Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe stood on the Senate floor last year to declare 2009 "the year of the skeptic.Turns out he jumped the gun.
This year, a host of Republican Senate hopefuls are trumpeting their rejection of climate science on the campaign trail. Christine O'Donnell became the latest to enter the spotlight last week when she rode tea party support to knock off Rep. Mike Castle -- one of eight House Republicans who voted for cap-and-trade climate legislation last summer -- in Delaware's open-seat GOP Senate primary.
She joins Nevada's Sharron Angle -- who has dismissed man-made global warming as a "mantra of the left" -- Wisconsin's Ron Johnson -- who blames warming on "sun spots" -- Florida's Marco Rubio, Alaska's Joe Miller and Colorado's Ken Buck as tea party-backed Republican Senate candidates who reject the science connecting human greenhouse gas emissions to climate change.
But the tea partiers are not alone. Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and challenger to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), says Americans need to "have the courage to examine the science of climate change." And at a debate last month in New Hampshire, all six Republicans seeking their party's nomination to replace retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R) expressed their skepticism, including former state Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, the eventual nominee.
As skeptics knock on the Senate door, many GOP climate moderates are headed out. Along with Gregg, Republican Sens. George Voinovich (Ohio) and George LeMieux (Fla.) are retiring at the end of this session. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski -- a Republican who acknowledges global warming but is leading the charge to block U.S. EPA from regulating greenhouse gases -- lost her party's nomination last month and will likely be gone next year.
The swelling rank of skeptics running for office stems from a public backlash against liberals' global warming "alarmism," said Inhofe spokesman Matt Dempsey. Democrats' attempts to pass greenhouse gas limits and the commercial success of Al Gore's climate science movie "An Inconvenient Truth" brought more scrutiny to the issue, Dempsey said.
And then there was "Climategate," the publication last November of a series of private e-mails between British climate scientists that skeptics say exposed holes in climate science and a conspiracy to hide them. The e-mails "vindicated Inhofe and everything he's been saying for the past seven years," Dempsey said. "That's why the bottom fell out on the global warming movement."
Murky polling
Gauging public sentiment on climate science is as difficult as it is politically contentious. A Gallup poll in March showed 46 percent of Americans believe global warming is a product of "natural causes," up from 36 percent in 2006. Another poll conducted in June by Stanford University researchers and funded by the National Science Foundation indicated three-fourths of Americans see the warming as a result of human activity.
Sherwood Boehlert, a retired House Republican from New York who now spends his days pushing Congress to tackle climate change, says the skeptics' ascendance is being driven less by public discontent than by powerful voices in the party hierarchy.
"You've got people in positions of prominence suggesting it's a hoax," said Boehlert, who was chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee before leaving office in 2006. "I don't know if that is out of sincere conviction or political convenience, but they find when they demagogue on the issue, they score some points."
Boehlert, singled out Inhofe, the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) as influential skeptics.
Tony Massaro, a senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters, says the skeptics' rise in the GOP goes beyond party leadership to a deliberate attempt to distort the public's perception of the science and the media's failure to properly cover it.
"I think it reflects a steady drumbeat by Fox News around the science of global warming and the coverage of the so-called 'Climategate' -- which turned out to be nothing," Massaro said. "The news media at first reported it ad nauseam, but when the investigation revealed that things had been taken out of context and the science was sound, the stories were buried on page 18."
Massaro also said he does not believe that skeptics are as prominent in the Republican Party as the primary results indicate.
"Millions of Republicans around the country know global warming is happening and much of it is human caused and we need to do something about it," Massaro said. "But they may not be the people who are participating in primaries in Alaska and Delaware."
DOA next year?
Regardless of how well the skeptics do against Democratic opponents in November, Dempsey says any climate change legislation brought in next year's Congress will be dead on arrival. Republicans are holding fast against it and more moderate Democrats are jumping ship, leaving the Obama administration and the environmental movement out in the cold.
But Boehlert is not ready to give up on his vision of a climate-friendly Republican Party. If the skeptics win in November, he predicted, they will be greeted in January with a tug-of-war with their party's remaining climate moderates -- such as Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and Indiana's Richard Lugar -- over the party's climate policy.
And Boehlert is hoping some skeptics will come around after they take office.
"They haven't been exposed to the science all that much," Boehlert said. "They're not here, and when they get here people like me are going to show them a lot of information."
ptic."
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Climate change focus shifts to "post-Cancun": Ramesh
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Noting that "no major breakthrough" was possible at the climate change conference in Cancun, environment minister Jairam Ramesh said that the focus of the international community had now shifted to what measures needed to be taken "post-Cancun".
The minister, who initiated the discussion at the Major Economies Forum in New York yesterday, pointed out that the discussion at MEF had revolved around discussing what would be the likely outcomes at Cancun, Mexico.
"Clearly now the focus is on post-Cancun...we recognise that there is no breakthrough possible in Cancun but let's now try to cut our losses and see what we can do after Cancun," Ramesh said.
"So we get a set of COP (Conference of Parties) decisions at Cancun and let those decisions serve as a further basis of further action post-Cancun," he said, after the MEF meeting.
The countries present in the two-day MEF meeting are Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States.
Countries that come to the conference in Cancun, later this year, are expected to produce a legally binding treaty to combat climate change, which the conference in Copenhagen failed to do.
Instead, two-weeks of negotiations yielded the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, which was produced by 29 countries, but principally drafted by the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, in the last few hours of the Conference.
It was criticised by certain countries including Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba for having left the majority of the nations out of the negotiating process, and led to charges of a "trust deficit" between the developed and developing world.
Key elements of the Accord included a limit 2 degree rise of global temperature, 100 billion dollars on finance in long term finance to developing countries and 30 billion dollars to short-term finance to the poorest and most vulnerable countries.
The minister reiterated that one of the reasons for the lack of progress in Cancun is the absence of any action towards dispensing of $30 billion by developed countries promised at Copenhagen.
India and other emerging economies do not benefit from this aid. "We should be realistic of what you can expect to do in Cancun," Ramesh said.
Noting that "no major breakthrough" was possible at the climate change conference in Cancun, environment minister Jairam Ramesh said that the focus of the international community had now shifted to what measures needed to be taken "post-Cancun".
The minister, who initiated the discussion at the Major Economies Forum in New York yesterday, pointed out that the discussion at MEF had revolved around discussing what would be the likely outcomes at Cancun, Mexico.
"Clearly now the focus is on post-Cancun...we recognise that there is no breakthrough possible in Cancun but let's now try to cut our losses and see what we can do after Cancun," Ramesh said.
"So we get a set of COP (Conference of Parties) decisions at Cancun and let those decisions serve as a further basis of further action post-Cancun," he said, after the MEF meeting.
The countries present in the two-day MEF meeting are Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States.
Countries that come to the conference in Cancun, later this year, are expected to produce a legally binding treaty to combat climate change, which the conference in Copenhagen failed to do.
Instead, two-weeks of negotiations yielded the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, which was produced by 29 countries, but principally drafted by the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, in the last few hours of the Conference.
It was criticised by certain countries including Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba for having left the majority of the nations out of the negotiating process, and led to charges of a "trust deficit" between the developed and developing world.
Key elements of the Accord included a limit 2 degree rise of global temperature, 100 billion dollars on finance in long term finance to developing countries and 30 billion dollars to short-term finance to the poorest and most vulnerable countries.
The minister reiterated that one of the reasons for the lack of progress in Cancun is the absence of any action towards dispensing of $30 billion by developed countries promised at Copenhagen.
India and other emerging economies do not benefit from this aid. "We should be realistic of what you can expect to do in Cancun," Ramesh said.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Graphic Packaging to Use Recycled Wastewater
WaterGraphic Packaging will use recycled wastewater from a new $20 million project that will reduce water use at the Sparta Aquifer in southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana, according to a report in the Monroe News-Star.
According to the report, the city of West Monroe, LA, is building a 45,000-square-foot water treatment facility along the Ouachita River, near an existing treatment facility. The aquifer supplies almost 71 million gallons of water demand daily, though it is only being replenished with 51 million gallons. The project will recycle 10 million gallons for use in Graphic Packaging’s production process. Construction is likely to complete early next year.
Environmental Leader previously reported on another wastewater development in Louisiana involving Siemens and the Petroleum Environmental Research Forum. The partnership is collaborating to test a new biological reactor for industrial wastewater treatment.
GE meanwhile, is collaborating with Consol Energy on a new water recycling system using advanced filtration membranes and thermal water treatment technology that will allow Consol to recycle 99 percent of the water it uses at its coal mine in Oakwood, VA.
According to the report, the city of West Monroe, LA, is building a 45,000-square-foot water treatment facility along the Ouachita River, near an existing treatment facility. The aquifer supplies almost 71 million gallons of water demand daily, though it is only being replenished with 51 million gallons. The project will recycle 10 million gallons for use in Graphic Packaging’s production process. Construction is likely to complete early next year.
Environmental Leader previously reported on another wastewater development in Louisiana involving Siemens and the Petroleum Environmental Research Forum. The partnership is collaborating to test a new biological reactor for industrial wastewater treatment.
GE meanwhile, is collaborating with Consol Energy on a new water recycling system using advanced filtration membranes and thermal water treatment technology that will allow Consol to recycle 99 percent of the water it uses at its coal mine in Oakwood, VA.
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