Let me summarize his remarks:

Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.

We didn’t have any new nuclear plant orders until the Energy Policy Act [with its absurdly lavish subsidies and loan guarantees -- Note, Domenici is proud of this].

Oil and gas prices blah, blah….

For those living paycheck to paycheck, the price at the pump is the difference between getting by or going into debt.

[Honestly -- It is only during climate debates that conservatives sound like bleeding hearts who actually care about the poor and working class.]

… jeopardize global competitiveness …

Every time a member of the GOP says gasoline prices, taxes, technology, bureaucrat, or nuclear take one drop of (grain) alcohol.

Please, don’t watch C-SPAN if you have to drive.

BEST DELAYER SOUNDBITE OF THE DAY: “Caps without technology are a $6.7 trillion tax increase.”

“I am very, very concerned about raising energy prices on … businesses, truckers, farmers.”

“Do we really want to vote to make this misery much worse.”

I talked to scientists and they won’t be ready for 15 to 20 years to solve the problem.

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First time a climate bill has reached the Senate floor that has been favorably reported out by the committee of jurisdiction.

Who deserves credit? Warner and Boxer.

The bill has bipartisan cosponsors, including Warner, Coleman, Collins, and Dole.

to protect the environment, economy and national security of the United States from man-made climate change.

Just last week the Bush administration itself released the scientific committee itself concluded that if we failed to reduce emissions and the resulting climate change would bring severe hardship on the American people, including slower growth and lower yields of key crops, plus greater wildfires, dwindling of mountain snows that provide reservoirs for the West, increased severity and duration of heat waves, greater spreading of animal and foodborne diseases.

The scientific community says we can still prevent the situation from reaching catastrophic proportions.

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In an address calling on Congress to make all his tax cuts permanent, President Bush discussed the upcoming Senate debate on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 3036), claiming it would “impose roughly $6 trillion of new costs on the American economy.” He continued:

There’s a much better way to address the environment than imposing these costs on the job creators, which will ultimately have to be borne by American consumers. And I urge the Congress to be very careful about running up enormous costs for future generations of Americans. We’ll work with the Congress, but the idea of a huge spending bill fueled by taxes — increases — isn’t the right way to proceed.

An accompanying White House statement indicates that Bush would veto the bill.

Bush’s argument that mandatory emissions reductions like those called for by Lieberman-Warner represent “enormous costs” on “job creators,” “American consumers,” “future generations of Americans” and the “American economy” is classic Bush doublespeak. When he unveiled his plan to allow global warming pollution to increase for the next 17 years and give polluters new tax cuts, he called it “an ambitious new track for greenhouse gas reductions.” The White House now describes this approach as the “right way.”

In truth:

The Bush Approach To Global Warming Is Catastrophic. The emissions path called for in Bush’s climate plan would lead to well over twice as much global warming over the next few decades as we have already experienced. Sea level rise would eliminate 30 percent of coastal wetlands and displace millions of people. There would be significant species loss around the globe, including practically all of the world’s coral reefs. Wildfires, drought, floods, and heat waves would destabilize the global economy. [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, 2007]

The Bush Approach To Global Warming Aids Polluters, Hurts American Jobs. The White House calls for federal subsidies for the coal and nuclear industry without any mandatory reductions on carbon emissions. In addition, the White House attacks Lieberman-Warner for making Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements on new technology investments. [White House Statement of Administration Policy, 6/2/08]

The Bush Approach To Global Warming Will Bring Enormous Costs For Future Generations Of Americans. A Natural Resources Defense Council report finds that under a global warming path consistent with the Bush approach, “Four global warming impacts alone — hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs — will come with a price tag of 1.8 percent of U.S. GDP, or almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today’s dollars) by 2100.” By 2025 — when the Bush plan would begin to possibly reduce emissions — the costs would already be $271 billion a year. [NRDC, 5/08]

Under the Bush approach to the Iraq war and the U.S. economy, hundreds of billions dollars have been lost irrevocably, corporate polluters have enjoyed record profits, and energy and food costs have risen without any benefit to consumers. Under the Bush approach to global warming, trillions of dollars will be lost irrevocably to damage from climate change, money that could instead be spent building the post-carbon economy.

This bill puts us on a path to energy independence.

Critical to our national security.

Waters of the Chesapeake Bay are too warm for juvenile crabs…

Science is telling of the global climate change is real and hurting our economy.

Bill promotes mass transit. Thanks Boxer for making that possible

I suspect this floor speech may set the record for most misstatements in Senate history.

“The vast majority of scientists do not believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are a major contributor to global warming.” [But time does not permit Inhofe to articulate this argument any further.]

“We support investments in solar, wind…”

“We are on the verge of a nuclear renaissance in this country….

“We must invest in clean coal technologies….”

“We cannot hold the future of coal hostage to this one technology” [carbon capture and storage].

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She points out that Boxer-Lieberman-Warner, which will finally move us off of oil. Therefore, the bill is really the only serious hope for Americans who are worried about rising gasoline prices after the disastrous policies of the Bush administration.

Note: The cloture vote will be around 5:30. The bill almost certainly will go forward, but only because many in the conservative leadership think this is a winning rhetorical issue for them.

Here is Senator Sessions’ stream of consciousness on the evil B-L-W bill.

Boxer-L-W means higher gas prices, higher gas prices, higher gas prices.

Oh, and Charles Krauthammer “is a fabulous columnist, brilliant man, one of the most sophisticated” writers [Strangely, at that point, Sen. Sessions' pants burst into flames, but he kept talking.]

Energy is good. We need more.

Scientists have complicated models.

Not been warming apparently in the last 10 years.

Quote Patrick Michaels from Cato raising “legitimate” concerns about the science:

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I think this is going to run through about 6 p.m.

I will do some live blogging, but of course, you can watch it here online.

Conservatives have given new meaning to the term delayer.

So it looks like conservatives are requiring the majority get 60 votes before the bill is even taken up — but then the GOP will vote to allow the bill to proceed. Why the pointless pseudo-filibuster? Because that allows the conservatives to waste 30 hours debating this before getting to the amendments. That means real debate on the bill will be put off until Wednesday.

Pathetic.

Not sure this will be the sole subject of Senate discussion for the rest of the day.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell just cited the columns by Charles Krauthammer and George Will in defense of the conservatives’ do-nothing cloimate strategy

From Hill Heat comes the Nobel laureates brief comments on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 3036):

I want to commend Senator Boxer for her leadership of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Thanks to her vision and dedication, we have the first global warming bill in history that is comprehensive, bipartisan and that enjoys support across the country — from labor and agriculture to the business and the environmental communities. Of course the bill needs to be stronger, but it’s vital that Congress begin to act. While it’s important that people change their light bulbs, it’s even more important that we change the laws.

Hey, Al, no gushing, please!

On the endorsement scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is, say, winning a Nobel Prize and 1 is, say, how the American people feel about George Bush, this is maybe a 4 or 5.

If you took out the words “begin to” it might represent a 6 or 7.

This appears to be a press conference. Hopefully they’ll walk us through what is going to happen this week on the Senate floor.

Details are here.

If you are looking for a shorter, more readable version of my study, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power,” I’ve got just the thing. Salon has published my article, “Nuclear bomb: Nuclear energy, the sequel, is opening to raves by everybody from John McCain to a Greenpeace co-founder. Don’t be fooled. It’s the Ishtar of power generation.”

As the article points out, back in May 2001, the Economist (subs. req’d) explained that nuclear power had fallen out of favor because it simply was “too costly to matter.” Today, nuclear power is nearly three times the price it was when the Economist wrote that.

My analysis on nuclear power for the Center for American Progress Action Fund is finally finished and online here. I think you will find it useful because it has many links to primary sources and tries to avoid the typical discussions by nuclear proponents and opponents, focusing instead on the rapidly escalating cost of nuclear power.

My point in this paper is not to say nuclear power will play no role in the fight to stay below 450 ppm of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and avoid catastrophic climate outcomes. Indeed, I even include a full wedge of nuclear in my 14-wedges “solution” to global warming here — though as will be clear from the study, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power,” achieving even one wedge of nuclear will be a very time-consuming and expensive proposition, probably costing $6 to $8 trillion.

Fundamentally, the large and growing risks from climate change, particularly the real danger that failure to act NOW means we will approach a horrific 1000 ppm by century’s end (see here), means two things:

1. We must seriously entertain any strategy that can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
2. We must focus on the lowest-cost options first, because we simply don’t have an unlimited amount of capital.

My primary point in this paper is to shatter the widespread myth among conservatives — and others — that nuclear power will be a dominant solution to global warming. No. It is extremely unlikely to even be 10% of the total solution. This is particularly true in the United States, where we have so many more cost-effective alternatives NOW, as I explain in the paper, including energy efficiency, wind power, solar photovoltaics, and concentrated solar power.

Here is the executive summary of the report:

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For the debate on Boxer-Liebermann-Warner, Daniel J. Weiss, Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress, has written a debunking of standard attack lines on climate action (here). Here are the myths he takes on:

1. Binding emissions reductions before 2020 are too swift, and should not be imposed until the technology to remove carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants is commercially available.
2. Global warming reductions will drive oil and gasoline prices even higher.
3. Global warming reductions will decimate families’ budgets.
4. Global warming reductions will send American jobs overseas to countries that do not reduce their emissions.
5. The Climate Security Act will wreck the economy.
6. Clean energy jobs will cost workers in fossil fuel industries their jobs.
7. Global warming solutions will hurt the poor.
8. The Climate Security Act will bankrupt American industry unless we hand out lots of free pollution permits.
9. Steep reductions in greenhouse gases cannot occur without a significant increase in subsidies for nuclear power.
10. Economic analyses by industry groups show that the Climate Security Act is unaffordable, will lead to huge electricity rate hikes, and cost jobs.