Contrary to popular belief, a strong climate bill will not harm US competitiveness. Quite the reverse — it is our only hope for restoring U.S. leadership in key job creating industries such as solar energy, wind power, and automobile manufacturing, which was lost in large part because of conservative orthodoxy (see “U.S. left in dust, having invented solar PV technology” and “Why Anti-wind McCain had to deliver his climate remarks at a foreign wind company” and below).

While the media debate over green jobs and cap & trade has begun in earnest (see here and here), most of it misses a key point. Action on global warming and resource efficiency is inevitable. Conservative deniers do not understand that, so they contract out for economic analyses that assume the choice is between action and inaction.

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Our guest blogger is Laurie Johnson, Chief Economist for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate Center.

Newt Gingrich has taken to calling President Obama’s proposal to cap global warming pollution an “energy tax,” even specifically claiming it would be a “hidden $1,300-per-family energy-tax increase“:

If the country’s No. 1 priority is to create jobs, then a hidden $1,300-per-family energy-tax increase in the guise of a cap-and-trade system is absolutely destructive. Herbert Hoover raised taxes in 1932, and it further crippled the economy.

Newt Gingrich’s assertion is voodoo economics — designed to scare us into believing we can’t afford climate protection.

In Newt’s nightmare tax math, the economic value of the carbon market just disappears! He assumes the money doesn’t get returned to taxpayers; it doesn’t get spent on any worthwhile investments in cleaner, smarter energy resources; it doesn’t get invested in ways to reduce the energy we waste today, saving us money; it doesn’t get used to help communities adapt to a changing climate; it doesn’t get used to address regional differences in the cost of cutting global warming pollution. No, in Newt’s scary world, the money just vanishes, leaving us only with the bills. Fortunately, in the real world the dollars created by the carbon market will go to all of these purposes, providing us with a safer climate, reduced dependence on oil imports, and creating new jobs to build our economic recovery.

In reality the cost of climate protection is far smaller than the size of the carbon market, from which the $1,300 estimate is derived. The cost to physically achieve the emission reductions — i.e., the compliance costs for polluting corporations — are roughly 10% of total carbon market value, according to the Energy Information Administration. The remaining 90% is just shifting money away from polluting activities toward cleaner goods and more secure sources of energy.

So, even if Newt were right that the total carbon market size worked out to $1300 per household, the actual cost of cutting that pollution would be more like $130 per household per year (minus any savings we earn from increased energy efficiency), or $2.50 a week.

And for that $2.50 (or less) per week we’d be getting a bargain that is hard to beat.

Just four categories of climate damages alone (hurricanes, higher energy bills, property lost to sea level rise, water supply impacts) are predicted to cost the average household $2,000 a year by 2025, $3,000 in 2050, rising rapidly to over $11,000 by the end of the century. And these estimates ignore (because they are too hard to count accurately), the added costs of droughts, floods, wildfires, agricultural damages, and the value of lost lives. We may not be able to eliminate all of these costs by acting now to cut pollution, but we sure can help reduce them dramatically.

So think twice before you rely on Newt for financial advice.

Crossposted from the NRDC Switchboard.

We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation for our lasting prosperity.

So said President Obama in another terrific speech today on clean energy.

As former transition chief and current Center for American Progress president John Podesta cautioned industry last month, Obama ‘Intends To Fulfill’ His ‘Promise Of Energy Transformation’.

In this speech to the Southern California Edison Electric Vehicle Technical Center in Pomona, the President detailed all of the clean energy goals for his administration — and announced a new battery initiative — so I will post it in its entirety:

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For any first-time visitors here because of the Rolling Stone special section “RS100: The people who are reinventing America,” this post is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress.

[My apologies to regular CP readers for yet another introductory piece -- and of course, for the tasetless RS cover -- but I've kinda started hangin' with a bad crowd now. And who doesn't like ice cream?]

RS has a list of 100 Agents of Change of which I’m #88 [woo hoo, I beat Joshua Micah Marshall and even Taylor Swift, but why couldn't I have been 2 ranks lower, fulfilling my lifelong dream of being Agent 86?].

The RS tagline for me is

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Gallup is heralding the finding that given the false choice between environmental protection and economic growth, Americans now choose the economy:

For the first time in Gallup’s 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.

The premise of the question is false. As we have learned in the last twenty-five years since Gallup began asking this question, environmental protection actually strengthens economic growth:

California’s Green Policies Have Created 1.5 Million Jobs And Added $45 Billion To The Economy. According to a University of California report, “California’s energy-efficiency policies created nearly 1.5 million jobs from 1977 to 2007,” while keeping per-capita electricity demand 40 percent below the national average. Instead of household income being lost to the capital intensive energy sector, “induced job growth has contributed approximately $45 billion to the California economy since 1972.” ["Energy Efficiency, Innovation, and Job Creation in California," 10/20/08]

A National Green Economy Creates Millions Of New Jobs. According to a Greenpeace International and European Renewable Energy Council study, building a green economy that would cut United States greenhouse emissions by 45% by 2030 would create a net 7.8 million jobs versus business as usual. ["Energy [R]evolution,” 3/11/09]

The economy vs. environment myth was debunked ten years ago when MIT found that states with stronger environmental policies “consistently out-performed the weaker environmental states on all the economic measures.” The real choice facing the American public is a green economy that offers jobs, opportunity, and a healthy planet or a gray economy of pollution, debt, and inequity. Maybe it’s time for Gallup to rewrite its questions.

The National Phenology Network’s Project Budburst Facebook group; an unidentified insect posted by Flickr user urtica as part of a citizen science project Life on the Japanese Knotweed; pasque flowers spotted in Brainerd, MN, by Flickr user esagor. This article is reprinted from the Center for American Progress’s “It’s Easy Being Green” series.

Are you plugged in to the Internet? Are you an amateur hiker? Photographer? Gardener? Birdwatcher? Frog aficionado? Nature lover? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then with the click of a button you can also make a serious contribution to the study of climate change.

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The United States has been the primary obstacle to saving a livable climate for a long while now. And that has given cover to countries — most notably China — that also wanted to ramp up emissions unfettered by any restrictions or the world’s moral condemnation. No one expected China to build coal plants at a rate that would more than double their CO2 emissions in the past several years. But they have, putting the world on an emissions trajectory worse than even the most pessimistic IPCC scenario, one reason M.I.T. doubled its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C, which would be the end of life as we know it on this planet (see impacts here).

Now as this country appears poised to take serious action, China has announced plans to keep expanding coal use at a pace so rapacious it would single-handedly finish off the climate no matter what we and the other rich countries do. This forces the Chinese to construct ever more elaborate arguments to defend their ever more indefensible actions (much as Bush did for most of his presidency). I have been intending to blog on China’s latest excuse for doing nothing. But instead, we are fortunate to have analysis from a guest blogger with far more first-hand knowledge about the Chinese: Charlie McElwee, an international energy & environmental lawyer and Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Law who writes the blog China Environmental Law where this post first appeared.

China’s public pronouncements on its Copenhagen position are becoming increasingly clumsy and shrill. I suspect that the Obama victory, the speed with which his administration has moved to engage China on climate change issues, the unified position of the US and Annex 1 countries that China needs to do more, and the crumbling of the unified front initially maintained by the “developing” countries, has caught China flat footed.

In an effort to stave off any kind of binding commitments, it has been forced to play a hastily cobbled together defense which has consisted of throwing up an array of increasingly unpersuasive and contradictory arguments in the hope that one or two may stick.

The latest such defense was advanced by Li Gao, China’s chief climate negotiator, who is in Washington to hold talks with the Obama’s administration.

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