Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Early this afternoon, the Senate overwhelming passed an amendment to the Stimulus package from Senator Coburn. We need to be Going Green to make green, and improving the stimulus package. Instead, the Republican and conservative D Senate have driven changes that progressively worsened an already not aggressive enough, not as effective economically as it could be, and clearly not green enough House bill.

Let us take a moment to look at this Coburn amendment. Let us take this at face value:

None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.

Let’s roll the dice and say that this is more about image than any substantive concerns over stimulative effects of bill’s spending.

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The other day, the Environmental Defense Action Fund opened voting for ‘the people’s choice’ as to the best 30-second video to explain how a Cap & Trade program to control carbon dioxide would help cut the nation’s dependence on oil. Putting aside questions as to Environmental Defense’s devotion to a CAP uber all, the best video seemed clear: The Thinking Cap. This choice seemed clear, evidently, to many as this video was the runaway victor for EDAF’s $1000 “People’s Choice” award. (The Climate Activists’ Choice Award.) But the experts, the experts had a different perspective. They went with the foul-language oriented Cursing Cap.

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Sadly, every time that we fill up our gas tank, flip the switch for fossil-foolish electricity, warm ourselves with (high efficiency?) natural gas, we risk sending funding to people dedicated to destroying the potential for fostering paths toward mitigation of global warming and our other serious challenges. Fractions of pennies add up to serious money, serious funding for those evidently uncaring as to the havoc that they are fostering for their own children — let alone yours and mine.

From the West, we have the fumes of a particularly egregious group of astroturfers. Let’s talk a little about the Western Business Roundtable. [Read more →]

few know that [Michael] Moore was the editor of the liberal Mother Jones in 1986 — for four short months. He was fired from the publication for refusing to print an article critizing the human rights record of the Sandista government in Nicaragua. Moore didn’t balk because of any solidarity with the communist regime, but because he had a keen tactical sense. He’d reasoned that if his magazine ran that story, his ideological nemesis, Ronald Reagan, “could easily hold it up, saying, “see, even Mother Jones agrees with me.” [Markos Moulitas Zuniga, Taking on the System, p 176]

At the beginning of the year, Huffington Post ran a rambling and (being generous) disingenuous piece by Harold Ambler entitled Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted. For the first time, that ‘bastion’ of the liberal blogosphere published a full-throated, unapologetic, and utterly misleading diatribe on global warming from some suffering from anti-science syndrome.

So what? It was an error from an intern over the holiday without Arianna’s engagement (“a mistake”). So what? It is only a blog. So what? …

Well, Ronald Reagan isn’t alive but Moore’s thoughts hold true. Senator James Inhofe (R-Exxon) has used this to prove that the “left” is increasingly skeptical of Global Warming, both in testimony and in another of his infamous and recklessly disingenuous press releases.

Of course, the right-wing sound machine doesn’t stop with such a press release, which actually provides talking points and “facts” to feed others prepared to push true information that is not truthful and falsehoods into public discourse.

Thus, last Friday Scripps News Service distributed Even left now laughing at global warming. Written by Deroy Murdock, a “media fellow at the Hoover Institute for War and Peace (a hotbed for right-wing ‘intellects’, if you weren’t aware). It begins

So-called “global warming” has shrunk from problem to punch line. And now, Leftists are laughing, too. It’s hard not to chuckle at the idea of Earth boiling in a carbon cauldron when the news won’t cooperate:

Murdock then provides material about snow and ice around the world to “prove” that, evidently, weather is climate.

It truly is a shame when media outlets enable deception on fundamental issues and contribute so directly to promotion of anti-science syndrome.

As Earth faces global cooling, both troglodyte right-wingers and lachrymose left-wingers find Albert Gore’s simmering-planet hypothesis increasingly hilarious:

And, from that tearful left:

Commentator Harold Ambler declared Jan. 3 on HuffingtonPost.com that he voted for Barack Obama “for a thousand times a thousand reasons.” He added that Gore “owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming.” He called Gore’s assertion that “the science is in” on this issue “the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of mankind.”

I don’t know. That tax cuts will boost the economy. That there were nuclear weapons in Iraq. That George W Bush was, somehow, bipartisan and compassionate. That deregulation was fine because banks and financial institutions would manage themselves. The list of whoopers is pretty large, Mr Ambler, and, by the way, judging by places like the world’s National Academy of Sciences and the leading scientific societies, Mr Gore is on target. But …

In any event, the point of this post is not to rehash Ambler’s errors and deceptions nor to analyze Inhofe’s flagrant propaganda nor to dissect Murdock’s in-your-face demonstration of ASS.

Let is be clear: Huffington Post chose to publish something that was disingenuous (dishonest) about science, for the first time ever publishing a global warming denier screed. Twenty years earlier, Michael Moore made an ideological choice as to whether something was appropriate for publication in the magazine.

The writer of the piece that Moore withheld, Paul Berman [said] that Moore was a “very ideological guy and not a very well-educated guy.” He also complained about being “censored.”

No one was censoring Berman, of course; he could have had the article published anywhere else. Moore was simply conscious of hte raminfications of publishing a story in a liberal magazine that would have brought aid and comfort to the Reaganites. Berman, with his master’s degree from Columbia University, turned his nose up at the “not very well-educated Moore, but Moore was the savvier one by far. Specifically, whether Moore agreed with Berman’s article or not was irrelevant. Moore simply didn’t want to hand Reagan a cheap propaganda victory, and if that required taking a step (rejecting an article) that offended Berman’s ethical sensibilities, so be it. There was a real-world difference between that article running in Mother Jones, the Weekly Standard, or that repository of hawkish liberals, the New Republic (where, fittingly, Berman eventually became a contributing editor). [Markos Moulitas Zuniga, Taking on the System, p 176]

Moore made a fully ideological choice, one to deny “a cheap propaganda victory” to the Reagan Administration. Huffington Post made (inadvertently or otherwise) a choice to hand Jim Inhofe and the ASS-promoters “a cheap propaganda victory”, one that we are likely to hear about for years to come.

Again, this is not about ‘taking on’ the deniers but simply to note that, yet again, Huffington Post‘s ‘credibility’ is being used in support of promoting ASS when it comes to global warming. Hopefully, editors will take a lesson from this: Huffington Post (and others) would be well-advised to pay a little more attention to Michael Moore.

Note: For those vocabulary-challenge, lachrymose: Weeping or inclined to weep; tearful; Causing or tending to cause tears.

T. Boone Pickens efforts to convince the political leadership to invest heavily in a fundamentally flawed energy concept continue to move apace.

Superficially, Pickens’ $10s (likely over $100 now) of millions expended on advertising, web sites, and otherwise provide a superficially appealing concept:

• Build wind turbines
• Use wind electricity to displace gas-fired electricity (about 22 percent of the grid’s power)
• Use that natural gas to replace imported oil in transportation

So simplistically appealing, with a clarity of purpose put forward by this old oil man in such a compelling manner.

The Pickens Plan has many problems, many flaws, but at the core the worst of all might best be referred to as the Peabody-Pickens Axis for Perpetuating Pollution.

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With Obama in the White House and, for most of you, no election any time soon, are you feeling voting withdrawal. If so, the Environmental Defense Action Fund has a fix for your voting blues: a chance to vote for the best short video that best explains how capping greenhouse gas pollution will break America’s addiction to oil.

The five videos (after the fold) are pretty good.

That is, within the constraints set by the contest …

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Jerome a Paris’ Wind power set to decline under Obama? highlighted how the on-again, off-again federal renewable energy policies have created a boom-and-bust cycle, with 2009 looking to be perhaps a minor bust after 2008’s record-setting boom period. And, that this might occur despite the Administration and Congressional focus on renewable energy. And, despite our desperate need to get off polluting energy sources via energy efficiency and clean energy production as quickly as possible.

Yesterday, however, also say another important item: the wind industry now employes more American’s than coal mining! Wind: 85,000 workers. Coal mining: 81,000 workers.

And, looking to the future, wind produces more jobs per kWh than coal while producing far (FAR) less environmental havoc.

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With $850 billion (or so, who is counting, anyway) on the table, moving around about 1/3rd of one percent might seem like nothing but $3 billion here, $3 billion there and it starts to add up.

Earlier today, the House approved Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY)’s amendment to add $3 billion in capital investment in transit.

This was money that was taken out of the Appropriations mark-up of the bill and this voice vote puts the money back in.

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Amid all the discussions about potential paths forward in terms climate legislation, there is basic agreement about the need to ‘put a price on carbon’ to incentivize reducing carbon intensity (and usage … or, actually, dumping into the atmosphere) throughout the economy.

And, then the debate turns to “what to do with the resources”. For many, the best answer seems to be some form of Cap & Dividend program as enunciated best by Peter Barnes in Capitalism 3.0. (This work is compelling, on multiple levels, and well worth the read. My head nodded in agreement with many passages, much of Barnes’ framing of discussion and the challenges we face.) In short, the concept is to return to the public (variously defined: citizen; resident; taxpayer) the funds collected (either in large part or entirety), to make the system ‘revenue neutral’ and, in essence, buy allegiance and support for the carbon price system (whether, again, Cap / Auction / Trade or a carbon fee). Someone who is an “average” polluter would be revenue neutral, “high” polluter would pay more than they get back, and “low” polluter would end up earning more money from their ‘carbon frugal ways’. In addition to providing incentives to reduce polluting energy use, such a system would also serve as a reversal of the regressive element of a carbon tax and foster improved social equity. And, Barnes represents this as “the” solution, a Silver Bullet path that will enable everything else to fall in line so that we can

This seems so simple. So clearly appealing. And, well, I’ve conceptualized including a variation of as part of a Global Warming Impact Fee. Yet, even within its appealing nature, the Cap & Dividend might just have such complicated problems to make it an extremely appealing prospect, on the surface, that shouldn’t survive detailed scrutiny.

Why?

1. Does the price signal work effectively, especailly against promotion of energy efficiency?

2. Can we “afford” to fund consumption and does the dividend work putting resources be put to better use?

3. The transfer of wealth isn’t only rich to poor, heavy polluters by choice to low polluters, but is also regional in a way that will not truly assist moving toward a lower carbon environment.

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Sadly, one of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) core responses to the massive ash spill in December and other recent mishaps will be to institute some form of e-mail control over its 50-person public relations staff. As per Epic Cover-Up at TVA Coal Plant, an internal memo was accidently sent to the wrong addressees. Th3 23 December “risk assessment talking points” provided classic PR language paths toward minimizing public concern and deflecting attention from the billion+ gallon spill.

• TVA should use the word “catastrophic” but speak of a “sudden, accidental release” to describe the “release of this large amount of material.”

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