by Christopher Mims.

It’s over: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has conceded the primary race to her opponent, Joe Miller. Murkowski and three other Republicans will be leaving the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which means new leadership and four open seats for the group tasked with dealing with just about everything readers of The Climate Post care about.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says he might have two Republicans on board for a lame-duck bill that would give the U.S. a Federal Renewable Energy Standard requiring utilities to “provide 15 percent of their power from renewables by 2021, although about a fourth of the requirement could be met with energy-efficiency programs.”

Greens recovering from a Fight Club-level whupping: It’s as much opinion as news, but The Washington Post paints a portrait of beaten-down, post-climate bill environmentalists trying to regroup by staging acts of cathartic street theater. Grist’s David Roberts asks: “How bad are the next few years going to suck?”

Court tells climate scientist to Mann up: Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has been temporarily thwarted in his quest to secure documents on the science of climate change from former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann. Undaunted, Cuccinelli pledged not to back down.

Administration to enviros: “We like you, just not in that way”: Many were left scratching their heads when the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would have allowed plaintiffs to sue emitters of greenhouse gasses under common-law nuisance claims.

These actions might make more sense in light of the administration’s current efforts to mollify greenhouse gas emitters in industry lest their allies on the hill take back whatever power the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has left to regulate greenhouse gases: “EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said over the weekend upcoming climate regulations are modest in scope, comments that come amid Capitol Hill efforts to scuttle the rules.”

As if on cue, environmentalist Bill McKibben declared Nixon was better for the environment than Obama.

Critical report did not land with a thud: Climate scientists think the new report suggesting a revamp of the IPCC is full of helpful suggestions, and the world’s leading science journal cast it in terms of adaptation and survival for the decades-old body.

Editorials on the right argued the report was an indictment of the IPCC’s findings in general, while those on the left countered it said nothing that impugned the science of climate change itself.

“Devastating climate shock needed to spur climate change policy” is kind of already here: An editorial in The New York Times cast resistance to action on climate change in terms of its perceived threat to American identity and hypothesized natural disasters might change that.

The next report from the IPCC will consider what happens if governments don’t sign on for or follow through with emissions reductions. Lawyers are already acting on related data, and are exploring the implications of nascent efforts to statistically assign blame to global warming for natural disasters already in progress.

The melting of Mont Blanc, one of Europe’s iconic glaciers, has engineers racing to avert an explosive flooding of the valley below. Acidifying oceans spell a marine biological “meltdown” by the end of the century.

The coffee bean is threatened by warming, retreat of glaciers in Asia will decrease the water supply of billions, and China’s crop yields are projected to decline in the next few years because of warming-related water shortages. In addition, flooding in Niger is devastating a people already menaced by a food crisis, El Niños leading to extreme weather are growing stronger, and food prices in Russia are soaring after a drought and fires with direct costs between $7 and 300 billion.

A new kind of desertification is afflicting the planet. “Ocean desertification” happens when warmer waters lead to decreased biological productivity in the world’s tropical marine ecosystems.

On the other hand, The Economist argues Brazil has a model for how to feed the denizens of a warmer, more crowded planet, New York had its hottest summer ever but nothing blew up or was looted, and Scientific American reviews a recent paper that asks “If the world is going to hell, why are humans doing so well?”

The fossil fuel lending crisis: Banks increasingly don’t want to fund environmentally controversial activities such as mountaintop-removal mining and palm oil. To transition to renewables, China must raise the price of coal without stalling its economy. Industry groups still back the Obama administration’s planned $1 billion clean-coal effort.

The renewables award tour: France wants $13 billion for 3,000 megawatts of wind farms and India approved 1,000 megawatts of solar. Angela Merkel wants to keep Germany’s nuclear power plants online for another 15 years, and the cost of Bulgaria’s nuclear plant has soared to 9 billion euro from 4 billion in 2007.

In shades of what’s happened to the solar panel industry, a supply glut means a price war in rechargeable batteries for cars.

In conclusion: tree sitting above the Arctic Circle: It used to be all you had to do was drive into the woods and chain yourself to a redwood, but that’s just not where the action is anymore if you’re a committed environmentalist. At the intersection of a warming Arctic, offshore drilling, Greenland’s eventual autonomy from Denmark, prospecting for remote oil in the face of peak fossil fuels and, well, Greenpeace, a handful of activists are braving what could be 50 mph winds to occupy the underside of a drilling platform in the storm-tossed coastal waters of Greenland.

Related Links:

The environmentalist’s paradox: we do better while the earth does worse

Latest Gulf oil well explosion was no disaster, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

Oil slick spreading after rig explosion forced 13 workers into the Gulf

by Joseph Romm.

Poor Carly Fiorina. To make conservative ideologues happy, she has to abandon science and her previous positions on the key issues of global warming and clean energy.

But to win election statewide, she has to appeal to the majority of California voters, who understand that clean energy is the key to the state’s long-term economic and job growth—and that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases will devastate California more than most states.

And so in her first debate with climate and clean energy champion Sen. Barbara Boxer, she simply couldn’t give a straightforward answer to the simple question of whether she supported the Big Oil funded Prop 23 effort to gut California’s landmark climate and clean energy law, Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32).

Let’s go to the videotape (watch to the end):

Ouch.

You know that you have screwed up as a conservative politician when the center-right Politico says so:

Fiorina’s major stumble came on the issue of Proposition 23, which would suspend AB 32.  She said the focus should be on federal climate legislation and that she had not yet taken a position on the proposition.

“If you can’t take a stand on Prop 23, I don’t know what you will take a stand on,” Boxer responded.

Talking to reporters after the debate, Fiorina sidestepped the issue,   saying she would “probably” take a position on Prop 23 before November, though it’s not her main priority. She insisted the real referendum on energy legislation “is on the ballot—and her name is Sen. Barbara Boxer.”

You’ll note that Fiorina immediately jumps to the old right-wing talking point created by Frank Luntz for conservatives who want to sound like they care about global warming and clean energy without actually having to do anything: We need to fund energy R&D.

As for her claim that AB 32 is a job-killer, not only do 118 economists disagree, but so did Fiorina and rational Republicans just two years ago:

Related Links:

Koch brothers jump into Prop 23 fight

California bags the plastic bag ban but makes solar leap

Latest Gulf oil well explosion was no disaster, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

by Agence France-Presse.

WASHINGTON—British oil giant BP revealed on Friday that it has so far spent $8 billion to battle the Gulf of Mexico disaster. At the same time, its crews worked to retrieve key evidence about the spill from the seabed.

Robotic submarines recorded the delicate operation as engineers sought to raise a failed blowout preventer from the sunken rig to the surface and hand it over to the Justice Department. The U.S. government is conducting what could be a criminal investigation into the April 20 explosion and subsequent oil spill.

BP, for its part, is hoping to shift some of the responsibility to its contractors. They include Transocean, which leased the Deepwater Horizon rig off the Louisiana coast to BP, and Halliburton, which cemented the well.

BP’s financial liability will soar if the government determines it was criminally negligent.

The British energy giant has forecast that the world’s worst maritime oil spill will cost the group a total of about $32.2 billion, after pushing it into a record $16.9 billion loss in the second quarter.

BP has vowed to meet the costs of the cleanup and compensation for residents hit hard by a fishing ban as well as the blow to the local tourist industry.

But a top executive warned Friday that proposed limits on offshore oil drilling could hurt BP’s ability to pay for damages, prompting outrage from environmental groups.

David Nagle, executive vice president for BP America, told The New York Times that legislation before Congress could have an impact on the company’s ability to compensate losses from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Of particular concern is a bill passed by the House of Representatives on July 30 that includes an amendment banning any company from receiving permits to drill on the Outer Continental Shelf if more than 10 fatalities had occurred at its offshore or onshore facilities, or if it had numerous environmental violations. BP is not mentioned by name in the legislation, but is the only company that currently meets that description.

“If we are unable to keep those [offshore] fields going, that is going to have a substantial impact on our cash flow,” Nagle told the Times, and implementation of such a law “makes it harder for us to fund things, fund these programs” to pay damages.

The Times said BP executives are not backing away from a commitment to pay $20 billion into in an escrow fund over the next four years to pay damage claims and government penalties. The company has also agreed to contribute $100 million to a foundation to support rig workers who have lost their jobs and $500 million for a research program to study the impact of the spill.

But demands continue to rise on BP, the newspaper noted, including from states affected by the disaster.

“Apparently, BP’s efforts to ‘make it right’ extend no further than their bottom line,” said David Pettit, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Petro-money may talk in Congress, but extortion is illegal in the United States. All lawmakers need to stiffen their spines. BP’s latest outrage cannot stand.”

The removal of the blowout preventer is a critical step toward killing the well once and for all, officials said.

The ruptured Macondo well was plugged from above with heavy drilling fluid and then sealed with cement last month, but the so-called “bottom kill” operation to permanently seal the well was delayed until the blowout preventer is replaced.

BP successfully removed a massive temporary cap on Thursday and will install a new blowout preventer once the failed device is removed. It will then use a relief well to pump heavy drilling oil and cement into the crippled well from below to permanently plug it.

BP said Friday it hopes the relief well will reach the damaged well by around mid-September, depending on weather conditions.

Related Links:

Latest Gulf oil well explosion was no disaster, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

Explosion on Gulf of Mexico oil platform contained, but damage unknown

Fuel tanker runs aground in Canadian Arctic

by Todd Woody.

A company controlled by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have bankrolled numerous right-wing causes, has donated $1 million to the campaign to pass Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative that would suspend the state’s global-warming law.

The contribution was made Thursday and came from Flint Hills Resources, a Kansas petrochemical company that is a subsidiary of Koch Industries. The Koch brothers were the subject of a recent profile in The New Yorker.

The Koch donation came a day after Tesoro, a Texas oil company that has been bankrolling the pro-Prop 23 campaign, put $1 million into the campaign coffers.

According to the No campaign, 97 percent of the $8.2 million raised by the Yes forces has been given by oil-related interests and 89 percent of that money has come from out of state. Three companies, Koch Industries, Tesoro, and Valero—another Texas-based oil company—have provided 80 percent of those funds.

“There are three companies from out of state that have a very specific economic interest in rolling back our clean energy economy and jobs,” Thomas Steyer, a San Francisco hedge-fund manger who is co-chair of the No on 23 campaign, said during a conference call Friday.

“I am a businessman,” he added. “I believe in the free enterprise system. I believe in profit. But companies have to accept the rules that are placed on them.”

Steyer, founder of Farallon Capital Management, has pledged $5 million of his own money to the No campaign.

As the traditional Labor Day kickoff to the fall campaign season approaches, the No campaign has also been collecting some large donations, albeit from individuals rather than corporations.

A Southern California businesswoman, Claire Perry, contributed $250,000 on Monday. Last Friday, Julie Packard, a daughter of Hewlett-Packard founder David Packard, gave $101,895.

“If the Yes on 23 folks win, we’re going to change the framework for investment here,” said Steyer. “We’re going to change our ability to create new industries. Those industries are going to go elsewhere, probably not in the United States. Probably specifically our biggest competition in this is China.”

Related Links:

Carly Fiorina fumbles on Prop 23 issue during California Senate debate

California bags the plastic bag ban but makes solar leap

Latest Gulf oil well explosion was no disaster, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

by Todd Woody.

The California Legislature started out the week in the green by passing the nation’s first energy storage bill. But legislators quickly ran into the red Wednesday when they failed to approve legislation to impose a statewide ban on plastic bags, or to codify Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s (R) executive order that utilities obtain a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

But don’t go crying in your organic beer yet. On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission signed off on 650 megawatts of new solar energy contracts and programs.

Which all goes to show that in the Golden State, environmental politics are not green and brown. And despite the unknown fate of Proposition 23, the oil company-bankrolled ballot initiative to suspend California’s global warming law, the state’s panoply of green laws allows progress to be made on various fronts.

The utilities commission, for instance, approved contracts for two giant photovoltaic solar farms to be built in the Mojave Desert by First Solar. Together they will supply 550 megawatts of electricity to the utility Southern California Edison.

Commissioner Timothy Simon noted at Thursday’s energy commission meeting in San Francisco that the price for that electricity is lower than previous solar contracts, another sign that photovoltaic power is edging ever closer to edging out fossil fuels. The price also speaks to the ability of First Solar, an Arizona-based thin-film solar company, to win and begin to execute big projects.

The commission also greenlighted San Diego Gas & Electric’s proposal for 100-megawatt’s worth of small-scale photovoltaic projects.

Most installations will be 1 or 2 megawatts and built in parking lots or other open spaces where they can be plugged into the grid without expensive transmission upgrades. The move comes on top of 1,000 megawatts of distributed solar generation that the utilities commission previously approved for California’s two other big utilities.

Michael R. Peevey, the president of the utilities commission, said despite the failure of the state legislature to institutionalize the 33 percent renewable portfolio standard—currently subject to reversal by the next governor—California was on a solar streak.

“With approval of this project we’ll have added 1,100 megawatts of photovoltaic electricity by the three utilities,” said Peevey, noting separately that the California Solar Initiative will add another 3,000 megawatts and that by year’s end, regulators are poised to approve big solar farms that will generate 4,700 megawatts of electricity.

“These are big, big numbers,” Peevey added. “Independent of the legislature, we’re moving to a RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard) economy.”

Related Links:

Carly Fiorina fumbles on Prop 23 issue during California Senate debate

Koch brothers jump into Prop 23 fight

Latest Gulf oil well explosion was no disaster, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

by Joseph Romm.

I know that you are shocked, shocked to learn the owner of the offshore oil and gas platform that exploded yesterday in the Gulf of Mexico had two violations just this year from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Outer Continental Shelf Civil and Criminal Penalties Program.

This not terribly surprising story is brought to you by Think Progress:

The Vermilion Oil Rig 360, owned by Mariner Energy—which was recently purchased by Apache Corp.—was producing about 58,800 gallons of oil and 900,000 cubic feet of gas per day.

As ThinkProgress noted, just Wednesday Mariner Energy said the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling is “trying to break us.” Mariner Energy also made a recent filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission saying its operations “may be   impacted in the future by increased regulatory oversight, which may increase the cost of” Outer Continental Shelf wells, “and delay drilling and production therefrom.”

But if Thursday’s explosion wasn’t enough evidence, government safety records indicate that Mariner Energy and Apache Corp. are desperately in   need of regulation. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Outer Continental Shelf Civil and Criminal Penalties Program cited Mariner Energy for two violations just in the first six months of this year, and once more in 2007.

A summary of the fines assessed against Mariner Energy:

Apache Energy has been cited for 22 violations since 1998, totaling over $1.74 million in fines, including a $435,000 fine this year for removing a key piece of equipment from a sump system, which then “could not automatically maintain oil at a level sufficient to prevent discharge into the Gulf of Mexico.”

A summary of the fines assessed against Apache Corp.:

Mariner Energy is probably right that the company will be “impacted” by “increased regulatory oversight.” But its workers, and the Gulf ecosystem, might avoid being impacted as they were today.

Related Links:

Explosion on Gulf of Mexico oil platform contained, but damage unknown

Fuel tanker runs aground in Canadian Arctic

Oil slick spreading after rig explosion forced 13 workers into the Gulf

by David Roberts.

Brad Plumer has a great post on why humanity seems to be doing relatively well even though the environment is falling apart. The same subject’s been on my mind since I read a piece by Foreign Policy editor Charles Kenny a few days ago called “Best. Decade. Ever.”

His argument is pretty simple: More people have more money, better health, more mobility, more food, and more security than ever before in human history. That chart on the right is from the Human Development Index, which tracks life expectancy, literacy, and other indicators of human well-being. The lines are heading up almost everywhere. Humanity doesn’t seem to be suffering unduly for its environmental sins.

The natural world, however, is going to sh*t. Species are dying off, the oceans are acidifying, forests are getting eaten by pine beetles, ice is melting, and plains are becoming deserts. Remember the study in Nature about “planetary boundaries” and how we’ve crossed a bunch of them?

So what explains the disparity? Why are people doing better even as ecosystems are doing worse?

That’s the subject of a new paper in Bioscience called “Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?” Brad lists the researchers’ four possible answers:

The reasonable conservative take on this (population: Jim Manzi) is that Nos. 2 and 3 are true, and that even if 4 is true, the wisest course is to get richer, not spend money trying to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Getting richer makes us more able to adapt to whatever nature brings our way. And we can get richer in perpetuity—it’s what virtually all mainstream economic models show.

The problem is that No. 3 is better stated like this:

The ability of humanity to grow and adapt, while extraordinary, is ultimately bounded by the amount of available, accessible energy. There is in fact a physical planet with finite resources. Merrily getting richer and assuming we’ll always be able to adapt to changes in global climate is to place unlimited faith in human ingenuity to overcome resource constraints. It is to imbue it with a kind of mystical significance.

If events like Russian fires, Pakistani floods, British Columbian pine-beetle infestations, Australian droughts, and Gulf hurricanes à la Katrina become steadily more common and severe, we’re likely to discover that it’s difficult to just up and redo a century’s worth of built infrastructure. For one thing, it takes an enormous amount of energy to retrofit and climate-proof our buildings, bridges, airports, sewage systems, and the rest. Yet there’s good reason to think that oil supply has or will soon peak and that coal may not be far behind. What will fuel our wholesale reindustrialization?

Mainstream economics views the last century’s growth of human population, power, and reach as the new normal—the default state of affairs. It is from that limited perspective that there is an “environmentalist’s paradox.” The world is degrading but we’re getting richer! From another perspective, however, we’re Wile E. Coyote riding that Acme rocket out over the canyon. What do you mean he’s in danger? He’s still going up!

The sociopolitical problem is that environmentalists (to use the term very broadly) have been arguing that we’re bumping up against limits for 50 years now, but human welfare just keeps spreading. Conservatives think this is a foolproof riposte against any talk of resource limits. I obviously disagree, but it is something greens need to grapple with.

There’s no contradiction in noting that coal is both bringing people out of poverty in China and insuring the suffering of future Chinese. Today the net welfare gains of coal use in China seem greater than the net losses, but that’s only because the gains are immediate and the losses are deferred for a while. In our lifetimes, that will change—the losses will come due. The dangers of responding too late to that inevitability are far, far worse than the dangers of acting too early.

The environmentalist’s paradox is a function of our parochial perspective. We’re just not accustomed to grappling with problems of global scope, decadal time lags, and irreversible impact.

Related Links:

The Climate Post: Will the “dead” climate bill become a federal renewable energy standard?

Latest Gulf oil well explosion was no disaster, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

Fighting Coal Ash, Bureaucracy and Confusion

by Randy Rieland.

If we hadn’t spent the summer watching crude gush into the Gulf, no one outside the industry would have noticed or cared much about Thursday’s explosion on a Mariner Energy oil platform.  No serious injuries, no spreading slick.

But everyone did notice, and it reminded us that no matter how much BP and the rest of Big Oil say they’ve learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, offshore drilling remains a high-risk business, even in shallow water. 

Plus, Tony Hayward had nothing to say: The fossil-fuel folks were quick to point out that yesterday’s accident had little in common with the BP debacle. But as David A. Fahrenthold and David S. Hilzenrath point out in The Washington Post, that made it even more noteworthy to offshore drilling critics.  This wasn’t some cutting-edge venture where machinery was drilling a mile under the ocean; it was in relatively shallow water, and while the well was still in production, the drilling was finished.  Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune cut to the chase:

The oil industry continues to rail against regulation, but it’s become all too clear that the current approach to offshore drilling is simply too dangerous. We don’t need to put American workers and waters in harm’s way just so multinational oil companies can break more profit records.

Timing is everything:  Wouldn’t you know it that just a day before the explosion, at a “Rally for Jobs” event in Houston sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, Barbara Hagood, a Mariner Energy exec, moaned about the moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf:

I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us. The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the Gulf Coast, Gulf Coast employees, and Gulf Coast residents.

While not in the same league as BP as a safety ne’er-do-well, Mariner has been more Homer Simpson than Ned Flanders. According to The Houston Chronicle, the company has been involved in at least 13 offshore accidents since 2006 in the Gulf—including a blowout and four fires.

Language barrier: BP, meanwhile, is sharing its concern that it may not be able to spend as much money on restoring the Gulf and its economy as it previously said it would.  The reason?  Language in a drilling overhaul bill passed by the House this summer that it contends would hamper its business.  Clifford Krauss and John M. Broder of The New York Times explain:

The bill includes an amendment that would bar any company from receiving permits to drill on the Outer Continental Shelf if more than 10 fatalities had occurred at its offshore or onshore facilities. It would also bar permits if the company had been penalized with fines of $10 million or more under the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts within a seven-year period.  While BP is not mentioned by name in the legislation, it is the only company that currently meets that description.

BP also announced that it has now spent $8 billion in dealing with the Deepwater Horizon explosion and its consequences.  About $93 million of that went toward ads on TV, radio, and in newspapers from April through July.  All those images of BP employees vowing to “make things right” appear to be working.  An Associated Press poll found that 33 percent of the people surveyed in August approved of the job BP was doing—more than double the number who felt that way in June.

You’re not the boss of me: If the comments of one of China’s top climate spokespeople is any indication, don’t expect that country to take the lead in slashing energy consumption.  Yu Qingtai, who represented China in climate talks from 2007 to 2009 and is now his country’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, had this to say in a recent speech:

As a Chinese person, I cannot accept someone from a developed nation having more right than me to consume energy. We are all created equal—this is no empty slogan. The Americans have no right to tell the Chinese that they can only consume 20 percent as much energy. We do not want to pollute as they did, but we have the right to pursue a better life. The public relations efforts of developed nations on climate change are always more effective than ours, but it is more important to look at their actual actions. Overall, when you look at the facts, there is a huge difference between what is said and what is done.

Andrew Revkin has more in his Dot Earth blog.

The road to madness:  Remember that hideous traffic jam in China that lasted nine days? Well, it’s back. The replay’s only a few days old, but it’s already stretching 75 miles again.  And also again, the cause is road construction and the huge number trucks hauling coal to Beijing from mines in Inner Mongolia. 

California reamin’: The race for California senator between incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer and her Republican challenger Carly Fiorina is heating up. But when it comes to green issues, it’s Fiorina, not Boxer, who’s doing the bobbing and weaving. During a recent debate, she refused to say if she believed global warming is real. Instead, Fiorina offered up the lame comment, “We should always have the courage to examine the science.”  When she also declined to take a stand on Prop. 23, which would suspend California’s landmark climate law, Boxer pounced:

If you can’t take a stand on Prop. 23, I don’t know what you will take a stand on. If we overturn California’s clean energy policies, that’s going to mean that China takes the lead away from us with solar, that Germany takes the lead away from us with wind, but I guess my opponent is kind of used to creating jobs in China and other places. I want those jobs created here in America.

Well, that didn’t take long: The more rabid of climate-change deniers have seized upon the revelation that James Lee, the madman shot by police after he grabbed three hostages in Discovery’s headquarters, was moved to environmental fanaticism in part by watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.  Matt Drudge has piled on, as have others in the right-wing blogosphere, laying blame on Gore himself. Under the headline “Stop the Hysteria,” here’s Thomas Fuller on the climate-change-denial site wattsupwiththat:

At what point will we call to account those who have preached ‘the end of the earth as we know it’ to countless people? How many people will be driven to desperation by those who distort the science?

Blizzard of lies: OK, one last run at all the woofin’ last winter by Foxcateers Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity when they mocked global warming during the double dose of blizzards in Washington.  New research suggests that the intense snowfalls were caused by a rare, once-in-a-century collision of two weather systems.  You could explain what happened—that a climatic phenomenon called a North Atlantic Oscillation entered a “strongly negative phase” and that brought cold air down from the Arctic to the East Coast where it rammed into air full of moisture from El Niño.

Or you could just play Whack-a-Gore.   

Related Links:

The Climate Post: Will the “dead” climate bill become a federal renewable energy standard?

Carly Fiorina fumbles on Prop 23 issue during California Senate debate

BP spill costs hit $8 billion as crews unearth clues

by Agence France-Presse.

NEW ORLEANS—An oil platform explosion Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico forced the crew to dive into the sea and threatened further damage to waters still recovering from the BP disaster.

Fire engulfed the offshore platform 100 miles south of the Louisiana coast shortly after 10:00 a.m. EST and massive plumes of gray smoke billowed into the sky as rescuers rushed to fish out the workers.

Photographs showed the 13-strong crew linking arms as they bobbed up and down in special flotation suits before being plucked out of the water by a nearby rig. Three U.S. Coast Guard helicopters and a commercial chopper then transported them to a mainland hospital. All escaped serious injury.

Workers told rescue crews they managed to shut down the wells before evacuating the platform and had spotted a thin sheen of oil spreading for about a mile.

Crews from three firefighting vessels managed to extinguish the blaze after about five hours and the oil sheen was no longer visible by the time the Coast Guard arrived.

“The fire is out, and Coast Guard helicopters on scene and vessels on scene have no reports of a visible sheen in the water,” Coast Guard Eighth District Chief of Staff Captain Peter Troedsson told reporters. “Responders remain vigilant for any evidence of oil on the water,” he added.

The incident ignited fresh criticism of the oil and gas industry as the region struggles to recover from the BP disaster, the largest ever maritime oil spill.

“The BP disaster was supposed to be the wake-up call, but we hit the snooze button. Today the alarm went off again,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “The oil industry continues to rail against regulation, but it’s become all too clear that the current approach to offshore drilling is simply too dangerous.”

“How many times are we going to gamble with lives, economies, and ecosystems?” asked John Hocevar, director of Greenpeace USA’s oceans campaign. “It’s time we learn from our mistakes and go beyond oil.”

The Mariner Energy platform that went ablaze on Thursday was operating in relatively shallow water, about 340 feet, and was not a drilling rig. It had been producing approximately 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate and 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, the Texas-based company said.

The White House said early in the day that it was monitoring the situation and reserved judgment until more information was available. “We will continue to gather information as we respond, we obviously have response assets ready for deployment, should we receive reports of pollution in the water,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters.

Gibbs declined to say whether the president believed inspections of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico were moving fast enough in the wake of the BP disaster.

It was also unclear how this incident would affect Obama’s moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling, which is being challenged in the courts and has faced harsh criticism from his political foes.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has held a congressional investigation into the BP spill, sent a swift letter to Mariner Energy’s chairman requesting a briefing on the incident.

“In the wake of the BP catastrophe, this is an extremely disturbing event,” said Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chair. “I call on the administration to immediately redouble safety reviews of all offshore drilling and platform operations in the gulf and take all appropriate action to ensure safety and protection of the environment.”

The Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition insisted the fire was an “industrial accident” that could have occurred at any industrial site, onshore or offshore.

“We should wait for the facts before we use what happened today on a production platform as a reason to stop offshore drilling, especially when the incident didn’t have anything to do with offshore drilling,” said Jim Noe, the group’s executive director.

Related Links:

BP spill costs hit $8 billion as crews unearth clues

Mariner Energy cited for two violations in past six months, totaling $55,000

Latest Gulf oil well explosion was no disaster, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

by Agence France-Presse.

OTTAWA—A fuel tanker has run aground in Canada’s far north, carrying 2.4 million gallons of diesel fuel that risk spilling into the Arctic waters, the Canadian Coast Guard said Thursday.

A Coast Guard spokesman told AFP no leaks from the tanker had yet been detected in the pristine waters.

The ship struck a sandbar in the famed Northwest Passage, southwest of the town of Gjoa Haven in Canada’s Nunavut territory, on Wednesday. It was carrying fuel to resupply remote communities in the region.

Authorities and the ship’s owner, Woodward’s Oil, will attempt to float it off the sandbar, the official said.

Last week, a cruise ship struck an uncharted rock in the same waterway, forcing the evacuation of more than 110 passengers and crew. That crash occurred late Friday as the ship Clipper Adventurer set out from Kugluktuk, Nunavut, for a 12-day voyage through the passage.

None of the tourists onboard were injured, said a spokesman for tour operator Adventure Canada. But it took two days for the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen to arrive at the scene, prompting calls for Canada to beef up its search and rescue capabilities in the far north.

With the acceleration of Arctic ice melt, interest in the region has soared. Shrinking ice has opened up sea navigation, and could give oil rigs improved access to the sea floor.

Canada’s claim to the Northwest Passage, however, is disputed by the United States.

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