Tag Archives: climate desk

Chipotle Says It’s Getting Rid of GMOs. Here’s the Problem.

by JonathaPFX Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chipotle announced this week that it will stop serving food made with genetically modified organisms. The company wants you to think the decision is “another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” apparently because GMOs are regarded with at best suspicion and at worst total revulsion by lots of Americans.

There’s data to support that notion: A Pew poll released earlier this year found that less than 40 percent of Americans think GMOs are safe to eat.

Here’s the thing, though: GMOs are totally safe to eat. Eighty-eight percent of the scientists in that same poll agreed. As longtime environmentalist Mark Lynas pointed out in the New York Times recently, the level of scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs is comparable to the scientific consensus on climate change, which is to say that the disagreement camp is a rapidly diminishing minority. Lynas also made the equally valid point that so-called “improved” seeds have a pretty remarkable track record in improving crop yields in developing countries, which translates to a direct win for local economies and food security. (Although there is evidence that widespread GMO use can lead to an increased reliance on pesticides.)

But there’s an even more important reason why Chipotle’s announcement is little more than self-congratulatory PR, even if you think that GMOs are the devil. As former MoJo-er Sarah Zhang pointed out at Gizmodo:

For the past couple of years, Chipotle has been getting its suppliers to get rid of GM corn and soybean. Today’s “GMO-free” announcement comes as Chipotle has switched over to non-GMO corn and soybean oil, but it still serves chicken and pork from animals raised on GMO feed. (Its beef comes from pasture-fed cows.) A good chunk of the GM corn and soybeans grown in America actually goes to feed livestock, so a truly principled stance against GMOs should cut out meat from GM-fed animals, too.

The same caveat applies to soda, which is also made mostly from corn.

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Chipotle Says It’s Getting Rid of GMOs. Here’s the Problem.

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Good Luck Going After the Pope, Climate Deniers

by WillAbendroth Posted on April 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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If you write about climate change for a living, you get used to being on the receiving end of tweets, emails, and comments explaining why manmade global warming is a colossal hoax. But it turns out that if you’re the pope, the trolls take things a bit further. From our partners at the Guardian:

A US activist group that has received funding from energy companies and the foundation controlled by conservative activist Charles Koch is trying to persuade the Vatican that “there is no global warming crisis” ahead of an environmental statement by Pope Francis this summer that is expected to call for strong action to combat climate change.

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative thinktank that seeks to discredit established science on climate change, said it was sending a team of climate scientists to Rome “to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science.”

“Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” Joseph Bast, Heartland’s president, said in a statement.

Jim Lakely, a Heartland spokesman, said the thinktank was “working on” securing a meeting with the Vatican. “I think Catholics should examine the evidence for themselves, and understand that the Holy Father is an authority on spiritual matters, not scientific ones,” he said.

The pope and his aides have publicly embraced the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet, and tomorrow the Vatican is putting on a summit entitled “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development.” Heartland beat them to the punch, setting up a “prebuttal” event on Monday in Rome. Heartland seems especially upset that the Vatican summit will feature two notable figures—UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and economist Jeffrey Sachs—who, it says, “refuse to acknowledge the abundant data showing human greenhouse gas emissions are not causing a climate crisis.”

Heartland is also encouraging its followers to send letters and emails to the pope and to spread the gospel of global warming denial to their local church officials. “Talk to your minister, priest, or spiritual leader,” advises Heartland’s website. “Tell him or her you’ve studied the global warming issue and believe Pope Francis is being misled about the science and economics of the issue.”

As my colleague James West reported, a sizeable majority of US Catholics actually share the pope’s belief the climate change is a serious threat. Heartland seems to be trying to shift their views on the issue by portraying climate activists as hostile to Catholic values. In an American Spectator op-ed today (headline: “Francis Is Out of His Element”), Heartland research fellow H. Sterling Burnett writes:

Those pushing for bans on fossil fuel use think too many humans are the environmental problem. Many of them worship the creation, not the Creator. The same people pushing the pope to join the fight against climate change support forcible population control programs such as those operating in China. That is not a Christian position.

On its website, Heartland goes even further, writing that “climate alarmists have misrepresented the facts, concocted false data, and tried to shut down a reasonable, scientific debate on the issue of climate change. This conduct violates the Eighth Commandment: ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.'”

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Good Luck Going After the Pope, Climate Deniers

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We Didn’t Learn Anything From Deepwater Horizon—And We’re Going to Pay For It

by IleneEganldsfpl Posted on April 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today is the fifth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, an event that triggered the nation’s worst-ever oil spill. The well leaked for three months and dumped over 200 million gallons of oil into the sea. The explosion itself killed eleven men; the resulting pollution killed a stupefying amount of wildlife, including 800,000 some birds. And despite billions paid out by BP in fines and restoration costs, the economic impact of the disaster remains wide-reaching and ongoing.

But possibly even more outrageous than the spill itself is how little has been done by government to prevent a similar disaster. The oil and gas industry has stayed active in Washington, and managed to fend off serious efforts to curb drilling: Congress has passed zero new laws—not one—to restrict offshore drilling or force it to be safer. The Obama administration has approved over 1,500 offshore drilling permits since the spill. And back in January the administration announced a plan to open new areas in the Atlantic and Arctic for offshore drilling. As my colleague Tim Murphy noted today, Louisiana’s oversight of the oil industry is rife with ludicrous conflicts of interest that raise serious doubts about the state’s ability to make drilling safer.

In other words, the wounds from BP are scarcely healed, but we’re pushing deeper and deeper into offshore drilling.

In fact, well construction in the Gulf is literally pushing into deeper water, where the risks of a spill are even greater. From an AP investigation pegged to the anniversary:

A review of offshore well data by the AP shows the average ocean depth of all wells started since 2010 has increased to 1,757 feet, 40 percent deeper than the average well drilled in the five years before that…

Drillers are exploring a “golden zone” of oil and natural gas that lies roughly 20,000 feet beneath the sea floor, through a 10,000-foot thick layer of prehistoric salt…

Technology now allows engineers to see the huge reservoirs beneath the previously opaque salt, but the layer is still harder to see through than rock. And it’s prone to hiding pockets of oil and gas that raise the potential for a blowout.

Drilling in the Gulf makes up less than one-fifth of US crude oil production, and an even smaller share of total oil production if you count unconventional oil from fracking. So it wouldn’t be a crippling blow to our energy supply to consider putting the brakes on offshore drilling—if not forever, at least until we feel secure that we’ve done enough to prevent another Deepwater Horizon.

Meanwhile, our expansion into deeper and riskier drilling is happening even though there are still an average of two offshore drilling accidents every day.

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We Didn’t Learn Anything From Deepwater Horizon—And We’re Going to Pay For It

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Here’s What Green Activists Think About Hillary Clinton

by AbelSVBXuzcfe Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Notwithstanding the Washington Post‘s inevitable jokes about “fedoras, flannel shirts and beards” outside Hillary Clinton’s campaign office “in the midst of hipster-cool downtown Brooklyn,” there actually is no such thing as “hipster-cool downtown Brooklyn.” Downtown Brooklyn is a warren of architecturally undistinguished office buildings and sterile windswept plazas. And so it was on a charmless little patch of sidewalk near the new campaign headquarters that a group of about 20 activists with 350 Action, an affiliate of 350.org, held signs and chanted on Monday afternoon urging Clinton to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. The signs played on a slogan used by Clinton’s supporters—”I’m ready for Hillary”—by tacking an extra phrase onto the end—”to say NO KXL.”

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In a comment that cut to the heart of the contradiction embedded in Clinton’s record—embracing both cuts to carbon emissions and increases in fossil fuel production—Duncan Meisel, an organizer with 350, said, “If you want to stop carbon pollution, keep carbon in the ground!”

Reporters in attendance strained to hear the unamplified speakers over the steady hum of idling buses across the street. What the event lacked in grandeur, though, it made up for in topical importance. Clinton herself has called climate change “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face.”

And yet climate activists have good reason to be worried about Clinton’s Keystone stance. In recent years, she has refused to take any position on the pipeline, but in 2010, when she was secretary of state, she said, “we are inclined to” approve it. Says Ben Schreiber, Friends of the Earth’s climate and energy program director, “It was inappropriate for her to make comments about the merits of the proposal when there wasn’t even an environmental impact statement.”

And that’s just one of the many reservations some environmental activists have about Clinton’s past record and current positions. In interviews, they also complain that she promoted fracking abroad as secretary of state, she has ties to Big Oil, and she favors pro-corporate trade agreements. Several of these issues have been gathering steam. Recent reports on large donations to the Clinton Foundation from oil companies have led to criticism from green groups. “This cash connection between the Clintons with natural gas and Big Oil is sincerely troubling,” says Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. Last week, a coalition of more than 100 environmental and local anti-fracking groups sent a letter to Clinton calling on her to “acknowledge the inherent dangers in shale development and stand with us.”

None of the biggest national environmental organizations—such as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and League of Conservation Voters (LCV)—signed the letter to Clinton, nor did those three groups respond to queries for this story. “National green groups have their own dance to do with Democratic candidates,” says one environmentalist who asked not to be named discussing other organizations. Withholding criticism allows for friendlier relations with—and, they hope, better access to—Clinton, and more influence over policy development in her campaign and in a future White House. The big groups might believe that this will ultimately mean better outcomes for climate policy than public confrontation. After all, if the Democratic frontrunner tells environmentalists to take a hike and wins without them, then they’re really doomed.

Whatever the reason, Clinton was warmly received when she spoke at an LCV dinner in New York last fall. Upon Clinton’s campaign announcement on Sunday, LCV issued a cautiously optimistic statement that listed her climate bona fides from her time in the Senate and State Department while noting that she must lay out specific climate action plans in her campaign platform. The group praised Clinton for having supported cap-and-trade and an international climate accord, but one could detect a hint of uncertainty from LCV as to how much Clinton will emphasize climate. “We welcome Secretary Clinton to the Presidential race, and encourage her to build on her long record of environmental leadership by making climate change a top priority of her campaign,” said LCV President Gene Karpinski.

He should have been pleased to see what Clinton campaign chair John Podesta tweeted on Sunday:

As ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum noted, to make climate and clean energy one of the campaign’s top three issues would be unprecedented for any major party nominee. “The Podesta tweet is a sea change, that would not have happened in 2008,” says Karthik Ganapathy, a spokesperson for 350.

Still, 350 and other aggressive green groups are openly ambivalent about Clinton. Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity both signed the anti-fracking letter to Clinton. “Our concerns about Clinton are some of the same concerns we have with President Obama as well,” says Schreiber. “We’re quite concerned about fracking, and the fact that she was actually advocating for other countries to frack as part of her role at State.” Another aspect of her State Department tenure that worries greens is her support for free trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would allow transnational corporations to challenge environmental regulations in signatory nations.

Climate hawks won’t all be such cheap dates any more. Some of them are demanding not only that Clinton say she will limit emissions and promote renewables, but that she commit to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

Says Kelly Mitchell, Greenpeace’s climate and energy campaign director, “Hillary Clinton needs to show that she would meet this challenge with the leadership required of our next president—that means standing up to the fossil fuel lobbyists, taking serious steps to keep coal, oil, and gas in the ground, and putting the United States on a path to 100 percent renewable energy.”

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Here’s What Green Activists Think About Hillary Clinton

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Coal Is Dying and It’s Never Coming Back

by OmaRedefzlunub Posted on April 14, 2015

Mother Jones

Coal, the No. 1 cause of climate change, is dying. Last year saw a record number of coal plant retirements in the United States, and a study last week from Duke University found that since 2008, the coal industry shed nearly 50,000 jobs, while natural gas and renewable energy added four times that number. Even China, which produces and consumes more coal than the rest of the world put together, is expected to hit peak coal use within a decade, in order to meet its promise to President Barack Obama to reduce its carbon emissions starting in 2030.

According to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), this is all the fault of President Barack Obama’s “war on coal”—specifically the administration’s new limits for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which probably will force many power companies to burn less coal. If there is a war, McConnell has long been the field marshal of the defending army. His latest maneuver came last month when he called on state lawmakers to simply ignore the administration’s new rules, in order to resist Obama’s “attack on the middle class.”

His logic, apparently, is that if Kentucky can stave off Obama long enough, the coal industry still has a glorious future ahead. That logic is fundamentally flawed. While Obama’s tenure will probably speed up the country’s transition to cleaner energy, the scales had already tipped against coal long before he took office. Kentucky’s coal production peaked in 1990, and coal industry employment peaked all the way back in the 1920s. The scales won’t tip back after he leaves. The “war on coal” narrative isn’t simply misleading, it also distracts from the very real problem of how to prepare coal mining communities and energy consumers (i.e., everyone) for an approaching future in which coal is demoted to a bit role after a century at center stage.

That’s the conclusion of a sweeping new account of the coal industry, Coal Wars, authored by leading energy analyst Richard Martin. The book dives deep into a simple truth: As long as we’re still burning coal for the majority of our energy, all the solar panels, electric cars, and vegetarian diets in the world won’t do a thing to stop global warming. Saving the planet starts with getting off coal.

The good news, Martin reports, is that transition is already underway, regardless of stonewalling by congressional Republicans, and with or without Obama’s new regulations. Martin documents evidence of coal’s decline from the mountain villages of Kentucky to the open pit mines of Wyoming, and from lavish industry parties in Shanghai to boardrooms in Germany. Everywhere he looks, market forces (for instance, natural gas made cheap by the fracking boom), technological advances, and environmental laws are conspiring to favor cleaner forms of energy over coal. At the same time, Martin writes, more and more financial institutions and private investors are starting to factor climate change into their investment decisions, which “would be a death blow that no EPA regulation could equal.”

Whether the transition will happen fast enough to limit the damage of climate change is a different story. China still gets nearly three-quarters of its energy from coal. The United States, while substantially reducing its own coal consumption in recent years, still has huge amounts of coal, especially in the West, that can be profitably mined and shipped overseas. Many billions of dollars have been sunk into mines, power plants, shipping terminals, and other infrastructure that can’t simply be shut down overnight, especially when all that stuff forms the backbone of a basic commodity like electricity.

Still, for coal, there is no resurgence on the horizon. “There’s no question which way the curve is headed, and it is down,” Martin tells Climate Desk.

Much less clear than the fate of coal is what will happen in the countless communities, from the American Southeast to northern China, that have long depended on coal to put food on the table. Martin has managed to locate dozens of compelling personal narratives that show the human face of a debate that is too often reduced—by environmentalists as much as by the coal industry—to numbers and yawn-inducing energy wonkery. These include the head of a small coal mining company in Kentucky who was forced to sell off the business he inherited from his father and lay off workers who were also friends and neighbors. The manager of a coal town coffee shop in Colorado is also facing closure. In China, self-contained cities are built around coal mines, but young people there are unable to get work and have no other employment opportunities.

The environmental imperative to get off coal is obvious, and even if you think climate change is a hoax, basic economics are already driving the coal industry to contract. But so far, according to Martin, the United States has done a terrible job of helping coal industry workers and their families find life after coal.

There are many guilty parties here, including coal barons like Don Blankenship (who is currently facing charges in federal court for flagrant safety violations) and profit-hungry utility company execs who are keen to squash competition from solar and wind energy. But Martin saves his most damning critiques for leaders like McConnell who are hung up on pointless political squabbling rather than finding innovative ways to revitalize former coal economies.

“The presence of the coal industry has kept these communities in a state of dependence, and not allowed them to develop a real economy beyond coal,” Martin says. “Whether we pine for the days of these jobs or not, they’re not coming back. We have to get beyond this state of dependency.”

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Coal Is Dying and It’s Never Coming Back

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Scott Walker Appointee Says Climate Action Is Pointless Because Volcanoes

by DominikCac Posted on April 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Wisconsin, which has been in the news this week for voting to bar staff of the state public lands board from talking about climate change, is getting a new state official who is skeptical of human contribution to climate change.

Gov. Scott Walker recently appointed Mike Huebsch to the state Public Service Commission, and Huebsch was asked about his views on climate change during his confirmation hearing this week. The Public Service Commission oversees utility issues in the state, including electricity, gas and water.

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“I believe that humans can have an impact to climate change, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near the level of impact of just the natural progression of our planet,” Huebsch said, according to the Wisconsin Radio Network. “You know, the elimination of essentially every automobile would be offset by one volcano exploding. You have to recognize the multiple factors that go into climate change.”

Scientists have studied this issue fairly extensively, and concluded that emissions generated by human activity—specifically, the burning of fossil fuels—far surpass volcanoes when it comes to warming the planet. Human activities generate about 35 gigatons of greenhouse gases per year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, while all the world’s volcanoes combined spew something in the range of 0.13 to 0.44 gigatons per year. That means the human influence on the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is 80 to 270 times greater than that of volcanoes.

Huebsch, who previously served as the secretary of the Department of Administration under Walker, made the remark in a hearing of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. During the hearing, he also questioned whether the state needs its renewable portfolio standard, which currently requires the state to draw 10 percent of its power from renewable sources.

“I’m not certain that policy is necessarily required in a law,” Huebsch said, according to the radio network. “Everybody recognizes the value of making sure that we have renewables available to us in a cost-effective way, and doing it in a way that’s going to maintain the grid and the infrastructure available for everyone.”

The Walker administration has been generally hostile to action on cutting emissions. Walker signed the Americans for Prosperity “No Climate Tax” pledge, and this week his administration joined a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to block new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Walker critics say the appointment of someone who thinks volcanoes are causing climate change to the Public Service Commission is just another part of the likely 2016 presidential contender’s assault on environmental regulations.

“It’s not just that Gov. Walker opposes responsible action to try to slow the pace of global climate change and avoid its disastrous consequences if left unchecked,” Mike Browne, deputy director of the progressive group One Wisconsin Now, told The Huffington Post, “he’s also willing to put his cronies with similar science-denying views in charge of regulating an industry central to efforts to stem climate change.”

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Scott Walker Appointee Says Climate Action Is Pointless Because Volcanoes

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These Maps Show Why We Keep Electing Climate Change Deniers

by BruceRosensteng Posted on April 9, 2015

Mother Jones

One of the most significant obstacles to addressing climate change is the fact that huge numbers of US politicians reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet. Why does the situation persist? How can a senator who (literally) holds up a snowball as evidence that global warming is a hoax keep winning reelection? How can someone who declares himself a climate “skeptic” be a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination? As newly released research from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication makes painfully clear, GOP climate deniers actually hold views that are quite similar to those of the voters who elect them.

The Yale research is based on data from more than 13,000 survey responses since 2008. It estimates that nationwide, just 48 percent of people agree with the scientific consensus that global warming is caused “mostly” by humans. While other recent polls have found a somewhat higher percentage who say they believe humans are causing the planet to warm, Yale’s numbers are not a good sign for those—like billionaire activist Tom Steyer—who are trying to turn climate change denial into a disqualifying political position.

Things look even more discouraging when you use the researchers’ snazzy interactive maps to break down the estimates by congressional district. The blue districts on the map below are places where the researchers’ statistical model predicts that fewer than half of respondents believe that humans are primarily responsible for climate change. Yellow/orange districts are places where at least half of respondents accept the scientific consensus. As you can see, there’s an awful lot of blue—according to the data, 58 percent of US congressional districts have majorities that don’t accept the climate science.

Yale Project on Climate Change Communication

The margin of error on the data makes it impossible to rank with certainty the districts with the most climate denial. Still, the two darker blue portions on the map are noteworthy—these are the only congressional districts in the country in which under 40 percent of residents are estimated to accept the scientific consensus. Texas’ 1st District (where 38 percent believe the science) is represented by Louie Gohmert, a Republican who thinks that the world “may be cooling” and that the rising level of carbon dioxide is a good thing because it will mean “more plants.” Alabama’s 4th District (39 percent believe climate science) is represented by Republican Robert Aderholt, who has argued that “Earth is currently in a natural warming cycle rather than a man-made climate change.” And it’s hard to see on the map, but California’s 12th District has the highest percentage of residents projected to believe that humans are causing climate change—65 percent. That district is in San Francisco, and it’s represented by House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Adding elected officials’ party affiliations to the Yale data makes it clear that these aren’t simply one-off examples: In the average district with a Democratic member of Congress, 54 percent of adults believe humans are largely responsible for global warming; in the average GOP-controlled district, less than 46 percent agree.

Similar patterns exist at the state level:

Yale Project on Climate Change Communication

In Oklahoma—home to snowball-wielding climate denier Sen. James Inhofe—just 44 percent of residents believe humans cause global warming, according to the researchers’ estimates. The same is true in Kentucky, which is represented in the Senate by Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul. Paul has said that he’s “not sure anybody exactly knows why” the climate is changing.

One final note: Take a look at the early presidential primary and caucus states—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. According to the Yale data, none of these states have majorities that accept the scientific consensus. (Nevada, at 50 percent, is the best of the four.) And when you consider that Republican primary voters are far more hostile to climate science than the general population, there seems to be very little incentive for GOP presidential candidates to embrace the truth about global warming.

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These Maps Show Why We Keep Electing Climate Change Deniers

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Another State Agency Just Banned the Words "Climate Change"

by CareySargent Posted on April 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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The climate change language police just struck again.

Last month it was in Florida, where former staffers with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection alleged that senior officials, under the direction of Gov. Rick Scott (R), had instituted an unwritten ban on using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming.” Scott denied the claim.

This week’s incident is much less ambiguous. Yesterday, the three-person commission that oversees a public land trust in Wisconsin voted 2-1 to block the trust’s dozen public employees “from engaging in global warming or climate change work while on BCPL time.”

In proposing and voting on the ban, the commission “spent 19 minutes and 29 seconds talking about talking about climate change,” according to Bloomberg:

The move to ban an issue leaves staff at the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands in the unusual position of not being able to speak about how climate change might affect lands it oversees…

The Midwest warmed about 1.5F on average from 1895 to 2012. Pine, maple, birch, spruce, fir, aspen, and beech forests, which are common in the region, are likely to decline as the century progresses, according to the latest US National Climate Assessment.

The ban was proposed by newly elected State Treasurer Matt Adamczyk, a Republican who ran on the unusual campaign promise to swiftly eliminate his own job. At a public meeting on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg, Adamczyk said he was disturbed to learn that the agency’s director, Tia Nelson, had spent some time co-chairing a global warming task force in 2007-08 at the request of former governor Jim Doyle (D). Dealing with climate issues—even responding to emails on the subject—isn’t in the agency’s wheelhouse, he said. Adamczyk didn’t immediately return our request for comment.

Adamczyk was joined in voting for the ban by State Attorney General Brad Schimel (R), also newly-elected. Schimel is handling Gov. Scott Walker’s lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency over President Barack Obama’s new climate regulations. The ban was opposed by the commission’s third member, Secretary of State Bob La Follette, a Democrat.

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Another State Agency Just Banned the Words "Climate Change"

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Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

by IvoryT33yv Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tom Steyer’s climate-focused political group is already gearing up for the 2016 presidential race, announcing on Monday a new effort that will focus on putting Republican candidates on the defense when it comes to global warming.

NextGen Climate’s chief strategist, Chris Lehane, said in a call with reporters that the group’s mission heading into 2016 is to “disqualify” candidates who deny that climate change is real or caused by human activity by proving that “they don’t have what it takes to be president.” The effort will be called Hot Seat, and NextGen Climate says it will involve media and on-the-ground campaigns in key electoral states aimed at linking Republican deniers to the Koch brothers and other interests that seek to undermine climate science.

The idea, NextGen says, is to force Republican candidates who are skeptical of climate change to defend their views right out of the gate.

“If you’re in a position that is different from 97 percent of scientists, that does raise basic competency questions in terms of whether people are going to want to give you the keys to the White House,” said Lehane.

Their first target, Lehane said, is Rand Paul, who is expected to announce his candidacy Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky. The group is planning to hit Paul with a stunt involving a “lie detector test” to force him to go on the record about his views on climate change, and will also follow the candidate to Iowa. Paul has previously questioned the consensus view among scientists that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the climate, but has also tried to moderate his stance somewhat in recent months.

The group intends to portray Republican candidates who deny climate change as being subservient to the will of major donors like the Koch brothers, the conservative fossil-fuel billionaires. “The Kochs have acquired the Republican Party and purposed it,” said Lehane. “Now they have these various Republican candidates saying they don’t believe in the science.”

Through his NextGen Climate project, billionaire investor Steyer spent more than $74 million trying to make climate change a central issue in the 2014 midterm election. The group’s effort had decidedly mixed results: Of the seven races it targeted, NextGen’s endorsed candidates won in only three. But the group has maintained that 2014 was a success, since Republican candidates were forced to go on the record about their views on climate change.

“Climate really is playing a significant role in the national election and in battleground states,” said Lehane. He noted that 2014 was the “first time that climate had really been elevated to that level in the election, where folks who believe the science were able to use it offensively, and deniers were on defense.”

In 2014, NextGen’s efforts included major television and online ad buys, as well as in-state spectacles such as following Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown’s campaign around New Hampshire in a truck loaded with oil barrels and rolling a replica of Noah’s Ark into Florida to confront Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

The group thinks that 2016 will be an even bigger year for climate, given the higher turnouts in presidential election years and the role young voters will play in the debate. Polls have found that 80 percent of voters under the age of 35 support the actions the Obama administration has taken to address climate change, and even 52 percent of young Republican voters said they were more inclined to back a candidate who supported those climate efforts.

Lehane was coy about how much Steyer intends to spend this time around, stating only that “he’s made pretty clear he will spend what it takes.” It was strongly implied that the dollar figure would be higher than it was in 2014, as the group believes that 2016 is “the defining election of our time.”

Hot Seat will include an “aggressive, state-of-the-art social media” element as well as “highly targeted” radio, television and online advertising, Lehane said. The group also plans to have a strong presence on college campuses and to engage in targeted outreach to young voters. The effort will be run from a “high-tech war room” in San Francisco.

NextGen is already planning to follow Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin and a potential 2016 candidate, as he travels to Europe later this month. Lehane didn’t elaborate on the group’s intentions for Walker’s trip, but said, “I can at the minimum guarantee it will be highly entertaining.”

Originally posted here: 

Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

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Scientists Are Arguing About When, Exactly, Humans Started to Rule the Planet

by Ouida0066rq Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Signs of human impact on the planet are everywhere. Sea levels are rising as ice at both poles melts; plastic waste clogs the ocean; urban sprawl paves over landscapes while industrial agricultural empties aquifers. Between climate change, urban development, and straight-up, old-school pollution, the Earth we inhabit now would be scarcely recognizable to our earliest ancestors 150,000 year ago.

In fact, these changes are so pronounced and their connection to human activity so obvious, that many scientists now believe we’ve already ventured well past a remarkable tipping point—Homo sapiens, they argue, have now surpassed nature as the dominant force shaping the Earth’s landscapes, atmosphere, and other living things. Units of deep geologic time often are defined by their dominant species: 400 million years ago fish owned the Devonian Period; 265 million years ago dinosaurs ruled the Mesozoic Era. Today, humans dominate the Anthropocene.

If defining what the Anthropocene represents is straight-forward, assigning it a commencement date has proved a monumental challenge. The term was first proposed by Russian geologist Aleksei Pavlov in 1922, and since then it has occupied off-and-on the attentions of the niche group of scientists whose job it is to decide how to slice our planet’s 4.5 billion-year history into manageable chunks. But in 2009, as climate change increasingly gained traction as a matter of public interest, the idea of actually making a formal designation started to appear in talks and papers. Today, if the scientific literature is any indication, the debate is fully ignited.

In fact, “it has been open season on the Anthropocene,” said Jan Zalasiewicz, a University of Leicester paleogeologist who is a leading voice in the debate. Within the last month a heap of new papers have come out with competing views on whether the Anthropocene is worthy of a formal designation, and if so, when exactly it began. The latest was published in Science today.

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Scientists Are Arguing About When, Exactly, Humans Started to Rule the Planet

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