Climate Progress

I have no idea what this ad means. But I saw it in Newsweek and had to scan it onto the blog:

Seriously! I am open to anyone’s thoughts as to what this means. Here is the best I can come up with.

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I don’t really see how there is any serious prospect for solving either our energy security problem or our climate problem if the traditional media doesn’t do any policing whatsoever of statements by major politicians. Here is McCain yesterday:

“… it will be vital that we continue oil production at a high level including offshore drilling. Now, the briefings that I have had with the oil producers, there are some instances that within a matter of months, they could be getting additional oil.“

Standing in front of a large California oil drill, in what appears to be filming of a new movie, There Will Be Lies, McCain went so far as to say:

But there’s abundant resources in the view of the people who are in the business that could be exploited within a period of months. So offshore drilling is something we have to do.

Okay, I can understand why he believes whatever stuff the oil producers make up — they are lining his pockets now. And I understand the three reasons that McCain would lie to the public:

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It’s official. T. Boone is overexposed. His monotonous TV ad runs on an endless loop, he has testified in front of Congress, he is now appearing on every cable show, and everybody quotes him even though he doesn’t actually agree with anybody but himself.

What specifically bugs me:

1. His ads say we can’t drill our way out of this problem, but then he says we should drill everywhere — offshore, Alaska, your backyard.
2. He keeps pushing his absurd idea of switching over to natural gas vehicles (see “Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb“).
3. His plan shares a great deal in common with Al Gore’s, but he still goes out of his way to diss it (inaccurately, see below): “Gore’s Global Warming Plan Ignores Crippling Stranglehold Foreign Oil Has on America’s Economic and National Security.”
4. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I/D/R/?) said the plan is a “classically American message of honesty, determination and can-do optimism.”
5. Did I mention he keeps pushing his absurd idea of switching over to natural gas vehicles, even though Russia, Iran and Persian Gulf states have most of world’s gas reserves?

The Gore critique seems to me particularly lame, as if he can’t stand to share the stage with anyone else. Why else release such a petty statement as this:

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I am going to live blog my own hearing.

Obviously I’m not going to be blogging during my own panel [Note to self: Hmm. Suppose you used your voice dictation system to transcribe your words to text….].

But I will squeeze in some blogging during the first panel, with the Members’ Statements and the testimony of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners.

Wow. Big turnout. Small room. Standing room only. Six Senators, including Inhofe!

Sen. Carper (D-chair): … create a strong nuclear power industry…. Air pollution reductions…. Nuclear energy is carbon-free. Provides good jobs…. Our country needs nuclear power…. 34 new nukes may be built in next 10 to 15 years…. One word is key for nuclear Renaissance: Safety.

Sen. Voinovich (R): High gas prices. Energy prices are “a form of regressive tax.” Energy independence. Bridge to a carbon-constrained world. Nuclear power must play an increasing role. “Renewable energy sources are intermittent and unreliable.”

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Disney/Pixar’s new hit Wall-E is easily one of the best movie dystopias ever. It ranks with Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the Matrix, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and the first two Terminator movies.

Yes, Hollywood loves dystopias. Perhaps because it is one (okay, technically it is an anti-utopia).

I have a couple of reasons for writing about the movie. One is that we can expect to see more environmental dystopias as the painful reality of global warming becomes more and more obvious to all. Wall-E makes clear that even the most brutal satire of our self-inflicted environmental predicament can be a box office success, if it is well done. The second reason is the incredible irony of Disney making this movie.

As a film it is superb, a must see for children and adults. Critically acclaimed, it received a rare 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. The New Yorker’s tough-to-please David Denby writes:

Watching Pixar’s animated film “WALL-E” must be a humbling experience for other filmmakers, because it demonstrates not just the number but the variety of ideas you need to make a terrific movie.

This may be the only major movie ever made that is both a dystopia and anti-utopia. In the dystopic first half, we see a lifeless post-eco-apocalyptic Earth overrun by toxic garbage, which is collected and compacted by our robotic hero, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class). WALL-E has become sentient by collecting and studying the waste of humanity, including an old tape of the movie Hello Dolly he plays over and over again.

In the anti-utopic second half, the megacorporation Buy ‘N Large had created a seeming paradise for humans on board “Executive Starliners” where every task has become automated. But hundreds of years after what was supposed to be a brief exodus while Earth was cleaned up, humans have become “a flabby mass of peabrained idiots who are literally too fat to walk.” These lazy, overweight video-addicts — whoever could the moviemakers be talking about? — are less human than WALL-E.

Though criticized by some conservatives as anti-capitalist, WALL-E is perhaps best described as one of the most anti-consumption movies ever made. That’s why even Michael Gerson, a Former Bush speechwriter known for his evangelical moralism, loved the movie and saw it as a daring attack on “a culture of consumption.”

As much as I loved the movie, I did find an odd disjunction….

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*That would be my headline if Climate Progress were the Washington Post or President Bush.

After all, at the end of 2006, the Republican Congress and the president enacted “The Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act,” which opened 8.3 million acres of the Outer Continental shelf for drilling. Yet oil prices were only $60 a barrel then. Now prices have more than have doubled. Doesn’t that prove that legislation to permit offshore drilling increases oil prices? That seems to be the logic of the Post and our President.

Bush’s radio address lies remarks are reprinted verbatim in the Washington Post today:

In his radio address Saturday, Bush said that “technological advances have allowed us to explore oil offshore in ways that protect the environment” and that outer continental shelf areas now off limits “could produce enough oil to match America’s current production for almost 10 years.”

Yes, and monkeys could fly out of my butt. But 99% of doctors say that is not going to happen (a few doctors funded by ExxonMobil say it will if we just do nothing). And Bush’s own energy analysts say we might get 150,000 barrels a day in the 2020s if we lift the remaining federal moratorium on offshore drilling (see “The cruel offshore-drilling hoax“). Note to Post: 150,000 barrels a day isn’t quite America’s current production rate.

In fact, buried deep in the piece, the Post does point out something first reported on Climate Progress almost a month ago:

A report last year by the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration said that “access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017.” It added, “Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.”

[Note: That link in the Post is not to the the EIA report. God forbid a major newspaper actually has a useful hyperlink, rather than an utterly useless one pointing back to its own website. And they say bloggers are solipsistic! The EIA study is here.]

And yet the Post headline is:

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The National Review online’s Larry Kudlow reports on the basis of “deep background” from a “senior McCain advisor” that “Mac’s Off Cap-and-Trade.” The Atlantic.com says “McCain Sticks By Cap-N-Trade.” You be the judge. Kudlow:

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McCain has a new ad titled “purpose” (here). The AP critique it with a piece titled, “McCain energy ad short on specifics.” OK, MSM, half credit.

The ad has a much bigger problem than lack of specifics — McCain is trying to get a political boost by claiming he will champion popular clean energy technologies that he, like President Bush and most conservatives, has consistently opposed:

SCRIPT: Announcer: American technology protected the world. We went to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. John McCain will call America to our next national purpose: energy security.

A comprehensive bipartisan plan to lower prices at the pump, reduce dependence on foreign oil through domestic drilling, and champion energy alternatives for better choices and lower costs. Putting country first.

McCain: I’m John McCain and I approved this message.

You cannot be serious. The only energy “alternative” McCain seriously champions is nuclear power, which is two years older then he is (the first experimental nuclear fission was in 1934). As for the other alternatives the ad depicts, solar and wind — McCain has been one of their leading opponents in Congress of government efforts to promote.

This ad is as phony as his photo-op earlier this year (see “Anti-wind McCain delivers climate remarks at foreign wind company“). To repeat the key point documented by the Center for American Progress, McCain has repeatedly opposed a renewable electricity standard that would have set a minimum requirement for utilities to generate part of their power from sources like wind.

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“TV journalism” has been an oxymoron as long as I can remember, but not “print journalism.” My father was an old-school newspaper editor, which is why I still hold print journalists in moderately high regard. But media critic Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, in a Tim Russert eulogy, explains just how far newspapers (like the Orlando Sentinel) have now fallen:

Under its new owner, Sam Zell, the Tribune Co. earlier this month decreed a 12 percent cutback in content, meaning that the Los Angeles Times, for instance, will be serving up 82 fewer news pages each week. Tribune’s Baltimore Sun announced last week it will cut 100 employees, in part through layoffs, and produce what publisher Tim Ryan called “a more concise newspaper with more local news” — a euphemism for slashing news space.

Randy Michaels, the company’s chief operating officer, said Tribune has begun measuring productivity by how much copy each journalist churns out – and that the average Times reporter generates a mere 51 pages a year, compared with more than 300 apiece at the Sun and Hartford Courant. Perhaps no one has explained to him that writing in-depth stories — say, prizewinning investigative pieces — takes a bit more time.

Note to Tribune — if “journalists” are measured by quantity over quality, then you really have nothing whatsoever over the web. Your journalists are typically less knowledgeable than many of the people who blog on their areas of expertise. And I don’t see how you can match the web for quantity. Nor price, of course. Once your quality is gone, why should anyone pay for your product?

Lee Abrams, hired from XM Satellite Radio as Tribune’s chief innovation officer, has been cranking out colorful memos: “Newspapers strike me as being a little TOO NPR. I like NPR, and their shows like Morning Edition do well. But NPR can also be a bit elitist. . . . It’s all about being INTELLIGENT . . . not intellectual.

Hence the emphasis on quality over quantity. Oops. But wait, the memo gets better….

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Wired magazine used to be the place to go for the latest in technology. But now it covers any sexy techy idea, no matter how impractical.

Given that we all have limited time, Wired should be off every technophile’s must-read list and replaced by Technology Review, which has revamped its stodgy old self and become what once Wired aspired to be.

For me, this started with the absurd cover story by Peter Schwartz 5 years ago, “How Hydrogen Can Save America,” which claimed “What we need is a massive, Apollo-scale effort [$100 billion over ten years] to unlock the potential of hydrogen, a virtually unlimited source of power.” Uhh, no. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not a source — except for the sun, of course, and if we really want to harness its power we should be placing big bets on solar energy. Try instead my Technology Review piece “The Last Car You Would Ever Buy — Literally.”

Recently Wired published their most misinformed piece, “Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green.” RealClimate beat me to the punch debunking Wired’s bizarre analyses in favor of using air-conditioning and against protecting old-growth forests or buying a Prius (see “Wired Magazine’s Incoherent Truths“). They didn’t debunk Wired’s claim, “Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy,” perhaps because it is so obviously absurd (see The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power).

Now Wired has fallen into the tank containing sharks with lasers by publishing Chris Mooney’s bizarre paeon to geo-engineering and the late Edward Teller and his protégé Lowell Wood — famed uber-hawkish promoters of all things dubious.

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