At 10 PM tonight, the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope and right-wing oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens began a live-streamed chat that had been advertised across the Internet as an “e-rally” in response to the presidential debate. Pickens and Pope previously met in a discussion moderated by Center for American Progress Action Fund president John Podesta, in which the three found common ground on the question of getting off our dependence on oil.

Under the banner of the Pickens Plan to increase wind and natural gas use, Pickens and other natural gas titans are fueling a major campaign to support Proposition 10 in California, which would give $5 billion in taxpayer money to natural gas companies. Clean Energy Fuels Corp., a Pickens company, has spent $3.8 million directly pushing Prop 10.

Although the Sierra Club opposes Prop 10, it has raised no money to block the measure, according to state records.

At the Huffington Post, Josh Nelson notes that Pickens met with Sarah Palin last week and said, “she gets this energy situation.” As the Wonk Room has pointed out before, this is an absurd claim. Pickens’ early emphasis on wind power has faded to a message primarily pushing natural gas. Sadly, like Palin, Pickens also refuses to accept that man-made global warming is a crisis. He has refused to work with Al Gore, saying “global warming is on page two for me.”

The “e-rally” site allows visitors to send an endorsement of the problem-filled Pickens Plan to the presidential candidates.

UPDATE: On the Sierra Club’s Wild Blog, Matt Kirby wrote this July about Pickens:

He has no interest in conservation and no interest in greening our energy supply. He’s merely interested in energy independence and if that involves renewable energy, not to mention if he can make billions off of it, then so be it. He made it clear that he wants more domestic drilling than even John McCain. In his own words: “McCain says, ‘OK off the east and west coast.’ I say east, west coast and ANWR—get it all!”

So let me get this straight. We can’t drill our way out of this problem, but we should drill everything anyway? Could there perhaps be some lingering vested interests for T. Boone?

If you don’t watch the debates on CNN, you are really missing something. CNN has set up a dial group of uncommitted Ohio voters. At the bottom of the screen CNN then shows the graph of the reaction by men and women as they rate statements they like or don’t like.

McCain seems to think his strong support of nuclear power is a big political winner for him, since he has brough it up three times in the first hour. But every time he talks about nuclear, he flatlines with both men and women. They simply are unethused about nuclear power, which is no surprise.

At best, people consider nuclear power as castor oil, something your parents made you take that is supposed to be good for you. At worst, people think it’s a source of radioactivity they’d like to stay far away from.

Frankly, McCain has been flatlining for most of the debate, which I suspect post-debate audience polls will reflect, though he seems to be doing better this debate than the first one.

My quick analysis on the Dingell-Boucher draft climate bill is “likely no CO2 cut until near 2030.” Here are various initial comments from

• NRDC
• Lots of Environmental Groups
• Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee
• Wilderness Society
• Greenpeace

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Future generations cry out to today’s leaders, “You can’t offset this problem, you need to solve it yourselves!” Rip-offsets are the new opiate of the masses — and the politicians.

John Dingell (D-MI), chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Rick Boucher (D-VA), chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, have released their long-awaited discussion draft climate legislation (bill text, summary, memo, and allocation chart here). Despite the fact that neither of them are particularly known as leaders on this subject, they write:

Politically, scientifically, legally, and morally, the question has been settled: regulation of greenhouse gases and United States is coming

Dingell and Boucher proudly announce that after holding some 27 hearings, “This draft is the culmination of nearly two years of intensive work on climate change by the Committee and marks an important step in our ongoing effort to address this increasingly serious problem.”

The bill “covers approximately 88% of US greenhouse gas emissions, and would reduce covered emissions to 6% below 2005 levels by 2020, 44% below 2005 levels by 2030, and 80% below 2005 levels by 2050″ — in theory.

In practice, of course, actual domestic reductions in the near term and the midterm will not come anywhere near that level because the bill adopts the mother of all cost containment measures, rip-offsets, much as the Boxer bill did (see here and “Boxer bill update: Probably no U.S. CO2 emissions cut until after 2025“) and much as John McCain’s plan does (see “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“).

I’ll let other people focus on the bill’s various goodies, including the strong push for energy efficiency and clean technology, and its complicated allowance formulas (the draft proposes four options). I’ll focus on the staggering amount of rip-offsets:

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July saw another sharp drop in vehicle miles traveled (aka VMT) according to the Federal Highway Administration’s monthly report on “Traffic Volume Trends.”

Lost in all the news about the financial meltdown and the election is the report that Americans drove 3.6 percent less, or 9.6 billion miles fewer, in July 2008 than July 2007. Okay, maybe it wasn’t lost in all the news — it looks like the FHA didn’t bother issuing a press release (see here). I guess even they are blas© about reductions in driving that just a few months ago would have been record-setting.

In any case, the moving 12-month trend-line remains striking:

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No, 450 is not politically possible today. Nor is 550. Nor is action sufficient to stave off 1000 ppm and 6°C warming.

OK, that was clear before because Congressional conservatives can certainly block the necessary action and demagogue the energy price issue — and they obviously intend to (see “Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us“).

But I think the financial bailout bill story has yet more sobering lessons:

1. Multi-hundred-billion-dollar-sized government action happens only when there is a very, very big crisis. Yes, lots of people out there think happy talk about clean energy and green collar jobs is mainly what you need to get a massive government spending program. Not gonna happen. The happy talk can help sell the needed policies, but without the crisis, it leads nowhere.
2. A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a crisis to be “very, very big” is that it must be labeled as such by very serious people who are perceived as essentially nonpartisan opinion leaders. In this case, it was the panic from people like uber-billionaire Warren Buffet and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan and even people like CNBC’s Jim Cramer (yes, he shouts a lot, but he called this meltdown a year ago and has a lot of credibility with the media).
3. In addition, bad things must be happening to regular people right now. It was quite interesting that the House in particular voted down the original bailout but reversed itself in large part because of the ensuing stock market meltdown and in part because they started to hear from all of the small and large businesses in their districts that the credit market was freezing up.
4. The credible people must say that the government action is going to solve the problem. This is a crucial point also missed by lots of people. If Buffet and Bernanke and Cramer said the sky is falling but your plan ain’t going to stop it, then your plan is dead, dead, dead.

What does this say about the climate and peak oil predicament?

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