Alberta's Carbon Tax is Pocket Change to Big Oil

Alberta! Apparently lots of people live there? Who knew!

Alberta is raising its carbon tax to $30 a ton by 2017, but that's projected to only cut carbon emissions two percent. So basically, it’s pocket change for the oil industry because it will barely change their behavior, and the government gets millions in revenue. 

There's plenty of evidence in the states that putting a price on carbon pollution is great for state budgets without hurting state economies. California's carbon cap and trade system raised $850 million last year. Business Insider recently ranked California's economic growth second-fastest in the US, so cap and trade is not exactly crippling its economy.

In the Northeast, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative just raised $85 million in its second auction of 2015. It raised $82 million in the first auction, meaning it's on pace to raise in the neighborhood of $330 million for the year, and continuing to prove that carbon cap and trade works really, really well.

Note that Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) pulled New Jersey out of RGGI, and now the state is having to raise taxes to make ends meet. I bet New Jersey could use those millions in easy money right about now.

Imagine how much in revenue Congress and other states are leaving on the table? It’s crazy.

I Can't Imagine Why California's Down To One Year of Water Left

Under California's new "restrictions," everyone can still have giant lawns, golf courses, etc., and they can still give them unlimited water, but they can only do it about every other day. And there's little or no punishment for breaking the rules. Golly, I can't imagine why they're down to one year of water left.

Meanwhile, the corporate farms that use most of the state's water remain completely unregulated as they race to steal the last drops from California's underground aquifers, which would take decades to refill even if everyone stopped siphoning them tomorrow. Wildlife that don't have water pumped to their doorstep are dropping like flies. And climate change is making the problem worse, faster.

Gizmodo's Alissa Walker lists some water restrictions with teeth that would help make sure California is still inhabitable in 2017. But until California politicians are willing to force its farms to sip instead of gulp, the state will continue down the road to disaster.

60 Minutes took a look at California's looming water crisis late last year. It's a good story with one big short coming - it never mentions climate change.

Warmest Winter Records Shattered in West, But Reporters Won't Say Climate Change

Winter was great for biking in Salt Lake City

Watching network television news, you'd think the entire Earth had entered an Ice Age just because it's been cold in Manhattan. While February was unusually cold in the Northeast and Midwest, what's not being mentioned on TV is that records have been falling on the high end of the temperature scale for the entire winter across a broad swath of the West and Pacific Northwest:

• Weather.com reports that more than 20 cities out west, including San Francisco, Sacramento and Las Vegas had their warmest winters on record, adding, "In case you're wondering, few if any cities in the East will have their coldest winters on record despite a series of high-profile blizzards and record cold waves – mainly because December was relatively mild."
• KOMOnews.com reports Seattle had its warmest winter on record, "obliterating" the old record by 1.4 degrees. In neighboring Oregon, Portland broke its winter warmth record and Salem topped 50 degrees every day in February, the first time that's ever happened.
• And The Salt Lake Tribune reports Salt Lake City had both its warmest and least snowy winter on record, the latter being the bigger concern as the West heads towards fire season. "Things are much more dry and, frankly, more ready to burn … than in [recent] memory," Jason Curry, spokesman for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, told the Tribune.

What do all of these articles have in common? Not one mentions climate change. It's just the latest example of media deliberately not connecting obvious climate dots for their audience.

Sometimes you have to wonder: If our media were actively trying to stifle public knowledge of climate change impacts and suppress support for climate action, how would that be different from what we have now?

They Deny Climate Science. Why Won't Reporters Call Them Science Deniers?

After the party's drubbing in the 2012 elections, many political pundits speculated that Republicans would spend 2013 trying to seem less extreme. Instead, many are spending the August Congressional recess assuring the Tea Party that they are, in fact, 2 Extreme 2 Quit.

As first reported by +The Nation's +Lee Fang, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has a bizarre theory that neatly ties his climate science denial into his broader delusions:

“Just so you'll know, global warming is a total fraud,” the 13-term lawmaker told a Tea Party group Thursday. Rohrabacher said the fraud has its origins with liberals at the local government level who want decision-making ceded to higher levels of government.

“You’ve got liberals who get elected at the local level [that] want the state government to do the work and let them make the decisions. Then at the state level they want the federal government to do it. And at the federal government they want to create global government to control all of our lives,” he said.

Republicans want to ban oral sex, ban gay marriage, ban a woman's right to choose, deport undocumented immigrants & send their children to massive government-run orphanages, ban workers from organizing into unions, and restrict which Americans get to vote. But it's liberals who want to use government to control your lives?

The Hill's Ben Geman adds:

Rohrabacher, whose remarks Thursday on climate began by disputing links between wildfires and global warming, is a longtime climate skeptic.

The science connecting man-made carbon pollution to climate disruption is much older and just as well established as the science connecting cigarettes to lung cancer. If a politician denied the link between cigarettes and cancer, we'd call them a science-denying shill who'd say anything for his friends at Big Tobacco.

Why do reporters tiptoe around politicians who attack climate science by calling them "skeptics"? As if they might judiciously change their minds depending on what's in NOAA's next set of satellite data? Dana Rohrabacher is a science-denying shill for industrial carbon polluters. It's OK to say that!

Here's the problem: Dana Rohrbacher hates to be called a science denier. Sure, he'll deny science all day. But if you call him on it, he'll claim to be a great student of science, because that's how Dana Rohrabacher would like to think of himself! That doesn't make it so.

Calling a science-denying politician like Dana Rohrbacher a science denier is 100% fair & accurate and reporters should do it more often. Are they really more interested in staying on politicians' good sides than being fair & accurate? (Don't answer that.)

Is Your City Still Wasting Money on Inefficient Streetlights?

At The Atlantic's Cities Blog, Nate Berg points out that streetlights drain a huge amount of a community's budget, but thanks to new technologies, cities like San Diego can slash their energy bills & carbon footprints:

Under the leadership of a program called CleanTECH San Diego, cities in the area have been able to streamline what would otherwise be a cumbersome process to make the switch from old bulbs to new. And with grant money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, 13 cities in the region have kicked off projects to replace about 55,000 streetlights, which will save an estimated $3 million annually.

The largest among those cities is San Diego, which will be replacing about 90 percent of its streetlights, roughly 35,000. The city is replacing its old low-pressure sodium lights – a common streetlight – with induction bulbs that use about 40 percent less energy. 16,500 have already been converted, and officials expect the transition to be finished by next spring.

Before the conversion, the city had been paying about $4.7 million a year to light its streets. When all 35,000 lights are replaced, that cost will drop to about $2.8 million a year, according to Tom Blair, deputy environmental services director for the City of San Diego.

And it's not just energy costs that will go down. The old sodium bulbs typically had to be replaced every 3 or 4 years, while the new induction bulbs can last more than a decade. Blair says a set of induction bulbs were installed in downtown San Diego about 12 years ago and have yet to need replacement. "That’s a significant savings," Blair says.

"It was kind of a no-brainer," says Marty Turock, a program manager at CleanTECH San Diego. "Virtually every city, at least within San Diego County, recognized that doing the street lighting retrofits was one of the biggest impacts and one of the biggest payback energy efficiency projects they could take on."

Another leader - Ann Arbor, MI, projected to save $100,000 a year by installing new LED streetlights with motion detectors (unlike older streetlight bulbs that need a few minutes to power up to full intensity, LEDs can fire up instantly).

White House Bashes Endangered Tortoise

What did the White House do that so enraged former Wonkette editor Ken Layne that he had to come out of retirement to post on it?

Oh, just attack some low-paid government biologists for working really hard on an endangered species website that costs all of $125 a year — that’s a hundred-and-twenty-five dollars. Hmm, that sounds a little bit like a number Joe Biden loves to spend, but you need to add nine zeroes, because that’s what this administration spends killing American troops and robot-bombing random villagers in Afghanistan, every year: $125 billion. But spending .000000001% of that — about the price of the average household’s monthly cell-phone bill — to maintain a website about the endangered state animal of California and Nevada, the beloved desert tortoise, now that’s something Joe Biden doesn’t care for at all.

As the Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote recently, "It's possible for a president to so alienate his base that it fails to show up on election day. Something to keep in mind before November 2012 rolls around."

Photo via Flickr's man_of_mud

Temperature Records Fall Out West

Given that we've had a colder-than-normal December here in the DC area, I'm surprised I haven't read more silly "how can there be global warming if it's warm here now" stories. Maybe it's because out west, they're in the grips of record-breaking warmth? For an area already facing threats to water supplies due to reduced snowpack, it's not a good way to start the winter.

UPDATE: My friend Jenn in Colorado reports, "Sandals for me today."

The Kochtopus Extends Its Tentacles in California

From the LA Times: "A company owned by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch has contributed $1 million to Proposition 23, a November ballot initiative to suspend California’s groundbreaking 2006 global-warming law."

Higher Temps, Weirder Weather: Welcome to Your New Climate

As the Associated Press reports, 2007 gave us our best taste yet of what climatologists say is coming as our planet warms:

When the calendar turned to 2007, the heat went on and the weather just got weirder. January was the warmest first month on record worldwide — 1.53 degrees above normal. It was the first time since record-keeping began in 1880 that the globe's average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year. [...]

It wasn't just the temperature. There were other oddball weather events. A tornado struck New York City in August, inspiring the tabloid headline: "This ain't Kansas!"

In the Middle East, an equally rare cyclone spun up in June, hitting Oman and Iran. Major U.S. lakes shrank; Atlanta had to worry about its drinking water supply. South Africa got its first significant snowfall in 25 years. And on Reunion Island, 400 miles east of Africa, nearly 155 inches of rain fell in three days — a world record for the most rain in 72 hours.

A separate story paints a detailed and bleak picture of California's climate future.

All this reinforces several key points that seem to get overlooked in the climate change:

1. Global warming is not an abstract future possibility. It's been already been happening for years. We've just chosen to pretend it's not happening or is not our fault.
   
2. Global warming is not just about melting glaciers and threatened polar bears. Changes are affecting all of us. If you're talking with friends about the climate crisis, cite the impacts in your own backyard.
   
3. Global warming does not mean it will never be cold anywhere again. Just because it was cold where you live yesterday doesn't mean the planet isn't warming, and just because OshKosh broke a record for most December snow doesn't mean the planet isn't warming (in fact, warmer air can hold more water vapor so if temperatures rise but remain below freezing, you can get higher snowfall).

For more tips on refuting global warming denial, read Grist's How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.

Florida Governor's Climate Change Summit: Real Action or Hot Air?

It's Tuesday night at 7:27pm and I'm sitting in National Airport waiting for my 5:40pm flight, which has been delayed until 10pm. A laptop and wireless internet is making the wait bearable, but if they cancel this puppy at 9:30pm, I'm gonna be pissed.

I guess it could be worse. See the depressed-looking guy across from me? I overheard him say he'd been trapped in the laptop pen since 2pm. Ouch.

I'm heading down to Miami for Governor Charlie Crist's Summit on Climate Change. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will also be there, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt IV.

Surprising that two Republican governors would get together for a climate change summit, huh? But Florida and California are two of the states most at risk to be impacted by global warming. Florida could be devastated by rising seas and stronger hurricanes, while California's already-bad problems with floods, droughts, and wildfires could get even worse.

Will Crist and Schwarzenegger commit to take concrete steps towards addressing global warming? I don't get the impression that they'd put on this whole summit before the eyes of the environmental world just to talk. I'll let you know how it goes!