Kate Sheppard

Reporter

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She was previously the political reporter for Grist and a writing fellow at The American Prospect. She can be reached by email at ksheppard (at) motherjones (dot) com.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @kate_sheppard

Her work has also been featured in the New York Times' Room for Debate blog, the Guardian's Comment Is Free, Foreign Policy, High Country News, The Center for Public Integrity, the Washington Independent, Washington Spectator, Who Runs Gov, In These Times, and Bitch. She was raised on a vegetable farm in southern New Jersey (yes, they do exist), but has adapted well to life in the nation's capital. She misses trees and having a congressional representative with voting power, but thinks DC is pretty great anyway.

A Climate Pact in 2010? Eh, Maybe.

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Feb. 10, 2010 3:42 PM PST

It's been two months since the climate summit at Copenhagen sputtered to a finish without producing a binding treaty to tackle global warming. Now, United States climate envoy Todd Stern is downplaying hopes that this year's summit in Mexico will produce a treaty, either.

Stern avoided stating outright that a legally binding agreement on climate change is possible this year. "I hope that we can get to a full legal treaty in December, but I'm not going to make any predictions one way or the other," he said at the Center for American Progress on Tuesday. "I'm also not going to fall into the trap of saying if it's not that, we've got a failure."

Instead, Stern said, it's important that "strong progress be made" and "pragmatic steps" taken. He added that the public expectations before the Copenhagen summit "were quite elevated beyond what was going on on the ground," and warned against raising expectations too high for the next summit.

As we reported in December, the future of the last-minute accord at Copenhagen is not yet clear. Leaders of a small group of countries—the US, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa—negotiated a political deal outside the normal protocols of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was not formally adopted by member states; instead, countries can voluntarily "associate" with the accord. The deadline for doing so was Jan. 31, though that deadline wasn't really enforced. So far 95 countries out of 192 have associated with the agreement.

Stern expressed hope that other nations would sign on eventually. "I do believe that they will sign on to the accord because the consequences of not doing so are so serious," he said. But he also observed that the commitments from some countries remain "ambiguous," and that China, India, and some other countries are trying to "limit the impact" of the deal. Yet it's hard to see how commitments could be construed as much more ambiguous than those of the US, which has pledged to cut emissions "in the range of 17%, in conformity with anticipated U.S. energy and climate legislation, recognizing that the final target will be reported to the Secretariat in light of enacted legislation."

Stern also dismissed the suggestion that the US Congress' failure to pass a domestic climate law played a major role in the outcome of the summit. "I don't think that our situation was a core problem, if you will, last year," he said. Still, the chances of a bill passing the Senate this year seem to grow bleaker by the day. And if there was one lesson that Copenhagen made clear, it was the absence of trust among the most important players in the negotiations that the US and other major emitters will actually make good on their promises.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Exxon Still Sponsoring Deniers

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Feb. 10, 2010 11:37 AM PST

ExxonMobil is still funding groups that deny climate change, despite claiming last year that it had stopped doing so.

Reports the Independent:

Free-market, anti-climate change think-tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the US and the International Policy Network in the UK have received grants totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the multinational energy company ExxonMobil. Both organisations have funded international seminars pulling together climate change deniers from across the globe.

Josh Harkinson reported on Atlas's role in the international climate change denier web in December, and Exxon topped our list of climate deniers in December. In fact, they've been the top source of climate-change-denier funding for some time, as Chris Mooney reported for Mother Jones in 2005. Exxon gave Atlas $100,000 in 2008, according to the oil company's reports, and Atlas has in turn supported at least 30 other foreign think-tanks that spread climate change misinformation. A number of these groups have been at the forefront of efforts to flog the so-called ClimateGate issue, and are now leading assaults on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

ExxonMobil's response? "We have the same concerns as people everywhere—and that is how to provide the world with the energy it needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions," the company said in a statement to the Independent. Yes, ExxonMobil, the fossil fuel-giant, is just like "people everywhere."

NYT's Skeptic Embrace

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Feb. 10, 2010 10:30 AM PST

"Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel," read the headline of a story on the front page of Tuesday's New York Times. The article was supposedly about criticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from "mainstream scientists." But the content of the article didn't provide evidence of such criticisms at all.

In fact, the article debunked one of the leading attacks on the head of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: that he's personally profiting from overhyping the threat of global warming. Way down in the 14th paragraph of the piece, the Times discloses that IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri had provided the paper with his tax return, which reveals that his work for the IPCC is not bringing in big bucks:

Dr. Pachauri, 69, said the only work income he received was a salary from the Energy and Resources Institute: about $49,000, according to his 2009 Indian tax return, which he provided to The New York Times. The return also lists $16,000 in other income, most of it interest on accounts in Indian banks.

Dr. Pachauri acknowledged his role as an adviser and consultant to businesses, but he said that it was his responsibility as the panel’s chairman to disseminate its findings to industry.

There's more later in the piece:

In response to the recent criticisms, Dr. Pachauri provided an accounting of some of his outside consulting fees paid to the Energy and Resources Institute. Those include about $140,000 from Deutsche Bank, $25,000 from Credit Suisse, $80,000 from Toyota and $48,750 from Yale. He has recently begun work as a strategic adviser for Pegasus, the investment firm, but has not yet attended a meeting, and no money has yet been paid to the Energy and Resources Institute. He has also provided advice free of charge to groups like the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The Times goes on to quote a number of well-known climate skeptics—not "mainstream scientists"—making baseless allegations about Pachauri personally profitting from his role, or that there are "willful" misrepresenations of science in the IPCC reports. There's Christopher Monckton, who lacks any shred of credibility, despite his continued appearances in the media. The story also describes Roger Pielke Jr. as a "mainstream" scientist. Pielke—by his own admission—is "not a climate scientist" (his doctorate is in political science.)

In fact, as Joe Romm points out, the piece never actually quotes a single climate scientist. The story doesn't actually deal with any new criticisms of the IPCC's science. Here's the real nugget of the story:

The panel, in reviewing complaints about possible errors in its report, has so far found that one was justified and another was "baseless." The general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions.

As I noted earlier this week, there are certainly fair criticisms to be made of the IPCC's sloppy work. And some critics have made reasonable suggestions of steps the organization could take to recover. But this New York Times piece doesn't deal with any of that.

Controversial NRC Pick Sails

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Feb. 10, 2010 8:45 AM PST

William Magwood, Barack Obama's controversial pick to serve on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a member of our list of worst nominees, was supposed to spend some time in the hot seat during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. But the members of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee barely questioned Magwood about his lengthy resume working for nuclear interests and how that history would affect his ability to regulate the industry.

Magwood served as the head of the Office of Nuclear Energy within the Department of Energy from 1998 to 2005. But as I wrote when Magwood was nominated, he has also worked for Westinghouse, which makes nuclear reactors and has big business before the NRC. He has also worked as a private consultant for nuclear interests. The Project on Government Oversight, as well as other anti-nuclear and environmental groups, say Magwood's boosterism for nuclear power should disqualify him from overseeing the industry.

One of the only senators to question Magwood directly about his work to promote nuclear power was the committee's chair, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). But it wasn't exactly what you would call a grilling.

"It is my firm opinion that the best service to the country and to the nuclear industry is to set a very, very high standard for safety and to do so in a way that the public has a great deal of confidence," Magwood responded. He also told Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) that he did not see any potential conflicts of interest over proposals expected to come before the NRC. No-one pressed him further.

Magwood and fellow Nuclear Regulatory Commission nominees George Apostolakis and William Ostendorff received hearty endorsement from both Republican and Democratic members of the panel. "It would be difficult for the president to find three better nominees," said Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). Even the panel's more liberal members were equally enthusiastic about the nominees and their role in heralding a nuclear revival. "I'm a proponent of nuclear power," said Ben Cardin (D-Md.). "I believe we stand on the cusp of a nuclear renaissance."

Boxer said their nominations are expected to move forward later this month.

GOP: Obama "Anti-Nuclear"

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Feb. 9, 2010 3:34 PM PST

Barack Obama on Tuesday told reporters that his recent embrace of nuclear power is part of an effort to adopt some Republican ideas on energy, noting that he remains an "eternal optimist" about bipartisanship. But Obama's attempt to woo Republicans with nuclear power has met predictably bad reviews from the Party of No, which maintains that this is "an anti-nuclear administration." (Sarah Palin seems to like it, however.)

Pouring another $36 billion into government-backed loans "avoids the bold, no-cost solutions that would truly jumpstart nuclear power in the U.S." writes the GOP on its website. (The Republicans also describe nuclear as an "emission-free" energy source, though it's not quite clear why they care about emissions since most Republicans don't seem to think greenhouse gases are a problem.) The GOP plan also touts its "no-cost nuclear power initiative" to bring 100 new nuclear reactors online over the next 20 years, which was included in the energy bill the party released last summer. They don't manage to explain how it will be "no-cost," since the nuclear industry has made it very clear that it can't exist without government support. (See "The Nuclear Option" for more.)

"Without loan guarantees we will not build nuclear power plants," Michael J. Wallace, co-chief executive of UniStar Nuclear and vice president of Constellation Energy, told the New York Times in 2007. The nuclear industry has called for $100 billion in loan guarantees from the government. And while those are, in theory, "loans," the Congressional Budget Office projects default rates of "well above 50 percent." With the cost of reactors now estimated at over $10 billion, plans to build 100 new plants in the next two decades would require more than a trillion dollars in capital investment.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]