At the Big Tent in Denver, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta, Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, and oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens engaged in a discussion about our energy future. Pickens, who believes that our global oil production is at its peak and will soon inexorably decline, discussed his “Pickens Plan” for a massive increase in wind and solar electricity production and a shift for trucking fleets from diesel to natural gas. Podesta noted that the climate crisis is evident today, in the flooding in Florida and the increasing threat of powerful hurricanes. “The cost of doing nothing,” Podesta said, “is extremely substantial.”

This panel of three highly powerful individuals from the environmental, progressive, and conservative energy industry communities represented a remarkable confluence of priorities, in recognizing the energy crisis and the need to get off oil. As Carl Pope described:

If our politics was even vaguely functional, anything that all three of us agree on would have happened long ago. We have some very deep profound political problems. Our politics are broken.

Pickens himself, a highly influential fundraiser for right-wing politicians, described how his money has gotten him access in Washington but that he had learned that his contributions don’t translate to policy. He expressed his enthusiasm for the ability of the Pickens Plan campaign to reach millions on the Internet and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people. He argued, “I’m not doing this to make money. My entire estate will go to charity when I go. We are now importing almost 70 percent of our oil. It’s too much. We’re not talking about my generation — we can make it to the finish line.”

They also aired for the audience a fifteen-second spot that was rejected by NBC censors, because, according to Pickens, the network wanted him to prove that “we’re not doing a thing here” on energy policy. Watch the rejected ad: Read more

I am starting a new feature and a new category here on Climate Progress for Must-have PowerPoint Slides. I’ll begin with my favorite new slide, which shows just how stable the climate has been over the 10,000-year period that allowed modern human civilization to develop and flourish (click figure for larger version):

The slide is a must-have because it captures the risk we are taking while also providing a quick visual rebuttal to a very common denier talking point, one that NASA administrator Michael Griffin of all people repeated last year (see “And the Moon is Made of Green Cheese“):

To assume that [global warming] is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change…. I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.

Seriously! Needless to say, his employee, James Hansen rightly called those remarks “ignorant and arrogant.” He might have added “suicidal.”

So I had to have this slide after I saw it in a recent presentation from my friend Bob Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and now Director of Global Change Programs at the Heinz Center.

And it’s not just Griffin pushing this nonsense. One of the Cato Institute climate experts currently debating the online, Indur Goklany, just advanced the following argument against my call to stabilize at 450 ppm or less:

… there is no guarantee that stabilizing CO₂ at 450 ppm would optimize human or environmental well-being. For all we know, stabilizing at 750 may be more optimal.

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“After all, just 20 years ago scientists were worried about the new Ice Age.” This myth is so potent for deniers from Michael Crichton to George Will to Senator James Inhofe that even word guru and strategist Frank “death tax” Luntz made it a recommended line of attack in his super-slimy 2002 memo to conservatives on how best to cast doubt on climate science.

Why do deniers love it so? It makes present global-warming fears seem faddish, saying current climate science is nothing more than finger-in-the-wind guessing. This attack appeals especially to conservatives who want to link their attack on climate scientists to their favorite attack against progressive presidential candidates — that they are flip-floppers.

The myth has been utterly debunked in the scientific literature (see “Another denier talking point — ‘global cooling’ — bites the dust,” RealClimate here and here, “Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the ’70′s by scientists, in scientific journals? No.” and Skeptical Science).

In fact, 27 years ago Thursday, James Hansen and six other NASA atmospheric physicists, published a seminal article in Science, “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” The paper has a number of caveats, as befits a major projection before modern climate models and modern supercomputers were available, before we had decades of verifying observations, and before we knew just how fast greenhouse gas emissions would rise. But the analysis bears up unbelievably well — any one of us would be delighted if we published something a quarter century ago that was this prescient:

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The Wonk Room sat down with Van Jones, founder of Green For All and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, in the Big Tent at Denver for an interview on the energy fight, what the right wing is selling, and what progressives need to do about it.

Van didn’t mince words. He called it “disgusting” when right-wing politicians only talk about hurricanes Katrina and Rita to falsely claim they didn’t cause oil spills. He reminds us that “we didn’t stop offshore drilling for the duckies and the fishies,” but because coastal communities were suffering. And he discusses how now we have to make the choice between a “pollution-based suicidal economy” and a green economy that lifts everyone up. Van also calls Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future campaign “Happy Meal politics”:

First of all, I’m mainly focused on spreading the word about the need for green-collar jobs and green communities, as usual. But, I’m also very concerned about the way that we’re as progressives getting totally rolled by this happy meal politics of “drill here, drill here pay less,” this false solution to this gas price debate. I think it’s really important for us to push back on that.

Watch it:

Van Jones concluded by discussing the Green Jobs Now day of action taking place September 27, the day after the first presidential debate. Go to the website — GreenJobsNow.com — and join the fight.

That headline is lifted from Drudge. Needless to say, he left out “… and on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, where both Bush and McCain were AWOL” (see TP’s “As Katrina hit, McCain celebrated 69th birthday with Bush“).

Track the storm with the National Hurricane Center here. Best hurricane blog here.

Readers of this blog know that my brother lost his home in Katrina three years ago, which is probably the main reason I began this blog in the first place (see “100 Katrinas and the Launch of Climate Progress“).

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