Whether you’ve been hitting snooze each time a global climate conference rolls around or you’re looking for a refresher before the Copenhagen climate talks this December, Grist has an interactive timeline to bring you up to speed. And don’t forget to keep tabs on all our juicy coverage of the Copenhagen climate talks.

The road to Copenhagen on Dipity.

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You know how sometimes Jon Stewart gets all smarmy and sycophantic when he has on a guest he actually admires? And you know how Al Gore has a reputation for being a bit stiff on occasion? Let’s just say they seemed to bring out those qualities in each other last night—or, as Stephen Colbert “jokingly” put it later, there was “no Al-Gore-rhythm.”

Still, Gore spoke clearly about the energy and technology solutions that exist, what it will take to actually implement them, and why it ain’t happenin’. The Daily Show published a two-part extended interview on its site—here’s part one:

... and here’s part two:

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It’s Getting Ha! in Here: Maria Bamford

Feed-in tariffs—the new school of thought

Al Gore's back in the public eye, promoting his new book, which naturally raises the question: which mainstream press outlet will be the first to do a vapid hit piece?

Today we have our answer: The New York Times, which has run a truly absurd and embarrassing piece from John Broder. It casts about desperately seeking something sinister about the fact that Gore invests in clean energy technologies. Listen to this piece of dark insinuation:

Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.

Gore is "positioned to profit," you understand. No wonder he's dedicated most of his adult life to schlepping around the world giving a slide show to tens of thousands of people! It was all to marginally increase the return on his future investments! Diabolical.

Who is saying this absurd crap? "Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first 'carbon billionaire' ..." Critics like loony Rep. Marsha Blackburn and denialist propaganda hack Marc Morano. These are the people driving the NYT news operation now.

But look down toward the bottom. No, farther ... farther ... farther ... yeah, waaay down in the second-to-last paragraph:

“I believe that the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us, and I have invested in it,” Mr. Gore said, adding that he had put “every penny” he has made from his investments into the Alliance for Climate Protection.

So all the money from Gore's investments is invested in a nonprofit to fight climate change. He's not "positioned to profit." He's not "poised" to become a "billionaire." The entire premise of the story is false. I'm sure the tiny percentage of readers who make it down this far in the story will be delighted to discover they've completely wasted their time.

To summarize: Professional Gore haters, who make their living peddling lies, cast an absurd charge against Gore. The charge goes in the headline. It goes in the first paragraphs of the story. Then in paragraph 32 it's revealed that the charge is baseless. And John Broder wasn't embarrassed to have this appear under his byline.

Oh, and to state the obvious: even if it were true, nobody but a professional Gore hater could possibly find anything wrong with someone investing in the very solutions they say are necessary to save the world. The non-Gore-demented might even find that a perfectly predictable way for a capitalist to respond.

As this Daily Kos diary points out, this seems of a piece with the New York Times' stated desire to be more "tuned-in" to Fox and right-wing talk radio. Apparently in our new media age, a baseless charge from 'wingers is in and of itself justification for an extended story on the nation's most precious news real estate. Welcome to the future.

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Al Gore’s last book, in case you hadn’t heard, was about the climate problem. The new followup to An Inconvenient Truth lays out solutions. The Vice President, Nobel laureate, and veteran climate advocate describes the most promising responses to the climate conundrum in Our Choice, released November 3. We’re tracking reviews, analysis, screeds, and tirades on the book right here.

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The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday, Nov. 3.  If you want a preview, Al Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference.  Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions. Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now.” Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

I was at one of the Solutions Summits, as long-time readers know (see “My Al Gore story").   I was interviewed by Newsweek about that Summit for their cover story:

Gore assigned each speaker at the summits a half dozen or so questions: Is nuclear power a viable solution? How can new photovoltaic technologies enter the market? He moderated every discussion, and no one remembers him ever glancing at his iPhone during even the most eye-glazing PowerPoint slides (”differentiation of value chain strategies”). Every panel at the New York meetings ran late, recalls Joseph Romm, who oversaw the Department of Energy’s renewables program from 1995 to 1998, as Gore asked question after question. “It was a fire hydrant of information,” says Romm, and it taught even experts things they didn’t know “about the latest technologies and strategies for clean energy.” Gore also hosted a reception afterward, where he betrayed no doubt that everyone would find everything as fascinating as he did. “Have Tim tell you all about soil carbon!” he said to one scientist. “Gore bothers to come talk to us,” says climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Most other politicians are too busy: ‘Just give us the talking points.’ He’s the only politician who’s interested in the nuts and bolts of the science—and the only one who knows what a hydroxyl radical is.”

Like Gore, I learned a lot from the summits.  Here is what I wrote in January 2008:

For the last three days I attended a small climate solutions summit hosted by the former Vice President and current Nobel Laureate. It was off-the-record, so I can’t report on presentations directly, but they have made me a lot smarter about the latest technologies and strategies for clean energy, which will inform my blogging this year on climate solutions. I will say now as an aside that I have become much more bullish on the potential for large-scale solar photovoltaics as a result of attending these meetings. The VP asked me to speak for seven minutes on hydrogen at dinner Wednesday. Before dinner, I gave him a copy of the brand-new paperback edition of -- warning, shameless product placement -- Hell and High Water. He looked it over for a few minutes and said, deadpan,

I have only one problem with this book—this blurb on the back here that says, “If you buy only one book about global warming, make it Hell and High Water.” I just can’t agree with that.

When he introduced me that night, he repeated the line to great laughter.

BTW, in case it wasn’t obvious from his movie, the VP has a terrific sense of humor — and not just in his delivery timing of canned jokes, but in quick, impromptu one liners, like the one above, many of them self-deprecating (one of the speakers from a web-based company thanked him for his work accelerating the Internet, and he said something like, “You heard I had something to do with the internet?”).

And in case this wasn’t obvious from his movie, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things related to climate, energy, science, and technology.

I didn’t realize until I read the Newsweek piece that the VP had a similar reaction to the PV panel:

By all accounts, Gore was open to changing positions he brought to the summits. He originally thought that concentrated solar thermal power, in which the sun heats liquids that then power an electric generator, is superior to photovoltaics, in which sunlight produces electricity directly (PVs are the solar panels sprouting on rooftops these days). But “the PV industry surprised people over the last three years with the speed at which costs dropped,” says Cornelius, who is now at Hudson Clean Energy, a private-equity firm. Gore came around. “We are at or near a threshold beyond which photovoltaics will actually have a cost advantage” over concentrated solar as well as fossil fuels, Gore writes. He likes the fact that they can be deployed in small installations—those rooftops—whereas solar thermal projects are immense; he’s impressed that the price of photovoltaics is dropping while their efficiency is rising, thanks to new materials and manufacturing techniques. “Photovoltaics are a prime example of where the developmental pathway had a big impact on my conclusions,” Gore said at his home last month. “The rate of cost reductions and increases in efficiency for PVs is very impressive. PVs probably overtakes concentrated solar thermal within the next half year.”

I’m not certain one can directly compare PV and solar thermal.  And I still think solar thermal will deliver more kilowatt-hours this century than any other form of low carbon electricity (see Solar Baseload—a core climate solution) particularly because it is so much cheaper and efficient to store thermal energy than electricity, and there are no obvious production bottlenecks for CSP.  But this summit did convince me to include a full wedge of PV in “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution,” along with 3 wedges of CSP.

The Newsweek article is by Sharon Begley, a journalist who definitely gets global warming—see Newsweek’s Science Editor explains why climate change is “even worse than we feared” and how “a consensus has developed during IPY that the Greenland ice sheet will disappear.”

And for those who want to learn about soils and biochar, the book has a good chapter:

Gore loves plants and soils as only a former farm boy can (well, a summertime farm boy: as a kid he spent the school year in Washington, where his father was a senator). He regales you with numbers: more CO2 is emitted from burning and destroying forests—20 to 23 percent of the annual total—than from all the world’s cars and trucks; only by the 1980s did CO2 from fossil fuels overtake that from deforestation, which accounts for 40 percent of the CO2 increase since the 1800s.

The potential for soils to absorb more of the CO2 that our utilities, factories, and vehicles spew poses a dilemma for Gore, one of two where his scientific and political instincts collide. With better management, soils could sequester much more carbon than they do now. The question is how much more. Soils scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State University was surprised to get a call last summer (”Vice President Gore would like to talk to you”) that began, “I have 15 or 20 questions about soils and climate for you.” Lal calculates that if more farmers adopted mulching, no-till farming, and the use of cover crops and manure, 3,700 million acres worldwide could sequester 1 gigaton per year of CO2, roughly 12 percent of annual global emissions. Other experts are even more sanguine. “If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit,” says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. The political clash is this: if you tell people soils can be managed to suck up lots of our carbon emissions, it sounds like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and could decrease what little enthusiasm there is for reducing those emissions—as one of Gore’s assistants told LaSalle in asking him to dial down his estimate. (He didn’t.)

To his credit, Gore sides with the science, letting the political chips fall where they may. He writes that soils could sequester an additional 15 percent of annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. That could cut 50 parts per million of CO2 from the atmosphere over the next 50 years. (We are now at 387, up from 280 before the industrial era, with 450 ppm or even less a dangerous level.) To encourage changes in agriculture that would foster carbon sequestration, Gore advocates moving away from price supports and toward paying farmers for “how much carbon they can put into and keep in their soil,” he says. Paying farmers to sequester carbon might jump-start the use of biochar, which Gore calls “one of the most exciting new strategies for restoring carbon to depleted soils, and sequestering significant amounts of CO2.” Biochar, which he learned about during a 1989 trip to the Amazon, is basically porous charcoal. Made by burning switch grass, corn husks, and other waste, it can absorb CO2 like a charcoal filter in a cigarette absorbs gases. Gore estimates that biochar could sequester 40 percent of annual CO2 emissions.

Begley notes one especially unexpected chapter in the book:

But because of one sentence, and one chapter, it does surprise. The chapter is an astute analysis of the psychological barriers that keep most Americans from taking the threat of climate change seriously, his acknowledgment that emotion, not just reason, drives the decisions people make. The sentence is this: “Simply laying out the facts won’t work.”

… Gore is a canny-enough politician to know that change of this magnitude takes time, and that politics tends to trump science. A new poll by the Pew Research Center found sharp declines in the numbers of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world is warming (57 percent, compared with 71 percent in April 2008), and in how many believe it is because of human activity (36 percent vs. 47 percent). Gore blames this on the boatloads of money the coal and oil industries have spent to muddy the science and confuse the public…. His favorite quote in Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”

The piece concludes with Gore’s native optimism:

“You know, the political system is [like climate] also nonlinear,” Gore says. “I’ve been waiting a long time for that tipping point,” when politicians and the public recognize the threat of climate change and act to avert it. “But I think we’re closer than ever. Reality does have a way of knocking on the door.”

Walking back through the house, I ask Gore again whether he believes the sanguine vision of Our Choice will come to be. He points to solar panels on his roof, and to his driveway, 300 feet beneath which seven geothermal wells gather the planet’s warmth to heat and cool his house. “I have to,” he says.

Our Choice is really the anti-SuperFreakonomics.  I’m sure it will be widely attacked by the deniers and delayers, so no doubt I’ll be blogging about it more this month.  The bottom line is that besides being informative, Our Choice is a truly beautiful book page after page, and I highly recommend it, particularly for those who want a broad overview of the key strategies for preserving a livable climate.

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AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

This article by Michael Lewyn is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

Some of my acquaintances believe that climate change may end human life (or at least civilization) and that the only way to save humanity is to massively reduce economic growth and consumption. Other acquaintances believe that climate change is, if not an outright hoax, a minor problem -- and that even the slightest attempt to regulate emission-creating industries will itself destroy American civilization.

Whole lotta head-shakin' going on.Most of these people are not scientists (let alone scientists specializing in climate-related science), so I strongly suspect that their opinions come from Al Gore's movie and Rush Limbaugh's talk show, rather than from a comprehensive review of the footnote-filled scientific papers addressing climate change. Nevertheless, they are as certain in their opinions as real scientists are. How come?

A plausible explanation was supplied by a Harvard Law Review article I recently read. The article links disputes over technical issues to clusters of values that form competing cultural worldviews, most notably "egalitarian" and "individualist" worldviews.

The article asserts that egalitarians are "naturally sensitive to environmental hazards, the abatement of which justifies regulating commercial activities that produce social inequality." In other words, egalitarians are predisposed to be hostile to large-scale capitalism, and will thus naturally believe any theory that supports this predisposition. When capitalism failed to deliver economic growth in the 1930s, some intellectuals supported communism as more likely to do so (and perhaps more likely to enhance the status of intellectuals by dragging down corporate elites that outrun them in the race for wealth and power). And when capitalism has delivered economic growth, modern egalitarians decided that growth wasn't so great after all.

By contrast, the article notes, "individualists" generally "dismiss claims of environmental risk as specious, in line with their commitment to the autonomy of markets." In other words, individualists believe that (1) government should only regulates transactions that cause harm to others, and (2) this no-harm rule justifies a small government that does not interfere with commercial activity except to prohibit force and fraud. But proposition (2) makes sense only if most commercial transactions in fact do not cause significant harm to nonparties (or to use an economic term, "externalities"). But if nearly all commerical transactions do in fact create dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, proposition (2) fails, which means that the entire ideology of individualism is based on a falsehood (the idea that business activity does not generally create externalities justifying regulation). Because climate change appears to threaten the core idea of individualism, individualists will engage in considerable intellectual gymnastics to avoid climate regulation.

In sum, most people (other than a few scientists and economists who actually know what they are talking about)* with strong opinions on climate policy are responding less to objective reality than to their cultural values. As a practical matter, this means that Americans are going to have a great deal of difficulty reaching a popular consensus on climate policy; because the issue is so technical, ill-informed public opinion is likely to be impervious to new scientific evidence. The stalemate can only be broken through policies that appeal to both sides.

Indeed, the climate change stalemate provides a lesson for policy entrepreneurs in other fields, such as planning-related issues. Policies that attract broad popular support will be policies that attract support from both egalitarians and individualists. For example, zoning (despite its many flaws) is popular because it appeals to both egalitarians' desire to bridle developers and to individualist homeowners' desire to protect their property rights -- since even individualist homeowners often see their neighborhood as part of their property.

*I make no claim to be part of this group.

Michael Lewyn is an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, FL, where he teaches a seminar on sprawl and the law, as well as numerous other courses.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Climate talks timeline: From 350 to Kyoto to Copenhagen and beyond

Today the Wall Street Journal editorial board published a typically dismissive editorial defending the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from the companies that have quit or criticized it over its position on climate change.

The Chamber, to recap, opposes the clean energy bill in Congress and recently called for a “Scopes Monkey Trial” questioning the scientific reality of climate change. The 97-year-old business lobby has faced a wave of defections, from large utilities such as Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Exelon and well-known members such as Nike (which quit the Chamber’s board but retained its membership) and Apple.

The WSJ editorial board waved its hand at the moves: “Apple and Nike are putting green political correctness above the long-term interests of their own shareholders.”

It also buys wholesale the Chamber’s claim that it really wants to help on climate change, it just doesn’t happen to approve of the bill currently in Congress, or last year’s Lieberman-Warner climate bill, or the plan the Environmental Protection Agency is pursuing.

Bizarrely, the WSJ editorial board also attacks Al Gore for promoting clean energy while investing his own money in renewable energy technologies, as if it were hypocritical to invest in a cause one believes in. It complains that cleantech could make Gore “richer than he already is,” as if his wealth discredits him.

No big news here—the editorial board has long made it clear it doesn’t believe in climate change and opposes any energy plan that attempts to address it. But I learned about the most recent editorial from a takedown by the WSJ’s own Keith Johnson, the lead reporter at the paper’s Energy Capital blog.

Writes Johnson:

Johnson (understandably) declined my request to talk about his criticism and the internal politics involved in posting it. Like the Washington Post, the WSJ puts out some solid journalism on climate and energy issues, combined with utterly misleading pieces from its opinion page. As with the Post reporters who called out Post columnist George Will for lying about climate science last spring, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Journal editorialists find themselves challenged by their own news staff.

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MADISON, Wisc. -- President Obama's lieutenants put on their game faces as they fielded journalists' questions Friday, but there was a palpable sense that they know the game is already over going into the global talks on climate change in December.

I wish I could say something different, but that's the sense I got as these key administration officials appeared here at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Former vice president Al Gore also tried to say a deal is possible at the COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen. But read between the lines, and it's clear that the administration is already focused on what happens after that.

Just listen to Nancy Sutley, head of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality: "I'm optimistic we'll know what we need to do when we leave Copenhagen."

Jim Rogers, head of Duke Energy (I guess they're the "good guys" on climate now? Because they're working for a climate bill...) even came out and said it: "Copenhagen has the capability to (continue) all next year."

If there was a bright side, it was Gore's speculation that Obama will in fact attend the Copenhagen talks. The former veepster said "I feel certain he will," this coming on the same day Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. (The prize will be presented in Oslo on December 10, making it very easy for the president to zip down to Copenhagen.)

For the record, from Gore as keynoter and all the members of the opening plenary panel, the order of the day was cheerleading for U.S. climate-change legislation and a successful meeting in Copenhagen. (Well, there was one exception: climate change denier and GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner said anything coming out of the COP15 meetings would be no better than "a blank piece of paper.")

In fact, Duke Energy's Rogers claimed that his firm is making decisions as if the climate-change legislation already had been passed.

Gore went so far as to predict relatively fast passage of climate legislation in the Senate, saying, "There is much more bipartisan dialogue behind the scenes in the U.S. Senate than is publicly known." He called Senate passage by December "more likely than not." OK, if you say so, Al ... but realistically, aren't senators going to be tied up with health care at least until December? Sure seems that way.

Gore went on to say he didn't expect a perfect treaty to come out of Copenhagen, but he looks at it the way he did the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which was drawn up to save the ozone layer: It was far short of what was thought was needed; but the very fact that so many nations signed on and got to work made it much easier to reach a more realistic and effective treaty three years later.

Jane Lubchenco, the ocean scientist Obama tapped to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was among those predicting a political tipping point on climate, just as happened previously with smoking, drunk driving, civil rights and women's suffrage.

"We are approaching the end game, I think," she told the conference.

But later I caught up with Lubchenco, and she didn't challenge my interpretation that administration officials aren't too hopeful about the climate talks. She allowed that every day that passes without climate legislation in the U.S. "makes it that much harder to get agreement in Copenhagen."

So, I asked, what's the road map beyond Copenhagen if there is no treaty?

"We've been working so hard on Copenhagen that we have not really thought beyond that," she answered.

Check out my Twitter feed @robertmcclure.

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Dip a toe into the Nobel Peace Prize news and next thing you’re drowning in commentary. Here’s an attempt to distill what it means for greens, by which I mean the types of people who rely on air, water, soil, and other naturey elements.

Obama’s nuclear disarmament work won him the award. A member of the Nobel selection committee says so. His reengagement with the international community was the broader reason. Much as we’d like to say his climate-change leadership was a key factor, that would be overstating things--even though his climate work got a mention in the official announcement.

Obama is going to Copenhagen for the U.N. climate conference in December. He has to--the prize ramps up expectations for everything on his foreign agenda. Plus, he’ll be in the neighborhood, accepting the prize in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 10. Today White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said a heads-of state portion of the climate conference was under discussion.

What can Obama really do on the world stage? The Council on Foreign Relations has a story on this question. Matt Yglesias explains how Americans are prone to placing too much stock in the President’s problem-solving ability and giving too little attention to the rest of the political system.

This year’s award isn’t going to a long-lasting, unsung activist. Duh, but this is a lost opportunity for celebrating someone who doesn’t get Obama-level attention. Few fit this model as well as Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan tree-planting organizer who was a surprise winner of the 2004 peace prize. She offered her thoughts on Obama’s award today.

There’s a connection between peace and living within ecological means, in the eyes of the Nobel Committee. In awarding Maathai for her ecological work, the committee expanded the scope of what peace work can mean. Giving the 2007 prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fit the pattern. The (brief) mention of Obama’s climate leadership is further evidence.

For more analysis, commentary, opinions, spin, whatever ... might we suggest the internet?

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Courtesy Climate SOSGlobal warming activists endorsed by the preeminent climatologist James Hansen are working to defeat the climate and energy bill in Congress, and they’re using some provocative stunts to spread their message.

Briefly:

At least three groups worked together on last week’s events—Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, and “Greenwash Guerrillas,” which pied Thomas Friedman last year. They all hold a “no compromise” philosophy on climate-change action, opposing carbon markets that allow polluters to buy and sell pollution credits and arguing that larger environmental groups such as NRDC have compromised too much in working with businesses and Democratic lawmakers.

“It’s an awkward position to be environmentalists working on climate change but opposing a climate bill,” said Climate SOS organizer Rachel Smolker, a Vermont ecologist and author. “Especially with a new administration that we want to support. But we felt we need to take a really strong position because this [bill] is so inadequate.”

The campaign is awkward for “establishment” green groups too. They’ve been preparing to battle fossil-fuel interests over the energy bill introduced in the Senate this week. Now they must figure out if and how to respond to this attack from the far left.

“It’s troubling,” said Daniel J. Weiss, director for climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank with close ties to the Obama administration. “No one believes that the clean energy bill that will come out of Congress will address the threat of global warming in a single step. But we have to start.”

“The real enemies are Big Oil and Big Coal and the right wing attack machine,” he said. “For them to mock [Gore] in the way they did shows that they don’t understand you need to attack your enemies and not your allies.”

Hansen’s involvement is especially troublesome. The director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wasn’t involved in the New York stunts, but he endorsed Climate SOS’s recent tour against a climate bill. The $2 trillion bill includes his statement that a cap-and-trade program “would be worse for the environment than doing nothing.”

The opposition by Hansen and Climate SOS is unlikely to influence Washington policymakers, in Weiss’s opinion, but it’s got the potential to make everyday Americans think the situation is hopeless.

“If they hear from such a respected scientist as James Hansen that what Congress is doing won’t matter, then why would they bother to call their senators to say ‘Act on this’?” he said.

Climate SOS activists at NRDC's headquartersCourtesy tanukiAside from the stunts last week, other moves by the “no-compromise” camp are downright perplexing. Last week Greenwash Guerrillas launched a website in response to Cleanenergyworks.us, a three-month-old diverse coalition supporting a comprehensive energy bill. The similar-sounding Cleanenergyworks.biz was a replica of the real Clean Energy Works site, with two notable changes: The phone number and email address for spokesperson Josh Dorner had been changed. His name was left the same. The site changed to a more innocuous version over the weekend and is currently down. (Have a screen grab? Send it in and we’ll post.)

Dorner had no interest in speaking about the site that took his name. “I don’t send too much of my day worrying about a website,” he said Thursday. “There are considerably more important tasks before us to get this bill across the Senate floor.”

NRDC spokesperson Michael Oko shared Dorner’s reluctance to give attention to the stunts. “There are a lot of different groups out there,” he said in regard to the banner hung at NRDC’s office. “Everybody has the right to express themselves.”

About the replica website Oko said, “Frankly, I was a little confused about what their intention was.”

Smolker of Climate SOS said the idea was “to provide a spoof, to reveal the emptiness of the claims Clean Energy Works provides. For them, it’s green jobs and clean energy and everything’s a smiley-face, you know? Our goal is to tell people to look deeper and take the smiley faces off.”

At Environmental Defense Fund.Courtesy tanukiShe said she contributed ideas for the mock site, but individuals from Greenwash Guerrillas, who did not want to be identified, created the idea.

The 51-year-old Smolker has seen firsthand how environmental groups can evolve, professionalize, and grow in wealth and influence. Her father was one of the founders of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), another group targeted by Climate SOS last week. EDF met in her childhood home when it was still a “ragtag group,” as Climate SOS is now, she said. (Smolker, who works for Biofuel Watch, declined to give funding information for Climate SOS but said all members were volunteers.)

“We’ve played that compromise game for a long time,” she said. “There’s too much at stake right now.”

The compromise question—whether to sacrifice what is ecologically necessary for what seems politically possible--has been around as long as the green movement itself. The naturalist-and-mystic John Muir and the politician-and-forester Gifford Pinchot clashed over the same tensions in the early 20th century.

As for Hansen’s “worse than nothing” remark, there has been plenty written about the failings of the House climate and energy bill—it gives away too much to dirty-energy backers, it even protects coal-plant pollution from further regulation. But there is historical precedent of legislation that is deeply flawed at first evolving into something effective and durable. The original Clean Air Act did not address the acid rain crisis, an omission not corrected until 1990. The original Social Security Act did not include domestic or agricultural workers, effectively excluding many Hispanic, black, and immigrant workers, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala notes.

“If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist,” writes Begala. “Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start.”

Most progressives, including many major green groups, would gladly embrace an imperfect climate bill as a start.

“Those who see the House clean energy bill as somehow tainted by deals, and therefore want a carbon tax, have to understand that no tax proposal would ever emerge from Congress as we know it without similar or worse deals being made,” said Weiss. “Unfortunately the moral high ground of ‘we must act for our children’ is necessary but not sufficient for our political process.”

Smolker said Climate SOS would continue on a different tack, insisting on an acceptable bill from the get-go. She expected the group would pause to take stock of the bill released in the Senate this week, then regroup.

Here's Cap'n Trade delivering his message to Danish climate and energy minister Connie Hedegaard:

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U.N. headquarters: Site of all the inaction.Photo: United NationsThe U.S. was given a starring role at the United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday, but China stole the show.

President Barack Obama had pride of place on the agenda, as the first head of state to speak to the gathered world leaders, ministers, and climate negotiators.  His speech, which was warmly received, offered rhetorically forceful yet wholly general commentary about the huge risks posed by climate change and the need for action.  Obama said nothing specific about what his nation was prepared to commit to in order to slash its emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.  Most of the speeches by other heads of state charted the same safe territory.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, on the other hand, vowed that China would curb the growth of its greenhouse-gas emissions by a “notable margin” from 2005 levels by 2020.  He said his nation would generate 15 percent of its power from renewables and nuclear by 2020, and plant 150,000 square miles of new forest over that same period.  He also committed to improving energy efficiency and integrating climate action into domestic economic development plans. 

While Hu avoided talk of specific emissions reductions and stressed that developed countries should do more than their developing counterparts, his statements were the most definitive to date about what China is prepared to do to cut and compensate for its carbon emissions.

Al Gore hailed Hu’s speech.  “I think that China has provided impressive leadership,” Gore said.

Humberto Rosa, Portugal’s secretary of state for environment, echoed that sentiment.  “China has today given a little bit of leadership” among the developing nations “by giving solid numbers,” Rosa said.

Gore, Rosa, and others had similar praise for Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, who has pledged that his nation will cut emissions 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

These new commitments from Asia’s powerhouses are putting real pressure on the U.S., as is the European Union’s willingness to commit to cuts of 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 if the U.S. will follow suit.

Meanwhile, small island nations—some of whose very existence is threatened by climate change—are also putting on all the pressure they can. 

This past summer, the world’s major economies announced a goal of keeping overall surface warming of the Earth by 2100 to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures.  The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has challenged the global community [PDF] to keep overall surface warming well below 1.5 degrees C, which would mean even greater cuts than the most ambitious treaty proposals made so far.

A treaty that settles for anything less would spell disaster for island nations, in the view of Dean Bialek, U.N. representative for the nonprofit group Independent Diplomat, who is advising and assisting the AOSIS nations in the climate treaty negotiations. “[It] would mean complete inundation and statelessness,” says Bialek.  “That’s a morally repugnant outcome, and totally unacceptable.”

But despite China, despite Japan, despite the European Union, most observers agree that it will all come down to what the U.S. is prepared to do.  “A firm commitment from the U.S. would make the dominoes fall into place,” Bialek says. 

“With the change in administration in the U.S., everyone believed that a strong deal was forthcoming,” Bialek continued. “Hopes have dimmed a bit due to the mixed signals coming from Washington.”

Portugal’s Rosa says the E.U. still trusts that President Obama wants to fight global warming, but worries that America’s domestic political process could derail this year’s international treaty talks. 

“The American people and the Senate are the real actors now,” Rosa says.  “We’re sure the United States will get there, but we’ll be sorry if it’s not in time for Copenhagen.”

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Copenhagen talks ready for take off: 5, 4, 3…

UNITED NATIONS - Former U.S. vice president and environmental activist Al Gore on Tuesday hailed China and Japan for providing global leadership in tackling climate change.

Speaking at a special U.N. Summit on Climate Change, the Nobel laureate praised statements made by both Chinese President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

"I think that China has provided impressive leadership," Gore told reporters.

Predicting that China would take further action if global negotiations on a new treaty succeed, Gore said: "I think the glass is very much half full with China. It's not widely known in the rest of the world but China in each of the last two years has planted two and half times more trees than the entire rest of the world put together," he said.

Chinese President Hu Jintao said that the world's largest developing economy was ready to slow down emissions by a "notable margin." But he said emissions would be measured in terms of China's growth and did not provide a figure.

The United States has led rich nations in demanding that China and other developing nations commit to action in a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, whose requirements on rich states to cut emissions expire in 2012.

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, making his first international appearance since his center-left government took charge, confirmed to the summit that the world's second largest economy would ramp up its commitments.

He pledged that Japan would cut emissions by 25 percent by 2020 compared with the 1990 level, a goal far more ambitious than the previous government's eight percent.

Gore described Hatoyama's speech as "terrific" and said he was "encouraged by his pledge to step up assistance for developing nations. Japan, along with the European Union, has provided tremendous political leadership over the past decade in keeping the world on track toward progress involving the climate crisis," he said.

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Now is the time for all good greens, rednecks, social entrepreneurs, hellraisers, Repower America and Al Gore to come to the aid of their fellow citizens in the Appalachian coalfields.

While Big Coal Gone Wild continues to unravel in its bizarre P.R. campaigns this summer, coalfield residents and advocates from around the country have been organizing one of the most important national campaigns to get our nation beyond coal, to launch clean energy jobs, to slow the grind of climate destabilization, and halt one of the most egregious human rights and environmental violations--mountaintop removal.

And they need your help. NOW.

The coalfields are in the throes of a state of emergency: Protesters have been met with violence, and saddled with reactionary and costly legal procedures. While 3 million pounds of ANFO explosives devastate the mountain communities and displace citizens every day, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has been wracked with scandal and embarrassing inaction; green job advocates desperately need national supporters and investors.

In a line: Whether you live (or are vacationing) in Martha's Vineyard, Yellowstone National Park, Washington, D.C. or anywhere between San Francisco and Boston, you are probably using electricity generated by mountaintop removal coal, and ravaged coalfield residents now need your help to transition away from this abomination--and the help of Al Gore, Repower America, green job investors, lawyers, activists, educators and endowed supporters who can write a check for a defense fund. Here are a few ways to support coalfield residents and heroes, affect climate destabilization, and move our nation toward clean energy jobs:

The "Made in America" Tour Should Add Some Pit-Stops in the Coalfields

Last week, the Allliance for Climate Protection's Repower America campaign, in partnership with the Blue Green Alliance and its labor and environmental partners, launched a fabulous nationwide Made in America Jobs tour, going to the frontlines in the industrial heartland to spotlight the "benefits to American workers and businesses of transitioning to a clean energy economy that will create millions of jobs."

 To go along with the 50 events in 22 states, it would be great if the Made in America tour could also add some events at ground zero in the battle to slow climate change and transition our country to clean energy--namely, the Appalachian and Midwestern coalfields.

Last year at the Netroots Nation gathering in July in Texas, Al Gore made it clear that coal miners should be in the forefront of the green jobs movement. He declared: "Mountaintop mining is an atrocity... We should guarantee a job and health and sunshine to every coal miner."

Green Jobs administrator Van Jones, who is currently at work on green jobs in the coalfields, told PowerShift activists in Washington, D.C. on February 28 this year: "This movement also has to include the coal miners." He added, "We could have clean coal, and we could have unicorns pull our cars for us."

West Virginia was ranked by Forbes Magazine last year as the worst state for business. Mountaintop removal, in particular, has destroyed any diversified economy or economic development, and led to soaring poverty rates. According to the CAP report on Green Economic Recovery [PDF], West Virginia could net 12,149 jobs through a green economic recovery program and jumpstart its economy.

The Made in America Tour should visit the JOBS project in Mingo County, West Virginia, where coalfield residents have been meeting to discuss renewable energy options and manufacturing ideas, setting up the infrastructure for investment in a biomass plant and clean energy jobs, and have even sponsored an "Energy Independence Day" this summer.

Coalfield Uprising Supporters Need More Defense Funds

In their fourth day of protest, courageous tree-sitters have scaled massive trees in the lush Appalachian forests in West Virginia--a region where 1.2 million acres of deciduous hardwoods in our nation's carbon sink have been clearcut and strip mined, and where one acre has more diversity than all of Europe's forests combined--and halted the blasting near a Edwight mountaintop removal site, in order to protect local citizens from fly rock, silica and heavy metal blasting showers, and erosion and flooding. However, two of the ground supporters were arrested yesterday, and now sit in jail with a $1,000 bail tab.

One arrested supporter is Zoe Beavers, who stated, "I am on this mountain because I believe that every single West Virginian who is proud of being from 'Almost Heaven' should take a stand against mountaintop removal. I am here because DEP officials have failed to stop the blasting. I am putting my body and reputation on the line to do their job and stop the blasting. I served in our military so that we can all live in a country that does not exploit and destroy its land and people."

Beavers graduated from Hurricane High School in June of 2000 and started basic training at Fort Jackson, SC in August of that year. During her five years of service, she was deployed in Iraq and Turkey and attained the rank of Sergeant. 

For more information, or to donate to the legal defense fund, go here. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is infamously embroiled in scandal.

On its own website, the West Va. DEP even admits it can't maintain proper data collection, due to staff vacancies.

In the meantime, with both ground supporters arrested, the tree-sitters now need hundreds of ground supporters to come to their aid. To keep up on coalfield issues, visit Mountain Justice.

Daring Dragline Protesters Need Defense Funds, Too

On June 18th, 12 brave activists, along with two investigative journalists, did something no high level Obama administration official has done--they went to a mountaintop removal site in West Virginia, the Twilight Massey Energy site, which has displaced residents and depopulated the area. Four protesters also occupied a 20-story dragline. The 12 protesters and 2 journalists were arrested and some very serious charges of assault and trespassing have been handed out.

According to the supporters, "The journalists had their gear confiscated, media stolen out of cameras and as of today only one camera has been returned, damaged. All media and gear was loaded into the back of a Massey company truck by the Boone County Sheriffs office and then a Massey employee drove the gear to the Madison Court House."

The protesters will return to court on September 3rd, and the four dragline activists are reportedly being charged with assault and facing 6 months in jail. According to the supporters, "This was a nonviolent protest, at no time did any of the protesters assault, physically or verbally, any of the miners.

A blog and film cliip on the action can been seen here.

And tell your member of Congress to support the Clean Water Protection Act

While your member of Congress is on vacation and back in the home district, now is the time to meet and greet and push them to support the Clean Water Protection Act, which will sharply reduce mountaintop removal coal mining, protect clean drinking water and the quality of life for Appalachian coalfield residents who face frequent catastrophic flooding and pollution or loss of drinking water as a result of mountaintop removal coal mining.

For more information, and a direct link to your member of Congress, go here.

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New ads from Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection are pushing swing-vote senators to back climate and clean-energy legislation, touting the job-creation angle.

The TV and radio ad campaign is targeted at moderate Democratic and Republican senators from fossil fuel–dependent, manufacturing-heavy Midwestern and Southern states: Blanche Lincoln (D) and Mark Pryor (D) of Arkansas, Evan Bayh (D) and Dick Lugar (R) of Indiana, Kit Bond (R) and Claire McCaskill (D) of Missouri, and Kent Conrad (D) and Byron Dorgan (D) of North Dakota. ACP plans to roll out ads in four additional states later this month.

"These senators represent the heartland of America, states hardest hit by our economic downturn but with the most to gain from jump-starting our economy and creating jobs with a new clean energy policy," ACP spokesperson Brian Rogers told Grist.

The TV ads feature a generic-looking white suburban father talking to the camera. "The folks in Washington need to stop arguing and help people get back to work," he says in the ad targeted at Bayh. "Take clean energy jobs. Now America talks about 'em, yet China's creating 'em. Are we forgetting we need those jobs in Indiana?"

"Look, the future's in clean energy -- wind and solar," he continues. "The question is, who's gonna to build it?"

The group is also running radio ads targeting the senators. One aimed at Pryor tells voters to call his office and "urge him to stand up for Arkansas jobs, clean energy and our nation's security." It highlights a 2005 quote from Pryor in which he said, "We need to take ambitious steps to reduce our country's increasing dependence on foreign oil. Fortunately, the solution will result in Americans manufacturing and using cleaner, healthier energy sources. We're talking about a win for national security, the environment, our children, and the economy."

In a more general ACP ad being run on national cable, entitled "Family Values," the same folksy dad argues that families would benefit from climate legislation that would provide new jobs, a cleaner environment, and decreased dependence on oil.

"Reading about Washington these days, I gotta ask, 'What's in it for me?'" the dad says. "I'm not looking for a bailout -- just a good paying job. That's why I like this clean energy idea."

"I hope our senators are listening," the ad concludes.

ACP would not say how much it's spending on the ad campaign, other than to acknowledge that the investment is "substantial." The ads will run through Labor Day, right up until senators return to Washington following their August recess.

Here is video of the Bayh ad, followed by the national ad:

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A number of people asked me to reply to a blog post by Atlantic monthly columnist James Fallows in which he opines on a variety of climate-related subjects from Al Gore to the "Hockey Stick" graph.

Since I have known Fallows for a long time - we share mutual interests in rhetoric and the late Colonel John Boyd - I decided to zip him an e-mail, which he promptly turned into his first (of several) self-debunkings, "Climate pushback #1."  Let me expand on a few of those dashed off points:

1)  Physics for Future Presidents. Fallows endorsed Richard Muller's book.  Earl Killian long ago doubly debunked that book here (see "Confusing Future Presidents, Part 1" and "Part 2").  ‘Nuff said.

2)  The Hockey Stick.  I wrote Fallows:

"The ‘hockey stick,' was essentially vindicated by the National Academy of Sciences, and it is almost certainly correct."  Cite here.

Few things excite the deniers more than the Hockey Stick graph because it allows them to wade deep into the analytical woods and entirely miss the forest [or is that "entirely miss the deforestation"].  I was trying to answer two separate questions quickly.  First, was the original analysis defensibly correct?  Yes (see NAS Report and RealClimate.org).  Second, were the conclusions correct [which could be true even if the analysis had flaws in it] - is the planet now as hot (or hotter) than it has been in a millenium?  Try two millennia (see "Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years").  See also J. Bradford DeLong commenting on Fallows here.

Perhaps more to the point, the Hockey Stick analysis is just the tiniest piece of our overall understanding of climate science, which is getting increasingly dire by the day.  In a few decades, not only will no one remember the Hockey-Stick controversy, many people won't even be using hockey sticks anymore outdoors- it will just be too darn hot (see "Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year - and that isn't the worst case, it's business as usual!").

3)  Al Gore. OK, one guy does excite the deniers more than the Hockey Stick.  I wrote Fallows:

"Gore's essential argument is correct and other than a very few technical quibbling with word choice, pretty every one on his major carefully crafted statements is accurate.  His Nobel Prize will, sadly, be vindicated by history."

Gore should not be the centerpiece of any discussion of climate science because he is not a scientist nor does he claim to be.  He is, however, filling the role as the country's leading climate journalist because the status quo media have utterly dropped the ball on the subject with their he-said/she-said stove-piped personality-driven stories, which continue even today (see Must-read (again) study: How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics - "The media's decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress." and countless examples in CP's media category - and, yes, deniers, I am using the word "countless" figuratively here).

Like any journalist, Gore occasionally makes statements one can quibble with, but compared to 99.9% of the reporters writing on the subject, his careful word choice, his knowledge of the subject, and his basic premises are are dead on.  But because deniers like Roger Pielke, Jr. dislike how Gore has elevated this issue, they often misrepresent what he said in order to attack him - and those misrepresentations have then become circulated as fact, and before you know it even serious journalists like the NYT's Andy Revkin are repeating them (see Unstaining Al Gore's good name 2: He is not "guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements" and is owed a correction and apology by the New York Times).

4)  Blogging journalists.  Now that global warming and clean energy have become a first-tier political issue, every major journalist is writing about it.  My unsolicited advice: This is the story of the century, so you should be writing about it, but it has many mine fields so please do your homework before opining on it.  If you end up being as technically accurate and strategically correct as Al Gore, you will have distinguished yourself among every other major journalist writing on this subject.

One of the plus sides of blogging, of course, is that you can quickly correct yourself, as Fallows has done.  Now that he is back in DC, perhaps I'll be able to get an interview or post from him on what he learned after his long stay in China.

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Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix

Gore on The Daily Show

First Things First: The Washington-to-Beijing diplomatic shuttle shows no sign of slowing down. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke visited China this week to prod collaboration on clean energy technology. Chu announced the U.S. would contribute $15 million to a partnership that will study how to capture carbon dioxide emissions and trap them underground. The Wall Street Journal’s “Environmental Capital” blogger Keith Johnson sums up mutual perceptions nicely by citing headlines in his paper (“Chu Warns China on Emissions”) and the China Daily (”Steven Chu: U.S. Ready to Lead on Climate Change”).

The New York Times reports that China is taking the lead on clean energy. The Washington Post surveys business trends there and in other Asian nations, places that “could outpace the programs in Obama’s economic stimulus package or in the House climate bill.” A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory official agrees that the U.S. is already left behind in some areas. And the number of U.S. “green jobs” is on the uptick–thanks to enterprising foreign firms.

The U.S. energy industry delivered a surprise this week. Exxon announced a plan to spend $600 million on research into fuel manufactured from algae. These simple plants, which include pond scum and seaweed, are a darling of many scientists and venture capital firms. Exxon’s investment further boosts the fortunes of maverick scientist Craig Venter, whose Synthetic Genomics is a partner in the project. Just a few years ago, Exxon’s previous CEO called ethanol “moonshine,” denigrating such projects, although it should be pointed out that moonshine is largely ethanol.

Count your carbs, count your carbon: Sweden assumed the presidency of the European Union earlier this month. The nation has had a carbon tax since the early 1990s, and continues to take the climate initiative, which now extends to food labeling.

With food or anything else, counting carbs is tricky business. Every facet of the climate story this week demonstrates why. In perhaps the most direct example, the Securities and Exchange Commission will take “a very serious look” at if or how to mandate that publicly traded companies disclose their climate risks.

Elsewhere, economic modeling spats continue. In California, small-business groups funded a study that suggests that, uh, small businesses will lose more than $180 billion in output –10 percent of the total–as a result of the state’s climate law. The California Air Resources Board says the study posits the climate law would bring no savings from increased efficiency or benefits from innovation and entrepreneurship, a supposition that “contradicts the track record of three decades” of state history.

Scientists are in the profession of keeping other scientists honest, theoretically. Computer simulations are such an easy activity to squawk at, scientists themselves do, in the most rarefied places, when they see less-than-rigorous studies published. As commentary on niche modeling, Nature publishes this paper that simulates the effects of climate change on Bigfoot habitats in North America.

The Washington Post runs another op-ed that pretends that climate change does not exist. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin pens this op-ed. She writes, “Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas.” Climate Post usually thinks of mountains as solid, oil as liquid, and gas as gas. The latter two phases of matter seem harder to sit on.

Palin quotes Warren Buffett, the famed investor, describing predicted burdens the bill will have on low-income Americans. Buffett himself comes under scrutiny elsewhere. Bloomberg Columnist Eric Pooley untangles the assumptions in Buffett’s statements and those of David Sokol, chairman of MidAmerican Energy Holdings.

The next day, the WP ran an editorial supportive of the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, last week, possibly to balance the decision to run Palin’s op-ed the day before.  Guardian columnist, and now backseat economist, George Monbiot takes a calculator to the aspirational agreements struck last week among G8 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and prevent more than two degrees C of warming. The developed world would meet their targets in part by offseting their emissions with credits generated by projects in the developing world. To generate enough offset credits, Monbiot calculates, developing nations would have to reduce their emissions by 125 percent.

Climate legislation allows regulated firms to meet their carbon caps by “offsetting” emissions–buying pollution credits generated by (mostly) forestry and agriculture projects. A comprehensive Greenwire article places offsets within the wider context of how markets can find efficient ways to protect ecosystem services–the many natural processes that clean water, or air, shuttle nutrients about, or cool the climate. Two Nicholas Institute colleagues are cited in the piece.

Summer Days: “Exceptional drought” sears central and southern Texas, draining crops and straining herds. Just one of 12 boat ramps at Lake Travis, near Austin, can reach water, which is down 40 feet. Plus side: Young children can wade safely in nearby river.

Officials, scientists, and at least one reporter in Macon, Georgia, have read the White House’s June report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, which predicts a future of twice as many 90-degree days, with the hottest days 10 degrees hotter than usual. “When I read those numbers, I think about what that means to me and my family and my lifestyle, and that’s a very different picture of the South than what I grew up with,” a Georgia Tech scientist said.

The summer sun has desiccated San Joaquin Valley in California, and the U.S. need only look south to consider the effects of poorly managed water.

Dryness is crippling farming in India’s massive farming sector. Bhopal residents, all 1.8 million of them, are allowed 30 minutes of water every other day, in rationing undertaken in October. Downpours and flooding in Mumbai couldn’t help Mumbai, where officials cut water use by 30 percent given a drop in lake levels.

BBC reports from Char Atra, a beleaguered island in the Ganges, where “hardcore poor” residents cope as they can with natural hydrology. Villagers have rebuilt one woman’s home because last year, “there was so much water in her hut that she had to tie her children to their bed at night to stop them from rolling and drowning.”

Does he still count?: Love him or hate him, leading NASA climatologist James Hansen has become an embattled figure. ClimateWire turns in a thoughtful analysis of just how relevant the grandfather of global warming is or isn’t in his activist period, a skeptical complement to the lighter fare published by the New Yorker recently.

Hansen and Al Gore held a colloquium in Hell, which itself, apparently, has seen a 3.8 degree average temperature rise since 1955. “[O]ccupants of Hell who in 1955 were standing night and day in boiling pitch up to their knees report that, owing to the expansion of pitch at higher temperatures, they now must endure the torment all the way up to mid-thigh, or even higher, during Hell’s warmer seasons,” writes Ian Frazier, a satirist, the New Yorker’s tongue-in-cheek “Shouts and Murmurs column.”

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Note: This is a guest post by Bo Webb, a Vietnam veteran and former businessman in the Coal River Valley, West Virginia, who has been one of the lead organizers in stopping mountaintop removal strip-mining. Webb received notice last week that mountaintop removal operations in Clay's Branch, directly above his home, will resume, despite regulatory violations noted by federal officials.

Dear Al Gore:

Your long-time work on climate destabilization has triggered a sea change in how our nation tackles the impending crisis of global warming. I deeply admire and appreciate your commitment to an urgent issue that transcends borders, and affects the fate of our children's future.

As a father and grandfather raising a family in the great forests of the Appalachian coalfields, where my family has been rooted since the 1830s, I am writing you in a time of similar urgency.

This spring, I waited anxiously during the entire debate over the historic American Clean Energy and Security Act--or Waxman-Markey bill--to hear one critical truth: That we cannot discuss the end result of burning coal--the greatest contributor of carbon dioxide emissions--without discussing the beginning process of extraction, cleaning and transportation of coal.

That, in effect, the coalfields are ground zero in the climate change battle. If we are to be serious about addressing the "inconvenient truth," then banning mountaintop removal is a logical and required first step in capturing carbon and saving our forests.

You, more than any other person in our country, understand this. As a former Senator of Tennessee, a coal-producing state, and Vice President, you have always been aware of the true price of coal for our communities, our environment, our skies, and our children's future.

As you know, mountaintop removal operations have wiped out millions of acres of deciduous hardwood forests in our nation's great carbon sink of Appalachia. In addition, in West Virginia alone, 50 million tons of coal are exported annually to the dirty coal-fired plants in China and other countries.

Here in the thriving green forests of the Appalachian mountains, coalfield residents understand the reality of climate change better than anyone.

My family and live in southern West Virginia, beneath a mountaintop removal site. I am forced to breathe silica dust everyday because of the blasting that is taking place right above me. Fly rock has landed in my garden. A boulder the size of a car hood came off there and stopped just short of my garden. The sediment catch ditches are full, again. The middle of the hollow is sliding in. The beautiful creek where I used to catch fish bait and along its sides dig ramps, mushrooms, and gingsing, is buried with rock, dirt and knocked down trees. The spring that we used to love to get water from is buried. The well water is sunken and muddy.

My house and my nerves rattle each day around 4 o'clock when the out-of-state Massey Energy company sets off yet another series of blast. And every evening I am reminded that my family has been on this mountain since around 1830--long before Massey Energy invaded from Richmond, Virginia; it's as simple as that.

As a former veteran of the Vietnam War, I tell my children and grandchildren that we are American citizens, just like you. That we have a God-given and inalienable right to live in peace and breathe air that is not contaminated with silica dust, diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate, and to have potable water. That these are basic human rights.

My father, like others in my family, first started working in the coal mines at age 11. But it is the grave of my Uncle Clyde Williams, who died in the mine at Leevale here on Coal River Mountain at age 17, that also hovers in my mind as I walk these hills, gather herbs and berries, and hunt and fish with my grandchildren. When my father went into the mines, 130,000 union coal miners in West Virginia proudly toted their lunch pails and went to their jobs in the underground mines in our state. Today, only 20,000 West Virginia coal miners make up those ranks.

I want my children and grandchildren to have the right to dream and flourish as great contributors to our state in West Virginia. I don't want them to feel compelled to leave our state to look for employment or to realize their dreams. I want them to know that the rule of law protects them, their families and our mountains.

In 2007, at the Reel Film Festival in Nashville, Tennessee, you reminded the nation that mountaintop removal "is a crime, and ought to be treated as one."

As you know, the Obama administration recently announced a series of regulatory initiatives to "strengthen oversight and regulation, minimize adverse environmental consequences of mountaintop coal mining." While I have great admiration for President Barack Obama, energy advisor Carol Browner, and his new EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and CEQ chief Nancy Sutley, the reality is that their regulations can easily be avoided through loopholes.

While federal regulators were able to temporarily halt blasting above my home, I recently learned from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection that the green light has been given to renew the blasting closer to the coal seam, in an area that is even closer to our Clay's Branch homes.

Nearly four decades of mountaintop removal regulatory history has taught me one thing: the devastation from mountaintop removal can never be regulated, but must be abolished.

For this, we need your help now. We need your help today, as 3.5 million pounds of explosives are detonated in our coalfields every day.

As our nation celebrates the 4th of July this weekend, we must not forget the words of George Washington in the dark moments of the American Revolution. He declared: "Give me but a banner to plant upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will rally about it the brave men who will lift our bleeding country from the dust, and set her free."

Last week, NASA climatologist James Hansen and actress Daryl Hannah, among many other national leaders, came to witness to the climate crisis on Coal River Valley, and visit Marsh Fork Elementary School, Shumate Dam, and do a flyover over mountaintop removal sites, as a way of bringing this issue to the attention of the nation, and our national leaders.

Al Gore, now is the time for you to journey to Coal River and stand with us in this urgent time of need. We have simply run out of options.

Thank you for your time and consideration, and your crucial work for our nation.

Bo Webb, Naoma, West Virginia

Related Links:

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Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Climate talks timeline: From 350 to Kyoto to Copenhagen and beyond