E&ENews PM (subs. req’d) reports:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) today pledged to include a provision that resembles the Senate’s corporate average fuel economy plan in “any energy bill” that makes it to President Bush.

Hoyer also hinted that House leaders may sidestep a floor fight over CAFE and wait instead for a House-Senate conference to address the issue. The Senate passed a broad energy bill last month with a CAFE standard of 35 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2020, an increase supported by Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

The rest of story is below:

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I really don’t think we have time to waste on safety valves. That said, the new bill by Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) is worth understanding because it is garnering a lot of support — at a cost:

But to secure labor and corporate support, the measure also places a limit on the price industry would have to pay for such permits. And to win the endorsement of Alaska’s two Republican senators, the bill contains billions of dollars in new money to help their state cope with the effects of climate change on roads, bridges and coastal areas.

And even with this bribe for climate adaptation, Ted Stevens (R-AK) would not concede that the drastic effects of climate change ravaging his state are caused primarily by human emissions:

Regardless of whether these changes are caused solely by human activity, we must take steps to protect people in the Arctic.

Everything you could possibly want to know about the bill is available here. What is the Bill’s safety valve, which they euphemistically call the “Technology Accelerator Payment”?

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CEO Alan Mulally … predicted that the industry will see plug-in hybrids, which combine electric motors with gasoline engines, in showrooms within five to 10 years. But he was careful not to commit Ford to production of them — only research for now — because the technology is in its early stage.

It’s about time. Plug ins are the future of green cars.

Costs Surge for Building Power Plants – New York Times. Soaring demand for raw materials in China and India is sending the cost of coal and nuclear power plants through the roof (and sadly, wind, too).
Ex-Surgeon General Says White House Hushed Him – Washington Post
“Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is often ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” Richard H. Carmona said.” Sound familiar?

Play peak oil before you live it - Salon. An alternate reality game (or ARG) is available at “World Without Oil. Here’s the Week 21 update: “Order is restored, but economy flatlining, famine looms.” Fun for the whole family, in a Mad Max sort of way!!

Variations in solar activity, including cosmic rays, are not responsible for recent planetary warming. A major study in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, “Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature” found:

There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.

Take that, Denyers (and you, too, Deniers).

The researchers looked at both solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last few decades and compare those trends with the global average surface temperature record.

Britain’s Royal Society said in a statement:

At present there is a small minority which is seeking to deliberately confuse the public on the causes of climate change. They are often misrepresenting the science, when the reality is that the evidence is getting stronger every day.

A comment on a previous post (by a Denyer) claimed, “You are the only person on the internet spelling denyer with a y.” You can tell this person is a Denyer not just by the rest of their post, but also because they made a glaring error of fact that could have been avoided by spending five seconds on the internet Googling “Global warming Denyer.”

Denyers, however, are not particularly interested in knowing the facts before they make their wild claims.

That said, most people spell the word Denier — and I used to. Why did I change? To annoy the Denyers? While that would be a good enough reason, the actual explanation is much simpler.

The copy-editor for my book Hell and High Water recommended that change for clarity’s sake, and I asked a few people, including my editor, and they all thought it was a good idea. So the secret is now officially out!

Everybody seems to be writing long, thoughtful articles on offsets these days. Greenwire (subs. req’d) has a good piece on what Live Earth did to offset its emissions. Here’s what they say:
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