This map from a new NBER study by UCLA economist Matthew Kahn and Michael Cragg of the Brattle Group (using data from Purdue's Vulcan project) shows the geography of carbon emissions by U.S. states. The study finds carbon emissions are more concentrated in poorer more conservative locations, posing significant political obstacles for policy to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Ethanol proposal may derail climate bill
By: Lisa Lerer
May 26, 2009 04:24 AM EST

Rural Democrats are threatening to vote against climate change legislation unless the Environmental Protection Agency halts new proposals that could hamper the development of corn ethanol.

Ethanol has long been an energy third rail in Congress, with lawmakers — particularly those from the Midwest and other states with large agricultural industries — clamoring to support the biofuel both to transition away from foreign energy and to support rural economies. But in recent years, environmentalists, livestock producers and grocery manufacturers have raised concerns about the fuel, claiming that it threatens to exacerbate global warming and that it raises food prices.

The debate intensified recently when EPA released a draft decision ruling that “indirect land use” issues must be considered when calculating the carbon footprint of corn-based ethanol. That decision raises the overall emissions of corn ethanol by including sometimes tenuously linked activities — critics say totally unrelated activities — in its carbon count. And in fact, the EPA finding showed that while biofuels from plants and other next-generation renewables reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the fuel might not be as environmentally friendly as the law requires.

Biofuels are required to generate 20 percent less greenhouse-gas emissions than gasoline — a standard substantially more difficult to meet when life cycle emissions are counted. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said certain types of corn-based ethanol reduce carbon emissions by only 16 percent and thus fall short of the mandate.

The indirect land-use ruling is a key element that unfairly drives up the carbon count, critics charge, and ethanol backers from rural states greeted EPA’s decision on it by threatening to go nuclear on the climate change bill, a key piece of the administration’s agenda.

“There’s just enough concerns that the committee members have pretty much decided to stick together — that unless we get a resolution here that we think we can live with, we don’t see how we can support this,” said House Agricultural Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (R-Minn.).

Peterson and the 26 Democrats on his committee say they will vote against climate change legislation passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week unless it better addresses several concerns raised by farmers, including reversing the EPA decision.

The issue could be even dicier in the Senate, where Democrats most likely need almost every Democratic vote to pass a climate change bill. Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and 12 other farm-state senators sent a letter in March asking the EPA to refrain from including the effects of indirect land-use changes in their calculations; the agency has not yet responded, Harkin said last week.

The EPA’s ethanol analysis was mandated by a 2007 energy law, which required EPA to evaluate the “life cycle emissions” of biofuels, or how much pollution the fuels generate from the time they are first being produced to the point when they are burned in vehicles.

As part of that calculation, EPA was required to consider indirect land-use changes prompted by biofuels, a category that includes ripple effects across the globe, and one that critics say holds U.S. farmers responsible for economic factors far beyond their control.

For example, they say, if an American farmer decides to respond to the ethanol market by planting corn instead of soybeans — and as a result, Brazilian farmers decide to clear rain forests to grow soybeans — the increased carbon emissions from cutting down the forest would be calculated as a cost of producing ethanol.

“EPA’s actions, if based on erroneous indirect land-use assumptions, could hinder biofuels development and actually extend America’s reliance on dirtier fossil fuels,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who claims to be the only working farmer on the Agriculture Committee. “Agricultural practices and land-use decisions in other countries are not driven by U.S. biofuels policy and should not be used to undermine our domestic biofuels industry.”

Last week, Peterson introduced a bill that would exclude indirect land use from the life cycle definition and would put the departments of Energy and Agriculture — instead of EPA — in charge of evaluating the emissions. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) introduced a corresponding measure in the Senate.

Ethanol backers argue that there is no reliable scientific methodology or economic modeling that accurately links decisions by American farmers to crop changes across the world.

“Assume that those soybeans grown in Brazil are processed into animal feed and used to produce pork that ends up on someone’s dinner plate in China,” Bob Dinneen, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, explained last week to the House Agriculture Committee. “According to the indirect land-use-change theory adopted by the EPA, U.S. corn ethanol would be responsible for the carbon footprint of that plate of moo shu pork being consumed in China.”

Dinneen and the Renewable Fuels Association plan to introduce “hundreds of pages” into the peer review process, hoping to persuade EPA to abandon the indirect land-use calculation. They’re using a similar strategy in California, where the Air Resources Board ruled last month to count indirect land-use changes when determining if biofuels meet the emissions standard set by California’s low-carbon fuel standard.

But a coalition of environmental groups is hitting back, arguing that calculating indirect land-use impacts is an important part of ensuring that the biofuel regulations actually lead to lower greenhouse-gas emissions. Including the indirect land use will help determine which types of biofuels have the biggest environmental benefit, they argue.

“Properly done, accounting for indirect land use will improve the ability of investors and developers to distinguish promising approaches from dead ends and drive investments and innovation towards these feedstocks and technologies,” the coalition argued in a letter to EPA.

With all due respect to everyone who's for it, corn-extracted ethanol, if it's from the edible part, has always been a giant confidence trick.

Advantage not just to the building underneath. White roof reflects short wave solar radiation immune to greenhouse gases back into space unlike the long wave heat radiation from dark roofs.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New York, Boston and other cities on North America's northeast coast could face a rise in sea level this century that would exceed forecasts for the rest of the planet if Greenland's ice sheet keeps melting as fast as it is now, researchers said on Wednesday.

Sea levels off the northeast coast of North America could rise by 12 to 20 inches more than other coastal areas if the Greenland glacier-melt continues to accelerate at its present pace, the researchers reported.

This is because the current rate of ice-melting in Greenland could send so much fresh water into the salty north Atlantic Ocean that it could change the vast ocean circulation pattern sometimes called the conveyor belt. Scientists call this pattern the meridional overturning circulation.

"If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise," said Aixie Hu, lead author of an article on the subject in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise," said Hu, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

This is an even bleaker assessment than an earlier study indicated. A March article in the journal Nature Geoscience said warmer water temperatures could shift ocean currents so as to raise sea levels off the U.S. northeast coast by about 8 inches more than the average global sea level rise.

However, this earlier research did not include the impact of melting Greenland ice, which would speed changes in ocean circulation and send 4 to 12 more inches of water toward northeastern North America, on top of the average global sea level rise.

The ice that covers much of Greenland is melting faster now due to global climate change, raising world sea levels. But sea level does not rise evenly around the globe. Sea level in the North Atlantic is now 28 inches lower than in the North Pacific, because the Atlantic has a dense, compact layer of deep, cold water that the Pacific lacks.

Just another benefit of global warming...

Think of all the jobs in new homebuilding.

LONDON (AFP) – Climate change is responsible for the deaths of 300,000 people every year and costs 125 billion dollars (90 billion euros) annually, a new report said Friday.

The study, from the Global Humanitarian Forum, claims to be the first to measure the impact of climate change on people globally -- and says it is 325 million of the poorest who suffer most.

It highlights the plight of people in Bangladesh, where millions face regular flooding and cyclones, Uganda, where farmers are plagued by drought and some Caribbean and Pacific islands facing obliteration due to rising seas.

This is despite the world's 50 least developed countries contributing less than one percent of global carbon emissions.

The report projects that by 2030, deaths worldwide due to climate change will rise to nearly half a million a year and the cost will hit 300 billion dollars.

It urges developing countries, which account for 99 percent of climate change casualties, to scale up their efforts to adapt for climate change "by a factor of 100."

The vast majority of deaths are caused by gradual environmental degradation which causes problems like malnutrition rather than natural disasters, it said.

LONDON (AFP) – Climate change is responsible for the deaths of 300,000 people every year and costs 125 billion dollars (90 billion euros) annually, a new report said Friday.

The study, from the Global Humanitarian Forum, claims to be the first to measure the impact of climate change on people globally -- and says it is 325 million of the poorest who suffer most.

So the authors think that one person in a thousand among the world's poorest people may be dying this year as a result of climate change.

My guess is that would place climate change pretty near the bottom of all mortality causes among the world's poorest people.

So the authors think that one person in a thousand among the world's poorest people may be dying this year as a result of climate change.

My guess is that would place climate change pretty near the bottom of all mortality causes among the world's poorest people.

That is the beginning rock bottom number which is supposed to grow dramatically with time as the changes continue and accumulate. If I remember correctly, the final effect is supposed to be the loss of 1/3 of the human population (around 2 billion people), most of whom will come from the poorest parts of the world.

The cure has it's costs too, at least as the leftists plan on implementing it.

Yes, and as it happens, the costs are huge.

It's a mixed bag, but if you look at the furthest left governments and economic systems they seldom generate the kind of prosperity that allows a lot of resources to be put toward environmentalism that doesn't produce concrete results. It dovetails with so many arguments that begin "how come a country as rich as the US can't ________"

Part of the reason we are rich is we don't throw a lot of resources behind losing propositions.

They never count all the people not killed by the absence of cold weather...

It doesn't help any with me that many groups who support tackling climate change are the same old groups who have been wanting to limit growth for years, each time for different but always "critical" reasons.

As I recall from the seventies, growth of Tucson beyond 250,000 people was going to ruin the whole place.

How did that turn out?

(CNN) -- A new kind of refugee is on the rise. And by 2050, there could be as many as 200 million of them.

They are not fleeing despicable acts of violence or persecution but the very land and water on which their livelihoods depend. They are some of the world's poorest, forced from their homes by global climate change.

Alarmed by the predictions on climate refugees, humanitarian agencies warn that recent gains in the fight against poverty could vanish unless issues of forced migration become an integral part of the dialogue on global warming.

"What can we say? This is not a pretty picture," said Charles Ehrhart, climate change coordinator for CARE International.

Ehrhart said the breakdown of ecosystem-dependent livelihoods is likely to remain the main driver of forced migration during the next few decades. In the Mekong River Delta, for instance, the sea level rising by 2 meters (6.5 feet) could mean the loss of millions of acres of agricultural land, reducing it by half, Ehrhart said.

Climate change will exacerbate stressful conditions unless vulnerable populations, especially the poorest, are assisted in building climate-resilient livelihoods, Ehrhart said. It's morally imperative for developing nations to adopt policy that addresses these global change, he said.

Simple changes can help address potential catastrophe. In flood-prone Bangladesh, for instance, CARE is helping women who raise chickens switch to ducks. In other regions, it could mean something as simple as changing water-craving crops to more resilient foods.

Ehrhart said climate migration could climb to staggering levels, its consequences reaching far and wide.

Without money or resources, climate refugees will likely stay within their own borders, accelerating movement from rural areas to urban centers and crowding into cities already bursting at the seams.

That could lead to government instability and further unrest.

Koko Warner, head of the U.N. University's Institute for Environment and Human Security and lead author of the report released Wednesday, said the challenge is to better understand the dynamics of climate-related migration and displacement.

"New thinking and practical approaches are needed to address the threats that climate-related migration poses to human security and well-being," Warner said.

For development experts, such as Ehrhart, climate change is a formidable foe that must be tackled. He doesn't want to see the hopes of the world's poorest turned to dust.

PARIS (AFP) – The world faces a growing risk of "abrupt and irreversible climatic shifts" as fallout from global warming hits faster than expected, according to research by international scientists released Thursday.

Global surface and ocean temperatures, sea levels, extreme climate events, and the retreat of Arctic sea ice have all significantly picked up more pace than experts predicted only a couple of years ago, they said.

The stark warning comes less than six months before an international conference aiming to seal a treaty to save the planet from the worst ravages of global warming.

The report said greenhouse gas emissions and other climate indicators are at or near the upper boundaries forecast by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose 2007 report has been the scientific benchmark for the troubled UN talks.

There is also new evidence that the planet itself has begun to contribute to global warming through fall out from human activity.

Huge stores of gases such as methane -- an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide -- trapped for millennia in the Arctic permafrost may be starting to leak into the atmosphere, speeding up the warming process.

The natural capacity of the oceans and forests to absorb CO2 created by the burning of fossil fuels has also been compromised, research has shown.

"Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation ... is required to avoid 'dangerous climate change' regardless of how it is defined," it said.

"Temperature rises above 2 C will be difficult for contemporary societies to cope with, and are likely to cause major societal and environmental disruptions through the rest of the century and beyond."

Many scientists agree that if those boundaries are crossed, it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to reverse the process.

The new synthesis does not carry the same weight as the IPCC report, which is based on an even wider range of studies and -- most importantly -- is a consensus document, which means even conservative scientific viewpoints are taken into account.

But the IPCC data is at least four or five years old, and a welter of new research suggests the global warming impacts could be even worse, and will arrive sooner rather than later.

Climate catastrophe getting closer, warn scientists



When I see the headline "Climate catastrophe getting closer, warn scientists" I can't help but think of another similarly ignored warning "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S." We'll bitch about it after the fact, but we're not going to do anything to stop it.

Climate catastrophe getting closer, warn scientists



When I see the headline "Climate catastrophe getting closer, warn scientists" I can't help but think of another similarly ignored warning "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S." We'll bitch about it after the fact, but we're not going to do anything to stop it.

Global warming: Want to see Northwest impacts? Just look around
Seattle Post Intelligencer - Joel Connelly - ‎6 hours ago‎
"We are the alpha and the omega of global warming," said Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., who helped write a flawed -- but needed -- bill to change national energy ...
Britain faces severe warming by 2080s: study Reuters
Report says United States already feeling effects of global warming Associated Baptist Press
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=gl...sa=N&tab=wn

since when was it MINE?

Well.....which is it??????


http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAMAY.pdf

IMHO, Global Warming, climate change caused by human activity is perhaps the largest HOAX ever created. Anyone who believes Mankind is responsible for climate change and we can somehow control it....might just as well believe in Inyer's 9/11 conspiracy nonsense!

You're right. You were just the lackey... serving up the inanities of much smarter dumbasses.

You deny that man can affect the climate? Seems LA just issued a warning telling citizens not to go outside in the middle of the day. Every hear tales of London in the coal burning hey days? Every major metropolitan area in the world has terrible pollution.

Now I'm not a big global warming advocate or environmentalist but to dismiss pollution and the effects it may have on the environment is every bit as extreme as those who say we're going to be flooded in 20 years, if not more.


<edited>

since when was it MINE?

60% of the commission members

http://www.911summary.com/

NO ONE has surfaced to take 'credit' for being part of the conspiracy?

CO2 as a result of pollution.


You know, I try to talk to you but it's like all you want is to piss people off.

I believe less than a 10% concentration of CO2 causes brain hemorrhaging. Perhaps you should have your septic system rechecked. CO2, methane, something is causing your disability.

I am not trying to piss anyone off.