Articles by Joseph Romm
Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
All Articles
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EIA maintains offshore drilling gains will be negligible
The GOP and McCain/Bush keep insisting that an end to the federal moratorium on (some) offshore drilling is a major solution to America's oil woes, even though Bush's own energy analysts make clear it is not.
That Energy Information Administration analysis is, however, a couple of years old, so I called up the author today and asked if it was being updated. Turns out a new version will be published in a couple of days, but she explained to me that the "answers are not very different" -- no significant impact for the duration of the analysis (through 2030) -- for reasons I will discuss below. First, however, it wasn't until I talked to her and looked closely at the original analysis -- "Impacts of Increased Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Lower 48 Federal Outer Continental Shelf" -- that I understood what a cruel hoax this whole issue is.
The oil companies already have access to some 34 billion barrels of offshore oil they haven't even developed yet, but ending the federal moratorium on offshore drilling would probably add only another 8 billion barrels (assuming California still blocks drilling off its coast). Who thinks adding under 100,000 barrels a day in supply sometime after 2020 -- some one-thousandth of total supply -- would be more than the proverbial drop in the ocean? Remember the Saudis couldn't stop prices from rising now by announcing that they will add 500,000 barrels of oil a day by the end of this year!
Here is the key data from EIA:
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Cheney’s office censors CDC director’s testimony on climate-related health threats
The Center for American Progress Action Fund emails out a great daily report (sign up here). Today's subject is Dick Cheney's one
Vaderman war to useJedi mind trickscensorship to keep the American public in the darksideon the dangers of climate change.In this case, he censored the testimony on the "health threat posed by global warming" by Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October. She had planned to say the "CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern."
But who really cares what the CDC has to say on the subject anyway when we have White House Press Secretary Dana Perino to assure us "There are public health benefits to climate change"? After all, Perino is an expert on the subject thanks to here bachelor's degree in mass communications and a masters in Public Affairs Reporting.
Here is the Progress Report in full:
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Bush hits the climate alarm snooze button at G8
The NYT's Andy Revkin dissed the G8 climate statement with the blog headline, "Rich and Emerging Greenhouse-Gas Emitters Fail to Set Common Long-Term Goal for Cuts." The headline of the NYT's article on the subject, however, is "Richest Nations Pledge to Halve Greenhouse Gas." The Grist story begins, "world leaders reached a landmark deal: agreeing to cut emissions in half by 2050," calling it a "significant step" for the Bush Administration, whereas NRDC's international climate policy director, Jake Schmidt, blogs, "Yup, Just as I Predicted ... No G8 Leadership!"
What is going on? You can read the "G8 statement on climate change and environment" and decide for yourself.
I think your reaction depends on whether you are a "glass is 90 percent empty" or "glass is 10 percent full" type of person and whether you judge the president on the relative basis of his dismal, pathetic, unconscionable climate record (in which case what he agreed to at the G8 was a big deal) or on an absolute basis of what needs to be done to avoid catastrophic climate impacts for the next 10 billion people to walk the earth (in which case what the G8 did was give a placebo to a diabetic -- a sugar-coated placebo, that is).
The Guardian online asked for my commentary, "Ignoring the climate change alarm." Here are some excerpts:
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His energy plan is half brilliant, half dumb
The Phone Call
based on a true storyMajor cable network: What do you think of T. Boone Pickens' latest energy plan?
Me: Half of it is great -- the big push on wind power. Heck, even the Bush administration says wind power could be 20 percent of U.S. electricity. But the notion that we would use the wind power to free up natural gas in order to fuel a transition to natural gas vehicles makes no sense. Why would we go to the trouble of switching our vehicle fleet from running on one expensive fossil fuel to another expensive fossil fuel? Any freed up natural gas should be used to displace coal ...
Major cable network: I was hoping you liked the whole plan. That way we could use you on the show ... You don't have any ideas of who might like the whole thing?
