Bill McKibben at 350.org’s recent Rally to End Fossil Fuel Subsidies. (Photo by 350.org.)

In just a few weeks, world leaders are converging on Rio for a landmark “Earth Summit” to talk about sustainability issues — but it’s time for them to stop talking and start doing. And we know where they can begin.

This year our governments will hand nearly hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies to the coal, gas, and oil industries. Instead, they should cut them off.

Cutting fossil fuel subsidies could actually take a giant step towards solving the climate crisis: Phasing out these subsidies would prevent gigatonnes of carbon emissions and help make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels.

And here’s the thing: This demand is completely reasonable — so reasonable that the leaders of the big countries have already agreed to it. The G20 promised in 2009 that fossil fuel subsidies would be phased out in the “medium term.” But the political power of the corporate polluters scares them, and so no nation has yet followed through.

If we want real action to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, we need to give world leaders a people-powered push as the Rio Summit approaches — and that push starts now with this global call to action.

Why focus on subsidies? Well, remember those pictures we took all over the world a few weeks ago, the ones where hundreds of thousands of people rallied in places wrecked by the drought, flood, fire, and melt that come with climate change? The billions in fossil fuel subsidies handed out to the fossil fuel industry are driving those climate disasters, and it’s time for us, and our political leaders, to connect the dots. Those billions should be spent investing in the world we want — in renewable energy, in efficiency, in public health and education — not sent to the corporate polluters who are super-heating our planet and threatening our future.

How are we going to ensure world leaders make good on their commitment to end fossil fuel subsidies? With a huge global groundswell of citizen pressure. Our friends at Avaaz, the planetary network for social good, are helping to lead this fight — already there are over half a million people signed on. In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of activists are pushing for landmark legislation to remove $113 billion in American fossil fuel subsidies over the next 10 years. But now we need a truly international effort in the lead-up to the Rio Earth Summit — which means enlisting you, and your friends.

Click here to sign on and spread the word.

After you sign on, please share the campaign with anyone you know who cares about the future. Or, for that matter, anyone who cares about not wasting their tax money by sending it to the richest industry on earth.

We’ll deliver the signatures on June 18, when world leaders arrive for the Earth Summit — in fact, we’ve got big plans brewing for some exciting ways to make sure our message in Rio is unignorable. But first we need you on the list, so please sign on today.

Denialist think tank the Heartland Institute likes to have all its besties over once a year to watch movies, braid each other’s hair, and talk about how they don’t believe in science or, when it comes down to it, really know what it is. Well, I have bad news for journalists looking for telling quotes, and for people like Lord Monckton who don’t get invited to any other parties: This year’s shindig was the last one for the foreseeable future.

The Heartland Institute has gotten in a lot of hot water lately, enraging not just activists but allies. People started giving the group the side-eye after some of its secret documents came to light, but the final straw was a hilariously asinine billboard campaign insinuating that people who care about the planet are psychos. So many funders walked out over that one that Heartland doesn’t have the money to put on its annual Jerkapalooza anymore.

Oh, denialists — will you never again go to the ball? Perhaps your fairy godmother will come and save you. She’s at least as plausible as the other things you believe in.

The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg is actually braving the Heartland Institute conference this week. And it’s totally worth it, because she’s coming out with quotes of horrifying callousness, like this one, from Heartland policy adviser John Dunn:

“Warm is good for people, and it’s particularly good for people as they get older,” said Dunn. “The people that warm spells kill are already moribund.” He went on to say that only extreme cold caused extra deaths.

Let us translate: Hey, old people! Sorry about that heat wave that killed you. You were going to die anyway, so no sweat, OK?

The next speaker wanted to revive the use of DDT.

Another thought Mitt Romney wasn’t doing enough to pump up oil and gas.

Good thing these guys are running out of money.

There’s a bit of news from the G8 summit that might have escaped notice: International leaders agreed to take collective action to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions. And pigs do fly.

The agreement (which, unlike flying pigs, is real — we promise) could be “the biggest step in years in tackling climate change,” as The Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean says. The catch is that it has nothing to do with carbon dioxide. Instead, it focuses on “short-lived climate pollutants” — all those other pesky carbon-based greenhouse gases, like methane, soot, and ozone.

Decreasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere could buy the world some time — three decades or so — to deal with the gobs of carbon dioxide we’re pumping out. Because these other pollutants hang out in the atmosphere for shorter periods of time, it’s easier to decrease their concentrations. Those concentrations might not be as high as the concentration of carbon dioxide, but since the short-lived pollutants are more potent greenhouse gases, decreasing their concentration can have an outsized impact.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, shoring up her new title as Keeper of All that is Awesome, launched an initiative to deal with short-lived pollutants back in February. Two G8 nations (the U.S. and Canada) were already on board. Now the other six have signed on, too. And there’s going to be a report! From the World Bank! Which isn’t the same as actually reducing greenhouse-gas concentrations. But progress is progress.

Before the Heartland Institute decided to alienate even right-wing denialists with their OTT billboard campaign, they were already in kind of hot water — some of their internal documents had come to light, and the light was not flattering. Climate scientist Peter Gleick admitted to obtaining the documents under false pretenses, which absolutely scandalized Heartland, whose policy on document-stealing is “it’s only fine when we or our friends do it.”

Since then, Heartland’s defense has rested mainly on this chain of logic:

• Gleick is a terrible person who should  never have stolen those secret documents that were OUR PERSONAL PROPERTY and SECRET.
• And anyway they aren’t ours at all and are total forgeries.

Gleick has already apologized for misrepresenting himself to Heartland in order to get the documents. But Heartland has continued to insist that he also forged one of the memos (conveniently, the one that made it look the worst). Well, he didn’t. An investigation has revealed that Gleick didn’t forge diddly-squat so shut up.

We expect this to get exactly as much coverage and attention, and have just as much long-term effect on the conversation, as the multiple investigations clearing the “Climategate” scientists of all wrongdoing charges. In other words, Heartland supporters — of whom there are fewer and fewer, thank god for small favors — will keep howling “forgery” and thinking they won.

Oops, missed again.

Why do those at the Breakthrough Institute insist that everyone else besides them who cares about the environment is wrong, wrong, wrong? Their latest, called “The Creative Destruction of Climate Economics,” is a swipe at those misguided souls who think putting a price on carbon emissions would help combat climate change.

Breakthrough, according to its website, aims “to modernize liberal-progressive-green politics” and to accelerate the transition to an “ecologically vibrant” future. It “broke through” into well-funded fame in 2003 with its attack on environmentalists for failing to emphasize the economic concerns of ordinary Americans, such as jobs — thereby alienating the major environmental groups, who had been talking about jobs and the environment for years.

What’s wrong with pricing carbon emissions? This particular breakthrough rests on a mistaken reading of an academic paper in the American Economic Review, the most prestigious outlet for mainstream economics. That paper develops a simplified, abstract model of an economy that generates carbon emissions. Unlike some climate economics models, it assumes that public policy can affect the pace of innovation. Its conclusion, in the authors’ own words, seems quite balanced:

A simple but important implication of our analysis is that optimal environmental regulation should always use both an input tax (“carbon tax”) to control current emissions, and research subsidies or profit taxes to influence the direction of research.

Compared to exclusive reliance on carbon taxes, they continue, “optimal policy relies less on a carbon tax and instead involves direct encouragement to the development of clean technologies.”

Nothing has been creatively destroyed here, except for a lopsided position that calls for carbon taxes to do the whole job alone. And note that we’re talking about a very simple model, not a study of the U.S. economy. Yet the Breakthrough crowd is ready to run with the claim that another shibboleth of environmentalism has been laid low. After dismissive comments about many advocates of carbon pricing — imagine the chutzpah of Paul Krugman, using his reputation as an economist to support price incentives! — they zoom in on Environmental Defense Fund economist Gernot Wagner.

Wagner has, in fact, made some lopsided statements about the possibility of reaching environmental goals through price incentives alone. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the Breakthrough authors, are right about a couple of specifics in their response to Wagner: Most of the phaseout of leaded gasoline in the 1970s happened before the introduction of a lead emissions trading system; the same was true for the decrease in the price of sulfur dioxide emissions from coal plants in the 1990s, ahead of the introduction of sulfur emissions trading.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger are wrong to conclude from this, however, that price incentives can be ignored. The European Union’s emissions trading system has no effect because the emissions cap is so high and the resulting price is so low — a common defect of recent emissions trading schemes, as it turns out. The early phaseout of lead emissions from gasoline, and of sulfur emissions from power plants, both were driven by old-fashioned “command and control” regulations, a euphemism for “telling polluters to stop polluting.”

What should be done to reduce carbon emissions? Climate change actually is a crisis that demands massive, immediate response. Putting a price on carbon emissions, funding research on clean energy, and adopting traditional controls on the dirtiest technologies all seem entirely compatible. We’ll need all of the above and more, right away, to stand a chance.

What should be said to those, like Gernot Wagner, who may be overly committed to a single policy choice? As long as it’s a desirable policy, as Wagner’s is, let’s congratulate them on advocating it, and urge them to take an even broader view.

It is so important to work together on this, that the help of Nordhaus and Shellenberger should be welcomed — as soon as they achieve one of those breakthroughs that’s normally required in kindergarten, namely learning to “play well with others.”

Photo by Musebrarian.

We’ve known for a while that climate change will threaten supplies of our favorite foods, like wine and bourbon. (Oh, and bacon, coffee, chocolate, oysters, and pecan pie.) But the optimists among us took this news with good humor. “Oh sure, our favorite foods and intoxicants might be a little scarcer,” these imaginary chirpy little shits said, “but that will make every mouthful more precious.” Well, not when it comes to maple syrup, sucker! Climate change isn’t just making it scarcer — it’s making it taste way worse.

The mild winter played hell with maple syrup production, and a lot of what was produced is only good for off-the-table uses like flavoring chewing tobacco. U.S. production dropped from 30 million pounds of syrup to 18 million pounds of yucky goo.

“You take 80 degrees in March by golly it don’t help nothing,” said Alfred Carrier, a sugarmaker in Glover, Vt. “We had quite a lot of off-flavored syrup. I don’t think you’d want to put it on a pancake.”

You said it, Alfred. By golly.

Prices on syrup actually won’t jump too much this year, because Quebec laid in a strategic syrup reserve when yields were high. And this winter could be cold, putting production back on track — but I wouldn’t count on that forever. It’s probably time to start looking into other pancake toppings, ones that will get more plentiful as we hurtle towards destruction. Maybe the salty tears of endangered pandas.

Thomas Keller in his kitchen. (Photo by Arnold Gatilao.)

Thanks, Thomas Keller. Now we know where you stand. When you joined forces with Andoni Luis Aduriz and came out publicly in The New York Times this week as a chef who does not feel any obligation to the environment, we heard you.“With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint?” you asked.

You think it’s not your place, as reporter Julia Moskin puts it, “to provide a livelihood for farmers near [your] restaurants, to preserve traditional culinary arts or to stop the spread of global warming.”

Yep, you’re just here to “create great, brilliant food.”

And you know what? That might make sense — if we lived in the 19th century. Then you could just focus on making your brilliant food (it would probably be served to royalty) and someone else would do the driving, someone else the laundry, and so forth. While the farmers — out in the countryside — would do nothing but farm. Of course, no one would dream of writing about you in a national publication, either. You wouldn’t have to be a global citizen of an information age.

And indeed — even in this day and age — you do have a choice. As a celebrity chef with an international following at whose restaurant a reservation may only be acquired with help of a skilled expert, you can opt out of caring about the impact the producers of your food have on the soil, water, and the atmosphere. You can downplay the role of the local food economy your restaurant supports and tell the “ambitious young chefs around the world hanging on [your] every word” that flavor comes first. You can also, by all means, call on “the world’s governments” to worry about climate change (and for all I know, you might even think they have the political will to do that). You absolutely can.

But you should know just how irresponsible this statement is. Not just irresponsible — destructive.

We’re at a turning point, globally, and food production — especially in its current, ultra-industrial form — is a huge part of the problem. We’re running out of land and water and, yes, the atmosphere is filling up with methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide. In fact, agriculture is a larger contributor of greenhouse gases than the transportation sector. (This TEDx video gives a good, brief overview of the problem.) Meanwhile, our broken food system asks that its producers plow under native forests and grasslands to grow soybeans that feed pigs in China and over-fertilize their crops even when they know it will contribute to a giant dead zone in the nation’s most important fishery.

The famous garden at the French Laundry. (Photo by Ernest Bludger.)

Meanwhile — as you know, Mr. Keller — there are a number of small-scale farmers, ranchers, and artisans willing to live on next to nothing because they believe there’s a better way. Many of today’s most sustainable farmers live without insurance, buy almost nothing, and find ways — by hook or by crook — to live on what they could otherwise earn driving buses or cleaning offices. And — thanks in part to the chefs and eaters who support them — they’ve succeeded at maintaining a small but growing front against monocropping and factory farms. And not coincidentally, the food they’re producing is some of the best; you and I absolutely agree on that fact.

Moskin calls your decision to undercut the role these producers are playing as stewards of the land at a crucial moment “radical.” She points out: “While their restaurants may be accessible only to the world’s 0.1 percent, chefs at top restaurants influence the entire global food community with the way they think, write, tweet and talk about food — not just the way they cook it.”

And indeed, some in the food world have responded critically, if subtly, which speaks to power chefs like you wield. In a wrap-up of Twitter responses on The New York Times‘ The Diner’s Journal blog, one of the harshest criticisms was, “Not sure this is the best strategy for ensuring history will treat you kindly.” Meanwhile, Chefs Collaborative — an organization dedicated to making the culinary industry more sustainable — has also begun collecting responses to the article.

I asked Laurie David — one well-known environmentalist who has recently turned her attention to food — what she thought about the chef’s statement, and, true to form for this producer of An Inconvenient Truth, she cut straight to the heart of what many in the food world are likely feeling. “The chef’s lack of concern for the serious challenges facing the world is anything but courageous. It’s really quite shocking. Why check your citizenship at the kitchen door?”

Artist’s conception.

You couldn’t have a one-ton snake today — the climate’s just too moderate for a cold-blooded creature that size. But back when the planet was warmer by nature, all kinds of terrifying mega-reptiles roamed the Earth. So, in anticipation of global warming, maybe we should start preparing for how to coexist with snakes the size of buses. Lesson one: Apparently they pal around with giant turtles.

Researchers from the University of Florida have announced that they’ve found an eight-foot-long prehistoric turtle in the same Colombian mine where the one-ton “Titanoboa” was discovered. The 60-million-year-old specimen, which the scientists have named Carbonemys cofrinii, is an ancestor of modern tropical turtles — and the press release describes it as “one of the only animals the world’s largest snake could not have eaten.” If that’s not the basis for a friendship, I don’t know what is.

Okay, we are probably never going to see C. cofrinii‘s like — or Titanoboa’s — again, no matter how much we eff up the climate. In theory, gradual warming could allow reptiles to grow to the size of large vehicles again, but in practice it’s happening too fast and it’s just gonna kill them. But that’s no reason not to pitch a new buddy comedy based on this discovery. “He’s a giant snake with a grudge …  She’s a giant turtle with a past … Together they are … R.E.P.T.I.L.E. F.O.R.C.E.”

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?