E2-Wire

The American Petroleum Institute or API, the oil industry’s biggest trade group, has hired the Nature Conservancy’s climate change organizer as its new grassroots director.

Deryck Spooner is now API’s senior director for external mobilization following his stint managing the Nature Conservancy’s climate change advocacy and outreach work, API announced Monday.

API said Spooner will coordinate efforts to “develop, mobilize and sustain a political infrastructure of individuals, groups and coalitions to advance priority advocacy issues with elected officials.”

Water pollution is a growing problem because controversial Supreme Court rulings has created uncertainty about which waterways are regulated by the Clean Water Act, according to this account in the New York Times.

“Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases,” the paper says.

The debate centers on the word "navigable." The Supreme Court rulings restricted its meaning. The result has been that some smaller bodies of water that feed into larger rivers or lakes are now uncovered by the federal clean water rules. One regulator said companies are starting to remember "how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek," the Times reports.

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Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander said that lawmakers could advance energy and climate legislation by adopting a step-by-step approach that eschews sweeping measures.

Alexander’s comments appear to indicate that he’s keeping an open mind about the climate and energy plan that Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are crafting.

Their plan is expected to differ substantially from the “economy-wide” cap and trade bill the House approved last year that Alexander opposes, although it is nonetheless expected to be broad in scope.

Al Gore said Saturday that public officials who fail to act on global warming don’t deserve to keep their jobs.

“Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them,” the former Vice President wrote in a New York Times column.

Gore said evidence of global warming has not been shaken by discovery of errors in a landmark 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the now-infamous hacked climate science emails.

Gore writes:

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

His lengthy op-ed also hits back at skeptics who say the big snowstorms somehow disprove global warming; argues that the Senate’s failure thus far to pass a climate bill is preventing international action; and says cap-and-trade remains the most viable system for curbing emissions.

Environmental groups are ramping up pressure on the Senate not to take up energy legislation that omits mandatory emissions limits.

The first round of a new fight over White House power to unilaterally impose new protections on large tracts of western lands went to the Obama administration.

The Senate on Thursday rejected, 38-58, Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) bid to block White House authority to designate national monuments in western states.

DeMint wanted to attach the amendment to legislation approved yesterday aimed at bolstering tourism in the U.S.

Two centrist Democrats – Reps. Ike Skelton (Mo.) and Collin Peterson (Minn.) -- on Thursday floated a House version of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution to thwart upcoming EPA climate change rules.

Murkowski quickly emphasized the Democratic support.

“There is bipartisan and bicameral agreement that command-and-control regulations from EPA are not the right way to reduce the emissions blamed for climate change,” she said in a prepared statement Friday morning.

G-20 leaders made waves last year when they jointly pledged to phase out fossil fuel subsidies to help cut greenhouse gas emissions.

But the September meeting in Pittsburgh didn’t produce a detailed plan (that’s supposed to come later), and an International Monetary Fund report Thursday spells out how tough it might be.

The report notes that after declining in the second half of 2008 along with oil prices, petroleum subsidies are now rising alongside them. Total global subsidies are estimated to be $740 billion this year, and over 70 percent are in the G-20, the report finds.

An independent board of scientists will review the United Nations’ embattled Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The board will be part of a broader review of the IPCC to be announced next week, Reuters reports.

The Wall Street Journal delves deeply into what’s plaguing the IPCC here.

Freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) drew GOP attacks when he voted for the controversial House climate change bill that narrowly passed last June.

Perriello – who is vulnerable in this year’s election – defends the vote in a colorful, combative interview with the environmental website Grist.

He has some choice words for the Senate (“If we were going to wait for the Senate to do anything, we would do nothing”) and expresses his disdain for “insider baseball crap.”

The whole thing can be found here.