[A post by Ken Levenson.]

Britain’s Telegraph reports:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock….

One official who witnessed the extraordinary scene said afterwards: “Everyone was very surprised that he was making a joke about America’s record on pollution.”

Mr. Bush, our 9-year-old boy king — goodbye cannot be soon enough.

Related Post:

• Climate Progress Person of the Year

The GOP and McCain/Bush keep insisting that an end to the federal moratorium on (some) offshore drilling is a major solution to America’s oil woes, even though Bush’s own energy analysts make clear it is not (see EIA bombshell: Offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices”³).

That Energy Information Administration analysis is, however, a couple of years old, so I called up the author today and asked if it was being updated. Turns out a new version will be published in a couple of days, but she explained to me that the “answers are not very different” — no significant impact for the duration of the analysis (through 2030) — for reasons I will discuss below. First, however, it wasn’t until I talked to her and looked closely at the original analysis — Impacts of Increased Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Lower 48 Federal Outer Continental Shelf — that I understood what a cruel hoax this whole issue is.

The oil companies already have access to some 34 billion barrels of offshore oil they haven’t even developed yet, but ending the federal moratorium on offshore drilling would probably add only another 8 billion barrels (assuming California still blocks drilling off its coast). Who thinks adding under 100,000 barrels a day in supply sometime after 2020 — some one-thousandth of total supply — would be more than the proverbial drop in the ocean? Remember the Saudis couldn’t stop prices from rising now by announcing that they will add 500,000 barrels of oil a day by the end of this year!

Here is the key data from EIA:

Look closely. As of 2003, oil companies had available for leasing and development 40.92 billion barrels of offshore oil in the Gulf of Mexico. I asked the EIA analyst how much of that (estimated) available oil had been discovered in the last five years. She went to her computer and said “about 7 billion barrels have been found.” That leaves about 34 billion still to find and develop.

The federal moratorium only blocks another 18 billion barrels of oil from being developed. But, as you can see, most of that is off of California, which has bipartisan opposition to drilling from Republican Governor Schwarzenegger — who, unlike McCain, seems serious about his commitment to greenhouse gas reduction — and the Democratic legislature, which remembers all too well the devastating 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara. Indeed, Karen Bass, the newly appointed speaker of the State Assembly, said, “The idea of increasing offshore drilling off the coast of California I think is absurd, and I can’t even imagine we would entertain that.” Why would they, given the risk to their beautiful coasts and their commitment to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions 80% by midcentury?

So that only leaves about 8 billion barrels, which is about what the world uses in three months. Not bloody much. And that assumes every other state, including Florida, goes aggressively with offshore drilling, which is exceedingly unlikely.

You may ask why big oil hasn’t gotten around to the 34 billion barrels already available to them offshore, given the staggering price for oil? The answer is pretty much the same reason why the EIA analyst told me that ending the federal moratorium is “certainly not going to make a difference in the next 10 years”: It ain’t easy being non-green off-shore.

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More than 1,700 wildfires are burning across California, at a cost of greater than $200 million. Yesterday, CNN interrupted its breathless coverage of these catastrophic wildfires to ask, “Is this climate change? Is this global warming?” Miles O’Brien, CNN’s chief technology and environment correspondent, attempted to supply an answer, with a dithering, confusing, and chart-filled presentation, cautioning that “it’s hard to make a connect-the-dots moment here in all of this” and that his charts “will make your eyes glaze over.”

At the end, anchor Tony Harris responded:

Let me ask something crazy here. You know, nature’s been doing this, lightning strikes, whatever, for a gazillion years. Isn’t it it’s own sort of a natural pruning process? I know that we’ve got a hand in this, but this has always been the case.

As a public service for the reporters at CNN, here’s a “connect-the dots” moment. This season’s wildfires are coming on the heels of the four worst wildfire seasons in the modern era of wildfire control, begun in the 1960s with wildfire management and changes in land use and forestry. In 2006, nearly “100,000 fires were reported and nearly 10 million acres burned, 125 percent above the 10-year average.”

And global warming is at fault.

As the 2006 Science report Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity states unequivocally:

Thus, although land-use history is an important factor for wildfire risks in specific forest types (such as some ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests), the broad-scale increase in wildfire frequency across the western United States has been driven primarily by sensitivity of fire regimes to recent changes in climate over a relatively large area.

Furthermore:

Hence, the projected regional warming and consequent increase in wildfire activity in the western United States is likely to magnify the threats to human communities and ecosystems, and substantially increase the management challenges in restoring forests and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

What’s more, multiple federal government agencies have been sounding the alarm for at least a decade, with the evidence for the building catastrophe growing starker year by year: Read more

Plug in hybrids are the only alternative fuel vehicle that can provide genuine energy independence from steadily rising oil prices and brutal price spikes.

I have agreed to participate as a guest blogger for ScienceBlogs in a three-month project on the next generation of energy ideas. My first post is “Electric Vehicles: The Next Generation.” Longtime readers of this blog or my books know that I have been an advocate of plug ins for a number of years [see "Plug-in hybrids and electric cars -- a core climate solution, nationally and globally" and "Plug in Hybrids are Green (Duh!)"].

The key point of this piece is that “Only one alternative fuel can significantly lower the annual fuel bill of U.S. consumers while at the same time significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions — electricity.”

Biofuels — whether from crops or cellulosic material — are likely to be sold at the market price for gasoline. That’s because it is extremely difficult to see how they could be produced in the kind of nearly unlimited quality you would need for them to dominate the liquid transportation fuels market for the foreseeable future. The same is true for offshore, Alaskan, or unconventional oil.

The price of electricity, however, is not linked to the price of oil.

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