On MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski discussed the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) with guests Tom Brokaw and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins of Green for All. The table agreed that the passage of clean energy jobs legislation could be the one “silver lining” of the current economic devastation, allowing the United States to rebuild its economy to be greener, stronger, and more competitive in the 21st century. Scarborough asked the key question:

We’re really at a reset right now. The opportunities that we have, it seems like America is restructuring its entire economy. So why don’t we restructure it in a way that prepares us for the next generation?

Watch it:

Ellis-Lamkins asked, “Will we be a country that imports its batteries from China and oil from the Middle East, or will we be a country that creates its own energy?” Brokaw related how both Henry Ford and Lee Iacocca missed the boat in the 1970s on energy efficiency and safety for automotives, stuck in the smug complacency of past success. “This is a generational thing,” Donny Deutsch remarked. “Kids today, it’s in their DNA. And that’s what’s going to save us.”

Scarborough concluded:

I can’t state this any more clearly. This is our best chance economically to reengage and once again be leaders. If we take the lead in the green economy, we’ll be economically in good shape.

Tonight at 9 pm on ABC, “Bob Woodruff explores what might be the worst case scenario for civilization.”

Hurray for the mainstream media exploring the worst-case scenario aka Hell and High Water!  I am very interested in your thoughts on this show — before and after.  One of the most commented on posts of this year was “How likely is it that Global Warming will destroy human civilization within the next century?”

You can see video excerpts and viewer submissions on what looks to be an excellent website:

Experts say over the next hundred years the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results….

“If we continue on the business as usual trajectory, there will be a tipping point that we cannot avert,” says John P. Holdren, science advisor to President Obama. “We will indeed drive the car over the cliff“….

“A few hundred years down the line, they’ll look back and say the dark ages began with the twenty-first century,” says E. O. Wilson, an award-winning evolutionary biologist and professor at Harvard University.

Here’s more on the two scenarios the show lays out for humanity’s future:

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The Energy and Commerce Committee finally released a summary (here) of the American Clean Energy and Security Act as reported by the Committee on May 21 by a vote of 33 to 25.  Here are the key provisions:

• Require electric utilities to meet 20% of their electricity demand through renewable energy sources and energy efficiency by 2020.
• Invest in new clean energy technologies and energy efficiency, including energy efficiency and renewable energy ($90 billion in new investments by 2025), carbon capture and sequestration ($60 billion), electric and other advanced technology vehicles ($20 billion), and basic scientific research and development ($20 billion).
• Mandate new energy-saving standards for buildings, appliances, and industry.
• Reduce carbon emissions from major U.S. sources by 17% by 2020 and over 80% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels. Complementary measures in the legislation, such as investments in preventing tropical deforestation, will achieve significant additional reductions in carbon emissions.
• Protect consumers from energy price increases. According to estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, the reductions in carbon pollution required by the legislation will cost American families less than a postage stamp per day.

The clean energy investments are based on EPA’s estimate of likely allowance cost, which strike me as maybe 25% high.  Yes, the CCS funding is too high (and the 2020 target is still too low).  The renewable energy standard is also too weak, but establishing any energy efficiency standard is important.  I will do a separate post on the building standards, since they are actually pretty impressive.

Here are extended excerpts of the longer summary, which provide a pretty good guide to a bill that, if it becomes law, would lead to a clean energy revolution that replaces most of our existing energy infrastructure over the next few decades:

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JR:  I have been meaning to blog on the beautiful new book by fellow blogger Gavin Schmidt (RealClimate.org).  Salon beat me to the punch.  Click the photo for a slideshow of great pictures from the book.

The seldom-seen devastation of climate change

In our visual culture, climate change remains oddly invisible. Few people can glimpse melting glaciers or perceive that seas levels are rising. We may feel hotter, but we cannot see carbon rising through the atmosphere as we drive our cars around. This is one reason for our lethargic response to the problem: out of sight, out of mind.

Climate Change: Picturing the Science, a new book by Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, aims to alter that by providing a rich photographic record of a warming world.  Some photos tell a self-evident record of geophysical change, like a shot of Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, where warming-induced drought has produced a dramatically lowered water line — a yellow “bathtub ring” of once-submerged rock.  [See picture above.]

Most of the piece is devoted to an interview with Schmidt, including his response to Freeman Dyson’s uninformed critique of climate modelers like him (see also Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Freeman Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not.”)

Kudos to Schmidt for a different take on climate.

Spain’s High-Speed Rail Offers Guideposts for U.S.

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• The choice:  Will they use the money to become cities of the past or cities of the future?
• The question:  What is a city of the future, anyway?

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Yesterday, long-time GM critic Michael Moore offered his take on the auto giant’s demise (here).  He calls for a radical change in GM’s mission — a WWII-style rapid reengineering of the company to address the planet’s environmental crisis.  Terrific idea (see “Advice to a young climate blogger: Always use WWII metaphors“).  He deserves to be heard because he warned us all two decades ago what was ahead for GM in his career-making first film.

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM’s birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one — has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh — and that wouldn’t start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the “inferior” Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to “improve” the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company’s body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with — dare I say it — joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know — who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let’s be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Thus, as GM is “reorganized” by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made “Roger & Me,” I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

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