Well, it’s not the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but it’s a start.

A coalition of U.S. environmental and social justice groups has asked President Obama to step up and attend the Earth Summit, a gathering of international bigwigs next month in Rio. It’ll be an important opportunity to meet influential people from other countries, attend critical meetings, and lead high-level negotiations. Oh, and figure out how to build a green economy, Van Jones-style, around the globe.

Twenty years ago, when George Bush Sr. was hedging about attending the first Rio Earth Summit, a pack of green groups tried to convince him with a spooky video featuring a horse charging through a burning wasteland and James Earl Jones warning ominously of the planet’s imminent demise. He did attend, and had some fascinating conversations, while Barbara enjoyed her stay as well.

This year, many of the major U.S. green groups were weirdly silent about the Earth Summit — until this week, when they sent Obama a letter:

We are writing on behalf of civil society organizations that represent more than 5 million Americans to urge you to commit as soon as possible to lead the United States delegation to the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil in June.

Your presence at this Summit would signal its critical importance to all Americans, demonstrate our country’s deep concern over urgent global issues that will inevitably affect our security and well-being, and highlight our nation’s determination to be a contender in the race to a low-carbon green economy.

The letter [PDF] also asks Obama to roll out a list of commitments from the U.S. to promote the green economy here and abroad. The groups want Obama to push for elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies, sign onto the U.N.’s Sustainable Energy for All Initiative, which aims to bring clean power to developing countries, and crack down on ocean pollution and overfishing.

Twenty-two groups signed onto the letter, including four of the seven groups behind the Horsemen of the Apocalypse video in 1992 (the National Audubon Society, The Wilderness Society, and the Rainforest Action Network are still MIA), and some notable additions, among them the National Tribal Environmental Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

No word yet from the prez on whether he’s accepting the invitation. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reportedly out. So is British Prime Minister David Cameron — never mind that Cameron once pledged to lead the “greenest government ever,” and the U.N. postponed the Earth Summit so it wouldn’t conflict with the other huge event of mind-blowing global importance next month: the British Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. (Seriously, Brits, why do you even still have a queen? You tell me that and I’ll try to explain why we have the Electoral College. Deal?) Also bailing are members of the European parliament, who say they can’t afford the hotels, which have jacked up their rates for the occasion.

The good news is that the presidents and prime ministers of more than 130 other nations have RSVPed for the event. And if Obama does decide to attend, I happen to know that there are still bunks available at one of the beachside hostels at Copacabana, cheap. I’m sure he’d find something worthwhile to do.

Fill ‘er up — with biofuels? (Photo by U.S. Army Africa)

The U.S. military’s “going green” is not a singular phenomenon. There are several different things going on under that rubric, with different rationales and different effects. Some of them make such obvious strategic, economic, and environmental sense that no one really can, or does, oppose them. But one in particular — the biofuels initiative — is much less clear-cut. Before discussing that, though, let’s try to pick apart and categorize the green initiatives underway at the Department of Defense.

First off, there are attempts to reduce fossil-fuel use in the theater of war, mainly Iraq and Afghanistan, through more efficiency (insulated tents, LED lights) and the use of distributed renewables. These efforts directly enhance battlefield effectiveness. They make fighting units lighter and faster. They reduce the need for fuel convoys, saving lives and money. They are unimpeachable — even Republicans in Congress will hesitate to second-guess the military’s tactical logistics decisions.

Second, there are attempts to make U.S. military bases more independent of civilian power grids, which are vulnerable to accidents, blackouts, or attacks. In part this is being done by generating power on-site. Solar power for bases has become far more affordable, thanks to plummeting solar-panel prices, but there are also experiments underway with wind, geothermal, and biomass. Bases are also increasing energy and waste efficiency and experimenting with smart microgrids. These efforts seem somewhat more vulnerable to political attack, but I’ve not yet heard of any.

Third, there are efforts to find new liquid fuels for the military’s vast land, air, and water fleets. This one is the biggie, from the standpoint of sheer quantities of energy and money. It’s the most difficult. And it’s also the most controversial, in terms of Republican opposition and environmental risk.

There’s been work on hybrid military ground vehicles, but as far as I know, there’s no prospect of electricity substantially powering ships, planes, and tanks. There’s also very little being done on natural-gas vehicles for the military, at least that I’ve been able to find.

So that means biofuels. A lot of biofuels. Mind-boggling amounts.

Thus far, the military has been careful to avoid biofuel crops that compete with food crops, which are, as all good Grist readers know, a bane — and, climate-wise, not much better than gasoline. Instead, it is trying to stimulate markets in biofuel alternatives like cooking oil, algae, animal fats, and camelina.

It’s a fascinating and laudable effort, but there are two potential problems. First, all these alternatives are wildly expensive. (The algae fuel is $424 a gallon!) That’s to be expected — they’re all experimental. The military’s theory is that it represents a big enough customer to single-handedly create a market sufficient to drive down the cost to competitive levels.

That’s not entirely crazy. The military is the country’s biggest energy consumer: “In fiscal year 2009, the DOD consumed 932 trillion Btu of site delivered energy at a cost of 13.3 billion dollars.” Roughly three-quarters of that went to “mobility fuels” for the fleets. That’s close to $10 billion a year, or, put another way, 360,000 barrels of oil a day. That’s not enormous on a global level — only about 2 percent of U.S. consumption — but it seems large enough to provide biofuels with a serious kickstart. Innovation is never certain, but the military is going about it in a smart way, from labs to field tests.

Still, fuel costs are squeezing DOD’s budget today (see this new briefing from Third Way). Driving down the costs of biofuel alternatives fast enough, at a large enough scale, would be a stunning and, as far as I know, unprecedented achievement.

Which brings up the other possible problem, which is, what if the effort succeeds? It’s one thing to brew a few hundred thousand gallons of algae fuel. It’s another entirely to brew several billion gallons every year. Is there enough cooking oil in all the world’s McDonalds for that much fuel? Enough space to grow that much camelina? These fuels appear benign in their current small-batch phase, but if they were to scale up that much, that fast, it’s hard to say what kind of environmental or social problems might crop up.

Also, the main problem with oil, from a military strategic standpoint, is not so much anything about oil itself, but just the fact that it so dominates the fuel mix. The military is dependent on a single, volatile supply chain over which it has little control. The best move from a strategic standpoint is to diversify. But what if, at the end of all this, the military just ends up dependent on one or two forms of biofuel, with volatile supply chains of their own?

Even if those fuel supply chains are domestic — even if, by some miracle, enough non-food biofuel can be produced within the U.S. to fuel the military — is it really healthy to have the military so dependent on one or two domestic industries? Those would become industries that, for national-security reasons, can’t be allowed to fail or even substantially shrink. They’d be one more addition to the military-industrial complex, one more advocate for military expansion. It’s a recipe for corruption.

None of this is to say that congressional Republicans are right and DOD should just scrap the whole thing. But it is to say that the biofuels initiative is different from the other military “greening” initiatives, more economically and environmentally fraught. Getting lighter and faster on the battlefield saves money and lives; it is self-justifying. Making military bases more self-sufficient is self-evidently a smart strategic move. But shifting from oil to biofuels on a grand scale is a huge, audacious, expensive, and extremely risky gamble. It absolutely warrants close oversight and public discussion.

Photo by the U.S. Army.

The U.S. military recognizes that dependence on fossil fuels is a threat to U.S. strategic influence and its own operational effectiveness. With that in mind, it’s trying to make itself lighter and leaner, reducing energy consumption at bases and on the battlefield while working to develop fuel alternatives for its ship and plane fleets. Republicans have been quietly grumbling about this for a while; now they are openly opposing it. The GOP wastes no opportunity to boast of “supporting the troops,” but that support apparently ends where Big Oil contributions begin.

Let’s look at a few examples, shall we?

GOP tries to block use of cleaner fuels

Last week, the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee proposed a new Pentagon budget. Tucked away inside it was a provision that would prohibit the Department of Defense from buying any alternative fuels that cost more than conventional fossil fuels. TPM has the story.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan laments that this provision would kill the $12 million “Green Strike Group” program the Navy is running, which would field a strike group running entirely on biofuels (and a nuclear-powered carrier) for a naval exercise in June. The Navy hopes to have an entire “Great Green Fleet” in the water by 2016.

But the language is far broader than that. It would effectively prohibit military field-testing of any non-fossil fuel. After all, if alternatives were already cheaper than fossil fuels, they wouldn’t be alternatives. The Air Force couldn’t experiment with fuel blends for its jets. The Army couldn’t fuel its “Green Warrior Convoy.” This provision would explicitly ban the military from being an instrument of energy innovation.

GOP tries to push use of dirtier fuel

But wait! There is one expensive alternative fuel that congressional Republicans support. You see, Section 526 of 2007′s Energy Independence and Security Act prohibits the military from buying fuel that is more carbon-intensive than crude oil. Earlier this month, Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) offered an amendment to an appropriations bill, later passed by the House, that would bar the military from enforcing Sec. 526.

Why, you ask? “Placing limits on federal agencies’ fuel choices,” says Flores, “is an unacceptable precedent to set in regard to America’s energy policy and independence.”

Yes, I’ll let that irony sink in a moment.

Why are Republicans so keen to get rid of Sec. 526? Are there dirtier-but-cheaper fuels the military could be using?

Well, no. Instead, Republicans have seized on the idea of using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to liquid fuel (a technology made famous by Hitler — don’t tell the Heartland Institute). Building a plant to do this requires enormous capital investment, running one requires enormous operational and maintenance investments, and the result is … fuel more expensive than oil. This is to say nothing of the fact that it requires mining and transporting coal on the front end and releases up to 2.5 times as much CO2 as oil when burned.

So, let’s pause and review. The Republican position on military fuel choices is as follows: Congressional restrictions are an “unacceptable precedent” when they prohibit dirtier fuels, but necessary when they prohibit cleaner fuels. Also, it is unacceptable for the military to pay more for cleaner fuels, but necessary for it to pay more for dirtier fuel.

If you were cynical, you’d almost think that the issue had nothing to do with Congress’s relationship with the military, or with costs. You’d almost think Republicans just support fossil fuels and oppose clean energy, no matter the context.

McMillen’s thesis is that industry and ecosystems are analogous — each goes through three stages, and only the last stage is fully sustainable. Our society is based on Type II industry, and the area around Mt. St. Helens has only reached a Type II ecology in the wake of the famous disaster. But we both need to fast-forward to Type III if we’re going to make it. For Mt. St. Helens, that means an ecosystem in harmony, a balanced arrangement where flora and fauna are inter-reliant and no one species dominates. For industry, it means being able to run industries off their own waste (or each other’s), in a closed-loop system that constantly feeds and renews itself. In both cases, basically, it means sustainability.

These would be interesting enough ideas in an article or thesis, but in comic form they become accessible and charming (I like the Twin Peaks homage in the first panel, and the dismayed squirrel on page 22). I promise reading the comic will be more fun than reading my last paragraph.

Photo by Eric Tastad.

On Thursday, President Obama will visit TPI Composites, a wind manufacturer in Newton, Iowa (population, 15,254). There, he will reiterate his support for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal support program that has helped drive wind’s rapid expansion in the U.S. The PTC is now in peril, as Congress appears unlikely to renew it when it expires at the end of this year. The loss of the PTC would put tens of thousands of current jobs — and almost 100,000 future jobs [PDF] — at risk.

Newton’s experience is incredibly illustrative, so let’s recount a little history.

Vulture capitalism

Newton used to be the “washing machine capital of the world,” with five washing machine manufacturers. One by one they closed, until there was only Maytag, which at its height employed around 4,000 Newtonians. Then, in 2006, Maytag was the subject of a bidding war. On one side was Chinese manufacturer Haier Group, in partnership with none other than former Romney employer Bain Capital (Romney was gone by then). On the other was Whirlpool.

Whirlpool won, but it would have been vulture capitalism either way. The Maytag plant was summarily shuttered and the jobs sent out of state.

Manufacturing jobs return on the wind, with bipartisan support

Since then, Newton has turned itself around, in no small part by attracting several wind-turbine manufacturers, including Trinity Structural Towers and TPI Composites.

It’s not an unusual story in Iowa, which is a leading wind-power state. Almost 19 percent of the state’s power came from wind in 2011 and the industry employs some 6,000-7,000 Iowans. According to wind industry estimates, since the state passed a renewable energy standard in 1983, some $5 billion in wind investment has flooded the state.

Unsurprisingly, these developments have left wind power with broad bipartisan support in Iowa. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has defended the wind industry and the PTC against attacks from the right. Even Iowa Rep. Steve King (R), one of the most notoriously bigoted right-wing nutbags in all of Congress, has said, “Now is the time for stability in the wind industry, and the PTC offers just that.” When they were in the state, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Thaddeus McCotter (remember him?) all posed next to a wind-turbine blade made by none other than TPI Composites, to show their support for the industry.

(Side bar: A new analysis [PDF] shows that “adding more wind power to the electric grid could reduce wholesale market prices by more than 25 percent in the Midwest region by 2020.”)

But Romney hates wind

Despite support from Iowa Republicans for wind (and despite that turbine photo-op), Mitt Romney has expressed only contempt for the industry. He would end federal support for solar and wind alike, technologies that, he has said, “make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.” (Y’know, like Iowa’s own TPI Composites, the 700 people it employs, and the town it saved.)

And here he is in Colorado, smirking about the wind industry losing 10,000 jobs since 2009. That’s true, of course — it’s gone from a high of 85,000 to around 75,000 now — but mainly because the industry is nervous about the future of the PTC. Which Romney wants to kill for good. Thus insuring far greater job losses.

The fact is, if Republicans win Congress and Romney becomes president, all federal support for clean energy will dry up and Newton, along with other Midwestern towns that have been revitalized by wind, will suffer yet another devastating blow. I wonder if Iowa voters — sitting in one of 2012′s most important swing states — were thinking about that when Romney came to the state recently to lecture about the deficit.

“They’re very disciplined, they’re very tightly organized, and they have a very emphatic policy of avoiding press coverage,” says Coll, a longtime editor at the Washington Post who is now a staff writer at the New Yorker and director of the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

It took three years to get into the heart of this beast, but Coll ultimately did it, even landing interviews with the company’s longtime CEO, Lee Raymond, a chemical engineer by training who famously denied that humans were causing climate change, and poured company money into climate denial organizations and campaigns.

The result of Coll’s labors is Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, a book that takes us from the Exxon Valdez oil spill up to the present day, tracking the company’s evolution through an era when its stance on climate change became less and less tenable, both scientifically and legally. I caught up with him over coffee recently as he passed through Seattle.

Q. Tell me about the money ExxonMobil poured into campaigns to discredit climate science.

A. In 1997, when the Kyoto [climate] accords were brought into being, there were many constituents and politicians in the United States that opposed American ratification on fairness grounds, on equity grounds, on economic competitiveness grounds. But I think the record shows that ExxonMobil took a much more radical view of the challenge of Kyoto. More than virtually any other American-headquartered, shareholder-owned corporation, it funded communications groups and campaigning groups to challenge the science itself. I think of it as a pretty radical decision for a corporation of that size and scale in the American democracy to go after the science that way. I think it made a difference, and it still resonates in the American debate. In what other case would you see as wide a gap between what, say, 97 percent of the relevant scientists believe, and what the public believes?

Q. The company now acknowledges that climate change is a reality — and even supported a carbon tax in 2009. Why did it change its story?

A. The corporation had been in a kind of running battle with its opponents, who had gradually exposed these campaigns and [corporate] funding and really had gone after ExxonMobil’s reputation, comparing them to tobacco companies. By 2005, they’re really isolated because they’ve been exposed [as funders of climate denial] and because the science has moved [in support of climate change]. The board and elements of senior management believed they really needed to change their tone, but they didn’t want to restate their views in such a way as might create an opening for liability lawsuits. So essentially the message was, “We were never wrong. We were only misunderstood.”

Q. Could Big Oil someday be forced to pay for its cover-up of climate science, the same way tobacco companies had to pay?

A. Looking back on the tobacco industry, we know that they knew that the actual product they were manufacturing and marketing was dangerous to human health and they suppressed their scientific evidence. They buried that information and sold the cigarettes directly to you and the cigarettes were addictive.

Turn to ExxonMobil by comparison. The causation between selling gasoline and global warming is less direct. There’s another problem which is, who’s the victim, in a legal sense? In the tobacco cases you have deaths, you have people who are sick right now, whereas the victims of global warming probably will live in the future. There are some communities that have tried to sue on the basis of, “We know certainly enough that our community will be destroyed as the seas rise,” but those kinds of indirect claims so far haven’t gotten traction.

But the main difference so far is, we don’t know that [oil companies] were aware within their own scientific evaluation of global warming that the best evidence showed that the burning of fossil fuels was causing global warming and they suppressed it.

Q. But I thought your book showed pretty clearly that ExxonMobil scientists did know that climate change was legit — they were looking for ways that the company could profit from it, right?

A. Investigating how to profit from global warming if it occurs isn’t the same as knowing that it is underway — at least not in a courtroom. You’re right in a directional sense but the tobacco companies fell because decades of lawsuits unearthed voluminous records showing that the companies knew smoking was deadly to their customers but covered up the evidence. With the oil companies, we don’t yet have those kinds of internal documents. It’s possible those documents are there in their archives, but no whistle-blower has walked out to say, “We knew this all along.”

Q. Despite all of its efforts to armor itself from risk and liability, I get the sense from your book that ExxonMobil is vulnerable.

A. They’re a very conservative culture that after the Valdez [oil spill] has tried to wring out human fallibility from their daily activity to the greatest degree human engineering can do it. And yet their business model — what they actually have to do in order to find and pump out all this oil and gas every year — is moving them more and more into a risk environment.

Geopolitically, the only places they can own oil and gas anymore are often weak, unstable states, and that puts them in coup-making countries and guerrilla wars. And then environmentally, the big safe pools of oil are owned by governments in the Middle East and they don’t want oil corporations in there anymore. That means ExxonMobil has to drill in crazy, dangerous frontier environments. So they’re out in deep water, they’re moving into the Arctic.

So they try to give the impression that they have taken all the risk out of their operations and that they simply would not allow another Valdez or Deepwater Horizon to happen. But the fact of the matter is, stuff happens, every day, in their system. It’s like aviation in the ’30s: Before we figured out how to basically idiot-proof our planes, we crashed a lot of them. And that’s what they’re sort of in — that mode trying not to crash too many. Because if you do it in a completely disastrous way, then you bet the company on a single day.

Q. At what point does the risk associated with oil extraction become so great that renewables start to make sense for a company like ExxonMobil — or maybe for our culture as a whole?

A. Our culture as a whole, that’s the key there, because I don’t think ExxonMobil will lead us in that direction. But I thought about that a lot, because they’re so confident in their forecast, at least for 50 years, that the rising middle classes of China and India alone will keep them in the oil business. So I kept thinking, well, what would change that equation?

Suppose we got 10 or 15 years of extreme weather and warm weather, and public consciousness started to shift. Suppose this consciousness is rising and then you get a series of Deepwater Horizons, or something in the Arctic ice that isn’t containable — another one of these catastrophic accidents that demonstrates that the corporations’ claims that they are capable of containment are just not right, or not reliable. Then you could start to imagine politics that would price some of this risk-taking out of our system and incent a more rapid shift toward solar and wind.

Q. Ten or 15 years of extreme weather?

A. Europe has obviously been moving much more aggressively in that direction. They’ve already created a model for how you can do it without completely blowing up your economy. They have obviously certain advantages of size and cohesion and density of population, but it can be done in the United States as well.

Q. Are there any clean technologies that scare this company — something that could force the transition more quickly?

A. The one area where I found that they were the most nervous — they study all of these alternatives, just to see if some black swan is coming their way — and I think that  batteries would be the one thing that could very rapidly transform the transportation sector where oil is most relevant. So that’s it: a globally scalable breakthrough in battery storage capacity. Electric vehicles.

Going solar in Afghanistan. (Photo by U.S. Marine Corps)

This is my contribution to a dialogue on the military and clean energy being hosted by National Journal.

—

To understand the promise of renewable energy for the U.S. military, it helps to start as far from Washington, D.C., as possible. (This is true for most forms of understanding.) Start far from the politicians, even from the military brass, far from the rooms where big-money decisions are made, far out on the leading edge of the conflict, with a small company of Marines in Afghanistan’s Sangin River Valley.

Not long ago, for a three-day mission out of a forward operating base in Afghanistan, each Marine would have humped between 20 and 35 pounds of batteries. One of the reasons Marines are so lethal in such small numbers today is that they are constantly connected by radios and computers. But radios and computers require a constant supply of batteries, brought by convoy over some of the deadliest roads on earth and then piled on the backs of Marines in highly kinetic environments.

In late 2010, India Company, from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, tried something new. They packed Solar Portable Alternative Communications Energy Systems, or SPACES — flexible solar panels, 64 square inches, that weigh about 2.5 pounds each. One 1st Lieutenant from India 3/5 later boasted that his patrol shed 700 pounds.

“We stayed out for three weeks,” he said, “and didn’t need a battery resupply once.”

This is a small example, of no great economic or geostrategic significance, yet it carries a profound lesson. It is a lesson that, in the unfolding age of energy insecurity, can be expressed as something like a universal law: reduced dependence on energy supply lines means greater autonomy, flexibility, and effectiveness.

The U.S. Marine Corps prides itself on being the U.S. military’s ship-to-shore expeditionary force — light, fast, and lethal, able to deploy quickly and operate autonomously in hostile or austere circumstances. So they have been the most sensitive to the chafing restrictions of what Gen. James Mattis, a Marine commander in the first Iraq war, famously called the “tether of fuel.”

That tether, the convoys crisscrossing Iraq and Afghanistan, not only slows the Marines and restricts their range of motion, it also gets them killed — one killed or wounded for each 50 convoys or so. And it is wildly expensive. By the time fuel is convoyed up through Pakistan or down through Russia, over the Hindu Kush mountains or across the Amu Darya river, and out from the big bases to the forward bases, sometimes on helicopter, fuel that costs the Marines $3 a gallon at the pump can reach a “fully burdened cost” of as high as $400 a gallon. It’s fair to say that Marines running diesel generators at forward operating bases in Afghanistan are using some of the most expensive fuel in the world.

With that in mind, Marines are field testing insulated tents, portable solar panels, LED lights, and systems to purify and cool local water. I reported on their efforts for a story in Outside last year, and every source I spoke to had the same thing to say: There may be some grumbling about the energy effort in the middle ranks, from officers set in their ways, but among young Marines on the front lines, and among the brass in the top ranks, there is nothing but enthusiasm.

It isn’t about “greening” anything or cooling the climate. “Other people are busy saving the planet; this is about saving Marine lives,” Col. Bob Charette, director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office, said recently. “I’d kiss a polar bear if it meant getting one Marine off an IED-filled highway.”

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has said that both the Navy and Marines will reduce fossil-fuel consumption by half by 2020. The Army and Air Force have also adopted aggressive goals. The military gets it: Reduced dependence on energy supply lines means greater autonomy, flexibility, and effectiveness. It’s not only true in the theater of war. It’s true for the great military fleets at sea and in the sky. It’s true for military bases in the U.S. or across the world, dependent on civilian power grids subject to attacks or blackouts.

And it’s not just true for the military. In a time of rising fossil-fuel prices and increasingly apparent climate dangers, the tether of fuel binds all of us — homes, businesses, communities, and whole economies — to a future of vulnerability and instability. Using less energy and generating more of our own is about more than dollars spent or saved. It’s about self-determination. That makes for a more effective military and a more secure, productive society.

A version of this post was originally published by the Center for American Progress.

Given today’s economic problems, you’d think the public would be in a surly mood about environmental protection, seeing it as a secondary and perhaps conflicting priority to jobs and economic growth. That’s certainly what conservatives are hoping as they continue to push their environment-wrecking agenda.

Turns out, though, the public didn’t get the memo. In the recently released poll from Yale University’s and George Mason University’s climate change communication programs, 58 percent of poll respondents said that protecting the environment improves economic growth and creates new jobs. Just 17 percent thought environmental protection hurts growth and jobs, and 25 percent thought there was no effect.

In the same poll, when asked to choose directly which was more important — environmental protection or economic growth — the public decisively favored protecting the environment, 62 percent to 38 percent, when there is a conflict between the two goals.

So no, the bad economy has not turned the public off to environmental protection. Conservatives, if they are wise, will factor that into their political calculations.

Image by Earl Wilkerson.

Apple is cleaning up its energy act.

The computer company says that by early next year, the energy used to power its worldwide data centers will all come from renewable sources, such as solar, wind power, or hydroelectric dams. It announced the news Thursday in a post on its website.

That’s a victory for the environmental activists at Greenpeace, who have been pressuring Apple for more than a year to clean up its act and commit to renewable energy.

A major sticking point has been Apple’s Maiden, N.C., facility, which is on the inexpensive but partially coal-powered Duke Energy grid. Apple had already started building a 100-acre solar array and a biogas energy plant on the site, but was still using Duke for a large chunk of the power at the 500,000-square-foot data center.

Now, the company says it will instead use local power providers who use renewable energy: “By the end of 2012, we’ll meet the energy needs of our Maiden, North Carolina, data center using entirely renewable sources.”

The company now plans to build a second 100-acre solar array a few miles down the road from the facility, but it isn’t saying when that will come online.

By year’s end, about 60 percent of Maiden’s energy will come from the solar farm and biogas plant. The other 40 percent will come from those unnamed renewable energy providers.

Greenpeace has stepped up its campaign against Apple in recent months. It sent cloud-cleaning activists to Apple stores in San Francisco, New York, and Toronto last month, and on Tuesday, two Greenpeacers were arrested after setting up a giant iPod in front of Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.

Greenpeace is happy with Thursday’s announcement, but it’s not stopping its campaign. “Apple’s announcement today is a great sign that Apple is taking seriously the hundreds of thousands of its customers who have asked for an iCloud powered by clean energy, not dirty coal,” a Greenpeace spokesman said in an email message.

Greenpeace wants Apple — and Microsoft and Amazon too, for that matter — to promise to make renewable energy a priority even as it builds new data centers. “Only then will customers have confidence that the iCloud will continue to get cleaner as it grows,” Greenpeace said.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment, but referred us to the company’s new web page.

Apple says that another of its data centers, this one in Newark, Calif., will be 100 percent renewable by February 2013. A third data center, located just down the road from Facebook in Prineville, Ore., will use wind, hydro, and geothermal energy when it comes online. The company also runs data facilities in Austin, Texas, and Sacramento, Calif., both of which are plugged into the renewable grid, Apple says.

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

Why are we handing Big Coal our bacon?

The most important thing you can read this week is Joe Smyth’s post on federal coal leasing. I realize “federal coal leasing” is not a phrase to quicken the pulse, but it’s a Very Big Deal.

A couple of weeks ago, I explained the situation the U.S. coal industry is in: domestic electricity use has leveled off, utilities are switching to cheap natural gas and wind, and the EPA is finally cracking down on dirty old coal plants. All that leaves U.S. coal in a pinch. Their main hope for the future is to increase coal exports. That’s why the fight over coal export terminals matters.

Arguably, though, the coal-export fight is secondary. From a climate-hawk point of view, it would be better just to leave the damn coal in the ground.

Is that even within our power as concerned U.S. citizens? As it happens, yes, it is, because we own much of the coal! The coal that companies like Peabody are itching to export comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. And most of the land in the Powder River Basin is owned by the federal government — that is to say, it’s owned by you and me.

The federal Bureau of Land Management leases the land to coal companies at bargain-basement prices, so they can strip-mine it and export the coal at a profit. Does that sound like good public policy to you?

You really should read Smyth’s whole post for the details, but here’s the important bit:

The BLM’s role is critical because unlike other regions such as Appalachia, Powder River Basin coal is mostly owned by the federal government, and BLM is supposed to ensure that coal development there “is in the best interests of the Nation.” But without proper oversight, the BLM has been offering this federal coal to companies like Peabody, Arch Coal, and Cloud Peak Energy for bargain rates. Over the last 30 years, this has amounted to a $28.9 billion subsidy to the coal mining industry and helped coal maintain its large share of US electricity generation by keeping coal prices artificially low, as explained in a report [PDF] and legal brief [PDF] by Tom Sanzillo of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. These low prices have also helped the Powder River Basin soar from just 5% of US coal production in 1970 to almost half today — even though the Federal Government no longer classifies the region as a coal-producing region. If this sounds absurd, that’s because the BLM’s process for leasing US coal is skewed to benefit coal mining companies, lacks proper oversight and public participation, and is basically corrupt — check out the WildEarth Guardians for more info. [my emphasis]

Speaking of that corrupt BLM process, there’s a lease auction happening today — BLM is selling off the “South Porcupine Tract,” which contains “an estimated 401,830,508 tons of mineable coal.” But the size of this lease is modest relative to the huge expansion of leasing the administration announced last year. When all that newly leased coal is burned, it will contribute 3.9 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, more than half what the U.S. emits in a year. (See also Joe Romm on this.)

As Smyth writes, this travesty is finally starting to get some attention from politicians like Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D). They are asking why U.S. taxpayers should subsidize coal companies to degrade Western port towns to export coal to Asia where it will accelerate climate change. That makes sense for no one other than the coal companies.

The BLM’s own justification for the lease doesn’t even make sense, as Smyth explains:

Keep in mind that in its Record of Decision [PDF] for [today's] South Porcupine lease, the BLM justified the decision by asserting that doing so would help “meet the national coal demand,” and that “The public interest is served by leasing the South Porcupine LBA tract because doing so provides a reliable, continuous supply of stable and affordable energy for consumers throughout the country.” At a time when coal’s share of US electricity generation has dropped 19% in one year to just 36%, and Peabody’s CEO is touting plans to profit from “the global coal supercycle,” even the twisted logic of BLM’s coal leasing process falls apart. How exactly is it in the “best interests of the Nation” to sell coal that belongs to US taxpayers at a discount so Peabody can strip mine and ship it to Asia? [my emphasis]

That’s a damn good question.

My question is, where’s the climate movement on this? More than Keystone XL, more than individual coal plants, more even than coal export plans, this seems to be where the real action is. The entire climate fight over coal is an attempt, often by indirect means, to keep the damn coal in the ground. And yet here’s a bunch of coal in the ground that U.S. citizens already own, and it’s being sold by an allegedly climate-concerned administration to coal companies for no particular public benefit. It seems like a place where concerted pressure could have an effect.

Why isn’t this the center of the climate fight right now?