[This series is based in part on the Salon article, "Why we never need to build another polluting power plant."]

Energy efficiency is by far the biggest low-carbon resource available (see Part 1) — and it is as limitless as wind, PV, and solar baseload (see Part 2). It is also the cheapest power you can buy, by far.

California has cut annual peak demand by 12 GW — and total demand by about 40,000 GWh — over the past three decades. The cost of efficiency programs has averaged 2-3¢ per kW — which is about one fifth the cost of electricity generated from new nuclear, coal and natural gas-fired plants. And, of course, energy efficiency does not require new power lines and does not generate greenhouse gas emissions or long-lived radioactive waste.

“Power plants costs have doubled since 2000” and electricity from new nuclear plants, in particular, has become absurdly expensive — 15¢ a kilowatt hour. Even wind power, now the cheapest of all new generation, has seen its price creep up in recent years — although that is expected to reverse over the next few years.

But year after year, efficiency stays absurdly cheap — indeed, it has even gotten cheaper as utilities have gotten smarter, as is clear from analysis by the California Energy Commission:

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Our guest blogger is Peter Altman, Climate Campaign Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

One of the ways to gauge how seriously Congress is talking about environmental issues is by watching how many industry front-groups pop up like weeds to try to choke off efforts to clean up the world around us. The weeds grow in various sizes and shapes, but they tend to share a common root system: funding from industry backers who would rather keep underground, away from the light of public discourse.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) — which is trying to persuade Americans that global warming is a hoax – is such a weed. The group isn’t just funded by an industry CEO, it was planted by one. David Koch, Executive Vice-President of family-founded multi-national conglomerate Koch Industries, is a founder of AFP and a financial supporter through the family-controlled and company-financed Claude R. Lambe Foundation. Koch Industries, Inc. and its sister company, Koch Holdings, LLC, own a group of companies invested in refineries, chemicals, minerals and so on.

The Koch companies have an atrocious record of sloppy operations. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the US and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters.  They were fined a record $35 million dollars and an additional $8 million in Minnesota for discharging into streams. In Texas –a state not usually known for rigid enforcement of environmental laws — the company was held liable for allowing large amounts of carcinogenic benzene to leak from a Texas refinery.

Koch’s slack attitude has led to tragic losses of life. In 1996, a rusty pipeline began to leak butane near a Texas residential neighborhood. Warned by the smell of gas, two teenagers drove their truck toward the nearest payphone to call for help, but they never made it. Sparks from their truck ignited the gas and the two burned alive.

It’s easy to see why the Koch family would plant and nurture sockpuppet groups like AFP. Koch can’t just come out and say we should ignore global warming, because their self-interest is too obvious. AFP is currently on a nationwide tour touting its new framing language regarding global warming, calling environmental proponents “alarmists” and pro business anti-environmentalists “realists.” Ironically enough, their image of choice is a hot air balloon (Note to front-groups: avoid using props that unintentionally reinforce your BS). But when over a million dollars of your funding in 2005 comes directly from donors like the Koch Industries “charitable foundation,” maybe hot air is all you’ve got to work with.

This post originally appeared at NRDC’s Switchboard .

UPDATE: Read more in the Wonk Room about Nancy Pfotenhauer, Koch Industries’ top lobbyist from 1996 to 2001 and president of Americans for Prosperity from 2003 to 2007.

Polluters pay McCain, that is, when he flip flops.

“Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling” blares the Washington Post headline today:

Campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Sen. John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling.

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month — three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban — compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.

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Joe Romm, one of the fastest bloggers in the post-typewriter era, was both quick and correct in his analysis of T. Boone Pickens’ energy plan. If you’re reading this, Mr. Pickens, have your people call Joe’s people. You guys need to talk.

Since Pickens’ $58 million ad campaign is likely to be with us for awhile, I’d like to add some thoughts to Joe’s, particularly about the highest and best use of America’s remaining and responsibly recoverable natural gas supplies.

First, my two cents on wind: As Joe points out, Pickens’ wind strategy is on the right track. In effect, the former oilman is proposing that America do what Texas is doing. Texas leads the nation in wind power. In a series of progressive actions in recent years, the state legislature established a renewable energy portfolio standard that was quickly achieved, and put a program in place to identify where the electric grid should be expanded to reach places where the wind blows most. Today, Texas is considering an investment of $6.4 billion to build new transmission capable of moving 17,000 megawatts of new wind power.

Pickens doesn’t want to wait for the bureaucracy. He’s investing $2 billion to build the world’s largest wind farm and plans to pay for the transmission lines that will carry the power from the Texas panhandle to Dallas.

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