The stunning success of the right wing disinformation machine in the health-care debate should give all progressives pause about our messaging strategy.

The Washington Post‘s well-respected media critic Howard Kurtz made an impassioned case today that the the media isn’t really to blame — “Journalists, Left Out of The Debate:  Few Americans Seem to Hear Health Care Facts” — which is to say, the media is irrelevant:

For once, mainstream journalists did not retreat to the studied neutrality of quoting dueling antagonists.

They tried to perform last rites on the ludicrous claim about President Obama’s death panels, telling Sarah Palin, in effect, you’ve got to quit making things up.

But it didn’t matter. The story refused to die.

The crackling, often angry debate over health-care reform has severely tested the media’s ability to untangle a story of immense complexity. In many ways, news organizations have risen to the occasion; in others they have become agents of distortion. But even when they report the facts, they have had trouble influencing public opinion.

In the 10 days after Palin warned on Facebook of an America “in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel,’ ” The Washington Post mentioned the phrase 18 times, the New York Times 16 times, and network and cable news at least 154 times (many daytime news shows are not transcribed).

Now the first thing to say is that it is a central rule of messaging, rhetoric, and psychology: Don’t keep repeating a strong word the other side is trying to push (see “Memo to Gore: Don’t call coal ‘clean’ seven times in your ad” for a brief discussion of the literature on that subject”).

But from my perspective this is just another way of saying that once again, the progressive side doesn’t have its own simple message on this issue — like so many others, including global warming.  As the saying goes, you can’t beat the horse with no horse, and right now, progressives have banned some of their best horses entirely (see here) and are running a few hapless ponies that get trampled out of the starting gate by the conservative thoroughbreds.

Kurtz continues with his proof of the media’s innocence impotence:

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So it now carries twice as many posts.  Seemed like the thing to do if I’m going to add some shorter posts among the longer ones.  Comments welcome.

Even as their colleagues place roadblocks on energy reform, several members of the U.S. Senate are attempting to strengthen the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the green economy legislation passed by the House of Representatives this June. As Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) take the lead to write the Senate draft, many of their fellow senators are fighting back against the armies of lobbyists and paid “grassroots” rallies of the oil and coal companies:

EMISSIONS LIMITS: Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) are calling for the legislation to strengthen its 2020 target for greenhouse pollution reductions to 20 percent below 2005 levels, instead of the current 17 percent target. “I like the House bill, don’t get me wrong,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD). “But I think we can do better.” Lautenberg told reporters: “That’s the objective, as far as I’m concerned, because the glide path has to be established that enables us to get to 80 percent in 2050. You can’t get there unless you start aggressively pushing.”

GREEN TRANSPORTATION: Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) is working to strengthen the bill’s funding for green transportation, pushing language that would “devote a guaranteed share of revenues from carbon regulation to transit, bike paths, and other green modes of transport.” The Clean, Low-Emission, Affordable, New Transportation Efficiency Act (S. 575 / H.R. 1329) would auction ten percent of carbon market allowances for clean transit improvement. Senators Arlen Specter (D-PA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Ben Cardin (D-MD) have co-sponsored the legislation.

COAL POLLUTION: Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) is working with Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) to add language to “regulate power plant emissions of mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide.”

CARBON MARKET REGULATION: Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) have introduced legislation to “prevent Enron-like fraud, manipulation and excessive speculation” in the carbon market that the ACES Act would establish. Boxer has told reporters she intends to include the Feinstein-Snowe language in her legislation.

RENEWABLE STANDARD: In February, Sens. Tom Udall (D-NM) and Mark Udall (D-CO) introduced legislation (S. 433) to set a federal standard of 25% renewable electricity by 2025, much stronger than the House bill. “The bill’s not perfect, but it is a beginning,” Mark Udall recently told reporters. “The Senate now has to work its bill, and there are a number of elements we could put in the Senate bill that would improve the House bill including passing a [stronger] renewable electricity standard for the nation.” Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO), John Kerry (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have cosponsored the legislation.

GREEN MANUFACTURING JOBS: Sen. Sherrod Brown‘s (D-OH) Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology (IMPACT) Act creates a “$30 billion Manufacturing Revolving Loan Fund to help small and medium-sized manufacturers finance retooling, shift design, and improve energy efficiency.” The IMPACT Act has been added to the Senate legislation. Ten Democratic senators, led by Sens. Brown and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), have urged President Obama to ensure the legislation includes “strong provisions to ensure the strength and viability of domestic manufacturing,” including a “border adjustment mechanism” if “other major carbon emitting countries fail to commit to an international agreement requiring commensurate action on climate change.” Brown and Stabenow are supported by Sens. Russ Feingold (D-WI), Carl Levin (D-MI), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Robert Casey (D-PA), Arlen Specter (D-PA), Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Robert Byrd (D-VW), and Al Franken (D-MN).

A number of senators have committed to passing strong climate and clean energy legislation, including Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD), who is “optimistic we can turn energy potential into reality and help create new job opportunities at home by producing more clean energy in the United States.” After telling a global warming skeptic that “climate change is very real,” Stabenow was eviscerated by the right wing. Both Brown and Specter have committed to voting against a Republican filibuster of climate legislation — a key move for President Obama’s progressive energy agenda.

After Boxer introduces her draft of the legislation in the beginning of September, the bill must pass out of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which has a strong Democratic majority with many liberal Democrats. “The move on the Senate floor will be rightward,” Sen. Whitehouse noted. “And therefore, we’ve got to do our job to keep as many possibilities open for the floor as possible.”

In addition to funding phony astroturf “Energy Citizen” campaigns against the climate bill, the American Petroleum Institute has just released a study purporting to show how devastating the House climate and clean energy bill would be to the refining industry.

But if you ignore the fantastical elements, and focus on the real analysis, it’s clear that the bill would have a minimal impact on petroleum refining through 2030, which is precisely what you would expect from a bill focused on achieving the maximum amount of emissions reduction at the lowest possible cost.  And the API completely ignores peak oil, which will hit U.S. refineries so hard that the climate bill will almost certainly have no impact whatsoever on U.S. refineries.

You can find the API’s study here.  If you want to understand what the real “worst-case” scenario is for petroleum refineries, focus on the “Basic Case” of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) that the API models.  As previously discussed, the EIA projects an allowance price of $32 per metric ton of CO2 equivalent in 2020 “” about double what EPA and I project and 50% higher than CBO’s projection (see “Despite its many flaws, EIA analysis of climate bill finds 23 cents a day cost to families, massive retirement of dirty coal plants and 119 GW of new renewables by 2030 “” plus a million barrels a day oil savings“).

Because the EIA is poor/dreadful at modeling natural gas, energy efficiency, and renewables, it’s basic analysis is a worst-case for the petroleum industry because it overestimates the allowance cost over the next two decades while underestimating the amount of low-cost reductions possible in the utility sector.  Here, then, is the worst-case for U.S. refining under a climate bill:

Note that even in the EIA’s Basic Case, with a CO2 price in 2020 of $32 per metric ton, the refinery industry would be supplying more product than it does today — for all the stats on U.S. refinery production, go here.  Heck, API projects that US domestic refined product will increase steadily under the climate bill, while imports drop steadily.

Of course, even this chart shows what a fantasy world API lives in.  Because of peak oil, the baseline is not steadily rising U.S. refining for two decades (see World’s top energy economist warns peak oil threatens recovery, urges immediate action: “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us”).

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One of the better articles on energy-efficient mortgages I’ve seen.

Green for Green

Want to make your home more energy efficient but can’t afford the cost? There may be ways to save on a loan to get the work done.

A number of lenders and government agencies are offering mortgage deals to people who borrow money to make their homes more efficient, or who buy homes that already meet high efficiency standards. The programs work in a number of ways. Some offer a discount””often $500 or more””on the closing costs for a refinancing or new mortgage. Other plans offer a lower interest rate on the loan, sometimes a half-point or more below the current market rate.

Meanwhile, some programs give another kind of benefit: They factor potential energy-bill savings into qualifying income, which may allow people to borrow more money. Even minor efficiency upgrades can bring hundreds of dollars a year in savings and potentially help people qualify for a bigger loan.

The savings also provide an incentive for homeowners to get the work done now””since energy prices may become more of a burden in the near future. Energy prices “have already started to go back up,” says Paul Ellis, a certified financial planner and senior financial adviser with Ameriprise. “Nothing is guaranteed, but as the economy recovers, energy costs will most likely start to rise again. Right now, while energy costs are still reasonable, there’s more of an opportunity for people to plan without feeling under the gun.”

Europe’s Saharan Power Plan: Miracle Or Mirage?

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Conservative media outlets are waging an online defamation campaign against Presidential Science Advisor Jon Holdren, using out-of-context quotes and misinformation to portray him as hell-bent on pursuing population control through the use of forced abortions and mass sterilization.

Fox News reported that Holdren was bent on adopting a “planetary regime” of population control, while blogger Michelle Malkin called him a “wackjob” who entertains policies that would mandate “forced abortions, mass sterilizations, and poisoning the water supply to control the population.” On February 27, FrontPage Magazine published an article decrying Holdren’s “globalist, redistributionist, Malthusian views.”

The attacks are widely off the mark. The evidence generally cited by critics is a 1977 textbook entitled “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment.” The authors — Holdren is one of three — in a chapter detailing various coercive and non-coercive policies for “population control” ultimately come out strongly against such policies. They argue that the harm caused by their adoption “would, in our opinion, militate against the use of any such agent” of involuntary population control.

This Huffington Post piece won’t come as a shock to anyone who follows the climate debate and sees how the deniers routinely smear the scientific reputation of serious climate scientists like Holdren and NASA’s James Hansen.  Indeed, the deniers and delayers and their media flacks were pimping lies and disinformation about Holdren when he was just a nominee (see “More proof Holdren is a great choice: Pielke, Tierney, Lomborg, and CEI diss him“).

I have known Holdren for over a decade and have discussed energy/climate issues with him many times. He probably has more combined expertise on both climate science and clean energy technology than any other person who could plausibly have been named science adviser. You can see a video of an excellent talk he gave here (along with talks by Chu and me). For a more recent BBC interview, see “The Climate Quote of the Week“.

He is about as far from a partisan flamethrower or radical environmentalist as one could possibly find among the scientific community.  It is, however, certainly the case that anybody who spends as much time as Holdren has researching climate and talking to leading experts is going to become hellbent on avoiding Hell and High Water, the myriad catastrophic impacts our unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases will impose on our children and grandchildren and the next 50 generations.  Hence the NYT quote from a Revkin piece:

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The Energy Information Administration (EIA) concluded its analysis of the House climate Bill:

“¦ new coal bill without CCS beyond those that are already under construction are almost eliminated.  There is also a large increase in coal power plant retirements [and a 60% drop in coal use in power plants] by 2030 from current levels in the ACESA main cases, well above the 1% of existing coal capacity projected to retire in the reference case.

EIA comes to this conclusion even though it is lousy at modeling energy efficiency and natural gas and renewable energy (see “Despite its many flaws, EIA analysis of climate bill finds 23 cents a day cost to families, massive retirement of dirty coal plants and 119 GW of new renewables by 2030 “” plus a million barrels a day oil savings“).

Indeed, by 2020, the House climate bill would likely reduce reduce coal use at existing power plants by 20% to 30% or more (see “Why unconventional gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet“).  The CBO analysis would lead to roughly the same conclusion (see here).  And by 2030, I expect an even bigger coal use drop than EIA projects.

So it is dismaying that two people whom I respect greatly have published an op-ed that, while well-intentioned, is just quite wrong on this subject.  I’m referring to “No more loopholes for King Coal,” an op-ed written by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club and Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project, along with Trip Van Noppen, president of Earthjustice.  Since their mistaken assertions have become a common refrain among some environmentalists, I will address this issue in detail.  Their piece begins:

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How many fake “citizen groups” fighting to destroy a livable climate and kill clean energy jobs can there be?  First the coal lobby hired a top GOP voter-fraud company to run a massive “grassroots” effort to undermine climate and clean energy action.  Then Big Oil started manufacturing ‘Energy Citizen’ rallies to oppose clean energy reform.  Now comes a group operating under the auspices of Robert Bradley, a man who proudly shilled for Enron CEO Ken Lay who was convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges in 2006.  Bradley may be the only ex-Enron staffer still bragging about the deceits of his former employer (see here).  Brad Johnson has the Astroturf details in a post first published here.  The picture is of American Energy Alliance staffers Kevin Kennedy, Patrick Creighton, and Laura Henderson — all former House GOP staff — on tour in Pennsylvania.

The American Energy Alliance (AEA), a new polluter front group, is touring the nation to smear President Barack Obama’s clean energy reform agenda. Employees riding the “American Energy Express” bus are spreading the conservative lies that the American Clean Energy and Security Act will “cripple our sluggish economy.” AEA is the 501 c(4) offshoot of the Institute for Energy Research, a right-wing oil-industry think tank run by Robert Bradley, a former speechwriter for Kenneth Lay. E&E News reports that AEA’s “Energy Town Hall” bus tour pictures workers in hard hats:

The American Energy Alliance, which is affiliated with the conservative Institute for Energy Research, has begun a four-week bus tour to county fairs, sporting events and public meetings in several coal-reliant states. Representatives of the group will travel in a large blue bus carrying the slogan “Stop the National Energy Tax, Save American Jobs” and a picture of workers in hard hats. They will cross Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and Virginia. Yesterday, AEA officials participated in a rally with another group, Americans for Prosperity, in Zanesville, Ohio; a day earlier, they visited a county fair in western Pennsylvania.

In fact, by attacking legislation that addresses climate change and our national dependence on fossil fuels, AEA is preventing a clean-energy economic boom. Laughably, AEA claims it has “no ties to any political party“:

AEA has no ties to any political party, and it has no interest in supporting the agenda of any particular political party.

AEA may be telling the truth that it has “no interest in supporting the agenda of any particular political party” “” its only interest seems to be blocking progressive reform by spreading lies and distortions. However, AEA is tightly connected to the Republican Party and right-wing oil interests. In fact, all of its employees are former House Republican staffers:

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