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Big military guy more scared of climate change than enemy guns

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State Department Again Sees No Environmental Barriers to Keystone Pipeline

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on March 1, 2013

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State Department Again Sees No Environmental Barriers to Keystone Pipeline

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The Keystone XL pipeline could create as many as 20 long-term jobs

by donkorleone842 Posted on February 20, 2013

The Keystone XL pipeline could create as many as 20 long-term jobs

MCLA

There are more people in this picture than may have long-term jobs with the pipeline.

Last week year, Bloomberg did a little digging into the oft-mentioned “thousands of jobs” that would result if the Keystone XL pipeline were built. What they found, as they say, might surprise you, if you are surprised when fatuous political arguments turn out to be erroneous.

From the article:

The debate in Washington has focused on short-term construction and manufacturing jobs, rather than on permanent ones. Estimates for construction and manufacturing employment range from 2,500 to 20,000, depending on assumptions of how much of the project’s budget will be spent in the U.S. The company says some of the steel will be made in Canada and India.

TransCanada Vice President Robert Jones said permanent jobs would be “in the hundreds, certainly not in the thousands,” in a Nov. 11 interview on CNN.

Calgary-based TransCanada says construction will create 20,000 “new, real U.S. jobs.”

TransCanada left out one adjective: temporary. Over the long term, though, that number drops a little bit. Once construction is complete, there won’t be 20,000 jobs — there will be more like 20.

The number of people needed to operate and maintain the 1,661-mile (2,673-kilometer) pipeline may be as few as 20, according to the U.S. State Department, or as many as a few hundred, according to TransCanada.

There are all sorts of caveats that can and should be made: Construction employment is necessarily temporary, for example, and a project of this scope will likely have some ancillary job creation benefits (at refineries on the Gulf Coast, for example). But the fact remains that pipeline advocates have been harping on the project’s job creation potential, yet in a decade the pipeline may have added fewer than two dozen people to the workforce. That’s as many jobs as are created when a new restaurant opens.

That said, the low number makes sense. After all, the pipes in your house don’t need someone to constantly sit and watch them. On the rare occasion that something goes wrong, that’s the point at which you become a TransCanada-style job creator, calling in a plumber.

Which raises another point: It’s very possible that the pipeline will create more jobs down the road. One little rupture, and we’re talking about hundreds more short-term jobs in the lucrative oil-sopping and valve-turning industries.

Update: In my enthusiasm to share this number, I failed to notice that the February 13th on which the article came out was in 2012, not 2013. In the intervening year, it’s possible that the number of projected long-term employees could have reached 22. Maybe even 23.

Source

Keystone’s Thousands of Jobs Fall to 20 When Pipeline Opens, Bloomberg

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

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In a blow to Republican rhetoric, China announces plan for a carbon tax

by anjunonstennyao Posted on February 20, 2013

In a blow to Republican rhetoric, China announces plan for a carbon tax

When Marco Rubio says that America “is a country, not a planet,” he’s saying that we don’t need to bother cutting pollution because we’re not the worst offenders. If China, which burns nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined, isn’t trying to limit its pollution, why should we? Rubio’s wording may be unique, but his rhetoric isn’t — it’s a key argument for the Republican Party. As long as China’s emitting unchecked carbon pollution, why can’t we?

Premier Hu Jintao meets with President Obama.

Well, so much for that argument. From Xinhua, the official press agency of the Chinese government:

China will proactively introduce a set of new taxation policies designed to preserve the environment, including a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, according to a senior official with the Ministry of Finance (MOF).

The government will collect the environmental protection tax instead of pollutant discharge fees, as well as levy a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, Jia Chen, head of the ministry’s tax policy division, wrote in an article published on the MOF’s website. …

China is among the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gas and has set goals for cutting emissions. The government has vowed to reduce carbon intensity, or the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic output, by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 in comparison to 2005 levels.

China’s Ministry of Finance has considered a carbon tax before, with the aim of having it in place by 2012. Some suggested that the timing of that proposal, on the heels of the disastrous Copenhagen climate conference, was meant to blunt criticism over China’s role in scuttling those talks. It’s hard to see what similar politics might be at play in this case, although at least one climate-change-denial site suggests that the move is a feint to encourage America to act on a carbon tax first.

Fat chance of that. Republicans may be using China’s pollution as an excuse to resist increasing the cost of carbon emissions, but if China implements a carbon tax, pollution apologists will just point instead to India. If India acted on carbon, they’d point to the economy. The goal isn’t to offer sincere critique; it’s to delay internalizing the cost of carbon pollution for their allies in the fossil fuel industry.

If Marco Rubio is lucky, that delay will last until after the 2016 primaries. If he’s got any goal in mind, it’s that.

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

In a blow to Republican rhetoric, China announces plan for a carbon tax

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Marco Rubio keeps digging deeper on climate denial

by Myrna Posted on February 7, 2013

Marco Rubio keeps digging deeper on climate denial

Let’s talk about Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Capitol Hill’s “it” guy in the same sense that Hollywood has marginally talented people whom it seizes upon and promotes until the next guy comes along. So here’s Rubio’s moment, maybe three years earlier than he would have hoped.

Earlier this week, Rubio sat down with BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith for a conversation about a range of topics. (The event was called “BuzzFeed Brews,” intending to be an informal two-guys-have-a-beer sort of thing. Rubio didn’t drink his beer.) At one point, Smith asked about climate change. Here’s the clip:

Rubio’s response?

Even if — anything that we would do on that would have a real impact on the economy and probably — if it’s only us doing it, a very negligible impact on the environment. Ultimately, if you look at the developing countries — which are not developing countries anymore; China, India, and others — they’re now the largest polluters in the world by far. So to the extent that that’s what you’re trying to get at, the United States is a country, not a planet.

On the other hand, if we unilaterally impose these things on our economy, you’re going to have a devastating impact on economics, depending on which measure it is we’re talking about. And I think that’s what, more than anything else, is standing in the way of doing anything on this. There has to be a cost-benefit analysis to every one of these principles that people are pushing on. And the benefit is difficult to justify when it’s just us doing it.

Smith follows up: Is climate change a threat to Florida? Rubio:

Well, first of all, the climate is always changing. That’s not the fundamental question. The fundamental question is whether man-made activity is what’s contributing most to it. I understand that people say there’s a significant scientific consensus on that issue, but I’ve actually seen reasonable debate on that principle. But beyond it, the secondary question is: Is there anything that government can do about that that will actually make a difference? In essence, we can pass a law that prohibits X, it has this dollar impact on our economy which is devastating, but what’s the benefit of it? Will it have a direct impact on actually turning around these climate changes that we’re trying to address? And that’s where I think this whole thing breaks down.

When you look at the cost-benefit analysis that’s being proposed, if you did all these things they’re talking about, what impact would it really have on these changes that we’re outlining? On the other hand, I can tell you the impact it would have on certain industries and on our economy, and that’s where it falls apart.

OK. Let’s start at the beginning.

Rubio’s first argument is that there’s no point in the United States doing anything since China and India are still polluting and those countries actually contribute more to greenhouse gas pollution than the U.S. It’s true that China produces the most CO2 in the world, but, on a per-capita basis, the U.S. exceeds it. Claiming that as a reason to do nothing is a bullshit, juvenile argument you’d hear from a 12-year-old: Why do I have to clean my room when my sister’s room is so dirty?

Moreover, this argument is a new staple of the right. We shouldn’t end subsidies to oil companies because it wouldn’t fix the deficit by itself. We shouldn’t curtail firearms because people will still die in other ways. We shouldn’t curb pollution because others pollute more.

We will concede his next point: The United States is not a planet.

gageskidmore

He then argues that the climate is always changing and that there’s debate on the role we play in that change. The first point is correct; the second, not. Here’s how Phil Plait at Slate rebutted this.

The first thing Rubio said was, “Well, first of all, the climate is always changing.” And sure, that’s true … on a 10,000 year time scale. What we’re seeing in the past few decades is climate change on scale unprecedented since records have been kept, and extremely unusual even when compared to proxy records (tree ring data, for example, and measurements using ice cores) that go back millennia. Weather can change abruptly, year-to-year, but climate change as we’re seeing now is extremely rare, and generally catastrophic for many species alive at the time. …

There has been no reasonable debate, at least not from the deniers, who for the overwhelmingly most part are not climate scientists, who twist data, who leave out critical information, who use cherry-picked graphs, and who resort to outrageous ad hominems to cast doubt on the reality of global warming.

Rubio’s said similarly silly things in the past, including his line about what the government can or can’t do. But the argument most worth dissecting is his argument on economics.

What Rubio does is attack a straw man, demolishing an opponent that he created. He twice says that taking action on climate change would be “devastating”; multiple times he suggests that “cost-benefit analysis” doesn’t support acting to curb pollution.

Both of these claims are hollow nonsense. To the first point: What would be devastating, Senator? What policy would be “devastating” to the economy? At no point does Rubio identify what he’s talking about. Carbon tax? Limiting CO2 pollution? What? What “economics” will be destroyed by this phantom policy? Rubio’s goal isn’t to make an argument, it’s to make a diversion. He plants a bomb off to the side so he can point at it instead of talking policy.

Then there’s his ever-so-sober take on economic analysis. The benefits of fixing the climate must outweigh the costs, Rubio says. Professor Rubio wishes he could help, but the math just doesn’t add up. This is as phony as his “devastating” remarks. Just as Rubio has done no real assessment of the science behind climate change, he’s done no assessment of the economics. Rubio’s understanding of what climate change could do to the American economy — what it did last year in New York City! — is so shallow that he isn’t even concerned for his home state. The Environmental Defense Fund suggests that just one small part of the state’s economy, reef tourism, could be damaged irreparably by the changing ocean — to the tune of $5.5 billion. In Florida alone.

Rubio doesn’t care. His goal isn’t to fix the problem; it’s to be popular. If the GOP base wants to hear dismissals of science and puerile overviews of economics, Rubio will deliver. It’s fair to ask if Rubio believes his rhetoric on climate change. It’s also fair to assume that he does.

Wasn’t last year’s election supposed to usher in a new Republican party committed to embracing reality? If so, Marco Rubio is solidly a Republican in the 2012 vein. Whether that’s good enough for 2016 is a great question.

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

Marco Rubio keeps digging deeper on climate denial

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California’s nutty farmland values are spiking

by f45 Posted on January 15, 2013

California’s nutty farmland values are spiking

By Susie Cagle

Over the past few years, farmland values have ballooned nationwide. In California, that rise has not only changed the economics of Central Valley farming, but the crops themselves.

A weak dollar has pushed up demand for exports of California’s goods to Asia, especially almonds, pistachios, and walnuts. In 2011, almonds beat out California’s iconic grapes as the state’s second top commodity, at $3.9 billion a year. Nut-growing farmland value has grown 15 to 20 percent over the last two years, and it’s still consistently selling for 10-20 percent above asking price.

In the economically troubled Central Valley, this is the kind of market that makes short-sighted investors drool and long-view economists wince. From the Associated Press:

Investors both foreign and domestic have taken notice, buying up farmland and driving up agricultural land values in a region with some of the highest residential foreclosure rates.

California’s almond industry, which grows about 80 percent of the global almond supply and 100 percent of the domestic supply, saw the most dramatic growth powered by strong demand from new money-spending middle classes in India and China. The growth has prompted a rush for almond-growing land and pushed almond land values through the roof …

Revenues for almonds and walnuts increased by 30 percent between 2010 and 2011, and revenues for grapes rose by 20 percent, according to the USDA. California’s agricultural exports during that time grew by more than $3 billion …

In Fresno County, almond land was valued at up to $18,000 per acre in 2012, and pistachio land at up to $25,000 per acre. That’s higher than citrus, grape, or tree fruit land — and much higher than the $7,200 average per acre farm real estate value in California last year, according to the USDA.

This farm boom is happening at the same time that California state is trying to figure out how to snag all the farmland it needs to turn into high-speed train tracks. The more lucrative the farming and the more expensive the land, the dirtier the fight over high-speed rail is likely to get. If California ends up using its power of eminent domain on these fancy farms, things could get truly nutty.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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U.S. renewable investment drops in 2012 – but still hits second-highest level ever

by vserko45 Posted on January 14, 2013

U.S. renewable investment drops in 2012 – but still hits second-highest level ever

This is one of those “good news/bad news” things. We’ll start with the bad news, from The Hill:

Green energy investment fell in 2012 globally after hitting record levels the year before, driven in part by reduced activity in the United States, according to new data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The research firm reported Monday that overall investment was $269 billion, down from $302 billion in 2011 …

And now the good.

… but still the second highest level ever, according to its database. …

“We warned at the start of last year that investment in 2012 was likely to fall below 2011 levels, but rumors of the death of clean energy investment have been greatly exaggerated,” Michael Liebreich, the company’s CEO, said.

“Indeed, the most striking aspect of these figures is that the decline was not bigger, given the fierce headwinds the clean-energy sector faced in 2012 as a result of policy uncertainty, the ongoing European fiscal crisis and continuing sharp falls in technology costs,” he said.

One of the main drivers for the decline was the wind industry, which spent the latter half of the year being treated by D.C. the way a cat treats a mouse.

The U.S. experienced a steep, 32 percent drop amid fears that a popular wind energy tax credit would lapse (it ultimately was extended in the “fiscal cliff” deal), and as renewable power faced competition from low-cost natural gas.

The company said wind investment also fell in Spain, which enacted a moratorium on subsidies for projects that have not yet been approved; India, where wind incentives expired; and Italy.

Bloomberg

Click to embiggen.

The Energy Information Administration suggested in December that renewable costs will continue to drop in 2013, and, combined with state mandates for renewables, that could mean an increase in installation this year.

Which would be a “good news/good news” thing.

Source

Analysts: Global, US green energy investment slid in ‘12, The Hill

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

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Kyoto’s first phase expires as greenhouse gas emissions and dirty energy use spike

by anjunonstennyao Posted on January 2, 2013

Kyoto’s first phase expires as greenhouse gas emissions and dirty energy use spike

In 1997, most of the world’s nations signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty intended to fight climate change. The goal was to gradually cut greenhouse gas emissions through the end of 2012, the first commitment period. How’d we do? From the CBC:

The controversial and ineffective Kyoto Protocol’s first stage comes to an end today, leaving the world with 58 per cent more greenhouse gases than in 1990, as opposed to the five per cent reduction its signatories sought.

Ah, well. Worth a shot!

If there is anything good that came out of the Kyoto experience, it is that the issue it tried and failed to tackle is now top of mind, says [Steven Guilbeault of Equiterre, a Montreal-based environmental group].

“That’s probably one of the biggest accomplishments of the Kyoto Protocol, is making climate change something that’s part of our everyday life.”

You know what else is making climate change something that’s part of our everyday life? Climate change.

One reason Kyoto has been such a failure is its unenforceability. As our David Roberts put it on Twitter:

For example, in the United States. President George W. Bush refused to support the protocol out of fear it would hurt the American economy. Our carbon emissions plummeted anyway — thanks largely to the economic slowdown.

Another reason Kyoto failed is that it exempted China, India, and other “developing” countries from emissions cuts during its first phase. By the end of 2011, coal use globally reached a new high, spurred by China and India.

From the Worldwatch Institute:

Coal use increased by 5.4 percent to 3,724.3 million tons of oil equivalent (mtoe) from the end of 2010 to the end of 2011. Demand for natural gas grew by 2.2 percent in 2011, reaching 2,905.6 mtoe. …

Spurred mainly by demand growth in China and India, coal’s share in the global primary energy mix reached 28 percent in 2011 — its highest point since the International Energy Agency began keeping statistics in 1971. While the United States remained one of the world’s largest coal users, consumption growth in 2011 was concentrated among countries that are not part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including China and India. Consumption in non-OECD countries grew by 8.4 percent to 2,625.7 mtoe. These countries accounted for 70.5 percent of global coal consumption in 2011.

We can expect to see that pattern continue as other nations increase energy use. Africa, for example, is seeing a boom in energy production and consumption. From The Christian Science Monitor:

Africa, home to 15 percent of the world’s population, consumes just 3 percent of the world’s energy output, and 587 million people, including close to three-quarters of those living in Sub-Saharan Africa, still have no access to electricity via national grids.

But the situation is changing, and swiftly. At 4.1 percent growth, Africa’s per capita energy consumption is growing faster than anywhere else, driven by improved infrastructure, inward investment, and efforts to tackle corruption.

Meanwhile, in the last five years, there have been 64 major discoveries of potential new fuel supplies — mostly oil and gas deposits. Of those, 13 were found in the first eight months of 2012 alone.

Overall, international growth in energy consumption is far outpacing interational efforts to reduce emissions.

Later this year, Poland will host the 19th annual U.N. climate summit. At worst, it can only tie last year’s summit for ineffectiveness. At best, an agreement will be reached to again try and curb global greenhouse gas emissions.

And in an ideal world choked with optimism, it might actually work.

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