Over at 80beats, we offered a breakdown of this week’s biofuels controversy. To summarize: The Guardian got hold of a “secret” “internal” report from the World Bank stating that biofuels had forced global food prices up by 75 percent—a sharp contrast to U.S. government’s claim that the plant-derived fuels were responsible for less than 3 percent of recent price increases.
But it wasn’t the whole story: The Wall Street Journal‘s Environmental Capital blog revealed that the reports of “damning unpublished assessment” declaring the evils of biofuels was somewhat overblown, and the “secret report” was neither secret nor a report, but rather an internal working paper.
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Popsci.com’s Dawn Stover offers an interesting insight into the reasoning behind the Department of Transportation’s modest (to put it mildly) CAFE standards put forth in April: They were based on a mistake.
Apparently an environmental impact report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which analyzed the costs and benefits of raising fuel efficiency standards, had relied on a “high-case” gas price estimate of $3.37 per gallon in 2011-2015, with a “low-case” scenario of $2.04 per gallon. Using these clearly erroneous numbers, the government proposed standards that would increase average passenger car and truck efficiency by a mere 4.5 percent per year from 2011 to 2015—meaning a total jump from the current 27.5 mpg to 35.7 mpg in seven years, an increase that won’t bring much comfort to anyone emptying their savings to pay today’s fuel prices.
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Over at Salon, climate expert Joseph Romm has a poignant update on the Senate’s most recent bout with global warming denial. The setting was a debate over the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, intended to regulate CO2 by setting emissions caps and creating a trading system for carbon allowances. Among the highlights he describes:
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.: “The vast majority of scientists do not believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are a major contributor to climate change.”
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.: This bill means “people must turn off air-conditioning in the summer.”
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.: “This bill will attack citizens at the pump” and “increase job losses.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.: This bill will “leave us less competitive in the world marketplace.”
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.: This bill “could bankrupt U.S. air carriers.”
Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo.: “Nobody in their right mind” believes we can get half our power from wind and solar or drive a “fleet of golf carts.”
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo.: “It’s unclear as to what the long-range trend is as far as the temperature of the Earth is concerned.”
His point is as troubling as it is well-made: Conservatives have a powerful political edge in the climate change debate, and they’re pulling it out at every opportunity.
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Climbing fuel costs have likely been sweet music to climate activists’ ears. But one unexpected downside of the hefty prices is that ocean researchers who study climate change can’t afford to make their trips.
The federal government is scrapping at least four trips for The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and slashing the number of days at sea for research vessels—in 2000, the number was 5,000 days, and it’s now at 4,000 and dropping.
Those given the ax include a cruise to measure the effects of factors like hurricanes, disease, and climate change on marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico. In Alaska, a salmon survey in the Bering Sea and a North Pacific marine ecosystem study have both been tossed.
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The residents of Florida and the U.K., though alike in their proximity to a whole lot of seawater, don’t appear to have much in common when it comes to views on global warming. In a recent poll of 1,039 adults in the U.K., six out of 10 of the respondents reportedly agreed with the statement “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change,” while four out of 10 sometimes thought that “climate change might not be as bad as people say.”
Those who reported the most worry were more likely to have a university degree and “be in social classes A or B,” as The Guardian put it (you’re assigned an actual grade! How handy!).
Less doubt is plaguing the residents of Florida, where concern about climate change is hitting all-time highs. A May survey of 1,077 adults found that 71 percent are convinced that global warming is real, while 55 percent think it’s caused primarily by human activities. A whopping 65 percent believe that global warming has already had or will have dangerous impacts on Floridians in the coming decade, while 69 percent think that parts of the state’s coasts may need to be abandoned within 50 years.
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Earlier this month, Senate Republicans blocked a proposal to tax the windfall profits of the five largest U.S. oil companies. The GOP’s filibuster of the bill, which would have rescinded $18 billion in tax breaks for oil companies, not only lessened the chances of Big Oil footing some of the bill for record high gas prices, it also meant the likely death of tax breaks for another cause: growth and development of wind, solar, and other alternative energy sources.
Existing tax breaks have been crucial for alternative energy providers, allowing them to raise the capital they need for growth. But while most members of Congress express continued support for the tax breaks, and even take occasional action to safeguard them—the Senate voted overwhelmingly in April to give the breaks a one-year extension—they’ll nonetheless expire by the end of this year. Last week, the breaks lost another battle when Republicans blocked yet another Senate vote, this time on a proposal to raise the $18 billion for alt-energy tax credits by closing a tax loophole for hedge-fund managers.
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Exactly twenty years ago, on June 23, 1988, James E. Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies testified to a Senate committee that he could state with “99 percent confidence” that a recent, persistent rise in global temperature was occurring, and had long been expected. That landmark statement, and the dawn of the global warming discussion, was covered by Andy Revkin, then a DISCOVER senior editor and now an environmental reporter for The New York Times. (More discussion of Hansen’s testimony can be found on Revkin’s blog.) Revkin kindly agreed to take our questions about his piece.
Q: How, if at all, were the 1988 predictions wrong?
A: Not much was really wrong. The range of warming projected—a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations from the preindustrial norm—remains similar today.
The things that were uncertain in 1988 remain uncertain now, including the mix of warming and cooling influences in clouds. As Steve Schneider, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado—who is still a frequent source of mine—put it in 1988:
“Clouds are an important factor about which little is known… When I first started looking at this in 1972, we didn’t know much about the feedback from clouds. We don’t know any more now than we did then.”
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Recently, we covered the disproportionate deluge of cuddly animals that make it onto the endangered list, the most recent example being the polar bear. But while their cuteness might win them a spot on the list, it looks like it may not do much else. According to the AP, the Bush administration has given the go-ahead to oil companies to “annoy and potentially harm” the bears in the pursuit of oil and natural gas. According to the report:
The Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations this week providing legal protection to seven oil companies planning to search for oil and gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska if “small numbers” of polar bears or Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed by their activities over the next five years.
Given that around eight percent of all Arctic polar bears live near the Chukchi Sea, and that the bears are known to be particularly sensitive to changes in their environment (not to mention the presence of humans), this decision does plenty to undermine the protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act.
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Oil hit a walloping $135 a barrel. Sales of SUVs and other gas-guzzlers are plummeting. The number of miles driven by Americans is showing its largest decrease ever recorded, with 11 billion fewer miles driven in March 2008 than in March 2007. Public transportation use is the highest its been in half a century, and gas consumption in the start of 2008 is estimated to be down 0.6 percent from the same months in 2007. All of which should be great news for global warming activists, right?
Not so, says The Wall Street Journal‘s Holman W. Jenkins, who argues that the current high prices will push investors and technology to find ways of producing “vast new resources” of fossil energy in order to capitalize on the public’s willingness to shell out more money. This push, he argues, will only increase the amount of fuel consumed and crank the knob up on emissions—a situation he calls “the worst nightmare of the climate worrywarts.”
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Polar bears have nabbed headlines recently, becoming the first creature to make the endangered species list specifically because of global warming. But as environmental decline tightens the screws on more and more animals, are all species receiving equal aid? Hardly, says Newsweek‘s Sharon Begley, who writes that “[g]etting people to care about the 238 species of spiders, clams, moths, snails, isopods and other invertebrates on the list of endangered species is about as likely as a magazine putting a photo of a dung beetle rather than a polar bear on its cover.”
On the contrary, Begley writes, it’s the “soulful-eyed, warm and fuzzy animals”—gorillas and tigers and (panda) bears, oh my!—that get the press time, and thus the attention and resources from both conservation agencies and the government. But more often than not, those small, less-darling creatures in danger of extinction have a greater impact on the ecosystems they inhabit.
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John McCain has been praised by pundits for pledging to combat global warming—a stark contrast to the cornucopia of indifference, obfuscation, and disbelief that’s fed the Bush years. But according to recent polls, his party members may not be so convinced that we’re indeed careening straight into a global crisis.
A recent Gallup poll found that the number of Republicans who believe that news of global warming is “generally exaggerated” has jumped from 34 percent in 1997 to 59 in 2008. The number of Democratic skeptics, meanwhile, have fallen from 23 percent in 1997 to 18 percent this year.
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Global Warming
First question: Is it real? Yes, it is. While the deniers have been going strong for years, leading to forehead-slapping patterns of government inaction, it looks like even anti-global warming proponents may finally be coming around. And not a moment too soon, given that those glaciers are still melting, the oceans are still rising, and the land is still warming.
Next question: What are we going to do about it? Thus far, Europe has been looking to the cap-and-trade system, which hasn’t been without its bumps. Despite the troubles it’s had in the U.S. so far, chances are it’ll be adopted here at some point after November.
There’s also the idea of sequestering all that carbon, an option that states like New York—as well as the Big Oil companies—have embraced.
Plus there’s no forgetting methane, the greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Efforts to dampen the most egregious methane emitters have focused on its biggest source: livestock burps. Luckily, there’s research in the works to, er, rectify the problem.
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