InsideClimate News

For three months last summer, temperatures in Texas soared higher than at any time in recorded history, and the state is still coping with the most expensive drought in its history. But can the 2011 Texas heat wave be attributed to global warming?

Most scientists are careful not to link specific weather events to climate change trends, but NASA's James Hansen and two colleagues from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University have taken that plunge. They've gathered data they say shows that the 2011 Texas and Oklahoma heat wave—as well as a deadly Moscow heat in 2010—were "a consequence of global warming because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming." 

Their conclusions are based on more than 50 years of temperature data, Hansen told InsideClimate News. By comparing the recent shift toward extreme high summer temperatures with that data, he said his group was able to demonstrate that the record-breaking 2011 Texas heat wave wouldn't have occurred without global warming. This data also provides a broader context for the summer of 2011, which across the United States was the second warmest on record, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Extremes Index twice the historical average.

After decades of subsidizing fossil fuels, it's clean energy's turn to get bountiful federal support, President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. 

On this issue the president emphasized two goals. The first was to pass a federal clean energy standard to require utilities to buy a certain percentage of their electricity from cleaner sources by 2035; the second, to act on expiring tax credits and pass new ones, including a new $5 billion subsidy to prop up clean energy manufacturers.

The policies are meant to eliminate risk to private investors and accelerate the boom in renewable-power plant construction. Obama said they'll help "double-down on a clean energy industry that's never been more promising."

But do the country's clean energy advocates, analysts and investors agree? InsideClimate News asked several leading U.S. players to weigh in on the president's policy choices.  

When the Obama administration rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline last week, it cited concerns over the project's route through Nebraska as one reason for its decision. That segment of the pipeline is now being rerouted, in response to Nebraskans who spent years persuading lawmakers to move the tar sands pipeline—intended to carry crude oil from Alberta, Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast—out of the Nebraska Sandhills, a fragile ecosystem that overlies the Ogallala aquifer.

Nebraska state Sen. Ken Haar, a 68-year-old Democrat who is nearing the end of his first term, played a key role in the movement's success. Haar has worked as a science teacher, business owner and inventor, and is a former executive director of the state's Democratic Party. He helped found the Save Our Sandhills coalition, a non-partisan group that includes organizations as diverse as the Sierra Club and the Independent Cattlemen of Nebraska. Haar was also the first public official to call for a special session of the legislature to discuss a pipeline reroute.

In November, that special session was finally held, and an agreement was reached with TransCanada to move the pipeline out of the Sandhills. One of the bills passed during the session gave the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) authority to study alternative pipeline routes.

In an interview with InsideClimate News, Haar talked about his plans for the future, why he chose to get involved in the Keystone XL controversy and the importance of citizen activism. He also warned that the public must remain vigilant, because the pipeline will likely be built.

How much political capital can Republican candidates and their aligned groups continue to squeeze out of Solyndra, the giant green stain on President Obama's first term?

It seems they're looking to find out, with a new ad campaign that aims to keep the failed clean energy investment in the forefront of voters' minds.

In response, Obama has tried to reframe the issue in the first T.V. spot of his re-election campaign, by redirecting the spotlight away from Solyndra on to what the president says are his job-creating clean energy policies.

The result of these dueling ad campaigns is a unique start to the 2012 campaign season, in which the clean energy economy has received top billing.

Chris Fox, co-director of policy programs at Ceres, a non-partisan coalition of investors and green groups, said the ads show deepening divisions between Republicans and Democrats on the question of whether clean energy can drive America's economic recovery.

"It's gotten to be such a partisan issue now, and we expect [the debate] to continue throughout the 2012 election season," he told InsideClimate News.

The battle of the ads began on Monday, when Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group, launched a $6 million campaign to run one-minute spots on T.V. and social media sites attacking Obama for backing Solyndra, the California solar panel maker that received half a billion dollars in federal loan guarantees before going belly-up in August.