U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods (NYT)

Tax Vox Editor: Want to Do Something About Greenhouse Gas? Try A Carbon Tax (Forbes)

Solving Climate Change Need Not Demand Unconditional Surrender (Bloomberg BW editorial)

Lessons from Canada’s 2008 Carbon Tax Defeat (Bloomberg View)

Alone among the major economies, Germany is moving purposefully to phase out fossil fuels while also shuttering nuclear power. Germany’s energy makeover, or “energiewende,” appears to be thriving, as evidenced by the country’s humming economy, low unemployment, robust exports, stable or declining CO2 emissions, and rapid uptake of renewables. Yet the world’s most influential newspaper casts this ambitious program as an incipient failure, even as elsewhere it decries the climate stalemate in Washington.

Here are ten packets of information worth bearing in mind as you sift through coverage in “the paper of record” of Germany’s transformative energy agenda.

1. The German economy is the world’s fourth largest ― after the United States, China and Japan. Of the three dozen highest-population countries, Germany boasts the highest per capita GDP, save for the U.S.

2. Germany has embarked upon a concerted program to transform its energy system from fossil fuels to renewable sources ― wind power, electricity from sunlight, and biological-based fuels. This energy makeover — energiewende, in German — is not an overnight phenomenon but the accumulation of a dozen synergistic laws and policy directives instituted over several decades. The energiewende is now reaching critical mass, such that last year over 20% of German-produced electricity was generated from renewable sources, not even counting traditional hydro-electricity: wind, 8.4%; biomass, 6.7%; photovoltaics, 4.7%; municipal waste, 0.8% (an additional 3.2% was from water power) ― more than triple the comparable percentage for the U.S. (see table), and the highest share by far of any major economy. Perhaps most notably, Germany, with cloudier skies, a more northerly location, and 1/27th the land area, produces more than three times as much photovoltaic electricity as the United States. PV’s share in Germany’s electricity generation mix is 20 times as large as that in the U.S. (more…)

Are Taxes Key to Curbing Climate Change? (Adele Morris, Christian Science Monitor)

Science Is Unequivocal, Policy Is Obvious: Tax CO2 Pollution (E Kolbert, New Yorker)

Progressive “Better Off Budget” Features Carbon Tax (San Diego Free Press)

Hansen Tells Senate: Carbon Tax Trumps Keystone XL (C-Span, 23:45-31:00)

Ev’rybody’s talkin’ ’bout Revolution, Evolution, Masturbation, Flagellation, Regulation, Integrations, Mediations, United Nations, Congratulations — John Lennon, “Give Peace a Chance”

The number-one energy meme of late is “fracking changes everything,” with fracked oil and methane (gas) having turned the United States almost overnight into the world’s leading extractor of hydrocarbons and, perhaps soon, even a net exporter. And that was before Russia annexed the Crimea and muscled in on the rest of Ukraine. Now the chorus of voices calling on Congress and the White House to neutralize Vladmir Putin’s use of natural gas as a geopolitical weapon by making America the “arsenal of energy” for Eastern Europe, as a former Bush NSC official urged in the New York Times, has moved into the higher decibels.

In the past week, the Times’ editorial board and the director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School have been among those urging stepped-up U.S. oil and gas exports (and, hence, more fracking). And that’s just on the center-lib part of the spectrum. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is demanding approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and pretty much the entire U.S. Right wants our oil-and-gas spigot on full bore as well.

To paraphrase John Lennon, everybody’s talking about gas fracking, well drilling, hydrocarbing, tar sands spilling (well, not spilling). But no one, it seems, is talking about exporting a different brand of energy to gas-dependent Eastern Europe: energy efficiency and renewables. Yet therm for therm, both would be just as effective as U.S. hydrocarbons at reducing the need for Russian gas. And, it almost goes without saying, efficiency and renewable could be in place a lot faster — and in a fashion that could allow Ukrainians, Czechs, Hungarians and Poles to be active participants in their liberation. (more…)