Greenpeace

Drill here, Drill Now. That’s the name of Newt Gingrich’s new petition to open oil drilling off of America’s coastlines.

Build 45 new nuclear plants by 2030 – that’s McCain’s plan to combat global warming.

They sound like simple solutions, right? In fact, they’re deceptively simple. And they’re not solutions at all.

No offshore drilling

What does drilling off America’s coastlines really mean? Will it help skyrocketing gas prices? The economy? You?

No.

According to predictions made by The U.S. Energy Information Administration last year: “Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017” if the moratorium on offshore drilling were lifted. The agency also estimated that U.S. oil production would increase by a mere 7 percent - about 200,000 barrels a day - by 2030, which would have an "insignificant" impact on oil prices.

So what will drilling do? It will:

• Expose whales and dolphins to potentially lethal seismic testing
• Open the possibility of oil spills on our beaches
• Line the pocketbooks of big oil companies, who are already sitting on top of 68 million acres of leased land that they aren’t drilling on at all, despite their “concern” about high oil prices

No more nuclear plants

McCain says that building 45 new nuclear plants by 2030 is a course of action “as difficult as it is necessary.” Well, he is right in one regard: It will be difficult. It takes billions of dollars and at least 10 years to bring a new nuclear reactor online.

But necessary? Hardly.

In fact, we don’t have 10 years to wait for clean energy to come online. Not that nuclear is all that clean: you still have to mine the uranium used in the reactors – and mining is a dirty, polluting process – and you have to store the nuclear waste somewhere – waste that can be around for centuries, sitting in a storage facility somewhere, susceptible to leaks. Meanwhile, we have solar and wind technologies, and several other renewable technologies, that are ready to be implemented on a large scale right now.

Which brings me to my next point: nuclear reactors cost so much, the utilities aren’t likely to build new plants unless they are heavily subsidized by the federal government. That’s billions upon billions of dollars that we could and should be investing in clean, renewable technologies – the real solutions to global warming and the true path to America’s energy independence.

So what am I asking of YOU? Well that’s actually plain old simple. Newt Gingrich has convinced more than a million people to sign his petition in support of offshore drilling. So I’m asking you to digg here, digg now. Then send a letter to McCain letting him know you're AGAINST false solutions. And if you really want to stop these false solutions from leading us astray, don’t stop there. Tell your friends about this action, send them this blog, ask them to get involved too.

Tell McCain, tell Gingrich, tell Congress: Don’t you dare drill here, don’t you dare drill here ever. And no new nukes! We demand real solutions to global warming!

While we wait for Cape Wind to clear all of the legal hurdles still preventing it from becoming a reality, the title of “America’s First Offshore Wind Farm” might just be claimed by another project:

(CNN) -- A contract to build what is being called the nation's first offshore field of wind turbines was announced Monday by a Delaware utility and a firm that will build the generators off the Atlantic coast.

Officials from Delmarva Power and Bluewater Wind announced details of their agreement in Newark, Delaware. Bluewater spokesman Jim Lanard said the power company will get about 16 percent of its electricity from a field of 150 wind turbines, anchored in the seafloor about a dozen miles off Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.…

The offshore site is expected to be operational within four years, but the timing depends on how quickly regulatory agencies can review and approve the construction project.

Using electricity generated by the wind, " Delmarva Power will be able to light about 50,000 homes a year, every year" for the duration of the 25-year contract, Lanard said, with first power expected by 2012.

To me, the most important takeaway from the article is that an offshore wind project that has just been announced could be producing energy and helping stabilize the market as soon as 2012, assuming there are no significant legal challenges to the plan. Compare that with offshore drilling, which experts tell us will not produce any oil or gas for sale on the market until 2017. Just another reason why clean, renewable energy sources are by far the better investment.

So I’ve been wondering lately if maybe we should start referring to man-made climate change as something other than “global warming.” While a rise in average global temperatures is the main effect of the unprecedented amount of greenhouse gases we are dumping into our atmosphere, and higher global temperatures are in turn the root cause of many of the drastic impacts we will experience, “global warming” as a premise is too easily attacked in the minds of the average public citizen.

For instance, as weather patterns change, some regions experienced higher than average snowfall last winter. In the minds of the general public – people who aren’t scientists and don’t follow global warming science and news closely – this can automatically debunk “global warming.” Yet, according to James Hansen (via ClimateProgress.org), there are many reasons why we might experience short-term cooling, including a volcanic eruption or ocean dynamics like the Southern Oscillation (more commonly known as the El Niño - La Niña cycle).

I’m not proposing that the environmental movement should cater our entire message to people who are willing to discount something as massively urgent as global warming just because they got a few extra inches in their yard. What I am saying is that there is perhaps an even more powerful and unassailable framework we could be employing, something everyone can recognize and identify with.

I have a friend who works during winters as a snowboarding instructor, and she says that in the snow sports industry it is referred to as “global weirding” when the weather acts all crazy. And the weather has certainly been acting crazy lately:

We’ve all come to know the words “extreme weather.” Wildfires rage across California, and a state of emergency is declared in several counties. Torrential rain in the Midwest and historic levels of flooding from Iowa to Missouri. At least six people are killed by tornadoes in Iowa and Kansas. A heat wave on the East coast has claimed the lives of a number of people. In China, people have barely had time to recover from the recent earthquake. Flooding and rain have killed over sixty and left over a million people homeless. Meanwhile, record drought in many parts of the United States and Australia continue.

The words “extreme weather” are rarely associated in the mainstream media with another two words: “global warming.” But scientists argue these extreme weather events are consistent with changes they have long predicted would accompany global warming. (Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!)

I kinda like the term Global Weirding because it points up the fact that the global ecosystem has been thrown out of whack. But it doesn’t quite convey the severity of the situation. Anyone got any good suggestions?

Bush has been pushing for offshore drilling the whole time he’s been in office, but what else can you expect? He's an oilman. He's just using the power of his office to make his friends even more disgustingly wealthy. Now John McCain wants to help Bush's buddies get rich too! That's right, he's pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics and calling for opening up all of America's coastlines to oil drilling.

Lots of others are jumping on the bandwagon, as well – including Florida governor (and potential McCain running mate) Charlie Crist and Newt Gingrich, who has started a petition in support of the proposal that claims to have 750,000 signatures.

All of these politicians are trying to exploit the insecurity people feel due to $4+ gas prices to score political points and make their friends in the oil business even richer. And yet opening up our nation’s coastline to drilling is an absolutely ludicrous proposal.

Not only will it pollute the shoreline and harm marine life, but it won’t really do a thing to lower today’s hyper-inflated energy costs – the gas from those oilfields wouldn’t even be on the market until 2017 at the earliest. And there’s not enough oil reserves off our coasts to even make a significant impact on our energy security in the long run. It’s estimated that only about 3% of the world’s oil reserves lie on or off the coast of America – yet we consume 24% of the world’s oil.

The only real, long-term solution to our energy problems is to move toward renewable energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, etc.

Thankfully, the coastal states that will be most affected are not staying quiet about this proposal. For instance, Florida Today has a really excellent piece up about how “utterly reckless” it would be to open Florida’s coastline to drilling. It’s well worth the read.

And Greenpeace has launched its own online action to counteract the call for offshore drilling. Hit it up and help us tell McCain that this is not the proposal he should be running on.

 

The current administration has been woefully inadequate in a number of ways, and the environment – especially with regards to addressing global warming – is definitely one of its chief inadequacies. Many environmental organizations are already looking to the next administration for leadership on global warming, and it appears no matter who gets elected, they will be stronger on the environment than Bush & Co.

McCain, rightly, felt it was important to distance himself from the President on the environment, and has recently begun airing an ad in which a narrator declares: “John McCain stood up to the President and sounded the alarm on global warming five years ago. Today, he has a realistic plan that will curb greenhouse gas emissions” (via CNN).

Well, the timing of this ad could not be more perfect: “The ad is being released the same day McCain is set to give a speech on energy policy in Houston. During the address, McCain will propose lifting the federal moratorium on offshore drilling for oil” (also via CNN). And yes, he does support drilling for oil in ANWR. Way to stand up against Bush there, buddy.

McCain has yet to release an energy policy, so it’s troubling at best that when he finally addresses the topic, he’s coming out in favor of drilling for oil all over our coastline rather than promoting the renewable energy technologies that will propel us towards a sustainable future. In fact, this has become a troubling pattern of McCain’s campaign: spinning away in the media to pander to voters, while pursuing a dubious agenda in reality.

That’s why I dig the “Searching for McCain” action created by Chris Bowers over at Open Left. Here’s how he describes it: “The utilization of simultaneous, widespread embedded hyperlinks in order to connect voters looking for information on John McCain to nine revealing, important news articles on John McCain.” Similar to Bowers’ “Googlebomb the Elections” campaign back in the ’06 election cycle, this is an effort to boost the Google search ranking of 9 news articles on John McCain that provide the real dirt on his voting record and policies – in other words, what you won’t get by simply listening to the man or his representatives in the media.

If you have a blog or website, you should head over to Open Left and link to one or some or all of the articles listed there. To explain how it works very quickly: Google uses links to websites to “contextualize” the content of that website and decide which search terms apply to it; the more links to the site it finds, the higher it is ranked and hence the higher it shows up in search results.

None of the articles pertain to McCain’s energy or environmental policies – or anything that Greenpeace works on directly, actually – so I’m not going to link to them here. It’s a shame, I would love to have participated in the Googlebombing of an article about McCain’s doublespeak on energy and environmental issues.

Well then, guess I just have to get it started: “McCain Touts Green Policies At Wind Energy Firm – But He Opposed Their Key Legislation” (via HuffPo).

If you don't know about RealClimate.org, you should definitely check it out. "Climate science from climate scientists" is their tagline, and that is exactly what you get: real, informed scientific discourse about global warming. Sometimes the posts are hard to read if you're not a climate scientists yourself, but they're always fascinating, well-written, and damned informative.

If you like your climate science news and opinion to be on the useful side, go the RealClimate.org Index page and scroll down to "Responses to Common Contrarian arguments." This section of the site rules. An example is this post, which discusses what real "scepticism" actually entails and why many global warming deniers are not in fact practicing true scepticism at all, but what might be "more accurately described as contrarianism, or 'la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you'-ism."

RealClimate recently dissected the shortcomings of an article in WIRED. You might already know which article I'm talking about, because it had this teaser boldly splashed across the cover: "Attention Environmentalists: Keep your SUV. Forget organics. Go nuclear. Screw the spotted owl." Yeah, a bit melodramatic.

And according to RealClimate, not even close to a fair and accurate assessment. About a section called "A/C is OK," RealClimate wrote: "WIRED got the story egregiously
wrong, and not just because they did the arithmetic wrong. In their rush to be cute, they didn't even make a half-baked attempt to do the arithmetic." If you, like me, were dismayed by this article, the full post by RealClimate, "WIRED Magazine's Incoherent Truths," might also be a good place for you to start digging into the site.

Earth: The Sequel is pretty heavy on the numbers – tons of pollution, millions of dollars in venture capital, megawatts, gigawatts , and so on – but if you can get through the wonkiness, it is a very thought-provoking and inspiring book. Its overall theme is summed up thusly on the final page:

The question is no longer just how to avert the catastrophic impacts of climate change, but which nations will produce—and export—the green technologies of the twenty-first century. A cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide will mean billions of dollars for the innovators who figure out how to save the planet, and provide the opportunity to mobilize virtually every realm of economic activity.

In explaining the “Sequel” bit in the title, the website has this to say:

Earth: The Sequel is the riveting story of the next new thing that none of us can afford to miss: how the multi-trillion dollar energy sector is being transformed — right now — by the American entrepreneurial spirit.

Fred Krupp, author of the book and president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and his co-writer Miriam Horn make a compelling case for a cap-and-trade system as a necessary measure to spur the energy revolution this country needs. Cap-and-trade will level the energy playing field, they argue, giving fledgling renewable energy sources a fighting chance in today’s market. In making their case, Krupp and Horn provide intriguing snapshots of the most promising renewable energy technologies out there – solar, biofuels, ocean/tidal, geothermal, and more – the companies developing them, and the people behind the companies. Earth, The Sequel does a fantastic job of juggling its human interest angles with its business and technology reportage.

The technology I found most interesting: reengineering “the metabolism of yeast to ferment sugar into a pure hydrocarbon fuel.” Now that’s resourceful.

What I found most thought-provoking about the book, however, was a subject only mentioned in passing: the social justice issues that can get entangled with renewable energy development. For example, the Makah tribe have lived off the bounty of Makah Bay in Washington state for thousands of years, and now they’re using the relentless waves of the bay to generate electricity for their homes. The basic mechanics are this: three miles out from shore, a company called AquaEnergy Group has placed pistons that are connected to a buoy on the surface and anchored to the ocean floor. As waves wash past the buoys, the pistons are driven up and down, and they are designed so that they pump water into a turbine, generating electricity. The Makah and AquaEnergy are generating 14 megawatts with the so-called AquaBuOY’s they have installed so far.

The Makah chose to pursue renewable energy over fossil fuels, going so far as to help create the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary when the U.S. Minerals Management Service was proposing to reactivate leases for gas and oil development off the coast of Makah Bay. Now, that very same marine sanctuary the Makah helped create is the single largest impediment to developing their ocean energy project to commercial scale. Tribal councilman Micah McCarty sums up his view of the situation this way:

We are an ancient society that still has a living relationship with our ancestral fishing and hunting grounds. By continuing to sustain ourselves from these resources, we keep the breath of our ancestors alive. It has spiritual meaning. But we repeatedly run up against a belief that nature should be viewed without touching it, kept pristine. I understand where that view derives—it comes from people who live in a wholly altered environment, see a devastating human impact, and overcompensate for that devastation. But it winds up disenfranchising the people who depend on the land.

Marine sanctuaries are definitely a good and necessary thing, and no doubt performing an environmental impact assessment before installing dozens of AquaBuOYs is necessary. The technology is so new there is no previously compiled data for the stewards of the marine sanctuary to refer to. But how can we decide to deny a people their right to live off of their land however they see fit – especially a people who have been so violently denied their right to self-determination in the past as have the Makah tribe? There are two societal views of nature at odds in Makah Bay – the Makah tribe’s, which views nature as something to live with harmoniously while drawing life and sustenance at the same time; and mainstream American society’s, which has traditionally viewed nature as an inanimate resource we can use and abuse however we want, to the point that we have so severely depleted and degraded our natural resources that we now must atone for our sins by setting certain portions off-limits.

It’s a thorny and complex issue, one with no easy answers. Hopefully some compromise can be reached. Earth, the Sequel does not speculate on what the outcome might be for the Makah tribe, but in raising the issue at all the book provides a considerably hearty meal of food for thought. Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the energy future of our society and the myriad issues we are facing.

Project Hot Seat got a couple good mentions in the national media this past week:

Politico:

Greenpeace is ... expanding Project Hot Seat, the nonpartisan, grass-roots global warming campaign that focuses solely on House districts.

Since 2006, Project Hot Seat’s presence has grown from six congressional districts to about 50, with several offices set to receive a new round of staffers.

“We need real leadership next year,” said Kate Smolski, Greenpeace’s legislative global warming coordinator. “We’re talking to incumbents and challengers in all districts. It doesn’t matter what party gets elected, as long as the party that gets elected gets the next bill right.”

The Nation (though they call it "Global Hot Seat," for some reason; but hey, they got the link right):

As the catastrophic consequences of inaction seep into the public onsciousness people everywhere are starting to take steps to fight global warming. But it's not enough to change light-bulbs and dispense with plastic bags -- we need bold, fundamental, and rapid action on climate change -- action as outlined at 1sky.org, CoolCities.us and Greenpeace's Global Hotseat. 

So I realized that, since my contention in my original post on Radiohead's green tour was that Radiohead is pioneering new ways of addressing global warming by using new tools that we have at our disposal, it would have been good of me to actually demonstrate that in action.

Not everyone lives in a city as small as San Francisco that is simultaneously big enough to have Radiohead come play there, so not everyone will be able to ride their bike to a Radiohead show. The cool thing about the carbon calculator they have up on their tour blog is that you can compare various methods of travel. I went ahead and calculated the carbon emissions for driving a car and taking the bus to the show. Check it out:

 

As you can see, if I took the bus, I’d be responsible for 1.06 kgC02, versus 1.85 kgC02 if I drove.

Before embarking on their current world tour, Radiohead commissioned a study of the environmental tolls of their past two trips across the pond (the band hails from the UK). In an effort to reduce their tour’s eco-footprint, they now transport their equipment by ship rather than air-freight, use LEDs in stage lighting, and had two complete stage sets built – one for Europe and one for America – to cut down on carbon emissions from transporting gear even further. They also work with venues to make special parking available for fans who carpool to the show.

This last measure might be the most important. According to a recent Rolling Stone article, the report Radiohead commissioned found that:

97 percent of the environmental damage done by the group’s 2003 tour – nearly 10,000 tons of C02, the equivalent of 4,000 trans-Atlantic flights – was fan-related. The conclusion was so demoralizing that the group considered scrapping the tour altogether.

Thank god they didn’t cancel the tour! (I’ll be catching them when they play the Outside Lands Festival here in San Francisco!) But that doesn’t mean that they just decided it was out of their hands and to hell with the environmental cost. For instance, the carpooler parking lots they’ve negotiated can reduce the number of cars driven to shows by as much as 10%, according to the Rolling Stone article. And even cooler, Radiohead launched a whole website about the carbon footprint of their tour, where the band discusses the complexities of trying to run a green tour. There's even a carbon calculator that fans can use to determine the most environmentally friendly means of traveling to the show they plan on attending.

The Outside Lands Festival is happening in Golden Gate Park, so I’ll be riding my bike. Which makes me not the best test case for the carbon calculator, but I thought I’d share my results with you anyway:



This is the kind of creativity it’s going to take to stop global warming. We need to rethink everything we do as a society. Luckily, as Radiohead has demonstrated, there is no shortage of tools that we can use.

This is a very cool tool, courtesy of the Drexel University College Democrats, for keeping the pressure on McCain to release his energy policy. In 2000, Bush issued his own energy policy barely a month before the general election, leaving very little time for scrutiny of his proposals. Is McCain trying to pull a similar trick? Given that most of McCain's policies amount to a continuation of the Bush presidency, and Bush's policies have brought us the horribly unstable energy market we have today, it certainly would seem McCain is attempting to use a similar tactic to avoid scrutiny, given that, as of this posting, he has been running for more than 411 days.

John McCain has now been officially running for president this cycle for more than a year, and he has yet to put forward any concrete or specific policy proposals regarding America's energy challenges. I first noticed this some months ago, reading his issues pages and realizing that nowhere does he address energy issues. There is an environment page which is entirely devoid of policy proposals, and several places he refers to the importance of reducing reliance on foreign oil, usually in a national security context. But nowhere does he have any proposals to do that.

You can post the widget to your webpage/blog by visiting the above link and copying the embed code. While there, you can also check out the detailed breakdown of the energy policies laid out by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that the Drexel Dems have compiled.