Republican Presidential Field Tilts Rightward on Climate Change

Wall Street Journal - Amy Harder and Beth Reinhard

Marco Rubio faces attacks over past support for cap-and-trade, and several rivals have moved to the right on climate change

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio campaigns Friday in Hillsboro, N.H. PHOTO: MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

 Shortly after a conservative website on Wednesday posted 2008 footage of Sen. Marco Rubio backing a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, his campaign roared back with a counterattack that included an entire web page aimed at debunking the video.
Mr. Rubio's muscular response revealed how toxic the issue of climate change has become in the Republican Party under President Barack Obama, who has sought to make reducing carbon emissions to alleviate global warming one of his signature accomplishments.
As speaker of the Florida House, Mr. Rubio did vote for a 2008 bill authorizing the state to come up with rules for a cap-and-trade plan, though he raised questions about its cost and effectiveness. A press release from the House Majority Office at the time described the bill as a "responsible response to concerns about global climate change."
But since running for U.S. Senate in 2010 as the conservative alternative to then-Gov. Charlie Crist, Mr. Rubio has questioned whether climate change is man-made, and opposed potential remedies like cap-and-trade that he says would hurt the economy.
Shifts by Mr. Rubio and some of his rivals on the issue recall an inconvenient past that many in the GOP would like to forget: Republicans, not Democrats, first championed market-based systems to control pollution, as a way to avoid more direct regulation.
Until 2008, many Republicans, including then-presidential nominee John McCain, supported cap-and-trade to address climate change. Once Mr. Obama won the White House, Republicans swiftly unified against nearly all of his initiatives, including a cap-and-trade bill that would have set limits on carbon emissions and allowed companies to trade pollution credits to comply.
Responding to what they call big-government overreach by Mr. Obama, many Republicans have moved to the right on several other issues as well, including illegal immigration, health-insurance mandates and the Common Core academic standards.
GOP candidates who had generally accepted the scientific consensus on man-made climate change, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, have said recently that it is unclear how much, if at all, humans are contributing to warmer temperatures.
"The climate is changing—it always has, that's not any news flash—and the outcomes of that are still not determined," Mr. Bush said in response to a question at a New Hampshire town hall in December. "To create policies for today that will have some impact for 50 years from now is almost destined to be wrong."

Then-Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio points to his official portrait in Tallahassee, Fla., in 2008. PHOTO: PHIL COALE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

 The GOP front-runners, Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), have been the most consistent in questioning and even denying climate change. "I believe in clean air, immaculate air," Mr. Trump said on CNN in September. "But I don't believe in climate change."
This view collides with a broad consensus among scientists that human activity is increasing the Earth's temperature, and that action is needed to soften the consequences. One question is whether the ultimate GOP nominee will have to moderate his position in the general election.
For now, that consistency of Messrs. Trump and Cruz has worked to their advantage, Republican strategists say, leaving rivals little room to outflank them on the right.
"You do much less damage to yourself politically if you just stay in one place," said Mike McKenna, a Republican lobbyist on energy and environmental issues.
In the March 2008 video leaked to the Breitbart News Network on Wednesday, Mr. Rubio calls a federal cap-and-trade program to address climate change "inevitable" and says Florida's Department of Environmental Protection should design its own plan. He would go on to preside over a unanimous vote in favor of directing the state's environmental agency to develop ground rules for companies to limit their carbon emissions, though Florida ultimately never adopted a cap-and-trade program.
"No bill comes through the House unless the speaker likes what's in it," said former Republican Rep. Paige Kreegel, who sponsored the bill as the chairman of the House energy committee. He has not endorsed a candidate in 2016.
Mr. Rubio has said the bill's requirement that the plan come back to the Legislature for approval was a backstop to ensure it would never happen. His campaign's new web page says that Mr. Rubio "successfully fought cap and trade in Florida," and that the video was "falsely edited," because it left out Mr. Rubio saying, "The way we're going to lower carbon emissions is not through government mandates."
Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, an outspoken critic of climate science, also released a statement defending Mr. Rubio, whom Mr. Inhofe had endorsed a few days earlier.
Meanwhile, the three Democratic candidates, including front-runner Hillary Clinton, have consistently supported climate-change science and pushed for more aggressive climate policies than Mr. Obama's. "There's hell of a lot more coherence among Democratic politicians than among Republican politicians on this issue," Mr. Mckenna said.
Polling indicates that most voters, especially Republicans, don't think the government should make climate change a priority. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from December, just 3% of GOP primary voters picked climate as the top issue the government should address, compared to 30% of Democrats and 11% of swing voters.
Climate change is expected to become a bigger issue in the general election, given the differences between the parties.

Link

• The Republican Party stands alone in climate denial

Hot And Dry Prompts Calls For Climate Action

Fairfax - Imogen Jubb*

The government's support for a massive new coal mine goes against the community demand for reduced climate pollution.

Illustration: Matt Golding

If Australia feels to you like it's growing hotter and extreme weather events are becoming more common there is a very good reason – it is and they are. The just released Bureau of Meteorology annual climate statement concludes that 2015 is very likely to be confirmed as the hottest year globally on record.
In Australia we have seen record-breaking hot days, hot nights, early-season fires and drought. Australia's three warmest springs have occurred in the past three years – and eight of Australia's warmest years on record have now occurred since 2002.
We are now experiencing changes to extreme events in Australia – notably more fire weather, record-breaking temperatures and heatwaves. We are experiencing the consequences of climate change here and now.

Mallee farmer Leon Hogan on his property near Birchip. His wheat crop harvest is down 80 per cent in 2015. Photo: Justin McManus

The bureau's statement confirms that every year since 1985 has recorded above-average temperatures globally. Every teenager alive today has experienced almost only record-breaking heat. How much hotter will the rest of their lives be?
The heat this year brought an early start to the fire season in Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria; 236 homes were destroyed by fire across the country in 2015. Six people lost their lives. These are events of trauma and stress, from which it can take years to recover.
Farmers are also experiencing the stress of drought across the country. According to the bureau report, rainfall has been very much below average for large areas of eastern Australia, with water storage levels dropping as a result. Large parts of eastern Australia commenced 2015 with a long-term lack of rainfall and over the course of the year this got worse.

One farmer's reaction after drought ruined his crop.

Southern and eastern Australia have experienced longer-term drying trends, with a 20 per cent drop in autumn-winter rainfall since about 1970 in south-west Western Australia. There has been a similar decline in late autumn and early winter rainfall in south-east Australia since the mid-1990s.
The drop in rainfall is well outside past variability.
The hot and dry spring meant losses for farmers as crops failed in southern Australia. Estimated losses were expected to be about $1 billion to $2 billion in Victoria alone.

Premier Daniel Andrews toured the Mallee and spoke with farmers in November. Photo: Justin McManus

When natural variability and climate change push in the same direction, we will experience weather and climate beyond anything we have known. According to the British Met Office, the warming of 2015 is predominantly from global pollution, with the El Nino event providing the icing on the cake.
The global agreement in Paris struck a deal that aims to limit warming by 2.7 degrees when science tells us we need to aim for 1.5 or 2 degrees at most. This presents an enormous challenge, but it is a challenge we can take on.
Already one in four homes in South Australia has rooftop solar. Battery storage will create a revolution in the way we think about energy. The technology for a carbon-neutral society already exists. We just need to implement it – and do it fast.
The Australian government is talking the talk internationally but not walking the walk in our own backyard. Emissions in Australia are going up since the carbon price was removed.
China has declared it will not approve any coal mines for at least the next three years. The rest of the world is taking action. We need to start catching up – not taking backward steps.
If the Adani Carmichael coal mine – recently approved by the Turnbull government – goes ahead, the pollution resulting from that single project will almost entirely wipe out Australia's pollution reduction commitments in Paris.
Big polluting companies are continuing to damage our climate, and we are experiencing the consequences here and now. The consequences are more fires, more heatwaves, more drought and more extreme weather.
Australians deserve better. We owe it to our farmers, to our firefighters and nurses, the cooks and carers that hold our communities together in times of stress.
Australians want to keep our climate safe. We want renewable energy instead of polluting fossil fuels. We saw a mass outpouring of community support for action on climate change with the biggest climate rallies Australia has ever seen at the end of last year before the Paris conference. There were massive turnouts of an estimated 60,000 in Melbourne and 45,000 in Sydney.
This kind of community spirit and support shows that we can overcome the challenge of climate pollution, limit the extremes we will face and look after each other when they happen.
Our politicians represent us, and have a responsibility to plan ahead for challenges today and tomorrow. Our government has a duty of care to protect life and to look after our communities. They can't do this and at the same time allow new coal mines to open in our country.

*Imogen Jubb is acting manager for the Climate Reality Project at the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Activists Lose Criminal Case On Climate Change Defense – But Judge Praises Effort

The Guardian - Julia Carrie Wong

The ‘Delta 5’ argued that they acted out of ‘necessity’ to prevent greater harm of catastrophic climate change, an issue that has been the subject of rallies from Australia, pictured, to the US. Photograph: Claire Mahjoub/Demotix/Corbis

Five environmental activists who failed to convince a court that their attempt to block crude oil trains near Seattle was a legally justifiable act of civil disobedience on Friday were nonetheless praised by a judge as "part of the solution" to climate change.
On Friday, the campaigners were convicted in a court in suburban Seattle of misdemeanor trespassing relating to a September 2014 protest in which they blocked railway tracks used by crude oil trains in Everett, Washington.
They were acquitted of a second count of misdemeanor obstructing a train.
The so-called "Delta 5" – Michael LaPointe, Patrick Mazza, Jackie Minchew, Elizabeth Spoerri and Abigail Brockway – had hoped that their trial would mark the first time that a US jury was allowed to consider the "necessity defense" in a case of climate activism.
The defendants intended to argue that their acts, though illegal, were necessary to prevent the greater harm of catastrophic climate change.
But after allowing two days of expert testimony on topics ranging from the Paris climate talks to railway safety standards and the health impacts of particulate matter, Judge Anthony E Howard ruled that the defense had failed to present sufficient evidence to show that the defendants had "no reasonable legal alternative" to trespassing on a private rail yard and blocking trains.
The case is a blow to environmental campaigners but marks the furthest defendants have managed to go in an American courtroom using the so-called "necessity" defense that argues such actions are justified to combat catastrophic climate change.
The activists progressed unusually far because Howard allowed them to call expert witnesses to testify to the harms of climate change, even though he later felt compelled to instruct the jury to disregard their evidence. The judge appeared to do so reluctantly, expressing some sympathy for the activists in a court on Thursday.
"Frankly the court is convinced that the defendants are far from the problem and are part of the solution to the problem of climate change," Howard said from the bench. But, he added: "I am bound by legal precedent, no matter what my personal beliefs might be."
That precedent, including a per se ban on necessity defenses in cases of indirect civil disobedience by the ninth circuit court of appeals, is overwhelmingly against the idea that such an argument should be available to defendants. After his ruling, the judge directed the jury to disregard the expert testimony on climate change, public health, and the dangers of transporting crude oil by train.
In an act of judicial consolation, Howard added that he hoped the defendants, whom he described as "tireless advocates of the kind that we need more of in this society", would find "some value in having been able to present their beliefs in a public forum". He also allowed an extra 10 minutes for lunch on Thursday, in recognition of the fact that he had "just crushed your hopes and dreams".
Though the necessity defense dominated the proceedings in the courtroom, it is something of a legal oddity that MJ McCallum, Bridge Joyce and Evelyn Chuang – three of the four lawyers on the defense team – recalled learning about in law school through a case of sailors lost at sea who resorted to cannibalism when one of their fellow castaways died of natural causes. (The defendants in Regina v Dudley and Stephens were found guilty when they admitted that they actually murdered the child they ate, but trust a defense team to put a different spin on it.)
Robert Goldsmith was the sole attorney on the defense team to have argued for necessity, which he did successfully, once, in the 1979 case of 20 protesters who blocked the entrance to the Zion nuclear power plant in Waukegan, Illinois.
Despite the odds, however, the necessity defense remains the holy grail for some climate activists.
"We're going to keep working with folks to keep pushing these defenses," said Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist who served 21 months behind bars for a civil disobedience action after a judge refused his attempt to employ the necessity defense.
DeChristopher's organization, Climate Disobedience Center, is supporting the efforts of another group that was arrested attempting to block a fracked natural gas pipeline in Westchester County, New York. According to DeChristopher, the protesters will try the necessity defense during a bench trial today, 15 January, in New York.
The defense has been used successfully in the UK, where a jury acquitted six Greenpeace protesters in 2008 after they argued their occupation and damage to a Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent was justified by the threat of climate change.
Beyond the necessity defense, some climate activists are looking at other strategies in the US to challenge the limitations of statutory law and push for urgent governmental action to limit climate change.
"Our legal principles have to account for the clear, imminent danger perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry," said Mary Wood, a professor of environmental law at the University of Oregon.
Wood is an advocate for applying "public trust doctrine" to climate change, arguing that a government has a fundamental responsibility to preserve crucial resources like the land, water, and air that "predates statutory law".
Michael Foster, who attended the Delta Five trial each day, works with Seattle youth who adopted Wood's theory and sued the Washington state government for failing to adequately protect the environment for their generation.
"The system is broken enough that we have to pursue every other avenue," Foster said.
In December, a judge issued a ruling in the case, which Foster described as "kickass poetry about the constitutional rights of these kids to air, land, and water".
Though the loss of the necessity defense in this case was a disappointment, DeChristopher remains hopeful that the law will be pushed to take a different view of climate change civil disobedience.
"We understand that precedent is not in our favor," he said, "but we also understand that people's consciences are hard to oppress."

Link

• A crime justified by climate change? Activists caught in legal showdown

In Climate Move, Obama Halts New Coal Mining Leases on Public Lands

New York Times - Coral Davenport

Full rail cars outside Cloud Peak Energy’s Antelope Coal loading terminal in Rawlins, Wyo. About 40 percent of the nation’s coal is mined on public land in the state. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration announced on Friday a halt to new coal mining leases on public lands as it considers an overhaul of the program that could lead to increased costs for energy companies and a slowdown in extraction.
"Given serious concerns raised about the federal coal program, we're taking the prudent step to hit pause on approving significant new leases so that decisions about those leases can benefit from the recommendations that come out of the review," said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. "During this time, companies can continue production activities on the large reserves of recoverable coal they have under lease, and we'll make accommodations in the event of emergency circumstances to ensure this pause will have no material impact on the nation's ability to meet its power generation needs."
The move represents a significant setback for the coal industry, effectively freezing new coal production on federal lands and sending a signal to energy markets that could turn investors away from an already reeling industry. President Obama telegraphed the step in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night when he said "I'm going to push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet."
Last year, Mr. Obama used his executive authority under the Clean Air Act to complete regulations that would limit carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, the nation's largest source of planet-warming pollution. Republicans have attacked the rules, which could lead to the closing of hundreds of coal plants, as a "war on coal." A halt to new leases would go even further by leaving coal unmined.
The action is certain to further inflame a political debate over the federal government's control of public lands, most recently illustrated by an armed takeover of a wildlife refuge in Oregon. About 40 percent of the nation's coal is mined on public land, and most of that land is in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.
"It appears that they're going after the federal coal leasing program with the intention of keeping coal in the ground," said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association.
But companies can continue to mine the coal reserves under lease, estimated to be enough to sustain current levels of production from federal land for about 20 years, according to the administration official.
"Even as our nation transitions to cleaner energy sources, building on smart policies and progress already underway, we know that coal will continue to be an important domestic energy source in the years ahead," Ms. Jewell said. "We haven't undertaken a comprehensive review of the program in more than 30 years, and we have an obligation to current and future generations to ensure the federal coal program delivers a fair return to American taxpayers and takes into account its impacts on climate change."
Mr. Obama hopes to make curbing climate change a cornerstone of his legacy. The administration's action is the latest step in his ambitious efforts to use his executive authority to tackle climate change, though it could be reversed by another president.
As the administration has sought additional ways to discourage production and consumption of the fuel most responsible for global warming, economists have proposed a "production fee" associated with emissions from coal. Administration officials have estimated that cost — tied to what they call the "social cost of carbon" — at about $40 per ton of carbon dioxide produced.
A fee of that size "would shut down the industry on federal lands entirely," said Alan Krupnick, an economist at Resources for the Future, which studies environmental economics.
He added, "But even a small charge that begins to internalize these costs — say, a couple of dollars per ton — would put the industry on notice."
The environmental advocacy group 350.org, which led the successful campaign against the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, has since turned its efforts to pushing Mr. Obama to shut down new leases for coal mining on public lands.
"The administration's top priority needs to be to keep fossil fuels in the ground," said Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the group. "Any move that increases the cost of extracting fossil fuels on public land."
In 2014, the federal government received about $1.2 billion in leases, royalties and other fees for coal mining on public lands, with a leasing rate of $3 per acre, plus royalties paid on the market value of the coal at the time of extraction.
But a 2013 report by the Government Accountability Office questioned whether the lease and royalty rates accurately reflected the market value of the coal. "The lease payments are notoriously known for being paid below market value," said Dan Bucks, a former director of the Montana Department of Revenue.
"In the current system, there's not an open and competitive process; it's hidden from public view," he added. "If they established a competitive leasing process, you'd get leasing at market prices. It's important that there be a fair return to the taxpayer."
The push to increase the cost to coal companies comes as the industry is struggling after one of its worst years in recent memory. The industry is suffering from a one-two punch from market forces and government policies. For decades, coal has dominated the American electricity market as the cheapest source of fuel, but in recent years, it has been overtaken by cheap natural gas.
At the same time, Mr. Obama's new climate change regulations are driving electric utilities to shut down coal plants and invest in cleaner sources of energy, including natural gas, which produces half of the carbon pollution of coal, as well as wind and solar power.
A wave of bankruptcies has hit the nation's largest coal companies, most recently on Monday with the bankruptcy filing of Arch Coal, the nation's second-largest coal company. United States production of coal and employment in the coal sector have fallen to their lowest levels since the 1980s.

Links

• With Coal Industry Under Pressure, Some See Long-Term Decline
• Obama to Unveil Tougher Environmental Plan With His Legacy in Mind