Last week on the Situation Room, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer parroted right-wing talking points on global warming. His program emphasized that Monday’s climate crisis protest took place in the cold — a talking point pushed by Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) office and global warming deniers from Glenn Beck to Nancy Pfotenhauer. He then followed the Heritage Foundation’s reasoning to challenge Tony Blair on the urgency of establishing a cap on carbon pollution, asking if it is “wise” to “effectively impose a new tax on consumers” instead of dealing with “bread-and-butter issues”:

At a time of this extraordinary economic distress, not only here in the United States but around the world, why go forward right now as a priority with all of these global warming related projects? It seems there are so many other key bread-and-butter issues literally on the table. … Is it wise to go ahead, effectively impose a new tax on consumers right now, an energy-related tax, this uh, uh cap-and-trade if you will, to try to reduce carbon emissions right now? In effect that’s going to be higher costs on consumers who use either gasoline or other electricity, forms of energy. Is that wise at a time of economic distress?

Watch it:

Blitzer summarized: “You say do it now despite all the economic issues.”

Blitzer is missing a few key facts:

Obama’s Cap-And-Trade System Begins In 2012, Not ‘Right Now.’ Nobody is proposing to “impose a new tax on consumers right now.” Instead, global leaders, including President Obama, are working to negotiate the successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2010. The United States needs to have a national climate policy as soon as possible in order to lead these negotiations. Instead of taking action to lead the international community to stop global warming, the Bush administration obstructed efforts. The seeming rush to action is a consequence of these lost years. [WRI, 2002; Platts 2/24/2009]

An Emissions Cap Drives Investment In A Clean Economy. As McKinsey & Company has found, putting a cap on carbon emissions corrects market failures by driving investment into efficiency and fuel economy improvements that actually saves everyone money. Then it spurs investment into the expansion of renewable energy, creating new jobs and a competitive advantage in the international marketplace. Economic analyses of the effect of an increasingly stringent cap, applied over decades, find that the economic impact of the transition to a clean economy is dwarfed by the high volatility of fossil fuel prices. [McKinsey & Co., 11/2007; EDF, 3/11/2008; NRDC 1/28/2009]

Global Warming Is A ‘Key Bread-And-Butter Issue’ That ‘Effectively Imposes’ A Tax On The Most Vulnerable. Global warming is only one of the most serious symptoms of our fossil-based economy, which benefits polluters at the expense of everyone else. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow out of the U.S. economy to oil suppliers; inner-city children suffer from asthma and communities in Appalachia are decimated by the coal industry. And deadly weather like Hurricane Katrina, Iowa’s floods, California’s wildfires, and Texas drought are becoming the new normal. Limiting carbon pollution is key to preserving prosperity today and for future generations. [U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 2008; Tufts University, 4/2008; MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change, 2009]

Cap And Trade Is Only ‘A New Tax’ If Polluters Pass On The Costs. A cap on emissions only raises costs for those energy producers who can’t find money-saving investments in efficiency and conservation. With the recovery act, Obama has already initiated major federal incentive programs for efficiency and clean energy that subsidize those investments. Obama plans to invest $15 billion a year from the cap-and-trade program to further drive clean energy investment and benefit the power industry. Only if polluters pass on additional costs to consumers — instead of, for example, taking executive pay cuts — will a cap-and-trade system “effectively impose a new tax on consumers.” [Barack Obama, 8/3/2008; Center for American Progress, 1/21/2008]

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has explained that a properly designed cap-and-trade system tackles global warming, spurs a clean-energy economy, and insulates working Americans from both energy price volatility and costs passed on to them from industrial polluters:

Auctioning the emissions allowances under a cap-and-trade system would generate more than enough revenue to pay for this consumer relief. Less than 60 percent of the auction revenues would be sufficient to provide relief to a substantial majority of U.S. consumers.

President Obama has proposed to return more than 80 percent of the auction revenues to provide relief to U.S. consumers through a tax cut to make work pay, not pollution.

On the same day the EPA announced plans to regulate coal ash and leaked a document that the CO2 “endangerment finding” is coming April 16, some 4,000 gallons of coal ash escaped its confinement and began a desperate journey to pollute DC waters. Coincidence? I think not!

Toxic coal sludge yearns to be free to pollute, as Tennesseeans have learned the hard way (see “The day ‘clean coal’ died” and “Second TVA coal ash pond ruptures — at Widows Creek coal plant.”

Now the Maryland Department of the Environment reports that East Coast coal ash also yearns to be free to pollute, and its preferred escape route is a river, one that just happens to flow into the nation’s capital:

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The Wonk Room would like to congratulate Center for American Progress Senior Fellow and Green for All founder Van Jones, who is joining the White House as the adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation.

Van Jones was a regular contributor to the Wonk Room, clearly expressing an inclusive vision for a green economy that benefits everyone, not just the few. He challenged progressives to stop “getting rolled by the Happy Meal politics” of conservatives, who sell unhealthy policies under feel-good slogans. In response to the $700 billion Wall Street bailout last October, he called for a “green bailout” to “retrofit and repower America using clean, green energy — and create millions of new jobs, in the process.”

Read all of his posts here.

Watch Van in action:

Van is a visionary, a unique voice, and a reliable friend. We wish him all the best.

An unusually unsustainable device that I own (see below).

I’m hoping to expand on the Ponzi scheme discussion in my next Salon piece. So I’m gathering examples of unsustainability at every scale.

In asking what is the most unsustainable piece of crap junk you own, I wasn’t really thinking private jet or Hummer, not that I think any of you own that uber-unsustainable stuff.

Nor was I thinking of an electric dryer, since most people (in this country) own that laborsaving device. But that does get us closer to the key question, though: How many of the 10 billion people on the planet post-2050 will be using large amounts of electricity for things that are easily done without electricity — once we have moved beyond desperation and are actually in the midst of the climate catastrophe.

By junk I was thinking of something closer to a relatively superfluous device that symbolizes the Ponzi scheme we have created. What comes to mind at the moderate cost level is a leaf blower and even a Segway [sorry, Dean Kamen -- your genius is really needed urgently for sustainability, not for electrifying human walking, even if many people find some value in that]. I don’t own either of those, but I do own a treadmill and a 50-inch flat panel TV (but hey it is Energy Star), which are close to what I have in mind in this post.

And I’d also be interested in hearing about any of the truly pointless low-cost stuff you have, like an electric pencil sharpener. Indeed, what really got me thinking about all this yesterday was my use of a gadget (pictured above) whose pointlessness and unsustainability simply staggers the imagination:

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The AP reports:

Author and activist Van Jones will be a special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation in the Obama administration.

Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a release Monday that Jones will start work next week to help direct the administration’s efforts to create jobs and help the environment. Sutley said Jones will work on “vulnerable communities.”

Jones founded Green for All, a national organization that promises environmentally friendly jobs to help lift people out of poverty. He wrote the New York Times best-seller The Green Collar Economy.

I have already been interviewed by Greenwire and The American Prospect about this appointment, and certainly endorse it wholeheartedly.

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If you live in the greater New York City area and are free Thursday night, I will be speaking on a panel at the American Museum of Natural History starting at 6:30 pm.

Details are here and below — and you have to admire any panel announcement that includes a picture of a concentrated solar thermal power plant, since it is perhaps the least well known core climate solution:

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Okay, that wasn’t a very tough question:

See also “Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh.”

The billionaire oilman and Swift-boat-smear funder T. Boone Pickens is a hard man for anyone to like these days.

His traditional political allies — rabid conservatives, fossil fuel companies — could not possibly be more opposed to his current agenda of pushing clean energy, especially a massive ramp up of wind power (see “Pickens learns the hard truth: Drill-only GOP hates alternative energy” and “Pickens in a pickle: He embraces progressive policies but not progressive politicians“).

Yet he really doesn’t try that hard to reach out to progressives who might be his allies, as indicated by the headline quote from his talk at the Mayflower Hotel ballroom in DC yesterday, reported in “The Beautiful Wind of T. Boone Pickens,” by snarky Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. Still, his general lack of interest in a progressive agenda should be a surprise to no one (see “New Pickens ad: “I say drill, drill, drill”).

I do take exception with Milbank’s brief foray into energy policy:

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