The delayer-1000s at the Competitive Enterprise Institute have launched an ad compaign to confuse the public. Their goal: Misleading people into thinking that restricting greenhouse gas emissions means restricting energy use and that means suffering for the poor around the world and at home (as if the CEI ever endorsed policies aimed at helping the poor). Don’t let them.

The science and economics are clear: Action is much cheaper than inaction. Failing to restrict GHGs will doom the world’s poor to centuries of misery.

The Progress Report from Think Progress (Subscribe here) has excellent coverage of CEI’s disinformation campaign:

Yesterday, the right-wing think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) unveiled an advertising campaign intended to provoke fear about solutions to global warming. The ads also make specious claims about former Vice President Al Gore’s own energy use. In CEI’s words, “The ads contrast Gore’s energy-consuming lifestyle with the life-and-death need for energy in developing countries.” The $30,000 campaign, set to run for two weeks on CNN, CNBC, and Fox News, includes a 60-second television spot and a longer web video. Despite decrying the “alarmism” of those who advocate fighting global warming, CEI is happy to use false alarmism in its own attacks. At the press conference, CEI’s General Counsel Sam Kazman said that climate change legislation of the kind Gore supports would herald “death on a massive scale” and “absolute disaster, suffering, and starvation on a massive scale” in the developing world. Today’s Progress Report sets the record straight.

CLUELESS ALARMISM:CEI claims that combating climate change means “restricting access to affordable energy,” a “sure recipe for increasing poverty, disease and human misery around the world.” CEI’s alarmist claims not only ignore the very real threat posed by climate change to the developing world, which would face food shortages and devastating drought. Moreover, the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 and now ratified by 174 nations — including the European Union, China, and India — recognizes the different economics of developing and industrialized nations. Industrialized states, which have achieved prosperity over 150 years of development without having to account for global warming pollution, are expected to meet stricter emissions standards, while developing nations are expected to engage in a more gradual transition to low-carbon economies. These guidelines have been embraced by the leaders of practically every nation on earth. Even major Fortune 500 companies have endorsed significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. At the Bali conference this past December, leaders of developing nations shamed the American, Canadian, and Japanese delegations into action.

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So the new publication from E&E News, ClimateWire (subs. req’d), has a long article on the “safety valve” debate and its history. I will reprint it in its entirety below because

1. The issue is important and not going away
2. It is the most thorough piece I’ve seen
3. I was interviewed at length for it
4. One of the quotes they excerpted from me is not something I would have said in a short interview.

First, some background: I have blogged repeatedly on why a safety valve is a bad idea [see links at the end]. The reporter, however, called me because he said that a number of people in the Clinton administration said I was a key player in the discussions leading up to Kyoto, in which the administration ultimately rejected a safety valve (or price ceiling on carbon emissions permits).

The #1 highlight of my time in the administration was at an October 6, 1997 “White House Conference on Climate Change,” when I was still in the middle of my brief tenure as Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. At 12:40 pm [I kept the ticket and wrote the time and the quote on the back], the President said, “I’m convinced the people in my Energy Department Labs are absolutely right.” He was talking about the 5-Lab study that I oversaw, which found that the United States could return to 1990 levels of carbon dioxide emissions by 2010 without raising the nation’s overall energy bill — if we had an aggressive technology deployment effort.

Rather than my solipsistically explaining what happened, you can read an account by Art Rosenfeld [the first article, his autobio] now California Energy Commissioner — then science adviser to the assistant secretary. Or not.

I was certainly proud of my role in the administration. Economic agencies like the Treasury Department and Council of Economic Advisers rarely lose policy debates. But they did this time. That said, I was hardly the main reason they lost.

In fact, as I recall, President Clinton explained at the Georgetown conference the main reason he didn’t believe his economic agencies’ gloomy predictions for the economic impact of Kyoto: They had made similarly gloomy predictions about the impact of his balanced budget bill, which, rather than causing an economic slowdown as predicted, instead created millions and millions of jobs.

That said, the subsequent incident described in the ClimateWire article is the #2 highlight of my time in the administration, although I foolishly didn’t keep the piece of paper. Anyway, here is the article (for ease of reading, I won’t bother indenting it):

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China, Australia to Install Clean Coal Plant in Beijing – Environment News Service. “Two of the world’s largest coal producing nations – Australia and China – signed a formal agreement for research and testing of clean coal technology Thursday in Beijing.” This technology is “a process that uses a liquid to capture the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from power station flue gases” post combustion.

EU told to prepare for flood of climate change migrants – The Guardian (UK). “According to the EU’s two senior foreign policy officials, Europe needs to brace itself for a new wave of migration with a very different cause – global warming. The ravages already being inflicted on parts of the developing world by climate change are engendering a new type of refugee, the ‘environmental migrant’.”

EPA’s own study argues for California waiver – San Francisco Chronicle. Stanford professor Mark Jacobson uses a 2007 EPA study on carbon dioxide, air pollution, and the health effects of smog as an example that California does face “compelling and extraordinary conditions” worthy of allowing the state to regulate tailpipe emissions.

(More on the EPA and its tailspin here.)

Climate change’s most deadly threat: drought – Christian Science Monitor. A review of Brian Fagan’s book, “The Great Warming” — “Fagan … makes an original contribution in ‘The Great Warming’ by summoning attention to what he calls ‘the silent elephant in the room’: drought….By taking readers back to the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, Fagan argues that history ‘shows how drought can destabilize a society and lead to its collapse.’”

I certainly agree drought may be the most deadly threat. More on droughts here.