A bunch of polls have come out that find the public supports strong climate action in spite of aggressive and widespread Republican fear-mongering about energy prices.

For instance, the new Washington Post/ABC poll of 1,072 Americans (here) found:

While majorities across the board support government regulation of greenhouse gases, it peaks among liberals (88%) and under 30s (80%), vs. 61% of conservatives and 64% of seniors. Support also ranges from 85% of Democrats, 65% “strongly,” to 64% of Republicans, 39% strongly. Concern about its cost is broader, and stronger, among those who’d presumably be hit hardest — lower-income adults.

Well, lower-income adults would be hardest hit if we didn’t give them a tax cut equal to their higher energy costs, as Obama plans (see “EPA Analysis: “Returning the revenues in [a lump-sum rebate] could make the median household, and those living at lower ends of the income distribution, better off than they would be without the program.” And indeed consumers can end up further ahead by taking advantage of Federal, state, and utility programs to lower their energy bills with energy-saving strategies that the media hardly ever discusses or polls on.

Our side has been weaker and less consistent on messaging, which makes these poll results even more remarkable.  The public seems to have absorbed the Republican arguments and not been persuaded. If you read the details of the poll, you’ll see that immediately after the regulation question, people were asked the cost question — “How concerned are you that federal regulation of greenhouse gases could substantially raise the price of things you have to pay” (with 77% saying they are concerned).

Americans appear to fully understand the worst-case consequences of what they are supporting.  Imagine how the polling will ultimately turn out when President Obama and his team actually launches an all out messaging blitz on energy and climate action, with a tax cut for the poor and middle class, with aggressive strategies to lower their energy bills and create green clean energy jobs, and with a clear message of the cost to Americans of inaction.

A new NBC/WSJ poll of 1,005 Americans (here) asked the question more directly, and also found the public supports strong action in spite of the cost:

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Even though his state is still rebuilding from unprecedented floods, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) is committed to coal and wary of fighting climate change. Dorgan told the North Dakota Senate that he was concerned that the market created by capping global warming pollution could be open to manipulation:

I’m not very interested with having a bunch of folks with a bunch of money get their mitts on trading credits, and have our future and our destiny tied to their interests. I feel very strongly there’s something going on with our climate. We need to be attentive to it, we need to deal with it, but as we do, we have to be smart.

It’s legitimate to have a concern about the regulatory structure of a carbon market, about one-tenth the size of the fossil-fuel commodity markets, and Sen. Dorgan has the expertise to design the legislation. But he seems to be letting a policy detail obscure the real issue — that global warming pollution is completely unregulated, allowing corporate polluters to make astronomical profits while destroying the atmosphere.

This carbon loophole has allowed pollution giants like Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Peabody Coal, and Massey Energy to ravage the planet, sicken our children, and rake in obscene profits for decades. Now, as North Dakota reels from its third extreme flood in as many years, scientists are warning that the climate crisis is outstripping their projections.

Yet Dorgan seems to be confusing political “reality” with actual reality, when he summarily dismissed Vice President Al Gore’s “Repower America” call that “the nation should rely solely on renewable fuels by 2020″:

Not going to happen. Not even close. We need to continue to use our most abundant resource, but to be able to do that, we have to be able to unlock the technology … to decarbonize coal, and we’re going to do that.

Again, Dorgan is missing the forest for the trees. Dorgan is strikingly pessimistic that America can free itself of fossil fuel dependence, even though the sun, wind, and human ingenuity are much more “abundant” resources than coal. Yet he willing to guarantee the success of experimental carbon capture and sequestration technology for coal-fired power plants Of course, a $300 million loan to a North Dakota coal plant for CCS development may help it along. If Dorgan truly wants CCS to happen, he should recognize that the most important thing the government can do is to create a market for clean energy by passing strong cap-and-trade legislation as soon as possible. Unfortunately, his voting record reveals he puts GOP filibusters of clean energy legislation above the security and health of the United States.

As readers know, I try to stay up-to-date on messaging, which is why I have a whole category devoted to rhetoric.

I have now sat through a couple of extended presentations about clean energy and climate messaging from people who definitely know how to do this sort of thing.  I will present some of the results in a series of posts.

One general theme emerges, I think, which is really Messaging 101:  Be specific.

“Green jobs” is not specific and requires people to fill in the blank depending on what the word “green” means to them.  For some, this apparently means “environmental jobs” as opposed to real jobs for regular folks.

“Clean energy jobs” is much better (according to multiple sources).  People have a much better notion of what clean energy is.

The same goes for “renewable energy” or “renewables.”  Interestingly, for different reasons, I had blogged a year ago that it was Time to stop using the phrase “renewable energy.”

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Memo to Media:  Who the heck are these guys and what are they hiding by apparently misstating their origin?

E&E News (subs. req’d) reports on a new advertising campaign from a “conservative organization”:

The American Energy Alliance (AEA) campaign targets 11 key members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — all of them moderates whose votes could be critical to the climate bill’s success or failure.

Who is the AEA?  Good question.  The AEA says on its website:

AEA is an independent affiliate of the Institute for Energy Research (IER)….

Aside from the cryptic nature of the oxymoronic phrase “independent affiliate,” it is worth noting that the Institute for Energy Research “has received $307,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.” The President of IER is one Robert Bradley “who previously served as Director of Public Policy Analysis at Enron, where he was a speechwriter for CEO Kenneth Lay,” who was “convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges on May 25, 2006.

Elsewhere on the site, AEA says it is “the independent grassroots affiliate” of IER.  The only people who think AEA is a “grassroots” organization are people who are actively smoking grass.

Now here is where it gets really confusing, apparently by design.

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Top Story

Jim Prentice, Canada’s environment minister, gives a remarkable interview with The Globe and Mail published on Wednesday on plans to meet the government target of “having a 90-per-cent emission-free electricity sector by 2025″:

OTTAWA “” The federal government is planning sweeping new climate-change regulations for Canada’s electricity sector that will phase out traditional coal-fired power.

Any new coal plants will have to include highly expensive — and unproven — technology to capture greenhouse gas emissions and inject it underground for permanent storage, Environment Minister Jim Prentice said in an interview yesterday.

Ottawa also plans to impose absolute emission caps on utilities’ existing coal-fired power plants and establish a market-based system to allow them to buy credits to meet those targets, Mr. Prentice said.

Electricity users in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia would be hit hard by the new rules, as their provinces rely on coal for more than 70 per cent of their power, and alternatives will be costly.

“The approach that we’ve been working towards involves a cap-and-trade system relating to thermal coal, and the requirement of phasing out those facilities as they reach the end of their useful, fully-amortized life,” Mr. Prentice said.

“The concept is that, as these facilities are fully amortized and their useful life fully expended, they would not be replaced with coal,” the minister said.

He added that coal would be an option if it produced near-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

This phaseout is driven by Canada’s tough target for power generation:

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Ostriches of a feather stick their heads in the sand together.

Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) is a true champion of the antiscience wing of the conservative movement stagnation (see Rep. Shimkus: Cutting CO2 emissions is “Taking away plant food from the atmosphere”).  [Note to self:  It isn't a wing of the right wing that is anti-science, it's the whole damn conservative bird ostrich.]

He knows with 100% certainty that humans can’t cause devastating sea level rise because God said in the Bible he would “never again” devastate humans with a flood again:

[Note to Shimkus:  If you believe "God's word is infallible, unchanging" why do you then talk about "The Age of the dinosaurs," when CO2 concentrations were 4000 ppm?  Seriously, I missed that part of the Bible.  If you are going to base your decision-making on absolutist religious beliefs, fine, but then spare me the science lecture.  For those who do quote science, it's worth noting that a 2008 study in Science (subs. req'd) of the Cretaceous [aka the heyday of the dinosaurs] found “sea level that is 170 meters [550 feet!] higher than it is today.“ Of course, much of the United States was a shallow sea during the Cretaceous (see figure below). Irony can be so ironic!]

That is old news. A lead profile of Shimkus in E&E Daily (subs. req’d), however, makes some “birds of a feather” news with this amazing quote from Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee:

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Bill Becker has some meaty suggestions for what “The Green FDR” should do next.

During the last presidential race, Republicans issued a bumper sticker that read “All Sizzle, No Steak” next to a picture of Barack Obama. It was the bumper sticker that didn’t stick and today, Republicans are eating those words. During his first 100 days in office, Obama has served up far more steak than Republicans are willing to digest.

A check of the Obama-Biden campaign platform shows the President has made progress on an impressive number of his pre-election promises on energy and climate, not the least of them an economic stimulus bill that provides the biggest green energy investment in the U.S. history.

Given the Bush Administration’s eight-year climate fast, we’ll need even more meat in the second 100 days and in many 100 days to come. In fact, stabilizing the climate and maintaining that stability is a standing commitment that every future president must make.

So, what’s on the president’s menu for the next 100 days?  Here’s hoping he uses the next three months as impressively as the last, serving up lots more steak — and some sizzle, too. I’ll propose some steak here and some sizzle in Part 2.

Here are some recommendations drawn mainly from the Presidential Climate Action Plan (PCAP):

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