We are standing at the threshold of a revolution in the world energy economy. Or, so we might hope after reading this week’s Economist.

The tell-tale signs of that revolution are documented in a 14-page special section on “The Future of Energy.”

The Economist, a magazine that calls itself a newspaper, began publishing in 1843 to “take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”

Its special energy section (June 21-27 edition) delivers a bit of both. But it contains plenty of information that ought to be circulated far beyond the periodical’s regular readership.

The feature’s bottom line (liberally paraphrased) is this:

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The Supreme Court buzz these days is all about the Court’s new “era of good feelings.” That’s dubious, because the central reality remains the same: the Court is deeply divided on fundamental questions about how we lead our lives and govern our country.

Even one more conservative justice would likely push the Court further right than President Bush has managed with two appointments. Bush shifted the Court’s swing vote from Justice O’Connor to Justice Kennedy. Kennedy usually votes with conservatives, but not always. A new conservative justice would likely shift the Court’s fifth vote from Kennedy to Senator McCain’s “model” for a judge, someone like John Roberts or Samuel Alito. These two are conservatives far more reliable than Kennedy.

What would this mean? On the most controversial issues, progressives and moderates would no longer have a shot.

In a new report, the Center for American Progress Action Fund outlines seven areas where the Court is now narrowly divided, and where a new appointee could make a big difference:

1. Taking away the Right to Choose.

2. Slowing the Fight Against Global Warming.

3. Reducing Government’s Ability to Protect Our Water and Air.

4. Eroding Voting Rights.

5. Weakening Civil Rights.

6. Reducing Access to the Courts and Undermining the Rule of Law.

7. Allowing Extreme Applications of the Death Penalty.

These shifts might not be immediate. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have made clear that they prefer to move slowly. But, on so many issues, moving the Court right is clearly their aim.

Read more here.

Wired magazine used to be the place to go for the latest in technology. But now it covers any sexy techy idea, no matter how impractical.

Given that we all have limited time, Wired should be off every technophile’s must-read list and replaced by Technology Review, which has revamped its stodgy old self and become what once Wired aspired to be.

For me, this started with the absurd cover story by Peter Schwartz 5 years ago, “How Hydrogen Can Save America,” which claimed “What we need is a massive, Apollo-scale effort [$100 billion over ten years] to unlock the potential of hydrogen, a virtually unlimited source of power.” Uhh, no. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not a source — except for the sun, of course, and if we really want to harness its power we should be placing big bets on solar energy. Try instead my Technology Review piece “The Last Car You Would Ever Buy — Literally.”

Recently Wired published their most misinformed piece, “Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green.” RealClimate beat me to the punch debunking Wired‘s bizarre analyses in favor of using air-conditioning and against protecting old-growth forests or buying a Prius (see “Wired Magazine’s Incoherent Truths“). They didn’t debunk Wired‘s claim, “Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy,” perhaps because it is so obviously absurd (see The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power).

Now Wired has fallen into the tank containing sharks with lasers by publishing Chris Mooney’s bizarre paeon to geo-engineering and the late Edward Teller and his prot©g© Lowell Wood — famed uber-hawkish promoters of all things dubious.

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When even the nation’s premier business newspaper is confused about your conflicting economic positions, your campaign has jumped the shark. I’d like to think the WSJ read my post on the presumptive GOP nominee’s doubletalk strategy: “Memo to media: McCain doubletalks to woo conservatives and independents at the same time.”

The WSJ really nails McCain. They trot out a variety of euphemisms for “inconsistent” or “baffling” or “incomprehensible” — the favorite journalistic phrase in this regard being “defies easy categorization”:

Senator’s Broad Range Of Energy Policies Defies Categories

Sen. John McCain is putting energy policy at the center of his presidential campaign, embracing a diverse array of positions that defies easy categorization.

He is for more oil drilling and also for alternatives to oil. He wants to drill off the coasts but not in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He supports subsidies for nuclear power and clean-coal technology, but has opposed them for ethanol, solar and wind power.

He wants to lower gasoline prices by temporarily suspending the federal gas tax. But he wants to raise the price of gas with a cap-and-trade system that punishes polluting industries.

In environmentally conscious Portland, Ore., he praised wind power. In Texas oil country he supported more drilling. In rural Missouri he urged more nuclear power. In California he praised fuel-efficiency standards.

An expert from the center-right think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies is even more blunt:

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I am glad that so many in the energy debate have picked up on one of the two messages from my previous post (see EIA bombshell: Offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030″³).

But in listening to the radio and TV debates, I realize that some people have the impression that U.S. Energy Information Administration said offshore drilling might eventually lower oil prices. It did not. It found that allowing offshore drilling would have no significant effect on prices as far out into the future as the analysis projected.

Why should it lower prices? Offshore drilling is projected by EIA to deliver less extra annual oil production in 2030 than Saudi Arabia announced it would add this year, an announcement that had no significant impact whatsoever on oil prices. [In fact, oil prices actually went up -- see yesterday's AP story, "Oil prices rise despite Saudi vow to pump more."]

It is worth nothing that the EIA report “Impacts of Increased Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Lower 48 Federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) is quite analytically substantive and made relatively optimistic assumptions:

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