By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 31, 2008; A04

Former vice president Al Gore will launch a three-year, $300 million campaign Wednesday aimed at mobilizing Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, a move that ranks as one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history.

The Alliance for Climate Protection's "we" campaign will employ online organizing and television advertisements on shows ranging from "American Idol" to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It highlights the extent to which Americans' growing awareness of global warming has yet to translate into national policy changes, Gore said in an hour-long phone interview last week. He said the campaign, which Gore is helping to fund, was undertaken in large part because of his fear that U.S. lawmakers are unwilling to curb the human-generated emissions linked to climate change.

"This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public's sense of urgency in addressing this crisis," Gore said. "I've tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it."

Private contributors have already donated or committed half the money needed to fund the entire campaign, he said. While Gore declined to quantify his contribution to the effort, he has devoted all his proceeds from the Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," the best-selling companion book, his salary from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and several international prizes, such as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which add up to more than a $2.7 million. Paramount Classics, the documentary's distributor, has pledged 5 percent of the film's profits to the group, and some of the money raised through the 2007 Live Earth concerts will help the campaign, along with Gore's proceeds from an upcoming book on climate change.

While "An Inconvenient Truth" urged viewers to fully inflate their car tires and to install compact fluorescent light bulbs to combat global warming, Gore said he is now focused on ensuring that the United States enacts a national carbon emission cap and ratifies a new global pact on climate change in the next three years.

"The simple algorithm is this: It's important to change the light bulbs, but it's much more important to change the laws," he said. "The options available to civilization worldwide to avert this terribly destructive pattern are beginning to slip away from us. The path for recovery runs right through Washington, D.C."

The new effort comes at a time when the three remaining major party presidential candidates -- Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) -- have all endorsed federal limits on greenhouse gases, virtually ensuring that the next occupant of the White House will offer a sharp break from President Bush's climate policy.

All three have discussed global warming with Gore in phone calls over the course of the past few months. While McCain backs a more modest plan than that favored by the Democrats -- he supports a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 1990 levels by 2050, compared with Obama and Clinton's vow of an 80 percent cut during that period -- the presumptive Republican nominee emphasized during a recent stop in Chula Vista, Calif., that he had pushed for a federal cap-and-trade system before either of his opponents came to the Senate.

"Neither have proposed legislation or played any public role during their time in the Senate," McCain said, sidestepping the fact that Clinton and Obama both back climate legislation, up for a Senate vote in June, that he has yet to endorse.

Gore, who backs a 90 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by mid-century, said that while he's "encouraged" that the remaining candidates back mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, they still need to be pushed: "What happens after the election will depend on whether or not we win enough hearts and minds in the country as a whole."

And former Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), a board member of the two-year-old alliance, said the candidates' commitment to a cap-and-trade system does not negate the fact that the majority of Americans fail to see climate change as a compelling political issue.

"Most Republicans, along with most Democrats, are focused almost exclusively on Iraq, the war against terrorism and the economy," Boehlert said. "That leaves little room for anything else."

In an effort to penetrate Americans' consciousness and change lawmakers' political calculus, the group aims to enlist 10 million volunteers through a combination of network and cable commercials, display ads in magazines ranging from People to Real Simple, and online social networks. By contrast, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s each boasted about 5 million activists.

Cathy Zoi, the Alliance for Climate Protection's chief executive, said the group will focus on individuals known in the advertising world as "influencers" who talk to a disproportionate number of people in their communities. While some ads will target inside-the-Beltway policymakers, the bulk of their efforts will focus on the general public.

"This is modern organizing," Zoi said, adding that the campaign aims to convince voters that "this is a solvable problem."

In an effort to broaden the campaign's appeal, the alliance has already forged working partnerships with groups including the Girl Scouts and the United Steelworkers of America. One of its early ads will feature the unlikely alliance of clergymen Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton sitting on a couch on Virginia Beach, talking about their commitment to address climate change.

Its first ad, which is narrated by the actor William H. Macy, highlights American's collective responses to historical challenges. "We didn't wait for someone else to storm the beaches of Normandy," Macy intones. "We didn't wait for someone else to guarantee civil rights." The commercial will run several times Wednesday on shows such as "Good Morning America," "Today," "American Idol," "Larry King Live" and "Anderson Cooper 360."

League of Conservation Voters president Gene Karpinski, whose group is supporting the effort, said he's optimistic the "we" campaign will succeed in a way that traditional environmental groups have not. "It heightens both the urgency and the sense we can get the job done with the broad middle that will make the difference," Karpinski said, "while having the resources to communicate in a sophisticated way, in a more expansive fashion than the community has done before."

Without question, the campaign represents one of the most far-reaching public advocacy initiatives in recent years. The American Legacy Foundation, an anti-smoking campaign that arose out of the massive 1998 tobacco settlement, made $100 million in ad buys its first year, but its funding quickly dwindled and it now spends $30 million annually. The Ad Council -- which runs public service announcements ranging from the "Just Say No" anti-drug message to the "Smokey the Bear" commercials -- receives an average of $40 million a year in donated media for the 50 campaigns it operates and only occasionally hits the $100 million annual mark for its campaigns.

The climate alliance's initiative, however, will not go unchallenged by climate change skeptics. Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a nonprofit funded by the coal industry and its allies, is spending about $35 million this election to bolster support for coal-generated electricity. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank that receives part of its funding from oil and gas companies, recently spent close to $35,000 to run a television ad both in the District and in scattered cities throughout the country attacking Gore, and plans a follow-up campaign. The ad argues that Gore and his allies in Hollywood use plenty of energy but that "Al Gore wants to cut our energy use, putting our jobs and our future in jeopardy."

Myron Ebell, who directs energy and global warming policy for CEI, said the fact that Gore feels compelled to run such an elaborate ad campaign highlights the extent to which his conservation message has failed to resonate with the American public. "He's spending a hundred million dollars to convince the American people to make sacrifices that he and his elite friends are not willing to make," Ebell said, adding that while many Americans may now blame humans for causing climate change, "the American people are not there with other alarmists" when it comes to supporting deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

John Podesta, president of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, said the fact that independent groups are already advertising on the issue underscores how much more politically relevant climate change is in the 2008 election, especially because Congress is unlikely to send a bill to Bush for signing this year. It is unclear whether the Senate has 60 votes to pass a cap-and-trade bill this summer, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee has yet to produce a companion climate bill.

"This will be played out on the candidate level, but also among an array of parties who have a stake in the outcome," Podesta said. "Without presidential leadership, you're left with a regional division and a partisan division [in Congress] that's likely to produce movement, but not the bold kind of change that's needed. You need a president for that."

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIMelBR3A3w

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1200259/rev_jerehiahs_new_home/

The Ethanol Scam: One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles

The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn't that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after "solutions" that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.

Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to***off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional ****. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.

Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world's oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. With the first vote to be held in Iowa, the largest corn-producing state in the nation, former skeptics like Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain now pay tribute to the wonders of ethanol. Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama pleased his agricultural backers in Illinois by co-authoring legislation to raise production of biofuels to 60 billion gallons by 2030. A few weeks later, rival Democrat John Edwards, who is staking his campaign on a victory in the Iowa caucus, upped the ante to 65 billion gallons by 2025.

The third factor stoking the ethanol frenzy is the war in Iraq, which has made energy independence a universal political slogan. Unlike coal, another heavily subsidized energy source, ethanol has the added political benefit of elevating the American farmer to national hero. As former CIA director James Woolsey, an outspoken ethanol evangelist, puts it, "American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism." If you love America, how can you not love ethanol?

Ethanol is nothing more than 180-proof grain alcohol. To avoid the prospect of drunks sucking on gas pumps, fuel ethanol is "denatured" with chemical additives (if you drink it, you'll end up dead or, at best, in the hospital). It can be distilled from a variety of plants, including sugar cane and switch- grass. Most vehicles can't run on pure ethanol, but E85, a mix of eighty-five percent ethanol and fifteen percent gasoline, requires only slight engine modifications.

But as a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing pipelines and must be distributed by truck or rail, which is tremendously inefficient.

Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.

The ethanol boondoggle is largely a tribute to the political muscle of a single company: agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. In the 1970s, looking for new ways to profit from corn, ADM began pushing ethanol as a fuel additive. By the early 1980s, ADM was producing 175 million gallons of ethanol a year. The company's then-chairman, Dwayne Andreas, struck up a close relationship with Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, a.k.a. "Senator Ethanol." During the 1992 election, ADM gave $1 million to Dole and his friends in the GOP (compared with $455,000 to the Democrats). In return, Dole helped the company secure billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks. In 1995, the conservative Cato Institute, estimating that nearly half of ADM's profits came from products either subsidized or protected by the federal government, called the company "the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history."

Today, ADM is the leading producer of ethanol, supplying more than 1 billion gallons of the fuel additive last year. Ethanol is propped up by more than 200 tax breaks and subsidies worth at least $5.5 billion a year. And ADM continues to give back: Since 2000, the company has contributed $3.7 million to state and federal politicians.

The Iraq War has also been a boon for ADM and other ethanol producers. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was pushed by Corn Belt politicians, mandated the consumption of 7.5 billion gallons of biofuels by 2012. After Democrats took over Congress last year, they too vowed to "do something" about America's addiction to foreign oil. By the time Sen. Jeff Bingaman, chair of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, proposed new energy legislation this spring, the only real question was how big the ethanol mandate would be. According to one lobbyist, 36 billion gallons became "the Goldilocks number -- not too big to be impractical, not too small to satisfy corn growers."

Under the Senate bill, only 15 billion gallons of ethanol will come from corn, in part because even corn growers admit that turning more grain into fuel would disrupt global food supplies. The remaining 21 billion gallons will have to come from advanced biofuels, most of which are currently brewed only in small-scale lab experiments. "It's like trying to solve a traffic problem by mandating hovercraft," says Dave Juday, an independent commodities consultant. "Except we don't have hovercraft."

The most seductive myth about ethanol is that it will free us from our dependence on foreign oil. But even if ethanol producers manage to hit the mandate of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, that will replace a paltry 1.5 million barrels of oil per day -- only seven percent of current oil needs. Even if the entire U.S. corn crop were used to make ethanol, the fuel would replace only twelve percent of current gasoline use.

Another misconception is that ethanol is green. In fact, corn production depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel -- not just the diesel needed to plow fields and transport crops, but also the vast quantities of natural gas used to produce fertilizers. Runoff from industrial-scale cornfields also silts up the Mississippi River and creates a vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. What's more, when corn ethanol is burned in vehicles, it is as dirty as conventional gasoline and does little to solve global warming: E85 reduces carbon dioxide emissions by a modest fifteen percent at best, while fueling the destruction of tropical forests.

But the biggest problem with ethanol is that it steals vast swaths of land that might be better used for growing food. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor," University of Minnesota economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer point out that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year.

Thanks in large part to the ethanol craze, the price of beef, poultry and pork in the United States rose more than three percent during the first five months of this year. In some parts of the country, hog farmers now find it cheaper to fatten their animals on trail mix, french fries and chocolate bars. And since America provides two-thirds of all global corn exports, the impact is being felt around the world. In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork prices in China are up twenty percent. By 2025, according to Runge and Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry worldwide.

Despite the serious drawbacks of ethanol, some technological visionaries believe that the fuel can be done right. "Corn ethanol is just a platform, the first step in a much larger transition we are undergoing from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a carbohydrate-based economy," says Vinod Khosla, a pioneering venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Next-generation corn- ethanol plants, he argues, will be much more efficient and environmentally friendly. He points to a company called E3 BioFuels that just opened an ethanol plant in Mead, Nebraska. The facility runs largely on biogas made from cow manure, and feeds leftover grain back to the cows, making it a "closed-loop system" -- one that requires very few fossil fuels to create ethanol.

Khosla is even higher on the prospects for cellulosic ethanol, a biofuel that can be made from almost any plant matter, including wood waste and perennial grasses like miscanthus and switchgrass. Like other high-tech ethanol evangelists, Khosla imagines a future in which such so-called "energy crops" are fed into giant refineries that use genetically engineered enzymes to break down the cellulose in plants and create fuel for a fraction of the cost of today's gasoline. Among other virtues, cellulosic ethanol would not cut into the global food supply (nobody eats miscanthus or switchgrass), and it could significantly cut global-warming pollution. Even more important, it could provide a gateway to a much larger biotech revolution, including synthetic microbes that could one day be engineered to gobble up carbon dioxide or other pollutants.

Unfortunately, no commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants exist today. In one venture backed by Khosla, a $225 million plant in central Georgia is currently being built to make ethanol out of wood chips. Mitch Mandich, a former Apple Computer executive who is now the CEO of the operation, calls it "the beginning of a real transformation in the way we think about energy in America."

Maybe. But oil-industry engineer Robert Rapier, who has spent years studying cellulosic ethanol, says that the difference between ethanol from corn and ethanol from cellulose is "like the difference between traveling to the moon and traveling to Mars." And even if the engineering hurdles can be overcome, there's still the problem of land use: According to Rapier, replacing fifty percent of our current gasoline consumption with cellulosic ethanol would consume thirteen percent of the land in the United States - about seven times the land currently utilized for corn production.

Increasing the production of cellulosic ethanol will also require solving huge logistical problems, including delivering vast quantities of feedstock to production plants. According to one plant manager in the Midwest, fueling an ethanol plant with switchgrass would require delivering a semi-truckload of the grass every six minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Finally, there is the challenge of wrestling the future away from Big Corn. "It's pretty clear to me that the corn guys will use all their lobbying muscle and political power to stall, thwart and sidetrack this revolution," says economist C. Ford Runge.

 

Polar Bear Video

A Michigan congressman wants to put a 50-cent tax on every gallon of gasoline to try to cut back on Americans' consumption.

Polls show that a majority of Americans support policies that would reduce greenhouse gases. But when it comes to paying for it, it's a different story.

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., wants to help cut consumption with a gas tax but some don't agree with the idea, according to a new poll by the National Center for Public Policy Research.

The poll, scheduled to be released on Thursday, shows 48 percent don't support paying even a penny more, 28 percent would pay up to 50 cents more, 10 percent would pay more than 50 cents and 8 percent would pay more than a dollar.

"I don't want to pay more, I don't think anyone wants to," said Karen Deacon, a motorist.

"I think that wouldn't make any sense," said Frankie Hoe, a motorist. "Ugh ... who's making the money from all this and where is that money going? Is it going to go green? I don't see any green things anywhere."

The automobile is the nation's biggest polluter; Americans use more gas than the next 20 countries combined.

But others say it wouldn't change much. Even if Americans abandoned their cars, global emissions would fall by less than one percent.

"A tax on gas is a way to reduce dependence on import oil, reduce traffic congrestion and reduce carbon emissions," said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute.

The Earth Policy Institute proposes raising the gas tax 30 cents per gallon each year over a decade and offset with a reduction of income taxes, Brown said.

David Ridenour, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, said the proposal wouldn't help long term.

"I think when you are talking about raising gas prices, there may be short-term reduction, put off vacations, but bottom line is over long term, that isn't going to have much of an effect," Ridenour said.

While Dingell's idea will likely lie dormant until after the 2008 election, the idea of carbon taxes is not. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all support some type of system that either directly or indirectly will raise prices to penalize polluters.

Energy Policy: Cuba invites bids to develop oil reserves 45 miles off the coast of South Florida that are as large as those in ANWR. So why are the United States and its Navy buying oil from a state sponsor of terror?

Formerly an American company, Citgo was sold in 1990 and is now owned by PDV America Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. But don't expect to see its signs: After Chavez's September 2006 speech at the U.N., where he called President Bush "the devil," the Navy changed the signs to "NEX."

Venezuela is using money from its oil exports to the U.S. to buy $3.4 billion worth of Russian weaponry, including 100,000 AK-103 and AK-104 assault rifles, a dozen Mi-17 military helicopters and 24 SU-30MK fighter jets.

The irony is that it's also negotiating a multibillion-dollar, multiyear contract to buy four Kilo-class diesel submarines and four state-of-the-art Amur submarines. They're intended to confront the U.S. Navy in the Caribbean and try to sink the ships those sailors and Marines sail on.

As we have reported, Venezuela is a state sponsor of terror, although it hasn't been officially designated as such. A recently captured laptop belonging to Raul Reyes, second-in-command of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), showed a Venezuelan commitment of $300 million to the FARC — $50 million of which, the computer indicated, has been paid out.

The FARC has been formally designated as a state sponsor of terror by Canada, the European Union and the Latin American Parliament. But it hasn't been by the U.S., at least not yet. The Bush administration has launched a preliminary legal inquiry into the obvious that could land Venezuela on the list.

Rhonda Shore, spokeswoman for the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, says that in order to qualify, a government must have "repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism." That shouldn't be hard.

Designating Venezuela as a state sponsor of terror would shut off its oil exports to the U.S., where its Citgo refineries are among the few in the world that can handle its heavy crude. This would make it hard for Chavez to export his tyranny and even stay in power.

Venezuela is the fourth-largest supplier of petroleum to the U.S., after Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. The question is whether cutting it off would hurt us more than them. A better question is whether it makes sense to buy oil from this thug at $100 a barrel.

If ever tapping our Strategic Petroleum Reserve made sense, this would be the occasion. At least it would be a bridge until we developed our own untapped oil reserves, a natural strategic oil reserve, if we had a mind to.

Soon there will be rigs 45 miles off the coast of Florida tapping into oil and gas reserves nearly as large as those contained in a tiny frozen part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But the rigs will belong to Hugo's friend and ally, the Cuba of Fidel and Raul Castro.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the North Cuban Basin contains as many as 9.3 billion barrels of oil (multiply by $100 plus) and almost 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Thanks to an agreement negotiated by Jimmy Carter that splits the 90 miles of water between the U.S. and Cuba for economic purposes, it will not be exploited by us.