Now, I’m no expert on wind energy, and I should state right at the outset that there a lot of qualifiers to this sweeping statement (not to mention plenty of environmental and aesthetic trade-offs to be considered). But this sure looks to me like a big honkin’ deal.

In Dateline Earth’s never-ending quest for the one hundred 1-percent solutions to global warming, this has to loom large. Just realizing a fraction of the nation’s potential  wind energy could knock off quite a few of those 1-percent chunks.

The study says if you put turbines up in all the windiest places in the country — everywhere reasonable; the estimate excludes cities, wilderness areas and open water — the Lower 48 could produce up to 37 million gigawatt hours every year. Compare that to total U.S. electricity generation in 2009: 4 million gigawatt hours.

Yes! Wind has the potential to generate nine time times more juice than we need to run our homes and businesses. Why, if just one-quarter the available area was actually used for wind power, we’re probably talking about enough electricity to power a bunch of our cars and trucks, too, if not all of them.

U.S. Department of Energy/AWS Truewind LLC

(Is your state a candidate for a lot of wind power? Check the study and click on the map of your state to find out. The orange, purple and red areas are hot for wind development; the greens and yellows not so much.)

The study was released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and contractor AWS Truewind. The one-paragraph press release I received this morning — sadly, like so many press releases nowadays — carried no contact information. And after a couple of phone calls to NREL and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, I haven’t located anyone to answer more questions. But, hey, this is a blog post, not a major investigation, so let’s just talk about the, as Paul Harvey might say, other side of the story:

• Well, first of all, no one expects for wind turbines to be built everywhere they can be. Not even remotely close. The 25 percent figure I mused about above would make anti-wind-energy activists swoon with disgust. This study is predicated on turbines that tower 260 feet into the air or so — getting pretty close to as tall as Seattle’s Space Needle. It’s really windy up there. But can you imagine the landscape covered in anything that tall? These turbines would be quite a bit taller than most currently in use.
• Another consideration: Where the wind is. As you can see, it’s almost all in “flyover country,” as my Midwest friends call their region. Most of the population lives far away. The East in particularly is all greens and yellows. You’d need a huge grid enhancement. There might be cheaper and better ways to do our laundry and keep our food cold.
• Yet another problem, of course, is that we don’t know how to store electricity very well, and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. In particular, from what I hear, it’s more likely to settle down at night — which is when we need the voltage.

Yes, there will be many, many reasons we cannot reach nine times our current production with wind, that 37 million gigawatt hours per year identified as the maximum in today’s report. But according to the best story I’ve seen on this so far, in Wired (figures, huh?), wind is currently generating just 52,000 gWh/year.  So we’re talking about a potential three orders of magnitude larger than our current production.

Wow.

Practically speaking, this is most important for folks in the wind industry, a tool they can  use to scout the landscape. For the rest of us, resist the temptation to think of this as a silver bullet.

Rather, consider that wind could be part of a barrage of what I recently heard referred to as “silver buckshot” that could still bag the greenhouse-gas-free energy target we’re after.

– Robert McClure

Our Olympic gold.

We’re happy to announce we’ve been awarded a $100,000 grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation to continue to do the hard-hitting, regional investigative work we’re becoming known for.

It’s gold, and of Olympic quality, because in this economic climate, it’s that hard to come by. And it recognizes true accomplishment in the field of independent, nonprofit journalism.  So forgive us for being a little self-congratulatory before we get back to our hard work. Congratulations to the journalists of InvestigateWest who brought us this far — Robert McClure and Carol Smith, Kristen Millares Young and Daniel Lathrop. Nice job, everyone!

And thanks to the many folks who have supported us out of the goodness of their hearts and wallets over this first 10 months of our lives. And to the good folks at the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation — to CEO and President Bob Ross and Senior Program Officer Nancy Hodgkinson, and to Sue Hale, who provided valuable insight at the early stages of this long process when we met way back at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in June 2009.

The Foundation, based in Oklahoma City and founded  in 1982 by journalist Edith Kinney Gaylord to improve the quality and ethical standards of journalism, has long invested in improving the quality of journalism and journalism education nationwide. This year, it dedicated a portion of its funds specifically to investigative journalism.

“The watchdog role of legacy media is in jeopardy due to the economic crisis facing the journalism industry,” Ross said. “We’re working to secure the future of watchdog journalism by funding investigative reporting models of innovation, sustainability and collaboration.”

InvestigateWest is part of that future. We’re wearing Journalistic Gold around our necks this week.

– Rita Hibbard

President Barack Obama is hosting a health care summit Thursday at the Blair House. It will be televised live. We can all watch and judge the proposals for ourselves. That transparency is an ideal opportunity for the president, Democrats and Republicans to put their best ideas forward and debate different approaches to solving the health care crisis.

“I am inviting members of both parties to take part in a bipartisan health care meeting, and I hope they come in a spirit of good faith. I don’t want to see this meeting turn into political theater, with each side simply reciting talking points and trying to score political points,” the president said in his weekly radio address. “Instead, I ask members of both parties to seek common ground in an effort to solve a problem that’s been with us for generations.

But after months of rancor about health care reform is there any common ground left? Absolutely. And I hope our elected leaders think so too.

First there is common ground on the fundamental nature of the U.S. system, employer-based health care. Neither Democrats nor Republicans dare attack what should be at the heart of the debate.

I’ll throw out my wishful thought for the day: We made a mistake with employer-based health care and should be looking for a national exit strategy.

But Democrats are attached to the current system in part because labor unions, a key constituent group, have fought hard battles to win health care benefits for workers. This notion would be fine except the nature of work is changing (if you are lucky enough to have a job). If you work for yourself (or even want to work for yourself) the prospect of buying insurance on the open market these days is daunting. For example I am relying on my former employer’s health care plan via COBRA. This plan is subsidized by a generous 66 percent subsidy from taxpayers (a back door approach to health care reform?) but when that ends in a few months I am not sure what I’ll do next.

On the other hand, the problem for Republicans is that once you say that employment-based health care is a mistake, the assumption is that the only alternative is a government-based single player plan. There are, of course, other options but how do you make the practical transition away from employer-based plans? Yet a shift of the health care responsibility away from jobs to individuals actually represents conservative ideas about individual responsibility.

But that’s enough trashing of the employer-based system. At least for now. There is a political consensus that employer-based health care stays. (Again, for now.) So the debate will be a back and forth about what goofy mechanisms are required to keep in place an illogical, impossible to design health care insurance system.

There is another issue of common ground that probably won’t get the attention it deserves on Thursday: Improving the Indian health system. This is clearly a government obligation and one where conservatives and liberals alike say the government has failed to live up to its promises. In an ideal world, that would mean full funding of the Indian Health Service.

But this week perhaps the best that can be done is an agreement to reauthorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. The president’s proposal includes this provision – as does both the Senate and the House bills. It should be an easy sell.

Will Republicans agree? A generation ago the original Indian Health Care Improvement Act had bipartisan support in Congress and was signed into law by President Gerald Ford.

Today one of the best cases for the conservative side of this debate comes from J.D. Hayworth. Hayworth is running against Arizona Sen. John McCain for the Republican nomination because, as Hayworth put it, McCain “campaigns like a conservative and … legislates like a liberal.” Hayworth’s credentials are solid in settings ranging from right-wing talk radio to any Tea Party assembly.

So what does Hayworth say about the Indian Health Care Improvement Act? As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives he testified in support for the reauthorization in 2004. “Unfortunately, today’s health care delivery to Native American communities remains disproportionately less than what the general population receives here in the United States,” Hayworth said.

Part of the problem, Hayworth said, is the that “year-by-year appropriation is not the optimal way to fund Indian health services. The tribes do not like it. Fiscal conservatives do not like it.”

Nothing has changed. Tribes still don’t like year-by-year approach. Fiscal conservatives ought not either. There is a lot of common ground here that could help produce a Blair House agreement.

Mark Trahant is an advisory board member of InvestigateWest and a Kaiser Media Fellow examining the Indian Health Service and its relevance to the national health care reform debate. He is a member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.

Not only that, but the eastern United States’ airborne gunk is making its way to Asia. And apparently Asia is looking nervously over its shoulder at emissions coming from Europe.

Based on some 100,000 pollution measurements over a quarter century, the new study published Jan. 21 in the journal Nature specifically points to Asia’s contribution to ozone pollution affecting those of us living along the Left Coast and in the Rocky Mountain states.

Study co-author Dan Jaffe of the University of Washington-Bothell has been studying the bad Asian air for years, slowly building a case that it has effects right here in Rain City as well as across the West. I caught up with him this afternoon, and he explained the significance of the new research:

This is the first time anyone’s been able to quantitatively identify that the amount of ozone coming from Asia is increasing.  We’ve seen ozone many, many times, but we’ve never had a long enough or complete enough record to measure an increase.

In earlier efforts, scientists looked for Asian ozone going up, but failed to pinpoint a statistically significant increase.

But China’s massive air pollution problems are no secret, and Jaffe  acknowledged:

Given what’s happening in China, this is not a shocking result.

Still, if you want to solve a problem, you first have to document it.

One long-documented problem the new study brought to mind is PCBs in Puget Sound. We know PCBs are still used in Asia, and that Puget Sound has long been plagued by PCB contamination that started around the time of World War II. I also know that some scientists studying Puget Sound a few years ago concluded — based on some fairly back-of-the-envelope calculations, as I recall — that the contribution of airborne PCBs from Asia was probably not a big very factor as far as PCBs in Puget Sound are concerned. Keep working on digging out the stuff buried in the bottom of the Sound, they advised. 

Now, PCBs are not something Jaffe’s studies have covered. But he does keep up on work in that area and he thinks concentrating on the high levels of PCBs in the sediments instead of small concentrations wafting over from Asia is a sound approach for the Sound.

I was alerted to the new study in a story by Les Blumenthal of McClatchy Newspapers. I also found scientist Kathy Law’s piece in Nature commenting on the new research to be worthwhile.   

– Robert McClure

So would calling climate change “the climate crisis” make a difference? That’s the contention of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who was featured on one NPR segment. Lakoff says people think of the “climate” as something positive. And “change” is not bad. “Global warming?” Maybe that’s an even worse term, Lakoff tells host Guy Raz:

Global warming applies to climate, not weather, and most people don’t think of the difference, and so you shouldn’t be talking just about global warming. You should be talking about the climate crisis. That, I think, is very important and then you explain what a crisis is. But the people who are in the environmental movement are very bad at communication, and they haven’t done that.

He said when Americans hear “global warming” they assume “that it applies to every place uniformly on the Earth. That is false too. They are thinking about weather, not about climate.”

Today’s NPR story by Christopher Joyce reviews how climate scientists have shot themselves in the foot by making mistakes, and then failing to respond quickly and effectively to attacks.  He quotes greenie Steven Hamburg:

We’ve done a poor job of explaining how these things are done. So how do we make predictions about the future? How do we understand impacts? How much is empirical so it’s direct measurement? How much of it is modeled? How much of it is theoretical?

The message was echoed at a recent American Association of the Advancement of Science conference, where longtime pollster Dan Yankelovich blamed scientists for failing to communicate. According to a press release on his appearance, Yankelovich spoke of  a “three-stage process that obliges the public to confront and overcome its own wishful thinking, a process that engages peoples’ deepest emotions and values as well as factual information.” In Yankelovich’s words:

Scientists, like leaders in other fields, have enormous difficulty engaging the public on critical issues like global warming, bioethics, and other challenges that can only be solved when good science, wise public policy and thoughtful public judgment all come together. The American public can grapple with tough problems in a meaningful way, but scientists have to understand how to communicate the non-cognitive aspects of the public’s learning curve.

(A video of Yankelovich’s appearance was supposed to be posted, but isn’t yet. If I find it I’ll link to it here.)

Now, we have to keep in mind that even if only 57 percent of Americans grok that global warming is going on, that’s still up from the 41 percent who felt that way in the same 2006 Pew Research Center poll. The latest update, from October 2009, noted that most Americans haven’t really thought that much about climate change. It went on:

Despite the growing public skepticism about global warming, the survey finds more support than opposition for a policy to set limits on carbon emissions. Half of Americans favor setting limits on carbon emissions and making companies pay for their emissions, even if this may lead to higher energy prices; 39 percent oppose imposing limits on carbon emissions under these circumstances.

That was before the so-called “climategate” e-mail leaks or the failed Copenhagen talks, of course. Wonder what the next set of numbers will show?

Final point on this: Not everyone is going to believe even the most airtight  and well-explained scientific case. For a great discussion of how modern Americans have somehow decided they are entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions, see Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough: Learning to Live In a Post-fact Society.” (Review here.)

Columnist Leonard Pitts hit on this phenomenon with an interesting column over the weekend recounting how some of his correspondents simply refuse to recognize facts, even uncontroverted fact. In decades past, he writes:

If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn’t just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn’t just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.

That’s all changing, as Pitts describes. His ending:

I submit that any people thus handicapped sow the seeds of their own decline; they respond to the world as they wish it were rather to the world as it is. . . But objective reality does not change because you refuse to accept it. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge a wall does not change the fact that it’s a wall. And you shouldn’t have to hit it to find that out.

– Robert McClure

The only question is, why did it take so long, and why is passage in this admittedly tough economic year far from certain?

“I’ve been advocating it for two decades,” Dr. Cristos Dagadakis, medical director of the crisis-intervention service at Harborview Community Mental Health Services, told The Seattle Times. “I think this is an opportunity to get people into care quicker.”

InvestigateWest reporter Carol Smith wrote about this problem  in 2008 after the stabbing of  Shannon Harps by a mentally ill man who had cycled in and out of the judicial system for decades. Her work also examined the inability of the family of Isaac Zamora to get him the mental health care he desperately needed. Zamora finally ended up behind bars for good when he shot and killed six people in Skagit County in 2008. Carol won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for her work examining the state’s ailing mental health care system and its impact on one family.  Now, perhaps in part because of the focus Carol and fellow InvestigateWest journalist Daniel Lathrop put on examining the true financial and societal costs of the issue, the Washington Legislature is taking a hard look at he issue.

And perhaps the Legislature is recognizing that the problem  just won’t go away. Despite many years of experts in all fields wishing really hard that it would.  Just this year,there were more senseless killings, apparently by perpetrators who gave law enforcement, the judicial system, and loved ones every sign of being dangerous and unstable, but were allowed to continue to walk our streets in desperate need of care they failed to get. The shooting of four Lakewood police officers, for example, is testimony to that. The man who shot those officers had been ill, unstable, and making frightening threats, but no one was able to stop him from spiraling out of control and killing others.

The proposed law would broaden the criteria for holding the dangerous mentally ill against their will. Instead of “imminent likelihood” of harm to themselves or others, it would be necessary only to show “substantial” likelihood of harm under the proposed law. The legislaton also would allow those making the commitment decision to consider information offered by family members and co-workers.

It’s testament to Washington’s reluctance and inability to deal with its mentally ill patients that the state has nearly the fewest number of psychiatric beds per 100,000 population than any state in the nation.

But as Dr. Peter Roy-Byrne, chief of psychiatry at Harborview Medical Center told Carol Ostrum of The Seattle Times, that is not a good reason to preserve the status quo.

“That’s like saying, ‘We don’t have enough room in the emergency room, so we won’t see anybody with heart attacks.’ “

Eleanor Owen, who I first met in the 1980s covering the social issues beat for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has been working on this issue a long time. The changes in the law appear modest, she told Ostrum, but they could mean a lot.

“You have to have a gun to your head or your mother’s head” to be held, under current law, said Owen, executive director of the the Washington chapter of the National Alliance of Mental Illness.

These changes, she noted,, would mean a big change in the number of mentally ill people ending up with criminal records they don’t need. Instead, there’s a chance they’ll get the help they do need. The bills, House Bills 3076 and 2882,  are now before the Senate Human Services & Corrections Committee. The first hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

– Rita Hibbard

Over the last two decades*, evidence piled up that the first group was right. Almost every practicing climatologist came around to seeing that, indeed, we’re on an unusually fast warming trend and it’s clear that greenhouse gases have at least something to do with that. Serious climate scientists aren’t debating the basics anymore. Now they’re trying to gauge just how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gases, i.e., how soon it’s likely to get how bad.

So today, climate change is not really so much a science story any more. It’s a business story. A government story. A consumer story. Even a food story.

But first and foremost, climate has become a political story.  It’s late, so I won’t belabor the point, but here are two significant developments on that front:

• BP, Conoco and Caterpillar are pulling out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of business interests and D.C.-savvy environmental groups. As Stephen Power and Ben Casselman report for The Wall Street Journal, it’s a sure sign that the Cap’n Trade legislation once thought likely to emerge from Congress is in big trouble.
• The United Nations’ top climate diplomat, Yvo de Boer, announced his resignation 3 1/2 years into his 4-year term. He remains nominally in charge until July, but really, he’s outta there. His early departure provides a symbolically loud echo of the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks in December. Darren Samuelsohn of Climatewire has a thorough piece in The New York Times,  while John Vidal of The Guardian provides a little insight into the man himself.

So, on both the national and international fronts, the news today was that of a failure to come to grips with what appears to be humanity’s largest environmental challenge ever, one that already seems likely to push global temperatures higher than they have been since long before humans organized themselves into anything resembling modern society.

Will climate change ever go back to being mostly a science story? Not bloody likely. We’ll do our best to stay on top of the big political developments here.

* The actual theory about greenhouse warming dates to 1896. Evidence didn’t start to be amassed in any measure until the 1970s and 1980s, says a compact history by Spencer Weart. He’s the same climate historian we mentioned in yesterday’s post who wrote up how he thinks future historians will look back on this period of intense political detate about climate.

– Robert McClure

The newly proposed legislation, sponsored by Rep. Timm Ormsby, D-Spokane, has caused a flurry of controversy since its proposal last week. At a hearing Wednesday, it generated a constant parade of people waiting to testify, even if only for a moment.

The bill would increase a tax on hazardous substances in Washington state from 0.7 percent to 2 percent in order to fund stormwater clean-up and other environmental programs. This alone makes the bill controversial, provoking opposition from state oil refineries, truckers, airlines, and other petroleum reliant industries. But an additional layer of contention has emerged because of how the funds generated from the tax would be distributed.

Between July 2010 and July 2011 nearly 70 percent of the revenue from the tax would go into the state’s general fund, while 20 percent would be allocated for stormwater clean-up. The remainder would be distributed into other environmental programs. The legislation would raise over $150 million for the general fund, which is currently facing an enormous deficit. This is only temporary. Over the following four years, the percentage of funds for stormwater clean-up would increase exponentially while the amount of revenue distributed into the general fund would gradually decrease down to zero by 2015.

Republican members of the House Capitol Budget Committee held on tightly to the issue of distribution, repeatedly asking supporters and opponents of the legislation how they felt about the allocation of the tax revenue. Rep. Glenn Anderson, R-Fall City, asked supporters of the bill:

“Would you be open to supporting an amendment that this funding, should it be passed by the Legislature, would remain dedicated to dealing with stormwater runoff and point source pollution and not transfer it to the general fund. Would you support that?”

The resounding answer from supporters and environmentalists was that this bill addresses two key issues: the state deficit and stormwater pollution. Since its conception 20 years ago, the state hazardous substance tax has never been raised, while water pollution has increased. The burden to clean up the environment and address stormwater pollution has been placed on local governments. Cities and counties have relied on utility and individual property tax revenue to pay for stormwater clean-up projects, but there simply is not enough money. Rep. Hans Dunshee, D-Snohomish, warned that if the state does not address the issue,  property taxes may increase. Testifying before the committee, Mo McBroom with the Washington Environmental Council, explained why she believes in the legislation:

“I can tell you from the perspective of the environmental community this is one of the most important things we can do. And over time as the economy improves, the bill sets up a structure to transition the dollars so all of them revert back to stormwater, but in the near term, we all suffer when the general fund does not have sufficient funding.”

But in this tough economy, the loss and creation of jobs is a crucial point of discussion with every bill that is proposed. Opponents of HB 3181 argued that the legislation would cause the loss of jobs due to the higher hazardous substance tax.

Donning coveralls, oil refinery workers testified one after another, emotionally voicing their concerns that the bill would put their jobs at risk. Lobbyists for oil companies claimed that the legislation would take away the companies’ competitive edge, causing them to lose business to neighboring states and overseas markets. Supporters claimed that the bill would create construction jobs for the industry that has been hit hard by the economy.

Clearly the legislation affects a diverse group of parties, but the bottom line for supporters is that water pollution has to be addressed now. According to the Washington State Department of Ecology, between 8 million and 55 million pounds of petroleum-based pollution enter Puget Sound via stormwater every year. Rivers, streams, and lakes across the state are facing similar stormwater pollution problems. This affects ground water, health of both humans and marine life, recreation, fishing, and tourism.

The financial burden of clean-up is too great to rest on the backs of local governments, supporters insist. Although pollution is an epidemic everyone should take responsibility, supporters argue that it’s due time to raise taxes on the pollutants that are dirtying local water.

Gov. Christine Gregoire gave her support to the bill this week and the majority of Democrats, environmentalists, cities, and counties have rallied in support of the legislation.

– Jennifer Privette

As of April 1, it’’s against the rules. Just like littering, or drug use, or God forbid, sexual misconduct. It’s all in the new code of conduct for the city’s 400 parks.

As seattlepi.com writes, this expands one of the nation’s strictest anti-smoking bans, passed by the state in 2005, that banned smoking in most public places. Seven Oregon cities, including the Portland suburb of Hillsboro also have recently banned smoking in public parks. Tacoma has signs in some parks asking people not to smoke, and some parks officials are pushing for a ban.

Apparently, the Seattle parks board contemplated banning spitting too, but hey, that went just a little too far…

– Rita Hibbard

That’s breathtaking. Even hard-core skeptics like Pat Michaels and Fred Singer gave up that  canard years ago. (It was this very argument and its proponents’ vehemence in presenting it that convinced me not to take up coverage of the global warming story from the time I came onto the environment beat in the late 1980s until 1997. By then, the evidence had really started to pile up, and I could see that these guys had been feeding us a steaming pile.)

For example, here’s an excerpt from something Singer just wrote (second item):

Let us grant that the past decade was the ‘warmest on record.’   What exactly does this prove?  Since the warming trend started well before the release of substantial amounts of greenhouse gases, the most likely cause is simply a natural recovery of the global climate from the Little Ice Age, which historical records place between around 1400 and 1800 AD.

You get the picture. Everyone knows the globe is warming. So… who are those 7 percent? Are these actually utility managers who are not keeping up on climate-change news and views? Astounding.

About this new poll of utility execs: Todd Woody’s post in in the New York Times says the engineering and consulting firm Black & Veatch surveyed 327 of them, finding that fully three-quarters believe there is a future for coal-fired power plants, which most of us know as the biggest and nastiest of the greenhouse gas producers.

The report is due out Thursday, and has some other interesting tidbits, such as the fact that water availability is becoming an increasing concern of utility managers. And what happens when the world warms? Well, in places like the American Southwest, that water will be even dearer than today. When the Black & Veatch report is out I’ll link to it. (Update: Actually, you have to pay $5.95 to see the study; the best I can do for free is a press release.)

Now, to get an idea how the utility execs could be so thoroughly in the thrall of rose-colored glasses, one need look no further than the very same New York Times website. There, Andy Revkin’s excellent Dot.Earth blog today carries an imagined future history of this period of climate-change science and politics.

Physicist and climate historian Spencer Weart writes what he thinks historians would say about this period from the vantage point of 2210. A few excerpts:

The scientific community — for it was not only the I.P.C.C. but the entire scientific community whose reliability was now called into question — was unprepared for the attacks they now faced. We can easily speculate about the personal and social characteristics that to this day make many scientists unfit for aggressive personal controversy. But it will suffice to point out that unlike, for example, any political organization or business corporation, the I.P.C.C. lacked a well-funded and expert public relations apparatus. Even the universities, notably East Anglia, showed a complete lack of understanding of the basic need to respond promptly with a coherent statement of the full factual history of their problems.

. . . (M)edia coverage represented a new low. . .  (T)his was the first time the media reported that an entire community of scientists had been accused of actual dishonesty. Such claims, if directed for example at a politician on a matter of minor importance, would normally require serious investigation. But even in leading newspapers like The New York Times, critics with a long public record for animosity and exaggeration were quoted as experts.

Meanwhile, in D.C. today, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while saying it does not dispute the science of climate change, does exactly that in a filing that sets up its challenge to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases, Kate Sheppard writes for Mother Jones.

– Robert McClure