Via Climate Progress:

The Kerry-Boxer bill is moving along well and we are looking forward to introducing legislation that will create millions of clean energy jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and ensure American leadership in the clean energy economy.Because of Senator Kennedy’s recent passing, Senator Kerry’s August hip surgery, and the intensive work on health care legislation particularly on the Finance Committee where Sen. Kerry serves, Majority Leader Reid has agreed to provide some additional time to work on the final details of our bill, and to reach out to colleagues and important stakeholders. We have told the Majority Leader that our goal is to introduce our bill later in September.

Update: Majority Leader Reid’s statement, also via Climate Progress:

“Senator Reid appreciates the leadership of Senators Boxer and Kerry as they shepherd this important legislation through their respective committees. They are working diligently to craft a well-balanced bill and Senator Reid fully expects the Senate to have ample time to consider this comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation before the end of the year.”

Institution of Mechanical Engineers:

Many people believe that we are fast approaching a critical point in dealing with climate change. Our planet is continuing to get hotter due to the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, most worryingly carbon dioxide (CO2), due to human activity.

The consensus is that we cannot allow global average temperature to rise by 2oC above pre-industrial levels. If we do – and many predict this will happen within the next few decades – dramatic changes to our climate may occur which could jeopardise modern civilisation.

What can be done to prevent this rise? For many years, governments have primarily focused on climate change mitigation: reducing the amount of CO2 each nation emits into the atmosphere. More recently, climate change adaptation has been embraced: an approach which sets out to ensure that critical assets, such as power generation, transport links and the urban environment, are redesigned and rebuilt to protect against future changes in climate.

A third, less explored approach, is geo-engineering: where technology is used to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, or where the planet is cooled by reflecting solar radiation back into space. Geo-engineering could be another potential component in our approach to climate change that could provide the world with extra time to decarbonise the global economy.

Geo-Engineering – Giving Us Time to Act? –

Via Green Inc.

Press release below the fold.

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Washington Post:

EBOCHA, Nigeria — Kingsley Okene is the chief here. But despite his authority, he says he has never managed to snuff the giant gas-fueled flames that have towered over his Niger Delta village for decades.Neither has the government of Nigeria, though it has often vowed to do so.

The flames spout day and night from tall smokestacks, fired by the gas that is a byproduct of oil pumped here by the Italian company Agip. As many as 100 flares burn at petroleum companies’ outposts across the oil-rich delta, belching harmful greenhouse gases and, human rights activists say, sickening residents.

New York Times:

UNIONTOWN, Ala. — Almost every day, a train pulls into a rail yard in rural Alabama, hauling 8,500 tons of a disaster that occurred 350 miles away to a final resting place, the Arrowhead Landfill here in Perry County, which is very poor and almost 70 percent black.

To county leaders, the train’s loads, which will total three million cubic yards of coal ash from a massive spill at a power plant in east Tennessee last December, are a tremendous financial windfall. A per-ton “host fee” that the landfill operators pay the county will add more than $3 million to the county’s budget of about $4.5 million.

Here is TVA’s Ash Disposal Plan:

Approved Offsite Ash Disposal Options Plan –

Transcript below the fold via WhiteHouse.gov.

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Background:

Remember the lobbying firm that got busted forging anti climate bill letters to Congress on behalf of a coal industry front group a few weeks ago?

In response to a harshly worded query from Representative Ed Markey, Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Bonner and Associates has lawyered-up in a major way and taken a highly defensive posture.

bonner_akingump –

I wrote last night about a series of new revelations in the case of the fraudulent climate letters to members of Congress. Throughout the day, Talking Points Memo has uncovered several additional developments.

• Astroturf Firm Bonner Institutes New No-Forgery Quality Control Policy
• Bonner Paid Productivity Bonus To Employee Who Forged Letter

Most importantly, TPM has obtained a copy of the letter Akin Gump sent to Congressman Markey’s office on behalf of Bonner and Associates. The letter included as an attachment a set of talking points and sample script employees working on the ACCCE campaign were given.

Crucially, the talking points specifically instructed employees to lie to the community organizations they were calling, telling them they were working with seniors/veterans groups and that other seniors/veterans groups had written the letter they would be signing. They were in fact working directly for a coal industry front group, and the letter was written by Bonner and associates.

Here is the text of the example script from the talking points:

I am working with seniors to stop an increase in their utility bills. Do you know any seniors that are struggling to get by on social security? {wait for a response} What would happen if their utility bill doubled? Would they not run the air-conditioner in the summer or not have heat in the winter? What else might they cut out of their budget to have electricity…food…medicine? I have a letter that other senior groups have wrote would you write a similar one (OR) would you sign a similar letter?

Here is a screenshot of the talking points (click for full size):

GreenWire:

The Obama administration and the Illinois attorney general filed a lawsuit (pdf) today against a Midwestern energy company for alleged Clean Air Act violations at six coal-fired power plants, including five in the Chicago area.The 38-count complaint said Midwest Generation made major modifications at the facilities without also installing the proper pollution control equipment, efforts that have led to unsafe air quality in the region, including high levels of ground-level ozone and soot that are linked to asthma and other respiratory ailments.

document_gw_01 –

Via email from Action Factory DC. More photos available here.

Climate Advocates Call on the President to Reflect and Take Action on the Fourth Anniversary of Katrina

WASHINGTON, D.C. — International climate activists floated two roof tops in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool early Thursday afternoon in anticipation of the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. One of the roofs read, “HELP—The Water Is Rising.” The 30 ft. banner behind the roofs declared, “Prevent the Next Katrina, Restore the Gulf, Stop Global Warming.”

Saturday’s anniversary of Katrina’s landfall coincides with the 100-day countdown to the much anticipated Copenhagen climate negotiations.

“Needless to say, many New Orleanians have placed their hopes in Barack Obama. We see the effects of man-made disaster every day. Climate change is the number one long-term threat to life facing New Orleans.” said Esquizito, a New Orleans jazz and blues performer and Katrina survivor working with the climate advocates. “We’re all waiting for President Obama’s leadership,” he said.

Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana on August 29th, 2005. 80 percent of New Orleans was under water and at least 1,836 people lost their lives, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in the history of the United States.

The group of concerned youth called attention to the anniversary of Katrina and the necessity of bold US leadership at the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December to pass a fair, ambitious, and binding global treaty that will prevent environmental disasters of the catastrophic magnitude of Katrina in the future. According to the climate advocates, a fair, ambitious, and binding treaty includes full funding for international adaptation, so that vulnerable areas can adapt to climate threats.

A statement by the Pew Center for Global Climate Change further expresses the link between Katrina and global warming: “It would be scientifically unsound to conclude that Katrina was not intensified by global warming. A reasonable assessment of the science suggests that we will face similar events again and that powerful storms are likely to happen more often than we have been accustomed to in the past.”