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RFS & Environmental Benefits: Our Response to the House Energy & Commerce Committee White Paper
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RFS & Environmental Benefits: Our Response to the House Energy & Commerce Committee White Paper
Posted 24 May 2013 in
The bottom line:
Changes to the RFS will only destabilize the current investment environment, slow the development of renewable fuel, and protect the oil industry from competition, effectively locking in our current greenhouse gas emission profile from the transportation fuel sector for decades to come.
According to the EPA, greenhouse gas emissions attributed to transportation accounted for about 31 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in 2010, with nearly 65 percent of those emissions stemming from gasoline consumption for personal vehicle use.
Renewable fuel has already displaced petroleum in 10 percent of our gasoline supply, with 13 billion gallons in 2012
In 2012, the use of renewable fuel slashed greenhouse gas emissions by 33.4 million metric tons
The RFS will do even more to reduce oil in our transportation fuel supply and bring increasingly low carbon alternatives to market, so long as it remains in its current form, particularly as the production of cellulosic and advanced renewable fuel increases
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Tagged anchor, changes, commerce-committee, development, energy, house, national, standard, white
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House votes to take Keystone decision out of Obama’s hands
House votes to take Keystone decision out of Obama’s hands
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.)
Those rambunctious fossil-fuel flunkies in the U.S. House of Representatives were at it again Wednesday. They passed a bill that would allow Keystone XL to bypass environmental laws and be built without approval from President Obama.
But the vote tally showed that support for construction of the pipeline is waning among House Democrats, following years of campaigning by environmentalists.
The House voted 241-175 to do away with an ongoing environmental review for the northern leg of the tar-sands pipeline project and make it more difficult for opponents to file appeals. (The southern leg is already more than halfway built.) The vote was mostly along partisan lines: All but one Republican voted in favor, and all but 19 Democrats voted against. Reuters reports that the number of Democrats in favor of the bill was down from the 69 that voted to approve similar legislation in April 2012.
“Pure political theater” is how The Guardian described the passage of the bill:
The bill was unlikely to pass in the Senate and the White House said on Tuesday it would veto any measure that attempted to bypass the current permit process.
But the vote — the seventh time Republicans in Congress have voted to speed up or approve Keystone — keeps up the pressure on Obama to approve the project.
The vote gave GOP lawmakers an opportunity to grandstand and demonstrate their loyalty to an industry that so heavily funds their campaigns:
“Five years! Five years and still no decision. What does five years mean? Well, world war two, where we mobilised America,” Ted Poe, a Texas congressman, said from the house floor on Wednesday.
“We went off to war in less than five years. But yet we can’t get a decision out of the White House for more than five years on this project. Are you kidding me?”
The bill was introduced by Rep. Terry Lee (R-Neb.), who posted a statement on his website lauding its passage and claiming the pipeline would somehow create up to 20,000 jobs, plus another 120,000 indirect jobs. Which is weird, since the State Department’s review found that the northern leg would create 3,900 temporary construction jobs and then just 35 permanent jobs. Maybe Lee doesn’t understand how pipelines work. Maybe he thinks they are filled with child laborers passing oil-filled buckets down the line.
A bill explainer from Anthony Swift’s NRDC blog:
Terry’s bill would thwart a decades old bipartisan process for considering international pipeline applications — a process [in] which the American public is heavily invested after submitting over a million comments detailing the tar sands project’s significant environmental impacts. Moreover, in a series of unprecedented provisions, Terry’s bill would exempt the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), permitting requirements for federal rights of way, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
The bill would not actually approve construction of the pipeline, it would just do away with environmental considerations that some House lawmakers liken to mere paperwork. From Reuters:
“What this boils down to is breaking through bureaucratic hurdles and making this project a priority,” said Jeff Denham, a California Republican.
Yeah, it attempts to boil something down alright. Earth.
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Climate activists to protest at Obama group’s climate events
Climate activists to protest at Obama group’s climate events
Barack Obama’s advocacy group, Organizing for Action, has been calling out Republican climate skeptics in Congress, but climate activists are not impressed. They’re planning to crash OFA events and push the group to fight the Keystone XL pipeline.
350.org and CREDO Action, the political arm of the company CREDO Mobile, are leading the charge. OFA is bracing for it. From BuzzFeed:
OFA circulated a set of talking points to its members for use in dealing with unruly activists. The document, obtained by BuzzFeed, includes information on the science behind climate change and the president’s environmental positions, and ends with a section titled “Keystone Talking Points.” …
The talking points come with a warning: “Volunteers from Credo Action or other organizations may attend your planning session and want to demand that we work on the Keystone XL pipeline.” …
“We understand that there are groups and individuals who would like to work to influence the President and the State Department on a variety of environmental decisions, but OFA’s plan is to do great organizing on building clean energy locally, turning up the heat on Congress and helping individuals and communities switch to clean energy,” the document reads. “They are more than welcome to work with those groups, but we encourage all volunteers to be part of our work and the mission of changing the conversation on climate!”
OFA asks its members to point to the State Department review process when asked about the pipeline.
Organizing for America defended itself to The Washington Post:
In an e-mail, OFA spokeswoman Katie Hogan noted the group already mobilized its members to both engage lawmakers on global warming and press for confirmation of Environmental Protection Agency administrator-designate Gina McCarthy.
“It has been made clear since our first day as an organization that we support the President’s plans from comprehensive immigration reform, to reducing gun violence to climate change, including the completion of the State Department [Keystone XL] review,” Hogan wrote. “Just last week OFA held almost 100 action planning sessions on climate change in communities across the country to talk about the action that can be taken right now to call out members of Congress for denying that climate change is a man-made problem.”
Um, Hogan, pointing out that you’re pointing out that Republicans aren’t taking climate change seriously is kinda missing the point.
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Climate activists to protest at Obama group’s climate events
U.N. to world: “Eat your insects.”
U.N. to world: “Eat your insects.”
“Something’s different about my Hoppy Meal … “
“Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”
“Terribly sorry, sir. It seems that the kitchen was running a little low on maggots.”
If we want to satiate the world population’s ever-growing appetite, insect farming should be the next global foodie fad. Or at least that’s the gist of a new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The thorough 187-page report [PDF], published Monday, covers everything from different cultures’ attitudes towards eating insects to farming methods to tips for using insects as emergency food during disasters.
Benefits of bug munching are manifold: The report points out that farmers can raise insects on human and animal waste, they emit fewer greenhouse gases and produce less pollution than cattle or pigs, and they use substantially less land and water than other livestock.
From the report’s foreword:
Land is scarce and expanding the area devoted to farming is rarely a viable or sustainable option. Oceans are overfished and climate change and related water shortages could have profound implications for food production. To meet the food and nutrition challenges of today – there are nearly 1 billion chronically hungry people worldwide – and tomorrow, what we eat and how we produce it needs to be re-evaluated. Inefficiencies need to be rectified and food waste reduced. We need to find new ways of growing food.
Edible insects have always been a part of human diets, but in some societies there is a degree of distaste for their consumption. Although the majority of edible insects are gathered from forest habitats, innovation in mass-rearing systems has begun in many countries.
More than 1,900 insect varieties have been identified as sources of human food around the world, the report notes. The most frequently consumed insects are (deep breath) beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, cicadas, leafhoppers, planthoppers, scale insects, termites, dragonflies, and even regular old flies.
If your mouth isn’t watering yet, read this passage from The Guardian’s report:
“In the past there has been a tendency to say insects are for primitive, stupid people. This is nonsense, a misconception that must be corrected,” says lead author Arnold van Huis, who has helped write a Dutch insect recipe book that includes mealworm pizza and locust ravioli.
Westerners barely know what they are missing, he suggests. Dragonflies boiled in coconut milk with ginger are an Indonesian delicacy; beekeepers in parts of China are considered virile because they eat larvae from their hives, and tarantulas are popular in Cambodia. Europe gave up eating them centuries ago, but Pliny the elder, the Roman scholar, wrote that aristocrats “loved to eat beetle larvae reared on flour and wine” while Aristotle described the best time to harvest cicadas: “The larva on attaining full size becomes a nymph; then it tastes best, before the husk is broken. At first the males are better to eat, but after copulation the females, which are then full of white eggs,” he wrote.
Mealworm pizza and locust ravioli are all fine and good, but beetle larvae infused with flour and wine? That’s haute cuisine.
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Climate-denying GOP rep wants to take science-funding decisions away from scientists
Climate-denying GOP rep wants to take science-funding decisions away from scientists
Rep. Lamar Smith, thinking deeply about science.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), a climate skeptic who somehow became chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, wants Congress to meddle in decisions about which science research efforts should get government funding.
Perhaps that’s because scientists have a scary track record of finding out bothersome stuff. Like about climate change and whatnot.
The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. For good measure, it would also set in motion a process to determine whether the same criteria should be adopted by every other federal science agency.
The legislation, being worked up by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), represents the latest—and bluntest—attack on NSF by congressional Republicans seeking to halt what they believe is frivolous and wasteful research being funded in the social sciences. Last month, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) successfully attached language to a 2013 spending bill that prohibits NSF from funding any political science research for the rest of the fiscal year unless its director certifies that it pertains to economic development or national security. Smith’s draft bill, called the “High Quality Research Act,” would apply similar language to NSF’s entire research portfolio across all the disciplines that it supports.
The National Science Foundation, which has a $7 billion annual budget, funds a wide variety of research on climate change, among many other topics. From an NSF climate change report [PDF]:
NSF funding through the decades has led to many of the most fundamental discoveries and advances in human knowledge about the causes and consequences of global climate change and variability. Paleoclimate records, computational climate models, and economic models of climate change are just some examples of the major contributions of NSF’s investments in this area.
Fortunately, with Barack Obama in the White House and Democrats in control of the Senate, maneuvers like this generally turn out to be little more than time-wasting chest-thumping by anti-science charlatans. So long as that is the case, American scientists can continue to further our understanding of how fossil-fuel addiction is recasting our environment — and what we could do about it.
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Climate-denying GOP rep wants to take science-funding decisions away from scientists
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