In October, corporate front group Americans for Prosperity is hosting its annual “Defending the American Dream” conference. The get-together will feature right-wing notables such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). The keynote address will be given by Newt Gingrich, who was propelled back into the media spotlight last year with his “Drill Here, Drill Now” pro-oil campaign.

One of the “Gold Sponsors” of AFP’s global warming denying conference is the “green” print and paper company TrayPML. TrayPML markets itself as a company that makes “active strides to protect the planet.” On its website, TrayPML also boasts about its ability to help companies “go green.” The company touts its environmental credentials by publicizing the World Wildlife Fund as an esteemed client. AFP, of course, mocks the protection of endangered wildlife, and argues for increased drilling in Alaska’s preserved lands.

AFP is supported largely by money derived from the Koch Industries polluter empire. David Koch, the billionaire VP of Koch Industries, sits on the board of the AFP Foundation and helped found its predecessor, Citizens for a Sound Economy. Koch Industries has an abysmal environmental record that includes both major oil spills and several instances where Koch pipelines leaked millions of gallons of toxic crude into ponds, lakes and streams across the country. Supporting Koch’s polluter agenda, AFP runs various organizing efforts to discredit global warming science, and mobilizes opposition to clean energy legislation. Not only that, but AFP’s Phil Kerpen, as ThinkProgress has noted, is waging an all out war against the concept of green jobs.

By sponsoring AFP’s anti-environmental conference, TrayPML wipes out any possible credibility that the firm is a friend of the “green” movement.

Yesterday, libertarian blogger Declan McCullagh, a senior correspondent for CBSNews.com, made the incendiary claim that the Obama administration was suppressing Treasury Department documents detailing the true cost of limiting greenhouse gases. After CBS published the story, “Obama Admin: Cap And Trade Could Cost Families $1,761 A Year,” Republicans claimed this was a startling admission, since it has officially estimated an average household cost in 2020 of $80 to $175. It turns out, however, that the $1,761 figure was constructed by McCullagh himself, not the administration, using a new form of economic analysis, Twitternomics:

Here’s one more math formula: McCullagh Twitternomics ≠ Obama Administration Analysis. Assistant Treasury Secretary Alan Krueger responded simply that the CBS “reporting” was “flat out wrong“:

The reporting on the Treasury analysis is flat out wrong. Treasury’s analysis is consistent with public analyses by the EIA, EPA, and CBO, and the reporting and blogging on this issue ignores the fact that the revenue raised from emission permits would be returned to consumers under both administration and legislative proposals. It is time for an honest debate about how to solve a long-term challenge and deliver comprehensive energy reform – not for misrepresentations of the facts.

In a follow-up piece, McCullagh quotes the response from Treasury, but somehow failed to include the lines where his reporting was called for being “flat out wrong” and using “misrepresentations of the facts.”

McCullagh is on the fringes of the right-wing Koch-Exxon pollution machine, writing for the Cato Institute (founded by David Koch and funded by ExxonMobil) and Reason Magazine (part of the Reason Foundation, funded by David Koch and ExxonMobil). Koch Industries’ revenue last year was estimated by Forbes to be $98 billion — in McCullagh’s Twitternomics, a tax on American families of $863. ExxonMobil’s record 2008 revenue was $442.85 billion — a McCullagh tax of $3,902.

McCullagh’s anti-government libertarianism sometimes reaches absurdities, as when he argued in 2004 that “Keynesian economists who believe in activist government intervention in the economy” were “fooled by the Soviet Union.” Further, McCullagh — who exaggerated his position at CBS — is an old hand at ascribing outlandish headlines to liberals that he actually made up himself. His real claim to fame is for establishing the false meme in 1999 that Al Gore made an “improvident boast” about inventing the Internet.

But none of this should come as a surprise, as McCullagh’s CBS blog is titled, appropriately, “Taking Liberties.”

The agenda of the people who smeared Van Jones is a matter of public record — see Fox News blurts out its agenda: “Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through”¦. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions,” and then put “the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

Now Van Jones has written a message to his friends and supporters laying out his agenda — a call to action, really:

Dear Friends:

My family and I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love and support that we have received over the past week or so. I resigned from the White House on Sept. 6, and I have remained silent since then””in keeping with my promise not to be a distraction during a key moment in the Obama Presidency.

Over the past several days, however, many people have been asking how they can help and what they can do.

The main thing is this: please do everything you can to support both President Obama and the green jobs movement. Winning real change is ultimately the best response to these kinds of smear campaigns.

I ask everyone to:

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White House plays down talk of climate delay to 2010

The White House on Wednesday played down the possible impact of putting off major U.S. climate change legislation to 2010, vowing to press for progress on the issue ahead of global talks in December.

Asked whether a delay would amount to a setback for President Barack Obama’s priorities on the issue, spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters: “No, I think we can continue to make progress.”

“We’ve got to make progress and the international community’s got to make progress getting China and India and developing nations, and evolving world economies like Brazil, on board,” he said.

Gibbs spoke one day after Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid raised the prospects of putting off action on the legislation until 2010, only to have his chief spokesman say Democrats still sought action this year.

“We are going to have a busy, busy time the rest of this year,” Reid said Tuesday. “And, of course, nothing terminates at the end of this year. We still have next year to complete things if we have to.”

Asked about his comments, spokesman Jim Manley replied: “We are still committing to passing health care reform, regulatory reform and global warming legislation by the end of the year.”

The U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of the legislation in June, and leaders of key Senate committees are due to unveil their version later this month after agreeing to a delay of a few weeks from a mid-September target date.

India says ready to issue non-binding emissions cut

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No, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack did NOT say global warming would be good for rural communities.

What he said was that taking action on global warming would be good for rural communities, as the rest of The Journal Record‘s article makes clear:

He also called climate change an opportunity, because the first country to develop technologies to deal with widespread changes in the environment and move those innovations into the market will be recognized as a worldwide winner.

Vilsack knows that the climate change from unrestricted greenhouse gases emissions would be a disaster for farmers (see “A Stormy Forecast for U.S. Agriculture“).  Oklahoma would do worse than most, probably becoming a permanent dust bowl in the second half of the century.  Vilsack has testified that the economic benefits of climate bill for farmers ‘easily trump’ the costs.

The story isn’t bad, but the headline is dreadful — and that’s a problem because many people don’t ever get past the headline.  The headline could have been “Vilsack: Action on climate change could help rural economies” or “Vilsack:  Fighting climate change could help rural economies.”

The paper’s “About Us” section asserts:

Our mission: To be Oklahoma’s foremost influential and trusted information service.

Our commitment: To serve our audiences with quality products and timely, accurate information that helps them gain success.

Not quite there, folks.

The United States created the solar cell industry and literally launched it into space 50 years ago.   And, yes, solar PV is going to be one of the largest job-creating industries of the century, projected to grow “from a $20 billion industry in 2007 to $74 billion by 2017.”

But while conservatives  work hard to kill the clean  air, clean water, clean energy jobs bill that is America’s  only real hope of remaining globally competitive, the rest of the world eats our lunch, a lunch we  were kind enough to cook for them using on our own no-longer-secret recipe.  As Tom Friedman explains:

Applied Materials is one of the most important U.S. companies you’ve probably never heard of. It makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your computer. The chip business, though, is volatile, so in 2004 Mike Splinter, Applied Materials’s C.E.O., decided to add a new business line to take advantage of the company’s nanotechnology capabilities “” making the machines that make solar panels. The other day, Splinter gave me a tour of the company’s Silicon Valley facility, culminating with a visit to its “war room,” where Applied maintains a real-time global interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it’s built around the world in the last two years. I could only laugh because crying would have been too embarrassing.

Not a single one is in America.

Let’s see: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. I suggested a new company motto for Applied Materials’s solar business: “Invented here, sold there.”

As the National Renewable Energy Laboratory documents, “From 1980 to 1985, the U.S. industry dominated the world market contributing 50% or more of world production.”  But then President Reagan gutted Jimmy Carter’s renewable energy program (see “Who got us in this energy mess? Start with Ronald Reagan“).  President Clinton began to increase federal efforts and incentives, so our  market share began to increase.  Then the Gingrich Congress started to roll back Clinton programs, especially those aimed at clean energy deployment or those aimed at increasing the competitiveness of US solar manufacturers.  Finally, the Cheney-Bush administration came in and started a major effort to gut all clean energy deployment programs, just as our competitors were seriously ramping up their efforts.

And so our market share in solar has plummeted in the past decade, as the NREL figure below makes all too painfully clear:

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Back on August 5, I explained How the Senate can fix cost containment in the climate bill with ‘price collar plus’.  E&E News then noted that Boxer was considering a modified ‘price collar’ for climate bill.   Now Energy Daily reports (subs. req’d):

Moving to assuage concerns about the potential costs of capping U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer has included an allowance “price collar” provision in climate change legislation she is drafting that would establish maximum and minimum prices for emission allowances in the early years of the cap-and-trade program the bill would create, The Energy Daily has learned.

The draft legislation, which Boxer (D-Calif.) plans to introduce at the end of the month, would establish an initial allowance price ceiling of $28 per metric ton of carbon dioxide and a price floor of $11, with the prices adjusted upwards annually thereafter, according to a source familiar with the measure.

Under the provision, if heavy demand pushed allowance market prices above the $28 ceiling, the government would borrow allowances from future years and sell them to regulated entities at the ceiling price, a move that in theory would reduce demand for allowances and lower prices.

The minimum, or floor, price would ensure that government-administered allowance auctions generate sufficient revenues to fund climate change adaptation efforts, for example, and other climate change-related public benefits.

This is almost precisely what I proposed.   I had originally suggested using the House’s starting floor price of $10, but recently suggested raising that to $14.  So $11 is a good start, but I hope Boxer and the Senate goes higher.  Equally important — the bill needs to have both the floor and ceiling rising 5% plus inflation every year thereafter.

This Carbon Collar is a vast improvement over the House bill.   Fence-sitting Senators and industries can legitimately see it as achieving stronger cost-containment protection than their analysis suggests the House bill now provides, including protection against speculators running the permit price up, while progressives can legitimately see it as achieving better environmental outcomes than their analysis suggests the House bill now provides. Win-win.

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This guest post is by two members of a student environmental group on the University of Maryland campus called “UMD for Clean Energy”.

This upcoming fall, we’ve decided to get involved in our city’s elections, which take place in College Park, Maryland on November 3rd.  Why now?  At the state level, policies and programs such as the Maryland global warming bill, new energy efficiency standards, an improved Renewable Electricity Standard, and renewable energy rebates are underway.  At the same time, the federal government is investing record amounts of money in clean energy and energy efficiency, and could soon pass a climate change bill that will drive hundreds of billions of dollars worth of public and private investment into clean energy and energy efficiency over the next decade.  In the next 10 years, we expect to see clean energy investment and the jobs that come with it raining down on many states, including Maryland.  Where is it all going to land?  We think the areas that benefit the most will be the ones out in front and in the lead on clean energy and low carbon technology policy.

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