I’m going to Maine for two weeks starting Saturday.  That means I’ll probably be blogging at most 2 hours a day on weekdays — yes, it wouldn’t be a true vacation if I couldn’t blog at all.

I will be giving a talk in Portland on Tuesday, August 18th at 7 pm.  This is a state with two swing Senators after all!  Details to come for all you New Englanders.

I aim to have a fair number of guest posts, though.  I’m also trying a small change in my blogging style, to accommodate this trip and the time I need to spend working on my book through mid-September.

Normally, about 2/3 of my posts take me some 60 to 90 minutes to write and about 1/3 take 90 to 180 minutes.  I’ve been trying to do more 30-minute posts in the last few days, in case you hadn’t noticed, and I expect to continue that for another month.  If it proves successful, I’ll keep doing it.

Comments and suggestions welcome!

UPDATE:  Roger Pielke, Jr. is a Senior Fellow for an organization that is dedicating all of its resources to killing any chance of either a national or international effort to avert catastrophic global warming and to spreading disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional Democrats, and the environmental movement.  My bad.  I keep forgetting how many people who come to CP on any given day aren’t regular readers and so don’t have the full context for some of my posts.  Back to the humor.

Now that they* have shut down his original popular blog Prometheus, I don’t read his new obscure blog, cleverly named “Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog.”  As an aside, I’m guessing Pielke’s gonna follow up his book, The Honest Broker, with one titled Roger Pielke’s book.  But I digress.

So it wasn’t until googlealerts pinged me this morning that I learned about Pielke’s July 31 plea to his readers to “Please Read Climate Progress.”

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[JR:  A nice story on a green building I had the pleasure of working in for two years in the early 1990s.  Click on figure for interactive floorplan.]

The Homely Costs of Energy Conservation

A quarter-century ago, in the wake of America’s first energy crisis, a young scientist named Amory Lovins came to the Rocky Mountains and built himself a radical house based on a radical idea. The country could save both energy and money, he believed, by combining common sense and unconventional technology.

Mr. Lovins did achieve substantial energy savings, and many of his innovations, from better insulation to multiple-pane windows to more-efficient refrigerators, eventually became familiar fixtures in American homes….

…Now, Mr. Lovins has completed a renovation that he hopes will demonstrate how much more energy-efficient houses can become. But the project also serves as a reminder of the still-enormous gulf between what is technologically possible and what society is able or willing to pay for….

Some of his proudest advances stem from mundane changes. He installed an electric stove made by a Swiss company that is 60% more efficient than other models he found. The savings stem partly from pots designed specifically for the stove. The pots eliminate warping that typically occurs with copper cookware, wasting heat.

He also has shaved energy use by insisting on an unconventional plumbing design. Typically, residential pipes that carry water would be ½-inch wide and turn at right angles. But that builds up friction, requiring electric pumps to work harder to propel the water. So Mr. Lovins had ¾-inch-wide pipes installed that run diagonally across ceilings and walls to minimize friction.

“If it looks pretty,” he says, “it probably doesn’t save energy.”

Pacific populations being prepared for relocation

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Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida said Friday he will resign from the Senate as soon as a replacement can be appointed, leaving the seat more than a year before his term ends.

Probably not positive news for the climate and clean energy bill.  Martinez was, according to fivethirtyeight.com‘s Nate Silver, only a 6.89% “Probability of a Yes Vote” (see “Epic Battle 3: Who are the swing Senators?“) — but most political honchos I know put him at a straight “undecided.”  That said, we have no idea who his replacement will be …

His decision puts Republican Gov. Charlie Crist “” who is running to replace Martinez “” in charge of filling the seat in the interim….

… his resignation will be “effective on a successor taking office to fill out the remainder of my term.”

Officials predicted that Crist, who faces a Republican primary challenge and a large field of Democratic contenders, would select a “placeholder” for the temporary assignment.

… except that he or she will be a placeholder chosen by one of the more climate-friendly GOP governors (see “Florida, Part 1: A 50% GHG cut by 2025 will SAVE the state $28 billion“).

So that person will be relatively free to vote their conscience on the single most important public decision that person will ever makes in their entire life, the one they’ll be remembered by for generations and generations to come — whether to try to save Florida from utter destruction.

The author of comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation believes that President Obama can convince the American public to embrace energy reform. Yesterday, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu spoke at the Harvard Kennedy School on “Laying the Foundation for the Next Generation of Clean Energy Jobs.” Both Markey and Secretary Chu argued that the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, which passed the House in June and is now under consideration by the Senate, is critical to keeping America economically competitive. Responding to a question from the Wonk Room about the fears being expressed at town hall meetings about the cap-and-trade legislation, Markey explained that the American public need to know how this bill will cut our dependence on foreign oil, create millions of new jobs, and strengthen our national security:

I think once the president makes this case in prime time, after this health care debate passes us by, I think it’s going to pass. I think the American people are going to understand the bill and support the bill in overwhelming numbers. The polling actually says that when the argument is made that way, 70 percent Americans want us to finally put this relationship we have with these old technologies to the rear of us and move ahead. And that’s going to be our opportunity this fall, hopefully with the help of everyone here.

Watch it:

Markey concluded that “the larger goals in this bill, what it’s going to accomplish, are so historic, that it would be the most important energy and environmental bill that has ever passed this United States Congress.” To great applause, he asked the entire audience of climate activists and clean energy supporters to accomplish its passage.

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The people who refuse to accept the reality that President Obama was born in the United States share much in common with those who refuse to accept the reality that humans are dramatically changing the climate.

5.  Both groups are impervious to the evidence. During the campaign, “Obama released a certification of live birth, which is the official document you get if you ask Hawaii for a copy of your birth certificate,” as Salon explains.  Further, “state officials have repeatedly affirmed its authenticity and said they’ve checked it against the original record and that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii.”  Politico labels this “seemingly incontrovertible evidence.”  Similarly, the reality of human-caused warming has been overwhelmingly demonstrated and affirmed by the peer-reviewed literature, the hundreds of scientists who review and report on that literature periodically as part of the IPCC process and the more than 100 world governments (including the Bush Administration) who approved the 2007 IPCC summary reports word for word (see “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly” and “Can you PROVE to me that global warming is being caused by mankind?“*).

4.  Both come from the same group of people. The NYT explained that the birther movement “first took root among some staunchly conservative elements.”  As Politico notes, “A whopping 58 percent of Republicans either think Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US (28 percent) or aren’t sure (30 percent).”  And it is conservatives and Republicans who make up the overwhelming majority of those who question climate science (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP“).

3.  Both group get their disinformation from the same right-wing sources. The NYT wrote on June 24 that “Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the country’s most popular talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, told his listeners on Tuesday that Mr. Obama “has yet to have to prove that he’s a citizen.” “  Similarly, Limbaugh tells his listeners things like, “Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming.”

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Employers throttled back on layoffs in July, cutting just 247,000 jobs, the fewest in a year, and the unemployment rate dipped to 9.4 percent, its first decline in 15 months. It was a better-than-expected showing that offered a strong signal that the recession is finally ending.

It may not be fair, but the likelihood of climate legislation passing the Senate in November (or later) depends critically on such seemingly unrelated matters as whether the Senate can pass health care reform and what the state of the economy is.  So the latest job report — along with other recent economic news like the better-than-expected GDP report from Monday — is a big deal:

The new snapshot, released by the Labor Department on Friday, also offered other encouraging news: workers’ hours nudged up after sinking to a record low in June, and paychecks grew after having fallen or flat lined in some cases.

To be sure, the report still indicates that the jobs market is on shaky ground. But the new figures were better than many analysts were expecting and offered welcomed improvements to a part of the economy that has been clobbered by the recession.

We’ve till got a long way to go to dig ourselves out of the economic hole abyss Bush-Cheney put us in, but we appear to have bottomed — thanks in part to the stimulus — and I am cautiously optimistic that we will be able to get 60 votes for ending the inevitable and immoral conservative filibuster the Senate will need to overcome to pass the climate and clean energy bill.