What team Obama has accomplished in its first month is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives.

As but one example, has there been a single story in the traditional media about the fact that Obama, for the first time in three decades, has dramatically increased funding for energy efficiency and renewable energy R&D? Since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, and slashed federal efficiency and renewables investments 80% to 90%, conservatives have blocked all efforts to ramp up funding in cleantech (see “Who got us in this energy mess? Start with Ronald Reagan” and “Why is our energy policy so lame? Ask the three GOP stooges.“).

The net result is that we lost market leadership in all of the major job-creating industries of the century — wind power, solar energy, and so on — since every other rich country in the world (and some developing ones like China and India) are not so ideologically blinkered (see below).

But much of the traditional media sees only the short-term partisan horse race, like some corporate CEO focused on the next quarter even as their company goes belly up. My favorite such misguided headline so far is from USA Today:

Stimulus slammed as Dems’ agenda

When are the media and the nation’s opinionmakers going to realize that the storyline of the decade — the storyline of the century — is not Dems vs. R’s or progressives vs. conservatives, but all of us vs. the 1,000 years of misery that is inevitable on our path of unregulated greenhouse gas emissions? (see Hadley Center: Catastrophic 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path and NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

Years from now, long after the economy has recovered, this may well be remembered as the time that progressives, led by Obama, began the climate-saving transition to a sustainable low-carbon economy built around green jobs.

Call me a cock-eyed optimist [OK, maybe more like a Spock-eyed optimist].

How has Obama jumpstarted the one true task of every U.S. President of the 21st century — preserving the health and welfare of the next 100 billion people to walk the Earth?

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The Washington Post “multi-layer editing process,” via The Onion.

George Will’s recent “global cooling” column contained several demonstrable falsehoods. Despite waves of criticism, George Will and Post opinion editor Fred Hiatt have refused to respond or run corrections on Will’s “stunning, boneheaded, egregious errors.”

When contacted by the Wonk Room, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, veteran reporter Andy Alexander, “sought clarification from the editorial page editors”:

Basically, I was told that the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Will’s column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors.

Wow. I’d hate to see what Will’s columns look like before the “multi-layer editing process.”

Full email from Andy Alexander (ombudsman@washpost.com): Read more

Recently, the Wonk Room unmasked the fifty-two men who work with Marc Morano, the environmental communications director for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), to obfuscate the threat and deny the scientific consensus of man-made global warming. This core network of conspiracy theorists and right-wing media operatives generate stories for broadcast by the conservative media network, from Glenn Beck to George Will. But one other man is especially responsible for getting their work out — Matt Drudge. Drudge is a masterful editor, countering real headlines of the climate crisis with tales of “global cooling” and scientific skepticism.

As it turns out, practically every single one the Drudge Report’s headlines of climate misinformation uses a story constructed by Morano’s minions, as the following review of recent Drudge Report headlines reveals:

Every single member of this deck of jokers was involved in the creation and dissemination of Marc Morano’s magnus opus, a sprawling PDF headlined “UN Blowback: More Than 650 Scientists Dissent Over Warming Claims,” released December 10, 2008. And so it appeared on the Drudge Report that very day:

[Please Digg this by clicking here.]

From January 2008 to January 2009, the planet warmed a remarkable 0.37°C (see data here). This is 20 times (!) the annual rate of warming in recent decades and 20 times what most climate models have projected we should be experiencing.

The N.Y. Times and WSJ have made this stunning news of accelerated human-caused global warming a lead story, and even some previously skeptical “deniers” who had been pushing the myth of global cooling have publicly wondered how they could have been so wrong…. Okay, maybe that last sentence is wishful thinking.

But I’m sure you remember how the deniers and the media spun up the global cooling meme a year ago [see "Media enable denier spin 1: A (sort of) cold January doesn't mean climate stopped warming"]. That meme began with a misleading post by retired TV weatherman Anthony Watts, which was based in large part on the coincidence of a (relatively) cool January 2008 following on the heels of the warmest January on record (according to NASA’s dataset).

So now we have a quite warm January 2009, which ties with 1998 as the 5th warmest January in NASA’s temperature record, following on the heels of that moderately cool [OK, technically 31st warmest on record] January 2008. And that gives us the huge year-over-year warming, which should be making headlines around the online and traditional media, if they were consistent, which, of course, they are not.

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This article is reprinted from the Center for American Progress’s “It’s Easy Being Green” series.

Recent research has pointed out the many benefits of a reduced-meat diet. One study found that a plant-based diet uses roughly one-fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat.

“Much about the typical American diet is wrong,” said New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman, author of Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, in an interview with National Public Radio. “It’s damaging both individually and globally, and we can’t expect Big Food or the government to help us fix it.”

Bittman and fellow food writer Michael Pollan–who coined the mantra “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.“–may be on to something. With the United States accounting for about 28 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and agriculture contributing to around 18 or 19 percent of that total, it’s worth taking a closer look at U.S. food production and consumption, not only for the planet’s sake, but our own as well.

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E&E News PM (subs req’d) reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said today that the Senate would turn to energy legislation when lawmakers return from the Presidents Day recess next week, while climate legislation is on a slower track.

Reid said the Senate would act on a bill that includes a national renewable electricity standard during the six-week work period that starts Monday. The measure will not be packaged with legislation to create curbs on nationwide greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

“That,” he said, “will come later.”

The Senate appears to be taking a different path from the House, where Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) recently said he is leaning toward packaging a national renewables standard with a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, as part of a comprehensive energy and climate measure.

I think Waxman is making a mistake here, since I don’t think we can (or should) get a climate bill this year (see “Obama can get a better climate bill in 2010. Here’s how.“), whereas we definitely can and should get a big energy bill this year to accelerate efficiency and renewables and a smart grid.

The article continues with more detail on the Senate’s plans:

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“If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances will be good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks,” warned Holly Gibbs of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

Frankly, this is not news. Scientists and economists have been in agreement about the threat that fuel crops pose to not only global food prices, but also deforestation rates in the tropics. Gibb’s findings are based on a systematic analysis of detailed satellite images collected between 1980 and 2000, which shows that cropland converted to soybean cultivation in Brazil has grown at an average rate of 15% per year since 1990, and that oil palm plantations in Indonesia have multiplied by a factor of six since 1990.

The problems with first generation biofuels (those that are made from agricultural crops like corn, cane, or soy) are manifold.

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