Climate Politics

Seeing the light in the Pew poll on Americans' top priorities

At first glance, the latest poll numbers from Pew Research Center on Americans' top priorities for the new president might appear worrisome to climate policy advocates.

Global warming is in last place in the top 20, and the environment in general slipped down in the list since last year. Andrew Revkin over at New York Times' Dot Earth blog goes so far as to say, "America and President Barack Obama are completely out of sync on human-caused global warming." (There are some startling new numbers from Rasmussen on that question ...)

But I'm convinced that's not the point. The fact is, solutions that will address the top two concerns -- the economy and jobs -- as well as several other top 10 concerns -- energy, terrorism, helping the poor -- are all wrapped up in the best solutions for combating climate change.

The fossil-fuel roller coaster has long whiplashed family budgets, and our economy remains shackled to its adrenaline-boosting unpredictability. Any economic recovery we muster in coming months will sputter if we fail to reduce our fossil-fuel dependence. As soon as the economy rebounds, oil prices are sure to shoot up again, negating the economic gains that we've made.

Our job now -- and Obama's -- is to encourage fellow lawmakers and citizens to connect the dots and stop seeing the economy, energy policy, and the environment as even vaguely separate issues.

Carl Pope stepping down from helm of the Sierra Club

The Sierra Club announced today that long-time executive director Carl Pope is stepping down. He'll be taking on a new role as chairman of the Sierra Club, focusing primarily on climate change.

"While I look forward to continuing to serve the Club in a new capacity, I am ready to turn the leadership of the organization over to someone new," Pope said in a statement today.

Pope, who has been at the helm of the organization since 1992, will move to the chairman post as soon as a new executive director is selected. The board of directors is preparing to launch a formal search for their new leader in the next few weeks.

"Over these years I have made many wonderful friends, and experienced both joyful victories and tragic setbacks in our struggle for a sustainable future," Pope continued. "I look forward to many more such victories as I continue this work. My decision comes at a very exciting time for the Sierra Club and the environmental movement. The election of President Barack Obama, and the increase in the number of environmental champions in the Congress, means that after eight years of bitter defense, it is time for America to resume its tradition of environmental leadership."

Green(ish) news from around the Capitol

• The House Ways and Means Committee marked up the stimulus package on Thursday, adding lots of goodies that should make clean-energy fans happy. It added $20 billion in renewable-energy and energy-efficiency tax credits and related financial incentives. The committee inserted language to make the investment tax credit passed last year refundable. It also increased by 20 percent the research expense credits for renewable energy, energy conservation, fuel cells, batteries, efficient transmission and distribution, and carbon capture and sequestration. The alternative-fuel vehicle refueling property credit was increased from 30 percent to 50 percent through 2010, and the residential energy-efficiency and energy-improvements tax credit was raised from 10 percent to 30 percent. The Senate Finance Committee will now have to consider the changes.

• On Wednesday, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker (R) sent a letter [PDF] to his colleagues bashing the climate plan from the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. "It appears their blueprint promotes many of the same problematic provisions that have plagued cap-and-trade bills in the past," wrote Corker. The lawmaker urged support for a carbon pricing plan that returns 100 percent of the revenue to consumers, and said he opposes the inclusion of international and domestic offsets.

• Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) has introduced a bill that would make it easier for homeowners and small businesses to install solar panels by allowing them to use both benefits provided by local governments and the full federal solar tax credit (the tax code currently prohibits this). The bill would also create a manufacturing tax credit for solar equipment, and allow federal buildings to enter into long-term solar-power purchase agreements. "These are the sorts of programs with short- and long-term economy benefits that should be considered for an economic recovery package," said Menendez.

GAO: EPA's chemical oversight system is broken

Few Obama officials have quite as much mess to clean up as EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. As if to warn her of the gravity of her task, the General Accounting Office has just added a key EPA oversight area to its list of government functions that are at "high risk" of "fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement" (short HTML version here, massive PDF here).

The GAO added three areas to its "high-risk list" this year, making a grand total of 30. The EPA's "Processes for Assessing and Controlling Toxic Chemicals" was one of them. (The other two new areas added to the GAO "high-risk list" are the FDA's process for approving medical products -- anyone up for a dose of Vioxx? -- and, um, the "the Outdated U.S. Financial Regulatory System," an attempt to shut the barn door on a banking meltdown that will only cost your kids a few trillion, if we're lucky.)

The section on the EPA and toxic chemicals will make bracing reading for the new administrator. Here are some highlights:

Paterson taps green ally to fill Clinton's senate seat

New York Gov. David Paterson (D) today tapped upstate Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) to fill the Senate seat vacated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Now in her second term in the House, Gillibrand has a mixed record on environmental issues but has received strong support from green groups.

Gillibrand, who has represented New York's 20th district since 2007, is characterized as a centrist Democratic up-and-comer. In the past, she was endorsed by the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, as well as the National Rifle Association.

After pulling a 95 percent score from LCV in her first year in office, she earned just a 69 percent in 2008. That puts her lifetime score at 85 percent, and she got rave reviews from the League in her reelection bid last year.

"Kristin Gillibrand has been a great friend in the House and will be a powerful ally in the Senate," LCV President Gene Karpinski said in a statement Friday shortly after her selection was announced. "In her first year, she voted in favor of clean energy and environmental protection 95 percent of the time. She understands the powerful potential of clean, renewable energy to create American jobs and will be a key vote on clean energy issues."

In her first year in office, Gillibrand helped secure $35,000 from the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Development Program for a project to install a solar energy system at a diary farm in Washington County, N.Y. She also voted for a measure to end tax breaks for oil and gas companies and fund renewable energy.

She also won praise from the New York State chapter of LCV. "Kirsten Gillibrand has proven her mettle on Capitol Hill by fighting for cleaner air, alternative energy and environmental safeguards," said Marcia Bystryn, president of the New York LCV in her endorsement last year. "Now, we urge voters in the 20th District to return her to Washington for another term, to work toward an energy-independent future that confronts the dangers of climate change while protecting New York's economy and growing jobs."

'Climate change,' 'global warming,' 'climate chaos' — what terminology fits best?

The usual scientific term for what I refer to as "climate chaos" is "climate change." Scientific preference is a strong argument in favor of using the latter term, and climate scientists prefer it to the term "global warming" because it encompasses changes besides average surface temperature, such as rising sea levels, increased floods and droughts, and stronger storms.

But in my opinion it encompasses too much. After all, denier blather about a new ice age also describes a (discredited) type of climate change. It is rather like referring to cancer as "cell change." (Cancer certainly is one kind of cell change.) Also a lot of delayers like the term "climate change" because it is emotionally neutral, and it helps them frame the debate they way they want.

What about the term "global warming"?

Americans' climate change doubts aren't hard to understand

As if in response to David Roberts' point that "[t]here is nothing close to the public or political support necessary to pass the kind of sweeping policies necessary to eliminate America's emissions," Pew is out with a new poll saying just that.

Kevin Drum (via Andy Revkin) has the details:

Global warming, once again, ranks as the lowest priority from a list of 20, and the more general category of "protecting the environment" fell 15 percentage points from last year.

And as if that's not bad enough, Revkin also points to a new Rasmussen poll, which finds that 44% of U.S. voters don't believe humans are the cause of global warming, compared to only 41% who do. That's even worse than last year's results.

Somehow, those numbers don't surprise me. Leaving aside the fact that, thanks to the contingencies of history, the developed world has ended up occupying the parts of the planet likely to be affected least by climate change, the whole phenomenon is too vague and amorphous for most Americans to focus on. It just doesn't feel real to many people. After all, the weather is weird. Sometimes it's warm. Sometimes it's cold. Sometimes it rains.

In fact, I'm willing to bet the poll numbers for global warming will wax and wane in correlation with the temperature in any given year (just like a president's approval rating correlates pretty well with perceptions about the economy). Is it cold this year? Support will fall. A beastly hot summer? Up go the poll numbers.

Meanwhile, we as a society aren't particularly good with the whole science thing in general. Let's look at some numbers from a National Science Foundation poll back in 2004.

• Only 40% of Americans know that the universe began with the Big Bang.
• Fully half don't believe in evolution (with 1 in 5 entirely "unaware" of the concept at all).
• 58% of Americans think lasers focus sound waves rather than light. Lasers! Didn't these people see Star Wars?!
• And capping it all off: 29% of Americans don't know that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

What part of Americans' confusion regarding anthropogenic climate change is hard to understand? Even the concept of the scientific method is understood by only a fraction of our society. This all is why Joe Romm is running a pool on the nature of the near-term catastrophes required to turn Americans' climate change doubts into certainty.

And, tellingly, the partisan split is huge, with 59% of Democrats saying climate change is caused by humans, while only 21% of Republican agree. And why should they? Climate skepticism has been a cornerstone of Bush Republicanism for eight years -- and so far it looks like many in the GOP will continue to use it as a rallying cry.

If there's any hope in these recent climate poll numbers, it comes from a figure buried in Rasmussen's poll. They found that 64% of American voters believe climate change, whatever the cause, to be at least a "somewhat serious" problem (41% say it's "very serious"). So we may not rank the issue very high at the moment, and we may not be sure why it's happening, but a solid majority of us are ready to be persuaded.

And President Obama has left little doubt that we'll be hearing a lot about climate change in the months and years ahead. If anyone can move public opinion on the issue, it's going to be him, don't you think?

Sue Tierney for deputy, names for under sec., and stuff I leaned at DOE, part 2

The Environmental and Clean Energy Ball may be a party, a once-in-four-years chance to wear my tux, but it is also a source of news about names. Everybody is buzzing over who is going to fill out the organization chart at the Energy Department under Secretary Chu.

Sue Tierney is widely expected to be nominated for deputy (as WaPo first reported here). Dr. Tierney would be a first rate deputy -- and I can say that with some confidence since not only is Sue a colleague and friend, but also my first job at the department in 1993 was special assistant for policy and planning to then Deputy Secretary Bill White (now mayor of Houston).

Deputy is a very demanding job. You are the DOE's chief operating officer. You have to make the trains run on time, and these are big, messy trains -- the nuclear weapons laboratories, the energy labs, the physics labs, and the "cleanup sites" like Hanford, which are the toxic legacy of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. If the secretary doesn't have prior experience as part of a senior leadership team managing a federal agency, the COO should. Dr. Tierney was assistant secretary of policy at DOE when I worked there.

Tierney has a unique set of qualifications at a time when we must redesign our entire energy system, change utility regulations to foster energy efficiency, and quickly site tens (and then hundreds) of gigawatts of renewable energy, along with a new, smart power grid to enable both the efficiency and the renewables (and plug-in hybrids):

Air Force to announce the fate of a synthetic fuel plant

President Barack Obama gave a powerful call to action on energy and climate, and he has given the order to halt Bush's final rules. But if he really wants to send a quick, strong signal that he intends to preserve a livable climate, he should intervene immediately to stop the Pentagon's toxic dalliance with liquid coal.

As reported by Air Force Times on Tuesday:

The future of a synthetic fuel plant that would power fighters and cargo planes with processed coal will be announced this week.

The Air Force decided on Friday whether to move ahead with a plan to build a synthetic fuel plant at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont.

Due to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and the inauguration, Air Force spokesman Gary Strasburg said the decision will not be released until Wednesday.

(Note: I can't find any notice of this decision on Google News or Montana newspapers.)

UPDATE: My sources say the decision "has been delayed."

This is simply a terrible idea (see here), especially since clean alternatives are on the way "Boeing: Jet biofuel in three years").

Obama said in his powerful inaugural address: "we will work tirelessly to ... roll back the specter of a warming planet." That can't be done running your Air Force on liquid coal:

Senate confirms Jackson as EPA chief

President Obama's "green team" is nearly complete, as the Senate on Thursday confirmed Lisa Jackson to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Nancy Sutley to head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Senators also approved Ray LaHood as Secretary of Transportation. All three officials were confirmed by voice vote.

Jackson's appointment had been in limbo, as reports suggested that a Republican senator, John Barrasso of Wyoming, was blocking it until he received some clarity about Carol Browner's role as Obama's top adviser on climate and energy issues. Barrasso later consented to allowing the confirmation to proceed after talking to Browner, according to a spokesperson for the Environment and Public Works Committee, which was managing the confirmation. (Barrasso told TPM the same thing).

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate panel, issued a statement immediately after the confirmation praising her colleagues for approving Sutley and Jackson. "I am really pleased that the Senate has taken the first steps toward restoring the EPA and CEQ to their proper role as organizations that fight to protect the health of our families and the safety of our air, our water and our planet," said Boxer. "Lisa Jackson and Nancy Sutley are well qualified to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Council on Environmental Quality, and they respect and understand that their organizations' mission is to protect public health and the environment."

The Senate has not yet acted on Obama's nomination of Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) to run the Department of Labor. Solis has said she will use her post to champion the creation of "green jobs."