We are going to have a huge economic stimulus package soon after Obama becomes President. And a big piece of it is going to be aimed at energy efficiency and renewable energy, as the NYT reported today in “Proposal Ties Economic Stimulus to Energy Plan.”

I have asked a bunch of my wonk ee friends for some energy efficiency ideas, which I’ll be posting in the coming days. I’d love to hear some ideas from you — please try to keep them practical. Focus on spending that creates jobs in the next two years AND that either saves energy (like weatherizing low-income homes) or helps jumpstart the transition to a clean energy economy (like ‘green’ transmission).

I’ll even send one or two the best ideas to the various transition folks I know. Realistically, it would be very hard to actually get into the stimulus package, but a good idea might still find its way into the huge energy bill that is equally inevitable for 2009, but on a somewhat slower track.

Try not to duplicate stuff in the Center for American Progress’s plan, “A Strategy for Green Recovery” (which is a good guide for how to write up an idea). Nor should you duplicate ideas in the NYT piece:

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E&E News PM has the news on the reemergence of this essential form of solar power:

SAN FRANCISCO — California regulators today approved a solar thermal contract for Southern California Edison, the first such project for the utility and the first to count toward its state-mandated renewable energy target.

The state Public Utilities Commission approved Southern California Edison’s purchase of power from the 105-megawatt Gaskell Sun Tower project in Kern County, located in the southern part of the Central Valley. The plant is being developed by eSolar Inc., a renewable energy startup backed by Oak Investment Partners, Idealab, and Google’s for-profit philanthropic arm, Google.org. One of Google.org’s goals is trying to get the cost of wind and solar power below that of coal-fired power; it has invested at least $130 million in eSolar this year.

Kudos to Google for backing solar baseload. More details below:

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The white lemuroid possum (Hemibelideus lemuroides), an Australian marsupial that lives only in the higher altitude rainforests of far north Queensland, may be the first species of mammal to go extinct because of global warming. This animal resembles a furry, snow-white lemur, with a prehensile tail and large eyes for nocturnal vision, and cannot survive sustained temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit. It has not been spotted since a heat wave in 2005 struck the cloud forests of the Mount Lewis forest reserve.

Left unchecked, by 2050 global warming will have committed about one-third of all species to extinction. Global warming-related diseases have already caused the extinction of dozens of species of cloud-forest-dwelling amphibians. A third of all corals are today threatened with extinction by the changes to the world’s oceans — toxic pollution, rising waters, warming temperatures, and increasing acidification.

To limit further damage and prevent an ecological catastrophe, developing nations — home to the world’s greatest reserves of biodiversity — “are calling for industrialized nations to agree to cuts of more than 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and more than 95 per cent by 2050″ of greenhouse gas emissions, far greater than President-elect Obama’s commitment to cut U.S. emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Yesterday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that 2007 U.S. emissions were 17% greater than 1990 levels.

Al Gore and a bunch of enviro groups have launched the “Reality” Coalition to tell the public there is no such thing as clean coal.

Their inaugural ad violates a central rule of messaging, rhetoric, and psychology: Don’t keep repeating a strong word the other side is trying to push.That is not just a basic tenet of the 25-century old art of persuasion, but a well-demonstrated principle of modern psychology. Here’s the ad:

“Clean” is a very strong word here for three reasons. First, it is short and simple — a key feature of effective rhetoric (see here). Second, GOP word guru Frank Luntz spent a lot of time and money test words and reported in his infamous Straight Talk memo:

The three words Americans are looking for in an environmental policy, they are “safer”, “cleaner”, and “healthier”.

Third, of course, “clean coal” uses one of the most memorable figures of speech, alliteration. That is perhaps redundant: The figures of speech were specifically designed to be memorable.

So if you want to destroy the clean coal myth, you don’t run an ad that repeats “clean coal” five times verbally and two times in writing.

I would have said the mistake in this ad is basic stuff, but even the sophisticated Obama team repeatedly made the same mistake (see here and here). So let me review again why you can’t debunk a myth by verbally repeating it, why linguist George Lakoff titled his best-selling book, Don’t think of an elephant.

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That’s the title of a new report from the Center for American Progress by Ken Berlin, available here. Summary below:

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Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st century presidents as failures if the world doesn’t stop catastrophic global warming.

If global warming exceeds 5°C (or even 3°C), then we will head inexorably toward an ice free planet with widespread desertification, sea levels rising 6 to 12 inches a decade for centuries, the oceans turning into a hot, acidic dead zone, and a billion or more environmental refugees (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction“). Historians (and every other human being) enduring such harsh misery will care little about Iraq, health care, an early 21st century recession, or the budget deficit.

Passing strong domestic climate legislation by itself cannot make Obama a successful president, let alone a great one, since we generate under one quarter of world CO2 emissions and are an even smaller fraction of future growth. To be a great president, Obama must bring the entire world together onto a sustainable path.

Part 1 explained why Obama can’t get a global climate treaty ratified in the U.S. Senate. So what should Obama do instead? That is the subject of my new piece in Salon (click here):

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Shell’s Mad Men win the 2008 award for the most unintentionally ironic greenwashing ad. On Monday (and again today), Shell ran a full page ad in the Washington Post on carbon capture with this image:

Yes, Shell is apparently trying to catch CO2 with a net! Let’s hope they have better luck than either the Bush administration (see “In seeming flipflop, Bush drops mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project“) or the rest of the world (see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?“).

Here is the full text of the ad (online here), which has an unintentionally amusing headline:

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