier.”

About a quarter of the average annual ice loss came from glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica (roughly 148 billion tons, or 39 cubic miles). Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica and their peripheral ice caps and glaciers averaged 385 billion tons (100 cubic miles) a year. Results of the study will be published online Feb. 8 in the journal Nature.

Traditional estimates of Earth’s ice caps and glaciers have been made using ground measurements from relatively few glaciers to infer what all the world’s unmonitored glaciers were doing. Only a few hundred of the roughly 200,000 glaciers worldwide have been monitored for longer than a decade.

One unexpected study result from GRACE was that the estimated ice loss from high Asian mountain ranges like the Himalaya, the Pamir and the Tien Shan was only about 4 billion tons of ice annually. Some previous ground-based estimates of ice loss in these high Asian mountains have ranged up to 50 billion tons annually.

“The GRACE results in this region really were a surprise,” said Wahr, who is also a fellow at the University of Colorado-headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and extrapolated to infer the behavior of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, most of the high glaciers are located in very cold environments and require greater amounts of atmospheric warming before local temperatures rise enough to cause significant melting. This makes it difficult to use low-elevation, ground-based measurements to estimate results from the entire system.”

“This study finds that the world’s small glaciers and ice caps in places like Alaska, South America and the Himalayas contribute about 0.02 inches per year to sea level rise,” said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “While this is lower than previous estimates, it confirms that ice is being lost from around the globe, with just a few areas in precarious balance. The results sharpen our view of land-ice melting, which poses the biggest, most threatening factor in future sea level rise.”

The twin GRACE satellites track changes in Earth’s gravity field by noting minute changes in gravitational pull caused by regional variations in Earth’s mass, which for periods of months to years is typically because of movements of water on Earth’s surface. It does this by measuring changes in the distance between its two identical spacecraft to one-hundredth the width of a human hair.

– a NASA repost

Joe Romm:  As I noted earlier, I checked with JPL’s Eric Rignot, who called the study “a solid confirmation” of his 2011 paper:  “JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050.”

On February 19, the Heartland Institute’s General Counsel, Maureen Martin, sent a letter by e-mail and post addressed to Think Progress in response to revelations about the Institute. Yesterday, Debbie Fine, General Counsel for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, replied to Martin.

The letter sent to the Heartland Institute is well worth reading and reprinted in full here:

Dear Ms. Martin:

I am General Counsel of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (“CAP Action”). This letter responds to your February 19 message regarding our reporters’ coverage of documents related to the Heartland Institute. Please be assured that CAP Action takes the accuracy of its reporting seriously.

Your letter asserts that the document entitled “2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” is “fabricated and false.” CAP Action has no interest in attributing a fabricated document to Heartland. Given the seriousness of this charge, and the fact that this document’s “tone and content closely matched that of other documents that [Heartland] did not dispute,”¹ we ask your assistance in verifying that the document is in fact “fabricated” rather than, for example, a draft of which you were not immediately aware. Please let me know the efforts that Heartland undertook to ensure that the document “was not written by anyone associated with Heartland,” as well as the “obvious and gross misstatements of fact” it contains. We have removed this document from the website while awaiting your response.

Your letter also notes that “Heartland has not authenticated” the remaining documents in the week since they were made public. To my knowledge, Heartland has never claimed that these documents were fabricated, and your February 15 admission that they were sent by a Heartland staff person to “an unknown person” posing as a Heartland board member suggests they are genuine. So does Heartland’s February 15 apology to the donors identified in the documents. Subsequently, the newly-admitted source has indicated that he received these documents directly from Heartland and has not altered them. Nevertheless, we await the outcome of your continued efforts to “authenticate” these documents.

Finally, your letter suggests that publication or even discussion of the Heartland documents “is improper and unlawful” because Heartland deems them “confidential.” The Supreme Court has flatly rejected this notion, repeatedly declaring that the First Amendment protects the right to publish information obtained lawfully – even if underlying sources act improperly, erroneously, or in violation of the law. See, e.g., Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514, 535 (2001). As CAP Action has reported, our bloggers received the documents via an anonymous email. Our reporters did nothing to purloin any documents, they did not encourage anyone else to do so, and they did not know the sender’s identity until many days later, on February 20, when the Huffington Post article titled: “The Origin of the Heartland Documents” was published. Faced with a substantially similar set of relevant facts in Bartnicki, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited recovery of damages for dissemination of an illegally-made recording that was left in a defendant’s mailbox because “a stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern.” Id.; see also Jean v. Massachusetts State Police, 492 F.3d 24, 29 (1st Cir. 2007) (applying Bartnicki). The same is true here, although we note that CAP Action takes no position as to whether the documents were lawfully obtained by the source.

CAP Action has taken extraordinary steps to ensure that Heartland’s perspective on these documents is included in our coverage. As your letter notes, CAP Action immediately and conspicuously linked to Heartland’s February 15 press release regarding the documents and has subsequently noted Heartland’s assertions in other blog posts in order to ensure that your position on these documents was reported fully and fairly. If you would like to provide us with additional information, including answers to the questions above, we will certainly consider it.

This is not a full recitation of the relevant facts and CAP Action reserves all its rights, remedies and defenses concerning these issues.

Sincerely,

Debbie Fine

General Counsel

¹ Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman, Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science, N.Y. Times, February 16, 2012, at A23.

Download the CAPAF response letter to the Heartland Institute.