Message to Congress: If you want to pass significant energy legislation soon and please the most voters, you don't have to read tea leaves to divine how. Move forward with the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act (Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal). Most American voters want it. How do we know?
Let's back up a little. Recently, Stanford psychologist Jon Krosnick analyzed the most high-profile American polls on global warming and clean energy. Based on these polls, headlines had been touting that the percentage of Americans over the past year who think there is solid evidence that the planet is warming had declined from 77% to 57%, and those who believe the warming is due to human activities had declined to about 34%. But is that what the pollsters had really asked? Krosnick found that in fact the poll's flawed questions led to misleading answers, which then led to misleading headlines. For example, consider the Pew poll's question, "From what you've read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not?" It asks the reader to judge what the media perceives about global warming, not the respondent's personal opinion, Krosnick argues. Some questions, as in a CNN poll, required yes/no answers on two concepts simultaneously, so that if one disagreed with just one of them, the resulting answer was misleading. Avoiding these types of flawed questions, Krosnick then performed his own survey. The simple questions directly queried people's perceptions about a warming world and solutions to climate change, giving them multiple choice options to express their answers.
What Krosnick, and other polls (ABC News/Washington Post; Ipsos/McClatchy) with simple direct questions found, was that 70% or more of Americans DO believe the planet is heating up. Over 70% of Krosnick's respondents believe that global warming was due to human activities. Krosnick then queried Americans about solutions to climate change. Over 80% want the federal government to regulate air pollution from businesses, and 76% wanted government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions specifically. Over 70% did not want to tax energy (gas and electricity) to reduce consumption. But over 80% favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks, to: 1) utilities to make electricity from solar, wind and water energy; 2) create more energy efficient cars and appliances; 3) build more energy efficient homes and buildings. These are all solutions that we promote in our free online book, Cool the Earth, Save the Economy, as "AAA": affordable, technologically accessible, and politically acceptable.
Back to options for energy legislation. While Senators Lieberman, Bingaman and Baucus start to form legislation (Baucus is creating a bill to overhaul federal oversight of offshore drilling), Senators Cantwell (D-Washington) and Collins (R-Maine) have created the bipartisan CLEAR Act, a brief bill which emphasizes regulating greenhouse gas emissions from businesses, and creating more government incentives to increase clean energy sources. Just what most American voters want, when you ask them plainly and directly.
With the magic word bipartisan describing it, and an overwhelming majority of American voters supporting its tenets, this is one bill that President Obama should be inspired to promote strongly to all of Congress.
Gloria Flora: No More Shortcuts: Congress Must Act to Make Drilling Safer
Bill Meadows: A Clear Idea on Oil and Gas Reform
Why Cantwell-Collins Is Best — And How It Just Might Win
... Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would also create a worldwide trading system for carbon ‘offsets’ and other carbon-based securities. Offsets are different from government- issued permits or allowances. They are assertions by private parties, often in foreign lands, that they will sequester or avoid emitting a quantity of carbon dioxide that otherwise would wind up in the atmosphere. Such claims are conjectural at best and potentially fraudulent at worst. They played no part whatsoever in the successful cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide, and are just as unnecessary for carbon dioxide...
Cantwell and Collins would establish a simple, transparent cap-and- dividend system that returns higher carbon prices directly to consumers and allows only minimal carbon trading. It would cap fossil fuel suppliers like Exxon-Mobil and Peabody Coal, rather than emitters like utilities and steel plants, because it’s much easier to catch carbon when it enters our economy than when it leaves. It would auction all carbon permits and avoid giveaways, market distortions and offsets. And it would put a ‘collar’ on the price of carbon permits in order to limit market volatility.
Revenue from Cantwell and Collins’ auctions would be split two ways: 75% would be returned to the American people to compensate for higher energy prices, and 25% would be used for transition assistance and public investments, subject to annual appropriations.
-California Solar Engineering
www.CalSolarEng.com
Ending the investor owned guaranteed rate of return (GROR) utility model and replacing it with the Independent Service Operator (ISO) model would allow small producers of clean energy to get paid market rates. The key being market rates because it ensures that they are able to compete with utilities and it also creates a system of time of day pricing. People need to get a check for the power they produce and they need to be encouraged to shift consumption to non -peak hours through time of day pricing to level demand and reduce electricity costs.
Add a phased in carbon tax to offset the investment tax credits for alternative energy and energy efficiency. This is not complicated stuff. California has the most advanced ISO in the country. Getting that check every month from the ISO is a strong incentive. Implementing energy efficiency first will let the residential or business investor of clean renwewable energy maximize their profits.
June 22, 2010 at 10:54 am
Before one buys a highly touted porker
S/he would be well advised
To take a hard look before buying
At the item of which s/he’s been favorably apprised.
And before purchasing anything, including, e.g., climate change,
From one who in one’s eyes is blowing smoke
It’s important to remember the admonition
Against buying a pig in a poke.
And when it comes to selling climate change
Folks everywhere–understandably a ma.jor.i.ty–
Are hesitant to buy a thing sight unseen
And say “Show me!”‘, as do pragmatic folks from Mis.sou.ri.
Another alarmist apologist.
A number of survey questions, conducted by several polling organizations — including Mr. Krosnick’s own recent survey — show demonstrable drops in Americans’ acknowledgment of and concern about global warming.
The scientific focus in survey research should be the integration of existing research into broad bodies of knowledge and the development of theories about why the phenomena under study has occurred. Mr. Krosnick’s article gave the impression, on the other hand, of an attempt to dismiss certain survey trend results because they did not fit his overall thesis.
The key point: At a time of concerted effort by those concerned about climate change to raise Americans’ consciousness about its existence and dire potential consequences, American public opinion on the issue has moved in the exact opposite direction. The scientific challenge is the effort to explain why this has occurred.
Frank Newport
Editor in Chief, The Gallup Poll
Princeton, N.J., June 11, 2010
a) The financial crash - that we must re-provide jobs and money - while trying to ignore that our own U.S. oligarchy crumpled our economic futures.
b) a focused, fossil-fuel funded campaign (Saudis, Exxon, Koch brothers, etc.) ludicrously amplified (with ZERO integrity) by mean stream media (creepoids like Jonathan Leake), to discredit global warming and climatologists to undermine the Copenhagen climate talks. 2 minor mistakes in a 3,000 page IPCC AR4 report aren't really much of a story, let alone a scandal. But the right-wing blogosphere and mean stream media made it into one.
www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/
Hacking thousands of emails to distort the meaning of a few phrases only makes a scandal about who did the hacking. But the mean stream media (who should be publicly flogged) turned it into a smear campaign against honest, innocent scientists. Three review commissions have independently concluded that the East Anglia controversy is baloney.
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/14/oxburgh-uea-cleared-malpractice
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy
c) an irrationally fierce and phobic backlash by small-minded WHITE America against all things seemingly liberal (including climate change), fomented mostly by having elected a new president with dark skin. Big deal.
There are a number of reasons mostly asociated the lack of education, poor analytical skills, an inability to critically and rationally evaluate information (perhaps even an undelying inability to listen and understand).
Humans, and it sems especially Americans, tend to be fundamentally irrational and accept only informational input that toys with that irrationality and engages the "gut". If this sounds farfetched, read Da Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational" for numerous examples and studies. Suffice it say, we are more swayed by a "good fairy tale" than to the actual facts of a situation. Recall: "If it doesn't fit, you must aquit" vs the vast forensic evidence plus the fact that the glove did actually fit like a European-cut glove should.
Combine this with saavy PR agencies, inept irrational media, and propagandists, who want to sway the general populace, and you have a formula for absurdity. You CAN fool most of the people all of the time - certainly enough to make the public do or not do what you want. It is so bad that even the news media focus more on presenting a "balanced" ( extreme protagonist vs extreme antagonist) view rather that getting the facts staright. Frankly, they are just as duped by all the garbage as the rest of us.
The public, the media, and our elected representatives have been conditioned to the premise: If you can't state your case in 30 sec, you have nothing worth hearing.