They titled their piece, “Bush rhetoric on energy strays from the facts.” Some people might call that making stuff up, but who can complain about a story that begins:

President Bush put politics ahead of the facts Tuesday as he sought to blame Congress for high energy prices, saying foreign suppliers are pumping just about all the oil they can and accusing lawmakers of blocking new refineries.

Bush renewed his call for drilling in an Arctic wildlife refuge, but his own Energy Department says that would have little impact on gasoline prices.

And then goes on to compare Bush’s “spin” with the facts. Kudos to AP’s H. Josef Hebert, who has been at this game a long time.

Recently, CNN’s senior business correspondent Ali Velshi has been promoting coal-based liquid fuel as a response to high oil prices, even though it leads to climate disaster. Yesterday, the Wonk Room noted that Velshi has even implied coal is cleaner than himself. This afternoon, Velshi continued his obsession with liquid coal in a discussion with CNN’s Glenn Beck. Beck is a self-described “big dumb rodeo clown” who believes the United States is a “suicidal superpower” for not turning coal into gasoline:

This can be done — coal to oil — at $55 a barrel. That’s about half of what we are paying right now for oil. We can have cheap oil that is actually good for the nation because it is all home grown. We’re sitting … just Montana is the Saudi Arabia of coal.

Montana does indeed have vast coal reserves. But coal-based fuel is in fact a dangerous and expensive prospect once the high costs of its pollution are factored in — especially its carbon dioxide global warming emissions.

Velshi then noted that his “clean coal” boosterism has raised questions about his journalistic integrity:

Well you know, South Africa, most of the gasoline it uses is produced from coal. I did something on this the other day and the number of e-mails and comments I got about how I’m shilling for the coal industry . . .

After Beck scoffed, “Oh please,” Velshi then made his most accurate pronouncement about coal to date:

I don’t think it’s clean. It’s not cleaner. It just happens to not be oil.

Glenn Beck — whose response to the threat of climate change is to complain that polar bears eat people — was terribly alarmed by Velshi’s moment of truth:

Now hang on just a second. We can sequester the CO2 now. We can make it cleaner than it has been.

In fact, there is not a single coal plant producing electricity or fuel that sequesters carbon dioxide anywhere on the planet. Although we definitely can make coal cleaner, the coal industry is doing everything it can to ensure that the American taxpayer foots the bill. If Velshi were truly interested in the economics of coal, he would host financial analysts that discuss the economic risks of coal power, not global-warming deniers like Glenn Beck.

Watch it:

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George W. Bush — dark green? I kid you not. Here’s what he said in his press conference today:

One thing I think that would be — I know would be very creative policy is if we — is if we would buy food from local farmers as a way to help deal with scarcity, but also as a way to put in place an infrastructure so that nations can be self-sustaining and self-supporting. It’s a proposal I put forth that Congress hasn’t responded to yet, and I sincerely hope they do.

I have no idea what he’s talking about — what proposal did he put forward to Congress about local food? But I’m sure the 100-Mile Diet folks are on the phone with the White House right now.

What’s next for Bush — composting?

Bush had a press conference this morning (see here) to blame Congress for soaring energy and food prices: ”Unfortunately, on many of these issues, all they [Americans' are getting is delay."

What does non-delayer Bush propose. Well, of course, new technology -- what else is new old? (see here and here). Heck, he even said the long-term answer was hydrogen. [Not!]

Oh but he did offer some “short-term” solutions. His anwer to rising electricity prices — nukes:

As electricity prices rise, Congress continues to block provisions needed to increase domestic electricity production by expanding the use of clean, safe nuclear power.

[Pause for laughter.]

Bush seems unaware of the soaring prices for nukes (see “Power plants costs double since 2000 — Efficiency anyone“). I am preparing a major analysis on this topic. Suffice it to say for now that a new nuclear power plant would probably not be able to deliver power substantially below $0.15 a kilowatt hour (not counting transmission and distribution costs)! Nuclear power is about the last form of electricity you would turn to if you care about price — or if you cared about delivering power in a hurry, for that matter.

High oil prices? That’s any easy one. It’s Congress’s fault for not opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, says the President.

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[Bill Becker says that a better stimulus than a rebate check would be vouchers for energy-efficient products.]

This is the week that all patriotic Americans will begin hitting the malls to rescue the U.S. economy — a redo of the Bush Administration’s appeal after 9-11 that we boost the economy by going shopping.

By the end of this week, nearly 8 million taxpayers will find rebates automatically deposited in their bank accounts. By July, the Treasury Department will distribute 130 million more rebates by mail — typically $600 for each individual taxpayer, $1,200 for couples filing jointly and $300 for each child. The talk in Congress is that another round of rebates may follow later this year.

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Someone else who makes Climate Progress and most everybody else into optimists, relatively speaking.

“In the new world order, energy scarcity will dominate our lives — determining when we drive, if we travel, and what we eat” — so says Michael T. Klare, Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies.

Klare is in the Kunstler school of energy dystopia, not a view I share (see “Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the “end of suburbia“).

He writes in Salon (here):

What this adds up to is simple and sobering: the end of the world as you’ve known it. In the new, energy-centric world we have all now entered, the price of oil will dominate our lives and power will reside in the hands of those who control its global distribution.

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Because this series has turned out to be so popular, I’m going to expand it to cover more issues relevant to The Question of the Century Millenium in the headline. This post will lay out the full series as I now envision it, and the final post, probably sometime next week, will include a revised version of “The Solution,” the 14 wedges, based on recent input I have received

I am definitely open to being lobbied on the final 14 wedges. But only by people who take the trouble to go back to the original Princeton analysis (and my comments on it) and present seriously-calculated wedges that save 1 gigaton of carbon by 2050 and that don’t double count (i.e. don’t save carbon already saved by existing wedges).

That said, don’t waste your time trying to convince me there is more than one wedge of biofuels, nuclear, or coal with CCS. Too many smart people I know think those choices are already way too optimistic. [BTW, I would NOT use much of the biofuels wedge for car and light truck travel. I would use it for things like air travel and long-distance trucking.]

Here is how the series will unfold:

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