Many of the top climate scientists in the world issued a major synthesis report reviewing the scientific literature since the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).  They found “greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections.”  In short, actual observations show things are much worse than the IPPC found.  Duh! and Duh! and Duh! Media coverage level — bupkis!  Technorati links to report released June 18 — 6.

One EPA economist,  Alan Carlin, cuts and pastes some disinformation from a denier blog post in order to (falsely) assert that the EPA’s endangerment finding is flawed because

• “In the rapidly evolving field of climate change, by grounding its TSD Technical Support Documents in the IPCC AR4 the EPA is largely relying on scientific findings that are, by early 2009, largely 3 years or more out of date.”
• “Important developments” since the IPCC cast doubt on its conclusions.

Media coverage level of this crap, whose entire conclusion was vitiated by the earlier synthesis by real scientists — Michael Jackson [adjusted for subject area]!  Technorati links to “report” posted by deniers on June 25 — 61.

THE MEDIA PREFERS FABRICATED DRAMA TO GENUINE FACTS

When a government agency doesn’t incorporate plagiarized disinformation into their work product, is that suppression — or your tax dollars working the way they’re supposed to, with decisions based on sound science?   Deniers like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Roger Pielke, Jr. say it’s the former, and they have spun some of the more gullible members of the status quo media, like CBS, who reported Friday:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

Well, this “report” was actually first just “proposed comments” and then actual “Comments on the Draft Technical Support Documents for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air.”

I worked in a federal agency for five years.  Lots of internal people provide comments on draft documents.  Some of it’s good, some of it’s irrelevant, and some is outright disinformation — typically the latter is from holdovers from a previous administration.  In this case, it actually looks like the comments were

1. Unadulterated and long-debunked disinformation
2. From someone unqualified on the subject they are writing
3. Cut and paste from a blog without attribution
4. Delivered too late and not actually germane

Such comments should not be incorporated into an official government document — certainly not without a serious inquiry first.  They might, however, be the basis of an advserse employment action, as the euphemism goes.

You can read a thorough debunking of these “comments” at the RealClimate Post, “Bubkes.”  A brilliant piece by Deep Climate showed that this so-called “suppressed report” is

largely lifted from an attack on the EPA published last November in climate science disinformation specialist Pat Michaels’ World Climate Report [WCR]. And all this came without any attribution of the large swathes of copied material to WCR or the original author (presumably either Michaels or sidekick Chip Knappenberger).

I won’t repeat the entire Deep Climate analysis, but let me quote from the central thesis of the WCR November 19, 2008 post:  Why the EPA should find against “Endangerment”:

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Turns out justice delayed is not always justice denied

The uphill battle to beat the inevitable conservative filibuster attempt against climate action just got one vote easier.  Think Progress reports:

Eight months after the 2008 election, the Minnesota Supreme Court has declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of the state’s U.S. Senate election. The unanimous decision clears the way for Franken to be seated:

“For all of the foregoing reasons, we affirm the decision of the trial court that Al Franken received the highest number of votes legally cast and is entitled under Minn. 32 Stat. § 204C.40 (2008) to receive the certificate of election as United States Senator from the State of Minnesota.”

This weekend on CNN, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) said that he would be ready to “sign” the certificate officially declaring Franken the winner as soon as the supreme court gave the “green light“:

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In 2007, the IPCC warned that “as global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C [relative to 1980 to 1999], model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.”  On our current emissions path, we will warm far more than that this century, which suggests we risk the high end of species loss.

A new study in Science study (subs. req’d) confirms this risk.  It examines “the pace of diversity loss leading to the Triassic-Jurassic boundary (TJB).”  It finds “the sudden diversity drop ^… coincided with a mere ~100 to ~350 ppmv rise in CO₂ concentration,” and “CO₂-induced global warming was likely an important contributory factor to plant species turnover at the TJB.”

The study notes “The abrupt plant diversity loss … is consistent with expected plant responses to a catastrophically rapid rather than gradual environmental change,” such as might be caused from a massive release of methane  Good thing homo “sapiens” sapiens isn’t doing anything that might bring about catastrophically rapid climate change, like say 5°C warming in one century or a massive release of methane (see NOAA stunner: “Methane levels rose in 2008 for the second consecutive year after a 10-year lull”).

Worse, the study concludes:

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Amazon Conservation Policy Working In Brazil, Study Finds

Contrary to common belief, Brazil’s policy of protecting portions of the Amazonian forest from development is capable of buffering the Amazon from climate change, according to a new study led by Michigan State University researchers.

The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contends state and federal governments in Brazil have created a sustainable core of protected areas within the Amazon. And even if the remaining Brazilian Amazon is deforested, the climate will not significantly change – thereby protecting the Amazon’s ecosystems.

New Measures to Aid Solar on Public Lands

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced measures on Monday to hasten the development of solar energy on Western public lands.

Mr. Salazar, appearing in Las Vegas with Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said that 670,000 acres of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (an agency within the Department of the Interior) would be studied to determine whether they could support large solar power arrays.

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You just can’t teach an old petro-dog re-new-able tricks.

The UK’s Guardian reports:

BP has shut down its alternative energy headquarters in London, accepted the resignation of its clean energy boss and imposed budget cuts in moves likely to be seen by environmental critics as further signs of the oil group moving “back to petroleum”.

Sad, but not terribly original or surprising (see “Shell shocker: Once ‘green’ oil company guts renewables effort“).

But Tony Hayward, the group’s chief executive, said BP remained as committed as ever to exploring new energy sources and the non-oil division would benefit from the extra focus of being brought back in house….

“It saves money and brings it closer to home … you could almost see it as a reinforcement [of our commitment to the business],” he said.

Paging Dr. Cal Lightman!

Seriously, they gut the program and claim it is “reinforcement” of their commitment.  Perhaps BP stands for “Beyond Prevarication” or “Beyond Pinocchio.”

In the business world, “money talks, bullsh!t walks” — so let’s follow the money (as it departs the BP clean energy biz):

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President Obama gave a very lengthy “must-read” interview to the several reporters Sunday in which he spelled out a great deal of his thinking on the climate bill (transcript here).  Since Senate passage of a climate bill depends crucially on Obama’s strong messaging and lobbying effort, I will excerpt the interview in two parts.

The wide-ranging interview gives Obama a chance to explain his reaction to the House abandoning his goal of 100% auctions and how the bill fits into the international negotiation process.

Significantly, Obama argues that, as I and others have suggested, meeting the emissions targets with domestic clean energy strategies will be cheaper and easier than the naysayers argued, and that we can then toughen the targets as the science — and other countries — demand.  We may

be able in this process to take a look at what kind of progress are we making five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. With the framework now in place we may find ourselves not only able, but eager to move on that even more ambitious program.

Here’s the first half of the interview [and in Part 2, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and climate czar Steven Carol Browner chime in]:

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I was at a small meeting on peak oil Friday — Executive Summary:  We’re peaking now!

James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, was there.  He is in the Mad Max/Lovelock/Wall-E school of dystopia, and so I have a number of disagreements with him (see “Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the “end of suburbia“).

He did, however, say one thing that really strike a chord.  He said we should stop calling Americans “consumers.”  It pigeonholes all Americans and also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That seems to me a reasonable point, and I will endeavor to make a change.  Indeed, I had previously blogged that the U.S. savings rate was on the rise, it looks like U.S. carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007, President Obama was making a big ush toward making America a nation of creators as opposed to consumers, and I asked “Is the U.S. consumption binge over?”

The figure above is from the NYT business blog, Economix, which has a longer-term, glass-is-half-empty perspective in a post titled, “Savings Rates Rising Toward Mediocrity“:

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This morning, Fox News Channel’s Gregg Jarrett introduced a “very big story” that the Environmental Protection Agency “intentionally buried a study challenging some of Uncle Sam’s global warming research.” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) claimed the report, written by economist Alan Carlin of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, vindicates his belief that man-made global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”:

The thing is phony. I feel so good about being redeemed after all of these years, because they have been throwing this thing in my face since 1998 when we realized that all of those scientists that Al Gore had lined up — and I’m talking about Claude Allegre in France, David Bellamy in UK, and Nir Shaviv in Israel — all of them used to be on his side. They all said, “Wait a minute, this science is not right.” That’s exactly what Allen Carlin said. We’ve already started a investigation.

Watch it:

When asked if there should be a criminal investigation, Inhofe replied, “There could be and there probably should be.” Continuing his attack, he claimed that the EPA “have been suppressing science and coming out with what they want people to say. You might remember — I talked to you about it on this station. When I first realized that this thing was a hoax and I made the statement that the notion that man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2 cause global warming, it is probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated.”

In reality, what Fox News, Inhofe, and right-wing bloggers are promoting as a suppressed EPA report is nothing of the kind. Carlin’s paper, released by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (“CO2: they call it pollution, we call it Life“), is a hodgepodge of widely discredited pseudoscience. Carlin was given permission by the NCEE to cobble the paper together even though he is not a climate researcher, and “the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists.”

The Carlin document cites the usual array of global warming deniers, including Joe D’Aleo, Don Easterbrook, William Gray, Christopher Monckton, Fred Singer, and Roy Spencer — all of whom worked with Sen. Inhofe’s former aide Marc Morano to disseminate denials of climate science. Carlin’s references come from denier blogs such as ICECAP.us and Watts Up With That, as well as publications from the Heartland Institute, the Science & Environmental Policy Project, and the Friends of Science Society, all conservative front groups. RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt summarizes the paper as “a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at.”

Similarly, although the 76-year-old botanist David Bellamy, 72-year-old geochemist Claude Allegre, and 32-year-old astrophysicist Nir Shaviv publicly question man-made global warming, they represent a steadily dwindling number of scientists, few of any of which actively study climate change, that argue fossil fuel emissions are not warming the planet.

What’s really shocking, however, is that “the CEI press release was reported with a more or less straight face by at least two media outlets, CBS News and New York Times Greenwire, without any questioning of CEI’s own motivations or role in the affair.” Both stories show the effect of the collapsing of the mainstream media industry — the CBS story is crossposted by CNet.com reporter Declan McCullagh, the libertarian who fabricated the “Al Gore invented the Internet” story. And the New York Times story is crossposted from E&E News, an independent subscription news service.

I don’t typically lay out what might be called a “worst-case scenario.”  I tend to focus on piecing together what the scientific literature says would happen if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path — Hell and High Water — since, that “business-as-usual” scenario should be motivation enough for action.

Would some 10°F total global warming and 900 to 1000 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations be the end of human civilization?  Possibly, though homo “sapiens” sapiens, while apparently not a very proactive species, is quite resilient.

In any case, a February poll found, “Nearly one-out-of-four voters (23%) say it is at least somewhat likely that global warming will destroy human civilization within the next century” (see “How likely is it that Global Warming will destroy human civilization within the next century?“).

Then we have the apostle of climate Apocalypse, James Lovelock (see “Lovelock: Malthus was right, and Climate Progress is way, way too optimistic.”)  He’s got a new piece in the UK’s Guardian, which I’ll reprint below.  While I don’t think this scenario is how things will play out — I don’t think we face a Mad Max future — the worst-case is obviously much worse than what I have laid out, so I do think it worthwhile to have someone describe a full-tilt worst-case scenario every so often other than in the movies:

Climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age

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Here’s a follow up to “GM sells Hummer to China “” the second mistake by those clueless new owners?“  Hmm.  If this story pans out, maybe it’s a second chance for those clueless owners of GM to make the right call.

China likely to reject bid for Hummer

The Chinese government will likely reject the bid of a local company to acquire the Hummer division of General Motors, partially out of concern that the infamous gas-guzzler conflicts with the country’s environmental goals, China’s state radio reported.

Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery emerged as the surprise buyer for Hummer this month, conditional on the state’s approval. GM is seeking to sell the unit as part of its bankruptcy.

Chinese regulators will also say Tengzhong, which typically makes construction vehicles like cement mixers, lacks the expertise to run Hummer, state radio reported, citing no source.

Tengzhong, a private company, said it would invest in more fuel-efficient Hummers and keep the division based in the U.S. Hummers are known as “Han Ma,” or Bold Horse, in China.

The Chinese government has ramped up its conservation efforts, cutting sales taxes on small cars and encouraging automakers to develop electric and other alternatively fueled vehicles.

Projected Food Demands Seen To Outpace Production

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Some have asked whether I’m using too-tough language against those devoted to delaying or blocking action needed to stop catastrophic global warming.  Actually, most of the time I think it is too mild, a point underscored by a terrific NYT column from Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, “Betraying the Planet.”

Krugman’s writing on climate has gotten increasingly blunt (see Nobelist Krugman takes on the “fantasists” of the “burn-baby-burn crowd” for opposing climate action that costs Americans 18 cents a day.  And his blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” is becoming a must-read for those interested in seeing the record set straight on climate economics.

As an aside, the times this blog gets bluntest are when I think about how future generations will speak about us if we fail to spend the tiny amount of our vast wealth needed to prevent their decades and centuries of incalculable misery — see “Intro to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.”  They won’t be calling us “The Greatest Generation.”  They will be cursing our name as “The Greediest Generation,” as the Bernie Madoffs of the global Ponzi scheme we created to enrich ourselves unsustainably at their expense.

Today’s column by Krugman takes that perspective, and I’m reprinting it below, with annotation:

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My guest blogger, Glenn Hurowitz, is Washington Director of Avoided Deforestation Partners.  This post is excerpted from a piece first published here.

One of the little-known ingredients of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454 is a breakthrough agreement on ending tropical deforestation, which is responsible for about 20 percent of global climate pollution””more than the emissions from all the cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined.

The Waxman-Markey legislation contains two primary tropical forest provisions that, combined, help meet the bill’s goals for reducing pollution in a way cost effective enough to win the support it needs to pass. First, it sets aside 5 percent of the bill’s pollution allowances to fund tropical forest conservation. Second, it allows emitters to get credit for investing in tropical forest conservation subject to a set of strict requirements.

Set-aside funding. The revenue from the 5 percent set aside can be used for a variety of purposes, including:

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Denial makes strange bedfellows.

Two of the leading sources of anti-scientific disinformation on global warming — George Will and Anthony Watts’ blog WattsUpWithThat — have embraced a man, Robert Bradley, who proudly shilled for Enron CEO Ken Lay, who was convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges in 2006.

Watts and I, you may recall, got into a tiny dustup a couple weeks ago (see Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice, brushes off the “breathtaking ignorance” of blogs like WattsUpWithThat and here).   Since then, Watts has been throwing everything at me including the kitchen stink, with four full posts attacking me this month.  I was planning to ignore him, until two things happened.

First, Watts ran a truly nonsensical piece (here) by Bradley, who is now President of the Institute for Energy Research, which “has received $307,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.”  Bradley is one of the Denier-Industrial-Complex Kooks (DICKs) — see, for instance, “Mysterious industry front-group affiliated with Ken Lay’s former speechwriter launches anti-Waxman-Markey ads with phony MIT cost figures.”

Second, George Will published a piece, “Tilting at Green Windmills” in which he uses a discredited Spanish “study” to claim clean energy investments don’t create jobs (for debunking by CP and the Regional Minister of Innovation, Enterprise and Employment for the Government of Navarre, see here and here and here).  Will’s piece is noteworthy for this remarkable admission:

[This] study was supported by a like-minded U.S. think tank (the Institute for Energy Research, for which this columnist has given a paid speech.

That’s right, George Will published an entire piece based on disinformation bought and paid for by a think tank that is bought and paid for by ExxonMobil and run by Ken Lay’s former top shill — and Will also took money from that think tank. At least editorial page editor Fred Hiatt required that much in return for letting Will publish his umpteenth article full of misleading and inaccurate statements.

Now you may say, wait a minute, Joe, sure Bradley 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″ — but how can you say he proudly shilled for Lay when he has wiped any trace of his connection to Enron from his IER bio here?

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Cultivating your own herbs — like parsely (above) — allows you to produce only what you need, as discussed in this post from the Center for American Progress.

You can add value and beauty to your home by maintaining a garden, but you may end up wasting time and money if you aren’t careful. Try these seven tips for keeping a garden that’s manageable and uses resources wisely.

Plant only what you can maintain. Overplanting will give you a headache and squander water, money, and other resources. To avoid this problem plant only what you can realistically maintain and look for plants that thrive on neglect if you aren’t around much to take care of them. If you are new to gardening, start small and work your way up. You can always add more, but getting rid of existing plants is both wasteful and frustrating.

Also, be sure to check the appropriate time to add new plantings to your garden. Adding plants out of season can require you to use harmful fertilizers and unnecessary amounts of water to keep them alive that you wouldn’t need if they were planted in season.

Compost your waste. Composting prevents yard trimmings, food scraps, and other household waste from entering landfills and reduces the need for watering by improving your soil’s water retention. It also enriches soil fertility and improves texture. You can use compost in garden beds, under shrubs, or as a potting soil for outdoor plants. Starting your own heap is easy and maintenance is minimal. For more information on what you should add to your compost, take our quiz.

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It’s my birthday (how coincidental!), and I’m on a rare plane trip (from a peak oil meeting — more on that later), so this will be the only post today.  And yes, this is really yesterday’s other news.

Dust-Bowlification is predicted to happen all over the world — see NOAA stunner: humanity faces permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.  But it’s happening some places now:

Deserts crossing Mediterranean

The Sahara Desert is crossing the Mediterranean, according to Italian environmental protection group Legambiente which warns that the livelihoods of 6.5 million people living along its shores could be at risk.

”Desertification isn’t limited to Africa,” said Legambiente Vice President Sebastiano Venneri.

”Without a serious change of direction in economic and environmental policies, the risk will become concrete and irreversible.” A recent report by Legambiente estimated that 74 million acres of fertile land along the Mediterranean were turning to desert as the result of overexploited land and water resources.

Legambiente said that southern Italy was at severe risk in addition to the islands of Sicily and Sardinia where 11% of all arable land showed signs of drying up. ”Semi-arid coastal regions like southern Italy are prone to the effects of desertification due to farmers’ dependence on water from underground aquifers instead of rainfall,” said Legambiente spokesman Giorgio Zampetti. According to Zampetti, pumping too much fresh water out of these underground deposits can result in seawater leaking in to replace it, effectively poisoning the groundwater.

As an example of the long-term consequences, Legambiente pointed to Egypt where it said brackish groundwater had compromised half the country’s farmland.

“The south of Italy isn’t the only part of the country at risk,” added Zampetti. ”Aquifers around the Po Delta in northern Italy have also begun showing signs of saltwater contamination.” Experts said that the Po River, which is Italy’s longest waterway and nearly dries up in parts when industrial consumption peaks, is one of the most visible examples of desertifying climate change in Italy. Italy is not the only country in Europe losing fertile land.

Legambiente estimated that desertification affects more than a fifth of the Iberian Peninsula with early indicators also present along the French Riviera.

Across the Mediterranean, Legambiente said that countries like Libya, Tunisia and Morocco were losing 1,000 square kilometers of fertile land every year.

Legambiente experts predict that between 1997 and 2020, desertification will have forced over 60 million people in sub-Saharan Africa to leave their homes, many of whom will head north to Europe.

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UPDATE:  My Salon piece, “One brief shining moment for clean energy” is up.  We do need to savor moments like these, since, as I note in that article, given modern conservative ideology, which is 100% anti-conservation, “the country can only contemplate serious environmental legislation when we have the unique constellation of a Democratic president and [large] Democratic majorities in both houses, an occurrence far rarer than a total eclipse of the sun.”

Every journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step “” including stopping human-caused global warming at “safe levels,” as close as possible to 2°C.

This bill would complete America’s transition to a clean energy economy, which was begun in the stimulus (see “EIA projects wind at 5% of U.S. electricity in 2012, all renewables at 14%, thanks to Obama stimulus!“).  Within four decades, the vast majority of American’s carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel consumption will be replaced by the technologies discussed here:  “An introduction to the core climate solutions.”

This bill makes possible an international deal in Copenhagen this December — as well as a bilateral deal with China, hopefully sooner.  Had the bill failed, the chance of humanity avoiding catastrophic climate change would be all but eliminated.  As Nobelist Gore wrote earlier today, there was no “backup plan” to Waxman-Markey.   In this post, I will revise and extend the post I wrote after the bill passed the Energy and Commerce Committee (see “House committee approves landmark (bipartisan!) clean energy and climate bill “” political realists rejoice, climate science realists demand more“).

For climate-politics realists, the vote today is a staggering achievement.  Today was the first time the U.S. House of Representatives has ever voted on climate legislation.  This country hasn’t enacted a major economy-wide clean air bill since the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.  And that bill had a cap-and-trade system where 97% of the permits were given to polluters.  And it focused on direct, obvious, short-term health threats to Americans.  And that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when the entire Republican establishment wasn’t dead set against any government led effort to reduce pollution.

Yet Waxman-Markey did get 8 Republican votes, which is 8 more than the stimulus bill got!  This bill needed Republican votes, which will also be true in the Senate.  The closeness of the House vote — with 44 Dems voting No — makes clear that the really hard work is yet to come.

And for those who say this doesn’t do enough — I agree 100%.  But then the original Clean Air Act didn’t do enough.  And the 1987 Montr©al protocol would not have stopped concentrations of ozone depleting substances from rising and thus would not have saved the ozone layer.  But it began a process and established a framework that, like the CAA, could be strengthened over time as the science warranted.  The painful reality of climate change is going to become increasingly obvious in the coming years, and strengthening is inevitable.

In the earlier post, I discussed the myriad forces lined up against serious climate action.  I won’t repeat that here, but instead want to excerpt something that David Corn wrote for Mother Jones, which states the climate-politics realist position very well — a position you might not associate with Corn and MJ:

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Doggett: “I Am Voting for Final Passage of the Climate Legislation in the Hope We Can Create a Better Bill”

Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) spoke on the House floor today about the Waxman-Markey bill:

“I struggled deeply about whether to support this flawed bill, but I finally determined that voting for it was my best hope for making it better.”

[Full text of his House floor statement follows below]

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In a C-SPAN interview today, Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) attacked green economy legislation, claiming it would “wreak havoc” on Alabama’s manufacturers. Even though a record-breaking heatwave has killed a woman in his state this week, the dynamic congressman now running for governor in Alabama explained his plan to vote against the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2998/H.R. 2454) today by arguing it would destroy his state’s fragile economy:

– “This bill is still going to wreak havoc with the manufacturing sector in some parts of the country.”

– “The Senate, for example, is not considering cap and trade. The cap and trade provisions are the ones that frankly would damage the manufacturing sector short term and have a lot of other unpredictable consequences on our economy.”

— “When we’re in the midst of a deep recession, we need to make sure we’re not making a dramatic change that could cost us jobs in the short term, because many states simply can’t afford to lose more jobs.”

– “This is the wrong time for cap and trade, this is the wrong time to impose a renewable electricity standard on the Southeast.”

Watch it:

Davis is wrong. In fact, the Senate is continuing to work on cap-and-trade legislation for passage this fall. Furthermore, Davis seems not to understand that states like Alabama need the clean-energy economy to recover from the Bush-Exxon recession.

A Clean-Energy Economy Will Create 29,000 Jobs In Alabama. The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), the EPA found, will “create strong demand for a domestic manufacturing market for these next generation technologies that will enable American workers to serve in a central role in our clean energy transformation” and “play a critical role in the American economic recovery and job growth.” A report from the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute “finds that Alabama could see a net increase of about $2.2 billion in investment revenue and 29,000 jobs based on its share of a total of $150 billion in clean-energy investments annually across the country. This is even after assuming a reduction in fossil fuel spending equivalent to the increase in clean-energy investments. [EPA, 4/20/09; PERI, 6/18/09]

Waxman-Markey Directs Billions Of Dollars To Energy-Intensive Manufacturing. The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) includes cost containment provisions, allowances for worker assistance and training, investments in clean energy technologies, a new clean energy deployment agency, and billions of dollars in direct assistance to trade-vulnerable and other industries. [Committee on Energy and Commerce, 6/9/09]

A Renewable Electricity Standard Would Reduce Costs In Alabama. The Energy Information Administration projects that a renewable electricity standard of 25 percent by 2025 — much stronger than the one in the Waxman-Markey legislation — would drive electricity costs down by more than 10 percent in Alabama and throughout the Southeast, as utilities move away from increasingly expensive coal to renewable biomass. [EIA, 4/09]

Alabama Is Especially Susceptible To Global Warming Damages. As a coastal state, Alabama is highly vulnerable to the devastation of hurricanes, which will increase in intensity as the oceans warm and sea levels rise. Rainfall is expected to decrease, increasing the rate of devastating droughts like that of 2007. By the end of the century, Alabama will have deadly heat waves over 90 degrees for more than four months every year. [U.S. Global Change Program, 2009]

Davis claims to support clean energy reform, but he opposes any effort to limit the carbon pollution responsible for global warming. Like the House Republicans, Davis is in denial.

[This post was reprinted from thinkprogress.]

During the floor debate this morning over the historic American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) received a round of applause from GOP colleagues when he claimed that man-made global warming is a “hoax” with “no scientific consensus.” Broun, citing misleading statistics, also claimed that the bill would hurt the poor and “kill jobs:”

BROUN: Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax. There is no scientific consensus. “¦ And who’s going to be hurt most [by ACES] the poor, the people on limited income”¦the people who can least afford to have their energy taxes raised by MIT says $3100 per family. “¦ This bill must be defeated. We need to be good stewards of our environment, but this is not it, it’s a hoax! “¦ [APPLAUSE.]

Watch it:

Broun’s tired hoax claims aside, Broun’s $3,100 talking point is contradicted by the Congressional Budget Office, which found that that the average cost of the legislation would be only 48-cents a day, the price of a postage stamp, and that “households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40 in 2020.” A report by the Center for American Progress and the University of Massachusetts also found that the bill would create 1.7 million new jobs, including 59,000 new jobs in Broun’s homestate of Georgia.

- Ben Bergmann

Nobelist Al Gore just posted this message on his website:

A Historic Opportunity June 26, 2009:

Today is an historic opportunity to pass truly meaningful legislation to limit global warming pollution, vastly expand our use of renewable energy, and use energy far more efficiently. A victory today in the House of Representatives on the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act would represent an essential first step towards solving the climate crisis. This bill doesn’t solve every problem, but passage today means that we build momentum for the debate coming up in the Senate and negotiations for the treaty talks in December which will put in place a global solution to the climate crisis.

There is no back-up plan. There is not a stronger bill waiting to pass the House of Representatives. It’s time to get started on a plan that will create jobs, increase our national security, and build the clean energy economy that will Repower America.