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Revealing skeptics as sock puppets in a few quick clicks

Want to play a fun Friday game? It's called Six Degrees of ExxonMobil. The object: To see how quickly you can get from a denier to ExxonMobil's coffers.

All you need to start is an opinion piece by a global warming denier. Let's take this column by Deroy Murdock for Scripps Howard News Service (he's also a contributing editor for the National Review Online).

OK, let's start. Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. The Hoover Institution has received at least $295,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

Wow, wasn't that easy and fun? OK, so it's not quite "Bruce Campbell was in The Majestic with Susan Willis, who was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon," but the connection is just as reliable.

Transportation policy and the working married woman

Progressives in favor of congestion pricing on highways and in central cities tend to argue for those policies on progressive grounds (shock!) -- that such pricing systems reduce emissions, improve air quality, and fund transit improvements, which benefit lower- and middle-income households. Those are all nice benefits to congestion pricing programs, but we shouldn't neglect the congestion reduction function.

Congestion costs America some $80 billion per year, in the form of lost time and wasted fuel. And as it turns out, commutes extended by congestion have other effects, as well:

There is a strong empirical evidence demonstrating that labor force participation rates of married women are negatively correlated with commuting time. What is more, the analysis shows that metropolitan areas which experienced relatively large increases in average commuting time between 1980 and 2000 also had slower growth of labor force participation of married women.

Long commutes are typically associated with dense cities like New York, but in recent decades, congestion has grown fastest in places with rapid exurban growth -- like Dallas, Riverside (California), San Diego, and Washington, D.C.

This might be my all-time favorite

Certainly in the top five:

From Chia to Chard

Chia leader The grass is always greener on the other side of the Atlantic. And speaking of decorative planters: It’s O-O-O-bama! She’s a poet and didn’t gnaw it Two buses diverged on a road, and I / I bit the driver of the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference. […]

Is there anything that isn't peaking?

Felix Salmon mused on the subject of Peakniks recently (and what a neologism that is!) after reading Ben McGrath's entertainingly morbid piece, "The Dystopians" in The New Yorker ($ub. req'd). While it's worth observing that "peaknik" has typically referred to Peak Oilers, I think it's safe to say that we're all peakniks now.

McGrath talks mostly about financial doomsayers, i.e. Peak Debt and Peak Dollars, but refers generally, if somewhat dismissively, to the "Peaknik Diaspora" and some of its adherents. These would be folks who "believe" in Peak Oil, Peak Carbon, Peak Dirt, Peak Fish. Personally, I think Peak Carbon is a not a terribly useful way to refer to climate change -- although "climate change" is itself a not terribly useful way to refer to climate change (something that Gar Lipow has taken it upon himself to fix). Peak Things, in my humble opinion (speaking of which, why did IMHO go out of favor? Is there no longer any humility on the Internet?), should only refer to resource maximums. Switching that around for carbon -- i.e. we're trying to stop producing carbon so we can declare/achieve Peak Carbon and continue reducing from there -- is just plain confusing. So let's dispense with Peak Carbon.

DeFazio says Summers should be canned for cutting mass transit funds

"Harvard had it right."

-- Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-Ore.), referring to the university's jettisoning of Larry Summers, who is now director of Obama's National Economic Council and who DeFazio has accused of axing mass transit funding from the stimulus bill

A chat with Obama's green-leaning liaison to the states, Boulder Mayor Shaun McGrath

As we reported on Thursday, the Obama administration has scooped up Shaun McGrath, the green mayor of Boulder, Colo., to serve as the deputy director of intergovernmental affairs within the White House.

McGrath has been mayor of Boulder since 2007 and a city council member since 2003. He has also worked on environmental issues for the Western Governors' Association since 1995. It was under his leadership that Boulder set out to become the first smart-grid city in the country. Voters there also approved the country's first carbon tax in 2006, and the city has been recognized with a platinum-level "bicycle-friendly community" award from the League of American Bicyclists. Pretty frickin' green, eh?

We tracked McGrath down to find out what he'll be doing in his new gig, which starts on Feb. 9.

Grist: What exactly will your role be in the White House?

Shaun McGrath: It's in the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. The office is the president's liaison to state and local elected officials, and I will be the deputy director responsible for liaising between the president and the nation's governors.

Grist: You've been active on green issues in Boulder. What do you hope to be able to do with that experience in your new role at the White House?

'Monaco Declaration' sounds alarm about ocean acidification

If the idea of acidic oceans sounds problematic, it should. The carbon emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere also wind up in the ocean, where they dissolve and turn the water acidic. This lowering of the pH of seawater -- already underway -- threatens coral reefs, shellfish, and the vast food chains to which they belong.

Today 155 scientists issued a report on the rising danger of ocean acidification, saying swift and drastic emissions cuts are needed to curb the problem. The Monaco Declaration [PDF] is based on the work of the Second International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World, held in Monaco last October. It's not the first warning scientists have issued about ocean acidification, though the call to action from scientists from 26 countries is unusually strongly worded:

Ocean acidification could affect marine food webs and lead to substantial changes in commercial fish stocks, threatening protein supply and food security for millions of people as well as the multi-billion dollar fishing industry by mid-century, ocean acidification may render most regions chemically inhospitable to coral reefs. These and other acidification-related changes could affect a wealth of marine goods and services, such as our ability to use the ocean to manage waste, to provide chemicals to make new medicines, and to benefit from its natural capacity to regulate climate.

The report aims to reposition ocean acidification from a peripheral environmental issue to "the other CO2 problem that must be grappled with alongside climate change." Additionally, as the pH of seawater falls, the process reduces the ocean's ability to absorb more carbon. Oceans currently absorb one quarter of the CO2 emitted by human activities, the report says.

The solution to acidification is essentially the same as that for climate change -- reduce carbon emissions. The declaration's action points are quite predictable: More research, bring policymakers and economists on board, and enact a global carbon emissions plan. Acidification doesn't require a separate plan as much as it provides another reason for an aggressive global climate treaty. From the declaration:

Solving this problem will require a monumental worldwide effort. All countries must contribute, and developed countries must lead by example and by engineering new technologies to help solve the problem. Promoting these technologies will be rewarded economically, and prevention of severe environmental degradation will be far less costly for all nations than would be trying to live with the consequences of the present approach where CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase, year after year.

The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, which helped organize the October summit, didn't explain its timing on the declaration, though it's a safe bet the release is designed to build on the momentum of new U.S. leadership. Not only has President Obama declared a return of science to the executive branch, he's also a bodysurfer from Hawaii who may be inclined to pay attention to oceanic issues. He's nominated ocean-protection superstar (at least in marine biology circles) Jane Lubchenco to lead the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, though she won't be confirmed until a commerce secretary is first nominated and confirmed (thank you very much, Bill Richardson).

It's not clear how scientists involved in acidification research intend to make a broader public-message push this year, though the declaration acknowledges the issue has a lot riding on the COP-15 climate talks in Copenhagen this December.

Why the rush to defend this not-so-embattled style of legislation?

Recently the green blogosphere has been engaged in an oddly vigorous defense of command and control style legislation. I'm not sure whether this trendlet grows out of environmentalists' unfortunate habit of ranking and re-ranking and arguing over the ranking of various solutions to climate change; or out of pique that odious people like Charles Krauthammer are pretending to be proponents of carbon pricing; or, as I suspect, out of something else entirely, but I have some good news for supporters of mandates: Both the public and public officials love command and control style legislation.

To be sure, the term "command and control" is pejorative, but no congressperson ever introduced the 2008 Command and Control Environmental Protection Act. Nevertheless, virtually every single piece of environmental legislation ever enacted takes the form of a mandate. From renewable portfolio standards to CAFE to wilderness protection to the quality of our air and water to species protection to waste management to an endless stream of subsidies and tax credits (good, bad, and ugly) -- they don't call it environmental regulation for nothing.

The new administration holds the incentives for a strong federal climate bill

The following is the first in a series of guest posts from the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive legal think tank that works on constitutional and environmental issues. It is written by online communications director Hannah McCrea and president Doug Kendall, who also help maintain CAC's blog, Warming Law.

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There can be little doubt that the U.S. needs a strong carbon-pricing system, such as a cap-and-trade program, to help combat global warming. Politicians have proposed a range of alternative policy measures that avoid carbon-pricing (e.g. traditional "command-and-control" regulations on emissions, renewable portfolio standards, massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure and technologies, etc.), but economists widely agree [PDF] that none of these approaches will, on their own, be swift or strong enough to reduce the risk of irreversible climate change. The better approach to mitigating this risk is to attach a price to carbon emissions -- one high enough to ensure that greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels are more expensive to consume, per unit, than are clean and renewable alternatives.

To this end, members of the 110th Congress, including then-Senator Barack Obama, focused on trying to pass a cap-and-trade bill. Last June, they pushed the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, an ultimately doomed effort that attracted harsh criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. As Grist readers will surely recall, progressives condemned the bill for being dangerously weak because it failed to meet the IPCC-established target of an 80 percent reduction below 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, while conservatives claimed the bill would ensure the U.S.'s economic ruin.

After the bill's death, leaders in Congress -- indeed Barack Obama himself -- promised a stronger follow-up to Lieberman-Warner. However, with the economic climate dramatically altered in the last six months, political support for such an ambitious program may be in doubt. As the severity of the recession came into greater focus in the weeks leading up to the November elections, candidates made a notable shift in their rhetoric on climate policy, subtly replacing the focus on cap-and-trade with one on clean energy investments and "green" recovery measures. Outside of Washington, state and local governments continued to demonstrate their lack of faith that federal climate action will be forthcoming, as evidenced by further development of regional cap-and-trade schemes, namely New England's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Western Climate Initiative, and the Midwestern Governors Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord. These initiatives are motivated by the widely-shared sentiment that even with hope of meaningful federal action on climate change in 2009, dramatic reductions in carbon emissions simply cannot wait a moment longer.