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ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson: We can adapt!

That talk by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at the Council on Foreign Relations that Gristmill linked to earlier today is a stunning demonstration of how to sow confusion and delay. It’s worth deeper analysis. So let’s dig in!

It’s very long, so we’ll summarize some sections and zero in on a couple of key passages. You can read the whole thing here.

Paragraphs 1-6, in short: Energy prices sure go up and down a lot! But we keep finding more fossil fuels when we need to.

Next 3 paragraphs: Boy, there was a lot more natural gas in the shale here in North America than we expected.

Next 6 paragraphs: Let’s all say “energy security” rather than “energy independence,” OK? Exxon is a multinational, and I want everyone to be friends and not worry about where their oil comes from as long as it keeps coming.

Here’s where Tillerson starts to gets interesting. Let’s quote his original and then translate:

Ours is an industry that is built on technology, it’s built on science, it’s built on engineering, and because we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.

Translation: You thought those people out there sounding an alarm about climate change were scientists? Forget it. We here at Exxon, we’re the scientists. And all those people with fancy degrees and titles who have been desperately trying to teach the U.S. public about global warming? They’re illiterates! We’re the clean guys in white coats; they’re the dirty “manufacturers” of fear.

And so as these technologies emerge, we know the immediate response from certain parts of interested parties out there is going to be to manufacture fear because that’s how you slow this down. And nowhere is it more effective than in the United States. And so that’s — the pace at which these things occur oftentimes is our ability to deal with the manufactured fear, our ability as an industry, working with well-intended regulators and policymakers to address the fears.

Translation: I am a dispassionate man of reason. Forget that I run one of the richest corporations in the world. I am not an “interested party.” The interested parties are all those illiterate, fear-mongering activists who are getting filthy rich off their fabulously wealthy nonprofit activities.

It requires a lot of education, requires taking an illiterate public — illiterate in the sciences, engineering and mathematics — and trying to help them understand why we can manage these risks. And that’s a very intensive, almost one-on-one process — town by town, city council by city council, state by state. So it takes a while. And we’re not particularly aided in our efforts by the broad-based media, because it’s a lot sexier to write the fear stories than it is to write the here’s-how-you-manage-it story.

Translation: Do not think that we buy advertisements and pay lobbyists in order to influence public policy in our favor. At Exxon, we re having one-on-one conversations with our community. Sadly, journalists sometimes help out those fearmongering ignoramuses by repeating their lies. So we have to spend lots of money setting the record straight.

Now, that’s just a fact, it’s not a complaint. But it’s part of why do things take so long. Well, that’s one of the reasons it takes us a long time to get the policy solutions, because it all becomes then a political process instead of a scientific process.

Translation: If only we could leave energy policy safely in the hands of scientists. Wait, maybe that’s not the best idea.

There are important questions about the things that people worry about, and we have an obligation to address them, and we devote a tremendous amount of effort in addressing those. But I think if you look at the technologies that are front and center today around the shale resources — hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, the integration of those technologies, how we drill these wells, how we protect fresh water zone, how we protect emissions — we have all of that engineered. And as long as we as an industry follow good engineering practices and standards, these risks are entirely manageable. And the consequences of a misstep by any member of our industry — and I’m speaking again about the shale revolution — the consequences of a misstep in a well, while large to the immediate people that live around that well, in the great scheme of things are pretty small, and even to the immediate people around the well, they could be mitigated.

Translation: Accidents don’t happen if you do things right, and at Exxon, we always do things right. And even if there is an accident with fracking, which sometimes is done by people who don’t work for Exxon who might not do everything right, it will only wreck the lives of a limited number of people in a small number of communities. So who cares?

These are not life-threatening, they’re not long-lasting, and they’re not new. They are the same risks that our industry has been managing for more than 100 years in the conventional development of oil and natural gas. There’s nothing new in what we’re doing, and we’ve been hydraulically refracturing (sic) wells in large numbers since the 1960s; first developed in 1940. So this is an old technology just being applied, integrated with some new technologies. So the risks are very manageable.

Translation: If you look at the history of our industry, why would anyone worry? It’s not as if there have ever been any accidents, right?

The fears are real. We don’t discount that people’s fears are their fears. We have to address that. We want to address it with sound science, we want to address it with real data, and somehow we have to overcome the manufactured fear which gets most of the headlines.

Translation: The fears aren’t real! But unfortunately the U.S. still has elections, and the government can still make trouble for us. So we have to pretend to take public fears seriously. After all, if we lose a few towns here and there, you and I here at this elite conference understand that that’s an acceptable risk — but the illiterate masses out there might get really upset.

There is much, much more in this speech, but that’s enough for now. OK, almost enough. Here’s one last bit from the Q&A at the end.

QUESTIONER: Hi, I’m David Fenton. Mr. Tillerson, I want to talk about science and risk, and I agree with you that’s the way we must proceed. So, as you know, it’s a basic fact of physics that CO2 traps heat, and too much CO2 will mean it will get too hot, and we will face enormous risks as a result of this not only to our way of life, but to the world economy. It will be devastating: The seas will rise, the coastlines will be unstable for generations, the price of food will go crazy. This is what we face, and we all know it.

Now — so my question for you is since we all know this knowledge, we’re a little in denial of it. You know, if we burn all these reserves you’ve talked about, you can kiss future generations good-bye. And maybe we’ll find a solution to take it out of the air. But, as you know, we don’t have one. So what are you going to do about this? We need your help to do something about this.

TILLERSON: Well, let me — let me say that we have studied that issue and continue to study it as well. We are and have been long-time participants in the IPCC panels. We author many of the IPCC subcommittee papers, and we peer-review most of them. So we are very current on the science, our understanding of the science, and importantly — and this is where I’m going to take exception to something you said — the competency of the models to predict the future. We’ve been working with a very good team at MIT now for more than 20 years on this area of modeling the climate, which, since obviously it’s an area of great interest to you, you know and have to know the competencies of the models are not particularly good.

Now you can plug in assumptions on many elements of the climate system that we cannot model — and you know what they all are. We cannot model aerosols; we cannot model clouds, which are big, big factors in how the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere affect temperatures at surface level. The models we need — and we are putting a lot of money supporting people and continuing to work on these models, try and become more competent with the models. But our ability to predict, with any accuracy, what the future’s going to be is really pretty limited.

So our approach is we do look at the range of the outcomes and try and understand the consequences of that, and clearly there’s going to be an impact. So I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It’ll have a warming impact. The — how large it is is what is very hard for anyone to predict. And depending on how large it is, then projects how dire the consequences are.

As we have looked at the most recent studies coming — and the IPCC reports, which we — I’ve seen the drafts; I can’t say too much because they’re not out yet. But when you predict things like sea level rise, you get numbers all over the map. If you take a — what I would call a reasonable scientific approach to that, we believe those consequences are manageable. They do require us to begin to exert — or spend more policy effort on adaptation. What do you want to do if we think the future has sea level rising four inches, six inches? Where are the impacted areas, and what do you want to do to adapt to that?

And as human beings as a — as a — as a species, that’s why we’re all still here. We have spent our entire existence adapting, OK? So we will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions. And so I don’t — the fear factor that people want to throw out there to say we just have to stop this, I do not accept.

I do believe we have to — we have to be efficient and we have to manage it, but we also need to look at the other side of the engineering solution, which is how are we going to adapt to it. And there are solutions. It’s not a problem that we can’t solve.

Translation: Yes, global warming is real. Carbon emissions really do boost temperatures. But nobody knows by how much — that’s impossible to predict. So what the hell? Let’s just take that risk of apocalypse. The consequences will be manageable — for us here at ExxonMobil. As for the human race? It will just have to adapt! And you can count on us engineers to help you out with that. After all, by that time we’re going to need a new line of business.

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This photo’s sepia-toned because coal plants are history. Get it? Har.

Despite what the coal industry would have you believe, the days of affordable coal-fired power are over. That’s the conclusion of the Sierra Club’s recent ”Locked In,” a report that analyzes the wide array of financial risks coal plant investments face.

We looked into these risks because while the environmental and human health impacts of coal plant investments are increasingly well-known, the financial impacts are not. What we found was eye-opening: Some of the world’s largest coal plants are on the verge of bankruptcy, but an emerging Organization of Coal Exporting Countries (OCEC) is on the rise. As the title of our report suggests, avoiding locking ourselves into this risky environment is tremendously important because, social and environmental damages aside, new coal plants are just lousy investments.

Here are the biggest risks coal plant financiers face:

Plant construction costs are rising and increasingly unpredictable: Over the past decade, in the U.S. and abroad, plant costs have increased by up to 100 percent. Add to that lengthy design and construction periods (five to seven years) and you get cost projections that are both wildly out of date and significantly understate the cost of new plants.

Coal prices are volatile, increasing, and exposed to an emerging OCEC: Just like oil prices, coal prices have trended sharply upward around the world. Worse, just like the oil market, the international coal market is highly concentrated. The top two producers alone — Australia and Indonesia — are responsible for roughly 50 percent of all internationally traded steam coal. That leaves new coal plants at the whim of this emerging Organization of Coal Exporting Countries that is increasingly — directly or indirectly — acting to maintain high prices.

Competing clean, renewable energy sources are coming down in price, further increasing market uncertainty: Most reliable estimates put the cost of new wind power between $0.05 and $.10 per kilowatt-hour — at or below the cost of new coal-fired power in the United States. The same is true for solar photovoltaic in the sunniest parts of the U.S., where it now competes for peaking power applications with the cheapest fossil fuel — natural gas. While high in capital expenditure, clean energy sources like wind and solar are not exposed to fuel price volatility. In essence, investors lock themselves into the ever-increasing costs of coal while competitors increasingly offer attractive returns that are both environmentally and economically preferable.

“Too big to fail” coal projects like India’s Tata Mundra can and should be avoided: Despite significant coal price increases, many new projects routinely underestimate price volatility, the cost of construction, and the risk of cost overruns. Way too often the optimistic scenarios predicted by coal proponents fail to materialize, leaving financial wreckage in their wake.

For example, even before construction of the four-gigawatt Tata Mundra project in India is complete, coal prices are three times those cited in its bid. The problem is that Tata Mundra is bound by a contract that fixes prices for decades to come, forcing the government and investors to face billions in losses if they do not pass on significant price increases to average Indian consumers.

Ultimately, it’s quite clear to us that international coal markets are far riskier than most think. These risks are wide-ranging — from soaring fuel prices to coal cartels — and they are not easily mitigated. Luckily a grassroots rebellion in the U.S. and a growing clean energy revolution in the E.U. have helped us avoid new coal plant lock-ins.

But as the Euro Zone crisis rages and contributes to a slowing Chinese and Indian economy, a significant lock-in threat looms as investors seek to finance a new era of coal. But can these economies really afford to lock themselves into billions of dollars in financially risky new coal plant investments? The only rational answer to come to is a resounding “NO.”

Filed under: Article, Climate & Energy

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Ecova/Spokane, WA

Finance
The Finance Team is part of a larger shared services group serving the financial needs of Ecova and all of its subsidiaries. As a member of this team, you will be critical to the success of Ecova. Our Finance department has an immediate need for a Revenue Recognition Specialist located in our Spokane, WA office.

In this role, you will experience all the benefits of working for a fast-paced, entrepreneurial company while having a broad impact on energy management and sustainability initiatives. You will develop working relationships with colleagues who have a shared vision for the company’s direction. Ecova creates an environment for individuals who want to impact the future of energy management while growing their own skills and capabilities.

Role Description
The Revenue Recognition Specialist has the responsibility for reviewing client contracts to ensure proper revenue recognition and various other responsibilities related to compliance with revenue recognition accounting standards. The Revenue Recognition Specialist reports to the Corporate Financial Reporting Manager.
•Key participant in the review of customer contracts to ensure compliance with revenue recognition and other critical accounting standards.
•Close interaction with the billing/invoicing team to ensure they are following revenue recognition policies.
•Maintain/update any changes to the revenue recognition policies and communicate such changes.
•Research of technical accounting issues, primarily related to revenue recognition.
•Keep up to date on changes in pertinent accounting rules and regulations and perform GAAP research as required.
•Comply with internal controls surrounding the revenue process.
•Assist with planning and implementing smooth and effective accounting integration for acquisition initiatives in the area of revenue recognition.

Role Competencies
•A Bachelor’s degree in Accounting or Business or equivalent experience.
•Minimum of 3 years related accounting experience in either public accounting, specifically auditing, or private sector.
•CPA preferred.
•Comprehensive knowledge and practical experience in accounting practices including an understanding of US GAAP, knowledge of SEC regulations preferred.
•Experience in technical research of complex accounting issues, specifically revenue recognition, is preferred.
•Skilled in Microsoft Office with intermediate Excel skills.
•Independent worker with good decision making skills, which includes knowing when to seek expert assistance.
•Strong communication, analytical and organization skills.
•Ability to organize, prioritize and manage multiple projects at the same time.
•Experience with establishing and maintaining effective work relationships.
•Must possess and demonstrate a high degree of integrity.
•Possess the ability to self-motivate and take initiative with minimal supervision.
•Must be organized, detail oriented and able to efficiently function under pressure.
•Ability to produce detailed, error-free work within limited timeframes.

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Stantec.
CA – California, Irvine
Overview: Stantec’s Geomatics Practice is a large and diverse group with surveying and mapping resources across North America. Our Geomatics group is at the forefront of surveying technology and performs…

Salary: . Date posted: 06/27/2012

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Don’t look now, but people in Japan are driving Hummers. By driving we mean pedaling. And by Hummers? We mean bicycles.

It’s true. An outfit called Global Innovation Company is distributing a line of bicycles bearing the names of foreign and American car manufacturers: Ferrari, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and Hummer, to name a few. The company was founded in 2002 by Katsuyoshi Ikeda, a man who thought younger cyclists would be more inclined to buy bicycles if they bore the logos of well-known, foreign car companies. Apparently no one told the Japanese that cars have lost their cool, because it seems to be working: Just last year, they bought 170,000 bikes flaunting the names of once-storied, combustion-powered four-wheelers.

The bicycles, manufactured with the carmakers’ blessing, are sold by the aptly named Import Bicycle Factory, which has a head office and shop in Yokohama, with sister stores in Kashiwa City and Kuki. Most of the lines — with the exception of Chevrolet — appear to include bikes for the whole family. Want Spartacus Atticus Thurston III to ride in style? Outfit him with this Ferrari kids’ bike with training wheels. Little Jimmy having issues with other kids in the playground? Have him roll up in this little Hummer (maybe take off the basket) and he can learn road rage years before other kids even realize their feet will one day touch the pedals. Gas pedal, break pedal …

Of course, Japan’s love of two-wheeled vehicular motion is nothing new. Bicycle parking lots the size of middle America’s Walmart Supercenters? Japan’s got ‘em. (Hello, 2 million bicycles’ worth of parking.) Ivy-covered above-ground bicycle storage containers? Check. (Let’s not even get started on their underground bike-parking contraptions.) Enough bicycles sold per year to outfit almost all of Los Angeles’s nearly 4 million residents three times? Yeah, Japan’s got those too. Schaaaa-winn.

But here’s the kicker: The car-bikes sold at Import Bicycle Factory, including the models proudly displaying American car manufacturers’ marks, are made in China. That’s no surprise, given that most bicycles in the U.S. are constructed by our friends in the Far East. Still, the irony of selling Hummer- and Cadillac-stamped bicycles, manufactured in China, to car-loving cyclists in Japan, while here at home GM tells us that we’re less manly if we ride a bike? That is worthy of some sort of award, especially as our own automobile industry continues to slump toward recovery.

Note to American automakers: Maybe it’s time to come out of the closet and start stamping your imprimaturs on bikes made here, stateside, for the growing bicycling public in the U.S. Trust us. Chicks dig that stuff.

Filed under: Biking

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A version of this article originally appeared on Sightline Daily.

This is post 11 in the series “Talking Weather and Climate.”

We humans are warming our climate — mostly by burning up fossil fuels. And we’re seeing a range of serious impacts in our own backyards and across the globe, including the increased frequency and magnitude of some types of extreme weather.

Americans seem to get it. Polling from 2011 shows that a majority of us now link an unnaturally warming climate to droughts, floods, and other extremes. But, according to opinion research by George Mason University, only 19 percent of television weather forecasters [PDF] acknowledge the established science of climate change. An earlier study found that 27 percent of TV meteorologists call global warming a “scam,” while over half denied that humans are the cause.

It’s a cryin’ shame, too, because as trusted local “personalities,” weathercasters are in a unique position to help interpret climate science and impacts through the lens of local weather.

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that some weathercasters are coming around on their own — and there are several campaigns to help the others catch up.

Weathercasters matter

As Inside Climate News’ Katherine Bagley points out, broadcast forecasters make up only a small fraction of meteorologists — maybe 10 percent. Most U.S. meteorologists are researchers — for NASA and NOAA and the like. So, they may be few, but weathercasters are mighty. Unlike their lab-bound counterparts, they enjoy the limelight that comes with being local TV celebrities. And polling shows us that what weathercasters say about climate matters:

• “The public cares about what their weathercaster thinks of climate change,” says Ed Maibach, director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

• In 2010, Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures.

• More than three-quarters of TV meteorologists say they have discussed the topic of global warming either on or off air.

Notably, Bagley reminds us that for many Americans, their TV weatherperson is the only climate-related authority they encounter on a regular basis — or ever!

Reasons weathercasters lag behind

Bagley identifies three likely reasons weathercasters are slow to acknowledge climate science:

1. They don’t trust the climate models. Polls show that about 75 percent of weathercasters distrust models of climate change. The climate models used for short-term weather forecasting and long-term projections about the broader climate are similar, but the short-term models are usually only accurate in predicting five- or seven-day forecasts — if that. Weather forecasters may think the long-term models are just as fallible.

2. Weathercasters aren’t required to learn about climate science. About half of meteorologists have bachelor’s degrees in meteorology. The other half are mainly journalists assigned to the weather beat. But there are virtually no undergraduate meteorology programs in the country that have a significant climate science component. And both the big certification programs (American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association) fail to require climate-related course work or to test for climate knowledge in the written exam or reviews of on-air work and forecasting.

3. Personal politics and beliefs cloud evaluation of the science. As Maibach cautions, whether, how, or if a weathercaster chooses to discuss climate change may come down to their personal politics and beliefs.

Of course weathercasters don’t have the final say when it comes to reporting beyond the forecast. As I’ve written before, it’s news directors (as well as station or network owners) who are the ultimate “gatekeepers,” often making content decisions based on ratings, advertising sales, and other commercial factors that might prevent full coverage of “controversial” issues like climate.

A weathercaster renaissance?

So, how do we get the weather personalities on our local news stations up to speed on climate?

There are some obvious fixes that could happen pretty fast.

As for the differences between short-term and long-term modeling, Bagley finds Keith Seitter, director of the American Meteorological Society, quite optimistic that there’s an easy solution. He says that some basic training for weathercasters about the differences between weather and climate models could go a long way.

What about education? Again, possibly a pretty easy fix here. Make climate science classes mandatory in these programs and/or put climate science questions on the certification exams. Campaigns like Forecast the Facts aim to pressure both professional societies and undergraduate programs to do just that.

And, to its credit, the American Meteorological Society has been offering workshops on climate science to its members for many years.

The National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) also has a promising program underway, providing weathercasters with tips on talking about the links between weather and the environment, including climate adaptation and mitigation information to incorporate into their broadcasts. As of several years ago, the free, weekly newsletter goes to 95 meteorologists in 63 cities, who in turn reach more than 150 million viewers.

NEEF’s weekly tip sheets (called Earth Gauge) are tailored to each city’s local three-day forecast. They include information about climate patterns as well as practical information like public transportation options to reduce emissions or suggestions to put off lawn fertilizing to prevent chemical runoff during a downpour. (Anybody can sign up for these tips, and they’re also available in Spanish.)

I haven’t seen any evidence of this on my local weather forecast, but The New York Times reported back in 2007 that The Weather Channel was at least one major broadcaster taking tips from NEEF’s Earth Gauge service to the airwaves (or cables). “If The Weather Channel isn’t talking about climate change and global warming, who is?” Kaye Zusmann, the network’s vice president for program strategy and development said at the time. “It’s our mandate.”

But that was back when climate was still fashionable. And as yet, I’d say taking this level of responsibility as weather forecasters is the exception, not the norm.

Additionally, NEEF collaborates with the Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training to provide online environmental science courses for meteorologists and the public, with an eye to nudging weathercasters to include more environmental perspective and coverage. It also features profiles of meteorologists on its site, playing up the notion that they are “station scientists,” ambassadors bridging the scientific community and the general public.

The biggest, most daunting obstacle, however, has to do with personal politics.

Paul Douglas, a prominent Minnesota meteorologist and Star Tribune contributor, made a big splash when he “came out” as a Republican weathercaster who acknowledges climate science — and he says we have cause for alarm. Writing in the Huffington Post about his own “ephiphany,” he lamented the partisan politics that had previously clouded his own ability to acknowledge the science. Those dark clouds continue to prevent his many conservative friends and meteorologist colleagues from seeing the evidence that’s all around them.

There will likely be many more stories like Douglas’s as our weather gets weirder. One can only hope those who see the light are equally vocal about it. We also need more structural fixes that nudge weathercasters to a similar renaissance, in time lending climate science the friendly, local, plain-speaking, and personable power of TV personalities across the land.

Filed under: Article, Climate Change

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DvL Publishing Inc/Liverpool, NS, Canada (South Shore)

Employment Opportunity; editor: DvL Publishing Inc., publishers of Rural Delivery (Canada's farm and country magazine, now in its 36th year) Atlantic Forestry, Atlantic Beef, and Atlantic Horse & Pony magazines, has immediate opening for full time, in-house, editor fully conversant with print journalism and all aspects of publishing. The right person for this position is familiar with farming (family farm scale), forestry, and country life and be willing to relocate to Liverpool, on Nova Scotia's South Shore – two hours west of Halifax – or to within easy commute. Compensation to be negotiated. For on-line introduction, please turn to www.CountryMagazines.com. Send resumé and expression of interest to dvledit@eastlink.ca. Box 1509 LIverpool, NS B0T 1K0) Deadline Sept. 1, 2012.

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Undaunted by their failure to catch so much as a single guppy, Republicans in Congress are paddling on with their fishing expedition through the Obama administration’s clean-energy initiatives. They are nothing if not dutiful.

The latest faux scandal (what are we up to now? a dozen?) has to do with the Ivanpah solar power plant, currently under construction in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California.

Here’s what we know about Ivanpah, a concentrated solar power (CSP) project being developed by BrightSource Energy. It started construction in October 2010, amid great fanfare from politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. It is technically three separate, contiguous power plants, built in phases, with a total of 170,000 heliostat mirrors, spread across 3,600 acres, aiming sunlight at three solar power towers. It will have a gross capacity of around 392 megawatts and will be, when completed, the largest CSP installation in the world.

In April 2011, the project got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy (DOE), allowing it to scale up its already substantial private funding from, among others, NRG Solar and Google. A little over a year later, according to DOE, the project is about one-third completed and is employing over 1,700 people on site. When it’s finished it will “avoid 574,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to emissions of 110,000 vehicles” and “generate enough clean electricity to power approximately 87,000 homes annually.”

In other words, DOE’s investment has not failed. On the contrary, it’s kind of awesome! Everything’s going according to schedule. Jobs are being created. Barriers are being broken. If it proceeds according to plan, taxpayers won’t shell out anything, California will get tons of clean energy and jobs, and the U.S. solar industry will have a domestic success story. Plus the thing is just gorgeous to look at.

Who could possibly object to American jobs and energy? Serial car thief Darrell Issa and his merry band of fisherman (aka the House Oversight Committee), of course.

Why the concern? This Wall Street Journal piece contains the damning details. At least it contains the damning tone. The details turn out to be pretty unimpressive.

Here’s what happened: BrightSource had been scrambling for this Ivanpah loan for more than two years, since before Obama took office. All signs were positive. Problem was, a couple of deadlines were approaching. On March 31, 2011, the conditional agreement with DOE would lapse, and on April 1, “tortoise moving season” would start and delay the project for six more months, which may well have killed it. So BrightSource started sweating, hiring lobbyists, and pestering the DOE to finalize the damn thing. In early March it even proposed having its then-chairman John Bryson write his old friend, then-White House Chief of Staff William Daley, to plead with him to “quarterback loan closure.”

Is there any evidence that this last-minute volley of lobbying had anything to do with the loan guarantee being approved? No. The letter was never sent to Daley. Buried down in paragraph 20, WSJ reveals that when loan-program director Jonathan Silver caught wind of Bryson’s proposed letter, he responded within hours, telling him to tone it down, cut the “quarterback” crap, and chill out — the loan was “on track” to close before the deadline. (Like many DOE loans, it was held up by a plodding review from a passive-aggressive OMB.)

That’s it. As usual with these faux scandals, the media conspicuously fails to note that the last-minute lobbying and emails to the White House were all about hurrying up the review process, i.e., they came after the guarantees had been approved by DOE. There’s not a shred of evidence that political connections or lobbying affected any of the loan decisions made by DOE staff. Here, as with the other faux scandals, there is only dark insinuation.

Insinuation has no legal power, of course. These shows trials of individual DOE loans haven’t uncovered any wrongdoing, much less anything worthy of official censure or criminal charges. And House Republicans have been fishing for over a year now. But this is post-truth politics — they don’t need the reality of a scandal. That would be an unexpected bonus at this point. All they need is the atmospherics of scandal; they just need to keep floating broad charges and having the media cover them. The purpose is to keep DOE and Obama on the defensive, to hound them, to waste their energy, and to discredit clean energy.

If a thriving American business has to be sacrificed on that political altar, so be it.

——

For kicks, here’s a slideshow from DOE on their clean energy programs:

And here are links to three independent assessments of DOE’s loan program:

• Herb Allison, former national finance chairman for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), led an independent review of the program.
• The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service did its own analysis [PDF].
• The research service Bloomberg Government did an analysis as well.

All these assessments found roughly the same thing: The program is making smart, low-risk investments and has cost over $2 billion less than expected. Unsurprisingly, the media has largely ignored them.

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When it comes to the health of the nation, asparagus no expense.

With all the talk of taxing and banning the foods (and sodas) that are bad for us, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that doing the opposite can work, too. In fact, subsidies for healthy foods can be very effective at changing eating habits. And we’re learning even more about how well this approach can work from an innovative program designed by the nonprofit Wholesome Wave called Fruit and Vegetable Rx.

As the name might suggest, the program provides low-income people who don’t have much access to healthy food a doctor’s “prescription” plus vouchers that can be used to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. Jane Black reports for the Washington Post on Washington, D.C.’s pilot project version of the program run by local nonprofits in conjunction with a health clinic:

On June 6, the clinic began writing “fruit and vegetable prescriptions” to help cover the cost of fresh produce. Thirty-five families will receive vouchers for $1 per family member per day — $112 every four weeks for a family of four — to spend at any of five District farmers markets … The hope is that a medical endorsement of healthful eating, plus cash to buy ingredients, will help families make real changes to the way they shop and eat.

Early data suggests that such programs do exactly that. There’s also anecdotal evidence that these kinds of programs can lead to healthier lifestyles overall:

Michael Lambke implemented the program in the poor, rural community of Skowhegan, Maine. In 2011, 76 percent of patient families attended sessions at the clinic at least three times and made 10 trips to the farmers market, spending more than $5,000 on fresh produce.

Anecdotally, the program is inspiring families to embrace other aspects of a healthful lifestyle, Lambke says. One family got friends to join the program. Another tried out a new walking trail. “The best quote was a kid who came back to me and said that the thing he liked about the program was that his parents played with him more,” Lambke says. “Oh, man. That was awesome.”

Wholesome Wave, which is known mostly for its Double Value Coupon Program for farmers markets, also limits the prescription vouchers to farmers markets. The organization makes a strong economical argument for that emphasis — helping farmers directly provides a great benefit to regions’ local economies while spending money at a supermarket doesn’t.

I would argue that there is also an important nutritional argument for such a restriction. The fact is that most supermarkets are designed to get consumers to buy processed and/or calorie-dense foods. And while it’s true that most farmers markets have sweets for sale, the market’s overall environment contributes to a sense of being surrounded by fresh, healthy food (rather than pushing it to the literal margins).

This question of how the shopping experience contributes to obesity is the subject of a new study by University of Washington researcher Adam Drewnowski. His team found that the vast majority of Seattle residents they studied shopped not at the closest supermarket but at the cheapest one — and their diets often suffered for it. Those who shopped at lower-priced supermarkets had higher rates of obesity than those who shopped at more expensive markets. And this was the case even after controlling for education and income.

The point is that your shopping choice can affect your health — so keeping the low-income participants in these programs at farmers markets and out of supermarkets may enhance the positive effects. They don’t walk in with their coupon for fruits and veggies and walk out with a shopping bag full of soda, salty snacks, and processed foods.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that more evidence is rolling in that changing diet and physical activity levels probably won’t on their own be enough to address the prevalence of obesity and diet-related diseases like diabetes. Chemicals in our environment are likely a major — if not the major — contributing factor to obesity.

A study by researchers at the University of Chicago, for example, found that a fungicide in common use in Europe (not so much here) can on its own induce insulin resistance (the beginnings of diabetes) in rats — and the researchers believe many chemicals may act in the same way. Another study by a team of scientists in South Korea found that obese children had higher levels of phthalates (a plastic additive found in toys, pacifiers, and many beauty products) in their blood than children of average weight. In fact, the higher the phthalate levels, the more obese the children were.

Some researchers are suggesting that the obesity epidemic itself was kicked off when the pervasiveness of these kinds of chemicals reached a tipping point. (If you’re wondering why there’s a spate of research on this subject, it’s because the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society is going on as we speak.)

Of course, we shouldn’t minimize the value of the kinds of nutrition programs that Wholesome Wave is designing. It’s nothing but good news that they actually seem to work. But it’s also long past time for nutritionists and medical doctors to get behind the idea that futzing with the “calories in/calories out” equation is a necessary, but insufficient, approach to address obesity. Until we have the entire public health community speaking out as forcefully against phthalates and other endocrine disruptors as they do against soda and trans fats, it’s unlikely we’ll ever truly “solve” obesity.

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