Today’s guest post on the green details of the Senate and House stimulus plans (with awesome bubble charts) is by Daniel J. Weiss and Alexandra Kougentakis. It was originally printed on the Center for American Progress website here.

On January 28, the House of Representatives passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, H.R. 1, by a vote of 244 to 188. The $819 billion recovery bill includes $72 billion for clean energy programs, and another $20 billion for clean energy tax incentives. This huge investment in weatherization, efficiency, transmission, transit, and clean vehicles programs will create at least 459,000 jobs by the end of 2010, as well as reduce oil consumption and global warming pollution.

Not to be outdone, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed the American Investment and Recovery Plan, S. 336, which includes $78 billion* in clean energy spending as part of its $365 billion recovery package. At the same time the Senate Finance Committee passed a $522 billion tax package that includes $31 billion in tax incentives for renewables and energy efficiency. The bills will likely be joined before Senate floor consideration.

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I know the climate junkies out there are reading RealClimate and DeSmogBlog and all The New Top 10 Climate Blogs.

But I’d like to direct you to Greenfyre’s, which Alexa suggests folks aren’t reading (yet). I was first taken by the blog of biologist Mike Kaulbars when I saw the post “Global Warming is over! once every decade or so …” which had this great figure:

It’s always cooling, except, of course, when it’s not.

If you have your own hidden gem of a climate blog — an internet geode, as it were — I’d love to hear about it.

Congress is expected to give final approval to a massive economic stimulus package in the next couple of weeks. But before it does, there’s important work to be done on the color and content of the package. Lawmakers should address three questions:

• Is the package green enough?
• Is it visionary enough?
• Can the beneficiaries handle the money?

I’ll offer some thoughts on each of these questions in a three-part post, starting with the green issue.

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Harvard economist Martin Weitzman published an important analysis last year in which he explained why conventional economic analyses of climate change are “arbitrarily inaccurate.”

The first draft of the paper had said the vast majority of such analyses should carry the following label:

“WARNING: to be used ONLY for cost-benefit analysis of non-extreme climate change possibilities. NOT INTENDED to cover welfare evaluation of extreme tail possibilities, for which a complete accounting might produce ARBITRARILY DIFFERENT welfare outcomes.”

The final version, “On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change,” eliminated that disclaimer, but replaced it with a longer statement that is equally devastating (see below).

Weitzman’s bottom line: If you don’t factor in plausible extreme-impact scenarios — and the vast majority of economic analyses don’t (this means you, William Nordhaus, and you, too, Richard Tol) — your analysis is worse than useless. It is delusional. Pretty strong stuff for a Harvard economist!

The extreme or fat tail of the damage function (click on figure at right) represents what Weitzman calls “rare climate disasters,” although as we’ll see, they aren’t rare at all, they are near certain with business-as-usual emissions. For Weitzman, disaster is a temperature change of > 6°C (11°F) in a century, as he explains in an earlier paper on the Stern Review on the economics of climate change:

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A: I don’t know since I’m not a vegetarian. Anyone out there switch from carnivore to vegetarian or vice versa and can therefore offer an unscientific sample?

I am of course referring to PETA’s banned Superbowl ad, which, though rather over-the-top in its depiction of intimacy between human and produce, is hardly more explicit than what the networks routinely show in Victoria’s Secret ads (let alone Victoria’s Secret TV show) and is certainly not in worse taste than, say, half the network schedule. If our children can be subjected to a TV show in which the hero is a serial killer, or in which semi-naked models are dressed as angels or the torture-du-jour on 24, they can probably survive a model rubbing a pumpkin against her torso:

‘Veggie Love’: PETA’s Banned Super Bowl Ad

This may be the origin of the nursery rhyme:

PETA PETA pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her.
He put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well.

Or not.

The Washington Post TV columnist opines that the ad was intended to be banned, to get the free publicity. Why not?

[Now you know the real reason I wrote the earlier post -- Scientific American: Beef contributes 13 times the greenhouse gas impact of chicken, 57x potatoes: to provide some minimal justification for this post.]