What do Michael Crichton, Bj¸rn Lomborg, Frank Luntz, George W Bush (and his climate/energy advisors) have in common with Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus? They all believe 1) new “breakthrough” technologies are needed to solve the global warming problem and 2) investing in such technology is far more important than regulating carbon.

In fairness to President Bush — he doesn’t really believe those two things (as evidenced by the fact that he has actually cut funding for key carbon-reducing technologies), he just says them because conservative strategist Frank Luntz says that is the best way to sound like you care about global warming without actually doing anything about it.

The “breakthrough technology” message is certainly the cleverest one the Deniers and Delayers have invented — who wouldn’t rather have a techno-fix than higher energy prices? — that’s why Lomborg endorses it so much in his book Cool It — but it is certainly wrong and dangerously so, as I argue at length in my book.

Why two people who say they care about the environment, Shellenberger & Nordhaus (S&N), embrace it, I don’t understand. I won’t waste time reading their instant new bestseller, unhelpfully titled Breakthrough — and you shouldn’t either (Roger Pielke, Jr. and Gregg Easterbrook endorse it — ’nuff said). I’ve read more than enough misinformation from them in their landmark essay,”The Death of Environmentalism” and recent articles in The New Republic (subs. req’d) and Gristmill (here and here).

S&N simply don’t know what they’re talking about. Worse, their message plays right into the hands of those who counsel delay. For that reason, I will spend some time debunking them. Here is the most dangerous S&N falsehood, from TNR:

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I don’t know how NASA’s James Hansen keeps up his pace of writing — or how he puts up with the steady stream of disinformation launched against him. I am not trying to create a cult of personality around him, but I do feel under some obligation to give his writing as much attention as possible — as I think he has done more than any other scientist to raise awareness on climate change, and deserves our thanks, not slander.

“The latest swift-boating,” Hansen explains in a new post “is the whacko claim that I received $720,000.00 from George Soros.” Here is a smear from Investors Business Daily of all places — I have no idea why investors would be interested in such drivel — which migrated over to the conservative websight NewsBusters in an article titled, “Is Global Warming Alarmist James Hansen a Shill for George Soros?”

Hansen explains, “Here is the real deal, with the order of things as well as I can remember without wasting even more time digging into papers and records”:

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The carbon plan of Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) is considerably lamer — and more transparently a poison pill — than early reports suggested. So I strongly disagree with Chris Dodd and Friends of the Earth and Gristmill’s Charles Komanoff who all applaud the bill. Here’s why.

First, as Dingell himself has said, he wanted to design a bill with maximum pain to prove to everyone how unpalatable greenhouse gas mitigation is (see below). Why else include a pointless $0.50 gasoline tax on top of the carbon tax? Dingell actually has a double agenda here — to torpedo both climate legislation and a toughening of CAFE. Taxes are unpopular enough — but two of them? Come on! We’ve seen gasoline prices jump two dollars a gallon in recent years, with little impact on usage. What would another 50 cents do, except piss people off? It would never make the final bill, and Dingell knows it.

Second, Dingell “Phases out the mortgage interest on primary mortgages on houses over 3000 square feet.” But why? Here is the lame answer:

These homes have contributed to increased sprawl and longer commutes. Despite new homes in and of themselves being more energy efficient, the sheer size, sprawl and commutes lead to dramatically more energy use — or to put it more simply, a larger carbon footprint.

Sprawl and longer commutes? Seriously? Even if sprawl and longer commutes were caused by large homes, it is at best an indirect (or second-order) effect. And the impact of changing the mortgage deduction on the size of homes would itself probably be second-order, so the overall impact of his sure-to-be unpopular proposal would be small — and slow — whereas we need more direct policies.

If you want to do something about sprawl/commutes — then why not just support location-efficient mortgages — instead of attacking the most popular tax deduction in the country? And if you want to reduce the energy impact of homes — indeed, of all buildings — why not put in tough national home-building energy codes modeled around California’s Title 24.

But Dingell’s proposal gets even more absurd. Consider this bizarre exemption:

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