Seriously. I’m asking you — how annoying is that?

I honestly don’t know how I should feel about someone copying my title for a book on exactly the same subject. But I learned today (of all days) from Paul in the comments (here) about this:

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The media are drama queens. The Washington Post has an Ali-Frazier front page story, ” ‘Green’ Jobs Compete for Stimulus Aid: Obama Weighs Them Vs. Traditional Projects,” which opens:

In one of the first internal struggles of the incoming Obama administration, environmentalists and smart-growth advocates are trying to shift the priorities of the economic stimulus plan that will be introduced in Congress next month away from allocating tens of billions of dollars to highways, bridges and other traditional infrastructure spending to more projects that create “green-collar” jobs.

But I’m afraid this isn’t even a Thrilla in Vanilla. The stimulus was always going to be mostly traditional spending, with maybe one-third (or more) going toward green projects.

I’d add there are lots of traditional stimulus projects that are green — such as repairing our decades old water infrastructure or funding mass transit. So I suspect under a quarter of the stimulus package is likely to be atypically green.

As is common in drama-queen articles by respectable media outlets like the Post, buried inside the article is a paragraph that completely guts the entire thesis of the rest of the story:

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RealClimate has spared me the task of compiling a list — and of deciding whether to put my book on it. I reprint their post (sans pics) below. Feel free to identify any omissions, such as NYT Bestseller The Green Collar Economy and, of course (!), Everything you could possibly want to know about carbon (aka The Carbon Age) , and, of course (!!), Hot, Flat, and Crowded:

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We are in the middle of the Jewish Festival of efficient and renewable Lights.

Hanukkah commemorates the “rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem” twenty-two centuries ago. The miracle being celebrated is that they only had enough “consecrated olive oil to fuel the eternal flame in the Temple for one day. Miraculously, the oil burned for eight days.”

From my perspective, the miracle was a sign from on high to use renewable fuels and/or put them in a lamp that burns very, very efficiently.

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Download this report (pdf)

The next administration will face an extensive list of simultaneous policy challenges, not least of which include an international financial crisis, two wars abroad, and the growing climate crisis. While President Barack Obama navigates which issues and policies to prioritize, an essential element of our nation’s economic recovery must be investing in a clean energy economy in order to create jobs and spur economic growth and prosperity, while at the same time fighting global warming and addressing national security.

This report seeks to highlight the multiple challenges and opportunities for action to vastly increase our nation’s renewable energy generation and connect this clean energy to the grid via advanced electrical transmission construction. Identifying the significant, but by no means insurmountable, obstacles to implementing this vision is the first step toward designing policy solutions that enable investments to not only significantly reduce our nation’s global warming emissions but also to put us on a path to a clean energy future.

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