Part 1 examined how conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy. This is how the GOP shrinks itself.

Here, I’ll look at how, by abandoning clean energy, the GOP is taking the side of the Luddites and leaving this hugely popular issue entirely to the Democrats.  As Mark Mellman, a leading pollster for progressives since 1982, explains in a must-read op-ed in The Hill, “In attacking the clean-energy legislation just passed by the House, Republicans make three critical errors for which they may well pay a political price.”

Mellman is a shrewd analyst — see Mellman on climate messaging: “A strong public consensus has emerged on the reality and severity of global warming, as well as on the need for federal action” “” ecoAmerica “could hardly be more wrong.”  His new piece is worth reading in its entirety:

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Breakthrough reported on low-cost alternative to silicon solar cells

Solar cells could be produced from materials other than silicon under a breakthrough that scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, say could dramatically reduce the price of solar technologies.

Solar companies have been searching for some time for materials that are more efficient, cheaper to produce and use fewer raw materials than silicon. But tests of copper, indium, gallium, selenide (CIGS) or related materials have failed so far to produce a winner.

“People have already demonstrated efficiency levels of up to 20 percent, but the current processing method is costly,” said William Hou, an engineering graduate student at UCLA, in a statement. “Ultimately the cost of fabricating the product makes it difficult to be competitive with current grid prices.”

Hou and his colleagues report in this week’s Thin Solid Films the development of a low-cost processing method for solar cells made from copper, indium and diselenide. Those cells, they say, will have the potential to be produced on a large scale for a number of applications, including placement on backpacks or clothing.

“With the solution process that we recently developed, we can inherently reach the same [20 percent] efficiency levels and bring the cost of manufacturing down quite significantly,” Hou said.

Major Emitters Fail to Agree on Plan to Fight Climate Change

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Our guest blogger is Open Left‘s Chris Bowers.

In explaining why he voted against climate change legislation in the House, freshman Democratic Representative Eric Massa said Monday that calls to his office against the bill outnumbered calls in favor of the bill by 19-1:

My final reason for opposing this bill was you, the constituents of New York’s 29th Congressional District. In the week leading up to the vote, our offices received hundreds of phone calls urging a ‘no’ vote. In fact, after we tallied the responses, the “vote no” calls outnumbered the “vote yes” calls by a ratio of 19 to 1. My job is to represent you, and that’s exactly what I did in casting my vote.

Even though conservatives pretty much always win the congressional office phone call battle through their enormous lobbying operations, a 19-1 margin is still pretty shocking. The margin is even more shocking considering that the vast majority of green groups in the United States put out high level action alerts to their membership urging them to call members of Congress in support of climate change legislation.

How could the progressive grassroots get so utterly trounced in activism on the climate change bill? One solid bet is because the messaging from those supporting the bill was patronizing, not entirely forthcoming, and full of cognitive dissonance. Supporters of the bill consistently had the following four activism-depressing messages:

1. The climate change bill sucks, but we should pass it anyway;
2. We are probably lying to you about actually trying to strengthen the bill;
3. Strengthening the bill is not possible because it will probably lead to the defeat of the bill. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve.
4. It is your fault that the climate change bill sucks.

Man, I want to get up off my ass and work hard based on that message. And this really was the message. Take self-styled climate change expert Thomas Friedman:

There is much in the House cap-and-trade energy bill that just passed that I absolutely hate. It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic that we couldn’t do better. It is appalling that so much had to be given away to polluters. It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it.

Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a strong opponent of climate legislation even though 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 (see here).

Now Tom Donohue, President and CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is echoing the House GOP in pushing a petroleum industry falsehood designed to scare the public into opposing even modest climate and clean energy legislation (see “House GOP repeat in unison the petroleum industry falsehood that CBO finds the Waxman-Markey bill would raise gasoline prices 77 cents a gallon“).  In a column for the Chamber’s online magazine, Donohue writes:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost impact could be as much as $0.77 per gallon for gasoline, $0.83 per gallon for jet fuel, and $0.88 per gallon for diesel fuel–all ultimately borne by the consumer.

That scary charge is, as I’ve shown, a complete falsehood.  It comes from the American Petroleum Institute, (see here) which decided to ignore the actual CBO analysis and offer its own instead, claiming it is what CBO found.  The API is a strong opponent of the bill and has been pushing disinformation on global warming for more than a decade.

Let me set the record straight once again.

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Major car companies are starting to vote on their choice for the “car and fuel of the future” with big bets on manufacturing capacity.  The winner, no surprise, is going to be highly efficient plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and pure electric vehicles (see, for instance, “Everything you could want to know about plug-in and EV announcements at Detroit auto show“).

Plug-ins and EVs are a core climate solution, since electric drives are more efficient, easily powered by carbon-free energy, and far cheaper to operate per mile than gasoline or any alternative fuel, especially hydrogen, even when running on renewable power. And they are the key alt-fuel strategy needed to deal with the energy/economic security threat of rising dependence on imported oil and the inevitably grim impacts of peak oil (see “Why electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence“).

No surprise, then, that Toyota is planning on a major rollout of its plug in:

Toyota Motor Corp plans to start mass producing plug-in hybrid vehicles in 2012, with a projected first-year output of about 20,000 to 30,000 units, the Nikkei business daily reported on Saturday.

We also have some details on the cost and all-electric range of the Toyota plug in:

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Australia is the canary-in-the-coal-mine koala-in-the-bushfire for climate change, since it is the most arid habited continent (see “Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040” and “Global Boiling: Australia’s hellish black Saturday of extreme fire“).  Prime Minister Rudd has been “moving forward with an imperfect but positive climate policy agenda that includes a cap-and-trade program” as explained in this reprinted post by Erwin Jackson, Director of Policy and Research at the Climate Institute (Australia’s leading independent policy think tank on climate change), and Andrew Light Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress where he coordinates CAP’s work on international climate change policy.

Are our closest allies””namely, Australia””who are ahead of us on addressing global warming in fact reversing their course and having second thoughts?  That’s the impression conveyed last week in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal by Kimberly Strassel. This argument is as false as the claim that China is doing nothing.

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A few moderate senators in both parties hold in their hands the fate of climate legislation — and hence the possibility that the nation and the world might have a realistic chance of averting catastrophic climate impacts.  That’s because

• The GOP has made the fateful — and fatal — decision to cast its lot with dirty energy and anti-scientific denial (see “Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh“).
• The overwhelming majority of Democrats are, like Tom Perriello (D-VA), willing to do the right thing even if it has little or no short-term political benefit and possibly a real political cost for them (see Perriello: “The Republicans may win some seats because of this vote, but they can’t regain their souls for demagoguing the issue.”)

Readers have asked for a discussion of the key swing senators.  I will begin a multipart series on that by examining a fascinating statistical analysis of who “Who Voted for the Climate Bill [in the House]? (And Why?)” by the stat master Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com.  Silver “built a logistic regression model that attempted to predict the likelihood of a particular congressman voting for the cap-and-trade bill as the result of a variety of factors.”

Ultimately, he found a “pretty useful” set of variables that “explains about three-quarters (R-squared = .74) of a particular Congressman’s vote on the climate bill. The model predicted 401 of 431 votes correctly.” Here are the factors affecting votes “listed roughly in declining order of significance”:

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