Hill Heat

Lugar Defeated In Primary By Richard Mourdock, Who Attacked 'Junk Science Associated with Global Climate Change Alarmism'

Brad Johnson — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:55:00 -0400

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) lost the Republican primary in his bid for re-election to Indiana state treasurer and Tea Party favorite Richard Mourdock, a climate conspiracy theorist. In April, Mourdock attacked Lugar for his association with the Alliance to Save Energy and the Brookings Institution’s Energy Security Initiative:

Clearly, Lugar is out of touch with Hoosier conservatives if he thinks that serving on the board of groups that advocate ‘cap and trade’ carbon tax schemes and the junk science associated with global climate change alarmism is prudent when he represents a state that meets the majority of its electrical needs with coal-fired generators.

Following his defeat, Lugar bemoaned the extremism of the Republican Party. “Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change,” Lugar said.

Lugar did not actually have a record of supporting climate legislation. In 2008, he joined the filibuster of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.

Green Coalitions Drop Heartland Institute

Brad Johnson — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:20:00 -0400

The Heartland Institute has been quietly dropped from two significant coalitions with top environmental organizations. Under pressure from Forecast the Facts and Greenpeace, insurers who funded Heartland’s Washington DC vice president, Eli Lehrer, ceased their support and helped to convince Lehrer to leave the organization. With Lehrer’s departure, the Heartland Institute has been excised from the websites of two green coalitions:

The Smarter Safer Coalition, an effort to reform the National Flood Insurance Program by top insurers, environmental organizations including American Rivers, the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, Defenders of Wildlife, Ceres, and the Nature Conservancy, alongside conservative groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Conservative Union, and Americans for Tax Reform
The Green Scissors Campaign, an initiative to reduce anti-environmental government spending with Friends of the Earth and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

According to leaked documents, Lehrer brought about $700,000 a year into the Heartland Institute for his Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, including the majority of Heartland’s corporate funding. The insurers who announced their departure from Heartland include the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers, XL Group, Renaissance Re, Allied World Assurance, and State Farm Insurance.

Corporate sponsors of the Heartland Institute who have resisted calls to end their financial support include Microsoft, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Comcast, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Heartland’s seventh climate-denier conference will take place in Chicago in two weeks.

Climate Hawk Tim DeChristopher: 'I Have Absolutely Nothing To Lose By Fighting Back'

Brad Johnson — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:15:00 -0400

Tim DeChristopher, the climate activist jailed by the Obama administration for disrupting a last-minute Bush administration oil auction, finds his strength by accepting the terrible reality of climate change.

In an interview recorded in May 2011 before his two-year jail term began in July of that year, DeChristopher told environmental activist and author Terry Tempest Williams that he was willing to be Bidder 70 at the Bureau of Land Management auction in Utah – willing to dedicate his life to fighting global warming through nonviolent direct action – the moment he learned that the window had already closed for humanity to avoid all of the terrible catastrophes of climate pollution:

TIM: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost.
TERRY: Coming out of college?

TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.

TERRY: In terms of climate change.

TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s—but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.

TERRY: When was this?

TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future—of a career and a retirement and all that stuff—I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.

DeChristopher also discussed a 2008 speech by Naomi Klein that noted that Barack Obama’s goals for climate change were centrist, that “even his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises were not enough.” “And so if the center is not good enough for our survival,” Klein argued, “and if Obama is a centrist, and will always be a centrist, then our job is to move the center.” So DeChristopher realized that “you have to go to the edge and push” :

I mean, with climate change, the center is this balancing point between the climate scientists on one side saying, “This is what needs to be done,” and ExxonMobil on the other. And so the center is always going to be less than what’s required for our survival.

Much of the conversation between DeChristopher and Williams involved the complexity of nonviolent resistance, about creating opposition without hatred. It’s easy to see what DeChristopher is fighting against – in particular the fossil-fuel interests that directly oppose action on climate change. But underlying that opposition is a wellspring of love. “This is what love looks like,” DeChristopher told the judge before receiving his prison sentence.

It took him a long time to grapple with the enormity of climate change. He dealt with despair and anger until he realized that there is great hope to be found in the traumatic change that is now inevitable for humanity:

It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.

DeChristopher believes his generation can build a “humane world” that puts people’s well-being above the consumption of material goods:

I’m for a humane world. A world that values humanity. I’m for a world where we meet our emotional needs not through the consumption of material goods, but through human relationships. A world where we measure our progress not through how much stuff we produce, but through our quality of life – whether or not we’re actually promoting a higher quality of life for human beings. I don’t think we have that in any shape or form now. I mean, we have a world where, in order to place a value on human beings, we monetize it – and say that the value of a human life is $3 million if you’re an American, $100,000 if you’re an Indian, or something like that. And I’m for a world where we would say that money has value because it can make human lives better, rather than saying that money is the thing with value.

Government Saves Countless Lives From Tornadoes In Koch And Inhofe Country

Brad Johnson — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Countless lives were saved this weekend by vigilant government officials who warned of deadly tornadoes in Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska—states whose politics are dominated by anti-government, anti-science ideologues. Over 100 tornadoes struck down in 24 hours, but only six people died in Oklahoma, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s home state, thanks to warnings from the National Weather Service scientists he has worked to discredit:

The tornadoes were unrelenting – more than 100 in 24 hours over a stretch of the Plains states. They tossed vehicles and ripped through homes. They drove families to their basements and whipped debris across small towns throughout the Midwest. In some areas, baseball-size hail rained from the sky.

And yet, in a stroke that some officials have attributed to a more vigilant and persistent warning system, relatively few people were killed or injured.

Wichita, Kansas, the headquarters of Koch Industries, suffered $280 million in damage from a ferocious twister, but the “ever-increasing government” demonized by the Koch brothers prevented any loss of life.

Greenhouse pollution from the fossil fuel industries that control the region’s politics is making our weather more extreme and dangerous. The heat trapped by carbon pollution is powering these earlier and more intense storms with record-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As Dr. Jeff Masters wrote on Friday:

This is the warmest March value on record for the Gulf of Mexico, going back over a century of record keeping. During the first two weeks of April, Gulf of Mexico waters remained about 1.5°C above average, putting April on pace to have the warmest April water temperatures on record. Only one year in the past century has had April water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico more than 1.1°C above average; that year was 2002 (1.4°C above average.) All that record-warm water is capable of putting record amounts of water vapor into the air, since evaporation increases when water is warmer. Because moist air is less dense than dry air, this warm, moist air flowing northwards from the Gulf of Mexico into the developing storm system over the Plains will be highly unstable once it encounters cold, dry air aloft. The record-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico are a key reason for the high risk of severe weather over the Plains this weekend.

Giffords Solar Summit

Brad Johnson — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:00:00 -0400

The office of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords will host a wide-ranging policy conference on the state and future of solar energy at the U.S. Capitol next week.

The Giffords Solar Summit will feature perspectives on the state of solar energy from federal and Arizona officials as well as a U.S. Marine Corps colonel and solar industry leaders and advocates, including Michael Bidwill, the president of the Arizona Cardinals and former chairman of the board for the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. Bidwill has developed and promoted tax and regulatory policies aimed at growing the solar industry in Arizona.

Speakers:

Pia Carusone – Chief of Staff to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords
Michael Bidwill – President, Arizona Cardinals
Thomas Doyle – President & CEO, NRG Solar
Tom Alston, Solar Outreach and Policy Coordinator, Congresswoman Giffords
Marc Spitzer – Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
Kris Mayes – Faculty Director, Program on Law and Sustainability Arizona State University
Ken Zweibel – Director, George Washington University Solar Institute
Dr. Gavi Begtrup, Policy Advisor, Congresswoman Giffords
Rhone Resch – President and CEO, Solar Energy Industries Association
Dr. Ramamoorthy Ramesh – U.S. Department of Energy, Program Manager Solar Energy Technologies Program
Col. Bob “Brutus” Charette – Director, Expeditiona

24 Hours of Reality

Brad Johnson — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:00:00 -0400

24 Hours of Reality will be broadcast live online from September 14 to 15, over 24 hours, representing 24 time zones and 13 languages.

The event begins in Mexico City at 7 pm local (8 pm EDT).

7 PM local, Saturday

Mexico City, Mexico
Boulder, CO, USA
Victoria, BC, Canada
French Polynesia
Kotzebue, AK, USA
Hawaii, USA

INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE

7 PM local, Sunday

Tonga
Auckland, New Zealand
Solomon Islands
Canberra, Australia
Seoul, South Korea
Beijing, China
Jakarta, Indonesia
New Delhi, India
Islamabad, Pakistan
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Istanbul, Turkey
Durban, South Africa
London, United Kingdom
Husavik, Iceland
Cape Verde
Ilulissat, Greenland
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
New York City, NY, USA

Olympic winter athletes fight climate change

Brad Johnson — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:30:00 -0400

Please join Protect Our Winters for a special evening with Olympian Gretchen Bleiler, pro snowboarder Jeremy Jones, skier Chris Davenport and Aspen Skiing Company’s Auden Schendler.

They’ll discuss climate change, winter sports, and why athletes are an important part of the solution.

Honorary co-hosts Rep. Jared Polis (CO), Sen. Mark Udall (CO), and Sen. Michael Bennet (CO).

League of Women Voters Launches 'People Not Polluters' Campaign

Brad Johnson — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:20:00 -0400

The League of Women Voters has launched a major, nationwide campaign in defense of the EPA’s work to give Americans clean air. The People Not Polluters campaign asks Americans and their elected officials to join the Clean Air Promise:

I promise to protect America’s children and families from dangerous air pollution. Because toxics and pollutants such as mercury, smog, carbon, and soot, cause thousands of hospital visits, asthma attacks, and even deaths, I will support clean air policies and other protections that scientists and public health experts have recommended to the EPA to safeguard our air quality.

Watch the campaign spot:

LWV is mobilizing its members to tell personal stories of the cost of asthma for children and families, including outreach to vulnerable populations like seniors, Latinos, and African Americans.

Deepwater Horizon, seafood, marine conservation legislation

Brad Johnson — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:00:00 -0400

The following legislation and nominations are scheduled for the Commerce Committee’s consideration:

S. 50, Commercial Seafood Consumer Protection Act
S. 179, Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuaries Boundary Modification and Protection
S. 183, Deepwater Horizon Survivors’ Fairness Act
S. 911, Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act
S. 962, a bill to reauthorize the Northwest Straits Marine Conservation Initiative Act to promote the protection of the resources of the Northwest Straits, and for other purposes
Nomination for Promotion in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Corps
Nominations for Promotion in the U.S. Coast Guard

Nuclear and alternative fuels legislation

Brad Johnson — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:00:00 -0400

The purpose of this hearing is to receive testimony on S. 512, the Nuclear Power 2021 Act; S. 937, the American Alternative Fuels Act of 2011; and S. 1067, a bill to amend the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to require the Secretary of Energy to carry out a research and development and demonstration program to reduce manufacturing and construction costs relating to nuclear reactors, and for other purposes (Hearing Room SD-366) (Overflow Room SDG-50).

Witnesses

Panel 1

Dr. John E. Kelly, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactor Technologies, U.S. Department of Energy
Steven G. Chalk, Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Energy

Panel 2

Dr. Edwin Lyman – Senior Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists
Joe Colvin, President, American Nuclear Society
Dr. James T. Bartis, Senior Policy Researcher, RAND Corporation
Brian Siu, Policy Analyst, Natural Resources Defense Council