The NYT Caucus Blog reports:

Gov. Sarah Palin will make her second policy speech as the Republican vice-presidential nominee on Wednesday morning, focusing on energy security, a campaign aide said. She will deliver the speech in Toledo, Ohio, at Xunlight Corporation, a company that manufactures solar power implements.

I guess it is mavericky to give an energy speech using the greenwashing backdrop of a popular clean energy technology your ticket has always opposed (see “Anti-wind McCain delivers climate remarks at foreign wind company“).

Remember, McCain has a record that is as strongly anti-solar and anti-renewable as that of Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the global-warming denier from the U.S. oil-patch (see here). McCain voted with Inhofe and against clean energy a staggering 42 out of 44 times in the past two decades.

Why does McCain vote against solar and other renewables even though he comes from a state that could supply the country’s electricity needs by itself with solar energy? Because, as he asserted last year, he believes that solar is among the “clean technologies [that] don’t work.” Similarly, Palin said in August:

Alternative-energy solutions are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop.

That’s right. She’s appearing at a solar energy company even though she thinks alternative energy would take more than 10 years to develop.

If conservatives like McCain had succeeded in the mid-1990s and shut down all clean energy R&D at the Department of Energy (DOE) where I worked, the kind of second-generation thin film solar technology that Xunlight has commercialized would never have happened, because it was the DOE that helped usher that technology into the market.

As for Palin’s specific remarks, no doubt she will repeat and expand upon the multiple lies and distortions she made in her acceptance speech:

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The Heritage Foundation, a once proud bastion of conservative thought, is now resorting to absurd historical revisionism and mentions of “Nazi Germany” to attack needed progressive policies. Heritage blogger Nick Loris responds to the United Nations Environmental Program’s Green Economy Initiative and the Center for American Progress’s Green Recovery program with this absurd rant:

The United Nations is proposing an environmental ‘New Deal’ that would “be similar to Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal which helped the US recover from the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

First, the reality is that FDR’s New Deal did not help the U.S. recover from the Great Depression but simply made things worse. Second, the only thing a green ‘New Deal’ will do is lead us down a Green Road to Serfdom. (Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is a telling portrayal of what collectivism in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany can lead to: impoverishment and oppression of freedom.)

In fact, economists broadly agree stimulative government spending is necessary to prevent a further collapse of the global economic system — just as the New Deal and the deficit spending of World War II restored the health of the global economy in the last century.

Scientists are warning with increasing stridency that carbon emissions must be drastically curbed to prevent a collapse of the world’s climate system. Instead of recognizing the real threat of the climate crisis, Loris writes, “The threat of climate change legislation is very real and very scary.”

Loris’s charge of Nazi-Soviet “collectivism” is utterly bizarre. The U.N.’s Green Economic Initative is a mainstream capitalist effort, with research overseen by Pavan Sukdhev, a top investment banker and self-described “total capitalist.” Its press release celebrates venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, public-private partnerships, and growth of international markets. CAP’s Green Recovery program primarily uses tax credits and federal loans to spur private investment, as well as investment in a 21st-century public infrastructure.

A cap and trade system to limit greenhouse pollution would correct what economist Sir Nicholas Stern called “the greatest market failure in history” — the failure to put a price on the pollution that is causing global warming. The fossil fuel industry is energy- and capital-intense, but creates few jobs. Despite Loris’s baseless claims that “taxing and spending does not create wealth,” moving to a green economy will in fact generate more jobs and greater economic growth, as California’s green economy has proven.

The Heritage Foundation is sliding into irrelevance. The last eight years of conservative misrule in Washington have demonstrated convincingly the failure of the right-wing policies it heralds. By all logic, preserving the planet from runaway global warming and restoring the health of the international free-market economy should be conservative ideals. Instead, they’re spending their time and money promoting puerile YouTube videos.

“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.” So the French statesman Talleyrand supposedly said of the pre-revolution monarchy. The words apply equally well to that bastion of libertarianism, the Cato Institute.

Over the years I have debated one of their senior scholars, Jerry Taylor, many times. He is probably the craftiest debater that the delayer/inactivist side has. But since, like all delayers, his positions are frozen in stone by his ideology, those positions inevitably become farther and farther disengaged from the reality of a (climate) changing world and hence less and less compelling. That is most clearly evident in my latest debate with him, online at Google’s new Knol site (aka the would-be Wikipedia killer).

My original post is “Jumpstarting the Transition to Clean Energy.” Taylor’s rebuttal is here. You see the typical rigid libertarian worldview sprinkled throughout:

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that global warming is a serious problem and that reducing emissions is cheaper than adapting to climate changes. Neither argument is persuasive to us….

It’s not altogether obvious to us that oil is becoming scarcer…. Regardless, if and when oil begins to disappear — or more accurately, if and when market actors believe the oil scarcity is on the horizon — oil prices will go up accordingly and the market will adjust without any need for government assistance. So while “peak-oil” arguments come and go with the related booms and busts in oil markets, there is no need for a policy argument about oil depletion.

In short, global warming isn’t a problem, and peak oil, if it ever occurs, is self-correcting. What a blissful world the Cato folk live in. Either problems don’t exist or the all-powerful, all-knowing free market will fix them. Now you might think that recent events would cause Cato scholars to at least slightly temper their blind faith in the power of greed to set all things right. But you would be wrong. Indeed, the most jaw-dropping paragraph in Taylor’s “rebuttal” is the last one:

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Australian media reports:

China will invest nearly $A445 billion (US$ 280 billion) in its overburdened rail system as a stimulus measure aimed at blunting the impact of the global financial crisis.

The investment is part of plans to extend the country’s railway network from the current roughly 125,502km to nearly 160,900km by 2010, Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post reported.

The Beijing News quoted a rail official as saying that, while the network needed extending, the massive investment was also intended to help lift the nation’s economy as it suffers amid the global woes.

“New rail investment will become a shining light in efforts to push forward economic growth,” railway ministry spokesman Wang Yongping said.

I hope Democrats in Congress are paying attention. Yes, spending money on roads and bridges may be a faster stimulus package, but this country needs to make the transition to greater rail-based transit. Seems like we may be able to learn a thing or two from the Middle Kingdom.

Last week I noted the glee with which the media used the global recession to shoot the clean-energy wounded (see “Global recession? Must be time for the media’s alternative-energy backlash“). Now Greenwire reports “Credit crunch scuttles W.Va. coal-to-liquids project” (subs. req’d, excerpted below):

Citing the lingering credit crunch, mining giant Consol Energy Inc. and the Texas gasification company Synthesis Energy Systems Inc. are halting a joint venture to convert coal to methanol and gasoline in West Virginia.

Obviously the crash in oil prices played a role too. The wide-ranging WSJ energy/environment blog has now covered the story, too. And given their well-known obsession with balance (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP“), I can hardly wait for the stream of stories on this from the big print media giants. [Cut to sound of crickets chirping.]

Here are more excerpts from the Greenwire story:

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The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is celebrating on its “Behind the Plug” blog about their successful photo-op with Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE):

Joe Lucas, an ACCCE lobbyist, gloats:

With just nine days left in the campaign, we still don’t know who will be running the country, but we know what will: American coal.

ACCCE is spending about $50 million to pollute our national discourse with the toxic myth of “clean coal.” The coal and oil industries have spent nearly $1 billion on an army of lobbyists, advertisements, and campaign contributions this year.

We have reached a new low in our democracy when corporate polluter flacks are willing to publicly state that their industry runs this nation.

Last week, Department of Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced an initiative to move forward on potentially developing 190 million acres of Federally-owned or managed land for geothermal energy generation.

The initiative is quite a reversal for the Bush Administration, since this past summer the government attempted to freeze solar applications in order to work through a procedural environmental assessment (interpreted as a delay tactic to most, and the moratorium was scratched after public uproar).

Now at least the government has put together a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for leasing land to develop geothermal generation, and once enacted, the government will begin to identify and more closely examine sections of federal land.

Climate Progress considers geothermal among the more promising renewable energies, particularly because it could contribute to baseload power (as an MIT study found in 2007).

As the press release for Kempthorne’s announcement notes, geothermal development in the U.S. is making good progress, but there’s room for much more:

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