[I'd love readers answers to the two headline questions posed by Klein. ]

When I get back from vacation, I’ll blog at length about what the White House’s dreadful messaging on health care says about the likelihood they’ll improve their dreadful messaging on the climate and clean energy bill.

But Time magazine’s Joe Klein — a generally moderate/centrist columnist — has written perhaps the definitive piece on what the health reform “debate” says about the Republican establishment, in a piece titled, “The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists.”  As Wikipedia explains:

Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Moral nihilists assert that morality does not exist, and subsequently there are no moral values with which to uphold a rule or to logically prefer one action over another.

I have previously made this point about the willful immorality of beltway conservatives/Republicans on climate change:

• Gingrich sums up GOP ethos: “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.”
• House GOP pledge to fight all action on climate. “Why do conservatives hate your children?
• RNC head Steele: “The supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process.”
• Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh — what does that radicalism mean for Obama, progressives, and humanity?

Klein shows it is a broader phenomenon.  I’ll excerpt him at length since the GOP scorched-earth strategy on healthcare certainly foreshadows the fall debate we’ll see on climate:

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At a “grassroots” rally organized by the American Petroleum Institute in Houston on Tuesday, activists bearing American flags were turned away. Oil company employees were bused in to the “Energy Citizens” gathering to hear billionaire Drayton McLane Jr. attack President Barack Obama’s clean energy agenda as an economy-destroying energy tax. However, grassroots tea-party activists told Public Citizen Texas that they and their American flags were refused entry to the company picnic:

ACTIVIST: They said, “We won’t let you have an American flag either.” They said they won’t let you have this, and then the guy touched this, the American flag.

ANOTHER ACTIVIST: I got an email from Freedomworks saying, “Come, it’s free, free food,” doodah doodah. And then I get here and they say, “Well, it’s against fire code to let people in the door.” And then, they let all these people in. Granted, one of the people was Drayton McLane. He’s got more money than God, so, I guess…

Watch it:

The activists explained that they were invited by Dick Armey’s Astroturf organization Freedomworks, one of the participating organizations in the new Energy Citizens coalition. While the activists were locked out, employees of the public corporations Chevron, Anadarko Energy, Halliburton, ConocoPhillips, and others were “invited to participate” and bused to the event on company time.

At the company picnic, Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane defended his billionaire lifestyle, saying, “We need to preserve this way of life.” Inheriting much of his wealth, McLane made billions by selling his grocery business to Wal-Mart. In January 2008, McLane received the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service for showing a “deep concern for the common good beyond the bottom line.” National Black Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Harry Alford, who recently accused Barbara Boxer of racism, was also a featured speaker.

What a pleasure it is to see a first-rate story on one of the major impacts of human-caused climate change in recent years, “Beetles, wildfire: Double threat in warming world.”  Even the photo caption is spot on:

As far as the eye can see, it’s all infested,” forester Rob Legare said, looking out over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley. The spruce bark beetle, 6 millimeters (.25 inch) long, has devastated the forests of southwest Yukon, aided by warmer summers that speed up its reproductive process and warmer winters that don’t kill off beetle larvae as in the past. Scientists warn that global warming will spur insect infestations and wildfires in the world’s northern forests.

We’ve had a number of bad national stories (from the supposedly liberal media!):

• NBC News ignores climate change, blows the bark beetle story
• Signs of global warming are everywhere, but if the New York Times can’t tell the story (twice!), how will the public hear it?

Whereas the local, conservative media got the story right:

• Conservative San Diego Union knows climate change is killing Western forests
• Oldest Utah newspaper: Bark-beetle driven wildfires are a vicious climate cycle.

Of course, the journal Nature understands the science, as a 2008 article made clear: “Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change.” So does the Canadian media: “Climate-Driven Pest Devours Canada’s Forests.”

Here’s what the AP reports:

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Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) has wielded his power as the chair of the House Agriculture Committee to shape clean energy legislation on behalf of industrial agriculture interests. Peterson’s efforts to limit environmental regulation of industrial farmers in the American Clean Energy and Security Act may have been motivated by the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has received from agribusiness. Yesterday, Peterson appeared at a town hall meeting in Colorado with Rep. Betsy Markey (D-CO), and explained that his actions are also shaped by anti-science ideology:

Many of my people think global warming is a hoax, and I’m a little skeptical myself. But it’s going on all over the world, and it’s not good to put all that carbon in the atmosphere.

After winning concessions so that “the EPA will not run the program for agriculture, the department of agriculture will,” Peterson voted in favor of the ACES Act, which creates a carbon market but limits traditional Clean Air Act regulation of global warming pollutants. Peterson told the town hall audience that if the legislation isn’t passed and EPA regulates carbon pollution on its own, “you’ll have to get a catalytic converter for all your cows.”

Extremist climate denier Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) is responsible for the bizarre canard that regulation of global warming pollution requires bovine catalytic converters. Sensenbrenner has been making this absurd claim since 2007, and this June embarrassed Fox News interviewer Megyn Kelly in June with a rant about “cow farts” and “a catalytic converter on each end of the cow.”

In reality, traditional regulation of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases — including performance standards and construction permitting — would powerfully complement a carbon cap-and-trade system to build a clean-energy economy. As the USDA has found, the economic opportunity for farmers and ranchers far outweighs any costs of compliance. In a side note, catalytic converters actually generate carbon dioxide by breaking down carbon monoxide. So the doomsday Peterson and Sensenbrenner imagine is not only a fantasyland cartoon, it doesn’t even make sense.

CAP’s Julian Wong has a follow up to “China softens climate rhetoric, commits to emissions peak (again), shows flexibility on Western reductions.”  In the photo, Chinese Vice Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission Xie Zhenhua shakes hands with Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher look on.

China’s climate change envoy, Yu Qingtai, made headlines when he declared in a news conference earlier this month that “there is no one in the world who is more keen than us to see China reach its emissions peak as early as possible.”

Now all eyes are focused on the United States and China””the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters””with just four months to go to the U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen, where nations will negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Attendees at the most recent round of U.N. climate talks in Bonn, Germany may have left the meetings with a pessimistic sense that we’re a long way off from a global agreement. But interesting developments are unfolding in China outside of these U.N. meetings that bring a more hopeful message.

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You may remember Paul Gilding, former executive director of Greenpeace International, from Tom Friedman’s Ponzi scheme column (see here and NPR interview here).  I asked him for a post, and he has offered up this recent post from his website (– a good follow up to Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier”).

In my work with companies around the world, one of my key messages is that business strategy needs to be based on science. The logic is simple. Whereas most future planning involves an array of complicated and interrelated uncertainties – like technology shifts, political moods, consumer behaviour, competitor actions – science is delightfully predictable. That’s the thing about physics and biology, the rules were written long ago.

Furthermore, climate science is deeply relevant and material to most businesses and to all economies. Therefore this week’s report (see here for BBC summary) that the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica was melting 4 times faster than it was just 10 years ago, and is now dropping at 16 metres per year, should strike fear into the hearts of oil company executives and bring delight to the CFOs of electric car companies like Better Place (yes, such is the perverse logic of climate science in the business community).

Why is it so significant?

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