As I have said many times “Obama can get a better climate bill in 2010” “” although that is true only if he and Congress have a coherent strategy to do just that (which at this point, they don’t, see below).

Since the CBO has made clear that health care reform is tougher than climate action (also see here) and since conservatives see blood in the water (see TP’s Inhofe: If GOP Can ‘Stall’ Or ‘Block’ Health Care Reform, It Will Be ‘A Huge Gain’ For The 2010 Elections) and since the  Senate will try to do health care first and since tortoise-like Senate floor debates are a lot longer than hare-like House debates, it is all but impossible to imagine the Senate vote on a climate bill before November.

And I’d say it’s at least 50-50 the vote isn’t until December or January, which would put a final bill, conferenced and passed again by both House and Senate, on Obama’s desk maybe in March.  That should not be a surprise to CP readers.

No hurry.  Right now, the House bill starts its first cap in 2012, but in any case the cap doesn’t actually start to bite for several more years after that, so it is far more important that the one shot we get in the Senate is our best shot.  And we need time for several reasons:

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Don Blankenship, the A.T. Massey coal baron rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for buying West Virginia judges, believes that coal breeds freedom. On his personal Twitter account, Blankenship wrote today, “If you support democracy in developing countries, you must support coal“:

Blankenship has called opponents of his coalocratic worldview “communists,” “atheists,” and “greeniacs.” In reality, dependence on coal breeds the same kind of economic instability and injustice seen in petrodictatorships. Fossil fuels, requiring capital-intensive extraction and rewarding centralized control of distribution, reward oligarchic power structures that are profoundly anti-democratic. Furthermore, when the costs of pollution are borne by society instead of the coal and oil corporations, the divide between the economic costs and benefits grows wider.

The coal-dominated economy of West Virginia is a troubling example of the cruelty of coalocracy. Despite $118 million in coal-mining annual income, West Virginia has the nation’s lowest median household income, worst educational services, worst social assistance, the highest population with disabilities, and nearly a quarter of West Virginia children in poverty. A recent study by West Virginia University found that the “human cost of the Appalachian coal mining economy outweighs its economic benefits”:

The coal industry generates a little more than $8 billion a year in economic benefits for the Appalachian region. But, they put the value of premature deaths attributable to the mining industry across the Appalachian coalfields at — by a most conservative estimate — $42 billion.

If Blankenship, who sits on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also tweeted that a cap and trade system is a “Ponzi scheme.” If Blankenship truly believed in the power of the free market and cheap energy to lift up democracies, he would support closing coal pollution loopholes — putting a true value on the majesty and diversity of Appalachia’s mountains instead of blowing them up, and putting a price on the carbon pollution that is destabilizing our climate. Instead, he and his fellow right-wing coalocrats are the Charles Ponzis of the entire planet.

I was going to blog on this umpteenth attack on strong progressive women, but Matt Yglesias beat me to the punch here, so to speak.  The illustration actually comes from the Politico.  I’ll add my thoughts to Matt’s comments at the end:

I used to think that US Senate Barbara Boxer was an experienced legislator with a solid progressive record on the issues. But then I read this Politico article in which various anonymous people criticize her “abrasive personal style” and “outspoken partisan liberal” demeanor. Big trouble! And then I got to thinking, I recall having read similar critiques of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. And Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate and now as Secretary of State has been subjected to similar criticism. Nancy Pelosi, too.

You’ve really got to wonder what the deal is with the Democratic Party that every woman who comes forward into a position of power and influence is a shrill, castrating harridan. I mean, what are Democrats thinking? What poor judgment! Doesn’t everyone know that politics is a business in which the only people who get ahead are soft-spoken sweethearts like Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer? Somehow male politicians have managed to figure this out. What’s stopping the women?

Two excerpts from the Politico piece are particularly egregioius:

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The radioactive disinformers of The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) have broken through to the MSM again.  This time they got The San Francisco Chronicle to print their willfully misleading op-ed attacking “Obama and Democratic leaders” for supposedly failing to deliver on clean energy promises.  As we’ll see, this TBI article sets a new record for phony “apples and oranges” comparisons — but I think it is worth looking at to fully understand the impressive nature of the clean energy investments that Obama and the Democratic leaders have done and plan to do.

The first thing to remember about TBI is that they have dedicated the resources of their organization to killing prospects for climate and clean energy action in this Congress and to spreading disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional leaders, Waxman and Markey, and anyone else trying to end our status quo energy policies (see “Memo to media: Don’t be suckered by bad analyses from TBI” and “The dynamic duo of disinformation and doubletalk return” and “”Shellenberger and Nordhaus smear Gore by making stuff up“)

Second, for all their supposed high-minded attacks on Obama and Congress for pushing a bill TBI claims is too weak, TBI has consistently proposed infinitely weaker climate legislation than Waxman-Markey — legislation so dreadful, it probably wouldn’t get a single vote in either house of Congress (as I discuss here).  The only surefire way to kill the prospects for serious climate and clean energy action, the only way to kill any chance whatsoever of a global deal to avert catastrophic global warming, is if policymakers listen to The Breakthrough Institute.

Third, their current line of attack — on the clean energy efforts of “Obama and Democratic leaders” — is not just utterly false, it is intentionally and hypocritically misleading, as I demonstrate here:  TBI is lying about Obama, misstating what CBO concluded about Waxman-Markey, and publishing deeply flawed analyses. The stimulus bill from “Obama and Democratic leaders” (plus Obama’s budget) increased clean energy funding more than every previous president combined in the past 3 decades (see “Progressives, Obama keep promise to jumpstart clean energy, economy“).  Obama’s actions in the transportation sector alone represent the single biggest push toward greenhouse gas reductions and efficent vehicles in US history (see “Obama to raise new car fuel efficiency standard to 39 mpg by 2016 “” The biggest step the U.S. government has ever taken to cut CO2“).

But, for the umpteenth time, let me briefly dissect their willfully misleading nonsense.  Here is how their op-ed, “Will America lose the clean-energy race?” begins:

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If climate change means “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse,” then it only seems appropriate we wipe out one of the cradles of civilization.  In the photo, drought plus Turkish dams combine to “reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a trickle.”

Fertile Crescent “will disappear this century”

Is it the final curtain for the Fertile Crescent? This summer, as Turkish dams reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a trickle, farmers abandon their desiccated fields across Iraq and Syria, and efforts to revive the Mesopotamian marshes appear to be abandoned, climate modellers are warning that the current drought is likely to become permanent. The Mesopotamian cradle of civilisation seems to be returning to desert.

Last week, Iraqi ministers called for urgent talks with upstream neighbours Turkey and Syria, after the combination of a second year of drought and dams in those countries cut flow on the Euphrates as it enters Iraq to below 250 cubic metres a second. That is less than a quarter the flow needed to maintain Iraqi agriculture….

Drought has helped precipitate the crisis. The most detailed assessment of the Fertile Crescent’s future under climate change suggests flow on the Euphrates could fall by 73 per cent. “The ancient Fertile Crescent will disappear in this century,” forecasts Akio Kitoh of Japan’s Meteorological Research Institute in Tsukuba, Japan. “The process has already begun.”

SunPower Suggests Solar Emerging From Doldrums

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“Convoys of turbine parts for windmills slow traffic and attract attention in coastal towns like Searsport, Me., on their way to western Maine” — the caption from the absurd NYT piece, “Slow, Costly and Often Dangerous Road to Wind Power.”

So here’s the news.

1. We’re now the #1 producer of wind power in the world.
2. Wind power is one of the few sectors of the economy still generating new construction and new jobs in this deep recession.
3. Even better, a growing fraction of wind manufacturing is taking place in this country.

The NYT, however, manages to find nothing but lemons in clean energy, while making the tastiest lemonade out of the dirtiest of fossil fuels:

1. Back in October, reporter Clifford Krauss wrote an essentially wrong-headed and one-sided story, “Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds” (see “Global recession? Must be time for the media’s alternative-energy backlash.”
2. Then, in November, Jad Mouawad wrote a staggeringly one-sided pro-oil piece with minimal discussion of oil’s myriad negative impacts — the word “spill” never appears.  It actually quoted one expert whining that ExxonMobil is “the most misunderstood company in the world” (see NYT suckered by ExxonMobil in puff piece titled “Green is for Sissies”).
3. Then, in March, Matt Wald blows the “Alternative and Renewable Energy” story, quotes only industry sources, ignores efficiency and huge cost of inaction.

Finally we have Kate Galbraith’s piece, which basically contradicts Krauss’s story and which in any other newspaper would be the lamest story they ever wrote on clean energy.

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