planted city

The Washington Post’s award winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles hits the climate-energy-money-politics nail on the head once again. It reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary* depends upon his not understanding it.”

(* or election)

Related:

• ‘Oil Donors Fete Romney Days Before Unveiling Energy Plan’ (Businessweek)
• ‘Romney’s Energy Plan Doubles Down On Fossil Fuels’ (NPR)
• ‘Surprise! The GOP’s climate position tracks closely with oil industry donations’ (Grist)

(Source: WaPo via Go Comics)

From Bill Moyers:

The country’s best opportunity to mitigate climate change came three years ago, soon after President Barack Obama took office, with a friendly Democratic Senate and House of Representatives. The American Clean Energy and Security Act (otherwise known as Waxman-Markey, after its sponsors) passed the House – barely.

It later failed in the Senate, punted along until it was eventually abandoned in July 2010. Since then, our elected officials have largely ignored the heat-trapping gases causing enormous disruptions across the planet.

The 2009 bill saw lobbying efforts unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Environmental groups pushing for the legislation, including the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund, spent a record $24.6 million lobbying in 2009, employing nearly 500 lobbyists in their hefty effort.

But even that kind of cash was grossly outmatched by the oil and gas industry, which also had a record spending year in lobbying: $175 million and 807 lobbyists. No wonder the bill didn’t stand a chance.

No piece of legislation since Waxman-Markey has been anywhere near as comprehensive in lowering carbon emissions. And smaller efforts have been decimated by the oil and gas industry’s influence on Capitol Hill. Take a recent vote to end $24 billion in tax breaks for big oil companies. 43 Senate Republicans and four Democrats filibustered to block the bill. All told, the 51 senators in favor of ending subsidies had received a paltry $5.9 million in career contributions from oil and gas. The 47 who protected the subsidies got $23.5 million.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• ‘Unburnable Carbon – Are the world’s financial markets carrying a carbon bubble?’ (Carbon Tracker)
• ‘The great carbon bubble: Why the fossil fuel industry fights so hard’ (Energy Bulletin)

(Image sources: Will Blog for Food; Carbon Tracker Initiative)

Climate Cartoon: A Big (Oil) Barrier to a Clean Energy Future… 

(Source: Dayton Daily News via The Oil Drum)

Related:

• ‘The Great Carbon Bubble: Why the Fossil-Fuel Industry Fights So Hard’ (Grist)
• ‘Clean Energy Switch to Cost Fossil Industry $4 Trillion by 2020’ (Clean Technica)
• ‘Today, ALEC Hosts Legislators & Big Oil — Topic? Undermining Clean Energy’ (Clean Technica)
• Memo: Group Wants To Create Fake Grassroots Wind ‘Subversion’ Campaign That ‘Should Appear As A Groundswell’ (Climate Progress)

A big barrier to a sustainable future: ‘When scientists predict calamity, politicians plug their ears’ (LA Times)

Panel: Confronting the Climate Disinformation Campaign

from Sustainability Now Radio:

Here is the video for the free presentation given on April 30, 2012 on Penn State’s University Park Campus. Penn State professors Michael Mann, Donald Brown, Janet Swim and Rick Schuhmann, and graduate student Peter Buckland spoke Monday evening at “Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change,” a talk that focused on climate change denial. Mann is director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center and part of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Susannah Barsom, with the university’s Center for Sustainability, moderated the event, which included a question and answer session.

From The Guardian:

The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.

Desmogblog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an “insider” at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.

…

The papers indicate that discrediting established climate science remains a core mission of the organisation, which has received support from a network of wealthy individuals – including the Koch oil billionaires as well as corporations such as Microsoft and RJR Tobacco.

The documents confirm what environmental groups such as Greenpeace have long suspected: that Heartland itself is a major source of funding to a network of experts and bloggers who have been prominent in the campaign to discredit established science.

Heartland is anxious to retain its hold over mainstream media outlets, fretting in the documents about how Forbes magazine is publishing prominent climate scientists such as Peter Gleick. “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out,” Heartland documents warn.

Heartland operates on a range of issues besides the environment. But discrediting the science of climate change remains a key mission. The group spends $300,000 on salaries for a team of experts working to undermine the findings of the UN climate body, the IPCC.

Check out the rest of the article here. 

(Cartoon credit: Tom Toles via Go Comics)

#Canada #KyotoProtocol #climatechange #shame #tarsands #fossilfuels #GHGs #cleanenergy #choices #thisisnotmyCanada

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario, in his new article in the Globe & Mail, ‘Climate summit was a pathetic exercise in deceit’.

‘Happy Climate Denial Season!’

(Source: NYT via CP)

Cartoon: ‘How to Build a Pipeline’

(Source: Politico)