If you’ve ever read anything on the internet, chances are you’ve encountered a troll. No, not the kind that live under bridges, or the ones with a shock of neon hair. We’re talking about those annoying commenters who get their kicks by riling people up as much as possible. But have you ever wondered who these people really are? Well, we found out.

Internet researchers at George Mason University recently found that when it comes to online commenting, throwing bombs gets more attention than being nice, and makes readers double down on their preexisting beliefs. What’s more, trolls create a false sense that a topic is more controversial than it really is. Witness the overwhelming consensus on climate change amongst scientists — 97 percent agreement that global warming is real, and caused by humans. But that doesn’t settle the question for Twitter addict and Climate Desk perennial thorn-in-the-side Hoyt Connell.

“If you allow somebody to make a comment and there’s no response, then they’re controlling the definition of the statement,” Hoyt says. “Then it can become a truth.”

We first encountered Hoyt, or as we know him, @hoytc55, several months ago on our Twitter page, taking us to task for our climate coverage. And the screed hasn’t stopped since: In April alone, Hoyt mentioned us on Twitter some 126 times, almost as much as our top nine other followers combined. So we did the only thing we knew how to do: Track him down, meet him face to face … and ask a few questions of our own. Here’s episode one of our three-part series, Trollus Maximus:

While it might not always seem this way, many of our followers actually do believe in climate change. Some are silent, watching from the wings, what internet researchers call “lurkers.” Not Rosi Reed, a 34-year-old nuclear physicist at the Large Hadron Collider and long-time internet truth crusader, who goes by the nom-de-guerre PhysicsGirl. We like to call her The Troll Slayer:

For better or worse, online, people have the luxury to lob bombs from behind a keyboard barricade. Which led us to launch an experiment: What if the trolls and the troll slayers met face to face and talked it out, analog-style (or as close as we can get with Google Hangout)?

For all their differences, Hoyt and Rosi have one thing in common: They aren’t cowards. They agreed to square off in a debate about online commenting, climate change, and what defines truth in the digital age. Watch episode three, The #Showdown:

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Over the last couple weeks, scientists and environmentalists have been keeping a particularly close eye on the Hawaii-based monitoring station that tracks how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, as the count tiptoed closer to a record-smashing 400 parts per million. Thursday, we finally got there: The daily mean concentration was higher than at any time in human history, NOAA reported.

Don’t worry: The earth is not about to go up in a ball of flame. The 400 ppm mark is only a milestone, 50 ppm over what legendary NASA scientist James Hansen has since 1988 called the safe zone for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, and yet only halfway to what the IPCC predicts we’ll reach by the end of the century.

“Somehow in the last 50 ppm we melted the Arctic,” said environmentalist and founder of activist group 350.org Bill McKibben, who called today’s news a “grim but predictable milestone” and has long used the symbolic number as a rallying call for climate action. “We’ll see what happens in the next 50.”

We could find out soon enough: With the East Coast still recovering from Superstorm Sandy and the West gearing up for what promises to be a nasty fire season, University of California ecologist Max Moritz says milestones like these are “an excuse for us to take a good hard look at where we are,” especially as the carbon concentration shows no signs of reversing course.

Scientists first saw the carbon scale tip past 400 ppm last summer, but only briefly; the record reported today by NOAA is the first time a daily average has surpassed that point. For the last several years concentrations have hovered in the 390s, and we’re still not to the point where the carbon concentration will stay above the 400 ppm threshold permanently. But that’s just around the corner, said J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society.

“It’s clear that sometime next year we’ll see 400 consistently,” he said. “Avoiding the future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in greenhouse gases.”

Most scientists, environmentalists, and climate-conscious policymakers agree this will require, at a minimum, slashing the use of fossil fuels, and in the meantime, taking steps to adapt for a world with higher temperatures, higher seas, and more extreme weather. For example, according to Hansen, the world will need to completely stop burning coal by 2030 if returning to 350 ppm is to remain possible. What’s the holdup? Texas Tech climatologist Katherine Hayhoe blames “the inertia of our economic system, and the inertia of our political system.” But she, like most of her peers, believe it can — and must — be done: “We have to change how we get our energy and how we use our energy.”

Some progress is being made on that front: Thanks to energy efficiency gains, increased use of renewable power, and policies to cut emissions from cars and power plants, carbon emissions in the U.S. have fallen 13 percent in the last seven years. But they’re expected to begin climbing again soon, and worldwide, 2012 saw the most carbon emissions ever. Thursday’s milestone underscores the reality that if we’re serious about addressing climate change, there’s still a long road ahead.

“So far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” NOAA scientist Pieter Tans, who oversees the monitoring program, told the Times.

For McKibben, the real date to mark in the history books has yet to arrive: “I don’t think this will be the turning point. The turning point will be when we do something about it.”

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Back in 2006, scientists in Greenland made an alarming observation: Glaciers were crumbling into the ocean twice as fast. And not in little cocktail-sized cubes, either: Glaciologist Jason Box accurately predicted the spot where a hunk four times the size of Manhattan would later shear off into the sea.

At the same time, the inland top of the ice sheet was thawing at record levels; last summer, for the first time in 150 years, its entire surface was melting. By summer’s end, this water alone raised sea levels all over the world by a millimeter.

As Box told our Climate Desk Live audience in January, rising air and water temperatures — driven by greenhouse gas emissions — are to blame. And with more warming on the way, he made a grim prediction: Melting from Greenland and the world’s other land-based glaciers could ultimately raise global sea levels by 69 feet, Box warns.

But don’t start building your flood-proof ark quite yet: Advanced imaging released in August suggested the ice sheet is capable of quickly reversing its melting habit. And a study out today in Nature finds that the sped-up ice loss on the water’s edge, while still a problem, is unlikely to get much worse, even with a big rise in global temperatures. Taken together, these two studies suggest that Greenland’s ice melt problem isn’t as bad as experts like Box had predicted.

For the Nature study, Faezeh Nick, a researcher at Norway’s University Center in Svalbard, led a team that took the closest-ever look at so-called “outlet glaciers,” the 200 or so outermost arms of the ice sheet that flow straight into the sea. Their findings suggest that the increase in melting rate is about to slow down, suggesting that in a medium warming scenario these glaciers will likely contribute just 19-30 millimeters to global sea levels by 2100. That’s much less than if the current acceleration of melting were to persist, but still a noteworthy share of the quarter- to half-meter rise projected by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The findings shed some light on what had been a big question mark in the study of Greenland’s glaciers: Of all the lost ice, how much melted from the surface, and how much broke off from outlet glaciers at the ice sheet edge?

“Until now we could calculate the amount of melt from all of Greenland, but we couldn’t really estimate the amount of mass lost from these outlet glaciers,” Nick said.

Nailing down the contribution of outlet glaciers has proven a challenge because their behavior is determined not just by air and water temperature, but also by their shape, orientation, and the geography of underlying terrain. Using new observational data from four massive, representative outlet glaciers (including one dubbed Petermann, the source of Box’s Manhattan-sized iceberg), Nick built a new model, which tested well against 10 years of ice movement records.

“We didn’t know exactly how they work,” she said. “This is the first time we’ve been able to model this behavior.”

By “behavior,” Nick means the glaciers’ steady erosion, as warming sea water melts them from beneath, ice sheet runoff melts them from above, and the packs of sea ice that keep them hemmed on land drift away. “Calving” occurs when these pressures work in tandem to break off huge chunks of ice — check out the insane flip-flop in the video below. Nick’s team captured this May 2008 “calving” event by setting set up a camera to take snapshots every 10 seconds and letting it run for an hour:

Scary as these breakups are, she says, evidence suggests they come in spurts and aren’t closely linked to temperature, unlike surface melt, the other main cause of lost ice.

Don’t get the wrong idea: “[Greenland] is still losing a lot of ice,” she said. Just not as much as some of her peers had feared: “The last 10 years it’s losing mass twice as fast as the 10 years before. But in the next 10 years it’s not going to be four times more.”

Box, who helped make the documentary Chasing Ice, said he isn’t surprised to find that disintegrating glaciers are less important in the overall scope of Greenland’s melt problem than runoff from the ice sheet surface.

“Ice loss from melting and subsequent meltwater runoff has been the dominant loss factor in recent years,” he wrote in an email. “Runoff will grow with warming as glaciers retreat out of the warming sea.” Indeed, another study confirming surface melt as the primary source of Greenland’s woes is currently in peer review, he said.

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

At 7:00 a.m. local time this morning, Lonnie’s Roadhouse Cafe in Williston, N.D., was already bustling, packed to the gills with truckers and roughnecks tanking up on coffee and omelets for another day in that town’s ongoing fracking boom.

“It’s continuous, it doesn’t stop,” says manager Lonnie Iverson. “Busy, busy, busy.”

It’s become a typical scene here in the last several years, as new drilling technology has unleashed massive deposits of oil from the Bakken Shale, in the process slashing unemployment to the lowest anywhere in the nation, minting a new class of oil wealth, and generally upending what was once a backwater prairie town — turmoil Climate Desk witnessed firsthand last year (see video below). And it looks like that growth is here for the long haul: A new analysis out yesterday from the U.S. Geological Survey doubled previous estimates of how much oil is in reserve under North Dakota, up to 7.4 billion barrels, which would make it the largest oil field in the country.

“It’s good,” Lonnie says. “It’ll keep our people working.” And eating, presumably.

The new numbers come as no surprise to the fossil fuel titans behind the boom: Back in 2011, fracking kingpin Harold Hamm said he thought the Bakken will ultimately churn out 24 billion barrels. While the new federal analysis doesn’t go quite that far, it does confirm that places like Lonnie’s are likely to be jam-packed for the foreseeable future. The exact expiration date of the boom remains unclear: Local officials are hesitant to pin it down, and estimates made before yesterday’s analysis range from 20 [PDF] to 100 years, depending on technological advances, future oil prices, and the level of private investment. But the USGS report could help clear that up: Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) requested the update in 2011 precisely to boost confidence in the corporations slinging up hotels, restaurants, and other services for the surging worker population.

The last time USGS took a crack at guessing what the Bakken might hold was in 2008; the upward revision since then comes mainly as a product of the learning process that happens when developers start to drill. As more wells go in and more oil comes out, geologists can refine their sense of what lies in store, said Jim Ladlee, associate director of Penn State’s Marcellus Center, which tracks the fracking revolution nationwide.

“The technology is always evolving,” he said, “there’s constant change and constant evolution going on.”

At the same time, the new estimate takes into account for the first time the Three Forks Formation, a nearby oil deposit that was previously — incorrectly — thought to be unproductive. It also nearly triples previous assumptions about natural gas reserves.

“These world-class formations contain even more energy resource potential than previously understood, which is important information as we continue to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said in a statement.

Still, Ladlee said that even this higher estimate is likely too low.

“Production estimates tend to go up as they drill more holes,” he said.

More oil in the ground means more of the growing pains Williston has gone through recently: Crumbling roads, overcrowded hotels, and injured workers crowding understaffed local hospitals, to name a few. For Lonnie, it’s worth it.

“The traffic sucks sometimes,” she says. “With all the good you get the bad. But I like it.”

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Back in 2011, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) declared war on energy-efficient lightbulbs, calling “sustainability” the gateway into a dystopic, Big Brother-patrolled liberal hellscape. When the lights went off during Beyoncé’s halftime set at the last Superbowl, conservative commentators from the Drudge Report to Michelle Malkin pointed blame (erroneously) at new power-saving measures at New Orleans’ Superdome. And one recent study found that giving Republican households feedback on their power use actually encourages them to use more energy.

Why do conservatives, who should have a natural inclination toward conservation, have a beef with energy efficiency? It could be tied to the political polarization of the climate change debate.

A study out Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined attitudes about energy efficiency in liberals and conservatives, and found that promoting energy-efficient products and services on the basis of their environmental benefits actually turned conservatives off from picking them. The researchers first quizzed participants on how much they value various benefits of energy efficiency, including reducing carbon emissions, reducing foreign oil dependence, and reducing how much consumers pay for energy; cutting emissions appealed to conservatives the least.

The study then presented participants with a real-world choice: With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to “buy” either an old-school lightbulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb (CFL), the same kind Bachmann railed against. Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons. When the bulbs cost the same, and even when the CFL cost more, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to buy the efficient bulb. But slap a message on the CFL’s packaging that says “Protect the Environment,” and “we saw a significant drop-off in more politically moderates and conservatives choosing that option,” said study author Dena Gromet, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

The chart below, from the report, shows how much liberals and conservatives value each argument for efficiency: While liberals (gray) valued all three equally, conservatives (white), were significantly less moved by and most at odds with liberals over the carbon-saving argument.

Gromet said she never expected the green message to motivate conservatives, but was surprised to find that it could in fact repel them from making a purchase even while they found other aspects, like saving cash on their power bills, attractive. The reason, she thinks, is that given the political polarization of the climate change debate, environmental activism is so frowned upon by those on the right that they’ll do anything to keep themselves distanced from it.

“When we’re given an option where the choice is made to represent a value that we don’t identify with or that our ideological group doesn’t value,” she said, “this can turn the purchase into something undesirable. By making [the environment] part of the choice, even though they might see the economic benefit, they no longer want to put their money toward that option.”

This graph, lifted from the report (on the x-axis, -1 is liberal and 1 is conservative), shows the damage the wrong messaging can do: With no messaging, roughly 60 percent of all participants picked the CFL; a pro-environment message boosted support in liberals but cut it sharply in conservatives:

That gap could represent real lost opportunities in the private sector: The EPA’s Energy Star label, for example, perhaps the most prominent label for energy-efficient products, puts greenhouse gas savings front and center in its packaging, and proudly boasts that products with the label help Americans “protect our climate.”

This isn’t just a problem for businesses trying to push energy-efficient products, but also for environmentalists and policymakers pushing to write efficiency or other climate-friendly policies into law, said Jessica Goodheart, director of RePower LA, which advocates for energy-saving practices in the Los Angeles power utility. Goodheart said while tackling climate change is driving force behind her lobbying, she more often finds herself talking about jobs and the economy, especially when addressing small business owners.

“It’s always important to speak to people where they are, and with energy efficiency there are so many positive messages you can use,” she said.

And there’s no shortage of opportunities to roll those messages out: Last week, Energy Department researchers found that rules requiring utilities to use renewable energy were under attack in over half the states they exist in; such laws might have better luck fending off Bachmann-esque fusillades if they refocus their rhetoric around their cost-savings, energy independence, or other benefits, Gromet’s research suggests, especially in conservative states.

That doesn’t necessarily mean green advocates need to somehow cover up the environmental benefits of a policy or product: A study from Stanford psychologists released last December found that reframing environmental messaging in terms of preserving the “purity” of the natural world resonated morally with conservatives.

“There’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all message that will appeal equally,” Gromet said. “It’s important to know the market you’re appealing to; there are some messages you may want to avoid.”

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Fossil fuel cheerleaders take note: Renewable energy ain’t going nowhere — and it may prove to be the better bet in the long run.

By 2030, renewables will account for 70 percent of new power supply worldwide, according to projections released Monday from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Bloomberg analysts examined gas prices, carbon prices, the dwindling price of green energy technology, and overall energy demand (which, in the U.S. at least, is on a massive decline), and found solar and wind beating fossil fuels like coal and natural gas by 2030.

The chart below shows annual installations of new power sources, in gigawatts; over time, more and more of the new energy supply being built each year comes from renewable sources (like wind turbines and solar panels), by 2030 representing $630 billion worth of investment, while new fossil fuel sources (like coal- or gas-burning power plants) become increasingly rare.

The effect of this projected growth, BNEF CEO Michael Liebreich told Climate Desk at a gathering of clean energy investors Monday in New York, is that damage to the climate from the electricity sector is likely to taper off even as worldwide electricity use grows. “I believe we’re in a phase of change where renewables are going to take the sting out of growth in energy demand,” he said.

Signs of this transformation are already appearing: Solar power workers now outnumber coal miners nationwide, wind power was the United States’ leading source of new power in 2012, and financial analysts warn that fossil fuel investments are poised to become a very bad bet.

But that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods yet: Fossil fuels have such a historic grip on the power market that even this projected massive growth isn’t enough to tip the scales fully towards sustainability. By 2030, non-renewable sources will still account for half of the world’s total power supply, according to the analysis. The chart below shows the world’s total energy use, again in gigawatts; while total use grows, more comes from renewable sources:

Liebreich cautioned that the accuracy of BNEF’s projection will hinge on China, which may have up to 50 percent more natural gas than the United States and seems to be on the brink of a fracking gold rush. The question, Liebreich said, is how renewables investors might react if China is able to exploit its gas resources cheaply. For now, he said the renewable renaissance is driven mainly by the bottom line: High returns and ever-cheaper technology make putting money into renewables good business. “If it’s attractive to the investors,” he said, “they invest.”

This story was produced by Mother Jones as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

—–

Read another post about the Bloomberg New Energy Finance report: Falling prices for renewable energy could lead to a tripling of investment

Earlier this month, when a burst pipe spilled thousands of gallons of heavy oil into an Arkansas suburb, the message from the White House went something like: “Everybody chill, the EPA has it under control.” But reporters on the scene found the cleanup orchestrated by the same company, ExxonMobil, that allowed the spill, and heard only crickets when they asked the EPA about its involvement.

Turns out, on some of the nation’s most pressing environmental health issues, the EPA’s transparency record isn’t exactly crystal-clear.

So with a vote on President Obama’s new pick to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy, coming up as soon as next week, it perhaps isn’t a surprise that congressional scrutiny of her nomination has centered more on the agency’s secret-keeping habits than on its environmental enforcement goals. At a hearing last Thursday before the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, McCarthy got grilled on EPA’s transparency record by Republican members, led by Louisiana’s David Vitter. On Tuesday, the committee’s Republicans sent a memo demanding details on her plans to open up the agency’s inner workings.

But for all their zeal, Vitter and his GOP colleagues (including climate change denier-in-chief James Inhofe [R-Okla.]) might be barking up the wrong tree: A major thrust of their complaint against McCarthy, a feisty Bostonian currently overseeing EPA’s air quality division, hinges on the use of email aliases by top EPA officials and the possibility that they’ve used personal email accounts for official business, an issue currently under investigation by the EPA inspector general.

Outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Bush-era EPA head Christie Whitman both created official email addresses under fake names (Jackson’s was “Richard Windsor,” after a pet dog), apparently to circumvent a chronic deluge of spam. McCarthy says she doesn’t have an alias email and told the Senate committee she found only one instance of using her personal email for work — which didn’t stop Vitter, in the memo, from demanding a full audit of her personal emails.

And while the use of unofficial email addresses beyond the reach of federal public records laws clearly raises the specter of important information being kept in the dark, few in the transparency or environmental journalism communities think it should be the focus of complaints about the agency’s openness.

“The concerns over fake emails are totally bogus,” says Joe Davis, a veteran environmental journalist and a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ freedom of information taskforce. “This wasn’t some made-up thing by Lisa Jackson to fool us all. They’re simply efforts to politically damage McCarthy and Lisa Jackson and EPA by people with an anti-regulatory agenda.”

Indeed, a review of a cache of “secret” emails from Jackson uncovered such pressing matters as whether “turducken” is a real thing (it is), and lyrics for a Santa-themed jingle about coal-ash regulation.

The problem, Davis said, is that focusing on the emails distracts from more legitimate transparency concerns, like whether McCarthy mislead Congress about greenhouse gas regulations, lawsuits alleging the EPA deliberately destroyed official instant messaging threads, and what Davis describes as a longstanding agency-wide pattern of rebuffing the news media — a pattern that has only gotten worse during the Obama administration. And if Senate Republicans are asking the wrong questions, Davis says, they’re at least doing better than Democrats, who haven’t raised any questions in the nomination process about the EPA’s openness with the media.

There’s plenty that could use a good airing: Back in 2010, the EPA asked the natural gas industry to cough up details on the ingredients in fracking fluid after companies were caught pumping toxic chemicals like benzene and toluene into the ground. It was a chance to shine a light on a practice that had been notoriously murky since being exempted from Safe Drinking Water Act disclosure rules five years before. There was only one problem: Under industry pressure, the EPA agreed to keep the ingredient lists a secret from the public, and by last year was still scrambling just to get the lists for themselves.

Meanwhile, a rule to crack down on toxic coal ash disposal that EPA boss Lisa Jackson hoped would be one of her flagship achievements was watered down during closed-door meetings with industry groups and then mysteriously delayed; with Jackson on her way out, it has yet to be finalized.

President Obama’s broader campaign promises to bring more transparency across the federal government have fallen short, and environmental watchdogs have called foul on the EPA in particular for shutting out journalists, controlling messages for political gain, obfuscating public comments on proposed policies, and a host of other transparency issues. A 2008 Union of Concerned Scientists study found that hundreds of EPA scientists had their work interfered with by officials for political reasons.

Transparency is “a chronic, burning issue at EPA,” says the SEJ’s Joe Davis. “It’s a way of insulating themselves from PR disasters and political and public accountability.”

An EPA spokesperson declined to comment for this story, instead forwarding an April 8 letter from McCarthy to Vitter saying that “the Agency should strive for excellence with respect to transparency and accountability.” And there are already indications that McCarthy has a different view from many environmental journalists of what “excellence” would look like. At a panel last September hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, McCarthy defended the agency’s practice of keeping their staff scientists under lock and key — and away from journalists: “It is the job of the agency to make sure that personalities don’t get in the way of really discussing the science in a way that maintains the agency’s credibility,” she said then.

The EPA is the environmental agency perhaps most often besieged by private industry and Republicans, and its transparency record makes it a sitting turducken for this kind of criticism, said Nancy Watzman, a consultant with the Sunlight Foundation, which monitors government openness.

Still, Watzman said, given the preponderance of transparency problems at the EPA, it’s critical for lawmakers to choose their battles wisely: “Transparency is kind of a feel-good word,” she said, but one that can too easily be wielded as a cudgel. “We believe in it, but it’s often used in a political way.”

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A national climate change plan is nowhere in sight from Congress, and last week the Obama administration pushed back a deadline to crack down on power plant emissions. But despite those — and many other — familiar setbacks, a new report has found that the U.S. is nonetheless inching ahead on climate action.

Yesterday the Climate Policy Initiative released a sweeping overview [PDF] of climate change policies across the globe. It paints a picture of the U.S. that climate hawks might find distressingly, if familiarly, chaotic: A tangle of federal subsidies, differing state-level clean energy mandates, and a host of natural resources, from wind to coal to natural gas, scrambling for political favor.

“What makes the U.S. unique is that we have no overall climate strategy where all these policies fit,” said David Nelson, a CPI researcher and lead author of the report, which describes the thicket of state and federal climate policies as “messy but useful,” in that it lacks clarity and direction but can, with luck, produce results.

The surprising thing, Nelson said, is that while the U.S.’s approach to dealing with climate change lacks the focus of, say, the E.U.’s carbon trading market, it must be doing something right: Carbon dioxide emissions have fallen 13 percent in the last seven years, and yesterday the EPA announced that greenhouse gas emissions fell 1.6 percent from 2010 to 2011.

New data released yesterday by the federal Energy Information Administration indicates that CO2 emissions could soon start climbing. But they are projected to rise much more slowly than in recent decades — and to stay below their 2007 peak — because of new policies that encourage increased vehicle efficiency, promote renewable energy, and clear the way for the extraction of more low-emissions natural gas through fracking:

At the same time, state and federal policies boosting energy efficiency will continue to lower energy use, according to the EIA. Energy use is expected to fall off both per capita and, more impressively, per dollar of GDP. That’s a sign that energy efficiency won’t choke economic growth:

Still, Nelson said, the U.S. could see greater improvements if it adopted a national carbon pricing scheme like the ones recently proposed in Congress, and streamlined coordination between state and federal governments. By way of example, he pointed to a deforestation policy in Brazil (where protecting rainforests is a critical area of climate change mitigation) that stalled because local officials weren’t equipped to enforce it, then sprung into action once the federal government provided adequate resources.

The problem for the U.S., Nelson said, is that without an overarching plan, the best that can be hoped for is that the country’s swirl of climate policies happen to complement each other more than they create contradiction or confusion. For now, he’s said, these projections suggest Americans are lucking out: “All the forces are beginning to line up.”

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Enviros hoping for details on President Obama’s promised biofuel push got a few answers yesterday in the president’s new budget, which still left some questions as to how the administration plans to pay for expensive new biofuels research. The budget [PDF] indicates the Interior Department may charge the fossil fuel industry more to drill on public lands, a plan that already had Republicans bristling when the president hinted at it last month.

In mid-March, in a speech at Illinois’ Argonne National Lab, Obama pitched an Energy Security Trust, which would collect $2 billion in additional revenues by 2020 from oil and gas companies that drill on federal land, and invest the funds in R&D for cutting-edge biofuels and clean vehicles. According to the Interior Department, these royalties totaled roughly $7.9 billion in FY 2012.

The speech left unclear the question of how an additional $2 billion in royalties could be raised without either raising royalty rates — a non-starter for the fossil fuel industry — or allowing more drilling on more public lands. A White House spokesperson was quick to rule out expanded drilling in Alaska, but left the possibility elsewhere. A Climate Desk calculation reviewed by MIT-based energy blogger Jesse Jenkins found that to raise an additional $2 billion in royalties through expanded drilling alone, oil and gas development on public land would need to increase by 1.5 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively, by 2020.

“You certainly don’t gain anything by promoting clean energy that ends up promoting the production of more dirty energy sources,” Natural Resources Defense Council policy analyst Bob Deans told Climate Desk last month.

Deans had hoped that today’s budget would clear things up. While the proposal doesn’t mention the Energy Security Trust by name, it calls for unspecified adjustments to royalty rates that The Hill reports would be redirected from the general treasury toward the trust. An Interior Department spokesperson said that annual oil and gas income to the government is projected to rise by $2.8 billion by 2023, but was unsure whether this money would come from new public land drilling or solely via increased royalties.

The budget also carves out $2.3 billion for the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which oversees R&D on advanced biofuels (as well as solar, wind, and other clean energy research), but doesn’t specify how much of that would go toward biofuels specifically, or whether these funds are in addition to the $2 billion for the Energy Security Trust. A White House spokesperson did not return repeated calls for comment.

If Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) has his way, it could be a moot point: Goodlatte introduced a bill yesterday that would bar biofuels from comprising more than 10 percent of the nation’s gasoline supply. That was the mix limit enforced by the EPA until 2010, but the agency has begun to relax enforcement of the restriction, allowing for the sale of gas with up to 15 percent ethanol. But Goodlatte’s bill would set the 10-percent cap in stone by limiting how much of the nation’s biofuel supply can go to fuel; it would also eliminate federal rules that require gasoline producers to use ethanol. Goodlatte claims his bill could help livestock producers by easing corn prices that were pushed to record highs by recent drought — prices that, incidentally, also hurt the ethanol industry.

At a press conference in Washington yesterday afternoon, Goodlatte, joined by co-sponsors Reps. Jim Costa (D-Calif.), Steve Womack (R-Ark.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), said the government’s support for ethanol “has quite frankly triggered a domino effect that is hurting American consumers, energy producers, food manufacturers, and retailers,” adding that he has support for the bill from livestock interests and the petroleum industry.

But while Goodlatte’s stuck to the topic of corn-based fuel, Brooke Coleman, director of the trade group that represents non-corn biofuel producers, says the bill would apply to all kinds of biofuel, and have the consequence of barring future growth of the kind Obama envisions.

“It’s a total smokescreen,” Coleman said. “You can’t ban ethanol over 10 percent and pretend you’re not affecting the advanced biofuels. You’d be banning our product.”

In November, the EPA, facing pressure from drought-beset governors to waive federal rules mandating ethanol use, found that the ethanol industry did not contribute [PDF] to higher food prices and ruled not to grant the requested waivers, which “greatly disappointed” Goodlatte, who introduced a similar, unsuccessful bill in 2011.

Given how much of the gasoline market corn-based ethanol eats up, Coleman said, placing a hard-and-fast limit on biofuels in the gas supply would kill off the nascent advanced biofuels industry before the president finds ways to fund it.

“[Goodlatte] is an advocate for protecting the free market for oil,” he said. “There’s no place for us to go.”

This story was produced by Mother Jones as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Of all the many and varied consequences of fracking (water contamination, injured workers, earthquakes, the list goes on) one of the least understood is so-called “fugitive” methane emissions. Methane is the primary ingredient of natural gas, and it escapes into the atmosphere at every stage of production: at wells, in processing plants, and in pipes on its way to your house. According to a new study [PDF], it could become one of the worst climate impacts of the fracking boom — and yet, it’s one of the easiest to tackle right away. Best of all, fixing the leaks is good for the bottom line.

According to the World Resources Institute, natural gas producers allow $1.5 billion worth of methane to escape from their operations every year. That might sound like small change to an industry that drilled up some $66.5 billion worth of natural gas in 2012 alone, but it’s a big deal for the climate: While methane only makes up 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (20 percent of which comes from cow farts), it packs a global warming punch 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide.

“Those leaks are everywhere,” said WRI analyst James Bradbury, so fixing them would be “super low-hanging fruit.”

The problem, he says, is that right now those emissions aren’t directly regulated by the EPA. In President Obama’s first term, the EPA set new requirements for capturing other types of pollutants that escape from fracked wells, using technology that also, incidentally, limits methane. But without a cap on methane itself, WRI finds, the potent gas is free to escape at incredible rates, principally from leaky pipelines. The scale of the problem is hard to overstate: The Energy Department found [PDF] that leaking methane could ultimately make natural gas — which purports to be a “clean” fossil fuel — even more damaging than coal, and an earlier WRI study found that fixing methane leaks would be the single biggest step the U.S. could take toward meeting its long-term greenhouse gas reduction goals.

What’s more, the solution to the problem doesn’t rely on some kind futuristic, expensive technology: It’s literally a matter of patching up leaky pipes.

So what’s the holdup? For one thing, Bradbury says, that $1.5 billion in savings wouldn’t necessarily go to the companies making investments in fixing pipes: Gas inside a pipeline is owned by the producer, but the pipeline itself is owned by an independent operator who might not see any advantage in preventing methane leaks. The other issue is detection: Methane is colorless and can be odorless, so there’s no way to know when it’s escaping, where, and how fast, without special equipment. Gear to simplify the detection process is beginning to crop up on the market, but without a government mandate there’s less incentive for companies to invest in it. And without hard data on how much methane they’re losing, companies are disinclined to address the problem — especially across all of the nation’s 300,000 miles [PDF] of natural gas pipelines.

Or simply unwilling: A recent (debunked) report from the American Natural Gas Alliance claims the methane emissions risk is way over-hyped; an industry spokesperson said current practices were already enough to ensure that “people don’t need to trade protection of air, land and water for economic advancement.”

This is where the EPA needs to step in, Bradbury says. Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA could regulate all greenhouse gas emissions, which would cover not only methane but also the main climate-change culprit, CO2. It could, at a minimum, require companies to monitor these emissions. And it could reward companies that take action via recognition in its fracking best-practices program, Natural Gas STAR. Finally, the EPA could provide better support to the state-level agencies that are ultimately responsible for enforcing Clean Air Act rules.

If the president is serious about tackling climate change from the Oval Office, Bradbury said, there could hardly be a better place to start than here.

“We need to be focused on solutions and not take a wait-and-see approach,” he said. “You want to get these rules in place at the front end; we’re already playing catch-up.”

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.