The disinformation (“Two Google searches ‘produce same CO2 as boiling a kettle’ “) has 869 diggs as of 10 pm EST (see here). It’s already on the first page of Digg Science

My debunking post (retitled “Ignore the hype and keep Googling – it won’t kill the planet“) has 12 diggs — click here to Digg it and set the record straight.

Chu’s Tuesday morning confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (live webcast here) will also be on C-SPAN 3 (live stream here).

It is must-see TV (see Top 5 reasons Chu is a great energy pick — #1: “It’s not guaranteed we have a solution for coal” and “A Nobelist for Energy Secretary who gets both climate and energy efficiency?“).

For live-blogging, stay tuned!

Another right-wing feeding frenzy, another opportunity to coin a new acronym [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"]. This was first published by the Wonk Room.

The right wing has discovered that Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s new White House energy and environment adviser, was briefly a member of the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. The commission first convened in November 2007 to “articulate from the world of progressive politics a way forward to address global environmental concerns, climate change and the issues of governance required to deal with these common challenges” at 10 Downing Street, hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Leader of the British Labour Party.

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Some myths are hard to kill. The Times Online “reports“:

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon.

The overhyping of the internet’s energy use goes back a decade, pushed by two right-wing deniers, Mark Mills and Peter Huber. They were actually using their easily-refuted analysis to argue against climate restrictions — I kid you not. In this 1999 press release from the laughably-named denier group, the “Greening Earth Society,” Mills says:

While many environmentalists want to substantially reduce coal use in making electricity, there is no chance of meeting future economically-driven and Internet-accelerated electric demand without retaining and expanding the coal component.

I ended up writing a major report debunking this myth and then testifying in front of the Senate Commerce committee (i.e. John McCain) and the House on the subject. Jon Koomey and others at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) did even more work debunking this nonsense (click here for everything you could possibly want to know on the subject).

There are actually two mistakes in the Harvard calculation. The first, which was the focus of my research, is the big picture issue. What is the net energy consumed by the internet? I argue the internet is a net energy saver — and a big one — since it increases efficiency (especially in things like the supply chain) and dematerialization (it uses less energy to research online than in person). The fact that U.S. energy intensity (energy consumed per dollar of GDP) began dropping sharply in the mid-1990s is but one piece of evidence that internet- and IT-driven growth is less energy intensive.

I, for instance, am able to work at home and telecommute thanks to the Internet and a broadband connection. That saves the energy consumed in commuting and a considerable amount of net building energy: Most people’s homes are an underutilized asset, which consume a great deal of energy whether or not they are there.

The other mistake just involves the more narrow question of how much energy is consumed by Googling. Wissner-Gross says it is 7g of CO2 per search. My LBNL colleagues say that is way too high, and Google itself has rebutted that analysis with their own, which I reprint here:

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The right wing has discovered that Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s new White House energy and environment adviser, was briefly a member of the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. The commission first convened in November 2007 to “articulate from the world of progressive politics a way forward to address global environmental concerns, climate change and the issues of governance required to deal with these common challenges” at 10 Downing Street, hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Leader of the British Labour Party.

The Socialist International is “the worldwide organisation of social democratic, socialist and labour parties” from Albania to Zimbabwe. Its members include the center-left New Democratic Party of Canada, the center-left Israeli Labor Party, and the ruling Labour Party in Great Britain. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, founded by the U.S. government to support democracy in developing nations, works with Socialist International and other political parties “to help foster open, accountable and responsive political systems.”

Also, it has the word “Socialist” in its name. Not only that, the press is calling Carol Browner the “climate czar.” In a leap worthy of Stephen Colbert or Monty Python, the radical right wing is claiming these are signs that Barack Obama is going to transform the United States into a leftist dictatorship. The spread of this tale is interesting mostly as an examination of the interlocking web of conservative politics and corporate polluters:

January 2: Steven Milloy discovered Browner’s work with SI, emailing the bloggers at GlobalWarming.org, run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing anti-regulatory think tank. Steven Milloy is a one-man scientific denial industry, as publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and a columnist for FoxNews.com and the New York Sun.

January 7: The story of Browner’s “utterly radical socialist agenda” reached the editorial pages of the DC and Baltimore Examiner last Wednesday. The Examiner newspapers are owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz, a right-wing evangelical Christian who built his father’s oil business into a far-ranging media, telecommunications, railroad, energy, and entertainment empire. He has served on the board of the American Petroleum Institute and founded the Discovery Institute, an intelligent-design think tank.

January 8: Newsbusters‘ Noel Sheppard reports that Browner is no longer listed as a member of the commission. Newsbusters is one of the many faces of the anti-regulatory media machine founded by Brent Bozell III (Business & Media Institute, Media Research Center). Bozell has also served on the board of the American Conservative Union. The National Review‘s resident global warming denier, Chris Horner, asks, “Hey, comrades, what’s to be ashamed of?!”

January 9: By Friday, right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones called her a socialist agent for world government, as Steven Milloy asks about her “mysterious and Stalinist-like disappearance” from the SI website.

January 12: The Washington Times made Browner’s “socialist ties” its headline story today. The Times was founded by the Unification Church’s Sung Myung Moon, a right-wing evangelical fundamentalist religious leader who blames Jews for the Holocaust. From the Times the headline leapt to the Drudge Report, where Matt Drudge juxtaposed the story with headlines about extreme cold weather. Tipped off by the John Locke Foundation‘s Paul Chesser, the American Spectator calls the story “tremendously important” and “truly scary.” At the Heritage Foundation, Nick Loris (who previously equated the New Deal to Nazism) repeated Milloy’s bizarre mention of purges in Stalinist Russia. On his national radio show today, Glenn Beck used story to claim “almost everyone who does believe in global warming is a socialist.”

At Townhall.com, Republican lawyer Carol Platt Liebau reaches McCarthyite levels of rhetorical excess:

It’s just one more piece of proof that some elements in the environmentalist movement (and note: I said some, not all) are merely fronts for the some collectivist, totalitarian, statist impulses that have reared their ugly heads throughout the 20th century with such devastating results for so many.

That’s right, according to conservatives, Carol Browner’s meeting with the prime minister of Great Britain to discuss global warming is equivalent to the genocides of Stalin and Hitler. And it isn’t even January 20th yet.

See also “Bush will go down in history as possibly a person who has doomed the planet”

The only thing worse than an economist who misapplies climate science to economics [redundant?] and misapplies cost-benefit analysis to climate [redundant!] is a non-economist who does both. Our guest blogger on Obama’s choice for regulatory czar is Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. This post was first published in Wonk Room.

How would progressives respond if President Bush nominated as “regulatory czar” a person who:

– Once called for changing the Clean Air Act to require a balancing of costs and benefits in setting national clean air standards — a fundamental weakening long sought by big polluters who believe it would help them resist cleanup;

– Urged the federal government to devalue senior citizens in calculating the benefits of federal regulations because “A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.” This is a concept dubbed the “senior death discount,” and that environmentalists forced EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman to renounce in 2003;

– Argued that it “might be better” to help future generations deal with global warming by “including approaches that make posterity richer and better able to adapt” than by “reducing emissions.”

[This paper, "Climate Change and Discounting the Future: A Guide for the Perplexed," is itself so perplexing, I'll write about it in a separate post.]

– Even raised questions about the value of cleaning up Love Canal, reducing arsenic in drinking water and using child restraints in automobiles?

Progressives would’ve screamed, of course.

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Describing it as “the ultimate exit interview,” George Bush held his final press conference as president of the United States, sparring with reporters over the legacy of his eight years in office. At no point during the 45-minute session did anyone discuss what may be the greatest failure of his presidency: Bush’s steadfast denial, obstruction, and inaction in the face of the climate crisis.

The press conference was wide ranging, covering Israel, the Axis of Evil, trade agreements, Social Security, immigration policy, No Child Left Behind, and his disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Bush fluffed his image as a tough guy:

You know, presidents can try to avoid hard decisions, and therefore avoid controversy. That’s just not my nature. I’m the kind of person that, you know, is willing to take — to take on hard — hard tasks.

The sad reality is that Bush has done everything possible to avoid tackling global warming, instead following the marching orders of industrial polluters. His tenure will go down in history as eight lost years in the fight to rein in global warming pollution and preserve our civilization. Each day, it becomes apparent those were years we could not afford to waste. From today’s papers come reports that “yields of staple crops such as rice and corn could fall by 20 percent to 40 percent by the end of the century,” putting hundreds of millions of people at risk of chronic food shortages, “the ocean could rise in the next 100 years to a meter higher than the current sea level,” and that the world’s oceans are beginning to absorb less global warming pollution, even as global emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise.

Building a clean energy economy is the kind of “hard task” that requires the leadership and will Bush utterly lacks. By similarly ignoring this issue, the White House press corps has also failed the American people. However, Bush did get in his assessment of his tenure in the Oval Office: “We had fun.”

You may have thought the coal industry would never sing the praises of environmental regulations. But now that the clean coal carolers have moved on [see "The day the (coal) music died"], the ACCCE (American Coalition for Clean Coal Euphemisms?) is singing a different tune.

In an analysis titled “77 Percent Cleaner,” the ACCCE makes one of the strongest cases I have recently seen for EPA regulations:

Over the last 35 years, America’s coal-based electricity providers have invested more than $50 billion in technologies to reduce emissions. Due to investments like these, our coal-based generating fleet is more than 77 percent cleaner on the basis of regulated emissions per unit of energy produced.

The calculations are based on five pollutants: carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter. The data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reflects the environmental performance per unit of energy produced. That is, the relationship of emissions per billion kilowatt-hours. From 1970 to 2005, the value for that ratio fell from 30,510 short tons per billion kilowatt-hours to just 6,970 short tons per billion kilowatt-hours — a reduction of 77.15 percent.

If the coal industry is publicly bragging about reducing regulated emissions, then it is obviously endorsing those regulations. And if the industry is bragging about the investments it had to make because of those regulations, then it is implicitly stating it is prepared to make further, large investments to achieve new regulatory requirements.

The ACCCE even includes a nice figure that makes the case for strong greenhouse regulations:

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The green stimulus is beginning to take shape, with mostly good stuff in the stocking, but one big lump of coal.

The package is getting bigger — no surprise (see “Senate Dems unhappy with level of energy funds in Obama stimulus plan“). The WashPost writes:

Congressional leaders and Obama advisers are looking at including as much as $25 billion of energy tax credits in the economic stimulus package in an effort to bolster renewable energy projects, fuel-efficient cars and biodiesel production, said sources familiar with the negotiations…..

The main elements under consideration include a two-year, $8.6 billion extension of the production tax credit [PTC] for renewable energy, an item that favors wind power projects. Obama advisers are considering a proposal from the wind and solar industry that would make those credits refundable or count them against past taxes because many financial firms that provided capital for those projects no longer have taxable income and can’t use the credits.

I understand why only a two-year PTC extension is being floated from a narrow stimulus perspective, but seriously, people, it’s time for a much longer extension to give the industry firmer ground. The solar investment tax credit got an eight-year extension last year! Is there any possibility that an Obama administration with a Democratic Congress won’t eventuallyy extend the PTC that long? So don’t play games with the industry. The idea of making the credits refundable is an important one I will elaborate on in Part 2.

The bill could also include tax credits for service stations that install high-ethanol-content fuel pumps, a $7,500 tax credit for plug-in vehicles, an extension of the biodiesel credit, and one for coal-fired power plants that capture more than half of their carbon emissions or that could be retrofitted to do so later. There could also be clean-energy credits for rural cooperatives.

Apparently someone missed the memo that plug ins already have a $7500 tax credit (“The energy tax credits in the bailout bill, Part 1: Solar power and plug in hybrids win big“) — which in any case won’t be doing much stimulating since there aren’t any plug-ins to stimulate!

Memo to Dems: Please, please, please, do not give a tax credit to any coal-fired plants “that could be retrofitted” for capturing carbon. So-called “capture ready” coal plants are nothing but snake oil, just like clean coal itself (see “Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?“).

Congress does not want to be in the business of trying to pass regulations to determine how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin whether it might be easier or harder for some new climate-destroying coal plant to some day integrate carbon capture. Either a new coal plant captures and permanently sequesters the vast majority (not just half) of its carbon emissions now or it should not be permitted in the first place. Stop trying to fool the public into thinking we can risk building any more new coal plants with unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions. We cannot.

One of the most exciting stimulus proposals is aimed at boosting clean energy financing during this credit crunch:

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