Global Warming

By Kristin Eberhard
Natural Resources Defense Council

California’s safest option for guarding against lawsuits over how it spends the billions anticipated from its landmark cap-and-trade program is to channel the auction revenue toward reducing greenhouse gas pollution and furthering the goals of its Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), according to a recent analysis.

The conclusion by the UCLA School of Law’s Emmett Center on Climate Change and Environment may put the brakes on some of the wide-ranging suggestions for using the state’s fee revenue.

By Alan Kandel

Fine particle and ozone pollution, despite tremendous strides made in terms of filtering such pollutants from Southern California air, is still very pronounced, so much so that recent research revealed, “Southern Californians are among those at highest risk of death due to air pollution, according to recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research published in the journal Risk Analysis,” reported Bernice Yeung of California Watch.

“Among the most populated areas of the country, Los Angeles had the highest estimated rate of deaths attributable to air pollution, at nearly 10 percent; San Jose had the lowest at 3.5 percent, according to Yeung.

Part 1 of this two-part series examines steps made to clean up fine particle pollution at California seaports, particularly those in the South Coast Air Basin.

By Bill Walker
AlterNet

A few years ago, Cheryl Manning assigned a research project on climate change to her high school environmental science class in Evergreen, Colo. She presented the basic facts and data from peer-reviewed studies, then asked the students to look into the issue themselves and report back on what they learned.

Halfway through the unit, three students came to class up in arms. They questioned whether the data was made up and if government scientists were part of a plot — “like conspiracy theorists that say we never went to the moon,” Manning said. At a PTA meeting the students’ parents accused her of trying to undermine their children’s religious belief system.

“Peer-reviewed science is the Kool-Aid of the left-wing liberal conspiracy,” they said, adding a warning: “Be on your guard.”

Manning’s superintendent backed her up, and the parents eventually pulled their kids out of school. But she said her experience is common enough that many teachers shy away from the subject of climate change.

By Marcy Winograd
Former Democratic Candidate for Congress

After the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, with its codification of imprisonment without charge or trial, I could no longer register voters for the Democratic Party – even with the hope of involving new registrants in the California Democratic Party’s popular Progressive Caucus. If I could not ask someone to join the Democratic Party, I could not in good conscience stay in the party, even as an insurgent writing resolutions and platform planks to end our wars for oil.

Unfortunately, too many corporate Democrats, beholden to big-money donors or to a jobs sector dependent on militarism, vote for perpetual war and the surveillance state, replete with secret wiretaps, black hole prisons, and targeted assassinations. Far too many who are fearful or bought by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee vote for legislation that relegates Palestinians to second-class citizenship and threatens to take our country to the brink of an unthinkable war on Iran.

By David Pettit
Natural Resources Defense Council
 
The process to implement California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard has had an interesting month. In mid-December we achieved a great victory when California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) unanimously agreed to move forward with implementation of the low emission fuel standard. However, a couple weeks after the December 15th vote, a legal ruling was issued that might delay that progress. Following is an explanation of the LCFS and what the ruling means for the program’s future.
 
What is LCFS?
 

By Simon Mui
Natural Resources Defense Council

Make no mistake. President Obama’s decision to delay the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is a big deal.

Some 15,000 Americans took the case directly to the White House. People sent more than 300,000 messages and put the brakes on a process that was all but coasting to approval. Americans from all walks of life made a difference in a battle against a well-funded oil industry effort.

BUT, don’t forget: Big Oil is not going to give up on its plan to strip-mine and steam tar sands from deep under the great Canadian Boreal forest and pipe one of the dirtiest crude oil sources 1,700 miles across America. Whoever is president in 2013—Obama or one of his Republican opponents—will have the final say.

By David Dayen

Conservatives are pushing very hard to punish the White House over loan guarantees they made to the now-bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra, and by association to damn any investment in green technologies whatsoever, to keep the dirty energy economy paramount.

The latest claim is that the White House tried to rush the $500 million loan to Solyndra to line up with a September 2009 announcement at the factory by Vice President Biden.

By David Dayen

Kevin Drum has a very important piece that shows us the predicament of the oil-fueled society we’ve constructed over the past several years. The story is basically this. Oil production is static, if not falling, and emerging markets are increasing and broadening their wealth, leading more and more Chinese and Indians and Indonesians and Brazilians to desire a higher standard of living. Invariably this means oil demand goes up.

By Amanda Wallner
Sierra Club California

We should not let dips in gas prices fool us into thinking cheap gas is on the way; gasoline prices have gone up more than 25% since January 1.[1] With much attention given to the summer driving months ahead, two recently released reports analyze the cost to California consumers of rising oil prices and how state and national governments can help protect us from the grip of Big Oil.

The 2011 edition of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s “Fighting Oil Addiction: Ranking States’ Gasoline Price Vulnerability and Solutions for Change,” analyzes the vulnerability of Americans in different states to changing oil prices, as well as state and federal policies to help drivers[2]. Through April of this year, the average California driver is spending 7.19% of their income on gasoline – up 2.54% from last year.

By David Goldstein
Natural Resources Defense Council

Every few years, a new report emerges that tries to resurrect an old hypothesis: that energy efficiency policy somehow results in consumers using more energy instead of less. This hypothesis was introduced in the 19th Century by economist William Stanley Jevons, who argued that increases in the energy efficiency throughout a nation would lead to increases in coal consumption, rather than decreases.  

Recent articles have attempted to revive these claims, also known as “rebound effect” —restating that energy efficiency tends to encourage more energy use, not less, and that if a consumer’s immediate goal is to tackle climate change, then it seems risky to count on reaching it by improving efficiency. Assuming rebound effects eat up most of the energy savings, such claims then argue that efficiency cannot be a good policy to reduce energy consumption or combat climate change.