Smog over Denver (WildEarth Guardians photo).

“The public health benefits far outweigh the costs. And contrary to the doomsday predictions of industry and their allies in Congress, the lights will stay on.”

Backers of the new rules say mercury is a neurotoxin with serious health implications for children and pregnant women, and the EPA estimates the new rules – which require new scrubber technology within three years (with extension possible on a case-by-case basis) – will prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths each year. Coal industry lobbyists argue the new rules are unnecessary and will increase energy costs in a fragile economy.

Climate change denier and leading oil, gas and coal advocate Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., told the Los Angeles Times he’ll introduce legislation to overturn the new EPA rules when Congress returns following the holiday break.

“This rule isn’t about public health,” Inhofe told the Times. “It is a thinly veiled electricity tax that continues the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy and is the latest in an unprecedented barrage of regulations that make up EPA’s job-killing regulatory agenda.”

But Obama will likely veto any such legislative attempt to undercut the new rules even if the Democrat-controlled Senate passes Inhofe’s bill, which is highly unlikely.

In Colorado, Xcel Energy is out ahead of the new rules thanks to the Clean Air, Clean Jobs Act in 2010 that compelled the state’s largest public utility to shut down several aging coal-fired power plants and convert others to cleaner-burning natural gas and renewable energy.

“We are modernizing our system and significantly reducing emissions under the state’s Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act,” Xcel officials said in a statement Wednesday, according to the Denver Post. “We also currently use activated carbon injection to control mercury emissions at our Pawnee Generating Plant and at all three units of our Comanche Generating Plant.”

Clean Air, Clean Jobs – highly controversial at the time it was passed – is now being held up as a model for other states, including neighboring Wyoming.

Environmental groups were dispirited by the Obama administration decision last summer to hold off on implementing new EPA smog rules ahead of a scheduled review in 2013.

Conservationists also have been sharply critical of the State Department approval this fall of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, although Obama later scored points by delaying that decision until after the 2012 election. Now a provision to fast track his decision has been included in a payroll tax cut extension that’s stalled in the House.

Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette today said Keystone XL was a necessary compromise to provide payroll tax relief and extend unemployment benefits and reimbursement for Medicare

“Over in the House, the Democrats, we don’t love this compromise,” DeGette, a Denver Democrat, said on a call with reporters today. “We don’t think it should be for two months. We don’t like the extension of this pipeline that was in it. We don’t like some of the ways it was paid for. But the fact is it was a compromise.”

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okila.

“This statement appears to contradict statements by you and other members of the federal government about hydraulic fracturing and drinking water contamination,” Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, wrote to Jackson.

In fact, the EPA recently released a report finding a solvent called 2-Butoxyethanol (2-BE) in domestic well water in the Pavillion area, and 2-BE is a common constituent of fracking mixtures. The EPA did not conclude definitively that the 2-BE in local well water came from EnCana fracking operations, but is expected to release a more conclusive report soon.

“Because of these contradictory statements, I am concerned that EPA has pre-determined that hydraulic fracturing is the cause of contamination in their Pavillion investigation and the agency is trying to make the data conform to that conclusion, instead of engaging in an open scientific inquiry,” Inhofe wrote.

The EPA has been investigating the Pavillion case since 2008 and has been engaged in extensive well water sampling in the area since 2009. Area residents have been instructed not to drink their well water because of elevated levels of benzene, and EnCana’s deal to sell its drilling operations in the Pavillion area recently fell through, in part because of the EPA findings.

Colorado citizen activists have pointed to the Pavillion case and EnCana’s well blowout in the West Divide Creek area of western Colorado as compelling evidence in favor of full public disclosure of fracking chemicals during an ongoing Colorado rulemaking on the topic.

Jackson, speaking at a recent event in Denver, stopped short of saying hydraulic fracturing – which involves the high-pressure injection of water, sand and chemicals into wells to free up more oil and gas – can lead to direct groundwater contamination. But she did echo widespread citizen concern.

“Natural gas is key to moving to a ‘Clean Air, Clean Jobs’ agenda, but we want it to be extracted in an environmentally sound way,” Jackson said in Denver, referring to landmark legislation switching coal-fired power plants over to cleaner burning gas. “With fracking, it’s a water issue, too. How we store the water that comes up carrying heavy metals, how the [fracking solutions] shot into the ground may be affecting groundwater.”

An Inhofe spokesman told the AP that the senator “is the leading advocate for hydraulic fracturing in the United States Senate and has had concerns about the Obama administration’s war on natural gas. And so he therefore takes his oversight responsibility seriously, and that’s why he’s been looking closely at the actions of the EPA in Wyoming.”

Besides its Pavillion probe, the EPA is also conducting a more comprehensive study of the impacts of fracking on drinking water, including a retrospective examination of fracking in southern Colorado.

An older EPA study of fracking has been sharply criticized for failing to comprehensively examine all of the potential impacts of the process before it was granted an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act in the 2005 Energy Policy Act that was passed during the Bush administration. Colorado Reps. Diana DeGette and Jared Polis have been working to reverse that exemption, dubbed the “Halliburton Loophole” by its many critics.

Inhofe has drawn criticism in recent years for deeming widely accepted climate change science a hoax. During the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Colorado, Republican Ken Buck stirred heated public debate by embracing Inhofe’s beliefs.

That’s an ongoing problem, according to the nineteen MediaClimate scholars, who have just published a book on media coverage of the last two United Nations climate summits called Global Climate, Local Journalisms. The fact that journalists overwhelmingly write about climate change as political news and in stories that lean heavily on politician-lawmakers as sources gives the views of people like Inhofe vastly disproportional power on the issue.

In the popular media, in the U.S. and in countries across the globe, members of the scientific and business community are cited less often than politicians by a wide margin.

“Politics is the avenue through which people come to understand climate change, which may be a way to say that politics is a way people come to misunderstand climate change or, more accurately, how they come to understand mostly just the politics of climate change,” said University of Denver media studies professor Adrienne Russell, one of the authors of the book.

Russell told the Colorado Independent that recent statistics on public perceptions of climate change make more sense when seen in that light. As has been widely reported, climate change denial is increasing among the public even as the science becomes more robust and policy changes to address the issue take effect and the clean energy industry advances.

“In Copenhagen during the last summit, you had new-energy business people trying to tell their stories. Yet reporters from every country were largely quoting only politicians,” Russell said. “Granted, it was a United Nations summit. The big story was what policy would come out of the gathering. Yet, major business and science players were there too.

“Danish Climate Consortium representatives told me that the case they wanted to make at the summit was that alternative energy models developed in Denmark demonstrated that development could successfully take place without adding to global warming. The models show there is money to be made and infrastructure to build and energy to use in a post carbon-fueled world. This is a business topic. The story is that it can be done very successfully. Yet, by comparison to politicians, they were left to wander in the media wilderness.”

A chart from the book on journalism story sourcing at the UN summits:

Other interesting findings related in the book include the fact that reporters from nations more vulnerable to climate change– countries such as Bangladesh and Egypt– write more urgently and often about the topic than reporters based elsewhere. Also, women are rarely included in climate change reporting, making up a scant 12 percent of story sources.

In her chapter of the book, Russell found that coverage of climate change in general and of the climate change summits in particular was more robust online than offline. She said reporters at mainstream outlets were producing way too much material to be reprinted in the newspapers they worked for and that the online work being done by people like New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, for example, was more insightful and rapid fire and leaned on more diverse sourcing. Revkin’s Dot Earth blog is hosted on the New York Times platform.

Russell said that despite the million laments about the death of journalism brought by the Web, she viewed the coverage she studied for the book being produced by U.S. journalists online as a source of great hope.

“There is real energy and credibility in the material, which is feverishly followed and fact checked in real time by readers and other journalists. The sourcing is different from the sourcing of offline stories, which I think is a welcome change. Significant is that professional models of journalism for a century-plus have been mostly exported from the United States to the rest of the world. In that light, I look at many of the changes in U.S. journalism tied to the Web as a sign of larger changes to come and for the better.”

Inhofe, incidentally, was one politician who got a cool reception in Copenhagen. The few reporters who showed up for the fleeting staircase press conference he called asked him for details to support his claim that a global warming “hoax” has been perpetrated over decades by scientists all over the world.

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

A reporter for Der Spiegel told him he was ridiculous.

[ Image: Aaron Koblin video of flight patterns over the U.S. About 2 million Americans travel by air every day. ]
–
Note: Prof. Adrienne Russell is related to the author of this post.

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Inhofe and Buck

Buck spent Wednesday telling concerned supporters in college town Fort Collins to ignore his comments this past weekend on Meet the Press, in which he declared that he believed homosexuality is a choice and that gays should resist same-sex attraction the way alcoholics should resist the temptation to drink.

“Let’s just stay focused on economic issues for the next 13 days,” he said. Not even Buck could stick to that plan.

As Bob Moore at the Fort Collins Coloradoan reports, hours later Buck attended a fundraiser in Loveland, not a college town, that featured Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, an insurance salesman who received his bachelor’s degree at age 38, who has no scientific training and who is the most vocal global warming skeptic in American politics. Inhofe has called global warming “the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state.” He is also one of the country’s most ardent opponents of equal rights for gay people.

Buck celebrated Inhofe as a leader.

“Sen. Inhofe was the first person to stand up and say this global warming is the greatest hoax that has been perpetrated. The evidence just keeps supporting his view, and more and more people’s view, of what’s going on,” Buck said.

Trevor Kincaid, spokesman for Buck opponent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, told Moore that Buck’s opposition to science was… disturbing.

“The simple fact that Ken Buck doesn’t believe in proven science is troubling and calls into question his understanding of more complex issues. It helps explain why he would oppose developing the new energy economy that would create jobs right here in Colorado.”

Spurred by Buck’s Meet the Press anti-gay statements, equal-rights group One Colorado is circulating a petition asking Buck to retract his statements and acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence that being gay is not a choice or a disease.

Below some quotes from the Tuesday conference in Denver that gain power in light of Buck’s support of Inhofe.

Psychologist Sarah Burgamy:

“Buck’s statements were just wholly inaccurate according to every bit of research and science [the professional psychological field] has compiled…. The American Psychological Association which is the largest body of psychologists in the world, affirmed over three decades ago that homosexuality is not a disease and disorder and that’s been the case for years. Every bit of analysis says the same thing. It’s a healthy variation of human sexuality.

“When spreading inaccuracies from such a high-profile position… that goes home [to] extreme negative effect.. It’s a dangerous context to support.”

Dr. Mark Thrun public health physician:

“In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual… In other words, [gay people] don’t have any treatable disease that Ken Buck seemed to allude to. The American Psychological Association has for many, many years asserted that homosexuality is not a choice but rather an ingrained and essential aspect of who someone is….

“On behalf of the medical community we denounce Ken Buck’s comments. We feel he should retract his statements. Science does not support his view that homosexuality is a treatable disorder. It is not a choice, and that is affirmed by science.

“I feel strongly that we should not be giving fodder for extremist ideology with statements contrary to the facts.”

A Climate change science petition is likely on the way.

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Our report was based on a study conducted by London’s Royal Society of Chemistry, which spelled out decades of problems with water and air quality in Estonia stemming from oil shale production– a cautionary tale as Colorado considers ramping up its own long-dormant oil shale production efforts.

A reader sent us the link to our story on the business news site that runs under the umbrella of one of Estonia’s largest news dailies, Postimees. In case you don’t read Estonian, the reader told us there was no real editorial accompanying our piece, just a link that has sparked reader comments.

The reader, an Estonian named Kaspar Kulli, pointed out that oil shale technology has changed a great deal in the years since it was last attempted commercially in Colorado in the 1980s. We did note that the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) report made the observation that things have improved in Estonia since the 1980s.

“There are different technologies to produce energy from oil shale and to deal with the leftovers like semi-coke [a troublesome waste byproduct, according to the RSC report],” wrote Kulli, who went on to explain his own interest in the industry.

“I’m in partnership with a couple of Estonian inventors who have patented technologies for a ‘combi-station’ that uses all kind of organic material, also oil shale, and can produce oil (that can be made into biodiesel), electricity and heat.

“It’s not as powerful as one coal-fired power plant, but using several ‘combi-stations’ side by side they can put out the necessary power. Compared to the conventional coal-fired power plants, the carbon footprint is very, very small. And it uses no water.”

Two of the biggest knocks on restarting full-scale, commercial oil shale production efforts in Colorado is that the process consumes far too much of the state’s most precious resource, water, and that it will require too much conventional electricity from carbon-belching coal-fire power plants.

The issue blew up last week when U.S. Rep. James Inhofe, R-Okla., criticized Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter on Capitol Hill for focusing on renewable energy when his state has so much untapped oil shale potential (the entire Green River Formation in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah is estimated to have more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia if oil shale can be economically and environmentally tapped).

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Conservationists say there’s no better example than Estonia.

The world’s leading producer and consumer of oil shale — generated by superheating organic kerogen trapped in rocks in sand — Estonia has seen some serious environmental problems over the course of 80 years of production, according to a study published in the journal of the London-based Royal Society of Chemistry.

Besides “voluminous dewatering,” the chief concern in arid Colorado, oil shale production in Estonia leaves huge heaps of residual limestone, ash piles and semi-coke, and the power plants that consume oil shale emit above-average amounts of carbon dioxide, while “the groundwater regime, and often also the water quality, are altered in mined-out areas.”

If that doesn’t sound scary enough to seriously question risking Colorado’s fragile mountain environment, consider this quote from the report titled “Environmental problems in the Estonian oil shale industry”:

Oil shale waste and waste heaps may be considered a rather innocent production residue; however, from time to time they are subject to self-ignition.

The Western Slope of Colorado is currently a massive tinderbox as a result of an ongoing mountain pine park beetle infestation that has killed nearly 2 million acres of lodgepole pine forests. Self-igniting waste heaps should probably be avoided at all costs.

To be fair, the report states the worst of Estonia’s environmental degradation occurred during the 1980s — about when Exxon was packing up its oil shale camps and heading out of town in Colorado, leaving thousands out of work overnight — and that things have improved a bit since. But much work clearly remains, and many conservationists question pumping billions into oil shale research instead of bolstering renewable production.

So transforming Colorado into Oklahoma via the oil shale industry may be a goal of Republican U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, but surely even he would draw the line at turning the Centennial State into the second coming of Estonia.

Inhofe, part of a partisan ambush of Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter Tuesday during his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, apparently hadn’t read a recent University of Colorado report on the dire condition of the Colorado River if current drought conditions and usage patterns continue.

The new CU study published in the American Geophysical Union journal Water Resources Research found that reservoirs along the 1,450-mile lifeline of the American Southwest could be fully depleted by the middle of the century if current conditions persist (they’re currently at just 59 percent of capacity). Pressure on the river is exacerbated by unprecedented energy production over the past decade.

Inhofe questioned why Ritter was on hand to tout green energy jobs in Colorado when the state is sitting on so much undeveloped oil shale. But numerous studies have indicated full-scale commercial oil shale production could suck the river dry. Even industry officials have acknowledged the thirsty nature of the extraction process, which at minimum will require two to three barrels of water per barrel of oil produced.

Oil and gas companies since the 1950s have been acquiring water rights in the Colorado River drainage – senior rights that could preempt agricultural and recreational users on the state’s Western Slope if and when oil shale ever moves into full-scale commercial production.

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Gov. Bill Ritter

Gov. Bill Ritter is calling out Republican members of the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee for what he called a very partisan approach to the debate on climate change legislation and new energy versus traditional energy jobs.

After testifying along with three other governors during a hearing titled “Clean Energy Jobs, Climate-Related Policies and Economic Growth: State and Local Views,” Ritter said in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday that the tone of the conversation on Capitol Hill caught him off-guard.

“The Senate committee hearing, and it’s probably something Sen. [Mark] Udall is more used to than I am, but it was a very partisan deal,” Ritter said, referring to the Colorado Democrat who joined him on the conference call. “When the western governors meet to talk about climate and energy, there’s very strong bipartisan support for addressing these two issues together.”

Udall took the opportunity to back up Ritter’s comments and take a dig at his fellow senators on the other side of the aisle. “I take my cues from the western governors and will continue to find bipartisan solutions here, and there are plenty of them frankly,” he said.

Specifically, Ritter responded to U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who questioned the governor’s very presence at the hearing but didn’t give him the chance to answer.

“One of the things [Inhofe] said was, ‘How can you be here when you have such significant oil shale deposits?’” Ritter said. “We very much support the [research and development] projects in the northwest part of the state where there’s vast deposits of oil shale.

“But until somebody can tell me that there’s a technology that protects our groundwater and air… and we know what level of energy is necessary just to produce a material that can be extracted in a conventional fashion, I don’t believe we should be writing the rules for commercial leasing.”

Ritter was referring to Bush administration midnight rulemaking to set royalty rates and oversight regulations for an industry that is very much in its nascent stages of development and could be decades from producing commercially viable amounts of oil. Udall concurred with Ritter on the oil shale issue, adding all forms of energy must be pursued.

“The governor and I both believe that you’ve got to do it all and there’s no silver bullet,” Udall said. “There may well be silver buckshot, but to make a bet, as Sen. Inhofe suggests, just on oil shale is one that right now’s unlikely to pay off in the ways that we need for it to pay off.”

Asked about the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or so-called Waxman-Markey bill named for its key House sponsors, Ritter said it needs to acknowledge the cleaner-burning potential of natural gas. Udall agreed, and added that he’ll work on that aspect of the Senate version of the bill, as well as push for a higher renewable electricity standard than what the House passed.

“I believe [Waxman-Markey] gives short shrift to natural gas,” Ritter said. “There’s one mention of natural gas if my memory serves me, and it is about a research project for conversion to natural gas [transportation] fleets. There should be far more done with natural gas and incentivizing the production of natural gas because it’s such a cleaner burning carbon fuel.”

Ritter has taken some heat lately for going to bat for the state’s natural gas industry, especially on the topic of legislation being pushed by U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette that seeks to remove an exemption under the Safe Drinking Water Act for the gas drilling process called hydraulic fracturing.

Ritter supports more research on the issue before turning it over to federal oversight.

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