Author: Joe

Talk about bad timing.  Just weeks before the most deadly mining disaster in decades, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) — a front group of big utilities and coal companies — compares mining coal to fighting in Afghanistan:

Yes, well, mining coal is like fighting in a war zone if you are working for Massey (see Deadly Record: Massey’s Montcoal mine cited for 3,000 violations, over $2.2 million in fines and FLASHBACK: Don Blankenship warned West Virginia that he believes in “survival of the fittest”).

As for ACCCE, you may recall from September that the dirty coal group’s 14th forgery impersonated American veterans, whereas real vets support strong action on climate and clean energy — as does GOP Senator John Warner, former Armed Services Committee chair. The coal industry front group is simply shameless in its phony flag-waving (see In “Act of Despicable Hubris,” coal front group ACCCE exploits veterans groups to push dirty energy agenda).

Continued unrestricted use of dirty coal and oil will destroy the health and well-being of countless Americans — it’s already killing tens of thousands of people today.  True patriots want us to slash fossil fuel use as fast as possible (which is pretty darn fast), see, for instance, New Poll of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Finds Overwhelming Support For Clean Energy Climate Legislation.

Oh and for the record, the Powder River Basin appears to have a lot less economically-recoverable coal than we’ve been led to believe — see WSJ front-page shocker: “U.S. Foresees a Thinner Cushion of Coal,” warns rosy U.S. coal estimates “may be wildly overconfident.”

Related Post:

• The Climate Patriots take up the global warming fight
• Quadrennial Defense Review Should Spark Interagency Climate Conversation

One thing I’ve strived for with my BlackBerry is to create access to every feature with the fewest possible movements. That’s why I focus on themes that feature plenty of home screen icons, as you can see in our bi-weekly theme reviews. I also enjoy applications like SuperQWERTY and QuickLaunch. Yet sometimes we don’t even need applications or themes to create shortcuts to various applications and functions. Sometimes that ability is already on our devices, but we just don’t know about it. This is the case with our current quick tip. I don’t know how I missed this before, but you can access your contacts by pressing just one key.

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Earth Day Network is organizing a huge event on the Mall in Washington DC on April 25. The goal is to demand tough, effective climate legislation and a swift transition away from 19th century energy sources.

“So what?” you may be asking yourself. There have been a lot of climate rallies over the last 25 years and Congress still hasn’t managed to pass a law. Why should I come to this one?

Let me count the ways….

Our guest blogger today is the legendary Denis Hayes, national coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970.

Hayes was director of the federal Solar Energy Research Institute (1979 to 1981) and is now president of the Bullitt Foundation and international chair of Earth Day 2010.

You can get all the information you want about the Sunday rally — as well as other actions you can take — by clicking on the Earth Day Network website.

In general, I haven’t been someone who pushes rallies.  But the Tea Partiers have gotten an absurd amount of media attention for relatively tiny rallies.  Back in September, they claimed they had a million attendees at a DC rally that in fact had perhaps 60,000 to 70,000.  Remember that overhyped Tea Party rally in DC last week where they ludicrously asked The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to speak (see “Irony-gate 2: Modern day Tea Partiers outsource denial to Lord Monckton — a British peer!“)?  The speakers claimed they had 25,000 attendees, but even the Wall Street Journal reported, “we estimate that the number was less than half of that, at best.”

This Sunday, let’s leave those numbers in the dust.  Here’s Hayes on all the reasons that you should come:

Size

Past climate rallies have generally run from a few dozen people to a couple thousand. On Sunday, April 25, energy and climate activists from New England to the Carolinas will gather together to find new friends and allies at largest climate rally ever. We are coming together to move beyond education; to demand change; and to make it clear there will be political consequences of Congress doesn’t act.

Inspiration and Direction.

You will hear from:
Climate scientists like James Hansen, and Stephen Schneider.
EPA chief (and heroine!) Lisa Jackson & CEQ Chair Nancy Sutley
Cultural leaders like James Cameron (Avatar; Titanic) and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale; The Blind Assassin)
Top business executives from Siemens, Phillips, UL, Future Friendly & SunEdison
Top labor leaders, including the President of the AFL-CIO and Secretary of the SEIU.
Progressive activists, including Jesse Jackson, Lydia Camarillo, & Hilary Shelton
Climate policy gurus like Joe Romm, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, & Rafael Fantauzzi
Spiritual leaders, including Rev. Theresa Thames, Rev. Richard Cizik, & Rabbi Warren Stone
Athletes like Dhani Jones, Aaron Peirsol, & Billy Demong
Environmentalists like Bobby Kennedy & Phillipe Cousteau

Entertainment

In between the speakers we will hear from some of the most committed artists in the nation, including Sting, John Legend, The Roots, Willie Colon, Passion Pit, Bob Weir, Jimmy Cliff, Joss Stone, Booker T, The Honor Society, Mavis Staples…

Intensity

In 1970, I told huge Earth Day crowds in Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York: “We won’t appeal anymore to the conscience of institutions because institutions have no conscience. If we want them to do what is right, we must make them do what is right. We will use proxy fights, lawsuits, demonstration, research, boycotts, and—above all—ballots…. If we let this become just a fad, it will be our last fad.”

Earth Day organizers created a Dirty Dozen campaign that made “the environment” a voting issue in the 1970 elections. One of the seven Congressmen we defeated that fall was George Fallon, chairman of the House Public Works Committee: the “pork” committee. THAT got their attention. If Chairman Fallon was vulnerable, everyone in politics was vulnerable.

Over the next three years, despite fierce opposition from the most powerful vested interests in the land, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a half-dozen other far-reaching laws that have utterly transformed the way America does business.

Now we must do it again.

What Is The Goal?

Humanity must swiftly abandon dirty energy sources and switch to safe, clean, decentralized, renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal. The world, led by America, must abandon the appallingly inefficient way it uses energy and swiftly embrace the most efficient new housing, transport, and industrial processes that exist. We Americans must slash our politically risky and economically catastrophic dependence on the oil wealth of nations that don’t like us very much.

A necessary—though not sufficient—common denominator is to establish a price on carbon that reflects the costs of climate disruption, blowing the tops off mountains, and acidifying the world’s oceans. We must place a firm cap with no loopholes on the amount of carbon fuels we consume each year and ratchet that cap down at a prescribed rate every year in the future until we hit something very close to zero.

Only a federal law can accomplish this goal.

If this were easy, we would have begun a quarter century ago. The junk science, climate-denying interest groups are rich, powerful, and ruthless. But sooner or later they will lose.

Sooner is better

They will lose for the same reason that IBM and Control Data lost to Microsoft, Apple and Dell. They will lose for the same reason that Ma Bell—the most powerful monopoly in the world—lost to cellular upstarts and Internet-telephony. They lost because their thinking was anchored in the past instead of envisioning the future

The junk science, climate-disruption-denying interest groups will lose because 19th century answers won’t solve 21st century problems.

Come to the Mall

At some point, this climate-disrupting madness has to start to stop. Come to the Mall between the Capitol Building and the White House on Sunday, April 25. Bring your spouse, your parents, your kids, your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers, your congregation, your bowling league. Vote with your bodies on April 25th at the largest climate rally ever.

And put our political leaders on notice that you will vote with your ballot a few months later!

Come to the mall.  Let’s show the Tea Partiers and the media and the general public what a real crowd looks like.  And I promise I won’t give a policy wonk speech!

Last Sunday’s post “What are your favorite climate and energy soundbites? drew dozens of comments that are a must read for anyone who speaks on this subject.  I will definitely use and/or adapt some of those suggestions.

Now I’m looking for something a little more specific — pithy metaphors and jokes, maybe two sentences at most.

Metaphors are the Rolls Royce of figures. Or, to put it more aptly, metaphors are the Toyota Prius of figures because a metaphor is a hybrid, connecting two dissimilar things to achieve a unique turn of phrase.

Aristotle wrote in Poetics, “To be a master of metaphor is a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” (see “How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, 3“).

A 2005 study on “Presidential Leadership and Charisma: The Effects of Metaphor” examined the use of metaphors in the first-term inaugural addresses of three dozen presidents who had been independently rated for charisma. The remarkable conclusion:

Charismatic presidents used nearly twice as many metaphors (adjusted for speech length) than non-charismatic presidents.

Additionally, when students were asked to read a random group of inaugural addresses and highlight the passages they viewed as most inspiring, “even those presidents who did not appear to be charismatic were still perceived to be more inspiring when they used metaphors.”

One of the comments in the earlier post by Dan Miller of Climate Place offered this metaphor:

“If your child has cancer, you’re going to take him or her to a pediatric oncologist, not a dentist or an ophthalmologist. And if the oncologist says your child needs treatment, you’re not going to withhold it because the doctor is only 95% certain of the diagnosis or the fact that the doctor will earn money from providing the treatment. The climate scientists are the experts that are telling us we need to take action now. To withhold treatment is to endanger the future of our children.”

It’s not bad, but from my perspective it’s too long and too quantitative — and possible too strong — to be effective as a metaphor in most situation.  I’d go with something more like, “When your child has a severe fever, you take him to a pediatrician, not a dentist or optometrist.”  And you can take that metaphor many places depending on the situation.

I’m certainly open to an extended metaphor.  It is, after all, How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address.  They are, however, much tougher to do well and much more likely to run amomk.

Also, I’d love a good joke or two.  I’m looking for stuff that can be used in a short speech or possibly even an interview or possibly a comeback in a FoxNews interview situation (though something friendly enough that one would get invited back).

I’m looking for material that covers not just climate change, but oil and clean energy and even the politics of this issue.

Related Posts:

• The rhetoric gap: Can Obama give ‘em Hell (and High Water) before it’s too late?

Buried on page 95, midway through his chapter titled “The Clean Energy Solution,” Joe Romm summarizes the only workable strategy for saving the planet from catastrophic climate change. That strategy focuses on rapid commercialization of existing renewable energy technologies. Our plan, he says, must be “Deployment, deployment, deployment, R&D, deployment, deployment, deployment.”

That’s a powerful message for wind, solar and geothermal businesses to run with.

Seth Masia, Deputy Editor of Solar Today, has a review of my new book Straight Up (click here to buy).

There’ll be a lot of reviews in the next couple of weeks, and I won’t print them all.  But since the book cuts through the crap on a broad set of subjects, I’m most interested in the different takeaways people have.  Here’s more from Masia:

Straight Up is a collection of short articles from Romm’s blog ClimateProgress.org. If you read that blog, you’re probably a passionate fan. If you don’t, you should know that Romm, an MIT Ph.D. in physics, ran a number of renewable energy programs at the Department of Energy from 1993 to 1998. Since then, he has consulted with a number of major corporations on energy issues, written several books and joined the Center for American Progress as a senior fellow. He has consistently beaten the drum for fast commercialization of concentrating solar power (CSP), wind, photovoltaics (PV) and geothermal energy sources. These are mature, scalable technologies that must overcome policy barriers, not technical hurdles.

Straight Up, however, is not mainly a book advocating policy and tax code changes. It’s a collection of spirited and readable critiques of the delaying forces — the corporations and institutions who want to see no changes in national policies and tax codes that now work to make them rich. In particular, Romm eviscerates the American news establishment for ignoring climate catastrophe issues, even while journalists around the world have made climate the story of the century….

Romm notes that a favorite delaying tactic is to call for research breakthroughs before carbon-neutral energy sources can be competitive. He summarizes critical data proving that mature and scalable renewable sources are at grid parity now and can be profitably commercialized wherever utilities have incentive to use them.

Straight Up probably won’t convert true believers in a fossil fuel future, but it may stiffen the spines of some renewable energy advocates. It’s full of solid fact-based arguments, properly referenced within the text (no footnotes!), along with a lot of low-carbon fire and brimstone.

The book’s release date is April 19, in time for Earth Day, but it can be ordered at Amazon.com now at a pre-publication price of $19.75.

This is my first book without an extensive set of notes.  The point of notes is to allow readers to go to original sources to check the accuracy of what is written (or to follow up on a subject of interest).  It seemed like a waste of paper in an age when people can use Google to look up a fact or quote and when I have active links in all the original blog posts on which the book is based.  It seemed redundant to reprint the references in the book in a less useful form.

So I decided to put the references either in the text or refer people to posts here.  I will try to do a post in the coming week with links to some of the key references to the book.

Related Post:

• The breakthrough technology illusion

We’re starting to see a lot more information about the upcoming-upcoming BlackBerry devices, which has made for exciting times on the BBGeekcast. This isn’t really the upcoming devices — the Bold 9650 and the Pearl 9100. We know most of what we’re going to know on them. Rather, we’re looking at the next wave of devices.

So click on over here to hear the BBGeekcast (9 min, 49 sec)

And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss future episodes!

You can also subscribe to the BBGeekcast in iTunes.

Highlights include:
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On Monday, April 19, from 12:00pm – 1:00pm, the Center for American Progress Action Fund will host the launch of my new book, Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions.

Everyone can watch the webcast here.  Details below:

As we approach the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the scientific realities about the warming of our world are becoming increasingly dire, an epic legislative battle looms in the Senate over whether the United States will be part of the solution or perpetuate the problem, and the mainstream media—hemorrhaging qualified science and environmental reporters—is paralyzed and unable to effectively inform a public that increasing seeks out information from online sources and the ever-expanding blogosphere.

Amid this backdrop, please join Dr. Joseph Romm in conversation with Center for American Progress Action Fund President and CEO John Podesta as they take on the science, the politics, the solutions, and the media.

Featured Author:
Joseph Romm, author, Straight Up; Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress Action Fund

Moderated by:
John Podesta, President and Chief Executive Officer, Center for American Progress Action Fund

The event is already SRO, so there’s only room for journalists, who can Click here to RSVP for this event.

Here’s Part 2 of Peter Sinclair, our favorite climate de-crocker, taking on The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB):

More on TVMOB here:

• Climate Crock takes on Lord Monckton aka TVMOB
• Lord Monckton meltdown: “I’m not going to shake the hands of Hitler youth.”
• TVMOB hate speech shocker: Lord Monckton repeats and expands on his charge that those who embrace climate science are “Hitler youth” and fascists.
• TVMOB shocker: Activists decried as “Hitler Youth” for crashing Americans For Prosperity’s global warming event in Copenhagen
• Irony-gate: Viscount Monckton, a British peer, says his paper was peer-reviewed by a scientist.
• How to diss-a-peer: Real Climate Scientists take on TVMOB
• Deltoid at ScienceBlogs: Monckton’s triple counting and here.
• Irony-gate 2: Modern day Tea Partiers outsource denial to Lord Monckton — a British peer!

About twice a week or so I make sure to check out the new additions to the BBGeeks Store. In one my weekly checks I stumbled upon two applications from the same developer that I thought were particularly useful for BlackBerry users. The first, deProcMan, isn’t a unique application. It helps save memory and prevent memory leak, something a number of other applications do. The other, however, deBattGym, does something I haven’t quite seen. It “works out” your battery in order to provide you with the longest lasting battery possible. Both sound like decent additions for any BlackBerry.

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Looks like a Senate climate bill will not be unveiled the week of Earth Day after all. The new goal for Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., and Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn., to publicly release a potential deal is April 26, sources said.

National Journal has the story:

Graham explained why the bill would not be released on Earth Day, April 22. “One, we’re not ready,” he said. Second, he said, the message “had been driven by global warming policy” but is now domestic energy policy, job creation and cleaner air. “We don’t want to mix messages here. I’m all for protecting the Earth but this is about energy independence,” he said.

Also important to their message and their effort to secure 60 votes is having some business leaders on board by the time they release a draft proposal. Kerry is giving industry officials a phone briefing this evening, a source said. A group of industry and business officials gathered earlier this week to assess the situation and many expressed continued reservations, sources said.

The Edison Electric Institute, the main trade association for the electric utility industry, wants more work done on how a bill would allocate cap-and-trade emission credits to their industry and whether it would pre-empt EPA and states from issuing their own greenhouse gas limits. EEI also wants a proposed $30 per ton “price collar” limiting the cost to businesses under a cap-and-trade program to come down.

Everybody wants something.

But it remains quite important to keep the ceiling of the price collar as high as possible — and rising at a rate of, say, 5% plus inflation a year.  If there is horse trading, then any reduction in the starting price for the ceiling should be matched by an increase in the starting price for the floor.  See “How the Senate can fix cost containment in the climate bill with ‘price collar plus’.”

Speaking of everybody wanting something, E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reports:

Ten moderate Senate Democrats today outlined a series of pro-industry ideas that they must see in a climate and energy bill if the measure has any chance of winning their vote.

Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan led the coalition pushing for provisions to help domestic manufacturers, including free allowances for energy-intensive industries vulnerable to international trade, a border adjustment mechanism aimed at developing countries without strong environmental policies and federal pre-emption over state climate laws.

“We are convinced that successful legislation must include a multi-pronged strategy to maintain and strengthen our industrial base and the millions of manufacturing jobs critical for our economic recovery,” the Democratic senators said in their letter to the climate bill’s three lead authors, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “This plan must promote manufacturing competitiveness, create and maintain American jobs, and recognize that a strong manufacturing base is a prerequisite for both a domestic clean energy economy and long-term economic recovery and growth.”

Senators who signed onto the letter represent Rust Belt, Midwestern and mid-Atlantic states with heavy amounts of industry, including Evan Bayh of Indiana, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Robert Casey and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Carl Levin of Michigan, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Mark Warner of Virginia.

Several provisions included in the legislation have long been considered critical parts of a climate bill, and Brown said today he has already gotten positive signals from Kerry, Graham and Lieberman that the ideas will be part of the legislation that is expected to be released later this month.

“If they accept all of this, or the great majority of it, it’ll be a huge, huge step to getting this bill passed,” Brown said. “I want to vote for it. But I want to vote for it as a jobs bill.”

Senate aides confirmed today that the Kerry-led trio plan to release their bill on April 26, a few days after their original plan, which was centered around the 40th anniversary of Earth Day next Thursday. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman have had another packed week of meetings. Kerry joked today on his Twitter account that he had missed a Boston Red Sox game because of the climate negotiations.

He also offered a peek into some of his recent meetings.

“Only in Washington can you talk with James Cameron and David Axelrod in the same afternoon,” he wrote, referring to the director of the Academy Award-nominated film “Avatar” and President Obama’s top political adviser.

The nine senators did not offer legislative language in their letter, though Brown said that would come as the negotiations continue. For now, they have ticked through a number of areas that industry has warned must be addressed to keep energy prices from going too high in the wake of new greenhouse gas limits.

They include “a firm price collar, sufficient offsets, a regionally equitable distribution of allowances, reasonable emissions targets and timetables, and a pathway for the development, demonstration, and deployment of carbon capture and sequestration technologies.”

If you want to understand why bills like Cantwell-Collins, which ignore regional equity and don’t focus squarely on dealing with energy intensive industries in the Midwest, simply don’t attract even a fraction of the 60 senators needed, read the letter here.

Graham has also issued the following statement today:

Senator Graham does not support a gas tax.  And the bill he is working on does not include a gas tax.

He is working with the energy industry to protect consumers from a cap-and-trade system which would do great damage to our economy and national security by driving our refiners overseas.

In this effort, he has some simple but important goals.  They include:

* Create legislation that will significantly reduce our dependency on foreign sources of oil.  Today we are more dependent on foreign oil than we were before 9/11.  It is a national imperative that we must break this unhealthy addiction.  By importing ever increasing amounts of foreign oil, we are placing our economy and national security at risk.

* Preempt the EPA from issuing regulations on greenhouse gas emissions which will do great harm to our economy.

* Create millions of new, 21st Century jobs by ensuring environmental policy is good economic policy.

* Limit carbon pollution.

There seems little chance of getting anywhere near the number of Senate votes needed for a bill that doesn’t preempt the EPA (same for the House).  As I wrote of the House climate bill, I agree with NRDC that it would be valuable for EPA to keep this authority under climate legislation, but is not one of the top five things I would change about the climate bill if I could.  Certainly, if the EPA does keep the authority, it won’t try to use that authority to shut existing coal plants down faster than the bill itself would.

Tom Toles cartoon yesterday is on our new plan for dealing with climate change:

Good thing nothing like that is possible (see Rep. Shimkus: “Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood.” Rep. Barton: “I wish I had another dozen John Shimkuses on the committee.”)

Related Post:

• Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”

For the past few months we’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of RIM’s next two devices, the Bold 9650 and the Pearl 9100. Every couple of weeks we got a few tidbits about the devices, and from what we now know we can assume they’ll be announced at WES and will hit shelves shortly thereafter. It is time, then, to move onto the next round of devices. We’ve talked a bit about the rumored slider device, and there’s the always persistent rumor of a Palm Treo style touchscreen/QWERTY device. Thankfully, this week we got a peek at what’s in the hopper for RIM.

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In January 2009, I blogged on a remarkable study by a leading journalist documenting the media’s mistakes and biases during the 2008 Senate debate of the Lieberman-Warner climate bill.  I posted it again last May since the media repeated the exact same mistakes in the debate over the House bill.  I included it in my new book “Straight Up” — and am reposting it here — to set the table for the roll out in the next several days of the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill by Senators Graham (R-SC), Kerry (D-MA), and Lieberman (I-CT).

One of the country’s leading journalists has written a searing critique of the media’s coverage of global warming, especially climate economics.

How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change is by Eric Pooley for Harvard’s prestigious Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Pooley has been managing editor of Fortune, national editor of Time, Time’s chief political correspondent, and Time’s White House correspondent, where he won the Gerald Ford Prize for Excellence in Reporting. Before that, he was senior editor of New York magazine.

In short, Pooley has earned the right to be heard. Journalists and senior editors need to pay heed to Pooley’s three tough conclusions abut how “damaging” the recent media of the climate debate has been:

1. The press misrepresented the economic debate over cap and trade. It failed to recognize the emerging consensus … that cap and trade would have a marginal effect on economic growth and gave doomsday forecasts coequal status with nonpartisan ones…. The press allowed opponents of climate action to replicate the false debate over climate science in the realm of climate economics.
2. The press failed to perform the basic service of making climate policy and its economic impact understandable to the reader and allowed opponents of climate action to set the terms of the cost debate. The argument centered on the short-term costs of taking action–i.e., higher electricity and gasoline prices–and sometimes assumed that doing nothing about climate change carried no cost.
3. Editors failed to devote sufficient resources to the climate story. In general, global warming is still being shoved into the “environment” pigeonhole, along with the spotted owls and delta smelt, when it is clearly to society’s detriment to think about the subject that way. It is time for editors to treat climate policy as a permanent, important beat: tracking a mobilization for the moral equivalent of war.

Precisely.

Pooley is one of the few major journalists in the country who understands that global warming is the story of the century — and if we don’t reverse our emissions path soon, it will likely be the story of the millennium, with irreversible impacts lasting for many, many centuries (see “Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water“ and “NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe“).

Pooley told me, “I think this is the only story going forward.” That’s why he has been devoting most of his time to researching and writing a book on the politics and economics of climate change.

The first step for Pooley was an analysis of media coverage over the previous 15 months. In a long introduction to the different roles reporters can play, Pooley notes:

Being a referee is harder than being a stenographer because it requires grappling with the substance of an issue in a way that many time-pressed journalists aren’t willing or able to do.

He decided to examine media coverage surrounding the 2008 Senate debate over the climate bill put forward by John Warner (R-VA) and Joseph Lieberman (??-CT):

News coverage of the Lieberman-Warner debate included some shoddy, one-sided reporting and some strong work that took the time both to dive into the policy weeds–evaluating the economic assumptions used by the various players–and step back to portray those players as com-batants in a war for public opinion. But most of the reporting was bad in the painstakingly balanced way of so much daily journalism–two sides, no real meat.

He then explains his research:

My analysis of news articles published in national and regional newspapers, wire services, and newsmagazines between December 2007 and June 2008 suggests that for most reporters covering this story, the default role was that of stenographer–presenting a nominally balanced view of the debate without questioning the validity of the arguments, sometimes even ignoring evidence that one side was twisting truth. Database searches yielded a sample of 40 published news and analysis stories that explored the cost debate in some de-tail (see appendix). Of these, seven stories were one-sided. Twenty-four stories were works of journalistic stenography. And nine stories attempted, with varying degrees of success, to move past the binary debate, weigh the arguments, and reach conclusions about this thorny issue.

The bottom line:

The media’s collective decision to play the stenographer role actually helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.

He makes another interesting point, one I would not have expected from a journalist

Mainstream news organizations have accepted the conclusions of the IPCC but have not yet applied those conclusions to the economic debate. The terms of that debate have been defined by opponents of climate action who argue that reducing emissions would “cost too much.” So the battle has been fought over the short-term price of climate action and its impact on GDP, while overlooking an extremely important variable, the long-term costs of inaction and business as usual.

Although Pooley doesn’t make the point, the problem he identifies is compounded by the fact that the mainstream economic community also overestimates the cost of action and underestimates the cost of inaction, a central point of my ongoing series on voodoo economists (see, for instance, Part 3: MIT and NBER — the right wing deniers love your work. Ask yourself “why?” and Part 2: Robert Mendelsohn says global warming is “a good thing for Canada.”).

That means when the media goes out looking for a well-known climate economist to quote in an article, they typically end up with someone who doesn’t understand the scientific urgency and those who misunderstand the economics.

If you really want to understand the fact that even a very strong cap and trade bill “would have a marginal effect on economic growth,” the best place to go is the the International Energy Agency and IPCC and McKinsey (see “McKinsey 2008 Research in Review: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero“).

Pooley’s whole paper is a must read, especially for advocates of climate action. Yes, the media bears much culpability for the fact that, as Pooley says, “the tipping point for climate action has not yet been reached.” But so do scientists, environmentalists, and progressives. The general state of our messaging remains lousy (see, for instance, Part 4: The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates and Does the “Reality Campaign” need new Mad Men?

One clear message from this study is that the climate science activists need to do a better job of spelling out the cost of inaction. Until that cost is clear to the public, the media, and policymakers, the country will never be able to mobilize to do what is needed to preserve a livable climate.

Related Post:

• Intro to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar

Despite all the spinning and hot air, the science is solid and global warming is a real, deadly serious concern. It’s time to deal with it.

That’s the final line of a terrific editorial from the country’s oil capital:

Of late U.S. public opinion has turned very chilly for the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists whose data demonstrates that human-generated emissions are heating the globe with potentially catastrophic results. Thanks to a confluence of events, some significant and others bogus, polls show Americans are increasingly confused about the reality of global warming.

After the election of President Barack Obama, the expectation was that the U.S. government would end the foot dragging of the George W. Bush administration and aggressively move to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. While the Environmental Protection Agency did classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant and the House of Representatives passed an ambitious energy bill with cap-and-trade measures to reduce emissions, the bipartisan version in the Senate sponsored by John Kerry, D-Mass, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., faces tough sledding.

The Copenhagen climate summit that was supposed to design a global climate treaty to succeed Kyoto instead produced little more than platitudes about future action. The worldwide economic recession made the costs of combating global warming less acceptable to both industrialized nations and their developing counterparts.

In the midst of that gloomy outlook came a pair of highly publicized incidents that were used to cast doubt on the validity of climate change theory.

First, hackers raided the computer system at the climate research unit of Britain’s East Anglia University and published thousands of scientists’ private e-mails. Global warming skeptics portrayed the communications as proof that devious researchers were cooking data to support a global warming hoax. That charge was decisively rejected by a British government commission that examined the e-mails. Although it faulted the scientists for petty and sometimes vindictive comments about their detractors, the commission found no grounds to challenge the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity.

In a second flap, global warming disbelievers seized on a single misstated claim in a 900-page report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers will melt by the year 2035 as proof the massive body of science authenticating global warming was suspect. Although the evidence of retreating glaciers around the world is incontrovertible, a single error on a timeline was used to cast doubt on the U.N. panel’s work. is cooling rather than heating up. Brushed aside was the fact that globally 2009 was the second warmest ever recorded, and the past decade was the warmest ever measured by man. An analysis compiled by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies projects that this year may be the hottest yet.

As writer Elizabeth Kolbert points out in the current issue of the New Yorker, “The message from scientists at this point couldn’t be clearer: the world’s emissions trajectory is extremely dangerous. Goofball weathermen, Climategate, conspiracy theories — these are all a distraction from what’s really happening.”

For those of us living in hurricane-vulnerable areas, keep in mind this ominous measurement: Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic main development area for tropical storms last month were the warmest ever recorded for March, already reaching levels typical of late June. The conjunction of several climate patterns combined with ongoing overall warming of the world’s oceans is thought to be the cause.

Despite all the spinning and hot air, the science is solid and global warming is a real, deadly serious concern. It’s time to deal with it.

More on the hurricane season ahead later.

As part of my daily reading regimen, I often come across articles that I want to read later. They’re either long or otherwise don’t fit with what I’m reading at the moment. This used to involve keeping the tab open until I got around to reading it. Problem is, oftentimes browser tabs can eat up too much memory, eventually causing the browser to crash. If it’s on a site that automatically reloads every minute or so, forget about it. It’s just a huge pain. On the suggestion of a friend I tried out Instapaper. It installs a bookmarklet in your browser which you can use to set aside everything you want to read at a later time, allowing you to avoid your browser’s clunky bookmark system. This type of application is even more useful on a BlackBerry, so when I learned that Emerick had released a BlackBerry version of Instapaper, I was all over it.

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Ever since I got a BlackBerry I’ve been looking for guitar-related applications. I have both a metronome and tuner, but it seems like those two functions would transfer well to the BlackBerry. A few months ago LCA Mobile released a preliminary version of Guitar Studio, and after giving it a look I became a fan. It didn’t do everything I wanted, but it is certainly a useful tool for guitarists who rock a BlackBerry. They’ve now released a full version, which is available in our store. If you’re a guitarist who spends a lot of time on the road, this might be the application for you.

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Another day, another exoneration for climate scientists.  Here’s the Guardian’s headline on the findings of the inquiry panel, which was led by Lord Oxburgh, the former chair of the House of Lords science and technology select committee:

Scientists cleared of malpractice in UEA’s hacked emails inquiry

Researchers ‘dedicated if slightly disorganised’, but basic science was fair, finds inquiry commissioned by university

Scientists who are “slightly disorganised”?  Off with their heads!  (see “Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists“)

Last month, the House of Commons exonerated Phil Jones:  Based on their inquiry and evidence, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason … to challenge the scientific consensus … that ‘global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity’.”

This is a busy day for me, so I’ll just repost BigCityLib on the latest exoneration:

Story about Lord Oxburgh’s inquiry into CRU practices here. Some excerpts:

The scientists at the centre of the row over the hacked climate emails have been cleared of any deliberate malpractice by the second of three inquiries into their conduct.…

The report concluded: “We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.”

… The panel was not tasked specifically with looking at the way CRU handled access to its data and Freedom of Information requests from members of the public but it commented that there were “a host of important unresolved questions” arising from the application of FoI to academic research. “We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it,” the report said. It did criticised the government’s policy of charging for access to data. “This is unfortunate and seems inconsistent with policies of open access to data promoted elsewhere in government.”

So, this puts Oxburgh’s panel at odds with the Parliamentary Inquiry, which seems to want the data handed out willy-nilly. Furthermore, a number of climate scientists have noted and expanded upon the issue raised in this last couple of (bolded) sentences, including James Annan:

Let me introduce you to the NERC policy on Intellectual Property. Short version: “Who owns the intellectual property? We do.” The UK Ministry of Defence (who run UK Met Office and therefore the Hadley Centre) is orders of magnitude worse in its defensive and bean-counting approach to the supply of, well, just about anything that they have and anyone else wants. The bottom line is (or certainly was, when I worked there) that NERC employees are under pressure to sell anything that can be sold. And if someone asks for something, that means it must surely be worth something, right? Of course this is an attitude that the scientists – who know that they can’t really get any significant price for their work – have always implacably opposed, but we don’t really count for much when the politicians are demanding budget cuts and percentage returns on investment.

There were some complaints about CRU’s statistical practices:

The panel did raise doubts about the statistical input into scientific papers authored by researchers at CRU. “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” it concluded.

…which the University of East Anglia responds to as follows:

The Report points out where things might have been done better. One is to engage more with professional statisticians in the analysis of data. Another, related, point is that more efficacious statistical techniques might have been employed in some instances (although it was pointed out that different methods may not have produced different results). Specialists in many areas of research acquire and develop the statistical skills pertinent to their own particular data analysis requirements. However, we do see the sense in engaging more fully with the wider statistics community to ensure that the most effective and up-to-date statistical techniques are adopted and will now consider further how best to achieve this.

But otherwise, a clean bill of health….  [T]he usual suspects … are, at this very moment (taking into account the Penn State investigation of Mann), batting 0-for-3.

The entire report can be read here.

Related Posts:

• The rise of anti-science cyber bullying; Morano says climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged.”
• Glenn Beck:  “There aren’t enough knives” for ‘dishonored’ climate scientists to kill themselves

Mobile security has become an increasing concern over the last few years. Our smartphones have essentially become mini computers, and as such are susceptible to many of the same pitfalls. BlackBerry provides a secure platform for wireless transfers, but there is always the chance of catching a virus. Users who frequently download files from the internet are at a greater risk. A few options exist for BlackBerry users who want to protect themselves against mobile phone viruses. Lookout has developed similar software for other platforms, and they have now released a BlackBerry application. While security is its primary aim, the application contains a couple of other features you might find useful.

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Oftentimes, when we discuss BlackBerry applications for our daily post, we’re featuring premium applications. There are some free applications mixed in there, but typically the free applications don’t get as much airtime. We’re going to overcompensate for this by listing a ton of free BlackBerry apps. How many? To be honest, I never counted. I just compiled a list and put them in some discernible order. If you’re ever on the hunt for BlackBerry applications, or know someone looking to fill her Berry with freebies, make sure to check out what follows.

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The House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on energy tax incentives and the green job economy.  It will be webcast here.

I’m on the 1 pm panel, the one The Hill says “will likely be a media circus because of the attention [T. Boone] Pickens usually draws.”  Here’s the full witness list for my panel:

T. Boone Pickens, Chairman, BP Capital, Dallas, Texas
Victor Abate, Vice President of Renewables, General Electric, Schenectady, New York
Jeffrey Sachs, Ph. D., Director, The Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, New York
Joseph Romm, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
The Honorable Karen Harbert, President and Chief Executive Officer, Institute for 21st Century Energy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Ahh, the The incredible, shrinking Chamber of Commerce that falsely claims “We’ve never questioned the science behind global warming.”

You can read about the Institute for 21st 19th Century’s “Catastrophic Energy Future” (and at Energy Smart).

Here’s more on the hearing:

BACKGROUND:

Over the last several years, the nation has benefitted from an unprecedented amount of both public and private investment in renewable electricity production, energy efficiency, and renewable fuels, ushering in the new, green economy as a driver for sustainable job creation.  A significant amount of Federal support for investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency is provided through the Internal Revenue Code.  Within the span of five months during the Winter of 2008 and 2009, the Congress passed and the President signed into law approximately $39 billion in provisions to stimulate demand for renewable electricity and renewable fuels, provide assistance to communities to make investments in energy efficiency, and assist domestic manufacturers engaged in the production of advanced energy equipment.  These investments include approximately $17 billion in incentives provided in the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008 (Division B of P.L. 110-343) and approximately $22 billion in incentives provided in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (P.L. 111-5).

In announcing this hearing, Chairman Levin said, “Investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy has major potential to create new jobs and help our economy recover.  In recent years we have made significant investments in policies to encourage and enhance domestic manufacturing and production of renewable energy as well as the use of more efficient fuel sources.  This hearing will examine benefits currently in place and discuss potential for new incentives to further drive job creation, economic growth, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

FOCUS OF THE HEARING:

The hearing will examine the effectiveness of current energy tax policy and identify additional steps that the Committee can take to ensure continued job growth in this area while at the same time advancing national energy policy focus on a discussion of current and proposed energy tax incentives.

Should be fun.