This Saturday, the Center for American Progress Action Fund has helped organize a presidential candidate forum on climate and energy to take place at Wadsworth Theatre in Los Angeles. Details can be found here, and Grist will be running a live webcast.

While all candidates have been invited, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich have been the only to accept. Tune-in to hear their climate and energy plans!

The most famous former car executive in the world gets it:

U.S. automakers also need to develop plug-in hybrid vehicles to boost fuel economy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, he said.

“Plug-in hybrids: that’s the wave of the future, not hydrogen,” Iacocca said.

Proposed plug-in models would use advanced lithium-ion batteries recharged at household outlets to provide extended electric motor driving range before an engine powered by gasoline or other fuel engages.

Toyota this month began testing prototype plug-in Prius hybrids at the University of California’s Irvine and Berkeley campuses. GM has said it wants to sell a version of its Volt plug-in with at least 40 miles (64 kilometers) of battery-only range by as early as 2010.

Climate news is coming so fast these days, it is almost impossible to keep up:

Cyclone Sidr Kills 350 in Bangladesh – New York Times. Kudos to the Times for the fourth paragraph: “Long vulnerable to nature’s fury, Bangladesh stands to suffer even more from extreme weather events like this, as a result of human-induced climate change, scientists say.” The Times also adds, “The United Nations Development Program, in pressing world leaders to take immediate steps to address human-induced climate change, argues that the increased frequency of droughts, floods and storms will hit the world’s poor the hardest and exacerbate poverty in places like Bangladesh.” I would add that droughts, floods, and storms hit this country pretty darn hard, too.

Scientists Fault Climate Exhibit Changes – Washington Post. The muzzling continues: “Some government scientists have complained that officials at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History took steps to downplay global warming in a 2006 exhibit on the Arctic to avoid a political backlash, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The museum’s director, Cristi¡n Samper, ordered last-minute changes to the exhibit’s script to add “scientific uncertainty” about climate change, according to internal documents and correspondence. Scientists at other agencies collaborating on the project expressed in e-mails their belief that Smithsonian officials acted to avoid criticism from congressional appropriators and global-warming skeptics in the Bush administration.”

Court Rejects Fuel Standards on Trucks – New York Times. A win for the enviornment: “SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 15 — A federal appeals court here rejected the Bush administration’s year-old fuel-economy standards for light trucks and sport utility vehicles on Thursday, saying that they were not tough enough because regulators had failed to thoroughly assess the economic impact of tailpipe emissions that contribute to climate change.”

Clean technology investment soars – msnbc.com. Some $3.8 billion in venture capital investments were made in just the first three quarters of 2007, while $4 billion was made in all of 2006. In 2006, $74 billion was made in all clean energy technology (not just venture capital).

China set to exceed renewables target – The Independent (UK). “Headlines in China tend to focus on how the country’s roaring economy is being fuelled by a lethal cocktail of coal, oil and nuclear power…. But China also has a fast-growing renewable energy sector and the country is likely to achieve — and may even exceed — its target to obtain 15 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2020, according to a report by the Worldwatch Institute” (Report can be found here, but costs $10-20.)

“China is poised to pass world solar and wind manufacturing leaders in Europe, Japan, and North America in the next three years, and it already dominates the markets for solar hot water and small hydropower. Wind power is the fastest growing power-generation technology in China. By 2007, China was home to four major domestic manufacturers of wind turbines and another six foreign subsidiary manufacturers.”

Thanks to Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush — we’ve nearly lost our chance to be the world leader in clean energy, which will probably been the major new-manufacturing-job-creating sector or the 21st century.

Maybe a tad off-topic, but the Center for American Progress has a nice interactive map that includes “Direct Payments for Corn by State.”

Required reading: Bill Moore’s EVWorld review and Martin Zimmerman’s LA Times piece about their test drives of the Toyota Plug-in Prius and the hydrogen fuel cell Highlander FCHV.

Paradox 1 – Soot: There’s an apparent emissions paradox with plug-in hybrids (PHEV): Driving longer distances on battery power means more cold starts as the internal combustion engine (ICE) stops and starts up again after the batteries deplete. Cold starts mean more pollution. The catalytic converter that keeps the ICE from being a gross polluter in conventional cars and hybrids however, isn’t kept warm by the continual embrace of an ever-churning engine in a hybrid with all-electric range. This catch-22 – you need the polluting engine running to keep the emissions mitigation running – has regulators including the California Air Resources Board (ARB) frowning upon PHEV conversions. It also spreads doubt about the enviro bona fides of plug-ins. Third party converters have spent time and resources tweaking their plug-in hybrids to meet ARB testing written with gasoline-only hybrids in mind.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to offer solutions. A supplemental electric heater comes right to mind. But you have to want to solve the problem. Third-party and DIY converters can’t muck with every system on a car. They are busy proving, despite automaker resistance, that the plug-in hybrid concept is worth pursuing. And these advocates have successfully prodded Toyota to dangle a concept PHEV before our eyes.

The automakers, including Toyota, that are not interested in rushing to market with plug-in cars never tired of suggesting that conventional gasoline-only hybrids are cleaner than plug-ins. Yet according to Bill Moore’s report in EVWorld on Toyota’s own PHEV Prius, Toyota solved the cold start dilemma with “a vacuum bottle of sorts on the Prius that stores a heated fluid for up to three days and is used to pre-warm the converter, thus reducing cold start emissions.” (UPDATE: Felix Kramer of Calcars informs me that the vacuum bottle is standard on 2004-2008 Prius.)

Toyota undoubtedly was testing this and perhaps other solutions even as they toyed with CARB’s emissions sensitivities to retard regulators’ interest in plug-ins. After all the system gaming of the ZEV mandate over the years, it is past time for CARB to recognize an automaker ploy to delay the zero-emission possibilities of plug-in options for what it is. The commonsense truth that emissions decrease with greater electric drive capability has been willfully confused for years now by automakers. CARB ought to tap into some of its bottomless reservoir of technological optimism applied to hydrogen and fuel cells when considering obstacles to plug-ins.

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