WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration announced plans Monday for a new office handling climate change, aiming to help businesses chart future plans as the nation shifts to a greener economy.

The first practical effect was the creation of a website, www.climate.gov, which came online Monday and brings together government resources on climate change for business, scholars, and the general public.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said the new Climate Service would help businesses in such industries as wind power by providing data on wind patterns.

"The bottom line is this -- the better climate information that alternative energy companies have, the more profitable they can be, the more jobs they can create, and the more they can actually meet the energy demands of our country and indeed the world," he told reporters.

Locke compared the initiative to the National Weather Service, which he said had spurred a private industry of forecasters who benefit from the government data.

The Climate Service would bring together resources now spread throughout the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency that falls under the Commerce Department. It will also have six regional offices across the country.

Locke said he expected that the Climate Service would be running before the start of the 2011 fiscal year. He said the administration would first consult with Congress, although he did not believe any new legislation was needed.

The Climate Service marks the latest effort by the Obama administration to act on climate change despite an uncertain political terrain.

The House of Representatives last year approved a landmark plan to impose the first nationwide caps on emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. But the legislation is stalled in the Senate, where Obama's Democratic Party last month lost a seat to a critic of the climate bill.

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Rajendra Pachauri.NEW DELHI -- The U.N.'s top climate official, who is at the heart of a controversy over a few instances of incorrect global warming data, has penned a racy novel that dishes up sex, reincarnation, and a real-life Hollywood actress.

The debut fiction work is in contrast to the dry academic tomes that 69-year-old Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has previously written.

Return to Almora, which has recently hit bookshops, is laced with steamy references to the sexual urges of the protagonist Sanjay Nath who, like Pachauri, studied engineering.

The book also weaves in lectures on the environment and the fate of Himalayan glaciers -- the issue that has triggered calls for Pachauri's resignation.

Pachauri has refused to step down over an error in which an IPCC report forecast Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

His novel charts the life of Sanjay who, as a young child in India, stuns his parents with the news he was a merchant in a past life and that his wife is still alive. The 402-page tale takes Sanjay through his university days during which loses his virginity, breathlessly describing how he was "overcome by a lust that he had never known before." Several passages from the book may interest the judges of London's Bad Sex awards, an annual celebration of the worst bedroom scenes in literature.

After university, Sanjay travels to the United States, has dinner with Oscar-winning actress Shirley MacLaine, and teaches meditation -- when he finds himself distracted by the "heaving breasts" of his students.

"You are absolutely superb after meditation," Sanjay's girlfriend tells him. "Why don't we make love every time immediately after you have meditated?"

The author, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 on behalf of the IPCC, has hinted parts of the book are autobiographical.

"Sometimes I'd be so overwhelmed trying to capture an incident of my life for the book that I would be moved to tears," the father of three told the Indian Express.

Pachauri, whose previous 20 books include titles such as Business Unusual: Championing Corporate Social Responsibility, says he wrote the romp while on international business flights.

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The Euro-leaf logo. BRUSSELS -- The European Union on Monday unveiled a new Green logo that will have to be shown on all pre-packaged organic products produced in Europe from July.

"I'm delighted that we now have a fresh E.U. organic food logo," said E.U. Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel as she announced that the "Euro-leaf" logo, a green leaf design incorporating the 12 stars of the E.U.
flag, had won a competition to find the right image.

"This exercise has raised the profile of organic food and we now have a logo which everyone will be able to identify with. It's a nice elegant design and I look forward to buying products carrying this logo from July this year," she added.

The winning logo -- said to combine the two themes of nature and Europe -- was the result of a pan-European contest open to art and design students. Almost 3,500 logo designs were submitted and evaluated by an international jury. The three logos chosen by the experts were then put online for a public vote and some 130,000 people made the final decision.

The Euro-leaf designed by Dusan Milenkovic, a student from Germany, was the overwhelming online favorite, picking up 63 percent of the votes cast.

From July 1, the chosen logo will appear on all pre-packaged organic products that have been produced in any of the 27 E.U. member states and meet the necessary standards. It will be optional for imported products.

Other private, regional, or national logos will be allowed to appear alongside the E.U. label.

The E.U.'s organic farming regulation will be amended in the coming weeks to introduce the new logo into law.

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Sarah Palin's much-anticipated speech Saturday night at the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville included a one-minute-and-20-second disquisition on energy policy.  She hit on her familiar talking points -- drill here, drill now, "cap-and-tax" sucks. But she also commended Obama for highlighting nuclear power during his State of the Union address, a brief departure from her otherwise sneering tone toward the president. ("How's that hopey-changey thing
workin' out for you?" was more typical.)

Considering that Palin was paid $100,000 for the 40-minute speech, this excerpt represents $3,333 worth of her wisdom: 

At another point in the speech, Palin extols the virtues of
"everyday Americans" who, among other things, "grow our
food" -- reinforcing Tom
Philpott's argument that conservatives and progressives should be able to
find common ground on food issues.

Here's video of the whole speech; the food mention is at 7:25 and the energy section is at
30:00-31:20:

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Dirty energy lobbyists long ago mastered the art of lobbying on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by their copious government subsidies. Now clean energy companies are playing catch-up. Jim Snyder at The Hill reports on executives flying in to Washington to learn about the happy ways of our capital:

They’ll be briefed on lobbying and media strategy, meeting with Republican pollster Frank Luntz, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and, of course, a former House member who is now a lobbyist, James Walsh.

I suppose this should be encouraging news—the sooner these growing industries build their clout in Washington, the better. Clean energy attracts more new private-sector funding than dirty energy does, but members of Congress don’t give the sector its due.  Instead, they spend their weekends frolicking in South Beach with oil industry reps.

Oh, and here’s what the clean energy companies are up against, from Greenwire ($ub req’d.):

Oil and gas companies spent at least $154 million on lobbying last year, potentially besting a field of rivals battling to shape climate and energy policies and setting a new record for the industry.

Influence efforts by the oil and gas sector grew at least 16 percent in 2009 from the $132 million spent in 2008, according to an early analysis of new lobbying disclosures by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The total reflects spending for the first nine months of 2009 plus 80 percent of reports filed for the past three months.

The electric utility industry, meanwhile, spent at least $134.7 million on lobbying last year. Combined, the two traditional energy sectors paid out nearly 10 times the $29 million that alternative energy companies allocated for lobbying efforts.

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PARIS -- Fifty-five nations including the world's top carbon polluters have registered their commitments to combat global warming, the U.N. climate chief said late Monday. The pledges from both industrialized and developing countries for cutting greenhouse gases up to 2020 cover nearly 80 percent of total emissions, and provide a much-needed boost to December's Copenhagen Accord.

"This represents an important invigoration of the U.N. climate change talks," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). "The commitment to confront climate change at the highest level is beyond doubt," he said in a statement Monday night.

But more than a month after the nearly scuttled climate deal, rich nations have yet to say when and how they will deliver emergency funds to help poor countries begin to green their economies and cope with climate impacts. $30 billion in so-called "fast start" financing is meant to cover the period 2010 to 2012.

Also missing for now is the list of countries that have chosen to "associate" themselves with the controversial Copenhagen Accord, which fell well short of the binding and comprehensive climate treaty once hoped for.

The U.N. climate forum shepherding the talks simply "took note" of its provisions after a handful of countries refused to back it in December.

The UNFCCC's 194 member nations were later invited to endorse the deal by Jan. 31, and to list the actions they plan for reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions. It is still not known how many countries have opted to formally back the accord.

On the action plans, there were no surprises. The United States, the European Union, Japan, and other rich nations all renewed pledges made in the run-up to the climate summit. Rapidly developing countries led by China, India, Brazil, and South Africa also reiterated voluntary national plans for curbing the carbon intensity of their economies.

But registering the commitments was widely seen as a critical step in jump-starting the troubled negotiations.

"The machine has been forcefully set in motion, it's going to put some new wind in our sails," said French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo.

Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy on climate change, said that the United States was "pleased" to be among 55 nations representing nearly 80 percent of emissions that met Sunday's deadline to submit plans to the United Nations. "In supporting the accord, we are taking an important step in the global effort to combat climate change," he said. Stern urged holdouts -- largely smaller nations -- to come forward and submit plans to the UNFCCC.

The Copenhagen Accord calls for limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), the threshold for dangerous impacts such as increased floods, drought, and extreme weather, according to scientists.

"This is the first time that countries have ever committed to this goal. That's the good news," said Alden Meyer, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists. "The bad news, of course, is that the pledges that have been put on the table to date don't put us on track to meet that goal, and would make it very difficult -- both economically and politically -- after 2020 to catch up."

The accord also commits developed countries to paying out $10 billion per year to developing nations over the next three years, to be ramped up to $100 billion annually by 2020.

"But it remains far from clear where the funding will come from, if it is genuinely new and additional, and how it will be allocated," said Saleemul Huq, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

Many of the poor nations most vulnerable to climate change complained of being sidelined in Copenhagen, and delays in providing the financing could increase tensions as talks proceed.

Japan has taken the lead in promising some $15 billion over the next three years, while the European Union has said it will stump up $10 billion. The United States has yet to announce what share of the $30 billion it will shoulder, but analysts say it is likely to be substantially less, in the $3.5 to $4.5 billion range.

But so far none of this money has materialized.

"Looking at past experience of overseas development aid and climate funding, it may take several years to disburse even the 'fast-start' finance promised for 2010 to 2012," Huq said.

Borloo agreed that it would take some time to get the wheels turning. "All the mechanisms have yet to be invented," he said of the $30 billion fund. "Simple bilateral aid is out of the question. We have to invent a new partnership and establish the fast-start modalities."

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The Obama administration released its 2011 budget proposal today and the internets are choked with stories about it. The four biggest green stories are EPA funding, fossil-fuel defunding, nuke and clean energy spending, and the cap-and-trade placeholder.

EPA regs are funded

The EPA's budget (PDF), which jumped up by 34 percent least year, will decline slightly from $10.3 to $10.2 billion. More notably, it contains $21 million to implement the Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule and $43 million to implement regulations on greenhouse gas emissions:

Requested funds include $25 million to aid States in permitting activities for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under the New Source Review, and Title V operating permits programs. The Budget also requests $7 million to develop New Source Performance Standards to control GHG emissions from a few categories of major stationary sources. The Budget requests an increase of $6 million to support regulatory programs to reduce GHG emissions from mobile sources. These initiatives will help the United States meet its target for emissions reductions.

The message to Congress -- particularly Dirty Air Act sponsors Murkowski et al. -- is that the administration still intends to regulate greenhouse gases if Congress doesn't legislate.

Fossil fuels lose out

The proposed budget "plans to do away with $36.5 billion in tax breaks to the oil and natural gas industry and $2.3 billion for the coal sector between 2011-2020." Note that fossil fuels get $70.2 billion a year in subsidies -- and that excludes implicit subsidies like unpriced carbon and military spending -- so this is the tip of the iceberg. Of course, modest efforts to remove fossil-fuel subsidies are inevitably portrayed by fossil shills as "raising taxes," and such efforts have failed in Congress many times before, so this one gets filed under, uh, aspirational.

Nuke and clean energy funding

To the naked eye it looks like nuclear energy wins out here:

The Budget substantially expands support for construction of new nuclear power plants by increasing the Department of Energy loan guarantees authority for such projects by $36 billion, to a total of $54.5 billion, and provides credit subsidy funding of $500 million to support $3 to $5 billion of loan guarantees for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

But it's worth unpacking this. As OMB chief Peter Orszag emphasized in a briefing call this morning, the nuclear loan guarantees are meant to be fully repaid, while the renewable energy and energy efficiency money contains $500 million in credit subsidy. So there's more direct spending on clean energy.

That's with one big caveat, of course: that the nuclear industry doesn't default on loans, sticking taxpayers with the liability. That could never happen, right? Ha ha. See Sue Sturgis and Dan Weiss on that subject. Or see the Congressional Research Service (PDF), which says the "federal government would bear most of the risk, facing potentially large losses if borrowers defaulted on reactor projects that could not be salvaged." Or the Congressional Budget Office, which "considers the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high--well above 50 percent."

Cap-and-trade placeholder

The FY2010 budget contained projected revenue from a cap-and-trade system -- $79 billion a year by 2012, $83 billion by 2019. Obviously that revenue, um, never showed up. (Thanks, Senate!)

This year, as Kate Sheppard noted, the administration included no specific revenue projections. Instead it merely includes a placeholder, noting it will "work to enact and implement a comprehensive market-based policy that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the range of 17 percent in 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050." Since nobody, including the administration, knows what a final bill might look like or how much revenue might be generated or how much of that revenue might go into the Treasury, they decided to just punt.

Whether this means they have less confidence in a bill being passed is a matter of (mostly pointless, but fun) speculation.

Other stuff

The budget increases the (already turbocharged) budget for scientific research (PDF) by 5.6 percent to $61.6 billion, so that's cool. Also:

What it all means

Generically, the budget reflects an administration that cares about science and wants to solve the energy crisis. But we already knew that. On the specifics there's a degree of la-la land here, since spending is ultimately up to Congress and Congress is broken. So we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

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You might not have heard, because almost nobody reported it, but new clean-energy projects attracted more global funding in 2008 than fossil-fuel projects did. For the first time ever, investors put more money in solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower than in fuels that must be burned, according to a U.N. report. And when venture-capital funding tanked in 2009 because of the recession, cleantech weathered the downturn better than any other sector. People with money to invest are choosing clean energy over dirty.

But lawmakers who shape energy legislation are not, quite possibly because they don’t don't have a good understanding of the energy landscape. Because they spend their weekends with oil lobbyists. In Miami Beach:

Twelve Democratic Senators spent last weekend in Miami Beach raising money from top lobbyists for oil, drug, and other corporate interests that they often decry, according to a guest list for the event obtained by POLITICO.

The guest list for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's "winter retreat" at the Ritz Carlton South Beach Resort doesn't include the price tag for attendance, but the maximum contribution to the committee, typical for such events, is $30,000. There, to participate in "informal conversations" and other meetings Saturday, were senators including DSCC Chairman Robert Menendez; Michigan's Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow; Bob Casey of Pennsylvania; Claire McCaskill of Missouri; freshmen Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Begich of Alaska; and even left-leaning Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Ben Smith’s piece in Politico notes the hypocrisy of senators pretending not to be in the pocket of corporate interests when in fact they are. But even if lawmakers want to make honest choices, “winter retreats” like this are giving them a skewed understanding of what’s really happening in the energy industry, for one. If they knew what investors know, they might rethink the tremendous advantage they give to fossil fuels via subsidies and tax breaks:

Publicly funding climate change.

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DUBAI -- Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden blamed industrial nations for global warming and urged a boycott of the U.S. dollar to end "slavery" in an audio tape aired by Al-Jazeera television on Friday.

"All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming," bin Laden said in the message attributed to him by the pan-Arab news channel based in Doha.

In an unusual message possibly timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, he warned of the impact of global warming by saying that "discussing climate change is not an intellectual luxury, but a reality."

"This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that," he said.

The Al-Qaeda leader then slammed the U.S. administration under former President George W. Bush for not signing the Kyoto protocol on combating climate change. "Bush the son, and the Congress before him, rejected this agreement, only to satisfy the big companies," he said.

Bin Laden then went on to urge a boycott of the U.S. dollar. "We should stop using the dollar and get rid of it ... I know that there would be huge repercussions for that, but this would be the only way to free humankind from slavery ... to America and its companies," he added.

The broadcast came less than a week after bin Laden praised as a "hero" Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who allegedly tried to detonate explosives on a U.S. plane approaching Detroit on Christmas Day, in another audio message.

Bin Laden has a $50 million bounty on his head and has been in hiding for the past eight years. He is widely believed to be holed up along the remote mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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WASHINGTON -- The White House announced Friday that President Obama would order the federal government to reduce its greenhouse-gas pollution by 28 percent by 2020.

"As the largest energy consumer in the United States, we have a responsibility to American citizens to reduce our energy use and become more efficient," Obama said in a statement. "Our goal is to lower costs, reduce pollution, and shift federal energy expenses away from oil and toward local, clean energy."

Government departments and agencies will achieve greenhouse-gas pollution cuts by measuring current energy and fuel use, becoming more energy efficient, and shifting to clean energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal.

The U.S. government is the most energy-thirsty component of the U.S. economy and spent more than $24.5 billion on electricity and fuel in 2008 alone, the White House said.

The new pollution targets will cut government energy use by the equivalent of 646 trillion BTUs, equal to 205 million barrels of oil or taking 17 million cars off the road for a year. This is also equivalent to a cumulative total of 8 to 11 billion in avoided energy costs through 2020, according to the White House.

Obama issued an executive order in October requiring agencies to set 2020 targets and to increase energy efficiency, cut gasoline consumption by official vehicles, and to save water and reduce waste, in moves which he said would save money and help cleanse the environment.

He has argued that cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and framing a sustainable green economy is vital not just to protect the planet, but also to future U.S. economic prosperity.

Several pieces of legislation backed by his administration -- including the mammoth $787 billion economic stimulus package -- provide incentives for governments and private firms to build a green economy.

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