Come hear blogosphere stars Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet give their road show on “How We Can Enhance Scientific Understanding through Better Communication” at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, Tuesday, June 19 at 9 am. I will be introducing them.

Mooney is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of the terrific bestseller, The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Storm World, which I will review next month. Mooney runs the popular science blog, The Intersection.

Matthew Nisbet is professor of communication at American University, and runs the popular science blog, Framing Science.

Everything you could want to know about this event is here.

The one blemish on Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) environmental stance had been his support for coal-to-liquid (CTL). Now he has clarified his position:

Senator Obama will not support the development of any coal-to-liquid fuels unless they emit at least 20% less life-cycle carbon than conventional fuels.

Yet, even if you capture all the carbon dioxide from the process, pure coal-to-liquids have 4% higher lifecycle carbon emissions than conventional fuels, as previously noted. The only way to get a 20% reduction in emissions is by blending in a lot of biomass (see page 25 here).

Yet in practice, that blending would add tremendous cost and complexity to a system that already costs a stunning $4.5 billion dollars just for a 50,000-barrel-a-day facility without CO2 storage and without biomass blending. And we would need more than 200 such facilities to replace all imported oil today. Not gonna happen.

Further, Obama’s clarification contains another commitment that is all-but-fatal to CTL:

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Sharp Sees US Passing Japan in Solar by 2010 – Reuters. “After that, US. solar power growth on a chart ‘could look like a hockey stick, it could be straight up.’ The United States “should surpass Germany … within 10 years” as the world’s top generator.

Ethanol to Take 30 Pct of US Corn Crop in 2012 – GAO – Reuters. GAO: “Using more corn for energy production will likely exert additional upward pressure on corn prices, potentially influencing livestock feed markets and meat prices.”

Coal use rise looks bad for climate aims – Reuters. “Without a big global policy change you’re seeing very rapidly rising emissions to 2020, 2025.”

Coal-to-liquids (CTL) is an irredeemably bad idea, as Climate Progress has repeatedly noted. Sadly, as the Washington Post reports today, coal-state Dems are pushing an energy bill amendment “that would provide as much as $10 billion in federal loans” for CTL.

In theory, some of that money would go to pay for capturing and storing greenhouse gases produced by those plants. Environmental groups aren’t buying it:

The heads of 14 leading environmental groups issued a letter yesterday saying a liquid coal provision would be “a poison pill that would make any bill totally unacceptable.”

CTL increases greenhouse gases by 119%, unless you capture and store the carbon dioxide — and even then, CTL still isn’t cleaner than regular diesel (and there are so many far cleaner alternatives).

But no CTL plant currently captures and stores the carbon dioxide and few are likely to do so any time soon — because the process is already wildly expensive. You need to spend a stunning $4.5 billion dollars just for a 50,000-barrel-a-day facility without CO2 storage. And the U.S. uses more than 20 million barrels of oil a day.

Even coal state newspapers realize federal subsidies for CTL are a boondoggle.

Keeping this poison pill out of the energy bill will be a major test for the Democratic leadership in both houses.

The media has been reporting on the wrong NASA employee on climate. The hyper-prolific James Hansen deserves our attention, not his boss. He has yet another journal article worth reading: “Climate change and trace gases.” He explains:

In my opinion, among our papers this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control.

Here is the lengthy abstract:

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