It is yours for the taking, since he has offered perhaps the dumbest bet in TV pundit history (if not the entire history of the universe), on his hopefully soon-to-be-axed MSNBC show:

Here is my guess, and I know that I’m right. I will bet my car, in fact. Bush will come out, this president when he leaves office, will come out in the next decade or so as a strong advocate on behalf of ending global warming. He will be, he will have an environmentally conscious post presidency.

Yes, and monkeys will fly out of my…. But, seriously. Tucker, don’t give up your dancing career yet — it shows more promise than your current one.

Bush has so far had an environmentally unconscious presidency. The only planet on which Bush could become an environmentalist is Htrae (aka the Bizzaro World).

Tucker isn’t the only one who is in an alternate universe. In the same discussion, columnist Bob Franken says — I kid you not:

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I wrote about this important American Meteorological Society seminar earlier.

Now, you can access both the video AND the presentations (both HTML and PDF) here. In fact, going through the presentations while playing the video will really bring you up to speed on what is happening now — and what is likely to happen in the future — for both Arctic Sea Ice, the great ice sheets, and sea level rise.

A major new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) provides a detailed roadmap for avoiding catastrophic global warming and restoring our energy security, while maintaining economic development.

The report, Capturing the Energy Opportunity: Creating a Low Carbon Economy, is by CAP’s John Podesta, Kitt Batten, and Todd Stern. It is well worth reading, and I say that not because I am a senior fellow at CAP, but because the 88-page report lays out the most comprehensive set of plausible job-creating climate/energy policies I have seen.

The authors understand the scale of the problem:

The challenge we face is nothing short of the conversion of an economy sustained by high-carbon energy–putting both our national security and the health of our planet at serious risk–to one based on low-carbon, sustainable sources of energy. The scale of this undertaking is immense and its potential enormous.

The urgency of this issue demands a president willing to make the low-carbon energy challenge a top priority in the White House–a centerpiece not only of his or her energy policy but also of his or her economic program–to produce broad-based growth and sustain American economic leadership in the 21st century. This task is so encompassing it will demand that the incoming president in 2009 reorganize the mission and responsibility of all relevant government agencies–economic, national security, and environmental.

The report explores the crucial steps needed to meet the challenge:
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We are the nation we are because giants have walked among us.

America was founded by giants. Others have appeared since to guide us through crises or to great things: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King. We have had leaders whose oratory has, sometimes in a single sentence, rallied the American people around their obligations of citizenship, the morality of equal rights, the spirit of exploration, and the compassion our blessed nation should show to those who have never known security or abundance.

Are giants walking among us today? Are any of them in the present field of presidential candidates?

Polls indicate that most Americans agree the current President has demonstrated some qualities we do not want in the White House. I’d like to offer an unabashedly old-fashioned and idealistic answer about the qualities we DO want, drawn from the Presidential Climate Action Plan.

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