Green Living // Current

NYT suckered by ExxonMobil in puff piece titled “Green is for Sissies”

Another nail in the coffin of the liberal media meme.

The NYT has run a greenwashing press release from the oil giant masquerading as a major business news story. Here are some unchallenged quotes — yes the print headline really is “Green is for Sissies,” but as you’ll see, this isn’t some kind of post-modern Onion-esque irony (except maybe unintentionally):

1. “The business model is based on a disciplined and rigorous approach to dealing with scientific data and facts,” [CEO Tillerson] says.
2. “For the foreseeable future — and in my horizon that is to the middle of the century — the world will continue to rely dominantly on hydrocarbons to fuel its economy,” Mr. Tillerson says.
3. “It’s the world’s greatest company, period,” says Arjun N. Murti, a Goldman Sachs oil analyst…. “It is also the most misunderstood company in the world. For many people, the image of Exxon is the Exxon Valdez…. Exxon has persevered over the past 100 years with the best culture and management team any company could have.”

Poor misunderstood oil giant … poor, misunderstood, disinformation-peddling, planet-destroying ExxonMobil. I need to pause for a moment to wipe the tear from my eye….

ExxonMobil is certainly misunderstood by the NYT! A “rigorous approach to dealing with scientific data and facts“? Again, you’ve got to believe me — this really isn’t a story in The Onion. No single company has been more anti-scientific or anti-factual for the last 20 years. No company has done more to fund anti-science deniers and delayers — thereby undermining any effort to take action on the greatest preventable threat to humanity’s health and well-being.

Had the reporter spent two second on the web he would have found ExxonSecrets, which details the millions of dollars that the company has shoveled to fund the disinformation campaigns of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, all of which continue to advance unfactual anti-scientific attacks as I have detailed recently (see posts on Heritage and CEI and AEI). Chris Mooney wrote an excellent piece on ExxonMobil’s two-decade anti-scientific campaign. A 2007 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report looked at ExxonMobil’s tobacco industry-like tactics in pushing global warming denial (see “Today We Have a Planet That’s Smoking!”).

continuedAnother nail in the coffin of the liberal media meme. The NYT has run a greenwashing press release from the oil giant... more

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1 day ago

No new coal plants without “Best Available Control Technology” for CO2

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Dirty air in California kills more than crashes

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5 days ago

BP scraps British renewables plan to focus on US

BP has dropped all plans to build wind farms and other renewable schemes in Britain and is instead concentrating the bulk of its $8bn (£5bn) renewables spending programme on the US, where government incentives for clean energy projects can provide a convenient tax shelter for oil and gas revenues.

The decision is a major blow to the prime minister, Gordon Brown, who has promised to sweep away all impediments to ensure Britain is at the forefront of the green energy revolution. BP and Shell - which has also pulled out of renewables in Britain - are heavily influential among investors.

BP has advertised its green credentials widely in the UK and has a representative on the ruling board of the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA). But it said difficulty in getting planning permission and lower economies of scale made the UK wind sector far less attractive than that of the US.

“The best place to get a strong rate of return for wind is the US,” said a BP spokesman, who confirmed the group had shelved ideas of building an onshore wind farm at the Isle of Grain, in Kent, and would not bid for any offshore licences.

BP has enormous financial firepower as a result of recent very high crude oil prices. Its move away from wind power in Britain follows a decision by Shell to sell off its stake in the London Array project off Kent, potentially the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

Shell gave the same reasons as BP for that move, saying the economics of UK wind were poor compared to those onshore across the Atlantic, where incoming president Barack Obama has promised to spend $150bn over 10 years to kick start a renewable energy revolution .

BP said about $1.5bn would be spent next year on US wind projects and the company expected to spend the $8bn up to the year 2015.

BP is still proceeding with some limited solar, biofuels and other schemes, but the vast majority of its time and energy is now being concentrated on wind. By the end of 2008, BP expects to have one gigawatt of US wind power installed and plans to have trebled this by 2010.

The BWEA shrugged off BP’s decision. “The offshore wind market is evolving and getting stronger. Different investors will come and go at different stages of the development cycle. But whoever the players are, we know that the offshore industry will be generating massive amounts of electricity for the UK market in the next few years,” said a spokesman.

Britain is not the only country to miss out on BP’s largesse. The company said yesterday it was also pulling out of China, India and Turkey, where it had also been looking at projects.

BP had formed a joint venture with Beijing Tianrun New Energy Investment Company, a subsidiary of Goldwind, China’s largest turbine maker. The two companies had signed a deal in January under which they planned 148.4MW of wind capacity in Inner Mongolia, China’s main wind power region. BP had also started building two wind farms in India and was considering schemes in Turkey. It is now expecting to sell off the Indian facilities and halt work in Turkey.

Green campaigners have been highly sceptical about BP’s plans to go “beyond petroleum” and feared that the company’s new chief executive, Tony Hayward, would drop this commitment, started under his predecessor, John Browne.BP has dropped all plans to build wind farms and other renewable schemes in Britain and is instead concentrating the bulk of its... more

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5 days ago

Why is our energy policy so lame? Ask the three GOP stooges.

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IEA report explains what must be done to avoid 6°C warming

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7 days ago

Green investment does create jobs

Robert Pollin has issued a direct rebuttal, “Green Investments and Jobs,” to the Heritage Foundation’s lame “debunking” of Green Recovery, a study Pollin co-authored for the the Center for American Progress. My line-by-line response to the disanalysis by Heritage’s Donald Kreutzer is here.

Pollin, Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute at U. Mass-Amherst, concludes:

Public investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy can overturn the long-held conventional wisdom reflected in Kreutzer’s critique, which claims we can have a green economy or a growing economy, but not both. In fact, green public investments to fight global warming are both a powerful engine of job creation and a necessary instrument for achieving environmental sustainability.

Pollin has included a summary of his basic arguments that is well worth reading:

First, green investments–including energy efficiency measures such as building retrofits, public transportation, freight rail, and “smart grid” electrical transmission systems; and renewable sources such as wind, solar, and biomass energy–are all potent sources of net job creation relative to spending on traditional fossil fuels, including oil, coal, and natural gas. By “net job creation,” I mean that green investments will create more jobs for a given amount of spending than expenditures within the oil, natural gas, or coal industries. For instance, spending $1 million on green investments will create about 17 jobs within the U.S. economy, while spending the same $1 million within the oil industry will create about 4.5 jobs.

Second, the main reasons green investments are a source of net job creation relative to spending within the traditional fossil fuel industries actually has nothing to do with whether the investments are “green.” Rather, there are two primary factors at play. The first factor is higher “labor intensity” of spending–that is, more money is being spent on hiring people and less on machines, supplies, and consuming energy. This becomes obvious if we imagine hiring construction workers to retrofit buildings or install solar panels, or bus drivers to expand public transportation offerings, as opposed to drilling for oil off the coasts of Florida, California, and Alaska. The second factor is the “domestic content” of spending–how much money is staying within the U.S. economy as opposed to buying imports or spending abroad. When we retrofit public buildings and private homes to raise their energy efficiency, or improve our public transportation systems, virtually every dollar is spent within the U.S. economy. By contrast, only 80 cents of every dollar spent within the oil industry remains within the United States.

Third, “Green Recovery”advances a short-term economic stimulus proposal as a tool for fighting the severe current recession. The first purpose of any short-run stimulus program–regardless of whether it is centered around green investments, household consumption, or expanding unemployment insurance benefits–is to inject more spending into the economy as quickly as possible. We pay for such short-run measures primarily through allowing the federal deficit to rise. As such, in “Green Recovery,” we do not propose any tax increases whatsoever in the short term. A $1 million increase in spending on green investments will therefore produce 17 new jobs, with no offsets in spending cuts or job losses elsewhere in the economy.

continued and worth readingRobert Pollin has issued a direct rebuttal, “Green Investments and Jobs,” to the Heritage Foundation’s lame... more

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10 days ago

Chinese Premier: Rich nations should ditch ‘unsustainable’ lifestyles

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15 days ago

Drought land “will be abandoned”

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, warned

Unchecked climate change will mean that some parts of the world will simply not have enough water to sustain settlements both small and large, because agriculture becomes untenable and industries relying on water can no longer compete or function effectively. This will trigger structural changes in economies right through to the displacement of people as environmental refugees.

While deniers continue trying to confuse the issue by arguing that we don’t know that our current climate is the ideal one, the drought and sea level rise issue render that argument tragically moot.

Humanity has developed around the climate of the last 10,000 years, a climate that has been remarkably stable (see “Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization” — and yes I will restart my “must-have PowerPoints” series after the election).

Any significantly different climate — let alone the devastating 5+°C climate we are risking on our current path — means hundreds of millions of environmental refugees. Unfortunately, with more than 6 billion people on the planet and the livable parts of the world poised to shrink by a third this century, the likelihood of conflict is enormous.

One odd thing about Steiner’s comments:

Steiner said it was not possible to identify specific places at risk, but said vulnerable areas were those which were already considered to be ‘water scarce’ because of dry weather and a lack of infrastructure to store and transport water

Actually it is quite possible to identify specific places at risk. The most threatened places are

1. Regions that get a significant fraction of their water from inland glaciers
2. The subtropics.

Indeed, climate change theory is quite specific that the subtropical deserts will expand from unchecked global warming. And that will be the subject of a (very) forthcoming “must have PowerPoint.”Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, warned Unchecked climate change will mean that some... more

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15 days ago

Palin shocker, Part 1: McCain won’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions

It’s time to stop trying to guess whether the latest McCain campaign gaffe revision on global warming means the Arizonan has walked away from his previous support for mandatory government control of greenhouse gases. He has.

That should have been clear from McCain’s repeated rejection of the word “mandatory” to describe his program, his choice of a global warming denier for vice president, and his failure to even mention global warming during his acceptance speech. Most recently, his chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said on Sunday that McCain does not agree with the Supreme Court decision that labels carbon dioxide a pollutant and requiring EPA to regulate it. He labels Obama’s decision to obey the Supreme Court decision “a draconian regulatory approach.”

Now the McCain campaign has decided to eliminate the ambiguity entirely in the desperate and erratic final days of his campaign. In her big greenwashing energy speech at an Ohio solar energy company, Palin was as blunt as possible in her prepared (and delivered) remarks:

And we will control greenhouse gas emissions by giving American businesses new incentives and new rewards to seek, instead of just giving them new taxes to pay and new orders that they must follow — “so says government”.

The final three words were ones she added, but the prepared text alone leaves no room for doubt. A McCain-Palin administration will not be issuing new orders that businesses must follow to control greenhouse gas emissions. It will use a voluntary or incentive-based approach, one that has never worked in any country to restrain emissions growth.

McCain and his campaign have made a concerted effort to reassure conservatives he’s not going to take strong action on climate, while hoping that moderates would be fooled just like some Bush voters were in 2000 ignore all this talk, which itself is a core campaign strategy of doubletalk (see “Memo to media: McCain doubletalks to woo conservatives and independents at the same time“).

The Palin speech was the last piece of the puzzle. For one last time, let’s consider the increasingly sorry history of the McCain campaign on climate and clean energy:

* During his career, McCain voted with Senator Inhofe (R-OK) and against clean energy a staggering 42 out of 44 times in the past two decades (see “The greenwasher from Arizona has a record as dirty as the denier from Oklahoma“).
* In December, anti-wind McCain skipped a vote to extend tax credits for renewable energy, though advisers say he would have voted against it.
* In January, McCain first boarded his Double-Talk Express on Global Warming when he began to walk away from calling his cap-and-trade “mandatory” — “voluntary” climate action is of course the core of the Luntz/Bush do-nothing but sound-like-you-care strategy.
* In February, he repeated his failure to show up for a vote to extend tax credit for renewable energy (the only Senator to do so).
* In February, McCain repeated that “It’s not quote mandatory caps.”
* In March, his senior economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said McCain “might take [new CAFE standards] off the books.”
* April, McCain revealed cynicism, hypocrisy with call for summer gas-tax holiday, energy budget freeze. As I noted at the time, “the greatest threat to the success of a cap and trade system is that somebody might artificially limit the carbon price … because some weak-kneed President (or Congress) walks away from that price the first time the economy suffers a downturn. McCain would appear to be that weak-kneed Presidential hopeful.”
* In mid-May, McCain announced the details of his climate plan, which stunningly allowed “unlimited offests” (i.e. phony tons) in place of actual domestic emissions reductions, which is the same as “Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
* In late May, he “announced he won’t even bother showing up to vote on his friend Joe Lieberman’s climate bill.”

continuedIt’s time to stop trying to guess whether the latest McCain campaign gaffe revision on global warming means the Arizonan has... more