Climate Progress

Via HuffingtonPost:

• Incredible Obama/McCain dance-off
• Funny and poignant return of the Waaaasup! guys
• Opie and the Fonz weigh in.

We know that Palin wants polar bears to go extinct, even though she wears a polar bear pin. And we know that under Palin, wolves are being slaughtered from helicopters and, for the first time ever, Alaska’s “Department of Wildlife Conservation” is entering into wolf dens and slaughtering wolf pups (see Palin “champions … savagery”).

Now you can add another animal to Palin’s enemies [extinction?] list, as the NYT reported Friday:

The federal government on Friday placed beluga whales that live in Cook Inlet in Alaska on the endangered species list, rejecting efforts by Gov. Sarah Palin and others against increased protection.

As Jeff Foxworthy might say, you might be a redneck an extremist if you think the Bush administration is going too far to protect wildlife. The NYT explains:

The relatively small, whitish whales, sometimes visible from downtown Anchorage, declined by almost 50 percent in the late 1990s, and federal scientists say they have not rebounded despite a series of protections [and] are in danger of extinction….

Well, if Palin can actually see the whales from downtown Anchorage, then I suppose that makes her a marine biologist. Seriously, though, the reason this harmless but endangered animal is in the sights of Sarah the Barracuda is that its continued existence might interfere with the work of her beloved, rapacious Big Oil buddies:

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Last week I critiqued EDF’s pointless video/graphics competition (see EDF’s bizarre $10,000 contest: “What is a carbon cap and how will it cure our oil addiction?”). The contest is pointless because a carbon cap can’t cure our oil addiction. Indeed, under any plausible cap, U.S. oil consumption rises.

Gernot Wagner, an economist at Environmental Defense Fund, responded with a post at Grist: ‘Bizarre’? No. Tough? Yes Joseph Romm’s critique of EDF’s contest is misguided. As I expected, EDF claimed that auctioning off the allowances would “generate large sums of money. Part of that could be used to jump-start our transition to a greener transportation sector that’s less dependent on fossil fuels.” That takes us to Fantasyland Shellenberger-Nordhaus-land, which we’ll visit below.

But what I did not expect is that someone from EDF, particularly an economist, would actually argue the cap itself “goes a long way toward solving the problem. Let’s look at the numbers”:

MIT’s analysis of the Climate Security Act [CSA] using their EPPA model says that net crude oil imports would be 22 percent lower by 2015 under CSA than without. These savings rise to 31 percent by 2020, 41 percent by 2025, and 66 percent by 2030. (Savings decrease in the next years due to some modeling assumptions around other countries taking on caps, but are up to 62 percent again by 2050.) Sure, that’s technically not “solving the problem” entirely. However, solving two thirds of it isn’t all that bad in my book.

I stand corrected — not! Needless to say, I was quite shocked to see my old alma mater cited as the source of a claim that so blatantly flies in the face of both standard economics and practical logic.

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A1: She wants to help people remember what they looked like before her policies render them extinct.

A2: She likes sticking it to the bears.

A3. She couldn’t find a wolf-cub pin.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is famously fighting the Bush administration liberals who designated the polar bears a threatened species, and her global warming denial, if enshrined into law, would finish off the bear’s habitat (see “McCain VP Palin is a global-warming-denying, polar-bear-dissing, Pat Buchanan acolyte“).

Yet she wears a polar bear pin off her right shoulder. [Some of you are looking in the wrong direction. That image off to the side of Palin’s right shoulder is Cindy McCain, who I’m guessing just loves standing behind her husband’s VP choice.]

Notwithstanding Palin’s faux pas of wearing white (with a white pin!) after Labor Day, her pin is clearly missing either a bull’s-eye or a red circle with a slash through it. I wonder what Polar bears against Palin think of this.

Given that eBay founder Meg Whitman is a McCain supporter, I suppose it is no surprise that you can buy the same pin Palin wears on eBay:

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The first (and hopefully last) song ever inspired by Newt Gingrich — and the only song I am aware of that actually disses alternative energy — certainly makes the list, even if it hadn’t debuted on the Sean Hannity show:

All together now:

Drill here, drill now
How ’bout some oil from our own soil that belongs to us anyhow
No more debatin’ we’re tired of waitin’ everybody shout out loud
Drill here, drill now

A classic case of poetic license undercutting the message. The debate concerned coastal drilling, not “oil from our own soil.” I for one am still waiting to hear from Warner EMI about whether they will pick up my newly recorded single, “Cruel Hoax.”

This certainly wins Aaron Tippin the prize for one of the most poorly timed songs in history, as the Democrats rolled over on the issue within days, and now people are talking about $50 oil (see “Q: Will we see $3 gasoline before $5?“). That’s life in Realityville. The full lyrics have also been nominated for the most unintentionally funny country song of the year:

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Video is here. You gotta go through a commercial.

When we last left GM Vice Chair Bob Lutz, he had dismissed global warming as a “total crock of shit” (see “General Motors is full of crocks“). That would be Vice Chair of Global Product Development, not, say, a finance or sales guy, but somebody who is in charge of scientists, engineers, technicians, and oh, I don’t know, the entire future product line of the largest U.S. automaker.

So this bastion of good judgment goes on cable TV’s leading ridicule-fest, The Colbert Report — justification enough to fire him for cause — to plug the Volt, as it were, and goes Cro-Magnon again:

NUTS LUTZ: I accept that the planet is heated, but like many noted scientists, I don’t believe in the CO2 theory.
COLBERT COLBERT: … It’s just sunspot activity.
NUTS LUTZ: In the opinion of about 32,000 of the world’s leading scientists, yes.

Well, I accept that Lutz is a human being, but like many noted scientists, I don’t believes he is evidence of the evolution theory.

Anyway, responding to a piece on Huffingtonpost by Josh Nelson, “General Motors Executive Doesn’t Recognize Global Warming as Fact — He Should Be Fired,” GM’s Director of News Relations, Tom Wilkinson, had this helpful comment:

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A website to lighten up your day.

Don’t miss the hilarious point/counterpoint debate between Palin and a suprisingly articulate and snarky polar bear.

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Just when you think the two oil-men in the White House can’t top themselves for corruption metaphors:

Government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties engaged in illicit sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with and received numerous gifts from them, federal investigators said Wednesday.

The alleged transgressions involve 13 Interior Department employees in Denver and Washington. Their alleged improprieties include rigging contracts, working part-time as private oil consultants, and having sexual relationships with - and accepting golf and ski trips and dinners from - oil company employees, according to three reports released Wednesday by the Interior Department’s inspector general [Earl Devaney].

And the winner of the best line ever to appear in an Interior Department Inspector General (IG) report:

“These same … marketers also engaged in brief sexual relations with industry contacts,” Devaney wrote. “Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.”

Guess, the IG never had sex with my ex-wife. Rimshot [technically, a sting].

[It’s just a joke, people.]

But wait, there’s more:

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