The NYT‘s Andy Revkin replied to my earlier post (“The religion of technology pessimism gains a disciple at the New York Times“) with “What Will Drive the Energy ‘Innovation Revolution’?”

I’m glad he replied since I view this issue as the debate of the decade as I wrote back in April. See “Welcome N.Y. Times readers to the debate of the decade: Technology development vs. deployment” — yes, I know, the title is d©ja vu all over again. That post really said it all, but here are the key points:
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When it comes to energy policy, Amory Lovins has proven again and again that he’s a pretty smart guy. At the moment, nothing seems more insightful than one of Amory’s comments in the May/June issue of Mother Jones.

Asked what energy policies the next president should champion, Lovins was skeptical. He believes energy policy will continue to be made not at the national level, but by communities and states. “With modest exceptions,” Amory said, “our federal energy policy is really a large trough arranged by the hogs for their convenience.”

Right now, the hogs are eating very, very well.

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White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters this morning that President Bush intends to rescind the presidential moratorium on offshore drilling, established in 1990 by his father, George H.W. Bush, in response to the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The presidential moratorium, extended by President Clinton to 2012, adds executive-branch weight to the Congressional moratorium on lease sales in the Outer Continental Shelf. Lease sales off the coast of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico — where the great majority of recoverable oil can be found — have continued. In fact, in 2007, Bush “lifted the ban on offshore drilling in Bristol Bay” in Alaska, opening up its valuable waters to potential environmental and economic catastrophe. Bush’s action is intended to put pressure on Congress to follow him in “capitulation to the oil companies.”

After blocking meaningful action on global warming at last week’s G8 summit of the world’s top economies, President Bush told the other leaders,

Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.

Today’s action shows Bush truly intends that message to be his legacy.

UPDATE: To support this reckless plan, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told the Washington Post a tired lie:

I think people are reassured that not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina or Rita. Those rigs in the Gulf, there was not a single incident of spillage that anyone reported.

The hurricanes, unsurprisingly, caused major onshore and offshore spills. Like Sen. McCain (R-AZ), Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, Mike Huckabee, George Will, and Bill O’Reilly, McConnell is lying.

UPDATE II: At Energy Smart A Siegel takes down President Bush’s radio address in support of offshore drilling:

George says that additional OCS drilling “could produce enough oil to match America’s current production for almost ten years.” He forgets to mention that that “could” is a “maybe, perhaps, best case” as to that amount of production (that all those birds in the bush will become birds in Bush’s hands) and that this production would be over decades of time, even into the 22d century. At what point does truthiness and disingenous arguments simply become lying?

UPDATE III: At Campaign for America’s Future, Bill Scher notes:

Bush’s Rose Garden statement was artfully crafted. He lamented the high price of gas. He called for drilling off the coasts to “expand oil production.” But if you watch closely, you’ll notice Bush did not explicitly claim that coastal drilling would significantly lower the price of the gas. Because it won’t.

UPDATE IV: Boztopia‘s Martin Bosworth writes:

Americans are smarter than we are often given credit for, and many of us do realize that destroying precious environmental resources and wildlife reserves to allow more domestic drilling is a psychological panacea — a placebo to make us feel like “something is being done.”

*That would be my headline if Climate Progress were the Washington Post or President Bush.

After all, at the end of 2006, the Republican Congress and the president enacted “The Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act,” which opened 8.3 million acres of the Outer Continental shelf for drilling. Yet oil prices were only $60 a barrel then. Now prices have more than have doubled. Doesn’t that prove that legislation to permit offshore drilling increases oil prices? That seems to be the logic of the Post and our President.

Bush’s radio address lies remarks are reprinted verbatim in the Washington Post today:

In his radio address Saturday, Bush said that “technological advances have allowed us to explore oil offshore in ways that protect the environment” and that outer continental shelf areas now off limits “could produce enough oil to match America’s current production for almost 10 years.”

Yes, and monkeys could fly out of my butt. But 99% of doctors say that is not going to happen (a few doctors funded by ExxonMobil say it will if we just do nothing). And Bush’s own energy analysts say we might get 150,000 barrels a day in the 2020s if we lift the remaining federal moratorium on offshore drilling (see “The cruel offshore-drilling hoax“). Note to Post: 150,000 barrels a day isn’t quite America’s current production rate.

In fact, buried deep in the piece, the Post does point out something first reported on Climate Progress almost a month ago:

A report last year by the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration said that “access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017.” It added, “Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.”

[Note: That link in the Post is not to the the EIA report. God forbid a major newspaper actually has a useful hyperlink, rather than an utterly useless one pointing back to its own website. And they say bloggers are solipsistic! The EIA study is here.]

And yet the Post headline is:

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Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. have a super-lame climate op-ed in the Washington Post today, “Bridging the Gap on Climate Change.” The article begins:

Despite the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, there remain sharp political disagreements both here in the United States and around the world about how policymakers should respond. Nowhere is this gap more profound than between developed and developing countries.

As our vigorous domestic debate shows, there is disagreement within America about whether we should take strong steps to limit greenhouse gas emissions if fast-growing emitters in the developing world do not make similar commitments.

Well, yes, the conservatives who don’t want to take any action throw up a variety of obstacles — including the nonsensical claim that the richest country in the world that has contributed by far the most to the cumulative emissions in the atmosphere can’t take any action unless the poorest countries take action at the same time. This is especially nonsensical since Bush’s father together with the Senate unanimously in 1992 agreed that the rich countries should go first.

The rest of the piece is just blah, blah, blah about an international Clean Technology Fund “proposed by President Bush last September” — yes those six words are reason enough to stop reading any article on climate policy. The article ends:

It is one of the most significant efforts proposed in years to address the challenges of climate change.

Uhh, no. Not close. This is the kind of disingenuous disinformation that newspaper editors really need to clamp down on if the public is ever going to become informed about what is really going to take to avoid climate catastrophe.