Environment Forum

from Tales from the Trail:

Salmon ‘chanted evening?

The one word that leaped out of President Obama's State of the Union address to Congress wasn't "optimism," "business," "teachers," "economy" or "budget."

To those who listened to the speech on National Public Radio, the memorable term was "salmon," writ large in a word cloud NPR compiled from its listeners after Obama finished.

That kind of makes sense. Without the Punch-and-Judy theater of Republicans and Democrats popping up from their seats to cheer or boo, as they customarily do when they're seated on opposing sides of the room for a presidential address, it was up to the Commander in Chief to deliver some chuckle-worthy lines.

Obama got his biggest laugh for this rather understated poke at overlapping federal bureaucracies:

"There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different agencies that deal with housing policy. Then there's my favorite example: the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater. (Laughter.) I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked. (Laughter and applause.)"

(No offense, Mr. President, but this was kind of an easy room if you got such a boffo response to this joke. Plenty of Facebook and Twitter posters wondered why you didn't mention cream cheese and bagels.)

This being Washington, though, it didn't end there.

from Tales from the Trail:

Panda diplomacy: the remix

The latest chapter in the long story of panda diplomacy was written at Washington's National Zoo, where the Chinese government agreed to lengthen the "loan" of popular panda pair Mei Xiang and Tian Tian for another five years. Actually, the loan is conditioned on whether they produce a new heir or heiress to the cuteness of panda-dom in the next two years;  one or both could be exchanged for more fecund substitutes.

They have a good track record: Washington native Tai Shan, born in 2005, headed back to China last year.

This was a big enough deal for President Barack Obama to mention it at an elaborate state dinner at the White House for Chinese President Hu Jintao.

“Today, we’ve shown that our governments can work together, as well, for our mutual benefit,” Obama told the glittering gathering. "And that includes this bit of news: Under a new agreement, our National Zoo will continue to dazzle children and visitors with the beloved giant pandas."

In the United States, panda diplomacy started soon after President Richard Nixon's 1972 trip to China. But the idea that China might be able to export, or at least loan, this cuddly symbol to further diplomatic ends may date back to the Tang Dynasty, when 7th century Chinese Empress Wu Zetian sent a pair of pandas to Japan.

For some reason, Washington has gone disproportionately gaga over pandas. In 2004, the PandaMania exhibition put fancifully painted panda sculptures around town; there's still one near the hotel where the Chinese government set up its press operations for President Hu Jintao's visit. Asked why people in the United States are so smitten, Chinese conservation official Zhang Shanming told reporters it just might be that, when pandas sit on their hind quarters, eating, they look like human babies.

To be honest, Tian Tian and Mei Xiang didn't look so much like babies in that distinctive pose; they looked more like furry beanbags as the big deal was unveiled. But pandas are pandas and Washingtonians are likely to continue the love affair with them.

from Tales from the Trail:

Green energy aspirations for Obama’s India visit

When Barack Obama heads for India next month, he'll be carrying a heavy policy agenda -- questions over the handling of nuclear material, the outsourcing of U.S. jobs and India's status as a growing economic power, along with regional relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel Peace laureate who heads the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hopes the U.S. president has time to focus on clean energy too.

Even as Pachauri and the U.N. panel evolve -- and as Pachauri himself weathers pressure from some quarters to resign -- he urged Obama to work on U.S.-India projects that he said would enhance global energy security.

Given India's red-hot economic growth rate -- 8 or 9 percent a year, Pachauri told reporters during a telephone briefing -- he said it makes sense for the United States to work with India to head off an expected soaring demand for fossil fuels.

Over the next two decades, Pachauri said, "If we continue on a business-as-usual path, India will be importing something like 750 million tons (that's about 5.25 million barrels) of oil a year ... and possibly over 1,000 million tons of coal. So I think India has to make some very radical shifts and bring about a movement towards cleaner energy technology."

While the two countries have launched a few initial programs in this area, Pachauri acknowledged that "nothing of great substance has been achieved so far." Obama's passage to India could change that, he said on the call, which was set up by the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council.

Areas ripe for cooperation include collaborative research and development in new areas of energy technology, as well as "a much more liberal approach" to investments in clean energy technology, Pachauri said.

Low interest financing for Indian clean energy projects, including large-scale solar projects in the Indian states of Rajasthan and Gujarat, would also be welcome, he said.

The quest to put solar power back on the White House

Bill McKibben, founder of the green group 350.org, is on a quest to convince President Barack Obama to put solar panels back on the roof of the White House.

He’s at the end of a journey to Washington from Maine in a van fired by biodiesel carrying one of the 32 panels Jimmy Carter unveiled in 1979 during the first press conference on the White House roof.

Also in the van are students from Unity College, which got the the panels some time after President Ronald Reagan, no fan of alternative energy, had workers remove the panels during “roof repairs” in 1986.

McKibben had hoped to meet with somebody high up in the Obama administration such as Carol Browner, Obama’s top energy and climate aide. He’s been talking all week with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) on the plan.

“They keep saying it’s complicated and difficult, but compared with the other tasks they face, we think this one is relatively simple and it would be a great statement,” McKibben said via cell phone from the van.

The White House tells him the administration is greening federal government buildings across the country, which he agrees is a good effort.

Washington math: oil spill + climate bill = new environmental polls

With BP’s spilled oil shimmering off the U.S. Gulf Coast, and a re-tooled bill to curb climate change expected to be unveiled this week in the U.S. Senate, what could be more appropriate than a bouquet of new environmental polls? Conducted on behalf of groups that want less fossil fuel use, the polls show hefty majorities favoring legislation to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide.

In the kind of harmonic convergence that sometimes happens inside the Capital Beltway, a new poll released on Monday by the Clean Energy Works campaign showed “overwhelming public support for comprehensive clean energy legislation,” with 61 percent of 2010 voters saying they want to limit pollution, invest in clean energy and make energy companies pay for emitting the carbon that contributes to climate change. A healthy majority — 54 percent — of respondents said they’d be more likely to re-elect a senator who votes for the bill.

Last Friday, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been pushing for climate change legislation for years, released its own poll numbers. NRDC’s pollsters found seven in 10 Americans want to see fast-tracked clean energy legislation in the wake of the BP oil spill, and two-thirds say they want to postpone new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated and new safeguards are put in place.

Going back one more day, Rasmussen Reports found that even after the Gulf oil spill began dominating the Web, TV newscasts and newspaper front pages, 58 percent of respondents still favor offshore drilling. That’s a big majority but a 14-point drop from the 72 percent who favored offshore drilling after President Barack Obama announced at the end of March that he was opening new areas to exploratory offshore drilling for the first time in more than two decades.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directed reporters to a poll by Republicans for Environmental Preservation — a quote on their website reads “Nothing is more conservative than conservation” — that showed 52 percent of Republicans and a similar number people who consider themselves conservatives support a U.S. energy policy to boost domestic energy production and cap carbon emissions.Even among Tea Party respondents, who are generally hostile to what they call big government, the poll found more favored the policy — 47 percent — than the 42 percent who opposed it.

Remember: the oil hasn’t really reached the Gulf Coast yet. And the bill, long delayed, isn’t set for launch until Wednesday. Let’s start counting now to see how many polls on these contentious issues arrive before a) the spill is cleaned up and b) the bill either becomes law or fails to gain congressional approval.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Navy (Oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico in an aerial view of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the coast of Mobile, Alabama, in this photograph taken from a U.S. Coast Guard HC-144 Ocean Sentry aircraft on May 6, 2010 and obtained on May 9, 2010)

Video Q+A with solar entrepreneur Dave Llorens

Solar energy is not a new technology, yet the adoption rate in the United States continues to crawl along. Just one percent of homes have made the switch to solar power and the reason is primarily a lack of understanding of how it all works, says Dave Llorens, founder and CEO of One Block Off the Grid (1BOG), a California solar retrofit company that groups together neighbourhoods to cut costs for consumers.

“The problem is nobody has it, but you should,” Llorens recently told Reuters in San Francisco, adding that it is common for in-home Q&A sessions to go on for hours and hours. “Everybody is so hungry for information, it’s like nobody knows anything.”

We asked Llorens about federal and state subsidies, technological advances, and the challenges of taking on global climate change locally. Here are his answers:

Q: How can the U.S. government improve its policies for the emerging solar market?

Q: What about people who criticize solar and say the only reason it works is because of all these subsidies?

from Tales from the Trail:

“Heroism fatigue”: another hurdle for U.S. climate change action?

Could "heroism fatigue" be yet another bump in the road for any U.S. law to curb climate change? And what is "heroism fatigue" anyway?

To Paul Bledsoe of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, heroism fatigue is what happens when the Congress has spent most of the year doing something heroic, like trying to hammer out an agreement on healthcare reform, when what lawmakers might rather be doing is naming a new post office. Following one big, gnarly piece of legislation with another -- like a bill to limit climate-warming carbon dioxide -- can seem daunting.

"Especially Democrats want to get  back to some meat-and-potatoes job-creation stuff," Bledsoe says. "They're going to need a little time after healthcare."

Congressional down-time doesn't sound like part of the Obama administration's game plan on climate and energy. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said last week that the president expects a comprehensive bill on this in 2010. President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech to Congress could be a good barometer of how much he wants this, as my colleague Richard Cowan wrote. The speech has yet to be scheduled, but is expected within the next few weeks.

Bledsoe, whose organization looks for consensus on such complex issues as climate change, said agreement on a climate bill is possible. "An energy bill with robust climate provisions that focuses on job creation seems a bill that could gain bipartisan support in this economic environment." By contrast, a bill styled as mainly combating climate change with energy issues added in "could have a hard time with unemployment at 10 percent," Bledsoe said.

To get a law to Obama's desk, there's going to have to be a "deliberate conscious attempt at reaching out to moderates of both parties," Bledsoe said.

It's early days on this, so let the handicapping begin! What's your best estimate of when or if Congress can craft a workable measure to combat climate change? This year? If so, when?

Obama gets high marks for green record: environmental group

President Barack Obama came into office with climate change and the environment on his list of top priorities.

Nearly a year later, one of the top environmental groups in the United States says that Obama has made the grade so far.

In a review of his green record, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) highlighted dozens of moves by Obama at home and abroad. They cited the $50 billion the president put in the stimulus package for cleaner energy and energy efficiency; an executive order for federal agencies to set targets to cut emissions by 2020; and the adoption of strict auto emissions standards, modeled after environmental trendsetter California.

Abroad, the group said that Obama has restored U.S. leadership in the arena of climate change. They pointed to Obama’s efforts to secure an accord at the global climate change summit in Copenhagen — an outcome that the president has said people are justified in being disappointed with — and to partner with China, India and Latin America on clean energy.

Perhaps the brightest spot on Obama’s green record is also his biggest challenge in 2010.

Early on in his first year, the president called on Congress to pass legislation to combat climate change. Getting that legislation passed now sits at the top of the list for his second year at the White House, the group concluded.

(Photo:  U.S. President Barack Obama takes a tour of DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, Florida in October. Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young)

from Tales from the Trail:

Boycott Copenhagen, Palin urges Obama

 If Sarah Palin had her way, President Barack Obama would be staying away from this month's global climate change talks in Copenhagen and "sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices."

The summit will hear from scientists like those from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, where recently revealed e-mails showed information that raised questions about climate change was suppressed, writes Palin.

"Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen," she wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post.

"He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a 'deal.' Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people," said the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate.

The biggest U.N. climate talks in history are aimed at working out a new pact to curb global warming, replacing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.  Obama said last week the United States will aim to reduce its carbon emissions by around 17 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.

Meeting Obama's stated targets will require cap and trade legislation that would result in job losses and higher energy costs, wrote Palin.

The view from the Arctic: on Sarah Palin and caribou soup

While the world gets ready for December’s climate meeting in Copenhagen, a group of native Arctic women traveled to Washington this week to talk about what climate change is doing right now in places like Arctic Village, Alaska, and Whitehorse, in Canada’s Yukon.******Five of the women talked emotionally about how much harder it is to hunt for traditional game animals like caribou in a time of global warming, and how important these traditional foods are to their culture and health. They also took aim at some of Sarah Palin’s statements, especially her push for oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.******Watch below as Norma Kassi, a member of the Gwich’in nation — sometimes translated as “People of the Caribou” — talks about her practices as a hunter, and her take on Palin and her “drill baby drill” strategy. (It’s a fairly long video; her comments on Palin start about halfway through):************Now watch Sarah James, of Arctic Village, talk about the plain fact that “Western” fare like pizza, meatloaf and fast food simply can’t satisfy her son like a soothing caribou soup:************Kassi, James and other members of the Arctic delegation are telling their story on Capitol Hill and to members of the Obama administration. Some are planning to attend the Copenhagen conference, despite dampening hopes of a major agreement from that gathering.******They have an invitation for President Barack Obama: they’d like him to visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge next year, the 50th anniversary of this far-north protected area where caribou herds have their calves and where some energy companies have hoped to drill.******Video credits: REUTERS/Deborah Zabarenko (Washington, November 11, 2009) ******Photo credit: REUTERS/Nathaniel Wilder (Sarah Palin outside the Mocha Moose Espresso after voting in Wasilla, Alaska, November 4, 2008)