Glenn Beck, the conservative ideologue whose show is mocked by fellow Fox News anchors, recently attacked plans to modernize our electric grid. After Carol Browner, President Obama’s climate and energy adviser, said that a smart grid means “we can get to a system where an electric company will be able to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air conditioner won’t operate at its peak, you’ll still be able to cool your house, but that’ll be a savings to the consumer,” Beck argued that would lead to “one-world government” with “Czar Browner” in charge of everyone’s air conditioners:

I can’t wait for the 97 degree day in August when Czar Browner in Washington decides it’s in my country’s best interest to make sure I’m not cooling my house. . . . There’s no way the government would turn down the air conditioning at the wrong place and kill someone.

On Fox News, Beck snorted, “Gosh, that would be great if I could just keep turning the air conditioner up and the government won’t let me do it. That’s fantastic.” Watch it:

In reality, Browner was describing demand-side management technology, the kind of grid modernization that corporate executives from Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott to American Electric Power’s Mike Morris have called an essential advance. Our antiquated power grid, a national embarrassment which threatens our energy future, needs to be upgraded to a digital network just as the analog phone system gave way to the Internet.

Beck’s rant assumes that an “electric company” and “the government” are one and the same. In fact, eight-four percent of the United States retail electric power market is provided by private companies. Over 120 million customers are served by the private market, versus 21 million served by public utilities, most of which are small municipal entities. The concept that Carol Browner would have control over a national thermostat is frankly bizarre:

During his diatribes on his Fox News show and his radio program, Beck also called cap-and-trade — which would establish a multi-billion-dollar private market in pollution allowances — “one of my favorite socialist ideas.” Although global warming is increasing the deadly heat waves that worry him so, Beck further claimed “the only thing that has become incredibly clear on the science of climate change is that they can’t decide whether to call it global warming or call it climate change.”

It’s not surprising that someone who can’t tell the difference between capitalism and socialism doesn’t understand much about science either.

I am trying to come up with a tagline that best captures the conservative movement’s stagnation’s insistence on assisting, rather than preventing, humanity’s self-destruction. I can’t decide between “Why do conservatives hate your children?” and “Why do conservatives hate children?” Your ideas are welcome (but first see polling below).

Fundamentally, anti-science conservatives are now the cement shoes on the American people, pulling us down into the ocean hot, acidic dead zone. If that wasn’t clear before (see “Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh“), House Republicans codified their opposition to climate action today.

CQ Politics reports that the House GOP “offered six principles Wednesday that they say will guide them as they formulate an alternative to the president’s ambitious plans”:

The principles reflect the minority’s long-held views. GOP leaders said they will oppose any tax increases, either on income or energy, and will fight a cap-and-trade program to curb carbon dioxide emissions in order to combat global warming. Instead, the Republicans reiterated their “all of the above” energy proposals that stress new domestic oil and gas production and development of alternative energy sources.

Here we have in one paragraph the essence of conservatives’ long-held energy policy — the Big Energy Lie and the willful effort to destroy the health and well-being of your children and grandchildren and 50 generations after that:

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Monday I wrote “The first five steps to a greener home are not what the NYT‘s Green Home column says.”

I was critical both of the author Julie Scelfo and Eric Corey Freed, the author of Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies. But having corresponded with Freed, it seems that his recommendations were taken somewhat out of context. He in fact provided a rough list of 20 things to do.

So I asked him for his list, which he cleaned up a bit (reprinted below). I am not going to number this list because the list is not in any particular order and in any case every home is different.

The list pretty much covers the vast majority of my recommendations. I do think that for those who want a truly green home, you’ll want to get 100% renewable power from a local certified provider if you can, but that should be done in concert with the efficiency measures below. I also recommend getting your home tested for dangerous pollutants.

Finally, there is one technology I had never heard of until I hired someone to help green my home a few years ago. That is a “Drain-Water Heat Recovery” system, featured in the picture. It costs a few hundred dollars and pays for itself in a few years — and everything you could possibly want to know about it can be found here.

If you want to know more about Freed, buy his book, or even hire his services, go to OrganicArchitect.com. Here is the list:

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Our guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund, and Kalen Pruss, a CAP intern and a U. Mich. junior majoring in environmental studies. See also Obama: “If you’re giving away carbon permits for free … it doesn’t work.”

Major United States utilities have long opposed binding reductions in the greenhouse gases emitted by their coal fired power plants. Now that reducing global warming is a priority for President Barack Obama, these same companies want to bear as little of the clean up costs as possible by asking for free pollution allowances.

A group of investor-owned utility companies are pressuring Congress and the administration to give them 40 percent of any cap and trade system’s emission credits for free. “We want to make sure we mitigate the cost impact on our customers,” said David Ratcliffe, CEO of Southern Co., which happens to be the most carbon polluting utility company in America.

However, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) testified on March 12 that providing free allowances to utility companies won’t do anything to help their middle and low-income families cope with higher energy costs caused by reducing pollution. Terry Dinan, senior CBO advisor on climate issues, told the House Ways and Means Committee that giving away allowances would not help utility customers:

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We were changing the header, as you can see, and something went awry.

Please let me know if the new header works on your browser. It works for me on Internet Explorer but not Firefox.

I will make this up by posting a few more times today.

Our guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Kalen Pruss, intern with the Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress, and a junior at the University of Michigan majoring in environmental studies and history.

Major United States utilities have long opposed binding reductions in the greenhouse gases emitted by their coal fired power plants. Now that reducing global warming is a priority for President Barack Obama, these same companies want to bear as little of the clean up costs as possible by asking for free pollution allowances.

A group of investor-owned utility companies are pressuring Congress and the administration to give them 40 percent of any cap and trade system’s emission credits for free. “We want to make sure we mitigate the cost impact on our customers,” said David Ratcliffe, CEO of Southern Co., which happens to be the most carbon polluting utility company in America.

However, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) testified on March 12 that providing free allowances to utility companies won’t do anything to help their middle and low-income families cope with higher energy costs caused by reducing pollution. Terry Dinan, senior CBO advisor on climate issues, told the House Ways and Means Committee that giving away allowances would not help utility customers:

Under a cap-and-trade program, firms would not ultimately bear most of the costs of the allowances but instead would pass them along to their customers in the form of higher prices. Such price increases would stem from the restriction on emissions and would occur regardless of whether the government sold emission allowances or gave them away.

Instead, low-income families could enjoy a net benefit from a cap-and-trade system if all emissions allowances are sold in the free market:

These families could be better off as a result of the policy (even without including any benefits from reducing climate change) if the government chose to sell the allowances and use the revenue to pay an equal lump-sum rebate to every household in the United States….. [rebate payments] could actually more than offset the average increase in spending on energy-intensive goods by low-income households.

Unsurprisingly, Dinan reported that only the wealthiest Americans and corporations would be better off if allowances are given away for free. Even if carbon-belching companies don’t have to purchase emission allowances, they would still reap in “windfall profits, which could be very large” from the rise in prices of goods and services that they sell. Utility companies’ pleas for free allowances are an attempt to boost their own revenues while asking middle and low income families to bear the burden of greenhouse gas clean up costs.

Climate Progress is happy to introduce John Passacantando as a new guest blogger. John is one of the top climate activists of the decade, having recently stepped down as Greenpeace USA’s executive director. You can read about his legacy (so far) here. I have known John for a long time, and he is not one to pull punches, as you’ll see. Welcome, John!

Why do crooks rob banks? Because “that’s where the money is,” according to the infamous 20th century bank robber, Willie Sutton. Today’s cash source for crooks is not the banks, but the American public. With every new revelation of million dollar bonuses and payoffs to big corporations, Americans feel like it’s the bankers who are robbing us blind.

Just in case the financial loss wasn’t distressing enough, some members of Congress are now supporting plans that would give big energy companies the next round of publicly financed bailouts, in the name of combating global warming. The leader of this approach is that perennial friend of corporate welfare: Senator Joe Lieberman.

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The best and cheapest near-term strategy for reducing coal plant CO2 emissions without forcing utilities to simply walk away from their entire capital investment is to replace that coal with biomass (see “If Obama stops dirty coal, as he must, what will replace it? Part 2: An intro to biomass cofiring“).

Today, Energy Daily (subs. req’d) reports on the huge — but little covered — news from one of the nation’s biggest carbon polluters:

The Georgia Public Service Commission gave the green light Tuesday to a Georgia Power request to convert the utility’s 155 megawatt coal-fired Plant Mitchell near Albany, Ga., to burn woody biomass, a move that will result in the first biomass plant in the vast generation fleet of Georgia Power parent Southern Co.

This will become “the largest biomass facility in the United States,” according to Southern Company COO Tom Fanning. And this is not the only biomass effort Southern Company is pursuing:

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I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks — even if that trick is the only hope of saving the dog (and human civilization) in the long term.

The last of the faux green big oil companies — Royal Dutch Shell — shocked many yesterday “when it announced plans to scale back its renewable energy business and focus purely on oil, gas and biofuels,” the UK Times online reported.

Jeroen van der Veer, the chief executive, said that Shell, the world’s second-largest non-state-controlled oil company, was planning to drop all new investment in wind, solar and hydrogen energy.

“I don’t expect them to grow much at Shell from here, due to portfolio fit and the returns outlook compared to other opportunities,” he said.

As somebody who has interviewed many Shell executives and written extensively about the company, explicitly praising them for their strategic planning vision and understanding that the future belongs to renewables, I confessed I am a tad surprised myself (see My 1996 warnings and predictions: “MidEast Oil Forever?” — Part I: Drifting Toward Disaster).

But perhaps nobody should be surprised. Shell is, after all, a big greenwashing oil company, which is obviously redundant (see “Investors warn Shell and BP over tar sands greenwashing” and “I see a green wash and I want it painted black” and “Shell spanked for greenwashing ad“).

And Shell understands we are close to peak oil, which means industry profits are going to be huge, at least for a while (see “Shell: Conventional oil peaks within 7 years“). But there is the rub. Consider this seemingly ironic story about Shell’s reserves, from Bloomberg today:

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