The British TV show Dispatches disses offsets in “The Great Green Smoke Screen” (downloadable here).

The show reports “flaws in a series of carbon offsetting schemes intended to make good the global warming gases emitted by flights and other polluting activities.” What kind of flaws?

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A year and a half overdue, the Bush Administration finally submitted its Climate Action Report – 2006 (CAR) last Friday afternoon, with hardly any mention by government officials of the report or its shameful findings (like a 15.8 percent increase in U.S. emissions since 1990).

While the mainstream media has been either silent or blind to the report‘s release, major kudos are due to the blogosphere. The few adept, new media journalists to blog on the report include Kevin Grandia from DeSmogBlog and Rick Piltz at Climate Science Watch.

Piltz’s analysis notes that the report doesn’t draw on the most current and accurate science (most notably the IPCC), nor does it acknowledge some of the consequences that threaten us. Piltz concldues,

The failure to use this material, and the overall evasiveness of the impacts and vulnerability chapter of the report, was clearly a political decision. Administration officials have once again defaulted on an opportunity to address a crucial challenge for national preparedness.

Piltz’s post ends with a list of questions for the Administration, and rightfully so. However, my question is more inline with what Kevin Grandia is asking:

Where is the media to expose these sort of trip-ups and inform the public now – not as a citation in a later hearing, or once the release is history! In light of this Administration’s record of scientific censorship and disgraceful climate record, there should be a public cacophony over the nature and content of this report!

The Washington Post reports today:

Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), claims to have rounded up about 200 votes for an amendment raising fuel economy standards, while the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, John D. Dingell (Mich.), and 50 other Democrats have signed on to a weaker version…. But yesterday, Pelosi said the bill was not likely to address fuel economy at all, postponing the issue until a conference committee reconciles House and Senate energy bills in September….

Pelosi is eager to avoid a breach with the powerful Dingell, who opposes the Markey amendment and whose committee will handle many important pieces of legislation, including health care. The United Auto Workers union and automakers have also lobbied against the Markey measure.

Unfortunately for the nation and the planet, Dingell is working to make fuel economy standards and serious action on climate as politically unpalatable as possible with a classic poison pill strategy:

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“The pine beetle infestation is the first major climate change crisis in Canada” notes Doug McArthur, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

The pests are “projected to kill 80 per cent of merchantable and susceptible lodgepole pine” in parts of British Columbia within 10 years — and that’s why the harvest levels in the region have been “increased significantly.” One analyst calls the devastation “probably the biggest landscape-level change since the ice age.”

It is slamming this country too:

The largest infestation of mountain pine beetles in 20 years has hit more than a million acres of forest in northern Idaho and Montana, while 2.5 million acres in Washington face disease and insect problems.

Climate change is the culprit. Milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in Wyoming from 80 percent per year to under 10 percent. Alaska is also being hit hard:

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