Blog & news round-up 9/25: Climate Week, Murkowski amendment DOA, and SurvivaBalls!

The eyes of the world were on New York City this week for the U.N. Climate Summit convened by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who urged world leaders to break the deadlock in international climate talks:

"Your decisions will have momentous consequences," he told the assembled leaders.

"The fate of future generations, and the hopes and livelihoods of billions today, rest, literally, with you," he added.

There's much more to say about this summit and the G-20, of course, but I'll let 1Sky Board President Betsy Taylor give you the full roundup in a forthcoming blog and I'll update this post when it's published.

The always-enlightening Paul Krugman used his New York Times column today to debunk the myths being propagated by opponents of climate legislation. Now that global warming denial has become increasingly untenable, they've taken to predicting an economic disaster if a climate bill were passed. Krugman's debunking is worth quoting at length:

It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Second, the best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the effects of Waxman-Markey, concluding that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. That’s roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.

By 2050, when the emissions limit would be much tighter, the burden would rise to 1.2 percent of income. But the budget office also predicts that real GDP will be about two-and-a-half times larger in 2050 than it is today, so that GDP per person will rise by about 80 percent. The cost of climate protection would barely make a dent in that growth. And all of this, of course, ignores the benefits of limiting global warming.

So where do the apocalyptic warnings about the cost of climate-change policy come from?

Krugman's answer: It's all lies.

Strong climate and clean energy action dodged a bullet this week when an amendment to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) appropriations bill by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) failed to come up for a vote. The amendment would've prevented the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, as the Supreme Court said it could. Her argument -- that EPA regs could result in and "economic train wreck" -- is a textbook example of the bogus arguments Krugman smacks down today. And as Kate Sheppard points out, it's not even a legally sound amendment:

The request for a delay comes more than two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the agency could regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act—and in fact has an obligation to. Murkowski argues that since the specific case dealt with automobile emissions, EPA regulation of mobile sources should proceed while stationary sources should be put on hold. Yet her interpretation plays fast and loose with the Supreme Court's decision and with the basics of the Clean Air Act, which mandates that once an emission is found to be a hazard to human health and welfare, the EPA shall begin regulating the sources of that pollutant. To refrain from so would violate the law, even if the specific case that raised the question dealt with automobiles.

This week we also experienced two major back-to-back extreme weather events -- one at home, the other halfway around the world -- that serve as a preview of what we have to look forward to if we don't tackle runaway climate change soon. From Sunday through Monday, Douglas County, Georgia, was hit with 21 inches (!) of rain -- the worst flooding Atlanta has seen in a hundred years, following its worst drought in as many years. Climate Progress' Joe Romm writes about the connection between this disaster and climate change:

I have called this type of rapid deluge, “global warming type” record rainfall, since it is one of the most basic predictions of climate science — and its an impact that has already been documented to have started...

. . .

And no, far be it from me to say that current flooding is caused directly by global warming.  Wouldn’t want to earn the wrath of the deniers and delayers who rush from house to house removing the batteries from the smoke detectors.

But funny how we are seeing these wild swings from extreme drought to extreme flooding more and more, just like those pesky climate scientists warned — see, for instance, my June post, AP, Washington Times: “Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency”:

Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 48 people and left 405,000 homeless.

Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving some fruit trees entirely submerged.

The other extreme weather event, a dust storm in Sydney, Australia, that literally turned the city red, had a sci-fi quality to it that only video can fully convey:

Finally, the Yes Men strike again! After pulling off a major climate action stunt involving the New York Post, the Yes Men offered a solution that will allow us all to survive climate change: SurvivaBalls:

The choice is clear: strong climate action, or SurvivaBalls for all!