U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped 1.3% in 2006, as the Energy Information Administration reported yesterday.

President Bush immediately took credit:

“We are effectively confronting the important challenge of global climate change through regulations, public-private partnerships, incentives, and strong economic investment.”

[Please, no laughing.]

Perversely, in spite of the fact that Bush has actually gutted programs aimed at the promoting clean energy technologies, last year’s emissions dropped because of 1) higher gasoline prices, 2) a sharp drop in heating demand from an unusually warm winter, which helped bring about 3) a decline in natural gas prices (and hence more use of this clean fuel for electricity generation ).

Hmm. An unusually warm winter — wonder what caused that. And high gasoline prices — maybe the president does deserve credit after all.

Planet Gore chimes in that this means “we can indeed reduce our greenhouse gas emissions intensity (the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per dollar of economic output) at a rate that exceeds our economic growth rate.” Well, yes, but contrary to PG’s implied support of Bush’s do-nothing climate policy, this fact argues for greenhouse gas standards and major clean technology investment– so we don’t have to rely on random fortuitous factors to get our emissions reductions to coincide with economic growth.

(If PG thinks Bush’s policies are the cause of the drop, then they should be happy to take a wager on 2007 emissions. I’ll give them $100 for every 0.1% emissions drop this year if they’ll give me $100 for every 0.1% rise this year.)

For those scoring at home, I’m going to count this as PG Disinfotainment Watch #7 — two in one day, you just can’t keep up with all of the entertaining disinformation from PG’s dirty dozen.

Study shows that climate change could harm crops – Environmental News Network. “During the next 50 years, more than 60 percent of 51 wild peanut species analyzed and 12 percent of 108 wild potato species analyzed could become extinct because of climate change.”

Germany and Japan press U.S. to agree to leadership role on climate change — International Herald Tribune. And I’m willing to take a large bet they’ll be just as successful as Tony Blair was.

Climate Progress wrote last year about the UK’s important Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. That report concluded avoiding catastrophic climate change might cost countries 1% of GDP (spent largely on clean energy technologies that have many other benefits such as reductions in urban smog), but failing to act could cost up to 20% of GDP as the world must deal with impacts such as massive flooding and hundreds of millions of environmental refugees.

Unsurprisingly, Planet Gore intensely dislikes the Stern Review. In Sterling Burnett’s recent post that misrepresented both the MIT report and CBO report on climate costs — to perversely argue that the media’s neglect of those reports is evidence of pro-warming bias — he writes:

By comparison, the now thoroughly discredited Stern report and the recent IPCC report on the costs of combating climate change were front page news.

As is typical on PG, he uses the phrase “now thoroughly discredited,” without a single link to an article or study. Such articles do exist, since the economic community in particular criticized certain assumptions in the Review. They especially don’t like his choice of a low discount rate. Boo-hoo! Stern places a higher value on future generations than many economists or conservatives. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.

In fact, the Stern Review is not thoroughly discredited nor was its choice of discount rate flawed, as argued here and here in some detail. This issue of the Stern Report and the discount rate is sufficiently important that I will return to it in future posts.