[In January, I blogged on this study by a leading journalist who documented the media's mistakes and biases during the Lieberman-Warner debate.  Yet the media is making the exact same mistakes in the current debate over the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill (see "The New Yorker (!) parrots right-wing talking points" and "David Broder" and "NYT's Matt Wald" and "the NYT again").  So I'm reposting it.]

One of the country’s leading journalists has written a searing critique of the media’s coverage of global warming, especially climate economics.

How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change is by Eric Pooley for Harvard’s prestigious Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Pooley has been managing editor of Fortune, national editor of Time, Time‘s chief political correspondent, and Time‘s White House correspondent, where he won the Gerald Ford Prize for Excellence in Reporting. Before that, he was senior editor of New York magazine.

In short, Pooley has earned the right to be heard. Journalists and senior editors need to pay heed to Pooley’s three tough conclusions abut how “damaging” the recent media of the climate debate has been:

1. The press misrepresented the economic debate over cap and trade. It failed to recognize the emerging consensus “¦ that cap and trade would have a marginal effect on economic growth and gave doomsday forecasts coequal status with nonpartisan ones”¦. The press allowed opponents of climate action to replicate the false debate over climate science in the realm of climate economics.
2. The press failed to perform the basic service of making climate policy and its economic impact understandable to the reader and allowed opponents of climate action to set the terms of the cost debate. The argument centered on the short-term costs of taking action-i.e., higher electricity and gasoline prices-and sometimes assumed that doing nothing about climate change carried no cost.
3. Editors failed to devote sufficient resources to the climate story. In general, global warming is still being shoved into the “environment” pigeonhole, along with the spotted owls and delta smelt, when it is clearly to society’s detriment to think about the subject that way. It is time for editors to treat climate policy as a permanent, important beat: tracking a mobilization for the moral equivalent of war.

Precisely.

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This was first posted on Think Progress.

In a new Time article on the state of the Republican Party, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) lamented the GOP’s exclusion of groups like minorities and environmentalists. “Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land,” she said, echoing comments her fellow Maine senator Susan Collins (R) made last week. She also complained that, “to the average American,” the GOP is just the party of “Big Oil and the rich“:

Snowe recalls that when she proposed fiscally conservative “triggers” to limit Bush’s tax cuts in case of deficits, she was attacked by fellow Republicans. “I don’t know when willy-nilly tax cuts became the essence of who we are,” she says. “To the average American who’s struggling, we’re in some other stratosphere. We’re the party of Big Business and Big Oil and the rich.”

Of course, Americans are right to view the GOP as the party of Big Oil, which gave nearly $20 million to the Republican party apparatus during the last election cycle. The securities and investments industry “” big banks “” donated more than $54 million to the GOP.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will covert to a hydrogen car economy?’ The answer, we felt, was ‘no,’” Chu said in a briefing today. He cited several barriers, including infrastructure, development of long-lasting portable fuel cells and other problems.

For years now, I have been urging the Department of Energy to slash the bloated hydrogen budget and redirect the funds toward clean energy technology development and deployment programs that could actually achieve significant benefits for the American public in the foreseeable future (see “California Hydrogen Highway R.I.P.” and “DOE flushes $15 million down the hydrogen toilet“).

Well, finally, we have somebody running the Department of Energy who gets how unproductive this whole effort has proven to be.  Nobelist Steven Chu has rolled out a FY2010 budget that cuts $100 million from the program.  Indeed, the budget (see page 4 here) zeroes out the “hydrogen” program and shifts all the money to “fuel cell technologies.”

I’ll blog on the rest of the remarkable FY2010 budget for clean energy shortly.  Here is how E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reports Chu’s remarks today on hydrogen and transportation in his budget:

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Competing with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” the coal front group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is launching an online “Factuality Tour” of five states to obscure the toxicity and pollution of coal. As part of the “Factuality Tour,” ACCCE is selling “Factuality” hats, “Factuality” tank tops, and “Factuality” organic baby bodysuits. You can “spread the word” online with “Factuality” widgets and badges. The first stop on the Factuality Tour is ACCCE member Arch Coal’s massive Thunder Basin strip mine in Wyoming:

No amount of PR spending or jazzy jingles can obscure the actual facts about coal: it’s a dirty killer of jobs, health, and the environment. Arch Coal, as can be seen from the Factuality video itself, is profiting obscenely from the literal stripmining of our planet:

Arch Sold Three Billion Dollars Of Coal Pollution In 2008. Arch sold 139.6 million tons of coal in 2008, about 12% of the United States supply, making $354.3 million on nearly three billion dollars of revenue. Employing only 4300 people, Arch produced over 32,000 tons of coal and made $82,400 per employee. Arch Coal’s CEO Steven Leer pulled in $6.56 million.

Arch Coal Is A Top Global Warming Polluter While Doing Nothing To Solve The Threat. The burning of Arch’s coal in 2008 generated about 223 million tons of carbon dioxide, approximately three percent of all U.S. emissions, and 52,000 tons per employee. Despite having made $929 million since 2003, Arch Coal is not investing in a single project to develop the technology needed to capture and store coal’s global warming pollution, according to a Center for American Progress analysis.

Arch Coal Is A High-Rolling Lobbying And Political Spender. Arch Coal spent $970,000 last year lobbying Congress, and has already spent $240,000 this year. Arch gave $116,750 to House members in 2007-2008, and $73,250 to Senate members in 2007-2008.

The average American carbon footprint is about 20 tons a year; the average Chinese carbon footprint is 3 tons a year. As he makes about two percent of Arch Coal profits, CEO Steven Leer’s footprint is over four million tons of global warming pollution a year.

“Don’t confuse my opposition to excessive regulation with a desire for inaction.  We don’t need an international treaty with rules and regulations that will handcuff the American economy or our ability to make our environment cleaner, safer and healthier.”

- “Words that Work” from GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz, in his 2002 memo on talking points for conservatives on how to undermine support for strong U.S. climate action.

Global warming deniers like Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) have long opposed U.S. participation in collective international action on global warming.  And yet they have the chutzpah to now offer this absurd argument for why this country should do nothing to prevent catastrophic global warming:  If we act by ourselves, it won’t solve the problem!

By way of debunking this, let me start by using a timely analogy.

Imagine if a serious global pandemic started spreading from, say, the United States, to the rest of the world.  Now imagine that the Centers for Disease Control proposed taking strong action to stop and reverse the spread of the pandemic in this country — action that would have a low cost but immediate benefits for all Americans — at the same time that the rest of the world was also in the early stages of designing their own action strategies, strategies that were contingent on the U.S. acting.

Now imagine an analysis saying that if the U.S. acted all by itself, the pandemic would still ravage the planet published by a website associated with a right-wing think tank directly supported by a company that benefits from inaction on the pandemic (let’s call it, Exxon-Immobile) — and run by a man who once worked directly for a corrupt CEO who was “convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges.”

Now imagine that analysis being advanced by a senior conservative member of Congress who has publicly stated that he thinks global pandemics are purely natural and benign occurrences, who opposes both U.S. and international action, who believes that people should just “bundle up” and “cover their mouth” as a response (“Rep. Barton: Climate change is ‘natural,’ humans should just ‘get shade’ “).

Oh, heck, don’t have to imagine it at all — it’s all true.  Here is the Dear Colleague letter Barton just sent out:

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It looks like Ford is finally entering the real world, one where global warming and, even sooner, peak oil, will drive consumer decisions about automotive purchases.  Indeed, as soon as the global economic recession is over, oil prices will quickly rise back above $100 a barrel.  They will almost certainly reach record levels in the next decade.  For gasoline to be significantly below $5 a gallon by 2020 would take a miracle “” or rather 6 miracles see “Science/IEA: World oil crunch looming? Not if we can find six Saudi Arabias!” and “IEA says oil will peak in 2020“).  See also “Merrill: Non-OPEC production has likely peaked, oil output could fall by 30 million bpd by 2015“).

The future belongs to car companies that make profitable, well-designed fuel-efficient cars, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and pure electrics, which seems to be a core element of Ford’s trategic plan for survival and revival (see “Whose bailout plan is best: Ford drops hydrogen while GM remains confused about ethanol“).  Today’s news is evidence that they are putting their plan into motion:

Ford Truck Plant to Build Electric Cars

The Ford Motor Company is investing $550 million to turn a factory that was dedicated to making large and fuel-hungry sport utility vehicles into a modern and scalable small-car plant that will eventually produce an all-electric version of the Focus.

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According to Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), corporations would be subsidized for most of their global warming pollution for more than ten years, under terms being negotiated for the climate and energy bill being drafted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. If this is true, the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act would violate a pledge by President Obama to fund tax cuts for working families through carbon market revenues and would generate massive windfall profits for polluters. Doyle said most of the pollution permits created for a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases would be given away:

While the exact numbers were still in flux, Doyle said, “The majority of the permits will be allocated (given away) at first.”

Asked what percentage would be sold to utilities, manufacturers and other firms, Doyle responded, “Not a big number initially…in the first 10 to 15 years.”

The Center for American Progress “supports auctioning 100 percent of the greenhouse gas emission permits from day one under a cap-and-trade program” and using the auction revenues to assist workers and industries to make the transition to a low-carbon economy:

This would include supporting new investments in green technology and energy efficiency; sheltering American households from any economic dislocations due to shifting energy prices; alleviating higher costs for energy-intensive industries; adapting to some of the effects of global warming that we are already experiencing globally; and creating good, “green jobs” and more vibrant, healthier communities in this process. A 100 percent auction will ensure that large polluters, and not the hardworking Americans least able to foot the bill, are financing the investments necessary to carry out these vital public projects.

Of course, without any climate policy, the public is subsidizing all the costs of global warming pollution, as the threat of catastrophic climate change grows without bound. So even a cap-and-trade system that pays hundreds of billions of dollars of public money to corporate polluters to get them to clean up their act is better than the alternative. As President Obama explained to business leaders in March, he is flexible on his campaign pledge for full auction of pollution permits:

Now, the experience of a cap-and-trade system thus far is that if you’re giving away carbon permits for free, then basically you’re not really pricing the thing and it doesn’t work, or people can game the system in so many ways that it’s not creating the incentive structures that we’re looking for. The flip side is, you’re right, if it’s so onerous that people can’t meet it, then it defeats the purpose — and politically we can’t get it done anyway.

Perhaps you know someone in the district of a swing Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

In “25 Easy Things One Hard Thing You Can Must Do to Save the Planet,” Jimmy Seidita disses the Earth Day lists of 10 simple things that you can do to save the planet and then (wisely) argues:

Ready for your one hard thing that you must do to save the planet? Here it is:

1. Actively support the Obama administration’s efforts to limit carbon emissions.

That’s it. That’s all you need to do. But really do it. Talk to your friends, relatives and neighbors about it. E-mail your congressman about it. Tell him you want action on climate this year, even if it means paying a little more for gas or electricity. Write your local newspaper. Join a climate organization.  [JR:  Support the Center for American Progress Action Fund!] Wear a button. Put it on your Facebook. Twitter it, goddammit, whatever that means. Do all that, and you can leave the old light bulbs in place, give your kids the bottled water, and drive your SUV to the end of your driveway to pick up the mail. Just do everything you can to help the administration pass its climate program this year.

The Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill aka “The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009″ “” aka A solid “B+” bill that boosts the economy, creates green jobs, and puts the country on a path to preserve a livable climate — is the only game in town, at least if the town is Washington DC.

E&E Daily has an excellent article on “High political stakes for swing Dems mulling cap-and-trade bill” (subs. req’d), that lists the wing votes on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and profiles some of the key swingers [Note to self:  Need a better term for distinguished members of Congress.].  I’ll list the members below and excerpt the article.  Perhaps you live in one of the swing districts or know someone who does.  If so, now would be the time to weigh in, since the well-funded deniers, delayers, and inactive this will certainly be exercising their constitutional right to spread disinformation and demagoguery.  A little truth couldn’t hurt, could it?

I would note that this is mostly a messaging battle right now.  Given that it is seemingly unlikely a bill would be enacted into law until 2010 (see Sen. Reid: “Health care is easier than this global warming stuff.” Las Vegas odds on bill in 2009 now longer shot than Mine That Bird.), it is very unlikely the cap would start until 2013, and I suspect the cap will be set too high — given the recent drop in emissions from the deep recession and renewable energy standards — so I doubt there will be a semi-serious carbon price (i.e. >$10/ton) until post 2015.  In short, people will not be seeing their energy prices rise for many election cycles, so the other side will have to campaign against them mostly on lies, not reality, but what else is new?

Here are the swing members (and yes, a few of them are probably not persuadable, but many are, I think, especially the 8 Dems profiled at the end):

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If you saw the Late Show with David Letterman last night and are visiting this website for the first time, please click here:  “An Introduction to Climate Progress.”

For regular readers, yes, this is me with a ventriloquist’s dummy, but I can explain….

Click here for video.

First off, it is now officially “Odd Day,” and everybody should do something odd to celebrate this rare occurrence:

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