Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my Chevy to the levee,
But the levee was under a half mile of rubble from a mountaintop that had been decapitated….

Okay, I’m no Don McClean, but then neither is the ACCCE (American Coalition for Clean Coal Euphemisms?). We’re still two weeks from Christmas, but the coal industry front group has yanked its offensive “lumps of coal sing bastardized Christmas carols” video. The explanation offered:

We had fun this week with the Clean Coal Carolers and hope you enjoyed them. Now it’s time for them to head home for the holidays. Season’s greetings from America’s Power!

Treehugger still has the videos here along with a blogosphere round-up of snarkiness and some great NRDC parodies of the parodies. ThinkProgress notes that even while removing the videos, the industry flacks still defended them:

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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 Poznań, Poland. This is the fourth of several on-the-scene dispatches.

In one of the more surreal moments of this year’s UN climate change talks, Bush’s chief environmental adviser blamed Russia for the Bush administration’s climate change obstructionism. The US negotiating team featuring James Connaughton, Paula Dobriansky, and Harlan Watson appeared Thursday evening for a press conference where they largely dodged a series of questions about the last eight years of inaction, obfuscation, and general mayhem. When asked by Fioney Harvey of The Financial Times: “If you look back over the course of the last few years, is there anything you would have done differently or is there anything you wished had happened but didn’t happen?” Connaughton, Bush’s chief environmental adviser, devised a mindbending response:

I wish first that Russia had made its mind up sooner as to whether it was going to join Kyoto or not. I think we lost a couple of years of work while that decision was being made. It almost didn’t matter which way they came out but we lost a couple years until it was decided whether Kyoto would go forward or not. As soon as it was decided that Kyoto would go forward then countries began to face up to the reality of what they needed to do at the national level to work toward meeting those commitments.

Except, of course, Bush didn’t “face up” to any such thing, instead waiting until this year to propose a global warming plan sufficient only in Bizarro World. Read more

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 Poznań, Poland. This is the third of several on-the-scene dispatches.

A Cook Island delegate.

In case there was any doubt about the urgency of getting some kind of agreement out of the next UN meeting on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009, the collection of environmental ministers giving opening statements in Poznań Thursday shared the stage with a giant monitor providing a live “Countdown to Copenhagen.”

Yesterday started the highest level of talks for the two-week UN meeting where delegates have gathered in hopes of making some progress toward the successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol scheduled to be decided next year. The initial salvo was surprisingly direct for an event usually bound in a straitjacket of diplomatic niceties. Read more

Gore’s terrific speech is here. Note: It plays for a minute and then stops. It takes 2 minutes for the video to buffer, then works fine. The last 10 minutes are here:

Gore, however, is not correct when he says “the early steps” for achieving 350 ppm are “very similar” to those for achieving 450 ppm (see “An open letter to James Hansen on the real truth about stabilizing at 350 ppm“). In fact, it is the later steps, say post-2030, that could be similar, but only if the actions in the first two decades are radically different.

McKibben’s report on the speech is here.

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 Poznań, Poland. This is the second of several on-the-scene dispatches.

Eileen Claussen, President of the Pew Center on Climate Change

Since Monday, one of the predominant topics of conversation among representatives of American non-governmental organizations at this year’s United Nations conference on climate change has been “what’s up with Pew?” In this case the “Pew” is the Pew Center on Climate Change, which is taking the public stance that a “full, final, ratifiable agreement just isn’t in the cards” to succeed the Kyoto Protocol at next year’s much anticipated UN meeting in Copenhagen, as Pew’s Elliot Diringer told the Washington Post.

The message coming from Pew was that the gathered parties here in Poland should not get their hopes up that the US would agree to language next year in Copenhagen since it is “too optimistic,” as Pew’s Eileen Claussen said, to believe we will have a final cap and trade bill through Congress by then. If true, then we will fail in a promissory note floated by John Kerry, Al Gore, and others at last year’s UN climate change meeting in Bali to wait one year for the US to rejoin the international community on fighting climate change. It was with much anticipation then that Pew held a press conference here Wednesday on its views on the future of the Kyoto process. Read more

The lead author of a new study (subs. req’d) says Inhofe’s office mischaracterized her work with its blaring headline, “Study: Half of warming due to Sun!” Far from supporting Inhofe’s denialist fantasies, the research, led by Anja Eichler, Senior Scientist at the Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, is actually one more piece of observation-driven analysis that strongly backs the reality of human-caused warming.

I pointed Eichler to the Senate website where Inhofe staffer Marc Morano not only misstated her results but also concluded:

Even if you try to stretch these numbers a little bit — but not unrealistically — you have to become sure that the participants of the Poznan conference are lunatics.

Yes, on the basis of misrepresenting the work of one study, Inhofe’s office calls the climate delegates “lunatics.” But the study showed the exact opposite of what Inhofe’s office said — and the climate delegates are working to stop humanity’s self-destruction, while Inhofe and Morano are trying to accelerate it. So who are the crazy ones here?

Eichler replied to my email:

Thank you for informing us about the controversial discussion of our paper in your country. You are totally right that our conclusions were misinterpreted and we are a bit concerned about that.

I also posed her a couple of clarifying questions:

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[This post is from Bill McKibben in Poland. For background on the science behind the 350 target and the challenge it poses see "Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet" and "The truth about stabilizing at 350 ppm." Video of Gore is here.]

Al Gore gave the international climate talks in Poznan a new set of marching orders this afternoon, declaring that old targets for fighting global warming had been made obsolete by new science and that 350 parts per million co2 was the new standard for which the world must aim.

“Even a goal of 450 parts per million, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate,” said Gore, adding we “need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million.”

The number itself is less than a year old–NASA scientist James Hansen first set it as a goal in a scientific paper last winter. But in the months since, a global effort led by 350.org has spread the goal with rallies and demonstrations on every continent.

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You might think someone who had utterly failed in his or her job might have learned enough humility to avoid criticizing others attempting a similar job. But not Bush’s first EPA administrator, Christie Todd Whitman, who told MSNBC:

As for Steven Chu, Obama’s apparent choice to head up the Energy Department, Whitman expressed concerns over his management experience.

“He’s certainly going to know how to analyze the issues,” she said. “He’s going to know the feasibility as he looks at them from a scientific point of view. But it’s going to be the ‘Can they be implemented?’ part of it that will be a challenge for him.

“It’s a big leap from the academic world to the administrative world.”

Let’s see. Whitman’s effort to get Bush to keep his campaign promise for regulating greenhouse gas emissions was crushed in a humiliating fashion by Dick Cheney (see here) — and Cheney in general ran circles around her on all environmental matters (see here), even though she presumably had lots of administrative experience as New Jersey Governor.

And she has the gall to diss a Nobel Prize winner who isn’t even in the “academic world.” He has been running a national laboratory that is actually part of the DOE family. So he has been in the administrative world for many years now.

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