Climate Progress

If I could know only one thing about a presidential candidate’s understanding of energy, it is whether they get that energy efficiency is the “first fuel.” If efficiency is not the cornerstone of their energy independence and climate strategy, they will fail. It’s that simple (see “Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution, Part 1: The biggest low-carbon resource by far“).

How delightful, then, to see Obama use valuable time in his expensive half-hour political infomercial — his closing economic argument to millions of Americans — to tout McKinstry, a company that does energy efficiency retrofits.

Now efficiency is far less visually sexy than wind turbines or solar panels. That’s why anti-cleantech greenwashers from, oh, I don’t know, say Arizona and Alaska, invariably use renewable energy company backdrops — the visuals overwhelm any factual debunking of their policies that the media might do (assuming for the moment we had a media that actually ever did that kind of debunking).

So you know the candidate is serious about energy in general and efficiency in particular when they visit an energy efficiency company and then tell the nation about it:

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Okay. The chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee didn’t quite say that, at least not directly. But E&E PM reports (subs. req’d):

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) expects to take her cues on climate in the 111th Congress from the next president.

The chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee told reporters here today that the next administration — whether led by a Democrat or a Republican — will likely set the pace when it comes to moving a greenhouse gas reduction bill through the House and Senate.

“It all depends on what the president wants,” said Boxer, in response to a question on whether she would reintroduce her own bill. “If the president wants the same bill back, we do it.”

Her plan is to reach out to the next administration “the day after Election Day” to talk principles on climate legislation, she said. Whether the chief executive is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) matters little on global warming, she added, as she expects “a friendly administration either way.”

But would she have said that if Obama weren’t 6 points ahead in the polls? After all, McCain’s proposed climate plan is far, far weaker than Boxer’s (see “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“). And even that assumes climate regulation remains a priority for McCain (see “Palin shocker: McCain won’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions“). Fortunately, the point should be moot in 6 days. Here’s the rest of the story:

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Conservative think tanks remain oblivious and impervious to the facts. They cling to global warming denial and delay even in the face of the remarkable advances both in scientific understanding about global warming and in clean technology solutions.

We have seen that the Cato Institute remains intellectually bankrupt on both the urgency of the climate problem and the availability of cost-effective solutions. The Competitive Enterprise Institute actually runs ad campaigns aimed at destroying the climate for centuries.

Now Kenneth Green, resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, has weighed in with a speech Monday to the International Oxygen Manufacturers Association (!) betraying a willful ignorance of science and technology.

On the technology front, he simply asserts with no evidence whatsoever that:

No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly.

ClimateProgress readers know that statement is utterly false (see “An introduction to the core climate solutions“). As do all those who believe in science. The latest multi-year synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature by the world’s top scientists and technologists — signed off by every major government including the Bush Administration — says that we have the needed technology today or are in the process of commercializing it and that the economic cost of strong action will be at most 0.1% of GDP per year, far less than the cost of inaction (see “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly“).

But Green asserts “My science is value-neutral–I just try to figure out what the science really says, and look past the hype.” Actually, it is very easy to figure out what the science really says — just read the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But that, of course, would shatter his carefully crafted ideologically-driven worldview.

Instead, Green — how’s that for an ironic name? — distorts climate science with these amazing anti-scientific assertions about “the state of the science”:

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It’s time to stop trying to guess whether the latest McCain campaign gaffe revision on global warming means the Arizonan has walked away from his previous support for mandatory government control of greenhouse gases. He has.

That should have been clear from McCain’s repeated rejection of the word “mandatory” to describe his program, his choice of a global warming denier for vice president, and his failure to even mention global warming during his acceptance speech. Most recently, his chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said on Sunday that McCain does not agree with the Supreme Court decision that labels carbon dioxide a pollutant and requiring EPA to regulate it. He labels Obama’s decision to obey the Supreme Court decision “a draconian regulatory approach.”

Now the McCain campaign has decided to eliminate the ambiguity entirely in the desperate and erratic final days of his campaign. In her big greenwashing energy speech at an Ohio solar energy company, Palin was as blunt as possible in her prepared (and delivered) remarks:

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The NYT Caucus Blog reports:

Gov. Sarah Palin will make her second policy speech as the Republican vice-presidential nominee on Wednesday morning, focusing on energy security, a campaign aide said. She will deliver the speech in Toledo, Ohio, at Xunlight Corporation, a company that manufactures solar power implements.

I guess it is mavericky to give an energy speech using the greenwashing backdrop of a popular clean energy technology your ticket has always opposed (see “Anti-wind McCain delivers climate remarks at foreign wind company“).

Remember, McCain has a record that is as strongly anti-solar and anti-renewable as that of Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the global-warming denier from the U.S. oil-patch (see here). McCain voted with Inhofe and against clean energy a staggering 42 out of 44 times in the past two decades.

Why does McCain vote against solar and other renewables even though he comes from a state that could supply the country’s electricity needs by itself with solar energy? Because, as he asserted last year, he believes that solar is among the “clean technologies [that] don’t work.” Similarly, Palin said in August:

Alternative-energy solutions are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop.

That’s right. She’s appearing at a solar energy company even though she thinks alternative energy would take more than 10 years to develop.

If conservatives like McCain had succeeded in the mid-1990s and shut down all clean energy R&D at the Department of Energy (DOE) where I worked, the kind of second-generation thin film solar technology that Xunlight has commercialized would never have happened, because it was the DOE that helped usher that technology into the market.

As for Palin’s specific remarks, no doubt she will repeat and expand upon the multiple lies and distortions she made in her acceptance speech:

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“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.” So the French statesman Talleyrand supposedly said of the pre-revolution monarchy. The words apply equally well to that bastion of libertarianism, the Cato Institute.

Over the years I have debated one of their senior scholars, Jerry Taylor, many times. He is probably the craftiest debater that the delayer/inactivist side has. But since, like all delayers, his positions are frozen in stone by his ideology, those positions inevitably become farther and farther disengaged from the reality of a (climate) changing world and hence less and less compelling. That is most clearly evident in my latest debate with him, online at Google’s new Knol site (aka the would-be Wikipedia killer).

My original post is “Jumpstarting the Transition to Clean Energy.” Taylor’s rebuttal is here. You see the typical rigid libertarian worldview sprinkled throughout:

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that global warming is a serious problem and that reducing emissions is cheaper than adapting to climate changes. Neither argument is persuasive to us….

It’s not altogether obvious to us that oil is becoming scarcer…. Regardless, if and when oil begins to disappear — or more accurately, if and when market actors believe the oil scarcity is on the horizon — oil prices will go up accordingly and the market will adjust without any need for government assistance. So while “peak-oil” arguments come and go with the related booms and busts in oil markets, there is no need for a policy argument about oil depletion.

In short, global warming isn’t a problem, and peak oil, if it ever occurs, is self-correcting. What a blissful world the Cato folk live in. Either problems don’t exist or the all-powerful, all-knowing free market will fix them. Now you might think that recent events would cause Cato scholars to at least slightly temper their blind faith in the power of greed to set all things right. But you would be wrong. Indeed, the most jaw-dropping paragraph in Taylor’s “rebuttal” is the last one:

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Australian media reports:

China will invest nearly $A445 billion (US$ 280 billion) in its overburdened rail system as a stimulus measure aimed at blunting the impact of the global financial crisis.

The investment is part of plans to extend the country’s railway network from the current roughly 125,502km to nearly 160,900km by 2010, Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post reported.

The Beijing News quoted a rail official as saying that, while the network needed extending, the massive investment was also intended to help lift the nation’s economy as it suffers amid the global woes.

“New rail investment will become a shining light in efforts to push forward economic growth,” railway ministry spokesman Wang Yongping said.

I hope Democrats in Congress are paying attention. Yes, spending money on roads and bridges may be a faster stimulus package, but this country needs to make the transition to greater rail-based transit. Seems like we may be able to learn a thing or two from the Middle Kingdom.

Last week I noted the glee with which the media used the global recession to shoot the clean-energy wounded (see “Global recession? Must be time for the media’s alternative-energy backlash“). Now Greenwire reports “Credit crunch scuttles W.Va. coal-to-liquids project” (subs. req’d, excerpted below):

Citing the lingering credit crunch, mining giant Consol Energy Inc. and the Texas gasification company Synthesis Energy Systems Inc. are halting a joint venture to convert coal to methanol and gasoline in West Virginia.

Obviously the crash in oil prices played a role too. The wide-ranging WSJ energy/environment blog has now covered the story, too. And given their well-known obsession with balance (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP“), I can hardly wait for the stream of stories on this from the big print media giants. [Cut to sound of crickets chirping.]

Here are more excerpts from the Greenwire story:

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Last week, Department of Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced an initiative to move forward on potentially developing 190 million acres of Federally-owned or managed land for geothermal energy generation.

The initiative is quite a reversal for the Bush Administration, since this past summer the government attempted to freeze solar applications in order to work through a procedural environmental assessment (interpreted as a delay tactic to most, and the moratorium was scratched after public uproar).

Now at least the government has put together a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for leasing land to develop geothermal generation, and once enacted, the government will begin to identify and more closely examine sections of federal land.

Climate Progress considers geothermal among the more promising renewable energies, particularly because it could contribute to baseload power (as an MIT study found in 2007).

As the press release for Kempthorne’s announcement notes, geothermal development in the U.S. is making good progress, but there’s room for much more:

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Big Oil corrupts — the definitive “Dog Bites Man” story:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted of seven corruption charges Monday in a trial that tainted the 40-year Senate career of Alaska’s political patriarch…. Stevens, 84, was convicted of all the charges he faced of lying about free home renovations and other gifts from a wealthy oil contractor.

The monthlong trial revealed that employees for VECO Corp., an oil services company, transformed Stevens’ modest mountain cabin into a modern, two-story home with wraparound porches, a sauna and a wine cellar.

The Senate’s longest-serving Republican, Stevens said he had no idea he was getting freebies.

Hmm. An Alaskan politician who simply expects the big money boys to buy them tens of thousands of dollars in stuff — where have we heard that before?

What’s funny is that Alaska has built their its economy around petro-dollar socialism, huge handouts from Big Oil. And yet the most famous Alaskan politician has the gall to accuse her opponents of being socialists, saying “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” Now that is projection.

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