is there something in mccain’s past where he significantly broke from the republican party in his voting record — or did he merely at one time suggest the heresy that global warming might be due to anthropogenic carbon emissions but did nothing about it?

i’m kind of sick of this asshole getting “moderate” credibility from saying a few things which piss off republicans because he deviates from the strict party line and then he does absolutely nothing about those issues. he was against the tax breaks, did nothing, then became for them. he was cautious against rushing into iraq, did nothing, and now is the biggest hawk. he might have at one time admitted to AGW, did nothing, and now is a complete denier. he was at one time pro-choice and is now clearly pandering to the right wing. what a fucking joke. and it’d be nice to see a more mainstream audience calling him on all this other than just the daily show.

How about:

Big Govmints Tax Carbon fuels - and big time,

Big Govmints shut down CO2 bizness, - forcefully

Big Govmints open the pathways to clean energy and energy conservation.

All three sound just fine to me.

Oh you say you want no Govmint and let the market to decide? How’s that working for you?

Seems the Carbon Fuels Market can’t control itself. Who will?

Lets just do 40 acres. I suppose each acre will grow 3 tons (dried) per acre per year; that’s 120 tons, the heating equivalent of 110 tons of central Appalachian coal. Assuming torrification and transportation costs are the same as the transporation costs of coal, that’s $140×110 = $15,400 per year; probably quite a good gross for a 40 acre wood lot.

http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/ 09/ 06/ us/ 06highway.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

and with electric cars, we might have no road projects at all.

It is not surprising that you have no knowledge of Governor Sarah Palin’s actual pro-active record on climate issues.

On September 14, 2007, Governor Palin signed Administrative Order 238 establishing a sub-cabinet to prepare a climate change strategy. The
Climate Change Sub-cabinet was established to consolidate the state’s knowledge about the expected effects of global warming in Alaska, recommend measures and policies to prepare communities and residents to respond to expected effects, and guide the state’s participation in local, regional and national efforts to curb and to respond to global warming. The Climate Change Sub-Cabinet will develop, support and expand renewable energy resource programs and to promote aggressive development of renewable energy sources such as geothermal, wind, hydroelectric, tidal, and in-stream energy. In addition, the Governor is signing a letter that adds Alaska as an observer to the Western Climate Initiative.

Actions indeed speak louder than words.

[JR: Congratulations. With this nonsensical comment you are now on permanent moderation, which means all of your posts will be reviewed before they are put online. Everything you cite is just “words” not actions. The only actions she has taken is to push hard to expand fossil fuel consumption and push hard for expensive transportation projects that serve no value. She is actively suing the interior department to delist the polar bear as a threatened species because that would interfere with oil drilling. But wait, Joe, she signed a letter that adds Alaska as an observer to the Western climate initiative — What a pitbull for climate action she is!]

My revulsion for him is only tempered by my pity for his unconscious inanity, which I feel is accurately portrayed in these links[1][2][3][4.

Looks like civilization has peaked in the west.

That doesn’t make sense.

All that will happen is that we will move to a different taxation system for roads.

Perhaps a mileage fee rather than a consumption fee. I would expect that it would be easy to read mileage via smart meters.

BTW, less driving and lighter cars = less maintenance. We’re just in a transition.

I challenge all whose newspapers don’t carry Friedman to do the same thing.

I dislike the columnists in my paper and their columnists are a big reason why my subscription has lapsed. They now carry more green features, but they should also be carrying Friedmans editorials on Energy and Climate.

I plan on making the case to phone solicitors who call me, to salespeople who recruit subscribers in kiosks in local stores and in letters to the editorial board. I will also seek out their advertisers who might be like minded and ask them to do the same things.

Activist groups with mailing lists could include the above review, the video link and some choice editorials. His ideas are great. Let’s work to get his columns in front of more and more people.

I challenge all whose newspapers don’t carry Friedman to do the same thing.

I’ve long been ambivalent about Friedman myself. I agree completely with his energy-climate change-national security-economic integrity nexus.

But, as a Peak Oiler, I don’t find his prescription - breathless technophilia and rampant globalization - realistic. That’s just digging deeper when you’re in a deep hole. (I also reject globalization on many other grounds, so I’d have a problem with F even leaving Peak Oil out of it.)

This line from the Raibbi review made me break up laughing:

It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans.

That’s as dead on as it gets. I’m very familiar with F’s way from reading his columns.

Then there’s this:

The book’s genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is being leveled.”

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!

This is like the pseudo-profound musing you have when you’re stoned or on an acid trip.

As for Iraq, from that clip I couldn’t quite tell if F was just describing that way of looking at it, or if he was endorsing it. I don’t recall his ever giving that kind of justification in his columns.

A friend of mine who lives in Alaska and served with two different governors — and who knows Palin — noted that when she signed AO 238, she promptly tried to stack the deck by appointing deniers and oil sympathizers to oversee the sub cabinet’s activities.

As for appointing an observer to the Western Climate Initiative, he says it’s not because she wants to support it, rather it’s a case of “keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Actions do speak louder than words, and Palin’s actions reveal her to be a climate denier and oil troll.

Your actions, Paul, show you to be so partisan and doctrinaire that your comments are at best, worthless, at worst, dangerous and disingenuous.

Sorry, having trouble tell snark from trolling, I suppose.

Noise level has been very high on pro-environmental forums lately.