Earlier this month, the Obama administration and the Republican-dominated House Natural Resources Committee took diametrically opposed steps regarding development of oil shale across the West. Not surprisingly, House Republicans are attaching the by-now-meaningless labels of “job creator” to its bill, and “job killing” to the Department of Interior’s action. Also not surprisingly, House Republicans’ views are not tethered to reality.

On Feb. 1, the House Natural Resources Committee approved a three-headed monster of an energy bill: drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, drilling off the California coast, and expansion of oil shale drilling. But hey, the bill has the magic word “jobs” in the label, so it’s all good! The committee’s press release trumpets the quantity of oil shale lurking deep under the Green River formation (Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming), and the need for job creators’ certainty.

The committee doesn’t bother with the thirsty facts of oil shale mining. If drilling for easy oil can be analogized to sticking a straw into a lemon and watching juice seep up, obtaining oil from oil shale involves digging up fossilized lemons, reconstituting them with a lot of water — some estimates are five gallons of water for every gallon of oil — using vast quantities of energy to boil the watery, dried-out lemons, catching the vapor, distilling lemon juice vapor from water vapor, and dumping all that contaminated wastewater somewhere. All these activities will be taking place in western Colorado and eastern Utah, which are not exactly known for their abundance of water.

The committee also doesn’t bother with the economics of oil shale mining. The technology isn’t in place for commercial oil shale mining, and may never be. Oil shale, like nuclear fusion, has been “10 years away from commercial development” for much longer than 10 years; the Checks and Balances Project has compiled oil shale industry boosters’ promises [PDF] going back to 1916. Unlike Canadian oil sands (aka tar sands), oil shale has never been produced commercially in the United States.

Rep. Douglas Lamborn (R-Colo.), the author of the oil shale bill, also doesn’t seem to care about the reactions of Coloradoans. They’re fighting mad: “It’s not a good deal for us,” said Rifle Mayor Jay Miller, a Republican. “We’re not against oil shale or gas development here, we just want it done in a way that doesn’t drive us into the ground.” Western Slope small town residents worry about low royalty rates, water, infrastructure, and impact on outdoor recreation.

This water-gobbling bill is part of the terrible transportation bill (says The New York Times) now working its way through the House, less a serious policy document than a wish list for oil lobbyists (says the Los Angeles Times), and the “worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen” (says Republican Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood). A list of all the transport bill’s failings would be very long indeed. Oil shale, Arctic drilling, and California offshore drilling are all years away from generating revenue, if ever, so sticking them into a transport bill on the pretense that they’ll pay for roads defies credibility. The Congressional Budget Office finds the obvious — a not-commercially feasible technology will generate no revenue.

Why is this oil shale bill necessary? In November 2008, President Bush announced a plan to open up 2 million acres of public lands for oil shale. (I believe that among those 2 million acres were the leases bid upon by Tim DeChristopher.) In February 2011, President Obama announced a moratorium on the Bush expansion. Republicans want a permanent end to the moratorium. Meanwhile, on Feb. 3, 2012, Obama’s Department of the Interior ended the moratorium in a good way, by formally rolling back the expansion, from 2 million acres to about 500,000 acres, with vastly less commercial potential.

The Bureau of Land Managament’s (BLM) plan favors continued research and development of oil-shale technology, but no commercial leasing of 461,965 acres — 252,181 acres in Utah, 174,476 in Wyoming, and 35,308 in Colorado. In addition, nearly 100,000 acres would be made available in eastern Utah for development of tar sands. It’s a far smarter policy than Bush’s. But Republicans are furious. Utah’s Gov. Gary Herbert is fuming, the American Petroleum Institute is whining, and the entire Utah congressional delegation wants the BLM decision scrapped.

Now, a broader observation: This pair of actions illustrates a bit of a deficiency in the environmental movement, and among progressives as a whole. The Lamborn bill is a fossil-fuel giveaway, and deserves to be defeated. National environmental groups have already generated, and will continue to generate, thousands of signatures on hundreds of email petitions telling senators to reject the transport bill. It will be rejected in its current form, because drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off the California coast are non-starters for senators such as Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

In the meantime, Obama has done the mostly right thing here. He’s reduced the scope of a bad Bush decision by 75 percent. And he’s ensured that the remaining 25 percent will be used mostly for research and development, not to pad some oil company’s bottom line. Yet the decision has gone mostly unnoticed. No one is thanking Obama, Salazar, or the BLM for standing up to Big Oil. Of the half-dozen stories I read before writing this post, all but one include the American Petroleum Institute’s canned angry reaction, but only one story included a favorable reaction, and that was from a local sportsman’s group. If environmental groups are pleased, they’re not writing press releases, and they’re not running thank-you emails. And if the progressive blogosphere reacted, I blinked and missed it. We’re quick to hurl sticks when Obama and Salazar do the wrong thing. Why don’t we grow carrots?

A careful analysis shows that the in all likelihood the deal will simply allow both sides to generate hot-button quotes come election 2012. At worst, it’s no more than Kabuki theater. At best, it gives President Obama a chance to affirm his commitment to environmental and climate issues, and reject the pipeline completely.

1. The deal: Congress can require the State Department to make a decision, but can’t tell the State Department what to decide.

Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) is taking credit for a bill he introduced, S.1932, to be incorporated into the deal. The bill, as currently written, requires the State Department to make a decision on the pipeline within 60 days. The bill does not require the State Department to make any particular decision, yes or no, only that it make a decision within 60 days.

The State Department has already said that no arbitrary deadlines can be set for its decision:

“Should Congress impose an arbitrary deadline for the permit decision … the Department would be unable to make a determination to issue a permit for this project,” the Department said in a statement.

The State Department’s official statement reiterates an “early 2013″ timetable.

Got that? The Senate deal requires the State Department to make a fast decision, and the State Department has already said that its fast decision would be a “no.” Tweets from @dpfeiffer44 emphasize:

How will the GOP explain to their members that their bill doesnt force the President to approve Keystone, it essentially kills it?

Lots of incorrect reporting out there today that says the House Payroll bill forces approval of the Keystone pipeline, that is not true

he House bill simply shortens the review process in a way that virtually guarantees that the pipeline will NOT be approved

Republicans presumably know all this – the State Department promised on December 12 to say no to an expedited decision on Keystone XL, and the payroll tax deal was made on December 16. So why go through this? Either they have faith in the caveats (discussed below), or they want the ability to score political points with voters more than they want the pipeline itself. In other words, they’re likely playing Kabuki theater, manufacturing an excuse to scream about the “job killing” Obama administration.

2. The caveats

First, Obama or the State Department could simply about-face: declare that enough information has been collected and approve the pipeline within 60 days. It wouldn’t be the first time the President has overruled his own agency’s recommendations on an environmental issue.

For what it’s worth, Ed Henry senses that the White House has already sustained whatever damage it would sustain from rejecting the pipeline, and is poised to turn it down:

sense i’m getting from WH — & i stress just a sense — POTUS leaning toward BLOCKING Keystone cause insiders think he already took hit

what i mean: WH thinks POTUS already took hit for allegedly “killing Keystone”/calculation is won’t be big deal to really kill it 60 days

In other words, the White House may have already made a political calculation that it could safely turn down the pipeline without damaging President Obama’s reelection campaign.

I’ve looked at a second caveat. The State Department’s original announcement of delay listed the factors it would weigh: “whether the proposed pipeline was in the national interest, considering all of the relevant issues together. Among the relevant issues that would be considered are environmental concerns (including climate change), energy security, economic impacts, and foreign policy.” Section 3 of Senator Lugar’s bill requires the President to either grant the pipeline permit if he determines that it’s in the national interest, or report to Congress why not, including “consideration of economic, employment, energy security, foreign policy, trade, and environmental factors.” That’s not quite the same list – Lugar adds employment and trade, and omits climate. Lugar’s bill might require approval. However, Lugar’s bill isn’t so different from the State Department factors; the employment aspect of Keystone XL is hotly disputed, and trade shouldn’t be a make-or-break point. In short, the language of S.1932 does not create a trap for unwary Democrats.

3. The advantages for Democrats

Why should Republicans get all the talking points? Democrats should use this episode to generate some Kabuki theater moments of their own. The GOP has risked a tax hike on millions of Americans just to prove, once again, that the party is owned lock, stock, and barrel by Big Oil. By contrast, President Obama will demonstrate to the world that he rejects dirty tar sands oil when he rejects the pipeline. Far from being a “cave” on the pipeline, the vote gives the President a chance to reject it entirely.

Texas’ water problems won’t be over anytime soon.Photo: Sean

That’s easy to dismiss as tit-for-tat revenge for Texas’ age-old talk of secession; after all, droughts end, and places recover. Unless they don’t: When one takes a hard look at Texas’ water supply, and plans to build nine water-intensive coal plants, it becomes clear that the state’s apocalyptic droughts are more likely to become the norm than the exception.

The state’s water shortage is structural, warns the Texas Water Development Board. Currently the state needs 18 million acre-feet of water, and it has 17 million acre-feet available to it. Aquifers deplete. Population grows. By 2060, the state is expected to need 22 million acre-feet, but only have 15.3 million acre-feet available to it. Because some dry places simply can’t have water piped, the total shortfall is projected to be 8.3 million acre-feet. Roughly, the state will have two gallons of water available to it for every three gallons it needs.

Houston, we have a problem.

Currently, 18 cities are high priority — they’ll either run out of water within six months unless the rains come, or they don’t know how much water they have. Texas’ water supply for the future is uncertain, and the health of Galveston Bay, home of the state’s most commercially productive estuary, is in jeopardy. Last week, voters approved one of two water-related measures on the ballot — a water bond to build dams, but that’s no short-term solution for a state whose wildfire “season” is now over one year old.

In the meantime, the state is blithely planning multiple power projects to meet projected population growth — nine coal plants in planning stages will be added to the 19 to 20 coal-fired power plants already in the state.

Most electricity power plants require large amounts of water. How large? Short answer: a lot, but no one knows. Medium answer: Thirsty power plants threaten watersheds, and Texas’ coal plants are among the nation’s thirstiest:

Coal-fired plants alone account for 67 percent of freshwater withdrawals by the power sector and for 65 percent of the water completely consumed by it, the report said. Newer plants include air-cooling or “dry cooling” technologies, but so many plants rely on water-cooling that they accounted for 41 percent of the withdrawals of freshwater in the United States in 2005, according to the United States Geological Survey.

In more detail, a Union of Concerned Scientists report on freshwater use by power sources begins by noting the impact on drought-stricken Texas:

As of late summer 2011, Texas had suffered the driest 10 months since record keeping began in 1895 (LCRA 2011). Some rivers, such as the Brazos, actually dried up (ClimateWatch 2011). The dry weather came with brutal heat: Seven cities recorded at least 80 days above 100 degrees F (Dolce and Erdman 2011). With air conditioners straining to keep up, the state’s demand for electricity shattered records as well, topping 68,000 megawatts in early August (ERCOT 2011).

An energy-water collision wasn’t far behind. One plant had to curtail nighttime operations because the drought had reduced the amount of cool water available to bring down the temperature of water discharged from the plant (O’Grady 2011; Sounder 2011). In East Texas, other plant owners had to bring in water from other rivers so they could continue to operate and meet demand for electricity. If the drought were to persist into the following year, operators of the electricity grid warned, power cuts on the scale of thousands of megawatts are possible (O’Grady 2011).

State planners have begun to notice the water-intensive nature of coal plants. The White Stallion coal plant, near Bay City, south of Houston, planned to take water from an estuary rich in oyster and shrimp nurseries. Even after promising to switch to a less water-intensive dry-cooling plan, the project has been opposed by farmers who don’t have water to sell. This week, the Lower Colorado River Authority recently rejected a water contract that would have given White Stallion a 25,000 acre-feet-per-year water permit. Citizens of Sweetwater, in west Texas, were outraged upon hearing that the city was secretly negotiating sale of water rights for a so-called clean coal project.

Texas will stay thirsty. A structural water shortage is a permanent water shortage that can only be solved by a drastic change — less agriculture, fewer people, more water from somewhere else (dams? desalination? Oklahoma?). More coal plants sucking more water from rivers and estuaries is not part of a sane water policy. Some alternatives to coal-fired electricity are just as water-intensive; natural gas power plants are frugal users of water, but extraction of natural gas through fracking uses billions of gallons of water. Fortunately, one electricity source uses virtually no water and is plentiful throughout west Texas: wind energy.

Photo: RL Miller

Keystone XL is a huge decision to be made at a Presidential level. However, all across America, similar decisions are being made: fossil fuel production is being expanded with the blessing of the federal government.

Consider Alton Coal.

But first, consider Bryce Canyon National Park.

Bryce Canyon is best known for its hoodoos, but the park is also the last grand sanctuary of natural darkness.

High and dry on the edge of a huge plateau, Bryce has wide open skies; its isolation means no light pollution (light from human activity) and very little air pollution. The park’s Dark Rangers give over 100 astronomy programs each year. Arriving from the west via Las Vegas or Salt Lake City, a Bryce visitor probably passes through Panguitch, an Old West town of 1600 heavily dependent on tourism – 70% of Garfield County’s economy is tourism-based.

What a great place for a coal mine!

Until now, Alton Coal Development, LLC has mined 635 acres of private land in Coal Hollow. It wants to expand on to 3,576 acres of federally owned land, administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM’s draft environmental impact statement, released November 4, considered three alternatives: full-bore production of 2,000,000 tons/year, operating 24 hours a day, 6 days a week; a limited mine on less land with seasonal closures to protect sage grouse and other threatened animals; and no mine at all.

Anyone who thinks the BLM seriously considered all three alternatives needs a reality check. The BLM prefers to expand a strip mine near a national park.

What’s wrong with expanding one strip mine? Everything that’s wrong with Keystone XL, and fossil fuels policy in America, that’s what.

– dangerous transport: coal trucks traveling 110 miles from mine to a railhead at Cedar City, along U.S. Highway 89,  local roads, and currently unimproved dirt roads, through Panguitch, 24 hours a day, 6 days a week

– puffed up jobs claims: the mine is said to generate 100 mining jobs and an additional 60 truckers’ jobs. I haven’t seen any numbers to rebut this, but I’m skeptical given that strip mining is relatively automated compared to underground mining.

– impact on federally protected land of great scenic value: the mine will affect Bryce’s clear dark skies, both in creating light pollution (lights will be on at the mine 24 hours a day – the EIS acknowledges a “perceptible increase in nighttime skyglow”) and air pollution

– corruption of public officials: Alton Coal gave Governor Herbert $10,000 the same day its principals met with him to complain about slow approval of their permit – and the permit was immediately fast-tracked

– fossil fuel regulatory capture: one alternative presented to the BLM was to develop wind, solar, and other renewable sources, but the BLM refused to consider it as outside the scope of Alton Coal’s request.

– shipping fossil fuel far away: the coal will fuel the Intermountain Power Pla
nt, which provides 75% of its electricity to the power grid fueling Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Southern Californians are demanding that the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power move beyond coal and phase out reliance on the Intermountain Power Plant by 2020.

– economics that make no sense: while Alton Coal desires to open this mine, Arch Coal isreducing production at another Utah coal mine due to continuing weakness in coal demand in the region

– increased carbon emissions: the BLM report estimates that the 2 million tons of coal/year emit 4.8 million tons (4.4 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide/year; for perspective, the United States in 2009 emitted 5,505 million tons of carbon dioxide. On the one hand, the EIS argues that Alton Coal mine is only 0.014% of the world’s 30,377 million tons of carbon dioxide/year. The relative size of any project compared to global emissions is the same argument being used by project proponents all across America, including Keystone XL itself.

Two key differences between Alton Coal and Keystone XL are the size of the project, and the amount of public scrutiny each has received. Keystone is the XL-sized carbon bomb, while Alton Coal is more of an IED: sufficient to inflict collateral damage, but not enough to get extra-large public scrutiny. The pipeline has become a signature environmental issue of the Obama administration, and a decision whether to approve it will be made by the President. On the other hand, the expansion of Alton Coal is being made by lower-level bureaucrats, without much public comment, and without any national policy weighing renewable energy against the fossil fuels that are slowly poisoning the planet.

Public comments will be taken at various Utah locations, including Cedar City on December 6 and Salt Lake City on December 7.

Nebraskan protesters outside the state capitol.Photo: Mitch Paine

The red state populist rebellion is now spreading beyond Nebraska. Now, South Dakota’s Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) wants the state legislature to impose additional restrictions on the pipeline:

Daugaard spokesman Tony Venhuizen said offering similar protections for South Dakota is only fair.

“We’ve already let TransCanada know that they can’t be cutting special deals for some states just because they protest more,” he said. “The squeaky Cornhusker wheel shouldn’t get all the grease.”

What’s going on in the remaining four states?

Montana, as the United States inlet for Keystone XL, will benefit from the pipe: Eastern Montana’s oil transport costs will be reduced. Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) and Sen. Max Baucus (D) lobbied hard for the pipeline. Only Sen. Jon Tester (D) seems concerned about safety, and his relatively milquetoast comments may not be enough to influence the governor or legislature. At a September hearing, county commissioners from all over eastern and southern Montana favored the pipeline.

Kansas is in a unique position: The Kansas portion of Keystone XL has already been built using a 10-year municipal property tax break and is simply waiting to be hooked up on both ends. A Kansas friend tells me that most people in the state who are upset about the pipeline feel ripped off. Still, pipeline opponents showed up at a hearing in September.

Of course, a pipeline that’s already been built isn’t going to be rerouted. Nor can construction methods be put into place to make the pipeline safer. By jumping the gun, Kansas has lost its best chance to minimize spills.

The pipeline is necessary, claims its backers, to relieve a bottleneck at Cushing, Okla. Supporters far outnumbered opponents at the Oklahoma hearing. And, although Texas has some grassroots protesters, the pipeline and the jobs it would supposedly bring are welcomed at Port Arthur, Texas.

Despite supporters’ claims that the project brings jobs along all of its 1,700 miles, the economic benefits of Keystone XL will flow mostly to three states: its United States inlet in Montana, the oil hub of Cushing, Okla., and the refineries of Texas. On the other hand, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas must accept the spills, contamination, and other risks of the project, without any corresponding benefit.

Nebraska’s governor and citizens have stood up for the rights of their state. Now, will South Dakota’s governor and citizens do the same?

An investigation reveals that Politico has indeed given more weight to Solyndra in its coverage.

In response to grumbling such as mine, Politico’s Darren Samulsohn has labeled those of us who see Keystone XL as a bigger issue the “left,” presumably in contrast with the ever-so-reasonable “center,” who care only about Solyndra. He writes:

Liberals and environmental activists desperately trying to change the narrative away from Solyndra are simultaneously working to throw the White House and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton under the bus with another energy trouble spot.

The Nation, The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Grist, Climate Progress and Media Matters have run editorials and articles in recent weeks bemoaning the “out of proportion” Solyndra coverage and drawing attention to the State Department’s pending review of the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline that would connect Canada’s Tar Sands to the Gulf Coast.

But which so-called scandal gets more media coverage? Is Politico skewing the chatter? I decided to compare Politico’s coverage of Solyndra with its coverage of the State Department’s Keystone XL approval process.

As background for anyone not already up on the “allegedly scandalous behavior” permeating the Keystone XL process, Friends of the Earth has been leading with Freedom Of Information Act requests and has a definitive collection of news. The New York Times has also written on questions of conflict in the pipeline approval process, drawing in part on work by Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups. Conflicts of interest generally center around two facts: a very cozy relationship between Clinton-aide-turned-TransCanada-lobbyist Paul Elliott and State Department employee Missy Verloop, and the fact that the State Department outsourced its environmental impact statement to a TransCanada associate, Cardno Entrix.

For methodology on Politico stories, I searched the Politico website for “Solyndra,” which, as of Oct. 20, returned 85 hits. I counted stories that fed into the narrative that Solyndra is a scandal. I planned to count separately stories that questioned whether Solyndra is a scandal. And I ignored stories that simply mentioned Solyndra in passing, such as this one, and opinion pieces, such as this one. A lot of reporting on the budget showdown of late September included mentions of Solyndra; I counted only the ones that mentioned it as a political problem for the White House, such as this one, but didn’t count stories mentioning its bankruptcy as a fact without any political overtones, such as this one. Similarly, I searched the Politico website for “keystone,” which returned 111 hits, and first sorted out 29 mentions of the Keystone pipeline from 82 mentions of the Keystone State, Keystone Kops, Keystone Beer, and the like. I also ran searches for “TransCanada,” “Verloop,” and “Cardno,” but didn’t turn up any additional hits.

I separately went through the Morning Energy archives from Aug. 22, 2011, to Oct. 20, 2011. For this, recognizing the role of Morning Energy in driving conversations, I used a slightly different methodology: I counted mentions, whether they fed or discredited the narrative of each as a scandal, or were simply netural. I included links to other news reports, but didn’t include anything simply listed as part of the day’s agenda. And I saved everything in a Google Docs spreadsheet for review by anyone who’s interested.

The data showed, very strongly, that Politico has determined Solyndra, but not Keystone XL, to be a scandal.

A total of 57 of the 85 stories, or 67 percent, reported on the Solyndra “scandal,” assumed that it was a scandal, and/or fed into the narrative of “Solyndra = scandal.” An additional five stories reported on Democrats’ efforts to go on offense, push back, or otherwise brush off the “Solyndra as scandal” narrative. Politico has not run any stories questioning whether Solyndra constitutes a scandal.

A total of one of the 29 Keystone stories reported on the cozy relationship between Elliott and Verloop, and another one (single solitary) story, published the same day, rebutted environmentalists’ efforts to paint the Elliott-Verloop relationship as a scandal. Additionally, one (the loneliest number) of the 29 Keystone stories reported on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (D-Vt.) meeting with the State Department in response to concerns arising from a New York Times article showing that Cardno Entrix was a major client of TransCanada. (Note the difference between concerns arising from facts and concerns arising from other newspapers’ reporting on facts.) That’s a total of two stories, or 6.8 percent of the Keystone XL coverage, reporting the existence of a scandal.

The Morning Energy column had 95 mentions of Solyndra over the course of 35 days (since the bankruptcy), or an average of 2.7 mentions per day. By contrast, Keystone XL was mentioned 37 times over 44 days (since the protests in late August), or an average of 0.84 mentions per day.

There’s a larger question here. What constitutes a scandal?

Are salacious facts required for a scandal? Media Matters compared coverage of Solyndra with coverage of a genuine, hookers-and-graft scandal at the former Minerals Management Service, only to find that Solyndra coverage far outweighed coverage of the MMS scandal. David Roberts points out that not only is Solyndra not a scandal, but the mainstream media have quietly found no evidence of wrongdoing: “Despite the fact that the Solyndra affair is ‘brewing’ and ‘ballooning’ and ‘playing out as a scandal,’ the fact remains that no wrongdoing has been uncovered.”

Does popular opinion make a scandal? Polls show that the American public doesn’t much know or care about Solyndra, but they still support clean energy by large margins. A friend deep in the heart of Texas tweeted that none of her coworkers knew anything about it, except for the one who thought Solyndra was a rock band. Climate Progress has dubbed Solyndra the  f=”http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/07/338761/media-solyndra-ignores-keystone-xl-scandal/”>royal wedding of energy stories for its sheer breathless hype. But the hype hasn’t sunk in among the American people.

Rather, Solyndra is being promoted by the self-referential Beltway cycle of which Politico is an essential part. The elite media, not the American public or what Darren Samuelsohn considers the left, determine whether something is a scandal or isn’t.

So far, the Solyndra “scandal” is playing out exactly as the Whitewater and Vince Foster scandals did during the Clinton era: allegations requiring much frenzied reporting, only to be found much later on to be lacking any substance at all.

It’s facile to assume that Politico simply has a right-wing bias — it only determines that something is a scandal if Republicans say it’s so. Evidence includes the fact that Morning Energy is sponsored by America’s Natural Gas Alliance, and Political Playbook is sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.

In addition to the fossil-fueled sponsorships, a second factor may be affecting coverage. In a fast-moving media world where the emphasis is on “winning the morning,” journalists can become stenographers, regurgitating what’s fed to them by lobbyists and staffers with agendas. They don’t have the luxury of time in which to do critical thinking. Here, two groups of people — Republicans and fossil-fueled lobbyists — have strong desires to destroy Obama’s political and policy agendas. They’re drawing out the Solyndra “scandal” long after it’s become obvious that there was no wrongdoing, just business miscalculations. They’re using Politico and other outlets, and Politico is only too happy to oblige in the name of page views.

Malibu is a notoriously high-risk area, prone to landslides, but that doesn’t stop people from paying high premiums to live there.Photo: Stephen

There’s only one problem: This market-driven solution won’t work.

Insurers are worried about climate change, with good reason. A recent Ceres report found, generally, that they’re ill-prepared for climate. Their model for pricing risks depends on historical models, which are meaningless in the time of the new normal.

For several years Munich Re, the giant reinsurer, has been advocating for governments to do something about climate change, based on rational self-interest: If governments can prevent it from happening, then insurers won’t have to pay out. Guess that didn’t work out so well — thanks, United States Senate! As climate mitigation seems to be failing, adaptation strategies become necessary.

The first adaptation strategy will be to raise rates. Here, the free market advocates are giddy. Coastal insurance will become very expensive, so no one will live on the coasts! Yay! However, it won’t work. A look at two southern California coastal communities illustrates the free-market failure of insurance to deter people from living near the coast.

Malibu is a notoriously high-risk area — I joke, “Do you know what Malibu means in the Chumash language? ‘Stupid people live here.’” It’s prone to fires and landslides. Year after year, TV cameras cover muddy devastation, wrecked mansions, and teary-eyed residents vowing to rebuild. And, generally, they do rebuild. But they rarely do so with insurance money, because California policies don’t cover landslides. Insurance in Malibu has become so expensive that many residents rely on the FAIR Plan, an insurance pool of last resort. Although California’s FAIR plan was created in 1968 ostensibly to aid inner-city residents who were considered uninsurable after the 1965 Watts Riots, it now serves wealthy homeowners who have chosen to live in high-risk canyons and coastlines. And wealthy people have lobbied the state legislature for concessions in coverage.

Twenty-eight states have similar plans that cover certain high-risk weather events — brushfires in Malibu; wind and hail damage in coastal communities in Georgia and New York. FAIR Plan high premiums and limited coverage haven’t deterred people from living in high-weather-risk areas so far.

Another way of understanding how high premiums fail to act as a deterrent is to imagine yourself with enough money to buy your dream car — that fire-engine-red Lotus, that 1965 Mustang, that Tesla Roadster. Insurance on that car is expensive. Does that stop you? If so, you’re rare. People who can afford to live on the coast do so for reasons wholly divorced from pragmatic cost issues.

In short, the free market of high insurance premiums and limited coverage hasn’t deterred people from living in pricey coastal communities. Climate change will raise premiums and limit coverage, but people will still want to live in Malibu. But what of less expensive coastal communities?

La Conchita is a small community sandwiched between the coast and steep, unstable mountains on the Ventura-Santa Barbara county line. A 1995 landslide buried seven homes. Property values plummeted, insurance became unaffordable, and people moved in anyway. Why did they move in? Because you could get a walk-to-beach home for $500,000 instead of the $5 million you’d spend in Santa Barbara or Malibu. The area took on a surfing haven reputation — a little funky, a little high-risk, a lot less expensive. People moved in, paid cash, and thus weren’t required to have insurance, or went onto the FAIR Plan — again, the cost of insurance wasn’t a factor. Then a second landslide in 2005 killed 10 people. The $500,000 house is now marked down to $350,000, and no one is buying it. Although no significant connection has been made between the storms of 1995 and 2005 and climate change, La Conchita may be a harbinger of what’s to come: high-risk hamlets.

A new OECD report finds that the two American cities most vulnerable to rising sea levels are New York and Miami. Lower Manhattan is likely to end up like Malibu — very wealthy people willing to ignore risks — while Miami becomes a high-risk island, cut off from the rest of Florida as a wall of saltwater moves inland. Insurance rates aren’t likely to uproot people.

In the medium-term (10 to 20 years), I wouldn’t be surprised to see insurers attempt to restrict coverage for climate-related damage, much as has been done for mold/fungus coverage when mold became a hot-button issue in about 2001.

In the long-term, the industry may not survive in its present day form. It’s built on charging risks based on past patterns. But past history can’t map a new normal. The property insurance industry is reeling from the storms of 2011, and the life and health insurers have barely begun to consider the likely profound impact of climate change on their mortality tables. If the federal crop insurance program has yet begun to calculate the impact of climate on its program, I haven’t seen it. Perhaps we’ll end up with some sort of two-tiered program in which government extends the concept of a FAIR plan (minimal coverage, high premiums) to virtually every aspect of insurance, and some wealthy people choose to pay even higher premiums for additional coverage. For now, the insurance industry shouldn’t be considered a player in the search for free-market solutions to climate change.

Connect the dots and you see China.

Every war has winners, losers, casualties, and traitors. So far, the winners are Chinese manufacturers, American consumers, and the future of the planet. The big loser may be the American solar manufacturing industry; Solyndra was simply the highest-profile example. Wondering who’s giving aid and comfort to the enemy?

Beginning in early 2009, the Obama administration’s use of stimulus money under the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program went not just to help out a handful of businesses, but to jump-start a market. Funds doled out under the stimulus have gone, or are going to, a portfolio of renewables. The complete list of 32 “section 1705″ (stimulus-funded) loan guarantees, available on the DOE website, is more than half solar — it includes four solar manufacturing companies (including Solyndra) and 15 solar generation plants, along with assorted wind, geothermal, and biofuel businesses.

Demand for solar panels rose, partially as a result of this and other government policies. United States solar firms achieved a positive trade flow of $1.9 billion in 2010, mostly on photovoltaic components. Of that, the United States imported $1.4 billion from China, and exported between $1.7 and $2 billion, says a solar industry report [PDF, p. 18].

China’s reaction to that trade surplus? Since January 2011, the Chinese government has dumped $30 billion into support for its solar industry. China now dominates solar manufacturing, with 70 percent of the global solar-panel market, and, as Agence France-Presse reports, it is “almost solely focused on exports, with as much as 95 percent of production sold overseas, according to some estimates,”

The U.S. market responded to the flood of cheap solar panels: Solar is booming. The U.S. solar market doubled last year, and it’s expected to double again this year, even though many states are reducing their subsidies. How many other industries are growing that fast in this economy? Clean Technica sums up the good news for both market and jobs:

The average cost of installing residential and commercial solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the US dropped a record 17 percent in 2010 and it continues to drop in 2011, an additional 11 percent through June …

The U.S. solar power market continued to grow at a record-breaking 66 percent pace in 2011′s first half. …

more than half of the country’s solar companies are planning to expand hiring in 2011 …

Two keys to the industry’s tremendous growth are cheap materials and government support — the kind of support offered by the DOE’s section 1705 program, among others.

The Solar Foundation [PDF] updates job numbers even further: Solar grew 6.8 percent between August 2010 and August 2011, as total jobs grew by 0.7 percent, and jobs in the fossil-fuel industry shrank.

In the meantime, Solyndra used a novel technology not dependent on silicon, which made sense when the price of silicon was high. But when the Chinese-subsidized price of silicon fell, Solyndra became an outlier, and ultimately collateral damage in a trade war.

The governments of China and the United States take different approaches to foster industrial growth. The United States has a complicated system: a tax subsidy here, a loan guarantee there, a presidential visit here, a burst of publicity there, but nothing worthy of the name “industrial policy.” China seems to simply shovel cash to certain sectors and command them to perform.

Republican fury over Solyndra may pull the plug on the DOE’s solar portfolio. Some of Solyndra’s loudest critics are also its most hypocritical — for example, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) repeatedly sought section 1705 loans for various natural gas, “clean coal,” and other vaguely innovative projects. If Vitter and his friends have their way, they’ll strangle an American success story and hand China a major victory in the solar trade war.

Science? Who needs it?Photo: IowaPolitics.com

Last year, my work on Climate Zombies — climate-denying candidates running for Congress — earned me a snippet on a New York Times blog, but most mainstream media ran stories presenting climate science as an issue with two sides.

Things have been changing as the media realize that people who deny climate science also deny other scientific realities.

PolitiFact, the independent fact-checking website, finally took on a Republican candidate for president over his claim that “scientists disagree about global warming” and found it false.

Tim Pawlenty to The Miami Herald:

Q: There is a strong case for man-made climate change, according to a University of Miami climate researcher I’ve spoken to. You don’t agree with him?

Pawlenty: There’s lots of layers to it. But at least, as to any potential man-made contribution to it, it’s fair to say the science is in dispute. There’s a lot of people who say the majority of the scientists think this way. And there’s a minority that way. And you count the number of scientists versus the quality of scientists and the like. But I think it’s fair to say that, as to whether and how much — if any — is attributable to human behavior, there’s dispute and controversy over it …

Pawlenty’s response piqued PolitiFact’s interest:

We divided Pawlenty’s answer into his two essential claims:  

  • Evidence points toward climate change being primarily a natural, rather than man-made, phenomenon.

  • The science about the causes of global climate change is in dispute.

… To summarize: Based on our research, there is very little dispute in the scientific community, especially among climate specialists, on whether climate change is primarily caused by natural or man-made forces. The overwhelming majority of scientists polled feel that human activity is the primary driver of climate change. Also, based on scientific studies by the IPCC and others, global warming over the past 50 years has been primarily driven by human activity.

It’s good that PolitiFact called out Pawlenty. However, he’s since quit the presidential race. This week, both Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry shambled into climate zombie-ism.

Bachmann called climate change “manufactured science.”

Perry called global warming an unproven, costly theory, repeating Pawlenty’s false claims that climate change is natural and that many scientists question the theory.

Doubling down on the stupid, Perry claims that climate scientists manipulate data to get grant money, never mind the $11 million he’s collected from oil and gas companies. And he further claims that complying with “anti-carbon programs” will cost billions of dollars, never mind the $35 billion that weather disasters have cost the U.S. just in the first eight months of 2011.

To its credit, the Washington Post‘s fact checker gives Perry’s made-up “facts” about climate change a “Four Pinocchios” rating.

Will the rest of the mainstream media now call out Bachmann and Perry for repeating obviously falsities? Or will their statements be presented as one legitimate side of a two-sided debate?