When America finally picks the next president two weeks from now, the clock will start ticking on a set of milestones critical to his leadership on climate. The first, lasting about 11 weeks, will be the transition period that ends with the Jan. 20 inauguration.

The President-elect and his team will have an enormous amount of work to do in a very short time to get ready for the extraordinary set of issues he will inherit, including two wars, a financial crisis and the restoration of American leadership in the most pressing and challenging issue of our time, and perhaps all time — global climate change.

Next comes the traditional honeymoon period in which a president sets the tone of his administration and has the best chance of implementing his agenda. It lasts for the six months between inauguration and Congress’s August recess. This short period, just an eighth of the first term, will have a lot to do with the president’s success for the remainder of his time in office.

How should the president use this time to jump-start federal leadership on climate change?

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My father used to say of his profession that newspaper editors are the people who come down from the mountaintop at the end of the battle and shoot the wounded.

A massive credit crunch and a drop in the price of fossil fuels can mean only one thing to the editors of the traditional media — an excuse for their favorite activity in the whole world, the backlash story, the rising starlet in rehab story.

Faster than you can say “Joe the Plumber” isn’t a licensed plumber, his name isn’t Joe, and he has a tax lien against him, you can be sure that if the media ever lets itself fawn over you for even a nano-second, it will turn its coverage on a dime and run the minute a few whispy short-term clouds appear in the horizon.

And so we have the New York Times story, “Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds,” which is supposed to be a clever headline, but the NYT, which accompanies the story with a picture of wind turbines, seems to have missed the irony that wind turbines like strong winds.

And we have the Washington Post Page 1 story, “As Fuel Prices Fall, Will Push For Alternatives Lose Steam?” You might notice the Post has chosen to show a picture of the Saturn plug in hybrid with the caption “Demand for electric cars like this Saturn hybrid may flag if gas prices keep sliding.” Currently demand is zero, since the car isn’t expected to go on sale for two years, so I’m not quite sure how demand can flag. More on this lame story below.

We also have a bunch of posts in the WSJ’s blog: “Green Ink: Crunch Time For Clean Everything” and “Financial Fallout: Why Renewable Energy Has the Blues” and “Clean Energy Meltdown: Now GE’s Bailing.”

Yes, renewables are capital-intensive. So is nuclear. Where are all the front-page stories on how difficult it’s going to be to raise capital for multibillion dollar nuclear plants? But those aren’t really sexy because nobody ever really liked nuclear power to start with, so you can’t have the backlash story. In fact, a global economic slowdown inevitably coupled with a credit crunch means a big drop in all major construction — as GE itself explained to the WSJ. And that same slow down reduces projected electricity demand growth rates in the near term, so you would expect an across-the-board slowing of all big electricity projects, including coal.

But again, it’s really only reduced growth in renewables that get you the faux drama the media hungers for: Can the rising media starlet in rehab recover? [Note to self: In the future, find a better analogy than comparing alternative energy to Lindsay Lohan.]

What’s funny about all of these backlash pieces about this recent former media darling is that for most of the 1990s when I was at the US Department of Energy, we couldn’t buy a story about clean tech. Good news stories really aren’t news. That’s why for all the talk about the liberal media, the traditional media is really conservative. It is a very status quo institution with the long-term thinking of an erection.

The fundamentals that guarantee clean tech will be the biggest job-creating and wealth-creating industry haven’t changed. We still need to replace most of the energy infrastructure of the developed world in the next four decades with clean energy, while at the same time building from scratch a clean energy infrastructure for the developing world [see "Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 2: The Solution"]. We still have a supply-demand mismatch in the oil sector that has brought us to the precipice of peak oil, as even the world’s largest oil companies now acknowledge (see “Peak Oil? Bring it on!“).

Let me focus on just one of the articles, the Washington Post piece, to show you the lengths that the traditional media will go to shoot what they think are the wounded alternative energy technologies. The story notes:

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Our guest blogger is Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal credited the American Council for Clean Coal Electricity’s (ACCCE) president, Stephen Miller, for convincing politicians, the media and the public that “clean coal” is a cure all for global warming pollution from coal-fired power plants:

Mr. Miller, 55 years old, is president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a Virginia group funded by the country’s major coal-burning utilities, coal producers and railroads that haul coal. Over the past year, his organization has spent nearly $40 million on television and radio spots and other outreach efforts to bolster public support for coal, and to reinforce fears that limits on its use will raise living costs.

ACCCE’s TV ads feature a diverse group of American archetypes saying “I believe” in achieving energy independence, using new technologies, and other similar platitudes. Only at the end does it mention that the ad is about “clean coal.”

What does ACCCE mean by “clean coal”? To the degree it means anything, it’s a euphemism for reducing greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants via carbon capture and storage (CCS), a promising but unproven technology. In fact, the International Energy Agency yesterday released a report that determined that CCS is a long way from commercialization: Read more

The relative population trends of the EU-15 and the United States seems to be a source of some confusion, if comments to my recent post on the European Union’s effort to meet its Kyoto targets are any indication (see “15 EU countries on track to meet Kyoto targets” and “Are Europe’s greenhouse gas cuts real?“).

One commenter writes “EU population is flat/declining. US population is growing.” Even our friend Roger Pielke, Jr. responds to my statement that “immigration now keeps their population rising almost as fast as United States,” with “You’ll want to recheck your assertion on the comparison of EU vs. US population growth.”

Here is the best comparison graph I could find online (the y-axis appears to be annual percentage growth rate):

Population growth rate

As can be seen, the annual population growth rates of the EU-15 and U.S. have been creeping towards each other and are getting surprisingly close. How is that possible?

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PBS’s Frontline “investigates how the world’s largest corporations and governments are responding to Earth’s looming environmental disaster.” The two-hour investigation by award-winning producer and correspondent Martin Smith airs tonight, Oct. 21, 2008, from 9 to 11 P.M. ET on PBS. Details here and below:

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Not too surprisingly (and thankfully), Thomas Friedman’s book Hot, Flat and Crowded holds spot #2 on the NYT‘s list of non-fiction bestsellers. A bit more shocking is that Van Jones’ book “The Green Collar Economy” landed the #12 spot.

The blogosphere is delighted by the news. As should be all advocates of the clean energy economy.

“The Green Collar Economy” received a major online push. Green for All, Jones’ organization founded to explore green solutions to poverty, launched a massive, online networking effort to spread the word about the book. They turned to e-mail lists, various forms of online promotion (videos, for example), and the blogosphere. Once the bloggers caught wind of the story, online sales skyrocketed. Next stop – NYT bestsellers.

At first, that sort of success seemed a long shot.

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