The coal industry has a new propaganada ad campaign featuring this image:

The Reality Campaign notes the image is “remarkably familiar” to one made famous by the merchants of death:

And perhaps that similarity stems from other similarities between coal and cigarettes, as the Reality folks note:

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Worldwatch just released its State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World, which finds:

The world will have to reduce emissions more drastically than has been widely predicted, essentially ending the emission of carbon dioxide by 2050 to avoid catastrophic disruption to the world’s climate.

At a kick-off event, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said

“President-elect Obama’s goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 falls short of the response needed by world leaders to meet the challenge of reducing emissions to levels that will actually spare us the worst effects of climate change.”

Told ya! (see “The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target“)

Pachauri was the guy handpicked by Bush to replace the “alarmist” Bob Watson. But it’s the facts that make scientists alarmists, not their politics, as I’ve said many times (see “Desperate times, desperate scientists“). At the end of 2007, Pachauri famously said:

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I’m not asking whether we should pass a serious climate bill before China acts. The answer to that question is obviously yes, as I’ve written many times (see The “China Excuse” for inaction and The U.S.-China Suicide Pact on Climate).

But as I noted in my post on Stephen Chu’s confirmation hearing for energy secretary, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) made some worrisome remarks on the subject. Our very own David Lewis transcribed the exchange in the comments (here). I’m going to repost it below because Bayh is a thoughtful moderate who certainly understands the climate issue.

First, however, let me make a few comments. We have no chance to stabilize CO2 concentrations at 450 ppm (let alone 350), if China does not agree to cap its carbon emissions by 2020 (see “Must-read IEA report explains what must be done to avoid 6°C warming“). Right now, however, China seems to be willfully pursuing planetary self-destruction (see “China announces plan to single-handedly finish off the climate“).

The international negotiation process that led to the Kyoto Protocol and that is supposed to culminate in another deal in Copenhagen at the end of this year is for all intents and purposes in a deep coma, even if most of the participants don’t realize that (see “Obama can’t get a global climate treaty ratified, so what should he do instead? Part 1“). Indeed, the only thing that could possibly revive it is China agreeing to a cap by no later than 2020. That alone means Obama’s top international priority this year must not be Copenhagen, but rather China. Whether or not Obama needs some action by China to get a U.S. bill passed, his entire presidency and the fate of the planet rest on whether he can in fact get a China deal (see “What will make Obama a great president, Part 2: A climate deal with China“).

Let me go further here, based in part on Bayh’s remarks. I think it is rather obvious that if China simply refuses to agree to any strong emissions constraints sometime during Obama’s (hopefully) two terms in office, than even if we had passed a climate bill in this country, the political support for the kind of carbon dioxide prices needed to achieve meaningful reductions by 2020 would just fade away. Second, I think it is even more obvious that the climate bill we could pass in this country would be considerably stronger if we could in fact negotiate a strong, bilateral GHG agreement with China (or trilateral with China and the EU) — though presumably the Chinese side of things would be contingent on a U.S. bill passing.

I do not want to be misunderstood here: It is more than reasonable to argue, as I have repeatedly, that the US should try to pass a bill first — and such a bill may be the key to unlocking Chinese action. But Bayh’s comments in his exchange with Chu suggest that may not work politically:

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There is good climate change and bad climate change. One of the very best types is the radical warming of the atmosphere for scientific inquiry we’re already feeling from the incoming Obama Administration.

Past posts and watchdog reports have detailed the suffocation of science in the Bush Administration — the censorship of findings, delays in producing required reports, reduced funding for earth sciences. President Bush is not known as the inquisitive type. As I have reported in the past, some members of the federal government’s science corps believe the president stifled climate science because he doesn’t want to know the answers. He most likely doesn’t want the rest of us to know them, either.

What a difference an election can make. President-elect Obama, often the smartest guy in the room, obviously is open to new knowledge, information and ideas. He’s named Nobel Laureate physicist Stephen Chu, director of Lawrence Livermore Berkeley National Laboratory to Energy; physicist and energy/environment expert John Holdren of Harvard as his science advisor; Marine biologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University to NOAA; Harold Varmus, former director of the national Institutes of Health, and Eric Lander of MIT as co-chairmen of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

As Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science notes in the Economist, “we’ve never had a president surrounded in close proximity with so many well-known, top scientific minds.”

Another signal that it’s springtime for science is the economic stimulus plan the Obama team is circulating in Congress and in cyberspace. According to the plan:

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