For any first time visitors here because of Tom Friedman’s column in the Sunday New York Times, “The Inflection Is Near?” this post is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress. I will blog later Sunday about the column itself, where I call the global economy a “Ponzi scheme.”

Tom describes me as

Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org.

I am a Senior Fellow at the Washington, DC think-and-act tank run by John Podesta, the Center for American Progress, whose Action Fund sponsors this blog. You can read my full bio at Wikipedia.

I try to inform and entertain here — and be a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants the inside view on climate science, solutions, and politics. A key goal is to save readers’ time, save you from wading through the sea of irrelevant information — or outright disinformation — on climate and energy that pervades the media and blogosphere.

I write from what I call a climate realist perspective — the emerging scientific view that on our current greenhouse gas emissions path we will will destroy the livability of the climate for 1,000 years. Good posts that lay out that case are:

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My recent blog post — Jack Bauer becomes first-ever carbon-neutral torturer as Murdoch says “Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats” — led one reader to email me that Gitmo has wind turbines. I googled, and indeed they do.

What is doubly interesting is that this project is the direct result of the Federal Energy Management Program, part of DOE’s office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) that I helped run in the mid-1990s. Since the Gingrich Congress blocked all efforts to ramp up funding for this “no brainer” program that helps reduce the deficit — by lowering the energy bill of federal agencies — while saving energy and reducing pollution, we launched a huge effort to leverage private money to pay for the retofits.

That effort had a classic bureaucratic name — Indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) Super Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPCs) — you can read about here. The ESPCs avoid the need for any upfront capital by the federal government. Even though Bush has grossly underfunded all such EERE deployment programs, the program continued and Gitmo made use of it (see here):

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You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course. So daylight saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever was.

In “13 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Daylight Saving Time,” U.S News notes:

Daylight saving time was first used during World War I, as part of an effort in the United States and other warring countries to conserve fuel. In theory, using daylight more efficiently saves fuel and energy because it reduces the nation’s need for artificial light.

But DST saves as much energy as light, according to most studies, as I noted last year. An Australian study concluded “These results suggest that current plans and proposals to extend DST will fail to conserve energy.”

In fact, a recent study, in fact, found DST “may actually waste energy“:

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