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Hillary Clinton Opposes the Keystone Pipeline

by MildredUnwin Posted on September 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton has long declined to take a position on whether or not the Obama administration should approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline. That just changed. At a campaign event Tuesday in Des Moines, Iowa, Clinton came out against the controversial project.

Here’s her statement, via NBC:

“I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone XL pipeline as what I believe it is: A distraction from the important work we have to do to combat climate change, and, unfortunately from my perspective, one that interferes with our ability to move forward and deal with other issues,” she said during a campaign event in Iowa Tuesday.

“Therefore, I oppose it. I oppose it because I don’t think it’s in the best interest of what we need to do to combat climate change.”

Clinton now joins the ranks of two of her opponents in the Democratic presidential primary, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, who have both opposed the pipeline. Democrat Jim Webb, however, supports the project, along with all of the Republican candidates. A final decision, which has been years in the making, is expected from the Obama administration by the end of this year.

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Hillary Clinton Opposes the Keystone Pipeline

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We Have Some Heartbreaking News About Leonardo DiCaprio

by ValentiKoss Posted on September 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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It sounds like a huge, flashy number: $2.6 trillion.

That’s probably why the environmental activist group 350.org used it in a headline for a press release today announcing a report on the growing movement to divest from dirty energy companies: “FOSSIL FUEL DIVESTMENT PLEDGES SURPASS $2.6 TRILLION.”

But the report itself tells a somewhat different story.

Released this morning at a New York press conference, the report tallied commitments—made by a global assortment of universities, local governments, pension funds, charitable foundations, religious institutions, and more—to sell off investments in the fossil fuel industry. The tactic has become popular with climate activists as a way to call attention to the industry’s transgressions against the climate, and maybe even to destabilize its bottom line.

On hand to trumpet the findings: Leonardo DiCaprio, along with the head of the UN climate agency (via video) and a packed room of top brass from environmental groups, clean energy companies, and major foundations. DiCaprio himself joined the list, pledging to divest his personal finances and his foundation’s holdings from fossil fuels.

“To date,” the report reads, “436 institutions and 2,040 individuals across 43 countries and representing $2.6 trillion in assets have committed to divest from fossil fuel companies.”

“That’s real money,” said Ellen Dorsey, director of the Wallace Global Fund, in announcing the number, to much applause.

And it is! Pulling that kind of cash out of the fossil fuel juggernaut could land a true financial blow, a clear victory in the global war to stop climate change.

But there’s a catch. That big number—$2.6 trillion—has nothing to do with the amount of money that is actually being pulled out of fossil fuel stocks. In fact, the investment consultancy behind today’s report has no idea how much money the institutions surveyed have invested in fossil fuels, and thus how much they have pledged to divest.

Instead, that number refers to the total size of all the assets held by those institutions—hence the word “representing” in the quote above from the report. And that’s a huge difference.

Here’s a perfect example: The report lists the University of California system as a prominent new entry into the divestment movement. Earlier this month, the UC’s chief investment officer announced that the system’s endowment would sell off its holdings in coal and tar sands oil. Those holdings were worth about $200 million. An undisclosed amount is still invested in oil and gas. But the report uses the full amount of the university’s total endowment: $98 billion. That’s 490 times higher than the amount of money actually being divested.

So what’s the exact portion of the $2.6 trillion that is being divested from fossil fuels? No one knows. Indeed, Dorsey couldn’t even confirm that all the institutions listed in the report necessarily had any fossil fuel holdings in their portfolios before they decided to divest. As for DiCaprio, when asked by reporters to clarify the exact amount of his personal stake in fossil fuels, he smiled and waved but kept mum.

“Every investment portfolio is different, and some are exceedingly complex,” Dorsey said.

Brad Goz, the director of business development for a New York consultancy that helps institutions figure out how to divest, agreed that it can be difficult to figure out how and where a fund is invested.

“Hedge funds like to keep it opaque,” he said. “But that’s becomes less challenging when CEOs demand the information.”

The best Dorsey could offer was an estimate based on the portion of the value of the S&P 500 that comes from fossil fuel companies: 3 to 7 percent. In other words, that $2.6 trillion statistic is probably much closer to $182 billion—a pretty small piece of the roughly $6 trillion value of the global market for coal, oil, and gas. Dorsey also clarified that the promised divestments are scheduled to take place over the next five years, not overnight.

To be fair, the real divestment figure isn’t nothing, and there’s some evidence that it’s growing: When this same analysis was released last year, the reported figure was just $50 billion (compared with $2.6 trillion this year). Still, it’s not clear whether any of this is enough to actually draw the notice of corporations like Exxon and Shell, and the report offered no evidence that the divestment campaign has had a specific, tangible impact on share prices.

In an interview following the announcement, May Boeve, director of the activist group 350.org, defended the framing of the announcement, saying she doesn’t “think it’s misleading.”

“The purpose of divestment is to make the point that the fossil fuel industry is losing legitimacy,” she said. “It’s about their reputation, which is less quantifiable but equally damaging.”

If she meant that the appearance of a big divestment movement can help promote more divestment, she’s probably right. Expect to see more announcements like this over the next few weeks in advance of the upcoming UN climate talks in Paris. Just make sure to read the fine print.

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We Have Some Heartbreaking News About Leonardo DiCaprio

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Conservative Group Blasts the Pope: "Paganism" Has "Entered the Church"

by Jesus44Ccz Posted on September 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A leading group of climate change skeptics is concerned that paganism is creeping into the Catholic Church. That was the message delivered by Gene Koprowski, director of marketing at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, at a press conference in Philadelphia Thursday.

The event, which Heartland had billed as a challenge to Pope Francis’ “views on global warming and the nature of capitalism,” was recorded by the liberal group American Bridge. Talking Points Memo first reported on the video Friday. You can watch an excerpt above.

The pope, who is visiting the United States next week, has called on policymakers to take action to control climate change and has criticized the excesses of free market capitalism. According to Koprowski, when Heartland staffers first began reading news stories about the pope speaking out on climate, they were “shocked that the pope was buying into this left-wing political craze that is global warming.” So in April, Heartland sent a delegation of climate skeptics to Rome to offer a “prebuttal” to a Vatican climate summit in an attempt to change the pope’s mind.

“When the Vatican leapt into the controversy on climate science, we were initially under the impression that His Holiness was a victim of bad advice from bad advisers,” Koprowski said Thursday. “There were people from the UN who were population control advocates. There were people from other left-wing groups who were advising the pontiff.”

But Koprowski said that after the pope released his landmark encyclical calling for action on climate change, he began to suspect that “something more may be afoot.” Koprowski then invoked pagan rituals and “nature worship” that he said were “seeping into the Church” during the Middle Ages, adding: “I’m wondering, as a scholar, if pagan forms are returning to the Church this day.”

Koprowski concluded: “I would say, contrary to some of the criticism, that this is not communism that has entered the church. It’s, rather, paganism.”

Heartland and Koprowski did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Conservative Group Blasts the Pope: "Paganism" Has "Entered the Church"

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Hillary Clinton Just Came Out Against Obama’s Arctic Drilling Plan

by JerrellSunderlan Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has agreed with the vast majority of President Barack Obama’s policies, but in a Tweet on Tuesday she expressed her disapproval with one: letting Shell drill for oil in the Arctic.

Clinton had previously said she was “skeptical” and had “doubts” as to whether the Obama administration should have given Shell the go-ahead for exploratory drilling. The oil company’s permit from the US Department of the Interior allows it to drill in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska. Shell halted its drilling program in the region after it lost control of a massive rig in 2012.

Environmental advocates say drilling in the Arctic will deepen the United States’ reliance on oil, harm local wildlife and upset the region’s fragile ecosystem. They have called Obama’s planned visit to the region later this month—the first to the Arctic by a sitting US president—hypocritical, given the president’s focus on combating climate change since he took office.

Clinton’s willingness to come out against Arctic drilling is at odds with her non-answer on whether she supports construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. When pressed on the issue, she said that it would be inappropriate for her to express an opinion, since she was head of the Department of State when the pipeline review process began.

Clinton outlined her own climate change plan in July, which focuses on incentivizing renewable energy sources.

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Hillary Clinton Just Came Out Against Obama’s Arctic Drilling Plan

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This Democrat Wants to Double the Gas Tax

by Emilia38Kex Posted on August 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was first published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The federal gas tax that pays for America’s highways hasn’t been raised in decades, but that doesn’t stop some determined lawmakers from trying. The latest effort comes via Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, who has introduced a plan to raise the tax four cents a year for four years then index it to inflation so it remains effective over time. The move would ultimately bring the fuel tax to 34 cents a gallon—nearly double the existing rate of 18.4 cents.

That might seem like a big bump, but even a gas tax twice as high as the current one would be incredibly low by global standards. A US Department of Energy review of fuel taxes among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in 2011 placed the US just about at the bottom of the pack. Kyle Pomerleau of the Tax Foundation recently updated these figures to reflect 2013 tax rates via OECD data—and found very little change.

We’ve charted Pomerleau’s findings here:

CityLab

The US rate of 53 cents a gallon reflects the federal gas tax as well as the average state tax. Adding Carper’s 16 cents wouldn’t budge the US position way at the back of the pack—nor would doubling the entire 53 cent average. As the numbers stand, lawmakers would have to raise the average gas tax at least eight-fold for Americans to pay the steepest rate in the world.

In that context, Carper’s plan seems like quite the bargain. A higher gas tax would help stabilize the Highway Trust Fund, which has staved off bankruptcy in recent years through a series of short-term funding patches and dubious transfers from the general taxpayer fund. And 34 cents is about what the gas tax would be today if it were indexed to inflation anyway, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The legislation even comes with a tax credit to reduce the hardship high fueled costs cause for the car-dependent middle class.

So what’s not to like? The short answer if you’re a federal lawmaker: the entire discussion. Official routinely dismiss gas tax hikes out of hand; as Paul Ryan said this June, We’re not going to raise the gas tax.” As James Surowiecki recently wrote in The New Yorker, the opposition begins with anti-tax conservatives but extends to liberals who fear political reprisal—creating a bloc of Congressional inaction that defies general bipartisan support for road maintenance, as well as common sense:

Indeed, the refusal of Congress to raise the gas tax is the ultimate expression of how reflexive and irrational the resistance to taxes has become. Opposition to higher income taxes has some theoretical justification: higher marginal rates discourage people from working more and investing. Seen in one light, they’re a penalty for success. But no such argument exists against the gas tax: all it does, in essence, is ask drivers to pay for the roads they use.

There are arguably better ways to get drivers to pay for roads—a per-mile driving fee chief among them—but none with the ease of implementation and immediate funding relief that even a modest gas tax hike like Carper’s would provide. Americans should one day strive to pay the full social cost of driving. Until then, recovering enough money to pay for basic highway upkeep is the least that good government can do.

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This Democrat Wants to Double the Gas Tax

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Here’s How President Trump Could Dismantle Obama’s Climate Rules

by RayfordAua Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was first published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Republican presidential candidates gathering in Cleveland for Thursday’s debate are sure to get questions about the Affordable Care Act, Planned Parenthood, and immigration.

All of those issues deserve attention. But maybe the first question should be about President Barack Obama’s latest effort to slow climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday released a final version of new regulations designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. Technically, the regulations are part of the Clean Air Act, which became law in the 1970s and gives the federal government broad powers to regulate pollutants that threaten public health.

The new regulations call upon states to devise plans that cut down on carbon output from power plants—which, in practice, could mean anything from shutting down aging coal-fired generators to creating multi-state markets for trading pollution permits. States must produce their plans by 2018, and begin making cuts by 2020. In states where officials decline to submit plans, as the law envisions, the EPA will step in and impose blueprints of its own making. (The Huffington Post‘s Kate Sheppard has all the details—and the case Obama is making in favor of these new regulations.)

Monday’s announcement is the latest step in the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to limit greenhouse gases. The idea is to reduce carbon emissions from existing power plants by about one-third, relative to 2005 levels, by 2030. You can make a credible argument that, taken together, the president’s efforts to slow climate change belong alongside the Affordable Care Act, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms as cornerstones of Obama’s legacy on domestic policy.

But that depends, in part, on the next administration implementing these new regulations faithfully. And that may not happen.

Even before the rules became final, Republicans were vowing to fight them. “This is going to be a disaster,” Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, told a gathering of conservative donors that the Koch Brothers convened on Sunday. Formal release of the regulations on Monday produced still more condemnations. “This is a buzzsaw to the nation’s economy,” Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, said at a candidate forum in New Hampshire.

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Here’s How President Trump Could Dismantle Obama’s Climate Rules

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"Lawless and Radical": What the 2016 Candidates Think of Obama’s New Climate Change Plan

by YolandaFoust Posted on August 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama just unveiled the final version of rules that crack down on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants—the most significant contributor to global warming in the United States. “Climate change is not a problem for another generation, not anymore,” Obama said in a video released on Sunday. But not everyone agrees. Here’s what some of the leading 2016 presidential candidates think of Obama’s Clean Power Plan:

Marco Rubio

On Sunday, at an event hosted by the Koch Brothers, the Florida senator slammed the plan. “So if there’s some billionaire somewhere who is a pro-environmental, cap and trade person, yeah, they can probably afford for their electric bill to go up a couple of hundred dollars,” Rubio said, according to The Huffington Post. “But if you’re a single mom in Tampa, Florida, and your electric bill goes up by thirty dollars a month, that is catastrophic.” Experts disagree with Rubio’s suggestion that the new rules will be costly for ratepayers. As Tim McDonnell explains, “even though electric rates will probably go up, monthly electric bills are likely to go down, thanks to efficiency improvements.”

Jeb Bush

The former Florida governor released an official statement, calling the plan “overreaching” and “irresponsible.” Bush argued that the new rules would raise energy prices while also trampling on the powers of state governments. Bush went so far as to say that the plan would “hollow out our economy” for the sake of addressing climate change.

Mike Huckabee

The former Arkansas governor has been adamant about his opposition to the Clean Power Plan, saying that it would “bankrupt families.” On Monday he doubled down on his opposition to the plan, characterizing it as the president’s “carbon crusade”:

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"Lawless and Radical": What the 2016 Candidates Think of Obama’s New Climate Change Plan

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Scott Walker Thinks Obama’s Climate Plan Will Jack Up Your Electric Bill. He’s Wrong.

by JanaShumway Posted on August 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today President Barack Obama released the final version of his signature climate plan, which sets new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector. Each state has a unique target, custom-built for its particular mix of energy sources. Each state also has total freedom to determine how exactly to reach the target. But the rules are clearly designed to expedite the closure of coal-fired power plants, the nation’s number-one source of CO2 emissions.

It took less than a day for the first legal challenges to the plan to emerge from coal interests. The news rules also attracted some pointed criticism from leading Republican presidential contenders, including Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. Here’s what Walker had to say on Twitter:

Neither of those predictions is likely to come true. Cries about job loss and high costs always accompany new environmental regulation. In the case of the Clean Power Plan, as the rules announced today are known, the fear revolves around the image of coal plants around the country going dark. Folks get laid off from the plant, there’s less electricity on the grid, so the price of electricity goes up, so factories can’t afford to pay their workers, so they lay them off…you get the idea.

But as I’ve reported in the past, that view of the plan is misguided for two reasons. The first is that Obama’s new rules, while an important and historic milestone in the annals of climate action, really aren’t much of a departure from the direction that the energy market is already going. As our friend Eric Holthaus at Slate points out, many states are already well on their way to achieving the new carbon targets simply because, for lots of reasons, making tons of inefficient energy from dirty old coal plants just isn’t economically feasible anymore. So you’d be hard-pressed to pin any particular lost job in the coal industry on Obama alone.

The second reason Walker and his ilk are off-base is that they focus too heavily on the coal-killing aspect of the plan, without also considering two equally vital aspects: (a) The building of tons of new energy supplies from renewables, and (b) big improvements in energy efficiency, which will allow us to use less power overall.

It’s true that by the time the plan takes effect, electricity prices will have risen steadily, as they always have for as long as we’ve had electricity. Because electric utilities typically have monopolies over their service area and prize reliability over affordability, power costs don’t naturally fall over time in the way that the costs of other technologies do. But even though electric rates will probably go up, monthly electric bills are likely to go down, thanks to efficiency improvements. The exact calculus will be different in every state, but to take one example, the Southern Environmental Law Center projected that in Virginia, the Clean Power Plan will lead to an 8 percent reduction in electric bills. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, savings like that add up to $37.4 billion for all US homes and businesses by 2020. The NRDC also projects that the plan will create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the energy efficiency sector, as homeowners, businesses, factories, etc. invest in upgrades that enable them use less power.

In any case, the solar industry alone already employs more than twice the number of people who work in coal mining. Making the energy system more climate-friendly is as much about juicing the clean energy industry as it is dismantling the coal industry.

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Scott Walker Thinks Obama’s Climate Plan Will Jack Up Your Electric Bill. He’s Wrong.

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Hillary Clinton Refuses to Take a Position on the Keystone Pipeline

by Stephanj0r Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton took a strong stance on clean energy Monday, telling a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, that her efforts to tackle climate change would parallel President John F. Kennedy’s call to action during the space race in the 1960s.

“I want to get the country back to setting big ambitious goals,” Clinton said. “I want us to get back into the future business, and one of the best ways we can do that is to be absolutely ready to address the challenge of climate change and make it work to our advantage economically.”

Her remarks tracked closely with an ambitious plan her campaign released Sunday night, which set a target of producing enough renewable energy to power all the nation’s homes and businesses by 2027.

“America’s ability to lead the world on this issue hinges on our ability to act ourselves,” she said. “I refuse to turn my back on what is one of the greatest threats and greatest opportunities America faces.”

Still, the Democractic front-runner refused—as she has several times before—to say whether or not she supports construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. That project, which would carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries and ports in the United States, is seen by many environmentalists as a blemish on President Barack Obama’s climate record. It has been stalled for years in a lengthy State Department review that began when Clinton was still Secretary of State. The Obama administration has resisted several recent attempts by Congress to force Keystone’s approval, but it has yet to make a final decision on the project—although one is expected sometime this year.

“I will refrain from commenting on Keystone XL, because I had a leading role in getting that process started, and we have to let it run its course,” Clinton said, in response to a question from an audience member.

Her non-position on Keystone earned derision from environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose organization 350.org has been at the forefront of opposition to the pipeline.

“I think it’s bogus,” he said in an email. “Look, the notion that she can’t talk about it because the State Dept. is still working on it makes no sense. By that test, she shouldn’t be talking about Benghazi or Iran or anything else either. The more she tries to duck the question, the more the whole thing smells.”

Clinton also punted on an audience request to reveal further details of how exactly she would finance the renewable energy targets she announced yesterday, which aim even higher than those already put in place by Obama. She reiterated that one key step would be to ensure the extension of federal tax credits for wind and solar energy that have expired or are set to expire over the next few years. And she said that she would continue Obama’s practice of pursuing aggressive climate policies from within the White House, saying that “we still have a lot we can do” without waiting for a recalcitrant Congress to act.

Clinton acknowledged that the clean energy boom would come at a cost for the US coal industry, which is already in steep decline. She said she would “guarantee that coal miners and their families get the benefits they’ve earned,” but didn’t elaborate on what she meant or how specifically she would achieve that.

Environmental groups offered a generally positive reaction to Clinton’s policy announcement Sunday. In a statement, League of Conservation Voters vice president Tiernan Sittenfield commended her for “calling out climate change deniers and effectively illustrating the urgent need to act on a defining issue of our time.” She also earned praise from billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who has set a high bar on climate action for any candidate who wants to tap his millions.

“I refuse to let those who are deniers to rip away all the progress we’ve made and leave our country exposed to climate change,” Clinton said.

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Hillary Clinton Refuses to Take a Position on the Keystone Pipeline

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

by Pilar2325h Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley made an astute observation about ISIS in an interview with Bloomberg.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria, the rise of ISIS, was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the…conditions of extreme poverty that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” said the former Maryland governor.

Republicans were quick to seize on the comment as an indication of O’Malley’s weak grasp of foreign policy. Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said the suggestion of a link between ISIS’s rise to power and climate change was “absurd” and a sign that “no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe.”

Here’s the thing, though: O’Malley is totally right. As we’ve reported here many times, Syria’s civil war is the best-understood and least ambiguous example of a case where an impact of climate change—in this case, an unprecedented drought that devastated rural farmers—directly contributed to violent conflict and political upheaval. There is no shortage of high-quality, peer-reviewed research explicating this link. As O’Malley said, the drought made it more difficult for rural families to survive off of farming. So they moved to cities in huge numbers, where they were confronted with urban poverty and an intransigent, autocratic government. Those elements clearly existed regardless of the drought. But the drought was the final straw, the factor that brought all the others to a boiling point.

Does this mean that America’s greenhouse gas emissions are solely responsible for ISIS’s rise to power? Obviously not. But it does mean that, without accounting for climate change, you have an incomplete picture of the current military situation in the Middle East. And without that understanding, it will be very difficult for a prospective commander-in-chief to predict where terrorist threats might emerge in the future.

The link between climate and security isn’t particularly controversial in the defense community. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama called climate change an “urgent and growing threat” to national security. A recent review by the Defense Department concluded that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that exacerbates other precursors to war, while the Center for Naval Analysis found that climate change-induced drought is already leading to conflict across Africa and the Middle East.

In other words, O’Malley’s comment is completely on-point. If Priebus and his party are serious about defeating ISIS and preventing future terrorist uprisings, they can’t continue to dismiss the role of climate change.

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

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