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The Daily Climate, October 17, 2008: Top Tornado Season, Debunking Clean Coal, more

by Emily Gertz

Published October 17, 2008 @ 07:51AM PT

Image: "Occluded mesocyclone tornado. Occluded means old circulation on a storm; this tornado was forming while the new circulation was beginning to form the tornadoes which preceeded the F5 Oklahoma City tornado." May 3, 1999. Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

As President, Obama Would Regulate CO2 as Dangerous Air Pollutant

by Emily Gertz

Published October 16, 2008 @ 12:55PM PT

As president, Barack Obama would tell the Environmental Protection Agency to use the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits on carbon dioxide, says the senator's energy advisor.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Obama energy advisor Jason Grumet said that Sen. Obama "would initiate those rulemakings...[H]e's not going to insert political judgments to interrupt the recommendations of the scientific efforts.''

Such a move "could halt up to half of the country’s proposed new coal-fired power plants and is considered a key potential step in addressing climate change," according to Yale's environment 360 blog.

The Bush/Cheney White House has actively opposed capping carbon dioxide pollution under the Clean Air Act -- but the Supreme Court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider in the case Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency in 2007. Since then, the only action the administration has taken has been refusing to open e-mail on the topic from the EPA last June.

Sen. John McCain has not indicated whether he, as president, would regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act, although he has been a notable advocate in the Senate for climate change action.

World Food Day: Right and wrong ways to link global warming and hunger

by Emily Gertz

Published October 16, 2008 @ 10:11AM PT

Today is World Food Day, and there's a new campaign from the World Resources Institute that links global warming to skyrocketing world food prices and threats to food security via the boom in biofuel brewed from corn.

(Video available after the jump.)

I'm going to dig into that dynamic below. But listen: pitting global hunger against global warming is a lose-lose. WRI has missed a good opportunity here to put its considerable clout behind linking good energy policies, and strong action to stop global warming, with solving hunger and poverty.

Why? Because global warming is expected to -- already is, some would say -- directly threaten food security because it will heat up and dry out many of the world's most productive farming regions, and shift arable lands towards the poles (where there is less land than towards the equator). Those who are already poor and landless will suffer even more than they do now. And while some predict a boost to agricultural productivity because of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it can also be argued that the simultaneous net reduction in arable land could cancel out that effect.

What I fear people will take away from WRI's campaign is not the rather complicated message that "using corn to make biofuels threatens food security," but the much simpler idea that "biofuels hurt poor people."

Okay, on to corn and biofuel:

Read More »

The Daily Climate, October 16, 2008: Clean-fueled road race, green rejeuvenates cities, more

by Emily Gertz

Published October 16, 2008 @ 08:27AM PT

Images: "Prisoners of Petroleum" vehicle and team, winners of the "Escape from Berkeley" road race for non-petroleum-burning vehicles. Credit: Mother Earth News Blog.

[[Yep -- looks just like Number 6's sports car from The Prisoner. Cool! Per car's inventor/driver Jack McCormack of Kinetic Vehicles:]] "I think we've proven the MAX concept with this run. Disguising MAX to look like the Prisoner car sure paid off — to anybody who stopped and said, "Oooh, The Prisoner, that was a great show," we'd counter with "Yes it was, but do you have any vegetable oil?

"The concept of having to scrounge fuel made for an exciting race (I mean competition event, Officer), but it would have been exciting if we'd been allowed to dash into grocery stores and buy it ourselves. "

Not Much on Energy, Global Warming in Debate #3

by Emily Gertz

Published October 15, 2008 @ 08:25PM PT

Given how the stock market plumbed new depths today, it's no surprise that there was very little on energy or global warming (or anything environmental)  in tonight's debate. Both dodged moderator Bob Schieffer's question of how much the nation could reduce its dependence on imported oil during his four-year term in office.  Sen. Obama did name-check creating green jobs as one way to pull the country through this recession.  Sen. McCain name-checked building around four dozen new nuclear plants to create jobs -- a position I deconstructed here on globalwarming.change.org, after debate #2.

Here's the exchange, courtesy of the transcript at The New York Times:

Read More »

The Daily Climate, October 15, 2008: Political Storms on the Horizon

by Emily Gertz

Published October 15, 2008 @ 05:21PM PT

Image: Mammatocumulus clouds, often associated with tornado development.  Source: U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency Photo Library

Presidential Debate #3: Confessions of a Live-Tweeter

by Emily Gertz

Published October 15, 2008 @ 08:55AM PT

Will tonight's third and last presidential debate offer any new insights into which senator,  Barack Obama or John McCain, would make the better president ?  And what's left for bloggers to contribute to the  public discussion?

The quality of the debate itself could go either way.  Here's what Slate has to say:

Barack Obama, John McCain, and Schieffer [CBS news reporter Bob Schiffer, the debate moderator] will be seated at a table. This is far preferable to the podium format, for both heat and light. It's much harder to deliver well-worn talking points when you're sitting right next to your opponent and a moderator than when you're at a podium, which invites bloviation. It permits Schieffer to look into a candidate's eyes from just a foot or two away and press him for an answer. And, counterintuitive though it may be, it actually can encourage sharper confrontations.

Politico.com is more skeptical:

Even the co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates admits the first two debates have been oddly non-confrontational and lacking a “major screw-up or a major defining event.” ... Fahrenkopf blames the candidates for being overly cautious, but the lackluster debates — particularly last week’s meandering town hall at Nashville’s Belmont University — have prompted a backlash against the commission, which replaced the League of Women Voters as debate organizer in 1988. 

“What we’re getting now aren’t debates — they are parallel stump speeches,” says George Farah, founder of Open Debates, a bipartisan group that has sparred with the commission for years over its secretive rule-making pacts with candidates. “We need to really look at changing the system … anything that allows for an unrehearsed answer, anything that throws the candidates off their game and give them a human face.” 

Otherwise, most of today's pre-debate coverage is focused on the horserace: McCain has to "perform well" to save his campaign; Obama must "avoid mistakes" to get to the White House.   This reads more like a review of the local high school's production of The Music Man** than coverage of the most important presidential election of my lifetime.

I've done a bit of live-tweeting* this political season -- during the party conventions and the presidential debates. My initial goal was simply to build up some skill with the form, frankly -- part of my job as a 21st century journalist is to learn to use these tools.  

Then I got swept up into actually being a journalist online at this moment in time, with these tools.  It was so thrilling that my beat, environmental-qua-energy policy and global warming, was finally being discussed  before the entire nation in prime time, that I couldn't stop myself from getting online to fact-check and reality-check along with the rest of the political blog-o-tweet-o-sphere.

What I discovered is that at its best, Twitter is kind of like hanging out in your favorite bar with your favorite, smartest, wittiest friends and co-workers -- trying to be the first on top of a fudged fact, competing to make the best pun, gaining insight and new knowledge from each other as quickly as it takes to type out the next 140 characters and hit "return."  And our work is better for both this conviviality and the friendly competition.

Sometimes the quality of the production really does trump covering the issues: "Drill Baby Drill!" is smoke and mirrors in place of a rational national energy policy, and that needs to be exposed at every opportunity.  But go too far in that direction, and you leave yourself vulnerable to nationally-televised humiliation:

 

 

But blogging and twittering come down to words.  They are great media (in the sense of the internet, radio, newspapers or television being a medium -- a means to convey content) for reporting right away on what the candidates say, and then parsing the levels of truth and falsehood, typical politi-speak fudging vs. outright misrepresentation.  

And because they're ultimately about the words, we can choose to put our attention on the issues, instead of the sets, costumes, and choreography.

Especially when the candidates themselves ditch the scripts.

*[[What is live-tweeting, you ask?  It's a kind of blogging in real time during an event, using the online message service Twitter -- where my account is ejgertz. You can follow globalwarming.change.org from my Twitter service, in addition to my straight-to-Twitter messages.]]

**[[Yes, I was in my high school's production of The Music Man.]]

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