Big Oil Mocks Climate Action With Help From Big Media

So I go to read a Washington Post story online, “Climate change could burn a hole in the government’s finances, GAO says.” And there is this banner ad mocking humanity’s primary hope of avoiding climate catastrophe:

“Energy Tomorrow is brought to you by the American Petroleum Institute (API),” in case you were wondering.

We all need to “imagine life without fossil fuels,” since that is where we will are going to end up this century one way or another:

Either we will make the decision by choice fast enough to stabilize near  2°C (3.6°F) warming to avoid the very worst impacts — and that means the rich countries in particular will be essentially off fossil fuels by mid-century (see “Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy.”Or we will be forced off fossil fuels soon after that by the ever-worsening reality of climate change — when we realize that we are headed toward 10+°F warming and a planet with a carrying capacity far below 9 billion (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).

[Carbon capture and storage might enable the continued use of some fossil fuels until they run out, though it probably won't be a decisive player in the solution and in any case wouldn't save Big Oil.]

As the WashPost article explains:

As climate change leads to more frequent and destructive natural disasters and threatens crop yields, bridges and other infrastructure, the federal government faces big financial risks that it is poorly positioned to address, auditors said Thursday.

Try imagining life with more frequent and destructive natural disasters and threatened crop yields. It isn’t hard to do (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming.”

Now it appears the API ad is just appearing in rotation, but I did come across it again for another climate article:

The story on Tom Steyer (who is also on the CAP board) explains:

Steyer is convinced that global greenhouse gas emissions will have to begin to fall within the next few years or the world will suffer catastrophic consequences. But when he talks to many in his circle — including business leaders and prominent politicians — he finds them oblivious to what he sees as a monumental threat.

So yes this is a story about a billionaire investor who can imagine life without fossil fuels — and the business leaders who are oblivious to climate reality.

In short, the Washington Post is explaining that influential people are oblivious to a threat that the Washington Post runs ads regularly mocking.  You can’t make this stuff up (unless you are a fossil-fuel-funded denier, of course).

jQuery(document).ready(function(){jQuery('#comment_submit').click(function(){if(jQuery('#comment_check:checked').length

View the original article here

Chinese Companies Projected To Make Solar Panels for 42 Cents Per Watt In 2015

Future cost drops from Chinese crystalline silicon solar producers will not be as steep as recent years, but they will still be significant.

Stephen Lacey, via GreenTechMedia

The cost of producing a conventional crystalline silicon (c-si) solar panel continues to drop. Between 2009 and 2012, leading “best-in-class” Chinese c-Si solar manufacturers reduced module costs by more than 50 percent. And in the next three years, those players — companies like Jinko, Yingli, Trina and Renesola — are on a path to lower costs by another 30 percent.

Check out [the above] chart outlining projected costs, which comes from GTM Research’s Global Intelligence PV Tracker.

“Clearly, the magnitude of cost reductions will be less than in previous years. But we still do see potential for significant cost reductions. Going from 53 cents to 42 cents is noteworthy,” says Shayle Kann, vice president of research at GTM Research.

With plenty of innovation still occurring in crystalline silicon PV manufacturing — including new sawing techniques, thinner wafers, conductive adhesives, and frameless modules — companies are able to squeeze more pennies off the cost of each panel. However, as the chart above shows, innovating “outside the module” to reduce the installed cost of solar will be increasingly important as companies find it harder to realize cost reductions in manufacturing.

Related Post:

jQuery(document).ready(function(){jQuery('#comment_submit').click(function(){if(jQuery('#comment_check:checked').length

View the original article here

The Other Aaron’s Law: How FASTR Could Help Americans Access The Research They Paid For

Just over a month after internet folk hero and activist Aaron Swartz ended his own life, a bipartisan group of law-makers have introduced legislation that would make progress on a cause near and dear to his heart: Open access to publicly funded research. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), introduced this week by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Mike Doyle (D-PA), and Kevin Yoder (R-KS) in the House and Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) in the Senate, “require[s] federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal,” building on the success of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) 2008 public access policy.

Swartz faced a maximum sentence of decades in prison at the time of his death for charges related to his alleged downloading of nearly 5 million documents from the academic database JSTOR, in what many believe was an attempt to release the data. While efforts to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the law Swartz was being prosecuted under, using the moniker “Aaron’s Law” emerged quickly, the introduction of FASTR is the first legislative effort since his death to address the open access movement — the effort to provide unrestricted access to peer-reviewed research online.

Here’s how academic publishing works: Research is largely done by members of university communities (frequently funded by the public) who submit research to journals for publication (sometimes paying for the privilege). Then journals send the research back out to other academics to be edited blind (usually pro-bono), and the journal’s (often for profit) publishers sell back access to the published research to university libraries.

While the largest of the for-profit academic publishers, Elsevier, made $1.1 billion in profits in 2011 with a profit margin of around 35 percent, libraries have struggled to afford rising subscription costs that drove up expenditures by a staggering 273 percent between 1986 and 2004. The Harvard Faculty Council released a statement on the crisis last year noting that the prices for online content from two major providers increased by around 145 percent over the last six years alone, saying “[m]any large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive.”

FASTR is not an outright solution to this broken system, but it is a substantive step in the right direction that would provide open access because academic federal funding is the primary source of basic research support in the U.S. (the majority of which is carried out by academic institutions). And there are signs that the open access movement is making dents in the the academic publishing industry’s armor, like JSTOR’s Register & Read program. Neither that limited concession or FASTR will fully bring about the world of free information Swartz envisioned, but taken together they are a sign that world is slowly moving in the right direction.

View the original article here

Weekly Address: Following the President’s Plan for a Strong Middle Class

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

WASHINGTON, DC— In this week’s address, President Obama called for quick action on the proposals he made during the State of the Union to grow our economy and create jobs, including making America a magnet for manufacturing, strengthening our education system through high-quality preschool for every child, and raising the minimum wage.  Congress must also act now to avert the sequester, which would be a harmful and self-inflicted wound on our economy, by reducing our deficit in a balanced way that makes investments in areas that help us grow and cuts what we don’t need. 

The audio of the address and video of the address will be available online at www.whitehouse.gov at 6:00 a.m. ET, Saturday, February 16, 2013.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
The White House
February 16, 2013

Hi, everybody.  This week, I’ve been traveling across the country – from North Carolina to Georgia to here at Hyde Park Academy in my hometown of Chicago – talking with folks about the important task I laid out in my State of the Union Address: reigniting the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.

Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions:  How do we bring good jobs to America?  How do we equip people with the skills those jobs require?  And how do we make sure your hard work leads to a decent living?

I believe all that starts by making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing.  After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three.  What we need to do now is simple.  We need to accelerate that trend.  We need to launch manufacturing hubs across the country that will transform hard-hit regions into global centers of high-tech jobs and manufacturing.  We need to make our tax code more competitive, ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, and rewarding companies that create jobs here at home.  And we need to invest in the research and technology that will allow us to harness more of our own energy and put more people back to work repairing our crumbling roads and bridges. 

These steps will help our businesses expand and create new jobs.  But we also need to provide every American with the skills and training they need to fill those jobs.  Let’s start in the earliest years by offering high-quality preschool to every child in America, because we know kids in these programs do better throughout their lives.  Let’s redesign our high schools so that our students graduate with skills that employers are looking for right now.  And because taxpayers can’t continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education, I’ve called on Congress to take affordability and value into account when determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid. 

So those are steps we can take today to help bring good jobs to America and equip our people with the skills those jobs require.  And that brings us to the third question – how do we make sure hard work leads to a decent living?

No one in America should work full-time and raise their children in poverty.  So let’s raise the minimum wage so that it’s a wage you can live on.  And it’s time to harness the talents and ingenuity of hardworking immigrants by finally passing comprehensive immigration reform – securing our borders, establishing a responsible path to earned citizenship, and attracting the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs. 

These steps will help grow our economy and rebuild a rising, thriving middle class.  And we can do it while shrinking our deficits.  We don’t have to choose between the two – we just have to make smart choices. 

Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion – which puts us more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.  Now we need to finish the job. 

But I disagree with Republicans who think we should do that by making even bigger cuts to things like education and job training; Medicare and Social Security benefits.  That would force our senior citizens and working families to bear the burden of deficit reduction while the wealthiest are asked to do nothing more.  That won’t work.  We can’t just cut our way to prosperity. 

Instead, I’ve proposed a balanced approach; one that makes responsible reforms to bring down the cost of health care and saves hundreds of billions of dollars by getting rid of tax loopholes and deductions for the well-off and well-connected.  And we should finally pursue bipartisan, comprehensive tax reform that encourages job creation and helps bring down the deficit.

So we know what we need to do.  All the steps I’ve mentioned are commonsense.  And, together, they will help us grow our economy and strengthen our middle class. 

In the coming weeks and months, our work won’t be easy, and we won’t agree on everything.  But America only moves forward when we do so together – when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.  That’s the American story.  And that is how we will write the next great chapter – together.

Thanks and have a great weekend.

###

February 16, 2013 10:19 AM EST

In Chicago, President Obama laid out a plan to rebuild ladders of opportunity for every American who is willing to work hard and climb them

In this week’s address, President Obama calls for quick action on the proposals he made during the State of the Union to grow our economy and create jobs, including making America a magnet for manufacturing, strengthening our education system through high-quality preschool for every child, and raising the minimum wage.

The two leaders discussed the world economy and President Obama's plan to pursue a U.S.-European Union free trade agreement, which was mentioned in his State of the Union address earlier this week.

view all related blog posts

View the original article here

Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul Join Bipartisan Bill To Legalize Hemp

While most Republican members of Congress have been lukewarm at best to the prospect of legalizing marijuana, senators introduced a bipartisan measure this week to legalize industrial hemp. Riding on the passage of recent Kentucky Senate bills to ease hemp growing, the state’s Republican senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, joined Oregon Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden in introducing a bill to legalize production of the strain of cannabis used in the production of goods.

Hemp is a plant in the cannabis family with significantly lower levels of the psychoactive component, THC, than most varieties that are smoked or consumed. It is used to make textiles, paper, paints, clothing, plastics, cosmetics, foodstuffs, insulation, animal feed and other products, according to NORML. Hemp is nonetheless lumped in with all other cannabis products, which are classified as Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive of the five schedules designated for those substances considered dangerous with no currently accepted medical value.

The bill, which would would remove hemp from the controlled substances list and define it as a non-drug so long as it contains less than 0.3 percent THC, is a small demonstration of fading hysteria over anything “cannabis” that emerged in the era of “Reefer Madness.” It also raises questions, however, about federal support for legalizing at least those strains of medical cannabis that have very low levels of THC, as well as those chemical compounds extracted from marijuana that are low in THC.

View the original article here

McCain Goes After NBC Host For Questioning GOP’s Benghazi Conspiracy Theories

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) levied a series of wild accuastions Sunday morning when discussing the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi last September, accusing the Obama Administration of perpetrating a “massive coverup” and NBC’s David Gregory of not caring about the death of American diplomats.

McCain’s outburst came after Gregory asked McCain what, exactly, the Administration was covering up. Taking umbrage at Gregory’s skepticism, the Arizona senator grew confrontational:

MCCAIN: We have had a massive coverup on the part of the administration.

GREGORY: I’m asking you, a coverup of what?

MCCAIN: I’m asking YOU, do you care whether four Americans died? The reasons for that? And shouldn’t people be held accountable for the fact that four americans died — including a very dear man?

GREGORY: You said there is a coverup. A coverup of what?

MCCAIN: Of the information concerning the deaths of four brave Americans.

Watch it:

As Gregory suggests, it’s not exactly clear what McCain thinks is being covered up. Both the lack of immediate military response to the attack on the consulate and the matter of UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s “talking points” on the attack were clearly explained several months ago. Nevertheless, McCain’s colleague Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has threatened to put a hold on the confirmation of the President’s nominees for both Secretary of Defense and CIA Director until he gets “the truth” on Benghazi.

View the original article here

Booker: ‘Clearly’ interested in Senate bid, but focus now on helping win state races

Newark Mayor Cory Booker said Sunday that he would focus his attention on helping his state elect a Democratic governor before addressing a possible 2014 Senate bid.

Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if he would seek the 2014 seat to be vacated by retiring Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Booker said “clearly it’s a job that I’m interested in.”

“I’ll spend the coming months working on and exploring that, but right now we have one election in New Jersey and that’s our state-wide gubernatorial and legislative elections. As a Democrat in New Jersey, that’s where my focus is,” he added. “Next year’s election for Senate will take care of itself.”

Booker’s path to the Senate opened up this week after Lautenberg announced Thursday that he would retire from the upper chamber. 

"While I may not be seeking reelection, there is plenty of work to do before the end of this term and I'm going to keep fighting as hard as ever for the people of New Jersey in the U.S. Senate,” said the 89-year old senator.

Booker had indicated earlier this year that he was exploring a run for Lautenberg’s seat in 2014, but had not said whether he would be willing to launch a primary challenge against the long-serving fellow Democrat.

His decision, though, had sparked criticism from other Democrats in the state, who had hoped Booker would instead challenge incumbent GOP Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.) this year.

Lautenberg’s decision will likely clear a path for other possible contenders, including Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), whom many sources say is considering a bid. 

 “I hope to be one of those people that the residents of New Jersey will consider giving me that honor to fight for them on a federal level,” said Booker on Sunday.

But he added: “We in New jersey take one election at a time. 2014 is a long way off.”

View Comments

View the original article here

Republicans Attack Obama For Drafting Immigration Reform Plan That Resembles Bipartisan Principles

On Sunday, Republicans lashed out at a leaked draft of the White House’s plan to reform the immigration system.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said any proposal from the president that lacked Republican input would be “dead on arrival” and is “hurting the effort” at reform. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) claimed that Obama was looking for a “partisan advantage” on the issue and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) announced that the draft demonstrated that “the president doesn’t want immigration reform.”

But as White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough made clear during appearances on several Sunday talk shows, Obama is committed to immigration reform but is developing a back-up plan, to be used only in the event that talks “break down.” Short of negotiation failure, the White House stands firmly behind bipartisan congressional negotiations:

BOB SCHIEFFER: So is this a new plan the president is circulating?

MCDONOUGH: I think the report said … it has been circulating inside the administration. And I think the president laid out in Las Vegas last week we will be prepared with our own plans if the talks between Republicans and Democrats on the Hill break down. There is no evidence they have broken down. We continue to support that. We are involved in those efforts by providing technical assistance and providing them ideas and i hope Republicans and Democrats up there don’t get involved in a kind of typical Washington back-and-forth sideshow here and rather roll up their sleeves and get to work on writing a comprehensive immigration bill.

McDonough added on Meet the Press that the White House is doing what it always said it would do in “aggressively supporting” Hill negotiations, while developing its own back-up proposal that includes the core elements of comprehensive immigration reform: continued strengthening of the borders, crackdowns on businesses that game the system, a path to citizenship, and reasonable opportunities for legal immigration.

USA Today reports that Obama’s draft mirrors the 2007 bipartisan immigration proposal backed by President George W. Bush and Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). But as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) admitted during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Republicans are unlikely to support any plan with Obama’s name on it — even if it incorporates many of their own proposals.

View the original article here

President Obama plays golf with Tiger Woods

President Obama is golfing in Florida Sunday with Tiger Woods. 

Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the president and Woods, the winner of 14 major golf championships, were joined on the course by United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Houston Astros owner Jim Crane, according to a White House pool report.

The news was first reported by Tim Rosaforte, a writer for Golf World.

"The President is arriving at The Floridian range. Awaiting is Tiger Woods and club owner Jim Crane. Historic day in golf. Their first round," Rosaforte said on Twitter.

The president is in Florida until Monday to golf with friends. First lady Michelle Obama and their daughters are “out West” on a ski trip.

 On Saturday, Obama practiced with Woods's former coach Butch Harmon at the club in Palm City. 

The round is taking place under a Florida cold snap with temperatures not expected to break 60 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, according to a pool report. 

Woods, one of the most successful golfers of all time, has been named the PGA Player of the Year a record ten times. In 2009 and 2010 his career suffered after revelations about extramarital affairs.

This post was updated at 2:05 p.m.

View Comments

View the original article here