The challenge for progressive climate activists, now that the Waxman-Markey clean energy act has been approved by the energy committee, is to turn the central flaw of the political process shaping the legislation into a strength.

The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy Security Act has been corrupted with weakened targets and incredibly large bailouts of the fossil fuel industry, because of the overwhelming influence of polluting corporations on the political process. As Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) explained during the markup on Wednesday, the history of US policy is to give “huge subsidies” to the coal and nuclear industry, and this bill is no exception:

So in talking about socialism, if, if you look at what the nuclear industry has received from this committee, what the coal industry in terms of subsidies has received from this committee, oil industry received in benefits from this committee, it so dwarfs the benefits that we have or even remotely intend to provide for these nascent renewable energy sources. The truth is, this entire bill is a clean energy bill. We have in huge subsidies for clean coal. Huge. Much more than we have in for renewables. . . .

But, please understand that it is a balanced bill. Nuclear, coal, oil, gas, all of these renewables, all part of the mix, including new hydro. Okay. All of it. And I just beg you to give these new renewable energy technologies a chance to play their role as well.

Watch it:

The policymakers in Washington have been barraged by corporate polluters, from the right-wing fossil fuel extremists — Koch, Peabody, Massey, Exxon, Southern Co. — to the centrist right — BP, Duke Energy, Caterpillar, Dupont — to the capitalist internationals — GE, Shell, Nike. The corporations are expressing their interests through dozens of front groups and PR firms, decades of campaign contributions to key members, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads, and thousands of lobbyists.

Not surprisingly, the four Democrats who voted against passage of the weakened Waxman-Markey legislation — Charlie Melancon (D-LA), Barrow (D-GA), Jim Matheson (D-UT), and Mike Ross (D-AR) — are high on the polluter cash rolls. In fact, all but Ross have received over $400K in pollution contributions.

Carbon-sector contributions to members of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. Click to enlarge (PDF).

However, this raw expression of corporate political power is also their weakness. The effort to pass clean energy reform tells a compelling story about how corporations shape our nation’s politics. The stakes are so high that corporations are taking a much, much more active role than they usually do, so they’re highly exposed. They’re fighting with their trade groups and their lapdog politicians. It’s time for activists to get the message out that if people don’t get involved, it will be up to corporations to determine our clean energy destiny, for good or evil.

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I can’t imagine why any serious journalist would cite the work of The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) — except to debunk it. As we’ll see once again, they constantly misstate and misrepresent what others say, and generally put out very bad analysis designed to push their anti-climate-action, anti-environmental agenda.

So why do journalists cite them?  Simple — the media love contrarians.  So if you convince the media you are, say, part of the progressive environmental movement, you can get all the media attention you want by then trashing your supposed allies.

I would ignore TBI if the media did, but because they don’t, I can’t.

In just the last few months, TBI, and its founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have gone on a disinformation rampage with the help of the media:

• They attacked President Obama’s cap-and-trade climate plan as political suicide and doomed to fail, 18 months after endorsing the plan “” heck, they said it was their plan all along (see Salon debunking here).
• They attacked Henry Waxman, the green groups, Tom Friedman, and Al Gore (for the umpteenth time) while utterly missrepresenting the findings of the International Energy Agency, McKinsey, and the Stern Review (see “The dynamic duo of disinformation and doubletalk return.”)
• They launched a lengthy attack against Al Gore that completely misstates his positions (see “Shellenberger and Nordhaus smear Gore by making stuff up“).
• The New Republic let them publish a string of factually untrue, egregious statements in an essay titled:  “The Green Bubble:  Why environmentalist keeps imploding.”  The biggest whopper:  “It has become an article of faith among many greens that the global poor are happier with less and must be shielded from the horrors of overconsumption and economic development–never mind the realities of infant mortality, treatable disease, short life expectancies, and grinding agrarian poverty.”  No one in the environmental movement believes that, but it is a right-wing fantasy of the “greens.”  Robert J. Brulle, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science, Drexel University utterly debunks this essay (see below) and writes of this quote, “Who or what environmental group has ever said anything of this nature?  This statement is an out-and-out fabrication.  One wonders if there are any fact-checkers at The New Republic.“

The key point everyone in the media must understand is that Shellenberger and Nordhaus need for Waxman-Markey to fail.  Otherwise all their claims that the environmental movement keeps imploding would be seen by everyone as the sham that it is.

So it is perhaps not surprising that 18 months after I got them to strongly and publicly endorse Obama’s cap-and-trade plan, they have launched a series of attacks on it — attacks based on misrepresentation and misanalysis.  What is surprising is that the media keeps treating them as if they were credible sources — or even worse, as credible sources who are part of the environmental movement.  They are not.  They are non-credible sources whose core arguments and analsyses are indistinguishable from the anti-climate disinformation campaign driven by fossil fuel companies and conservative media, politicians and think tanks.

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For those who know the history, the relationship between the environmental movement and the labor movement has been cool, at best, for a long time.

But the two groups have been talking to each other much more in recent years and have come to a better of understanding of how to work together.  The environmental movement has been talking jobs, jobs, jobs so much that Obama has even appointed a green jobs czar clean energy jobs handyman, Van Jones.

The labor movement increasingly understands that ending our addiction to oil, preserving a livable climate, and promoting clean energy means millions of good jobs at good wages — from manufacturing wind turbines to installing solar panels to putting in insulation [see "When the global Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green"].

Even with all this coming together, the statement today from AFL-CIO President John Sweeney is a big deal, so I reprint it in its entirety:

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In case anyone thought the hard part was over in the House, I’m excerpting at length this analysis from E&E News.  Remember, most members outside of Energy and Commerce don’t think a lot about global warming, don’t know a lot about cap-and-trade, and this bill is as complicated as the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act, except that it doesn’t deal with directly cleaning up dirty air and water whose harm to constituents are obvious to any member.

Energy and Commerce ‘emissaries’ a key to House floor success

Thirty-three members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee gained a new title last night: global warming ambassadors.

In voting to adopt comprehensive legislation to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the 32 Democrats and one Republican now embark on the difficult task of convincing their fellow House colleagues to support sweeping new environmental legislation in tight economic times.

“We really need to be emissaries to the caucus, talking to them about how we were able to find some good common ground, and how it’s a good bill,” said Rep. Diane DeGette, a Democrat from Denver who said she would focus in the coming months on her fellow Western and urban lawmakers.

Rep. Mike Doyle, a Democrat who represents Pittsburgh, has already gotten started, albeit in a very subtle way. He brought up the climate bill over breakfast yesterday with a wavering lawmaker from the South.

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a strong opponent of strong climate legislation.  Its business-as-usual policy plan has so little to say about the greatest threat to the health and welfare of Americans — and the greatest potential opportunity for U.S. businesses to become a leader in the clean energy industries of the future — that even the WSJ dissed it:  “So what does the Chamber of Commerce really want? More of the same, it seems.”  Yet, as explained in this recent Think Progress post, the vast majority of the major businesses on the Chamber’s board who have a publicly stated their position on climate legislation support strong action.  For more, see this NRDC post, “The U.S. Chamber Split Grows Wider: Now Local Chambers Are Going Their Own Way.”

Yesterday, President Obama sat down with members of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board to discuss the pending Waxman-Markey energy reform legislation. One of the advisers is James Owens, who is the CEO of Caterpillar and also a member of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the right-wing trade group that has taken a hard-line approach against any energy reform that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. When the President asked Owens if he saw a “competitive disadvantage” as a “big manufacturer” in dealing with energy reform, Owens said placing a cap on carbon would actually spur innovation:

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