As I write this, the Democratic National Convention is getting underway in Denver. It will be an intense week of speeches, workshops and symposia about the issues facing American today, among them our energy and climate security.

While climate change is arguably the most complex problem the community of nations has faced, it isn’t the first time an American president has grappled with issues of global and moral consequence. John Kennedy led at a time the world seemed only a few minutes away from nuclear annihilation, and when Russia threatened to dominate space. Bobby Kennedy opposed the Vietnam War and confronted the issue of civil rights around the world.

What might they say if they were addressing the Democratic National Convention today? The following is compiled from their speeches decades ago. (All are from JFK except where designated):

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The gold medal goes to Steven Goddard of The Register. On Friday August 15, he published a scathing article, “Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered: There’s something rotten north of Denmark” attacking the National Snow and Ice Data Center plot of Arctic Sea Ice Extent (below) that I and pretty much everyone else on the planet use.

Based on some (mis)analysis too obscure for mortal men and women to follow, he concluded “The problem is that this graph does not appear to be correct”:

The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn’t even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss….

Unless you are a denier, you may not be surprised to learn the amateur denier was wrong and the country’s leading cryosphere scientists were right. But you might be surprised that Goddard issued an unequivocal retraction within days at the site of the original article:

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As always with Toles, don’t miss the small print.

Or at least 7 in 10 say they are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. That’s according to a new ABC News/Planet Green/Stanford University Poll released this month.

Yes, this headline appears very much a result of higher gasoline prices:

59 percent say they’re using less gasoline — driving less, using smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, carpooling, taking mass transit and the like.

Yet it goes beyond just gasoline:

60 percent, also say they’re cutting their consumption of power (and water).

Let’s dig in and run through some of the numbers -

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In his first TV ad, conservative billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens said “This Is One Emergency We Can’t Drill Our Way Out Of.” Although Pickens clearly still believes that, I’m sure he got beat up by his conservative Big Oil friends about how progressives were repeating “over and over again” to argue, correctly, as to how pointless offshore drilling is.

So in his new ad, here, Pickens says, “drill, drill, drill” even though it won’t solve the problem. Sad.

I interviewed Pickens for Salon and will be doing a big article on him later this week. The bottom line is that because he remains an uber-conservative at heart — he was a big funder of the Swift Boat ads — he simply cannot bring himself to support politically those who believe in his renewable energy vision.

Related Posts:

• Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb
• Five reasons Pickens is now as tiresome as Madonna and Britney
• A bone to pick with T. Boone Pickens