Two pros give you the inside scoop Monday, April 21 at 11:30am.

Energy, global warming, and environmental protection will be major issues during the 2008 election campaign. Recent polls determined that voters believe that energy is the third most important issue after the economy and the Iraq war. The public’s desire to know about the presidential candidates’ records and positions is higher this year than ever before.

On the eve of Earth Day, please join two experts in the field of energy and environmental policy and politics. They will provide information about the records and policies of the three remaining major party candidates. They will also highlight key energy and environmental issues.

HOW TO LISTEN IN: Phone: 888-387-8686, Passcode: 5869246

WHO: Gene Karpinski, President, League of Conservation Voters, and Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy, Center for American Progress Action Fund

When I see a Nicholas Kristof piece in the NYT on global warming, I expect to learn something. Alas, not today. The online version of his article, “Our Favorite Planet,” has the blurb

None of the presidential candidates focus adequately on climate change, for this will be one of humanity’s great tests in the coming decades — and so far we’re failing.

Well, actually two of them do, as I explained in “Could a President Obama or Clinton stop global warming?” As we’ll see, this time Kristof couldn’t be bothered to check out the facts about “one of humanity’s great tests.” Near the end he says:

So the next president should start a $20 billion-a-year program (financed by a pullout from Iraq) to develop new energy technologies, backed by a carbon tax and cap-and-trade system.

No, no, a hundred times no. First off, why on God’s green earth would you have both a carbon tax and cap-and-trade system? One of the main reasons to do something as complicated as an economy-wide cap-and-trade system is that the simple approach, a tax, is a political nonstarter in this country. If you could get a tax, why would you add all the complexity of a cap-and-trade system? Pick one and stick with it. Please.

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One of my most tedious jobs here at Climate Progress is to read all the crap major articles published on global warming, and sort the wheat from the chaff. That was once the job of real journalists at places like, say, the New York Times. Simply providing, say, a long list of things that could conceivably reduce carbon emissions, without actually discriminating the ponies from the crap lemons, is, in fact, one of the MSM’s main critique of the Internet. [Cue laugh-track.]

Given that this is Earth-day week, where newspaper editors around the country say to their best writers (who, of course typically know very little about energy or the environment), “Give me 800 words on that global warming thing — oh, and try to find a new spin, something not so … Al Gore.” End result, lots and lots of drivel.

Case in point, “The Green Issue” of the New York Times Magazine today, titled, appropriately enough in the print edition, “The low-carbon catalog.” You can skip the whole thing (and I’m not going to provide any more links for it, since I don’t want to encourage you to waste your time). I mean, really, catalogs don’t tell you what the good stuff is — they just throw everything at you. Kind of like this issue.

For instance, on the same page is the pebble-bed nuclear reactor, which could conceivably deliver hundreds of gigawatts of zero carbon power, and Blackle Search engine, which probably accomplishes nothing whatsoever, especially if you own a flat-panel monitor like, uhh, most people who read the NYT.

As an aside, in the online edition, the subhead reads, “Some Bold Steps to Make Your Carbon Footprint Smaller,” and in the print edition, the subhead reads “any number of ways to reduce your footprint. PLUS: A defense of small, individual eco-actions.” So you probably think, given the NYT’s reputation for clarity, that this issue is going to focus on measures you yourself can take to reduce your carbon footprint, possibly small, possibly bold.

Now I knew the readership of the NYT mag was upscale, but a pebble-bed nuke is not even Tiger Woods territory. We’re talking Gates or Buffet.

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