Some 60 organizations, including my own — the Center for American Progress Action Fund — sent the following Principles for a Green & Equitable Stimulus and Recovery to PEBO’s transition team today:

As you draft and debate proposals to stimulate the American economy, we strongly urge you to make the recovery package as green and as equitable as possible. We propose these principles as benchmarks against which all stimulus proposals — indeed, all energy-related proposals coming out of the new administration and Congress — should be measured.

The stimulus must:

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UPDATE: Please Digg the original post here, so people looking to debunk the Inhofe nonsense will know about a link to send people.

[I am asking all Climate Progress readers to start an email campaign to Richard Haas, President, Council on Foreign Relations, E-mail: president@cfr.org. Please feel free to post your emails as comments.]

I was worried the media would be duped by Inhofe’s repackaged disinformation. Turns out the first to bite was the Council on Foreign Relations, widely (though it would seem, incorrectly) viewed as an uber-credible, centrist organization.

They have a list of what they claim are “ESSENTIAL DOCUMENTS: Vital primary sources underpinning the foreign policy debate.” Yes, you guessed it, the latest addition is U. S. Senate Minority Report: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Scientists Continue to Debunk “Consensus” in 2008.

It is grotesque enough that CFR calls this an essential document. But it is absurd to call this a “primary source” when it is nothing more than a rehash of denier talking points and a retread collection of quotes by other people, many of whom aren’t scientists and/or don’t even question human-cause global warming (see more on the laughable, padded Inhofe list). It is especially annoying for CFR to repeat the whole name of the report so that anyone looking at their “Essential Documents” page for any reason would have this disinformation shoved down their throat.

The President of CFR is Richard Haas, a former Bush State Department appointee who I actually thought was a reasonable “Colin Powell” guy.

You can let Haas know what you think of this inanity — and how it undermines the credibility of the once distinguished Council he was entrusted to lead — by emailing him at president@cfr.org.

[I'm going to reprint dispatches from the climate talks in Poland by Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Andrew Light, which were first printed in WonkRoom.]

It goes by various names here: “The chicken and egg problem.” “The ping pong problem.” Mostly though it’s just “The American problem.” All are various terms for the same issue which so far has cast a pall (matching the weather) over the early part of the second, and most important week of the UN climate change talks currently underway in Poland.

What is the problem? The pervading fear here that the Obama administration will not embrace the next iteration of the Kyoto Protocol climate change treaty, set to be decided a year from now at the next UN climate meeting in Copenhagen, because they will not have a national cap and trade agreement through Congress by that time.

According to organizations like the Pew Center on Global Climate Change no national cap and trade equals no confidence that new targets for limiting emissions stipulated by a Copenhagen agreement could be met equals no agreement to finalize a new treaty at Copenhagen where an extension of Kyoto must be finished. According to Pew’s Elliot Diringer, “A full, final, ratifiable agreement just isn’t in the cards.”

[That is my view, too (see "If there's no U.S. climate bill in 2009, would U.N. climate talks collapse in Copenhagen?" and "Obama can't get a global climate treaty ratified, so what should he do instead? Part 1"]

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Who will the media believe this time: The Senate’s leading climate denier, James Inhofe (R-OK), or their own lying eyes?

Deniers like Inhofe have a serious media problem — an ever growing number of studies, real world observations, and credible scientific bodies all point to human-caused emissions as the increasingly dominant cause of planetary warming and dangerous climate change.

What’s a denier to do? The answer is simple: Repackage previously debunked disinformation, release it as a “new” so-called “Full Senate Report” full of hysterical headlines, push it through right-wing news outlets, and hope the traditional media bites. Why not? It worked before.

Here is the screaming headline this week from Inhofe staffer Marc Morano

UN Blowback: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

Study: Half of warming due to Sun! –Sea Levels Fail to Rise?

Yes, it is tiresome debunking such nonsense for the umpteenth time, so let me try to keep this as short as possible.

SEA LEVELS ARE STILL RISING MORE THAN 50% FASTER NOW THAN PRE-1990

On what does Inhofe’s office base the “Sea Levels Fail to Rise” claim? Nothing more than a single blog post by a former TV meteorologist, Anthony Watts, who runs a denial website. That post claims “We’ve been waiting for the UC [Univesity of Colorado] web page to be updated with the most recent sea level data. It finally has been updated for 2008. It looks like the steady upward trend of sea level as measured by satellite has stumbled since 2005. The 60 day line in blue tells the story.”

Does it look to you like the recent data shows that the rate of sea level rise has slowed, as Watts says, let alone stopped, as Inhofe suggests? If so, I suggest you get your eyes checked. In particular, look at the most recent data points at the upper right. They are precisely on the long-term trend.

For an even clearer picture without the fluctuations that are driven by short-term temperature changes (i.e. last winter was cold), go to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s key indicator page for sea level rise (click here). Role your mouse over the final data point in the upper right from August 2008. Again, it is almost precisely on the long-term trend.

Yet Inhofe’s office looks at the data and sees “Sea Levels Fail to Rise?” Who are you going to believe, traditional media — Inhofe, or your own lying eyes? In fact, JPL has two nice side-by-side graphs of sea level rise that show the rate of sea level rise since 1993 has consistently been about 70% higher than pre-1993 — a far bigger jump than the climate models had projected:

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Our guest blogger is Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, who is now attending the United Nations climate change talks in Poznan, Poland. This is the first of several on-the-scene dispatches.

It goes by various names here: “The chicken and egg problem.” “The ping pong problem.” Mostly though it’s just “The American problem.” All are various terms for the same issue which so far has cast a pall (matching the weather) over the early part of the second, and most important week of the UN climate change talks currently underway in Poland.

What is the problem? The pervading fear here that the Obama administration will not embrace the next iteration of the Kyoto Protocol climate change treaty, set to be decided a year from now at the next UN climate meeting in Copenhagen, because they will not have a national cap and trade agreement through Congress by that time. According to organizations like the Pew Center on Global Climate Change no national cap and trade equals no confidence that new targets for limiting emissions stipulated by a Copenhagen agreement could be met equals no agreement to finalize a new treaty at Copenhagen where an extension of Kyoto must be finished. According to Pew’s Elliot Diringer, “A full, final, ratifiable agreement just isn’t in the cards.”

This is particularly hard news for the international community here to swallow after last year’s UN meeting in Bali where a “roadmap” document for the anticipated Copenhagen treaty was negotiated over much turmoil. The Bush administration almost hijacked that meeting by initially refusing to sign the roadmap because it included a broad and modest range of stipulated targets for CO2 reductions for the successor treaty. Bali would have ended in utter failure if not for Al Gore and a few others who saved the conference by convincing outraged delegates to wait one year for a new administration ready to join the world community. As a result, after much drama, Europeans and others shelved their plan for targeted cuts in the Bali roadmap and the US agreed to a vastly watered down document in the final minutes of the conference. Bush and company won that round but the rest of the world walked out confident that this year would be different regardless of who won the US presidential election.

And then came Obama. Expectations here couldn’t have been higher that the results of the US election were a complete game changer for the next phase of the Kyoto process. Were they just wrong? Read more

What is a green job?

Green jobs are living-wage, career-track jobs that contribute to preserving or enhancing environmental quality. They have some important characteristics:

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[In my effort to highlight other climate bloggers, I'm reprinting this post from Richard Graves, of It's Getting Hot in Here, since it's their future we "adults" are destroying.]

The world is halfway through the process to create a global climate treaty to respond to Global Warming. In the halls around me, government, NGO, and UN negotiators are painstakingly working through the process to create a draft text for this treaty. The last decade has been a period where climate campaigners and negotiators knew where they stood, with the Bush Administration blocking progress, the European Union leading on the UN process, and environmental organizations facing off against the Oil, Gas, and Coal industries. Suddenly everything has changed, with Obama’s election, the EU Climate Package failing, and the Canadians having a parliamentary crisis – a financial crisis dragging down the automobile companies – and newly emergent actors like the youth movement, trade unions, and justice advocates showing up onto the global scene.

Nevertheless, with a financial crisis diverting attention from the climate crisis and backsliding among traditional advocates for strong international climate action – there is a lot of frustration and fear on the behalf of many Non-Governmental Organizations. One of the bright spots of the Poznan climate talks has been the arrival of large and energized youth delegations, including representatives of countries such as India, that have inspired many people here. Yet, despite the ever-growing level of international cooperation there remains two paths that this movement could take – that will have major consequences on the outcome of the global negotiations.
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