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It takes more than a hurricane to sway some voters in this Texas election

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John Culberson, a United State congressman who represents west Houston, has long questioned “the data” on climate change, which scientists say contributes to more intense and frequent storms. When Hurricane Harvey drenched coastal Texas in the summer of 2017, Culberson’s denials didn’t protect him. Harvey flooded many of his constituents’ homes, as well as, according to one of his staffers, parts of the building that houses his district office.

A few months after the storm, Daniel Cohan, an environmental engineering professor at Rice University, penned a Houston Chronicle op-ed asking whether candidates for Congress were “ready to face climate change.” The piece was largely directed at Culberson, who has represented the Texas 7th congressional district, where Cohan lives, since 2001.

Read about other midterm races where voters are concerned about climate.

Cohan’s op-ed was intended to “debunk the misperceptions of voter apathy on climate.” Sure enough, based on data from The Cook Political Report and Yale’s 2018 Climate Opinion Maps, a lot of people in frequently flooded Houston are worried about global warming. But while the issue played a big role in the Texas 7th’s Democratic primary — the candidate who finished second, Laura Moser, warned that climate change could threaten “the very existence of our city” — it’s unclear how much these concerns will translate into political pressure on Culberson during this year’s midterm elections.

To date, Culberson is still not talking about climate change — even as his lead in the polls dwindles as election day nears. His opponent Lizzie Fletcher isn’t doing much to highlight the topic, either, at least in the general election. In its endorsement of Culberson’s opponent, the Houston Chronicle described Fletcher as a centrist who “backs offshore drilling.”

Nevertheless, environmentalists like Cohan have been working for months to bring the issue of climate change front and center. When he wrote his Chronicle piece, in January, Cohan had just moderated an event in west Houston called the “Houston Climate Forum.” The goal was to get politicians and voters talking about policies to slow global warming. Eight candidates attended, including Fletcher and Beto O’Rourke, the fawned-over Democratic Senate candidate trying to unseat Ted Cruz. More than 10,000 people tuned in online to watch, according to the event’s organizers.

U.S. Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is recognized during a visit by Vice President Mike Pence to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.David J. Phillip / AP

“Candidates [were] trying to one-up each other, showing how strong they would be on climate change,” Cohan recalls.

Alas, no Republican candidates showed up to the forum.

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A year after Harvey, climate concerns remain stubbornly on the left side of the political spectrum, at least in Houston. They haven’t become a bipartisan rallying cry like, say, health-care reform. Cohan is still hopeful, but he acknowledges climate change might not play an outsized role in November’s midterm elections — in Houston or beyond. “There have been so many other hot-button issues, from the treatment of immigrants to Trump scandals,” he says.

If warming can’t crash the conversation in a seemingly climate-changed place like Houston, it suggests the issue has much headway to make up nationwide. And if the Texas 7th is a barometer for conservative political will on climate, the fact that Culberson still won’t talk about it means much of the right probably isn’t ready to take action.


According to Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Culberson doesn’t have to talk about climate change because there aren’t enough swing voters in the Texas 7th who care about the issue. Those that do care already know how they’re voting.

“For the people for whom that’s important, they know Lizzie Fletcher is a Democrat and that John Culberson is a Republican,” Jones points out.

The Texas 7th is affluent, well-educated, and largely residential. While the east side of Houston has become infamous for its toxic oil and gas infrastructure, the west side serves as a comparatively clean bedroom community for the countless white-collar energy industry employees who work in the region. It is also generally spared from the worst of the health effects associated with Texas’ petrochemical economy.

“It’s two completely different worlds,” says Rosanne Barone of the two sides of the 7th. She’s a program director at Texas Campaign for the Environment and assessed the impact of pollution across Houston. “The worst offenders are on the east side.”

Still, signs abound that west Houston is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change, in the form of freak storms and floods. It has suffered extensive flooding from Harvey and at least two other storms in the past five years. In fact, Rep. Culberson has used last year’s hurricane as a major talking point during his campaign, name-dropping the storm in more than half of his emails to voters this year.

Lizzie Fletcher (far left) poses with Daniel Cohan (center) and others at January’s Houston Climate Forum.Courtesy Daniel Cohan

Despite those invocations, Culberson hasn’t budged on the issue of global warming, which many scientists believe will fuel the continual flooding of his district. On his official website, one of the few references to climate change is a 2009 press release questioning the “scientific integrity” of climate data. Culberson’s office didn’t respond to an interview request for this story. (Neither did Fletcher’s campaign.)

“He hasn’t been one of the snowball throwers calling climate change a hoax,” Daniel Cohan says of Culberson. “But he takes a wait-and-see attitude, falsely indicating that the science isn’t clear.”

That’s a problem, according to the Rice professor. The science is clear, he says, and “not something theoretical.” Houstonians regularly witness the effects of climate change, he explains, as they patiently wait for waters to recede from their flooded homes, cars, and roadways.


While Culberson’s unwillingness to discuss climate might be problematic for his specific district, it’s not strange for Republican congressional candidates in 2018. Few GOP members appear to take climate change seriously.

Nationwide polling helps explain why. Self-identified “liberal” voters rank global warming as one of the issues that are most important to them. But its ranking drops off precipitously as you move to the right along the political spectrum, according to a poll conducted by Yale and George Mason University. For the next-most liberal group — “moderate/conservative Democrats” — the issue drops to 16th. It keeps falling among increasingly conservative groups.

The exception may be voters who are still grappling with Harvey, whom Jones notes are “not an insignificant number” and could be swung by talk of climate policy. In a University of Houston survey this summer on the storm’s impact on four south Texas counties, eight percent of respondents said that they were still living in temporary housing. Twenty-two percent of survey respondents said they had to abandon their homes during Harvey, and almost half said their residence had flooded at some point since 2001. People whose homes flooded during Harvey were indeed more likely to say they believed the scientific consensus on climate change — but that was a view shared by more than 60 percent of the overall respondents.

Even then, the polling broke down along “generational and partisan divides,” the study researchers wrote. Just 35 percent of Houston Republicans accepted the science on climate change, compared to 80 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of non-affiliated voters.

“People are so rigid in their partisanship,” says Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston who has studied these trends. “Even in the wake of the most profound storm that the city and region has ever faced, it’s difficult to move people’s perceptions.”

If anything, intense partisanship in the era of Trump might cause Republicans to dig their heels even further on climate policy. In one study, published in April, researchers asked participants about proposals to mitigate warming. Republicans were less likely to support ideas once they learned Democrats also supported them. (Democrats were also less likely to support Republican proposals, but the effect was less dramatic.)

Former Democratic congressional candidate Laura Moser speaks at January’s Houston Climate Forum.Courtesy Daniel Cohan

Still, environmentalists say the increasing frequency and severity of floods, storms, and wildfires — not to mention the alarming U.N. climate report released earlier this month — will continue pushing global warming to the center of United States politics. “We’re seeing more and more that people generally do care about climate change and climate policy, and more people associate it with extreme weather,” says Jack Pratt, a senior political director at the Environmental Defense Fund.


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Oil and gas is a major industry in Houston, accounting for one-quarter of drilling jobs in the United States, according to recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s a factor that some experts point to as a reason why climate-change activism hasn’t gained much traction in the region. But while it can be, as Upton Sinclair famously pointed out, “difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” those blinders could eventually fall.

“When you see water coming into your home, the evidence suggests that the storm was more severe,” Cohan says, about the link between climate change and more extreme weather events.

As the effects of warming worsen, it will get harder for Republican politicians to avoid discussing it. And with the U.N. now warning that climate change could destabilize the planet as early as 2030, the real question is whether this shift will happen in time.

Daniel Cohan thinks there’s a growing interest in climate policy on the right. He points to support for the Paris climate accord among GOP voters and the formation of the recent bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Though Cohan readily concedes the caucus hasn’t put forth any concrete policies since forming in 2016).

For him, even the fact that Culberson isn’t outright denying climate change is a sign of progress. “He’s not running on a platform of standing up for the oil-and-gas industry against climate policy,” Cohan says, “which a Republican could do.”

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It takes more than a hurricane to sway some voters in this Texas election

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Tech billionaires and Republican leaders use secret retreat to plot against Trump

Tech billionaires and Republican leaders use secret retreat to plot against Trump

By on 9 Mar 2016commentsShare

In a last-ditch effort to stop Donald Trump from trampling all over their presidential primary, billionaires, tech leaders, and establishment Republicans met last weekend on a private resort on Sea Island, Georgia, to come up with a plan.

The Huffington Post reports that attendees of the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, political operative Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, several members of Congress, and business luminaries like Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Larry Page, Napster creator Sean Parker, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, and Tesla founder and libertarian clean energy advocate Elon Musk, who really, really hates Donald Trump. Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, was also in attendance at the off-the-record meeting, and he reportedly wrote in an email that “A specter was haunting the World Forum — the specter of Donald Trump.”

While the event is notoriously secretive, the main attraction (beside the spa), according to insiders, was a presentation by Karl Rove, the Bush policy advisor who has nearly as many scandals linked to his name as Trump himself. Rove reportedly used data from focus groups to show that most Americans don’t view Trump as “presidential” or think he should be “anywhere near a nuclear trigger.” We don’t know where Rove got his data, but a quick Google test tells us basically the same thing.

Of course, Trump’s continuing dominance in the polls and primaries shows that some American voters might not actually have a problem with a man they think is a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler — even an orange-tinted reincarnation who thinks climate change is a liberal hoax and talks about his penis on national television. Regardless, Rove argued at the Forum that Trump’s presumed victory could be thwarted if rivals John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio can siphon off enough votes to deny him a plurality at the Republican National Convention. If that happened, Rove would likely throw his considerable weight behind Kasich or Rubio — anyone else, Rove wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, will lose to his presumed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

So did the power players down in Georgia come up with plan? Doubtful.

“Whatever becomes of Trump’s campaign,” wrote Sean Illing in Salon, “this much is certain: the people on that island won’t have a say in it. Trump owes his existence to the angry mob supporting him, and that mob was born of decades of Republican propaganda.”

The men of Sea Island, Rove, McConnell, Ryan, among others, have used their political will to spread this propaganda and divide the nation. Whatever plan did or didn’t come of AEI’s forum, it’s almost uplifting that the Republican party elites have found someone besides Obama and his fellow Democrats to dump their rage upon — and it’s someone of their own creation.

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North Dakota’s top oil regulator is also its top oil promoter

North Dakota’s top oil regulator is also its top oil promoter

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In North Dakota, where an oil boom is leading to spills and explosions, the top oil regulator also serves as a cheerleader for the oil industry. And some Democrats think it’s time for the pom-poms to change hands.

The Forum News Service reports that state’s Senate and House minority leaders have asked the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which oversees industries including oil and gas, to separate the oil regulation and promotion responsibilities of the Department of Mineral Resources’s boss.

In a letter to the commission sent Tuesday, the Democrats pointed to recent accidents involving crude that was fracked from the state’s Bakken formation. The accidents included the spill of 20,000 barrels of oil from a pipeline into a wheat field, and the derailment and explosion two weeks ago of an oil-hauling train near the town of Casselton. The Casselton fire prompted warnings from the federal government that Bakken crude poses a “significant fire risk.” Here’s more from the Forum News Service:

“Recent, high-profile incidents across the state confirm the public is ill-served by a director who is charged with regulating the development he is duty-bound to promote,” write Sen. Mac Schneider, D-Grand Forks, and Rep. Kent Onstad, D-Parshall.

The Democrats cite a portion of the North Dakota Century Code that says it’s the state’s policy “to foster, to encourage, and to promote the development, production, and utilization of natural resources of oil and gas.” The Industrial Commission is charged with regulating oil and gas development and delegates much of that authority to the director of Mineral Resources.

Schneider and Onstad announced they will introduce legislation in the 2015 legislative session that would permanently separate responsibilities of regulation and promotion.

In the near term, the North Dakota Democrats ask the Industrial Commission to use its authority to “establish a firewall” between the promotion and regulation roles, Schneider said.

But it sounds like Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R) is happy with things just the way they are. “I really feel that it’s clear that regulation is [the department director’s] essential job,” he told the paper, having not yet read the letter. “I think he does his job.”


Source
ND Democrats propose splitting regulation, promotion duties, Inforum

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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World leaders emitted 2.5 million kilograms of CO2 getting to Davos

World leaders emitted 2.5 million kilograms of CO2 getting to Davos

The World Economic Forum worries about climate change. Here is the organization’s page on the issue, including its “CEO Climate Policy Recommendations.” (For example: “‘Environmentally effective and economically efficient’ framework proposed to succeed Kyoto Accord.” Get on that, U.N.!) This week, WEF’s CEO friends are at the Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which we’ve mentioned.

Which made us wonder: How much did getting all of those CEOs and government leaders and baseball players together itself contribute to climate change?

The answer is: quite a bit. But before we get to the actual number, here’s how we got it. Earlier this week, the business site Quartz got its hands on the complete attendee list for this year’s Davos gathering. Quartz parsed the data about 15 different ways (go play with the sorting tool!) and, when we asked, were happy to share the data with us. (The Forum has an updated list [PDF], but Quartz’ data is more than enough for our purposes.)

Getting to Davos isn’t easy. The picture above shows the town itself, small boxes at the base of various Alps and foothills. There’s no airport. The only ways in are by train, car, or — for the elite of the elite — helicopter. The closest major airport is in Zurich, about a three-hour train ride away. For the smallest possible carbon footprint, then, someone from the United States would fly to Zurich and take the train in. (This is what I did, in 2009.) Seems modest. Until you realize that over 700 people came from the United States to attend the Annual Meeting — not including World Economic Forum staff or support staff.

We took Quartz’ data on the originating country of each of the 2,500-plus listed attendees, and estimated the flight distance between that country’s capital (for the sake of convenience) and Zurich. To calculate carbon dioxide production, we used a figure of .21 kilograms per passenger per kilometer for the flight, and 22 kilograms for a three-hour train trip, per person. To be extra generous, we didn’t include people actually from Switzerland.

Here’s what those flights looked like, as the crow flies. The width of a line represents the number of people from each country that attended Davos. (Every line except the United States is to scale. The United States had two-and-a-half times the next largest contingent, so it would have skewed everything.)

And now, the numbers. The 2,630 attendees cumulatively travelled over 550,000 kilometers by plane; in doing so, they generated 2.47 million kilograms of carbon dioxide. 2,470 metric tons. Add in train travel — 57,860 more kilograms — and the total footprint for those jetting in to Davos is 2,520 metric tons of carbon dioxide. The data, by country:

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t an earth-shattering (earth-boiling?) amount of carbon dioxide. It’s the equivalent of a year’s production by 350 people from China (or 146 Americans). But again: This is only travel to the site, only including attendees. There’s a whole coterie of staff and drivers and media who don’t figure into this number.

As we noted yesterday, the Forum this week released a report reinforcing the urgent need to reduce fossil fuel use, presumably even 2,500 tons of it. So we’ll grant it an exemption for the carbon pollution the gathering itself creates. After all, getting people together to discuss important world issues certainly takes precedence. When these people leave Davos — doubling the total emissions to over 5,000 tons of CO2 — they’ll at least be bringing back some of what they learned to their home countries.

Incidentally, if you’re at Davos, you still have time to get to the forum “Life Lessons from Jazz — Improvisation as a Way of Life.” If you’re pressed for time, borrow someone’s town car.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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