Climate Progress

He did it. Proving once again that Freeman Dyson is no Tiger, Woods took home the US championship trophy, while playing in pain for five consecutive days.

If you missed the U.S. Open over the weekend, and the 18-hole playoff today with Rocco Mediate, which was played to a draw, forcing a sudden death 19th hole — then you missed one of the greatest golf matches of all time.

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So when will the last Father’s Day be?

Proposed nearly a century agao to honor the “strength and selflessness” of fathers, the underlying premise of the holiday is that fathers selflessly work hard to ensure their children have a better future than they did. Interestingly, “the holiday was not officially recognized until 1972.”

Certainly it made sense to honor the fathers who came from the Greatest Generation, with their grit and determination to win WWII. But on our current path, for the first time in US history, we know with high confidence that thanks to our actions (and our inactions) our children will not face a better future, quite the reverse (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction.”)

No books will be written labeling the Baby Boom generation, the “Greatest Generation” or even the “Second Greatest Generation.” Right now, we’re not even in the top 10.

Selflessness? Try selfishness. We appear unwilling to shift even 1.1% of our fabulous wealth toward the clean energy investments needed to avert catastrophe (see “Must read IEA report, Part 1: Act now with clean energy or face 6°C warming. Cost is NOT high — media blows the story“). Conservative politicians rail against any price whatsoever for carbon dioxide. The supposedly climate-wise candidate of the GOP opposes any subsidies for clean energy, even existing ones, as does most of his party. Politician after politician calls for a Manhattan project or an Apollo program to develop breakthrough technologies, which is the same thing as saying, let someone else deal with the catastrophic problem we created (see “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 3: The breakthrough technology illusion“).

In a few decades, we might see a best-selling book about the baby boomers titled, “The Greediest Generation,” though. Once it becomes clear to all that the Baby Boom is a Bust, that our self-absorbed myopia has doomed the next 50 generations to centuries of sea level rise, widespread desertification, the loss of the inland glaciers, hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, massive species loss and so on, people will wonder what exactly we are celebrating with holidays like Father’s Day.

By mid-century, I’m not sure they’ll be very many holidays at all, other than, of course, Triage Day. Enjoy the new tie while you can, Boomer Dads. The party is almost over.

One of the many reasons why the Lieberman-Warner (and Boxer substitute) bill dropped dead on the Senate floor was costs — costs to the economy and costs to households already burdened by rising food and record-high gas prices. A post-mortem in Time observed the floor’s action was rampant with “economic fear mongering.”

The Time article (which Joe blogged on earlier) goes into more detail about how delay tactics and the Republican messaging on economic costs dominated the bill’s presence. Simple messages are always more successful than complex messages, and while the overall message (slow global warming) is pretty clear, good legislation will be indescribably complicated (the devil is in the details).

How to deal with global warming and high energy costs is a question that will not go away. What leaked out of the Senate last week demonstrated that, as does an on-going debate in Britain (on how to address ‘fuel poverty’).

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You can listen here. [It says live, but it started at the beginning for me.]

At 10 am, Mike is interviewing experts doing a post-mortem on Boxer- Lieberman-Warner, so you may want to tune in now.

UPDATE: I was on NPR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbook,” with William Nordhaus and Andy Revkin. The audio for the show can be found here after 3:30 pm EST. Here are the details:

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Lieberman points out that the NAM study, which conservatives have been relying on to attack the climate bill, uses EIA’s high oil price case to drive up costs for Lieberman Warner Bill. We heard this from EIA during the Bingaman hearing.

I believe EIA said NAM used EIA’s base case for their base case, and then the high oil price case for looking at the cost from the L-W bill, thus absurdly jacking up the bill’s conomic impacts — especially since if anything the bill is likely to drive down oil prices because it will drive down oil demand.

See also “Wrong Again 2: Delayers cry wolf with same old Garbage In, Garbage Out economic model.”

I am blogging relatively fast, so I apologize for any typos.

I do all of my writing with a voice-dictation software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 9.5. That means I tend to make different, unusual types of spelling mistakes. Words are rarely mistyped, but they are sometimes misheard or, rather, poorly pronounced. It is also tricky talking over the very audio that I am trying to report on.

Also, for some reason, the system has an occasional glitch dictating into WordPress — it sometimes drops the first letter of the first word I speak in a long phrase.

Still, it is a great piece of software and I recommend it to anybody.

Let me summarize his remarks:

Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.

We didn’t have any new nuclear plant orders until the Energy Policy Act [with its absurdly lavish subsidies and loan guarantees — Note, Domenici is proud of this].

Oil and gas prices blah, blah….

For those living paycheck to paycheck, the price at the pump is the difference between getting by or going into debt.

[Honestly — It is only during climate debates that conservatives sound like bleeding hearts who actually care about the poor and working class.]

… jeopardize global competitiveness …

Global warming is hot. But who knew it was this hot?

Climate Progress had 50,000 unique visitors in December and 20,000 last May. I don’t expect this kind of growth to continue, but then I never expected the growth of the last year in the first place.

I usually post web stats only on the anniversary of the CP’s launch and at the end of the year, but I wanted to share this milestone with all my readers and thank everyone for helping set this monthly record.

I cannot imagine what possessed the New York Review of Books to have theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson review two books on human-caused global warming (see here). It is a subject completely outside of his expertise and one that he has repeatedly said is bunk.

Dyson has previously said stuff directly at odds with the actual scientific evidence, like “There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global” (see “Freeman Dyson, Climate Crackpot“).

Then again, while he was once a brilliant theoretical physicist, he’s never been strong on the applied side of science. He was, after all, one of the “geniuses” pushing Project Orion — the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs.

The new article is critiqued by RealClimate (here). But I did want to highlight one amazing assertion by Dyson on how he believes the issue of carbon emissions will be solved soon, which makes all too clear why he should stick with theoretical physics:

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