Global Warming

NFIB and Lincoln have teamed up to launch a campaign urging the EPA not to do anything about greenhouse gases, and she details her fight in an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing's E&E TV. It's not a very coherent interview, as Lincoln just repeats an endless flood of talking points (uninspired ones, too) and verbally treads water. She's a politician, not an expert on policy, or anything else. The basic idea is that there are too many regulations, and regulations are bad.

Monica Trauzzi: EPA hasn't yet sent its proposed rule of greenhouse gas emissions for utilities to OMB. The deadline is September 30. Do you take that as a sign that maybe there are some other regulations that they're thinking of rolling back on?

Sen. Blanche Lincoln: I certainly hope so. I mean, that is definitely what we've been aiming for is to make sure -- and you can go to our Website, www.sensiblereg.org, and that is where you can see these small businesses talking about what they face on a day-to-day basis, the cost of it, the time, how it is, you know, prohibitive towards them being able to reinvest their resources into their businesses to create new jobs. And it's not just the new regs that come out, it is the uncertainty of what happens. You know, you're exactly right, delaying that greenhouse gas emission rule is something that should be done if we don't have all the facts, if we don't have the appropriate cost-benefit analysis, if we don't have the appropriate analysis of what, you know, is going to actually happen with that. OMB has got to have -- I mean, sometimes it can take them two or three or four months, you know, to get that information out. And that is absolutely appropriate and it should not go forward until we have all that information. But when there are over 4200 new pending regulations out there, it just creates this unbelievable arena of uncertainty in businesses large and small, but particularly small, because they get hit harder. They're not going to take their own money and spend $10,000 or $10 million, because they don't know what those types of regs are going to cost them.

Uncertainty is bad, so the EPA must delay its new regulations as long as possible. 4,200 new regulations!

This is all fairly standard-issue Republican cant. Which isn't surprising: The oil and gas industry were another of Lincoln's major funders. (Lincoln also received more money than any other Democrat from ALEC, the organization that helps major industries write their own right-wing legislation in statehouses across the country.)

Blanche Lincoln's loss proved that out-Republicaning the Republicans is an insane way to try to win an election, but Democrats never bother to learn that lesson.

In "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the World," Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Prize," tackles both this anxiety and its root causes.  [Editor's Note: We should point out that Yergin, as chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, has financial ties to the energy industry and there is great dispute in the scientific community about his opinions on peak oil.] The book is an enlightening and detailed historical survey of how man has discovered and harnessed various energy sources, from oil to wind, electricity to shale gas. Although Yergin focuses on the people behind these discoveries -- we learn, for example, how a 19th-century mountaineer's obsession with understanding why the sky is blue led to the discovery of the greenhouse effect -- he adeptly explains the often-complicated political and economical backdrop to these revolutionary feats.

Yergin spoke with Salon over the phone, about our overblown peak oil fears, China's energy future and the value of energy efficiency.

You address an important question that has fazed many people: Is the world going to run out of oil? Some people say it will -- and quite abruptly. This is peak oil theory. You say otherwise.

The peak oil argument is that we are already halfway through the world's endowment of recoverable oil. The argument that I am making is that the endowment is much larger, and technology keeps enlarging what we can recover. Case study No. 1 is offshore Brazil where you have what is called presalt [oil found under a thick layer of salt lying just beneath the seabed]. It was inaccessible up until a few years ago. It is very large and will likely make Brazil one of the powerhouses of world oil production. Case study No. 2 is North Dakota. The Bakken formation [a rock formation yielding shale, or "tight" oil] was producing, a few years ago, 10,000 barrels a day. Now it is producing about 450,000 barrels a day. That came as a surprise. Five years ago, no one would have thought that North Dakota would be the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the country, but that's because of advanced technology.

There have been recurrent periods of great fear of running out of oil and it goes back to when oil was first developed as a commercial business in western Pennsylvania in the 19th century. It was always mysterious and people were predicting it would come to an end and we'd have to go back to using whale oil or coal or so forth. But each time there is this anxiety, what happens is new technology, new innovations, new areas open up, and the supply picture suddenly looks much better. So this current peak oil discussion is really the latest manifestation of what has been a recurrent feature since people started using and developing oil. But when you look at the numbers, we see that there is an additional supply coming in. My view is that rather than facing an imminent decline we'll see production of oil liquids continue to expand for a few more decades and then it'll come to a plateau. It won't necessarily fall off sharply.

But this is not to say that everything is fine because, first of all, new resources have to be developed and that requires investment and time. Secondly, it does go back to what I call the aboveground risks, which are the geopolitics: conflicts within countries, what governments want to do. There are many things to worry about but with adequate investment and progress in technology, we can meet the supply needs.

But what about China? We constantly read headlines about China's booming consumerist class and its growing demand for cars. What about developing countries? Their energy consumption rates are also going to rise rapidly.

There is a split in the world right now—the U.S., Western Europe and Japan's consumption of oil is actually going to go down, because we are going to be driving more efficient cars by 2025. New cars are supposed to get up to 64 miles to the gallon.

A decline in oil reserves may be seen, but now, in 2011, we don't know whether a decline in 2040 or 2050 will be because of physical constraints on available supply, or because, in fact, the Chinese have bought all the cars they are going to buy, and they're driving more efficient cars, and maybe some of those cars are electric cars. Maybe [the decline in oil consumption] we've seen in developed countries is something that will happen in a few decades in these countries that are so rapidly going up the economic ladder. For China, energy efficiency is one of their high priorities.

You write about energy efficiency. In your view it's something grossly underestimated in discussions about energy.

I've always thought of energy conservation really as an energy source. I call it the fifth fuel and it's the one that's underestimated. But in fact the U.S. is twice as efficient as it was in the 1970s and early 1980s. It's a big change. I think the potential is very great; it just doesn't have the glamour of a beautiful wind turbine or wonderful solar panels. It's much harder to illustrate. Even in looking for pictures for the book: How do you illustrate conservation? You know how to illustrate wind and you know how to illustrate solar and you know how to illustrate oil. Conservation is kind of everything. I try to show with some examples of how a company like Dow [Chemical], or an airline and airplane manufacturers, improves conservation. You have to start with an energy efficiency mentality.

OK. But just thinking of myself as one individual, it can be kind of hard to conceptualize the societal impact of my decision to, say, buy an Energy Star fridge or a more fuel-efficient car.

Exactly. You're one person. How does one person have an influence? What will motivate you to do it? It may be the very practical thing of saving money. That will motivate people.

But there are some cultures where the idea of conservation is much more deeply imbedded. I talk about Japan. It is a country that has developed without resources. They import virtually everything.

Right. There is a Japanese term you mention ...

"Mottainai": too precious to waste. It's really a deep-seeded cultural value.

The U.S. has been deeply blessed, since its foundation, with ample resources. That gives us a different kind of mentality. But I remember a time when energy conservation, or efficiency, was a sharply divisive question. I am struck -- and I find this a hopeful sign -- that across the spectrum today, energy conservation is embraced as a major component in meeting our energy needs for the future. If you look at the emphasis on sustainability and how that has become part of the value system of so many Americans, you really see a shift in thinking.

Is this shift the result of having suffered some economic crises? I'm thinking about the 2008 oil crisis.

That oil crisis really did shift the way people think. You could see it in what people thought about when they bought a vehicle. If you look at Detroit in 2007, it was still all about SUVs because that is what it seemed the public wanted. Now they are planning very different types of cars with a commitment to building efficiency into these vehicles. That is a big swing. Automobile makers can't just turn on a dime, because it takes five years to bring a model out and there is a lot of investment in production lines. But look at what they're advertising today. There is a big emphasis on how these are efficient cars.

I think the $147 oil barrel in 2008 actually did one of the things prices can do and that is change the way people think. Price really matters. It's a piece of information. Depending on what the price is, it says to you: keep doing what you're doing; or, innovate, become more efficient, find alternatives, make changes and develop new supplies.

"Energy security" is one of those ubiquitous terms people use all the time but that is hard to define. Can you explain it for us?

Our $14 trillion economy rests on an energy foundation and we basically depend upon reliable flows of energy to keep everything going. Not just the proverbial keeping your lights on, but keeping everything on, including the Internet. So the question of energy security is what are the threats and risks [to these flows], and how to manage them. Those threats and risks cover a very broad range, from disruptions in supply because there is a conflict in the Middle East, to what the CEO of Sony called the "bad new world" of cyber vulnerability, to natural disasters -- we've had several episodes in the U.S. in the last several years when electricity has gone down in different parts of the country and life was paralyzed.

The best thing about energy security is when you don't have to think about it because you are secure.

There are a lot of things to keep track of, though, from protecting infrastructure to having the right equipment. But the politics behind all of this is very complicated. I don't think people think about this on a day-to-day basis.

I think it's true that we just take the flow of energy -- as we should -- for granted, but it's a very complex system that delivers our electricity. It delivers fuel that keeps our cars going, our airplanes in the sky. In terms of oil, it is a vast, global system and the scale of it is enormous.

One of the refreshing points you make in your book is that mankind underestimates its own intellectual capabilities in producing game-changing innovations in technology. Are you maybe putting too much faith in our abilities? Can we leave the security of energy up to chance?

Sure, you don't know the innovation or breakthrough until it happens, and there can be long lead times and then suddenly it takes over the world. Look at the Internet. It was started after the Cuban Missile Crisis but it didn't take over the world until after the Internet bubble. Innovation needs to be nurtured. It can come from left field. It could be the result of large organizations mobilizing resources. It can also be the result of a single obsessed individual who stays the course in the face of great derision, criticism and disappointment. But it's remarkable what's been achieved and how it shapes our every dimension. So, yes, there are risks, but there is also this capacity for human creativity and conviction.

You say that the right policies need to be in place to ensure investment and energy security. How much of a role do you think government should play in exploring and developing energy resources?

Government -- federal and state -- sets the regulatory environment. Another big role is supporting R&D and that's been a role the federal government has played since WWII. As a country we have benefited enormously from it.

One of the recurring themes of these stories you write about is repeated failure and risk before a venture is successful. Reports of such failures have been in the news of late, for example, the Solyndra affair and flammable drinking water in upstate New York and Pennsylvania due to fracking. Innovation, as you state, takes time, but there are real adverse effects on real lives in the process. Is it a fair burden to place on the average person just trying to provide for himself and his family?

I headed a task force on energy efficient development during the Clinton administration. One of the things about research and development is that it does involve failure, and a willingness and ability to tolerate failure. Even with all these breakthroughs, there were a lot of things that didn't work out and it took a long time. If we look at the renewables industry today, it started with great optimism in the '70s and '80s, and then crashed and went through what its survivors have called the "valley of death." Now, it's come back and it's a much bigger industry. But it is hard to know who the winners are. The ground keeps shifting. 

The Caller claimed to have learned that the EPA was planning to hire "230,000 new bureaucrats — at a cost of $21 billion" to implement new greenhouse gas regulations. That was the scoop. $21 billion and 230,000 new EPA bureaucrats! That is false. It's based on a misreading of a Justice Department brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals DC circuit, which presents the "$21 billion" figure as an example of what the EPA would need to regulate emissions if the rule they're going to court to defend is blocked.

Here's Politico -- noted left-wing rag Politico! -- handily debunking the story:

“Hiring the 230,000 full-time employees necessary to produce the 1.4 billion work hours required to address the actual increase in permitting functions would result in an increase in the Title V administration costs of $21 billion per year,” DOJ wrote.

DOJ adds that the tailoring rule is designed specifically to avoid that kind of scenario.

The EPA determined that phasing in the statutory limits would still allow most of the emission benefits “while avoiding the permit gridlock that unquestionably would result from the immediate application” of the thresholds laid out in the Clean Air Act, DOJ said in the brief.

(Emphasis mine.)

Who is fighting this "tailoring rule"? The biggest industrial polluters, as Kate Sheppard explains. The tailoring rule means opening up the permitting process to the biggest emitters first, because otherwise the EPA would have to immediately begin regulating every greenhouse gas emitter in the country, which would be a bureaucratic disaster and insanely expensive. Again: This is what the EPA would like to avoid. Polluters want to block the rule in order to force the EPA to give up on this crazy idea of regulating greenhouse gas emissions entirely.

So the Caller read a DoJ brief incorrectly. It happens! Those things are written in legalese, who can understand any of it?

They admitted their screw-up and moved on, right? No. Instead, they continue to insist that they're right, and that the Obama administration purposefully and explicitly seeks to destroy American industry while bankrupting the nation by expanding the size of the EPA 13-fold and increasing its budget by $21 billion, and this secret plot was buried in a legal brief that they and they alone understand.

The Caller's executive editor, one David Martosko, writes an editor's note attacking all the Callers critics as left-wing pinkos and liars. "Despite the criticisms that some have offered," he writes, "we haven’t changed a word." It must be correct, then, because no one ever intentionally lies on the internet.

Martosko goes on to describe the filing with a marginally greater degree of accuracy, making this editorial something of a snide, defiant walk-back (a right-wing media special), but he insists on the opposite-day reading of the filing's argument that underpins the Caller's scoop, which was of course already latched onto by Fox and by anti-enviromental Republicans in Congress.

Dave Weigel charitably writes that Martosko "doesn't really know what the 'facts' are," but Weigel also notes where Martosko used to work: the "communications firm" Berman and Company, where he was, until this August, "senior strategist and director of research."

Berman and Company is quite objectively in the business of manufacturing misinformation. They don't just lobby politicians or send out press releases, they create front groups and spread specious pro-industry "research." Martosko's former job was to deceive journalists.

Any senior Berman and Company strategist would know how to take a document like this legal filing and argue that it says the opposite of what it says. They teach that on day one. (I would also not be shocked to learn that some of the polluters challenging the EPA in court are among Berman and Company's clients, but there's no way to know -- Berman generally makes sure his clients names appear no where near his work promoting their interests.)

Why would any organization supposedly dedicated to journalism hire a Berman and Company "strategist" as executive editor? If your political beliefs align, let him write a column every week or something, but someone for whom truth is a malleable resource to be bent in the service of promoting influential industry players is not really someone you want in charge of a newsroom.

Unless, of course, "winning" the stupid partisan argument is actually more important to you than reporting reality.

The national media overlooked the George Bush Park fire, just as they ignored the link between climate change and the hellish summer Texas experienced, but the fire was big news in Houston. Local TV stations showed trees burning like torches, unleashing orange flames and black smoke.No evacuations were ordered, but guests at nearby hotels were spooked. "The hallways in the hotel here, you can hardly breathe," said hotel guest Shawn Porter. "It's in all the rooms. They're getting filled with smoke." 

It took helicopters and fire trucks three days to get the fire 95 percent contained, according to the Texas Forest Service. By then, 1,623 acres had burned, an area the size of two Central Parks in New York City.

A week later, the park, which was named after the senior President Bush, was still recovering but back in service. Seeking relief from the 98-degree heat, a German Shepherd splashed in a pond named after Bush's White House dog, Millie, while the pop-pop-pop of pistol shots rang out from one of the park's practice ranges. In the burned area, however, the soil was still charred, the grass burned away. The trunks of shrubs and trees were as black and lifeless as charcoal.

Sizable though it was, the George Bush Park fire was a minor fire in the context of Texas 2011. Some 3.7 million acres of Texas have burned in the last 12 months, an area roughly equal to the state of Connecticut. Fires are still burning today, as the Texas Forest Service reports, yet Gov. Perry has offered little in the way of relief but the power of prayer and positive thinking.

"We'll be fine," Perry said in mid-August. "As my dad [a retired cotton farmer] says, 'It'll rain. It always does.'"

Perry's followers among evangelical Christians like to talk about the "end of days," when the Lord will return to judge the living and the dead. The ferocious heat and drought that have been punishing Texas for the last 12 months made it seem that the end of days might well be approaching, though not exactly in the way Gov. Perry and fellow evangelicals mean. As one region of the Lone Star State after another has been engulfed in flames and smoke, Texas appeared to have descended into the fires of hell.

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When President Obama criticized Perry on Sept. 25 as being "the governor of a state that is on fire [while he is] denying climate change," Obama probably had in mind the fires in Bastrop, a bedroom community 25 miles east of Austin, the Texas capital. The Bastrop fires were so powerful, photogenic and devastating that they received not just statewide but national news coverage.

Responding to Obama, Perry spokesman Mark Miner told ABC News, "It’s outrageous President Obama would use the burning of 1,500 homes, the worst fires in state history, as a political attack."

With Texas suffering the most severe one-year drought in the state's history and the hottest summer in the entire nation's history, firefighters were supremely challenged. In Bastrop, the heat of the fire "was so intense, our firefighters couldn't get close enough to fight it [at first]. They had to shift to evacuation mode," said Judge Ronnie McDonald, Bastrop's highest-ranking local official.

"No one on the face of this Earth has ever fought fires in the face of such extreme conditions," said the Texas Forest Service.

The Bastrop fires destroyed 1,633 homes and caused two deaths, reported Judge McDonald as he led a Salon reporter on a tour of the disaster zone on Sept. 23. Most of the homes that were destroyed had burned down to the ground, with nothing left standing but a stone foundation or chimney. Outside one house, a pickup truck had been scorched so intensely that its color had changed to a ghostly white.

In contrast to the three days required to subdue the George Bush Park fire, the Bastrop fires "burned for two weeks before we reached more than 90 percent containment," McDonald added. As a result, more than 34,068 acres were scorched -- an area larger than the entire city of San Francisco. The judge estimated that the town stands to lose 10 to 12 percent of its tax base.

Meanwhile, three other major fires had combined with the Bastrop blaze to encircle the state capital with flames and smoke. Lee Leffingwell, the mayor of Austin, was monitoring a fire in Steiner Ranch, a hilly area west of the city, when he saw a "huge cloud of black and gray smoke" in the eastern sky, coming from the Bastrop fire.

"Standing at the Steiner Ranch fire, we were surrounded by fire on all four sides," Leffingwell told Salon. "We could see the Bastrop fire to the east, there was a fire in Leander to the north and a fire in Spicewood to the south."

"It looked like we'd been bombed," added Leffingwell, who served as a U.S. Navy pilot in Vietnam. "It looked like a war zone."

- - - - - - - - - -

It was the Bastrop blaze, and the high-profile media coverage of it, that led Perry to leave the campaign trail and return to Texas on Sept. 6. The governor spent less than 24 hours in his fire-ravaged state. After a helicopter tour of the Austin area, he issued a statement calling the fires "as mean as I have ever seen" and expressing his thanks for "the brave men and women who put themselves in harm's way to protect Texans' lives and property."

But Perry treated those same brave men and women quite differently three months earlier. In the name of balancing Texas' budget, Perry and the Republican super-majority in the Legislature slashed fire protection spending, while also cutting spending for education, healthcare, parks and other state services. With a $10 billion shortfall to accommodate and revenue increases off the table thanks to Perry's antipathy to raising taxes, the arithmetic demanded huge spending cuts. Thus a state fund that volunteer fire departments across Texas have historically drawn on to buy firefighting equipment, supplies and protective clothing was cut by a staggering 72 percent, from $25 million a year down to $7 million, according to Chris Barron, executive director the the state Firemen's and Fire Marshal's Association of Texas. The Texas Forest Service budget was also sharply cut, from $122 million down to $75 million.

"To cut is fine, but you can't cut first responders -- that's a matter of life and death," responded Texas state Sen. Mario Gallegos, a Democrat who spent 22 years as a firefighter and paramedic in Houston before entering politics. "Volunteer fire departments are the backbone of fire protection in this state, and they need heavy equipment and other resources to do their job. If they had had those resources, maybe we could have stopped those fires in Bastrop sooner and saved another 100 or 200 homes."

“The 2012-13 appropriation for the Volunteer Firefighter Assistance Account is comparable to that in previous budgets signed by Gov. Perry,” Lucy Nashed, the governor’s deputy press secretary told Salon. “According to the Texas Forest Service, their funding level does not hinder their ability to fight fires…. The state has been and will continue to provide the Texas Forest Service and local officials with all available resources to fight these fires.”

Perry demanded these spending cuts in the spring of 2011, Gallegos added, "when there was no mystery that Texas was in the midst of a record drought and heat wave." Indeed, it was in April that Perry convened the prayer rally where he urged fellow Texans to appeal for heavenly help against the drought. At the time, the governor was telling the Legislature that voter identification control and sanctuary cities for immigrants "were emergency issues" that required immediate attention, recalled Gallegos, who added, "I come from a public safety background, and to me, maintaining the forest service and fire protection during a time of record heat and drought is a real emergency, not this other stuff."

Meanwhile, Perry was ignoring the findings of mainstream climate scientists in his state, whose research indicates that while climate change was not the primary cause of the hellish summer of 2011, it was undoubtedly a contributing factor. "This summer's temperatures were about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average in Texas," John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M, told Salon. "My rough calculation is that about 74 percent of those 5.4 degrees was due to La Niña [the oceanic-atmospheric phenomenon that influences weather patterns across the Western Hemisphere] and about 9 percent from greenhouse gas emissions." These higher temperatures made the impact of the drought worse, Nielsen-Gammon explained, by increasing evaporation and reducing soil moisture -- thereby making trees and grasses more vulnerable to fire -- while also boosting the demand for water on the part of humans and livestock.

"There are no skeptics involved in climate change science in Texas," Nielsen-Gammon said, but public opinion is mixed. Appointed state climatologist in 2000 by Gov. George W. Bush, Nielsen-Gammon deals with skeptics by presenting the data and arguments on all sides of the issue before concluding, "Whether you believe this is what is going to happen with temperatures in the future or not, it's a possibility you have to take seriously, because here's the evidence."

Nielsen-Gammon has never tried this approach on the state's No. 1 climate skeptic, however. Gov. Perry, he says, has never asked for a briefing on climate change, nor have his top advisors.

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It's no shock that a Texas governor would resist taking action against climate change; the oil and gas industry has dominated the state's economy and politics for decades. As a state, Texas emits the most greenhouse gases in the U.S.; if it were a separate nation, it would rank as the world's seventh largest emitter. When George W. Bush left the governor's mansion for the White House in 2000, he quickly became the most hostile president to climate action ever to occupy the Oval Office.

But Rick Perry is well to the right of Bush on climate change, well to the right even of the oil and gas industry. Bush accepted the science of climate change for the most part, he just didn't like the policy implications and sought, quite successfully, to torpedo them. Likewise, even Exxon-Mobil, the biggest funder of climate disinformation activities over the past 20 years, no longer publicly disputes the science of climate change; it simply refuses to do anything about it. By contrast, Perry's rhetoric on the issue channels the paranoid extremism of the Tea Party and its corporate founders, the Koch brothers.

In his book, "Fed Up!," Perry doesn't engage the arguments pro or con about climate science or policy. He simply asserts that "it's all a contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight" and the economic effects of addressing it "could be absolutely devastating."

As governor, Perry has been an enthusiastic booster of fossil fuel consumption and the corporations that profit from it. In 2005, he tried to fast-track construction of 11 new coal-fired power plants outside of Dallas that, as a complex, would have ranked as the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the U.S. On the very same day that Perry signed his executive order, the retired chairman of the utility company pushing the project, TXU, gave Perry a $2,000 check. TXU as a whole contributed $104,000 to Perry's 2006 election campaign, highlighting a recurring theme in Perry's gubernatorial career that will be the focus of Part 2 of this Salon special report: Perry's willingness to do favors for big donors, including making Texas land available for a nuclear waste dump proposed by Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, the second largest donor to Perry's gubernatorial campaigns.

"Gov. Perry makes decisions in the best interest of Texas," said deputy press secretary Nashed. “In the decade of the 2000's Texas reduced ozone emissions by 27 percent -- more than any other state -- and reduced SO2 emissions by 32 percent and NOX emissions by 58 percent, all while remaining the nation's leading energy producer and protecting jobs.”

Perry's handling of the fires of 2011 does not appear to have hurt him politically, at least not yet. Perhaps seeking to contain the problem, Perry joined with legislative leaders on Sept. 15 to provide an additional $5 million to the volunteer fire department fund. It helps that neither the Texas nor the national media tend to connect the wildfires with climate change. The Houston Chronicle even came to Perry's defense on his cuts to fire protection, saying he was falsely accused. Why? Well, the newspaper explained, because the cuts didn't take effect until the new fiscal year on Sept. 1 -- an odd defense to offer, considering that the Bastrop mega-fire did take place after Sept. 1, as did the George Bush Park fire.

The Texas Farm Bureau, which represents the state's farmers and ranchers, also continues to support Perry's budget decisions and handling of the drought, even though the drought has caused $5.2 billion of losses to Texas agriculture, according to official calculations, a figure that is expected to rise to at least $8 billion before year's end. "Rick Perry has been a good governor, and we support elected officials making the decisions they need to make," said Gene Hall, a genial former cattle rancher from east Texas who is the farm bureau's director of public relations. Asked whether the bureau accepts the mainstream science view of global warming and climate change, Hall ignored the question of science in favor of condemning the policy of cap-and-trade, which the bureau vehemently opposes on the grounds that it would raise the costs of fossil fuel. "You just can't produce a crop without putting diesel in the tractor and crossing the field a certain number of times," explained Hall.

In the end, it is Perry's combination of ideological fervor and his Pay-to-Play approach to politics that is most alarming about his potential ascension to president of the United States, according to critics. But friends and enemies alike agree that no one should underestimate the man.

"Rick Perry is not book smart, but he is very shrewd," said Tom "Smitty" Smith, the executive director of Public Citizen Texas. "He's one of the best politicians I've ever seen. He can connect with voters and he knows how to hire good staff and let them do what they need to do."

But the drought and fires now afflicting Texas also illuminate the governor's weaknesses, Smith added. "Perry is not a thinker," Smith told Salon. "He lacks intellectual curiosity. So if he became president and faced a climate change crisis like we have today in Texas, he wouldn't be able to get past his ideological, knee-jerk reaction and think his way out of it. Ideology and donors drive his policy decisions, so he tends to insist that his policies are right no matter what reality might say."

Coming: Pay to Play: The greening of Rick Perry

Mark Hertsgaard (www.markhertsgaard.com) is an independent journalist who has covered politics and the environment for 20 years for leading outlets around the world, including Vanity Fair, Time, the Nation and the BBC. He is the author of six books, including most recently, "Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth."

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.”

The first sentence is a mischaracterization of a summary of a study. Breitbart could conceivably argue that it doesn't warrant a correction, even though it's intentionally misleading. But the second sentence is straight-up factually wrong. As Mark Follman writes at Mother Jones, Professor Jurki Kauppinen is not one of the report's authors. He just isn't.

New York Times "Dot Earth" writer Andrew Revkin submitted a correction request to Mediabugs, a media error-tracking site, but, shockingly, Breitbart has yet to fix the post.

So you should drop Andrew a line, maybe? He's pretty busy, destroying the institutional left and having insane feverish conversations with imaginary military dudes about the coming violent civil war with liberals, but I'm sure he will get around to fixing this blatant factual error once it is pointed out to him.

We expected the Park Police to arrest and release us after a short stay in custody and a modest fine. Jail, said the action organizers, was a possibility but we would most likely be out by late afternoon. Wrong. Instead, our arrest on Pennsylvania Avenue began a two-and-a-half day ordeal that illustrated how the authorities tried -- and failed -- to deter future protests, which have been going on ever since and will conclude on Sept. 4.

After taking our belongings and removing our belts and shoelaces, the police asked us for personal information before leading us to a 6-by-7-foot holding room. It was Saturday morning and the protesters already there informed us we would be held until Monday. We surmised this was an attempt to intimidate other protesters from participating in the action. Sure enough, the police led more and more protesters into the room, as if it were some sort of clown car. Eventually, 15 of us were stuffed into the tiny room where we waited for nearly six hours. Since there was not enough room for everyone to sit, even on the floor, we rotated standing and sitting.

I consoled myself with the thought of our next destination, the D.C. Central Cell Block. Surely, it would be better than this. A small cell, no doubt, but at least there would be fewer of us crammed into such a small space. In reality, the cellblock proved even worse. We descended into the facility via a long ramp into a dark underground parking lot. Once there, the guards, in a businesslike manner, frisked us, removed our cuffs and led us to our cells. Except for a brief time in a nearby room to have my photograph taken and have my finger- and palm prints scanned, I didn't leave this cell for the next 35 hours. Apparently, every D.C.-area detention facility is bad, I learned, but bad in its own way.

My cell, 5 feet by 6, and encased in metal, resembled the interior of a large oven with the racks removed. There was a small metal sink and toilet. For sleeping and sitting, we had two metal beds -- sort of like giant metal cookie sheets. Imagine being in a non-air-conditioned attic on a hot afternoon and then staying there for the next day and a half. Most of us spent the time shirtless; others stripped down to their underwear. The fluorescent light, shielded behind bars and brownish-opaque plastic, stayed on 24 hours a day. This made sleeping almost impossible. Yet after a day in the cell, the light was a blessing; it helped keep the cockroaches at bay.

I expected the proverbial bread and water, but even this proved wishful thinking. Twice a day, the guards brought one bologna or cheese sandwich for us to eat and a small cup of water to drink. The first sandwich was so foul, I didn't finish it or eat anything else for the next two days. There was water from the sink, but even the guards couldn't agree whether it was potable. I drank it anyway, fearing dehydration more than sickness.

The worst part was the ceaseless, utter boredom. From jailhouse documentaries, I recall inmates watching TV or reading a book. Not here. We could speak with our cellmates, and to a lesser degree, the other people on our cellblock. Veteran environmentalist Gus Speth gave an impromptu lecture on his new book. McKibben told us about the experience of civil rights protesters in Southern jails during the 1960s. But for much of the time, we had little but our thoughts to occupy us. In the endless hours, I understood, the price of civil disobedience is real. It entails surrendering your body to the whims of authorities. Your body bears the brunt of the discomfort. Stripped of possessions, refused contact with loved ones, and denied most freedoms, one must simply endure. Anybody who says getting arrested is a cheap gesture should try it.

The guards appeared at 6:30 a.m. on Monday, quickly led us out of our cells, placed us in cuffs once again, and ferried us a couple blocks to the courthouse. Unlike two days ago, I now craved contact with the other protesters, even if it was in a small holding room. At least we would be together.

Like the D.C. Central Cell Block, the holding facility in the District of Columbia courthouse in Judiciary Square is also underground. Rather than the dungeon-like design of our previous detention center, the courthouse jail was brightly lit with white walls and red bars, sort of like a suburban Target box store. The guards here were a different breed from the ones at the Central Cell Block. U.S. marshals provide security at federal courthouses and look like Navy SEALs. I was growing weary of being handled by the various authorities. They frisked each of us again, removed our cuffs and placed us in leg irons. It was clear we should not trifle with the U.S. marshals. While being frisked, one member of our group chuckled. Bad idea. A marshal barked at him, "Stop laughing! I don't care if you're a protester -- I'll beat your fucking ass!"

We shuffled into a large cell, a relief after so many hours in cramped quarters. But the marshals kept leading more and more people to the holding pen until it was nearly as cramped as our earlier cells, except this time there were more than 50 people in the same space. There, we languished hour upon hour, with no water or food, waiting to see a judge. One inmate in an orange prison suit being led past us in leg shackles and cuffs took one look at us and shouted, "That's what you get for protesting!" Everybody laughed. He had a point.

Then, much to our delight, at 3:00, the women from our group -- whom we hadn't seen in nearly two days -- passed our cell without shackles while we cheered loudly. The rest of us were giddy, hoping we'd soon join them.

Then, in groups of six or so, they took us out of the cell and removed our leg irons. Even without them, we were expected to walk with our hands behind our backs. A silent marshal led us through a set of doors. I passed through and kept walking. With my hands still behind me, I stopped and noticed the guard was no longer beside me. I dropped my hands and realized I was in the lobby of the courthouse.

We strode onto the courthouse square and into the brilliant late afternoon sunlight. Dozens of people greeted us with food and drink. I embraced some I hadn't seen for days and even strangers who wanted to offer thanks. I stood around for a few minutes saying goodbyes before walking off alone.

As I wandered along the National Mall, I reflected on the grueling ordeal and didn't regret it for a moment. It stiffened my resolve to fight the Keystone XL pipeline and to support the climate movement. I felt proud to join such inspiring everyday citizens and wondered how many people like them the authorities will detain in future climate actions. I left the courthouse fortified by the resolve of these people willing to sacrifice their daily comfort to impede our headlong rush toward climate chaos. For the first time in a long while, I felt hope. 

Bob Wilson is an associate professor of geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.