The German paper Spiegel has published part of an interview with the man who used to be the next POTUS:

“I see the calendar, I see the unfolding of events, and I feel certain he will go,” Gore told SPIEGEL in an interview. Gore expressed optimism that the US Congress will agree on the outline of climate change legislation before the conference. “Therefore, I think there is a very real prospect that the legislation will pass, and that as a result, Obama will have the ability to go to Copenhagen with a more substantive position.”

Spiegel promises to publish the full interview on Monday.

Matt Dernoga:

A more thorough investigation through a LCV questionnaire reveals that Owens has a number of favorable positions for the climate movement. He is for emissions cutting climate legislation, engaging the international community on a global climate treaty, says the green economy is one of his top priorities, supports a 25% clean RES, near zero emissions performance standards for new power plants, and supports the current moratorium on new oil and gas drilling. There are of course some unfavorable or cautious statements, such as support for the nuclear industry, a yes and no answer on unconventional fuels, and he sometimes says “as long as it doesn’t cause the loss of jobs”.If you’re looking for a champion on fighting global warming, Bill Owens isn’t going to be your hero. If you want a champion for a clean energy economy, he’s got a chance. His opponent will do everything he can to obstruct clean energy investment, environmental protection, and climate legislation. My read on Owens is he’ll be proactive in addressing these issues in Congress. He could even be an important House vote on the final product of climate legislation after conference committee. So if you live in New York, or you’re actually in his district, I think it would be worth your time for the next few days to support Owens, whether it be financial, or grassroots activism.

Here is the LCV questionnaire:

Yesterday I mentioned Senator Inhofe’s nefarious plot to obstruct the clean energy bill.

The EPW Republicans have released this statement:

“The taxpayers expect us to know what this 1,000-page bill costs before we start voting on it,” the statement read. “They will only know this if we have a full economic analysis of how Kerry-Boxer affects them. This bill threatens Americans with trillions of dollars in higher energy taxes and millions of lost jobs. Yet as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted this week, EPA has ‘not run the full economic modeling.’ We cannot move forward in the legislative process if we don’t have a complete understanding of this bill.”

The EPW Democrats have responded with this statement:

“Senator Boxer believes that it is in the best interests of the American people for Republicans and Democrats to work together toward independence from foreign oil, toward protecting our children from pollution, and toward creation of millions of clean energy jobs,” Rafle wrote in an e-mail. “Therefore, she urges the Republicans to rethink their decision, and to join us at the opening of the markup on Tuesday morning.”

Offered without comment, for now.

Here we go again. James Inhofe, the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for next week’s markup:

But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.

Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.

“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”

Sadly, this is a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding strategy of delaying clean energy legislation:

• As Chairman Markey shepherded his American Clean Energy and Security Act through the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Republicans employed multiple parliamentary tricks to — as Politico put it — “nitpick the bill into legislative oblivion.” Brian Beutler called these nefarious stall tactics, and noted that Democrats responded by hiring a speed reader.
• Last year during the debate over the Climate Security Act, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded that the entire 491 page bill be read on the floor of the United States Senate. A strategy memo was leaked at the time detailing the Republican strategy for delaying the bill as much as humanly possible.

While this Republican obstructionism is not necessarily surprising, it is especially egregious this time. Here are a few things about this episode that struck me:

1. Despite the fact that Senator Inhofe has been working to orchestrate this obstruction for a week now, Republicans are pretending the effort is being led by the two moderate Republicans on the committee. Politico handled the stenography:

The boycott effort is being led by the two most moderate Republican members on the committee: Sens. George Voinovich of Ohio and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

This is absolutely not true. Voinovich and Alexander have both indicated a willingness to lend bipartisan support to the legislation. Their statements in support of Inhofe’s obstruction are an indication that they are showing deference to the ranking member on the committee, nothing more. Again, this thing has Inhofe written all over it.

2. Senator Inhofe, of course, will never support the bill regardless of any economic modeling the EPA does. He does not even believe that humans are responsible for climate change. In his opposition to health care legislation he was at least honest enough to say so up front, telling a town hall in August, “I don’t have to read it, or know what’s in it. I’m going to oppose it anyways.” The same is true of the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill: Inhofe has no intention of learning anything about it or voting for it. His only intention is to gum up the works and delay delay delay.

3. As Senator Boxer has pointed out, Inhofe’s reason for concern here is absurd:

“This is the longest study there is,” she said, noting that it included a two-week review of the Senate proposal, as well as the findings from a five-week review that the agency took this spring to analyze H.R. 2454, the House-passed climate bill. Combined, Boxer said the two bills are 90 percent similar, leaving little reason to dive deeper before the markup. “We’re not going to waste taxpayer money because someone drew a line in the sand,” she said.

Senator Whitehouse called this exactly what it is, theatrics.

This is nothing more than a shameless attempt to obstruct and delay clean energy legislation. Both on the EPW Committee, and in the full Senate, the numbers are on the side of passage. Senator Inhofe knows this, so he is throwing one last hail-mary in an attempt to stall the process. I don’t expect better from him, but it is still pretty pathetic.

Update — David Roberts at Grist:

The danger here is not so much that Inhofe can block markup, but he can make the entire process so toxic that any hope of Republican support is lost—and the bill won’t pass without some Republican support.

So it’s classic Inhofe: a petty procedural ratf*ck designed to poison the waters and prevent and reasonable engagement with the issues at hand.

KTVU:

A mile-long sheen of bunker fuel oil drifted from a tanker anchored in the still waters of the San Francisco Bay Friday, triggering an emergency response by the U.S. Coast Guard, authorities said.

A Coast Guard spokesman said the agency got a report at around 8 a.m. reporting the sheen of drifting oil and tarballs streaming from the rear of Panamanian registered tanker Dubai Star that was anchored 2 1/1 miles south of the Bay Bridge.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Melissa Lee said a massive response was under way.

“The leak occurred when they were transferring bunker fuel (from a barge to the tanker),” she said. “We are evaluating the situation and have resources responding. “

Friends of the Earth has a petition calling for the use of bunker fuel to be discontinued:

Bunker fuel is a toxic, asphalt-like substance that is causing air pollution and global warming, harming marine life, and damaging human health and the environment. I join with Friends of the Earth in calling on Congress to require the cruise and shipping industries to end their use of this dirty fuel and transition to cleaner alternatives.

Friends of the Earth and Clean Air Task Force submit the following written testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last year:

Morgan Goodwin:

As part of a national day of action to stop mountaintop removal coal mining, 14 activists have staged a sit in at 11:30 the EPA. Dozens others are also holding a rally in front. They are asking the EPA to take immediate action to stop the mountaintop removal blasting that began this week on Coal River Mountain, WV, the site of a proposed wind farm.

While President Obama spent the week trumpeting his administration’s support for clean energy, Massey Energy began dynamiting Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, which is the site of the proposed 328-megawatt wind farm. Coal River Mountain gained national notoriety after a study showed that its peaks and ridges have enough wind potential to provide 70,000 households with electricity, support 700 long-term green jobs and give back $1.7 million in annual county taxes. Massey Energy began dynamiting those peaks this week in preparation for a massive mountaintop removal project.

Morgan is liveblogging at It’s Getting Hot in Here.

Scott Parkin is offering updates on Twitter.

Here is the letter two West Virginia residents tried to deliver to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson today:

Kate Sheppard:

In an email to Bonner headed “Ready to Rumble,” Hawthorn lists seven key Democratic targets it believed could be pressured to vote against the bill. Hawthorn also named specific interest groups it hoped would write letters opposing the legislation—especially organizations “representing the interests of veterans, senior citizens, minorities, and other groups,” according to the documents. The email requests Bonner to produce five letters from such groups in the district of each targted lawmaker.

Here is the letter:

Associated Press:

Videos posted online by US oil company Chevron purporting to show rampant corruption among Ecuadoran officials are actually a set-up meant to taint an ongoing trial against the energy giant, an attorney in the case alleged.

“By releasing the videos, in my opinion Chevron is trying to taint a trial process that they knew they were going to lose, with the hope that the case would be dismissed in Ecuador,” Steven Donziger, an attorney for Ecuadoran Amazon communities who are suing the oil giant told reporters.

Chevron at the end of August released several grainy videos purporting to show “a three-million-dollar bribery scheme implicating the judge presiding over the environmental lawsuit” against the US oil major.

The Ecuadorans allege that Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon.

But a report released Thursday by the Amazon Defense Coalition found that one of the individuals said to have produced the videos was a convicted felon with “a habit of breaking the law” and with longstanding ties to the oil company.

Here is Amazon Defense Council’s Report:

While gloating that a House Committee will hold a hearing on geoengineering next week, Dubner let this one slip:

While there is a lot of room for a lot of legitimate debate about many aspects of global warming, let us say one thing here: we believe that anyone who reads our chapter without an agenda wouldn’t even find it particularly controversial. They will see that we routinely address the concerns that critics accuse us of ignoring (the problem of ocean acidification, e.g., — touched upon in the previous chapter — and the “excuse to pollute” that geoengineering solutions might afford), and that we neither “misrepresent” climate scientists nor flub the facts.

Tim Lambert over at Deltoid bats this one down by quoting the entirety of what chapter 5 of Superfreakonomics says about ocean acidification:

[Caldeira] and a co-author coined the phrase ‘ocean acidification.’ the process by which the seas absorb so much carbon dioxide that corals and other shallow-water organisms are threatened.

Lambert also notes that those defending Superfreakonomics are almost all either GW deniers or completely clueless:

While Dubner has studiously avoided linking to any of the “attacks” he links to defences. Trouble is, the only defenders he has are global warming deniers like Bret “It’s a Mass Neurosis!” Stevens and Jonah “It’s the sun!” Goldberg, or people like Jon Stewart who admit that they don’t know anything about the subject.

Super-Freaking-Silly, if you ask me.

And while it is bad enough having respected economists, scientists and journalists tearing your work to shreds, having members of Congress do so is that much worse. Via Brad Johnson, here is a clip of Rep. Inslee doing so yesterday:

Here is the best part of that clip:

The second thing I want to note is this is not the only continuing effort to deceive the American public. I want to note a book called Freakonomics, or SuperFreakonomics, that some authors wrote, that basically said or asserted we don’t have to control CO2, we’ll just pump sulfur dioxide up into the atmosphere and that will solve the problem. They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford who’s one of the predominant researchers in ocean acidification to suggest that Dr. Caldeira didn’t think we should control CO2. Which is an absolute deception. Dr. Caldeira I’ve spoken to personally. He’s told me we have to solve ocean acidification. You can’t solve ocean acidification without controlling CO2 and yet people are still trying to write books to deceive the American public. And we ought to blow the whistle on them, we’re blowing the whistle on one today, we’ll continue to do it, because ultimately science is going to triumph in this discussion.

Meanwhile, Things Break and Left as an Exercise continue documenting the atrocities as they unfold.