Would the New York Times have Bernard Madoff as a business columnist?  Only if they hated business.

So why does the NYT let John Tierney write a “science” column?  The “founding principles” of his NYT blog are the clearest anti-scientific statement you will ever find by anybody claiming to be covering science (see “here“).

And, of course, Tierney makes up stuff up to smear real scientists (such as John Holdren and Steven Chu), which is only science as practiced by “political” scientists, like, say Roger Pielke, Jr.  And that’s my segue.

Why does anyone who cares about science quote Roger Pielke, Jr. on scientific matters? We’ve already seen one major NYT reporter tarnish his reputation by relying on Roger Pielke Jr.’s anti-scientific –  and anti-scientist — disinformation (see here).

Pielke has launched what is both the lamest and the most intellectually dishonest attack in his career — on a few innocuous sentences in the terrific new NOAA-led report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.  This attack has been pimped by Swift-boat smearer Morano and Tierney.   Pielke has one primary mission in his professional career — other than working with his colleagues at The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) to spread disinformation aimed at stopping any serious climate action, of course — and that is to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather.

As we’ll see, Pielke’s obsession on this point is so extreme that he trashes the reputation of any scientist who even suggests that there is the tiniest link whatsoever between climate change and extreme weather — even though he himself has stated such a link exists.  Indeed, he has smeared the integrity of many hundreds of the country’s top scientists for merely sitting through a discussion of the issue that doesn’t meet his extreme form of political correctness (see here).

Pielke launches the strongest possible accusation on his blog — “misrepresenting science in a government report” — on the basis of four sentences in this 196-page, 13-agency report:

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First, is the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill compatible with “” indeed integral to “” a national and international effort to keep global warming as close as possible to 2°C?

Second, what would be the outcome if the bill failed?

This is the basis of the 500-word post at Yale e360, in which they asked “11 prominent people in the environmental and energy fields for their views on this controversial legislation.”

Much of the writing about about the bill — particularly by people critical of it — don’t fully address these two crucial questions, especially the second, and so they are, as I see it, not particularly helpful to the debate.

Many people, including some commenters here, are under the misimpression that absent passage of this bill, the EPA can and will use the endangerment finding to achieve comparable regulation of CO2 under the Clean Air Act.  That view has several flaws.

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Nobel prize-winning NYT columnist Paul Krugman has been doing some terrific writing on the economics of climate action (see Climate action “now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump” by giving “businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities” and “Krugman strongly endorses Waxman-Markey“).

Now he writes on Friday’s important CBO study, which found a “cost to households of Waxman-Markey in 2020 at $22 billion “” which, given a projected population of 335 million, comes to 18 cents a day.  [We've been using the household figure of 48 cents a day.]  He ends his column titled, “Climate change fantasies“:

The point is that we need to be clear about who are the realists and who are the fantasists here. The realists are actually the climate activists, who understand that if you give people in a market economy the right incentives they will make big changes in their energy use and environmental impact. The fantasists are the burn-baby-burn crowd who hate the idea of using government for good, and therefore insist that doing the right thing is economically impossible.

From a fellow climate realist — Hear!  Hear!

I detailed the escalating costs of nuclear power in my May 2008 report, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power,” which noted a “reasonable estimate for levelized cost range “¦ is 12 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour lifetime, and 1.7 times that number [20 to 29 cents per kilowatt-hour] in first year of commercial operation.”  On December 31, Time noted that nuclear plants’ capital costs are “out of control,” concludingm “Most efficiency improvements have been priced at 1¢ to 3¢ per kilowatt-hour, while new nuclear energy is on track to cost 15¢ to 20¢ per kilowatt-hour. And no nuclear plant has ever been completed on budget.”

Then a January 2009 study for CP put the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour “” triple current U.S. electricity rates (see “The staggering cost of new nuclear power“).  Now we have:

New reactors could increase consumer costs by $4 trillion — report

Consumers could pay $1.9 trillion to $4.4 trillion in excess costs if 100 new nuclear reactors are built instead of using renewable energy and energy efficiency to provide the same electricity, according to a new report by a consumer advocate and senior fellow at Vermont Law School.

The report released yesterday said cost estimates for new nuclear reactors are currently four times as high as estimates made at the beginning of the “nuclear renaissance.” New reactors will cost 12 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour — at least 6 cents per kilowatt-hour more than electricity provided by renewable energy and energy efficiency, the report says.

“The nuclear industry cannot live up to the hope and hype because nuclear reactors are mega projects … that are site-specific and prone to delay and disruption,” Mark Cooper, a senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School and director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, said during a teleconference yesterday.

American shoppers misled by greenwash, Congress told

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Bill Becker discusses a recent study that provides one more example of the Ponzi scheme our U.S. economy is built on. See also “The day ‘clean coal’ died” and “Second TVA coal ash pond ruptures “” at Widows Creek coal plant.”

The Appalachian region has been supplying American with cheap energy for generations, a duty it has performed with a sense of pride and patriotism. But while electricity from the region’s coal has been cheap for the rest of us, the price has been extraordinarily high for the people of the mountains.

That price took on a new dimension this week in a peer-reviewed study (subs. req’d) from the Health Policy Institute at West Virginia University. Researcher Michael Hendryx reports that coal mining costs the region five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits.

Hendryx’s sobering calculation is that the coal industry provides about $8 billion annually in jobs, taxes and other economic benefits — but premature deaths attributed to coal mining and its impacts, including local air and water pollution, cost the region $42 billion.

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A June 5 Congressional Budget Office analysis found under the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act, greenhouse gas emissions in capped sectors would be cut nearly 12% in 2020. And I’ve argued we would actually achieve even deeper U.S. reductions in 2020 thanks in part to soaring production of unconventional natural gas.  On Friday, CBO released a new analysis showing just how little it would cost American families to start down this path of averting catastrophic global warming — and another new study found that accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy would generate 1.7 million jobs.  Daniel J. Weiss, Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, discusses the latest CBO analysis in a post for CP.

The opponents of ACES, H.R. 2454, keep raising their estimated cost of the clean energy and global warming pollution reduction programs like some out of control auctioneer.  These wild estimates were based on either perversions or distortions of independent government or university studies, or partisan studies with rigged assumptions designed to produce an outlandish estimate.

On June 19, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the average household would spend a miniscule amount to reduce global warming pollution under H.R. 2454.  This independent analysis determined “that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion””or about $175 per household.”  This is 48 cents per day — a little more than the cost of a postage stamp.

The least well off households — those “in the lowest income quintile — would see an average net benefit of about $40 in 2020.” These households had an income under $20,292 in 2007.

CBO acknowledges that its estimates are quite conservative (low) since the calculation “does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and the associated slowing of climate change.”

Signficantly, CBO’s estimate also does not include the economic benefits of other provisions in H.R. 2454. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy estimates that the efficiency provisions alone could save businesses and consumers $22 billion annually by 2020.  The savings would be $170 per household in 2020 — roughly equal to CBO’s cost per household estimate for ACES in 2020.

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