The site for baseball-style statistical analysis applied to polling, FiveThirtyEight.com, finds:

Obama has developed a structural advantage in the Electoral College that is understated by the popular vote margin. If we break the election down into its four fundamental scenarios, it looks like this:

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Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is an avowed climate science believer who comes from a state with enough solar resource to power the entire nation. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is an avowed climate science denier who comes from a major oil patch state.

So why has McCain voted with Inhofe and against clean energy and the environment a staggering 42 out of 44 times since the mid-1990s? And that doesn’t even include eight straight votes on extending the renewable energy tax credits that McCain missed in the last year, where he would have sided with Inhofe and against a clean energy future.

The answer is that “Few politicians in history have more successfully sold a phony image about caring for the environment than Sen. John McCain” — which is the central point of my new Salon piece, “John McCain’s hot air.” The facts are clear: McCain is at best an out-of-touch green washer and at worst simply a pathological liar.

For instance, at an Aspen Institute meeting in August, when McCain was asked about those missed votes, he simply lied to the audience:

I have a long record of that support of alternate energy. I come from a state where we have sunshine 360 days a year…. I’ve always been for all of those and I have not missed any crucial vote.

As for McCain’s “long record of that support of alternate energy,” consider the votes on renewable energy funding and a federal “renewable portfolio standard” (RPS) that he did show up for this decade:

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Hopes that the Air Force would abandon CTL may have been premature. There is a backdoor approach in the works. According to Politico,

Democrats have all but pushed coal out of the clean energy debates, but the coal lobby might have found a new tap into the U.S. Treasury: the Pentagon.

The Defense Authorization Bill now being debated in the Senate includes a provision that would allow energy companies to sign 10-year contracts with the military to produce synthetic fuel.

The article goes on to describe the history behind the coal-to-liquids push at the Air Force. It quotes former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne as saying:

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