When we last met Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, he was explaining why you shouldn’t buy a diesel car if you care about global warming (see “Why hybrids beat diesels“).

His new myth-busting study finds the following “Total CO2-eq of Electricity Sources”:

[CSP is concentrated solar power, but I prefer solar baseload to that ambiguous acronym. CCS is carbon capture and storage, called "clean coal" by some, "clap trap" by others.]

The study, “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security,” by the co-founder and Director of Stanford’s Atmospheric Energy Program warrants a two-part examination. I will focus on electricity in Part I, but it is worth noting now that in his alt fuels analysis, cellulosic ethanol comes in last.

His basic conclusions will come as no surprise to Climate Progress readers (see “An introduction to the core climate solutions“). But as Stanford’s summary of this important paper notes:

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[I think this is worthy of another email campaign -- this time to the Post (see below).]

There’s nothing wrong with mocking GM. It is a target-rich environment that has gone the extra mile and painted a bunch of bull’s-eyes on itself (see General Motors is full of crocks and GM’s Lutz: Wagoner is one of “the innocents,” just “the mayor of a city hit by an earthquake”).

To fire at GM and hit yourself instead thus requires a special kind of ignorance, as both cartoonist Pat Oliphant and the Washington Post exhibited Saturday when they ran this staggeringly ill-informed cartoon:

This easily wins the 2008 award for the most unintentionally laughable cartoon of 2008. The cartoon mocks GM for designing a car that solves the very problem the cartoon claims it does not address.

The idea that a major media outlet could publish such a cartoon in the internet era is almost incomprehensible and really tells you a lot about why the print media is dying a long-deserved death.

I do think this cartoon should represent a mini-wake-up call to plug in hybrid advocates [note to self: this means you] — every time you discuss plug ins, you must be 100% clear the vehicles revert to being gasoline-powered after they exhaust their charge from the electric grid.

But that is not to excuse the supreme laziness of both Oliphant and the Post:

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Blame themselves? You’re getting colder. Blame Canada? You’re getting (globally) warmer….

Below is another dispatch from the climate talks in Poland by CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light, first printed in WonkRoom.

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:

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