Senate Squabbling Again Over Climate Concerns

The President remains committed to advancing his stalled legislative agenda. Addressing the Democratic National Committee in Washington last Saturday, Obama insisted he is not going to let go of his aspirations

for America. "I'm not going to walk away from the American people," he said. "I'm not going to walk away on any challenge."

However, Senators from Red States, Coal States, and Rust Belt States are concerned about job losses and increased costs associated with a climate

bill. Many lawmakers are also concerned about controlling the emissions of rapidly developing nations like India and China.
Republican Senators are virtually unanimous in their resistance to the Democrat's legislative efforts and with the recent Republican win in Massachusetts, they now have the numbers they need to block legislation.
In this hostile political and economic climate, the chances of passing meaningful climate change legislation seem bleak. However, Steve Eule, the US Chamber of Commerce vice president held out hope that a solution can be reached. "It's possible to have a compromise" he said, "but it won't be easy."
While the President continues his ongoing appeal for bipartisanship, in the Senate, Democrats are working on a more modest package of climate and energy measures. To ease the passage of energy legislation, there is talk of eliminating the cap-and-trade component of the plan. Senate moderates from both parties including Agriculture Chairwoman Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), and Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) are all pushing for an energy only approach without putting a price on carbon emissions.

For The Love Of Oil...

Investors want oil giants to answer questions on their involvement in the environmentally damaging extraction of oil from tar sands

Shareholders at BP and Shell will get the chance to vote at upcoming AGMs on whether to force oil giants to come clean on their Canadian tar sands involvement

Institutional investors including The Co-operative Asset Management and Rathbone Greenbank have co-signed a ‘special resolution,’ which would force the two companies to fully disclose and justify their involvement in Canadian tar sands.

The oil sands in Canada are the largest reserve of petroleum in the world outside of Saudi Arabia with an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 trillion barrels of oil trapped in a mixture of sand, water and clay.

However, the energy needed to extract and process the oil results in greenhouse gas emissions per barrel three times those of conventional oil. The spread of the tar sands exploration and production is also destroying forests and impacting on local wildlife and communities.

Shell has invested almost one-third of its resources in extracting oil from tar sands and produces 155,000 barrels a day. However, it is reported to be 'scaling down' some of its investment because of concerns over the high costs of extracting the oil.

In contrast, BP is rapidly expanding its investment. Amidst criticism from investors, the oil company has acquired a 50 per cent stake in the Sunrise Project, a tar sands extraction project near Alberta and has entered into talks to buy a major share of Canadian oil sands company Value Creation.

Shareholder power

The investors putting forward the special resolution remain sceptical that it will get the 75 per cent support necessary for it to be passed and discussed but are hopeful it will bring the issue of tar sands to the fore once again.

‘Since the resolution was announced, BP has been forced out of their bunker to comment on the carbon intensity of the projects, the oil price they need to make the projects economically viable and whether they are factoring in a carbon price,’ said Niall O’Shea, Head of Responsible Investing at the Co-operative Asset Management.

‘Realistically there is no chance that we will get enough votes for the resolution to be passed, but it’s what happens around the resolution that is important,’ he added.  

The NGO Fair Pensions, which helped to draft the resolution, said even when unsuccessful such resolutions can prove influential.

‘If you look back at the history of shareholder activism there have been changes in company behaviour when a small percentage of investors vote in favour of special resolutions of this kind. 

'Hugh Fernley Whittingstall’s ‘free-range chicken resolution’ had a big impact even though only one in ten investors voted for it,’ said Louise Rouse of Fair Pensions.

Global Warming, Al Gore, and How it Affects Us All

Former Vice President Al Gore, the target of ridicule by climate skeptics this winter, says he wishes global warming were an "illusion."

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has long warned of the dangers of global warming. He spoke about them during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

Unfortunately, its dangers are real, despite mistakes by a leading United Nations climate-science panel, Gore writes Sunday in the New York Times. "The overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged," he says, adding:

In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

Climate skeptics, citing recent snowfall in parts of the East Coast, have mocked Gore. Tycoon Donald Trump says Gore should be stripped of his Nobel Peace Prize for warning about climate change. "It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries "uncle,""  Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., wrote on Twitter.
Gore says global data show last month was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago and the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
He says these rising temperatures have increased evaporation from the oceans, putting more moisture into the atmosphere and thus heavier rain and snow in some areas.
Gore, author of the best-selling An Inconvenient Truth and founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection, acknowledges at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages published by the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change or IPCC. He says such research will never be "completely free of mistakes."
The IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore for a report that called climate change "unequivocal" and "very likely" caused by human activity, announced Saturday that it will seek independent review of its major reports.
Gore says the U.S. Senate needs to pass legislation, already approved by the House, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who's been working with Democrats to craft a compromise, says the current so-called "cap and trade" bill won't pass.
In an op-ed piece Sunday by the New York Times' Thomas Friedman, Graham is quoted as saying that Republicans need to support some kind of climate bill even if they don't believe in global warming.
Graham says the United States needs to reduce its dependence on foreign oil and compete with China for clean energy jobs. He says the GOP needs to regain the support of young Americans, most of whom are concerned about climate change.
Gore says U.S. industry also needs to back a climate bill, but he likens its reluctance to Big Tobacco's decades-long fight against regulation:

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.