From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

No, I’m not operating under the misimpression that my writing can be compared with George Orwell’s.  I know of no essayists today who come close to matching his skill in writing.  On top of that, bloggers simply lack the time necessary for consistently first-rate efforts.  I’ve written some two million words since launching this blog three years ago this week.  Perfection isn’t an option.

But operating under the dictum, “if you want to be a better writer, read better writers,” I took on vacation Facing Unpleasant Facts, a collection of Orwell’s brilliant narrative essays.  My life has been almost the exact opposite of Orwell’s.  Indeed, if you think you had a rough childhood, trying reading, “Such, such were the joys.”  Compared to Orwell, we’ve all been raised by Mary Poppins.

Orwell does have the soul of a blogger, as we’ll see.  He is solipsistic almost to a fault, but with a brutal honesty that puts even the best modern memoirist to shame.

Read about how his headmaster cured his bedwetting with a beating, a double caning with a riding crop in fact, after he foolishly announced that the first one “didn’t hurt.”  Or read “Shooting an Elephant,” with its gut-punching first line, “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people “” the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”

Second, he has “a power of facing unpleasant facts,” which I think is perhaps the primary quality I aspire for here.

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts — see “What if the MSM simply can’t cover humanity’s self-destruction?” and “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress” and dozens more examples here.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I didn’t want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way.  My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation 20,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid dirt, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay ten times as much.  My mother pursued freelance writing for many, many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also “This could not possibly be more off topic“).

Why share this?  Orwell, who shares far, far more in his master class of essay writing, argues in “Why I write“:

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A new “grassroots” fossil fuel front group, FACES of Coal, is employing a shadowy Republican-staffed company to spread its message. The Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security — a new pro-mountaintop removal campaign that refuses to reveal its “grassroots” members — is employing a GOP Beltway shop to promote its work. At the group’s initial press conference in Charleston, West Virginia, the West Virginia Coal Association’s Bryan Brown complained about “outsiders” who don’t “appreciate America’s reliance on coal”:

Many outsiders are putting pressure here in West Virginia and nationally. We feel they don’t understand and appreciate America’s reliance on coal and the economic impact coal has on our communities, our state and our nation.

The West Virginia Coal Association and the County Commissioners Association of West Virginia are the only organizations to publicly admit being part of FACES. However, as the DeSmog Project first reported, they’re willing to rely on “outsiders” to do their actual work: The FACES website, which includes no contact information, is registered to the Adfero Group, a K-Street public relations firm. Adfero’s online communications arm was spun off as Fireside 21. Adfero and Fireside21 serve predominantly Republican and corporate clients:

Ken Ward, Fireside21 CEO, Is A Former Richard Pombo Staffer. Kenneth Ward, the CEO of Fireside21, served as a Legislative Assistant and Deputy Press Secretary to the extreme anti-environmentalist Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) until 2004. [Fireside21, Legistorm]

Jeff Mascott, Fireside21 President And Adfero Group Managing Director, Built The GOP.gov Website. Jeff Mascott, the managing director of the Adfero Group and the president of Fireside 21, “designed the original GOP.gov web site” as the “primary online communications consultant at the House Republican Conference under former Chairman U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, Jr. (R-OK).” He is married to a former staffer for Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Rep. Anne Northrup (R-KY). [Adfero, Innovative Advocacy, Legistorm]

Fireside21′s Congressional Clients Are Predominantly Republican. Fireside21 claims the record of building the websites for 150 members of Congress. Of the 38 members listed publicly on their site as clients, 28 are Republicans, from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-GA) to Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Only 10 clients are Democrats, including Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). [Fireside21: CMF Awards, Website Launches]

Adfero Is Behind Numerous Big Oil Astroturf Campaigns. Working for the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, Adfero’s “Fuel For America” campaign whitewashed price-gouging by its clients following Hurricane Katrina. Adfero’s “ChamberGrassroots,” “Vote For Business” and “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace” campaigns fight labor reforms including card-check. “Californians Against Higher Taxes” killed a clean energy reform ballot measure in 2006. Other clients include the American Tort Reform Association, the National Pork Producers Council, and the Independent Petroleum Association of America. [Adfero]

What do the FACES of Coal really look like? The same inside-the-Beltway, fossil-funded conservative lobbyists behind the other “grassroots” efforts to demonize clean energy reform.

Given the silly sniping at this small, wildly successful program, I feel obliged to update my last post.

BusinessWeek’s Auto Beat whines, “They say the program was effective in selling cars, but the boost won’t last long enough to really help the car industry for very long.”  Ya think?  It’s a friggin’ stimulus, and a tiny one at that — $3 billion.

And then we have the academics — UC Davis’s Christopher R. Knittel actually did a study on “The Implied Cost of Carbon Dioxide under the Cash for Clunkers Program,” which got lots of media attention like “Cash for Clunkers Pays Ten Times Market Rate for Greenhouse Gas Reduction.”  I could have saved them a lot of trouble had they bothered to read my May post, which noted “As a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this “cash for clunkers” deal is probably among the least cost-effective uses of federal dollars one could imagine.”

Memo to media:  It ain’t “Cash for carbon.”

I was not a big fan of the final version of “Cash for Clunkers” because its mileage improvement requirements were so inadequate, as Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) explained here.

But in the real world, the public has mostly turned in gas-guzzlers in exchange for fuel-efficient cars “” which perhaps should not have been a total surprise since oil prices are rising, gas guzzlers remain a tough resell in the used car market, and most fuel-efficient cars are much cheaper than SUVs.  So as a stimulus that saves oil while cutting CO2 for free “” it has turned out to be a slam dunk, far better than I had expected.

You can read the government’s final report on Cash for Clunkers aka Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) here.  The economic bottom line, “According to a preliminary analysis by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the CARS program” will:

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My colleague David Roberts at Grist has a provocative post I am reprinting below.  I think it is an important message for progressives to hear (see “Memo to enviros, progressives: The deniers and dirty energy bunch are “full of passionate intensity” “” and eating our lunch on the climate bill!“) although I only half agree with him.  I think that if team Obama’s messaging and outreach had been superlative (as it was for most of the campaign), rather than dreadful as it has been for over two months now, that both the health care and climate bills would be in far better shape.  But that would still not be any guarantee of success nor would it necessarily have resulted in a climate bill on his desk substantially stronger than the one the House passed, for many reasons some of which Roberts spells out.  Even Obama can’t single-handedly beat the well-funded disinformers when progressives in genral are lousy at messaging and big media is impotent? I’ll blog more on messaging in September.  Comments on Roberts’ piece are welcome.

More Sun for Less: Solar Panels Drop in Price

For solar shoppers these days, the price is right. Panel prices have fallen about 40 percent since the middle of last year, driven down partly by an increase in the supply of a crucial ingredient for panels, according to analysts at the investment bank Piper Jaffray.

The price drops “” coupled with recently expanded federal incentives “” could shrink the time it takes solar panels to pay for themselves to 16 years, from 22 years, in places with high electricity costs….

American consumers have the rest of the world to thank for the big solar price break.

Until recently, panel makers had been constrained by limited production of polysilicon, which goes into most types of panels. But more factories making the material have opened, as have more plants churning out the panels themselves “” especially in China.

“A ton of production, mostly Chinese, has come online,” said Chris Whitman, the president of U.S. Solar Finance, which helps arrange bank financing for solar projects.

Talk about your mixed feelings — it’s WalMart all over again, but with clean energy, not toys and households products (see “Solar PV market doubled to 6 Gigawatts in 2008 “” U.S. left in dust, having invented the technology“).

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Videos are now available (here) for the “National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 on Jobs and the New Economy” at UNLV in Nevada August 10.

Participants at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas, NV, discussed ways smart federal and state-level policies can work to upscale existing markets for energy-efficiency retrofits, renewable energy, and energy infrastructure in a way that creates jobs, saves consumers money, and generates private investment. In conjunction with the summit, John Podesta and former Senator Timothy E. Wirth (D-CO) authored a short memo about the promise of natural gas as a bridge fuel for the 21st century, and CAP released a report with the Energy Future Coalition.

The videos represent an excellent six-hour workshop on the clean energy challenge and opportunity from some of the leading experts in the country  (see also “An introduction to the core climate solutions“).  Here is the agenda with the full list of Summit Speakers you can listen to:

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