On Wednesday, five major U.S. corporations launched a new business coalition with the investors’ activist group Ceres to call for immediate, muscular, and progressive action to fight global warming. The founding members of Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP) are Levi Strauss & Co., Nike, Starbucks, Sun Microsystems and The Timberland Company. As right-wing business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce pretend that limits on pollution will destroy the economy, the members of BICEP recognize that the true threat is failing to halt catastrophic climate change.

The eight principles embraced by BICEP for national action on global warming reflect recommendations from the Center for American Progress, Green For All, 1Sky, and other progressive organizations, including a moratorium on new coal plants, no subsidies for pollution permits, aggressive efficiency standards, and green-job creation in low-income communities.

In addition, BICEP calls for greenhouse gas emissions to be at least 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, in line with scientific recommendations — and more than double the target set by President-elect Barack Obama.

As Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres said in a press call, tackling global warming is integral to future economic strength:

Rather than ignore risk, address the risk and turn it into an opportunity. We need to send the right and honest market signal. Carbon pollution has a cost.

The full list of recommendations: Read more

My very peaceful friend Mike Tidwell has a long post at Grist on how the Maryland State police shamefully spied on him. It updates the story I reported on earlier, “Maryland climate campaigners on terrorist list.”

Note to the police, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and anyone else watching and listening — the threat to the health and well-being — the security — of Americans isn’t from those peacefully protesting climate inaction. It’s from the climate inaction, as even our intelligence community understands (see “The moving Fingar writes: Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S“).

As our future Commander in Chief has said: “The science is beyond dispute… Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.“

Concentrated solar thermal power — aka solar baseload — remains hot. The Daily Climate has a nice update:

All told some 60 plants are either under construction or under contract worldwide — with most in either Spain or the United States — for a total capacity just north of 5,700 megawatts

Here is the world list of projects. Here is the U.S. list.

I remain as convinced as ever that solar baseload could well be “The technology that will save humanity,” in large part because it is highly scalable, eventually able to achieve 50 to 100 gigawatts a year growth or more.

Indeed, given the immense challenges that coal with CCS faces (see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?“), I’m still happy, indeed eager, to bet that concentrated solar thermal will continue delivering more power every year this century than so-called “clean coal” — and at a far lower cost per kilowatt-hour.

Solar baseload’s ultimate “trump card” is, of course, storage:

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Barack Obama has created a top-notch team to guide his transition into the White House (see “Obama fills key posts on environment, energy teams“). Next, he should create a team to guide America’s transition to a new energy economy.

I’m not talking about the prestigious group of economic advisors Obama already has assembled to help him identify solutions to the economic meltdown. I’m talking about a team that includes experts in sustainable energy technologies, climate mitigation and adaptation, capital investment, state and local government, business, industry and labor.

Their job should be to fashion a deliberate, coherent and intelligent plan to move as rapidly and painlessly as possible from the old carbon-based economy to a brand new and long-overdue economic order powered by sustainable resources, dedicated to natural resource stewardship and striving to achieve a near-zero carbon society.

We have no such plan now. Instead, as I pointed out in Part 2 in this series, America’s de facto energy policy is a hodgepodge of self-defeating laws, programs and subsidies. Congress must make a critical decision: We either have to phase out fossil fuels or abandon any pretense that we care about climate change, despite its profound implications for public health, national security, peace and economic stability.

If we decide we really care, we need a transition plan for the economy — not just a stimulus package, but a program that focuses on long-term investment in a sustainable nation. What might such a program be like? Here’s one scenario:

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A key reason for Detroit’s woes is that for decades they successfully fought efforts to build the kind of fuel-efficient cars the public has increasingly wanted to buy. Virtually all independent observers acknowledge that fact, but no conservative leader can. After all, they provided the political support and the votes that blocked repeated efforts by progressive to toughen federal fuel economy standards.

Denying their contribution to the current mess, however, is not enough for these master deniers. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of conservatives, somehow a law passed last year to boost fuel economy standards to 35 mpg by 2020 — a weaker standard than China and Europe already have — is a key cause of the Big Three’s current troubles.

ThinkProgress has the surreal quotes:

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