Our guest blogger is Julian L. Wong, Senior Policy Analyst with the Energy Opportunity team.

China’s energy sector gets a bad reputation because of its heavy reliance on coal, which accounts for 80 percent of its electricity supply, and its continued appetite to expand coal power capacity at a rate of two coal power plants a week. While all of this is true, it’s not the full story.

The plants that China is currently building are some of the most efficient in the industry. And as the Wall Street Journal reported today, China has a concurrent program of shutting down small, inefficient coal plants:

The National Energy Administration said Thursday that since 2007 it had closed 54 gigawatts of coal- and oil-fired power plants as part of the cleanup plan. That would amount to about 7% of China’s current electricity-generating capacity.

According to the Associated Press, this capacity translates to a closure of “7,467 generating units, meeting a previously announced goal 18 months ahead of schedule.”

These reports come a few days after Greenpeace China released a report entitled “Polluting Power: Ranking of China’s Power Companies,” which analyzes China’s ten biggest power companies across various metrics such as coal consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and share of renewable power. In sensationalistic fashion, Reuters tried to put an unhelpful gloss to Greenpeace’s report by proclaiming in a headline “Emissions of 3 big China power firms exceed UK,” conjuring images of ecological apocalypse. The Guardian has a similar headline.

No doubt, China’s reliance on coal makes it a leading carbon emitter, but this is hardly news. To say that “greenhouse gas emissions from the three biggest Chinese power firms in 2008 were higher than those of the entire United Kingdom” is rather meaningless without context.

We need to ask — how big are these firms? It is certainly not the case that China’s biggest three power plants are matching the entire UK in carbon emissions. China’s three biggest utility companies, with fleets of hundreds and hundreds of power plants accountable for 30 percent of the entire power supply for China and its 1.3 billion people (30 percent x 1.3 billion = 390 million), match the carbon emissions output of the entire economy of the UK and its 61 million citizens. Viewed in that light, China isn’t doing that badly.

The Greenpeace report is actually much more balanced and hopeful than the Reuters and Guardian headlines indicate. It rightfully points out the challenges that China’s biggest power firms face in terms of carbon emissions and environmental costs, but it also recognizes China’s achievements in increasing coal combustion efficiency and increasing renewable energy share in certain circumstances, in addition to its active program of shutting down plants.

Sensational headlines conveying half-truths can do much more harm than good. If we are to actively engage China in international energy and climate cooperation, we need to have an accurate understanding of what’s really happening there on the ground.

In April, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said he knows with 100% certainty that humans can’t cause devastating sea level rise because God said in the Bible he would “never again” devastate humans with a flood again (see Rep. Shimkus: “Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood.” Rep. Barton: “I wish I had another dozen John Shimkuses on the committee.”).

Now, as ThinkProgress’s Lee Fang reports, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) has extended that doctrine.  Armey told GOP members of Congress on Capitol Hill yesterday that because “the lord God almighty made the heavens and the Earth … to his satisfaction … it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that, that we are going to destroy God’s creation.”

Under Armey’s Gospel of Pollution (GOP), God made his creation invulnerable to all human action — not counting all the species we have wiped out, of course.  For some reason, God made them vulnerable.  Same for the forests we cut down.  And, of course, all the humans killed by human-generated toxins and pollution.  That’s why it’s a Gospel — you have to take it on faith.

And this guy was House Majority leader once!  Here’s the video in which Armey lays out his GOP to the GOP:

Lee Fang has the transcript and the story behind Armey’s “testimony”:

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$30B available to jumpstart renewable energy, ‘smart grid’ projects

The Energy Department is making up to $30 billion in loan guarantee authority available for renewable energy and electric grid modernization projects.

DOE announced yesterday it was ready to accept applications for about $8.5 billion in loan guarantee authority for advanced renewable energy projects made available in the department’s 2009 spending bill and $3.25 billion provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to cover the subsidy costs that will unleash the billions of dollars in loan guarantee authority for renewable energy, transmission projects and biofuels….

“This administration has set a goal of doubling renewable electricity generation over the next three years,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement. “To achieve that goal, we need to accelerate renewable project development by ensuring access to capital for advanced technology projects. We also need a grid that can move clean energy from the places it can be produced to the places where it can be used and that can integrate variable sources of power, like wind and solar,” he said.

New Energy Injects Hope in a Colorado Steel Town

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“If the slimehead were still a slimehead, it wouldn’t be in this kind of trouble,” begins a good WashPost story today on overfishing of the Orange roughy and other fish with popular nom de plumes. 

As lakes and oceans have been depleted by heavy fishing, the seafood industry tried to dress up what was left — former ‘trash’ species, and unfamiliar fish from the deep ocean — with new names to improve their popularity.

The Post story is based on a major report on the world’s seafood stocks published in Science, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries” (subs. req’d), which found that 63 percent of assessed fish stocks, species are below healthy levels.  I feel compelled to note that the lead author of this major report on overfishing is Boris Worm.  I can only imagine what he went through as a child….

Worm predicted that “if fishing continued at the same rate, all the world’s seafood stocks would collapse by 2048.”  The world’s fish catch “has grown more than fivefold since 1950.”  The result:

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Some 1970s-era liberals and old-school enviros think massive government spending is the only way to achieve the clean energy transition.  They could not be more wrong, as a particularly uninformed post by the otherwise cutting-edge Grist online magazine makes clear.

As a climate bill, Waxman-Markey is at best a B-, but as a clean energy bill, it is a solid A — though both sides of the bill should be improved.  Together with Obama’s other climate and clean energy efforts, it would, as I’ll explain, very quickly bring U.S. investments in clean energy technologies and industries close to the record-smashing levels now being set by the stimulus bill, nearly $100 billion a year.

BACKGROUND

I have spent two decades trying to accelerate the clean energy transformation of the US (and global) economy, since that is our only hope for averting catastrophic global warming impacts, Hell and High Water.  For a number of years in the mid-1990s, I helped run DOE’s billion-dollar Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), the largest program in the world (at the time) for working with businesses to develop and deploy the core clean energy technologies.

Over the years, the work of the office has been crucial in maintaining and expanding US leadership in key areas of clean energy.  In fact, its investments have the highest documented rate of return of any federal program.  The success of the office and its analytic work, especially the 5-Lab study that I initiated, oversaw, and publicized, played a key role in convincing the White House to engage positively in the Kyoto negotations in the face of strong opposition by Clinton’s entire economic team (see “The history of the ‘safety valve’ debate“).  You can read an account by Art Rosenfeld [the first article, his autobio] now California Energy Commissioner “” then science adviser to the assistant secretary of EERE.  Kyoto was not ratified here, of course, but it has ultimately driven many tens of billions of dollars in clean energy investment in Europe and Asia.

What I came to learn in the federal government was that no matter how much money the federal government spent — money that would always be constrained by moderates and conservatives in Congress and the vagaries of presidential elections — it would always pale in comparison to what the private sector must spend in any genuine clean energy transition, by at least a factor of ten or more.  Indeed, in the 5-lab study we specifically needed to model a modest CO2 price just to return to 1990 levels of CO2 emissions by 2010 — otherwise, all of the energy efficiency that we were driving the private sector to adopt mainly squeezed out new renewables and high-efficiency gas plants, not the least efficient coal plants.

GRIST FOR THOUGHT — NOT

So I was shocked, needless to say, when Grist magazine published an anachronistic (and falsehood-filled) piece yesterday, “Joe Romm’s strategy to lose the clean energy race.”  The amazingly flawed premise of this article is that the only way to win the clean energy race is massive government spending — spending of a kind that is not merely politically infeasible, but suicidal from the perspective of the human race.  Indeed, the article actually asserts that because I would like to pass a strengthened version of Waxman-Markey, I am embracing a strategy that would lose the clean energy race.

Who would write such old-school drivel?  Let’s call them The Big-government Institute (TBI) or The Bad Idea (TBI).  But I’m far less interested taking on the authors, who are stuck in the 1970s, or even Grist, who bizarrely published it, then in addressing the old-think at the core of their argument.

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Our guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

There’s something about the Endangered Species Act that brings out the worst kind of demagoguery on the right. Doubly so when climate change is involved.

Ever since the battle over the Tellico Dam and the snail darter in Tennessee in the 1970’s, the right has consistently fallen back on the same old, tired, and inaccurate construct: it’s always a tiny fish (or useless bird, or obscure snail) that is destroying jobs and threatening the economy.

The latest example has been unfolding over the past few months in California, where a three-year drought is being mis-characterized as a “manmade drought” brought on by federal efforts to protect an endangered fish, the delta smelt, in compliance with a 2007 court decision. Reductions in irrigation water deliveries by state and federal water projects to protect a 3-inch fish, scream the commentators and lawmakers, are crippling agriculture in the state’s Central Valley and throwing tens of thousands of people out of work.

“Because of this little fish, up to 80,000 people are going to lose jobs,” caterwauled Sean Hannity on Fox in mid-May. “This is madness.”

There’s madness out there all right, but it has a lot more to do with degradation of the Pacific coast’s largest estuary, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, climate change, mismanagement of the state’s water resources, and the right’s inability to look at the facts than it does with protecting a small fish.

Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, punctures some of the myths surrounding the California drought in a blog posting that shows Central Valley farmers are getting lots more water than is commonly reported, that the jobs impact has been overstated, and that the smelt is not to blame.

As Gleick notes, a couple of weeks before Beck’s tirade, the head of California’s Department of Water Resources said that if the Endangered Species Act didn’t exist there would only be a five percent increase in water deliveries to farmers. “If the ESA goes away this afternoon, we still have a drought,” said Lester Snow.

The delta smelt is a handy whipping boy for the likes of Rep. Devin Nunes, who has tried to suspend the ESA to prevent what he calls a “government imposed dust bowl.” But the smelt is only a symptom of the collapse of one of America’s most important ecosystems, a collapse that has been building for decades and affects not just the smelt, but salmon, steelhead and about 750 other species of fish, birds and animals – 18 of which are designated as threatened or endangered by the state and federal governments.

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According to disclosures released earlier this month, oil and natural gas interests are pumping money into lobbying firms to influence climate change legislation at a furious pace. With $82.2 million spent in just the first half of 2009 — compared to $132.2 million in all of 2008 — the industry is on track to set new records.

Unfortunately, as large as this direct lobbying figure is, it represents probably a fraction of the total amount of money the oil and gas industry is pouring into the debate. Some of the money flows straight to candidates and to political action committees. Another huge, largely undisclosed portion goes to what is known as “outside lobbying” efforts — public relations and advertising firms which coordinate a pro-polluter propaganda campaign to influence public opinion. And finally much of the money goes to financing “think-tanks” to produce reports outside the realm of scientific consensus to legitimize skepticism of global warming.

The outside lobbying campaign the industry has embraced this year is the most corrosive because it is based upon deception — and increasingly, hate. Koch Industries, the oil and gas behemoth, bankrolls the astroturf groups Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. These groups were instrumental in orchestrating the anti-Obama tea party protests, where thousands gathered to display racist signs directed at the President, absurd calls for an impeachment, and more recently, protesters hanging Democratic leaders in effigy. In addition to the anti-Obama protests, these groups provide a useful front for industries as they hire dozens of field staff to spread misinformation about clean energy and bus people around the country to create the guise of public distrust of global warming. Koch has funneled its money not only to these astroturf efforts, but has been a prolific leader in all the aforementioned strategies that industries pursue (Charles Koch even founded the Cato Institute, a leader of global warming skepticism and has spent nearly $4 million in lobbying this year alone).

Although Koch has traditionally given mostly to Republicans, E&E notes that it is giving increasingly to Democrats. In 2009, Koch gave about 28 percent of its contributions to Democrats, compared to about 15 percent last year:

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT): $5,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR): $10,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR): $2,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]

Rep. Marion Berry (D-AR): $2,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK): $3,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Allen Boyd (D-FL): $6,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX): $3,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D-TX): $4,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Gene Green (D-TX): $3,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-LA): $2,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-TX): $1,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN): $6,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR): $2,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. David Scott (D-GA): $1,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Henry Teague (D-NM): $1,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]

In accepting dirty energy Koch money, these lawmakers are legitimizing the financiers of the anti-Obama tea party effort.

I am going to do a glossary for Climate Progress, and I’d like your suggestions as to what it should include.

I’ve been planning to do one for a while.  Now it looks like I will be doing a book of best blog posts (see “What is your favorite Climate Progress post?“) — and that certainly needs a glossary.

I’ll cover everything from amplifying feedback to recycled Energy to Solar Baseload to wedges (stabilization).  I’ll try to steal borrow liberally progressively from EPA‘s and Wikipedia‘s, but hopefully be less boring.  It will posted on the sidebar and constantly upgraded.

Suggestions?

We’ve heard plenty about the mainstream media’s complete inadequacy when it comes to covering climate change (see links here).

At least one organization, the Earth Journalism Network (EJN) — whose mission is to “establish networks of environmental journalists in countries where they don’t exist, and build their capacity where they do” — is doing its part to support a better-covered future through the Earth Journalism Awards.  This video above illustrates how serious EJN is.

With the EJN’s broad goal of translating “complex issues for local audiences,” budding and established environmental journalists aged 18-to-28 have until midday, Paris time on September 7^th to submit their best climate piece. Aimed at empowering young people across the world to make up for the world media’s many gaps and failings, the awards actively push for a stronger focus on climate issues in regions both devoid and oversaturated with media coverage.

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Beijing closing coal plants in environmental move

China has taken advantage of a drop in electricity demand due to the global financial crisis to speed up a campaign to close small coal-fired power plants and improve its battered environment, an official said Thursday.

Authorities have closed power plants with a total of 7,467 generating units, meeting a previously announced goal 18 months ahead of schedule, said Sun Qin, deputy administrator of the Cabinet’s National Energy Administration….

Beijing is trying to improve its energy efficiency and reduce surging demand for imported oil and gas by closing smaller, less efficient power plants and encouraging use of wind, solar and other clean sources.

The latest closures will reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain by an estimated 1.1 million tons and carbon dioxide output by 124 million tons per year, Sun said. He said the closures involved moving 400,000 workers to new jobs.

China and the United States are the world’s biggest emitters of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” that scientists say trap the sun’s heat and are altering the climate.  China produced 6.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2006, according to a study by the Netherlands’ Environmental Assessment Agency.

NZ apples sent to UK generate own weight in C02

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A major new study, “Impacts of climate change from 2000 to 2050 on wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” finds a staggering increase in “wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario:

We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day … with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively. Increased area burned results in near doubling of wildfire carbonaceous aerosol emissions by mid-century.

“This graph shows the percentage increase in area burned by wildfires, from the present-day to the 2050s, as calculated by the model of Spracklen et al. [2009] for the May-October fire season. The model follows a scenario of moderately increasing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and leads to average global warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050. Warmer temperatures can dry out underbrush, leading to more serious conflagrations in the future climate.”

And this is just the mid-century prediction for the IPCC’s “moderate” A1B scenario (CO2 at 522 ppm in 2050), which predicts “mean July temperatures to increase by 1.8°C from 2000 to 2050.”  This is not the worst-case emissions path, which we are currently on (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm “¦ the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” “” 1000 ppm).  What would happen by 2100 on our current emissions path, when the mean July temperature increase from 2000 is triple (or more) the 1.8°C that the researchers modeled?  Turns out someone did model that a few years ago.

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A supermarket employee in Seattle bags groceries into a cloth bag. On August 18, the city will vote on a plastic bag fee modeled after Ireland’s successful PlasTax fee.

We’ve all heard of the plastic menace. Plastic bags litter streets, trees, and streams. They suffocate wildlife. They can take over 1,000 years to decompose. And we’re only consuming and throwing away more of them every year.

They also have a knack for getting into the world’s oceans. Plastic bags and cigarettes account for more than 80 percent of marine litter, according to a recent landmark study by the U.N. Environment Programme, or UNEP. They are eaten by all kinds of fish and kill an estimated 1 million seabirds a year. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of litter twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean, is largely made up of plastic. UNEP says cutting bags off at the source is much cheaper than removing them later.

Enter the bag tax. A bag tax works by charging shoppers a fee””typically between 5 and 30 cents””for every bag they get in a store. This fee drives consumers to buy reusable bags and change their habits. It also causes high-quality reusable bags to emerge and diffuse because it’s a market solution. The resulting revenue can be used to raise awareness, to pay for environmental clean up, or to subsidize reusable bags.

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More than perhaps any other company, McKinsey has documented how an aggressive energy efficiency strategy sharply lowers the cost of climate action (see “McKinsey 2008 Research in Review: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero“).

Today they released their most comprehensive analysis to date of this country’s energy efficiency opportunity, “Unlocking energy efficiency in the U.S. economy.”  Bottom line:  If this country get serious about energy efficiency — for instance, by passing a climate and clean energy bill like Waxman-Markey — then we can sharply reduce existing emissions at a large net savings to the public and U.S. businesses.  McKinsey has a new cost-curve just of efficiency measures (click to enlarge):

The width of each column on the chart represents the amount of efficiency potential (in trillion BTUs) found in that group of measures….  The height of each bar corresponds to the average annualized cost (in dollars per million BTU of potential).

For those expecting to seeing efficiency below the line (i.e. negative cost), McKinsey has added a dashed line that represents the average cost of a new power plant.  McKinsey said at the press conference today that all the measures above have a positive net present value.

McKinsey explains that these measures, if fully enacted over the next decade, would save a remarkable 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, which is 17% of U.S. CO2e emissions in 2005.  In other words, the entire 2020 target in the Waxman-Markey climate bill could be met with energy efficiency at a net savings to U.S. consumers and businesses of $700 billion.

And what is even more stunning about this analysis is that it didn’t even look at the transportation sector, where we know huge savings opportunities are possible (see “U.S. can cut half its transportation emissions by 2050“).

McKinsey explains “The central conclusion of our work”:

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NIMBY, meet NUMBY:  Not under my backyard.

The Guardian reports today:

It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming – a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground.

But the German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.

Ouch.  Perhaps CCS is just another (open) pipe dream.

CCS was never going to be a slam dunk.  As I explained a year ago, “CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role“:

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U.S. can cut half its transportation emissions by 2050 — report

The United States can cut greenhouse gas emissions from transportation in half by 2050 with strategies ranging from cutting speed limits to imposing road pricing, according to a report released today by federal agencies and environmental and industry groups.

Examining about 50 transportation strategies, the report found transportation emissions could be reduced 24 percent by 2050 by acting to change travel behavior and land-use patterns. The emissions reduction hit 47 percent by adding road pricing techniques, ranging from pay-as-you-go insurance to charging Americans for every mile driven….

John Porcari, deputy secretary at the Department of Transportation, said the report shows that lawmakers looking to recast the nation’s transportation system to curb emissions and fuel consumption will need to look for combinations of policy changes. “There is no magic bullet,” he said. “There is no single strategy that can be pursued to help us turn our corner. We need to look at a number of options.”

Transportation accounts for roughly 28 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, and the sector has been one of the fastest-growing in the past two decades — representing nearly half of the nation’s total increase in greenhouse emissions since 1990

A Plan to Cut Carbon Emissions From Deforestation

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This is the video that Anthony Watts demanded YouTube take down.  This is what the former TV weatherman who runs a leading anti-scientific website, WattsUpWithThat, is afraid to let the public see:

Fortunately, Anthony Watts knows even less about copyright laws than he does about climate science, if that’s possible [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"].  So YouTube has put it back up after temporarily removing it, which is standard practice for them.

Here’s some background on the terrific video from DeSmogBlog:

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The U.S. wind energy industry installed 1,210 megawatts (MW) of new power generating capacity in the second quarter, bringing the total added this year to just over 4,000 MW -  an amount larger than the 2,900 MW added in the first six months of 2008, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today in its second quarter (Q2) market report [click here].

And this is after a record 2008 (see “U.S. wind energy grows by record 8,300 MW“), which in turn made this country the global wind leader. AWEA’s press release notes:

The state posting the fastest growth in the 2nd quarter was Missouri, where wind power installations expanded by 90%.

“Missourians know that in order for us to grow our state’s economy and create the jobs of the twenty-first century, we must embrace new technology and advances like the ones presented to us through renewable wind energy,” said Missouri Governor Jay Nixon. “So I’m proud that the American Wind Energy Association’s quarterly report shows no state has capitalized on these growth opportunities more aggressively over the last three months than Missouri has.  But that isn’t enough.  Missouri will continue to look for ways to enhance our energy supply and independence by using common-sense and cost effective expansions of clean, renewable wind power.”

Paging Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) — your vote is needed on a climate and clean energy bill.  As is the vote of members from other fast growing wind states:

Pennsylvania and South Dakota ranked second and third in terms of growth rate in the second quarter, expanding by 28% and 21% respectively.

With growth like this comes more than a dozen new and expanding factories around the country — and the jobs they bring:

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From 2009 to 2014, projected rises in anthropogenic influences and solar irradiance will increase global surface temperature 0.15 ±0.03 °C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC.

So conclude Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in a new Geophysical Research Letters study, “How Will Earth’s Surface Temperature Change in Future Decades?” (subs. req’d).  The UK Guardian explains:

The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO₂ and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Ni±o southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

This study does not assume we will have a major El Ni±o, but notes that if we did have a really big one, it could add as much as 0.2°C [0.36°F] to the temperature in an individual year.  In the July 27 weekly update by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, “ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions,” NCEP notes “Current observations and dynamical model forecasts indicate El Ni±o conditions will continue to intensify and are expected to last through” the winter, and “nearly all of the dynamical models predict a moderate-to-strong episode.”  So again, it looks NASA’s January prediction is accurate,

Given our expectation of the next El Ni±o beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years.

Significantly, a 2007 Hadley Center paper in Science: “Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model” (see “Climate Forecast: Hot “” and then Very Hot“) also concluded:

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UPDATE:  For a compilation of debunkings of Roger Pielke, Jr. by leading scientists and science bloggers (see “Foreign Policy’s “Guide to Climate Skeptics” includes Roger Pielke, Jr.“)

Now that they* have shut down his original blog, Roger Pielke, Jr., is desperately trying to remain relevant in the blogosphere.  Pielke’s preferred strategy — as it has always been — is to utterly misrepresent what people say and then attack that misrepresentation in the hopes of garnering media attention.  Baselessly smearing the professional reputation of hundreds of leading U.S. scientists means nothing whatsoever to him — if it gets him press coverage (see details here).

These days, the main “media” paying attention to Pielke, Jr. (as with Pielke, Sr.) are the global warming deniers (see “Uber-denier Inhofe gives big wet Valentine’s kiss to Pielke “” go figure!“).  So it’s no surprise that Pielke Jr.’s latest distortion was immediately picked up by Swift Boat smearer Marc Morano, much as the main person pushing Pielke Sr.’s climate disinformation is anti-science blogger Anthony Watts (see “Like father, like son: Roger Pielke Sr. also doesn’t understand the science of global warming “” or just chooses to willfully misrepresent it“)  What is (a little) surprising is that Pielke would utterly misrepresent something I wrote when everyone can plainly see what he is doing.

Normally I’d ignore this, but I need to set the record straight when Pielke falsely claims I called Democratic members of Congress “liars about the promise of [green] jobs” — and when Morano trumpets that lie.  I advanced the jobs message in the very post Pielke attacked and have blogged repeatedly about the millions of green jobs Democrats are in the process of creating — as Pielke knows.

Also, this post gives me a chance to praise the real leadership that Sen. John Kerry has been showing on the climate and clean energy bill — and his crucial understanding and articulation of both winning messages.

Last night I wrote a post that ended with a discussion of the need for pushing two key messages to advance legislation in the Senate — 1) the threat posed by global warming and 2) the clean energy opportunity.  I excerpted a January piece I wrote:

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China’s three biggest power firms emit more carbon than Britain, says report

China’s three biggest power firms produced more greenhouse gas emissions last year than the whole of Britain, according to a Greenpeace report published today.

The group warned that inefficient plants and the country’s heavy reliance on coal are hindering efforts to tackle climate change. While China’s emissions per capita remain far below those of developed countries, the country as a whole has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest emitter.

Greenpeace said the top 10 companies, which provided almost 60% of China’s total electricity last year, burned 20% of China’s coal “” 590m tonnes “” and emitted the equivalent of 1.44 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

The efficiency of Chinese power generation compares unfavourably with other countries. In Japan, 418 grams of carbon dioxide are emitted per kilowatt hour and in the US, the equivalent figure is 625 grams. But most of the top 10 firms in China produce 752 grams of CO2.

Director of Energy at AD Little:  “I think we will reach peak oil demand in the middle of the next decade.”

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