OK, Planet Gore posts this cartoon under the headline: “Dilbert Tells an Inconvenient Truth?”

Well, shouldn’t the headline be “Dogbert Tells an Inconvenient Truth”? And Dogbert is not so much a truth-teller as “a megalomaniac; one of his dreams is to conquer the world and enslave all humans.” So the fact that he spouts misanthropic conservative claptrap is not something that really advances PG’s (false) argument that environmentalists are elitists who only want other people to change their behavior.

This isn’t the first time PG has misued a cartoon to try to make a point. This one was far more inane:

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Strong support offered for tougher fuel economy standards this afternoon by Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Dick Durbin (D-IL). Still, Dorgan couldn’t resist a couple of minutes on hydrogen cars.

I really wish he wouldn’t say “Hydrogen is ubiquitous. Hydrogen is everywhere.” Hydrogen is nowhere — hydrocarbons and H20 are everywhere, but making hydrogen from hydrocarbons produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases, and extracting hydrogen from water is incredibly energy intensive.

Fortunately, the Senator understands that hydrogen is at best a long-term strategy and that we need to focus on fuel economy today.

For a quarter-century, American automakers and their allies argued that any legislation to increase fuel economy standards would rob them of profits, force them to lay off workers and deprive consumers of the vehicles they wanted to buy.

So begins a very good front-page article in the New York Times today. The article goes on to note:

Even as recently as last weekend, a lobbying group financed by auto companies was still running radio ads in 11 states, raising the prospect that soccer moms might lose the opportunity to buy big sport utility vehicles if they did not urge Congress to reject legislation calling for higher mileage….

But this week, with a vote possible in the Senate on an energy plan, Detroit blinked, and the car companies retreated from their longstanding argument. They are now lobbying for a modest increase in mileage standards, a position already adopted by Toyota, in the hopes of silencing calls for even tougher targets.

So what has changed?

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China overtakes US as world’s biggest CO2 emitter – The Guardian. Factoid: “Soaring demand for coal to generate electricity and a surge in cement production have helped to push China’s recorded emissions for 2006 beyond those from the US already…. China produced 6,200m tonnes of CO2 last year, compared with 5,800m tonnes from the US.”

Live Earth shows aim to set new green standard – Reuters. No surprise, but good to see the media report on this.

Spring is arriving in the Arctic weeks earlier than it did a decade ago. – The Guardian. “The change in the seasons” is “one of the most rapid examples of climate change.”