Published: Saturday, July 12, 2008 in The Nashua Telegraph

Big Oil’s prime goal to reward investors

The op-ed column “Energy independence isn’t Big Oil’s job” (June 28 in the Nashua Telegraph) got it exactly right. Like all corporations, “Big Oil’s” primary responsibilities are to make a profit and to work to maximize the return to their investors.

The piece by syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock quotes U.S. Rep. Edward Markey as saying ExxonMobil “only spent $10 million on renewables last year.” It states that ExxonMobil has spent $1 billion since 2004 on cogeneration technology and that the company is donating $100 million to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project.

Let’s be real. All of these “investments” by ExxonMobil are great public relations but “chump change” compared to ExxonMobil’s cumulative net income of $174.5 billion and its cumulative gross profit of $388.5 billion for the years of 2002 through 2007.

In 2007, the company invested $15.4 billion into capital expenditures, but it also spent $30.7 billion for something called “Retirement of Stock.” So in 2007, ExxonMobil spent about double the amount of funds in buying back its stock than the amount it spent on all capital expenditures.

When a company issues public stock to raise funds, its outstanding stock shares are usually “diluted.” After the issuance of new stock, the original stockholders own a little less percentage-wise of the company.

But when a company like ExxonMobil is flush with cash, it has the option of buying back shares. If the stock price is high, shareholders who sell their stock obtain immediate gratification. Individuals retaining shares (such as company officers and board members: the ones making the buyback decisions) will increase the value of their shares through a “reverse dilution” process.

This is not rocket science. What ExxonMobil and other Big Oil companies have been and will keep doing is in the best financial interest of its investors. It is not, nor has it ever been, corporate America’s responsibility do what is in the best interest of the public or our country.

Rather, the decades-long fallacy that corporate decisions would serve the best interest of the public is a concept that has successfully been sold to Americans by politicians whose true constituents (and major contributors) are the corporations and their corporate leaders.

The shame is not that corporations have been “evil” in pursuing their responsibilities to their investors, but that our government has failed in the 35 years since the first oil shocks of the 1970s to implement substantial national energy policies that take into account the fact that oil is a guaranteed limited global energy resource.

Your guest editorial on that same day (“Additional drilling is not the answer”) also got it right.

Our country will not be able to drill its way out of the current energy problems. It is now time for our politicians to step up and implement sensible national energy policies that encourage conservation and efficiency.

It is time for the politicians to implement legislation that facilitates the development of alternative and renewable energy sources that will reduce our dependence on oil and ensure our country’s national security and economic success.

Stephen C. Nodvin, Ph.D.
Nashua

On July 2, 2008, Governor Deval Patrick signed an historic energy bill at the Museum of Science in Boston.  The bill signing was a wonderful event. In the picture above, you see the signing officials on stage and in the front row from right to left you see Keith Bergman (our colleague from The Climate Project and the Town Manager of Littleton, MA), me, my daughter Madelaine (with red hair), and Vanessa St. Laurent, Executive Secretary for Dept. of Applied Math and Sciences at Wewntworth. One of the members of the signing delegation was Senator Marc Pacheco who is also a Climate Project “Messenger.” We saw a fourth Climate Messenger at the event: Nick D’arbeloff.

More detail on the Green Communities Act is available here.

I have not posted to the blog in a while but I am still “living and kicking” as my grandfather used to say.

I have been busy. Last year I was selected to be one of former Vice President Al Gore’s “Climate Messengers”. In less than a year, I gave over 40 presentations on climate  change related issues including a debate at the Southern New England Weather Conference as to whether current global warming is natural or human driven.

This fall I was selected to be the new Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Science at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. Our Department has a new undergraduate degree program in Environmental Sciences that is part of the intercollegiate Colleges of the Fenway Joint Environmental Sciences Program. The program only started this year and we already have 17 first-year students.

Another project that I have been working on is the Encyclopedia of Earth. Think of Wikipedia but with peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries. I am both an author, topic editor, and a member of the EoEarth Stewardship Committee. Some of the articles on EoEarth have been organized into collections. I am one of the lead persons helping to coordinate and expand the Climate Change Collection of entries for the EoEarth.

While the entries to the Encyclopedia of Earth are written and edited by experts in their fields who have been approved by the Stewardship Committee and those entries only become published to the public after peer and editorial review, there is a related site to EoEarth that is a “Blog” open for submission and comments by a larger group of participants. If you like reading Blogs and are interested in possibly contributing to an environmentally-focused Blog, check out the Earth Forum.

In August, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the America Competes Act of 2007. Taking seriously the National Academies’ “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report and the Council on Competitiveness’ “Innovate America” report that I discussed on this blog previously, here and here, politicians in Washington garnered the political will to include int he legislation actions that will help mitigate American students’ poor literacy rates in math and science compared to those in countries worldwide that compete with the U.S.

EdNews summarized the major points in the act:

Increase Research Investment by:

• Doubling funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) from approximately $5.6 billion in Fiscal Year 2006 to $11.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2011.

• Setting the Department of Energy’s Office of Science on track to double in funding over ten years, increasing from $3.6 billion in Fiscal Year 2006 to over $5.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2011.

• Establishing the Innovation Acceleration Research Program to direct federal agencies funding research in science and technology to set as a goal dedicating approximately 8% of their Research and Development (R&D) budgets toward high-risk frontier research.

• Authorizing the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from approximately $703 million in Fiscal Year 2008 to approximately $937 million in Fiscal Year 2011 and requiring NIST to set aside no less than 8 percent of its annual funding for high-risk, high-reward innovation acceleration research.

• Directing NASA to increase funding for basic research and fully participate in interagency activities to foster competitiveness and innovation, using the full extent of existing budget authority.

• Coordinating ocean and atmospheric research and education at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies to promote U.S. leadership in these important fields.

Strengthen Educational Opportunities in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Critical Foreign Languages by:

• Authorizing competitive grants to States to promote better alignment of elementary and secondary education with the knowledge and skills needed for success in postsecondary education, the 21st century workforce, and the Armed Forces, and grants to support the establishment or improvement of statewide P-16 education longitudinal data systems.

• Strengthening the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by establishing training and education programs at summer institutes hosted at the National Laboratories and by increasing support for the Teacher Institutes for the 21st Century program at NSF.

• Expanding the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program at NSF to recruit and train individuals to become math and science teachers in high- need local educational agencies.

• Assisting States in establishing or expanding statewide specialty schools in math and science that students from across the state would be eligible to attend and providing expert assistance in teaching from National Laboratories’ staff at those schools.

• Facilitating the expansion of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs by increasing the number of teachers prepared to teach AP/IB and pre-AP/IB math, science, and foreign language courses in high need schools, thereby increasing the number of courses available and students who take and pass AP and IB exams.

• Developing and implementing programs for bachelor’s degrees in math, science, engineering, and critical foreign languages with concurrent teaching credentials and part-time master’s in education programs for math, science, and critical foreign language teachers to enhance both content knowledge and teaching skills.

• Creating partnerships between National Laboratories and local high-need high schools to establish centers of excellence in math and science education.

• Expanding existing NSF graduate research fellowship and traineeship programs, requiring NSF to work with institutions of higher education to facilitate the development of professional science master’s degree programs, and expanding NSF’s science, mathematics, engineering and technology talent program.

• Providing Math Now grants to improve math instruction in the elementary and middle grades and provide targeted help to struggling students so that all students can master grade-level mathematics standards.

• Expanding programs to increase the number of students from elementary school through postsecondary education who study critical foreign languages and become proficient.

Develop an Innovation Infrastructure by:
• Establishing a President’s Council on Innovation and Competitiveness to develop a comprehensive agenda to promote innovation and competitiveness in the public and private sectors.

• Requiring the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study to identify forms of risk that create barriers to innovation.

The president of an industry-funded front group with an environmental-friendly sounding name was charged Wednesday with tax evasion and obstruction of justice as part of the continuing federal criminal investigation into lobbying practices in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal. Italia Federici, president of the “Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA)”, “plans to plead guilty to charges of obstructing Senate proceedings and tax evasion.”

If there is anything that should have been a tip-off as to the true bona fides of this supposed environmental group it would have been that text of this article from the Washington Post in 2001.

On a June evening in 1998, in the big ballroom of the J.W. Marriott on Pennsylvania Avenue, Gale A. Norton hosted the national kickoff for an organization she founded that is now called, after several name changes, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy.
The guest of honor was Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (Miss.). The keynote address was delivered by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.). The sponsors for the gala that night included the National Coal Council, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the National Mining Association, the Chlorine Chemical Council and the political consulting firm of Karl Rove, one of Bush’s closest advisers.

True to form, the Bush administration and special interests aligned with it have been masters at creating “initiatives” and “non-profit” organizations that certainly sound to be environmental or consumer conscious but, in fact, have been supported morally and/or financially by major corporate interests. The implementation of President Bush’s “Clear Skies Initiative” actually would have resulted in the weakening of the Clean Air Act. Mr. Bush’s “Healthy Forest Initiative” was anything but healthy but rather an effort give free reign to the timber industry across National Forests under the guise of “fuel reduction. And Mr. Bush’s recently announced new “climate initiative” appears to me to have been suspiciously timed to successfully preempt and delay the implementation of a more proactive proposal to manage greenhouse emissions that had been put forth by German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G8 Summit this week.

Many industry-funded front-groups like the CREA exist today. Sourcewatch calls them “the quintessential tool of deceptive propaganda.” The idea of such groups was the brain-child of Edward Bernays who is generally regarded as the “father of public relations.” On its website, Sourcewatch lists a number of other front-groups with environmental-friendly or consumer-friendly sounding names which, in fact, work primarily to block any honest-to-goodness attempts to protect the environment, preserve human health, or support the best interests of consumers and the public.

Yes. That is correct. Today the majority of Republicans voted against the war funding bill that President Bush wanted and signed into law. I thought I was reading the results incorrectly at first but check it out.

H R 2206 passed today, 221-10, with 3 not voting and President Bush promptly signed it into law. But it was 219 Democrats who voted for the bill and 195 Republicans who opposed. Only 2 Republicans voted for the legislation.

So what gives? The President got the bill he wanted with no timelines for withdrawal included. Are the Republicans now against the continued funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not long ago the Republican congressional leaders were lambasting the Democrats for not supporting the troops and the military leaders with the funds they needed.

Even today, John McCain and Mitt Romney assailed Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton for voting against the measure in the Senate. (One might ask why Mitt and John did not savage their own Republican House members for also voting against the measure).

So again, what gives? Well the bill includes spending for a number of Democratic domestic priorities and the first increase in the minimum wage in a decade. Minimum wage earners would get a pay increase to $7.25 over the next two years. This increase amounts to a 2.4% increase per year over the 12 year period since 1997 until 2009 when it goes into effect. A 2.4% increase per year is less than the current annual inflation rate and also less than the average yearly inflation rate during the past decade.

I guess the Republicans just couldn’t stomach providing minimum wage earners a basic pay raise that might actually bring their earning potential anywhere close to being able to keep up with inflation.

I have cross-posted this blog entry at the Earth Forum.

Contrary to what most climate change naysayers claim, scientists are mostly a conservative lot. The peer review process can sometimes be brutal. It is often only after significant resistance and repeated attempts and additional substantiation that new research ideas and findings traverse the gauntlet of reviewers and are published in the top scientific journals.

(One of the most important papers in ecology on the trophic-dynamic concept by Raymond Lindeman was originally rejected for publication. Reviewers felt there were insufficient data to support the theoretical model and that theoretical essays were inappropriate for the most important journal in the field.)

Recently, at least three reports have been published that document that recent scientific projections of global warming have likely been conservative.
The reports indicate that climate change models, used by the world’s scientists to make the projections, likely are providing underestimates of both future warming and the global impacts of a warming earth.

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First, new analyses reported in the journal Science, indicate that climate projections published in 2001 by the IPCC were conservative compared to actual warmings observed. The 2001 projections were part of the IPCC Third Assessment Report and modeled changes in key global climate parameters since 1973, compared with a series of differing emissions scenarios. Although published in 2001, the model projections were essentially independent from the observed climate data since 1990.

• As be seen in the figures (right), measured carbon dioxide concentrations between the years 1990 and 2006 followed the model projections almost exactly.
• But measured global mean surface temperature increase (land and ocean combined) between 1990 and 2006 was in the upper range of the various IPCC scenarios.
• However, the actual observed rates of sea-level rise since 1990 were faster than the those projected by models.

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Second, a NASA report suggests that existing climate models may be significantly underestimating future warmings in eastern North America due to limitations in their ability to accurately project future precipitation regimes.To focus on more local scales, the NASA scientists scaled the simulations from a global climate model developed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and coupled the simulations with those of a widely-used weather prediction model.

Coupling the weather prediction model with the global climate model allowed the scientists to assesses details about future climate at a finer geographic scale than global models alone. The coupling provided reliable simulations not only on the amounts of summer precipitation, but also on its frequency and timing. Accurately predicting the timing and frequency of precipitation events is important because daily temperatures are usually higher on rainless days and when precipitation falls less frequently than normal.

Once more accurate information on the timing and frequency of summer rainfall events were incorporated, the simulations projected much higher summer temperatures that had been projected with the global model alone.

The new projections indicate that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into the low-to-mid-90s during typical summers by the 2080s. In extreme seasons — when precipitation falls infrequently — July and August daily high temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.

Image: A computer model projection of average daily maximum temperatures over the eastern United States for July 2085 (left) and July 1993 (right). Areas in violet shading show temperatures of 26°C (79°F); green 30°C (86°F); yellow 34°C (93°F); red 38°C (100°F);dark purple 42°C (108°F). Credit: NASA/GISS

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Third, another new study released by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that arctic sea ice is melting at a significantly faster rate than projected by the most advanced computer models.Satellite and other observations showed the Arctic ice cover is retreating more rapidly than estimated by any of the eighteen computer models used by the IPCC in preparing its 2007 assessments.

Similar to the reports above, the authors of this study concluded that current model projections are providing conservative estimates of future global warming impacts such as the melting of the Arctic ice cap. The findings show that the shrinking of summertime ice is about thirty years ahead of the climate model projections.

The 2007 IPCC report projected that the Arctic would become seasonally ice free sometime between 2050 to well beyond 2100. The new results suggest the Arctic could become ice free in summers even earlier than the year 2050.

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Another argument made by the climate change naysayers against the facts of global warming is that the global climate models are not accurate. Computer simulation models are, by definition, designed as simplified representations of the complex systems they attempt to simulate.Earth processes are extremely complex. Simulation models are developed because an exact replication of all of the multitude of Earth processes is simply out of the scope of our human capacity today. So models are necessarily incorporate simplifications of both processes and scales of the real Earth and its climate and weather systems.

After 30-40 years of development, the global climate models are pretty good. They do a reasonable job of back-projecting known climate trends of the last 30-50 years against real world observed trends.

The naysayers are correct in asserting that the climate models are not 100% accurate. But the lesson of their argument is not what they think it to be. The contrarians argue that since climate models are not 100% accurate, they provide no support to the facts of global warming.

In fact as these reports show, in comparing model projections to real measured trends, the global climate models are doing a good job of projecting the directions of the trends, it is just that the current models have been underestimating the magnitudes and the rapidity in which the Earth is warming and in which the warming is impacting local and global Earth processes.

It is good to know that the United States is ahead of Turkey (the country) in public acceptance of evolution.

At a time of increasing environmental awareness by American citizens, the Bush Administration has included yet more cuts in environmental related funding in its proposed FY2008 budget.

It is time to contact your representatives in Congress and let them know that the environment is a priority and that funding should not be cut.

Here are some highlights from a report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on proposed cuts in the biological and ecological sciences:

• DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
  The Savannah River Ecology Laboratory’s (SREL) funding from DOE will be exhausted at the end of May 2007 and as a result will likely be forced to close. Funds have been budgeted to complete these tasks, however DOE has not released these funds to SREL. SREL programs are more important than ever, performing environmental evaluation for SRS programs that will process new nuclear materials. For more information see www.savesrel.org

• ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
  The Administration is proposing a $8.8 million cut to the Human Health & Ecosystems Program that would nearly completely eliminate the extramural ecosystem program. Also, a $5.75 million cut is proposed to the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) of which some $800,000 that has funded long-term surface water monitoring in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic for 20 years would be canceled.

• FOREST SERVICE
  A $17 million decrease is proposed for the Forest and Rangeland Research budget despite the fact that fire suppression costs have been increasing.

• NATIONAL OCEANIC & ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATIONThe agency has been essentially flat-funded for the last five years and the budget proposed by the Administration for fiscal year 2008 shows no sign of altering course. The majority of the agency’s research is supported by its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which would stay essentially flat-funded. The National Ocean Service would continue its decrease in funding since fiscal year 2005, while the National Marine Fisheries Service would reflect no real change since fiscal year 2003.

• NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION—EDUCATION & HUMAN RESOURCES
  The Administration proposes that the agency’s core education portfolio grow by 7.5 percent in fiscal year 2008 after remaining flat in 2007. But the Education and Human Resources budget would still lag 19 percent behind its 2004 funding levels despite the fact that the President has stated that science education should be a priority for America to remain competitive.

• USDA NATIONAL RESEARCH INITIATIVE
  The Administration proposes a $10 million cut to the National Research Initiative, the nation’s premier competitive research program for fundamental and applied agriculture research.

One really has to wonder just how far the American “news” media is willing to move away from the Principles of Journalism. In 1997, the Committee of Concerned Journalists of the Project for Excellence in Journalism outlined nine Principles of Journalism (below). Ten years after the formulation of these principles, it appears that every major American television news outlet, including CNN, has abandoned the nine core principles that are supposed to comprise the basis of objective journalism.

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth
2. Its first loyalty is to citizens
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience

As I posted on this blog years ago, an October 2003 report by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the university of Maryland found that “a substantial portion of the (American) public had a number of misperceptions that were demonstrably false, or were at odds with the dominant view in the intelligence community.”

According to the PIPA study, which consumers of the mainstream “news” media who were polled showed the highest frequency of misperceptions regarding events related to the Iraq war? The chart shows that the inappropriately named “Fox News” clearly won the misperception contest. But you know until now, I had not paid that much attention how closely behind Fox all the other television news outlets and even the print media were in their race to promote misperceptions and to abandon the nine principles of journalism.

But now it seems that CNN has upped “the ante” in the race to be the most disingenuous television news outlet in America.

On May 2, 2007, CNN aired a disinformation program on global warming hosted by Glen Beck entitled Exposed: The Climate of Fear. Beck seems to be CNN’s answer to the ratings grabber and Ad hominen attack specialist Bill O’Reilly.

A new study from Indiana University found that Bill O’Reilly calls “a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.” The study shows that O’Reilly frequently employs multiple propagandist techniques that have been documented to have been in popular since after the end of World War I.

The May 2 CNN program brings back on to the stage a cadre of the well-known climate change deniers (many of whom are funded by Exxon Mobil and other industry powerhouses) as well as their tired arguments which have been thoroughly debated and debunked by scientists and the few remaining American news outlets that actually attempt to uphold the Principles of Journalism.

CNN promoted the program as being a vehicle to present the “other side of the climate debate that you don’t hear anywhere.” But in fact the program is rife with techniques that the climate deniers have been using ad naseum for decades including Ad hominen attacks on the deniers’ preferred high profile target, former Vice President Al Gore.

From Glen Beck, the man

• who claimed that the movie Happy Feet was a propaganda tool designed by a Hollywood director to indoctrinate children from being able to think for themselves about issues including global warming, and
• who uses the same name-calling techniques as does Bill O’Reilly,

one could not have expected anything more in this “television special” that purported to look “for answers and solutions about why Earth is warming and what man can do about it.”

But from CNN and Time Warner, outfits that claim to be “The Most Trusted Name in News” and offer “socially responsible programming” whose “actions must be guided by the highest standards of ethics”, one could and should expect a tremendous amount more.

It is time for American citizens to insist that CNN and many of the other once great and trusted American news media outlets change the direction of their race. To now move away from disingenuity and the promotion of misperception and distasteful discourse in the obvious quest for greater ratings. And to now move back to the objective Principles of Journalism.