Yes, even stranger than the skater crashing though the ice (though not as funny, notwithstanding the well-known dry British wit):

During these turbulent economic times, Gordon Brown is keen for the country to stick by him.

However, this probably wasn’t quite what he had in mind.

Dan Glass, of the climate change pressure group Plane Stupid today tried to superglue himself to the Prime Minister at a Downing Street reception.

Yes, that is the name of the group. Their website is www.planestupid.com.

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It’s official. T. Boone is overexposed. His monotonous TV ad runs on an endless loop, he has testified in front of Congress, he is now appearing on every cable show, and everybody quotes him even though he doesn’t actually agree with anybody but himself.

What specifically bugs me:

1. His ads say we can’t drill our way out of this problem, but then he says we should drill everywhere — offshore, Alaska, your backyard.
2. He keeps pushing his absurd idea of switching over to natural gas vehicles (see “Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb“).
3. His plan shares a great deal in common with Al Gore’s, but he still goes out of his way to diss it (inaccurately, see below): “Gore’s Global Warming Plan Ignores Crippling Stranglehold Foreign Oil Has on America’s Economic and National Security.”
4. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I/D/R/?) said the plan is a “classically American message of honesty, determination and can-do optimism.”
5. Did I mention he keeps pushing his absurd idea of switching over to natural gas vehicles, even though Russia, Iran and Persian Gulf states have most of world’s gas reserves?

The Gore critique seems to me particularly lame, as if he can’t stand to share the stage with anyone else. Why else release such a petty statement as this:

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Testifying before Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-CT) Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, conservative Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens explained his plan to dramatically decrease oil usage by greatly expanding wind power electricity. “World oil production, I believe,” Pickens explained, “has peaked.” When questioned by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) about the value of lifting the moratorium on drilling of the East and West coasts of the United States, Pickens responded:

I’m not a big believer. I think you’re going to get a rude awakening as to the value of the East and West coasts when it’s opened up and when it’s put up for sale. When it’s put up for sale, I think you’ll be surprised at the price you get for the tracts.

Watch it:

Pickens was politely relating to Domenici a cold hard fact — the offshore oil reserves of the United States lie predominantly in areas already open to drilling. The Gulf Coast and Alaskan shores, not the California or Eastern seaboard, have the great majority of remaining reserves:

Most of the country’s estimated offshore reserves – about 75 percent – lie in areas that have been drilled for years or are being opened for exploration. Roughly 48 percent of the nation’s estimated reserves, or 41 billion barrels, lie beneath the western and central Gulf of Mexico, where oil companies armed with new drilling technology are pushing into ever deeper water. Another 27 percent of the estimated reserves, or 23.6 billion barrels, are believed to lie off the north coast of Alaska, where the federal government sold oil exploration leases this spring, despite fears that the work would hurt the polar bear population.

As the Energy Information Administration has found, lifting the offshore drilling moratorium would have an “insignificant” impact on prices for at least twenty years.

[This question is the subject of a hearing Wednesday morning where I am a witness. At least that's how I view the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming hearing on selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. A live webcast should be available here.]

The headline question is not an abstract one for the American public. Taxpayers do have $100 billion in oil we bought since 1975 that was placed in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

Despite the name, the SPR does not have any strategic value. It was created at a time when people worried that countries could withhold oil from us. But now we have a global market. The only impacts of some country withholding a significant amount of oil, say two million barrels a day (which is a little more than 2% of global consumption), is

1. The producer loses $100 billion a year!
2. Prices rise.

I have not yet found a plausible “crisis” scenario in which we would use large amounts of that oil, assuming the current situation is not close to being dire enough. Since its inception, there have been only two emergency sales of crude oil from the SPR. After Hurricane Katrina disrupted oil flow from the Gulf of Mexico in 2005, 11 million barrels of oil were sold. In the wake of the Persian Gulf War 21 million barrels were sold in 1990-91. [In 1996-97, 28 million barrels were sold for nonemergency reasons.] In other words, a mere 32 million barrels were sold over the years during crises.

I can’t imagine we’re going to keep this relatively useless “reserve” for many more decades.

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The House GOP has made shale a cornerstone of their energy plan, and now AP reports:

The Bush administration wants to set the stage before leaving office for developing oil shale, rocky deposits in the western U.S. that could eventually yield 800 billion barrels of oil, according to government estimates.

The Interior Department is scheduled to unveil proposed regulations Tuesday for a program to sell oil shale leases on federal lands, similar to the leases sold now for oil and natural gas both on and offshore.

Shale appears to be the most destructive alternative fuel imaginable from a climate perspective, worse even than liquid coal, as I discussed here. With one-third the energy density of Cap’n Crunch, you have to put huge amounts of energy into heating the shale to turn it into a useful liquid fossil fuel. If we were to try to extract and refine as much shale oil as Bush and the conservatives want, “an additional 2.5 million barrels of oil per day” or more, that would all but guarantee a climate-destroying concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide of 1000 ppm.

It would also destroy much of the state of Colorado, where most of the shale is, and the Colorado River basin. This is clear from an exhaustive 2005 Rand Corporation study, “Oil Shale Development in the United States.” The study finds:

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U.S. conservatives aren’t the only ones who are easily duped (see “The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP“). When 1039 Brits were asked “To what extent do you agree or disagree that … Many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change,” a remarkable 60% agreed whereas only 22% disagreed.

Congrats to the British deniers out there — yes, even you TVMOB, who apparently qualifies as a scientific expert in the UK because he wears a Nobel prize pin made of gold recovered from a physics experiment presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York. [Since I have been focusing on TVMOB so much, I thought I would present a picture of a different UK denier, which can be found here, to help Climate Progress readers understand why deniers are so popular with so many Brits.]

The poll also asked responses to “I sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say.” Some 42% agreed while 41% disagreed. I am going to (optimistically) ascribe that less to the UK airing of the The Great Global Warming Swindle than to the fact that this statement is true when it comes to one particular famous British person (see “James Lovelock turns everyone into a climate optimist” and “Lovelock: Malthus was right, and Climate Progress is way, way too optimistic.”)