According to the World Resources Institute, the razing of forests from Indonesia to Brazil is responsible for the release of five billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, which amounts to 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than all the cars and trucks in the world. The international effort to comprehensively fund forest protection as part of a new climate treaty is known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). Experts estimate that an investment of about $10 to $20 billion a year will cut deforestation by half, if properly implemented. This is one of the cheapest routes to cutting global warming pollution, even ignoring the $4.5 to $5 trillion in benefits of saving the world’s tropical forests. As Papua New Guinea’s climate negotiator Kevin Conrad said last month:

We have to value forests when they are alive and standing. Presently, we only value them when they’re dead.

Saving the world’s tropical forests is a profound challenge. A funding framework controlled by corporations and international bodies raises great concerns from representatives for indigenous people, who worry that “States and Carbon Traders will take more control over our forests.” “Where countries are corrupt,” the United Nations notes, “the potential for REDD corruption is dangerous.” Realizing these fears, a $100 million scandal involving false carbon credits swept Papua New Guinea this summer.

“Logging companies may turn into carbon companies,” warns conservationist Rob Dodwell, who notes that only efforts that strengthen local communities rather than reward multinational corporations have any chance of being fair, sustainable, or trustworthy. An international framework to solve deforestation cannot ignore the “links between the exploitation of natural resources and the funding of conflict and corruption.” In other words, storing carbon must not be the only reason to save the forests.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) have been leading efforts in the U.S. Senate to confront international deforestation. In February, Lugar said he hopes the United States will “exercise leadership in protecting forests and responding to the risks of climate change”:

Deforestation is a critical national security challenge because of its connections with threats from climate change and food security.

The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), passed by the House in June, “provides funding for tropical countries to prepare and implement plans to reduce deforestation, as well as for achieving these reduction goals.” ACES establishes private and public financing from polluters to prevent deforestation, and would create an “International Climate Change Adaptation Program within the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide adaptation assistance to the most vulnerable developing countries.”

Last week, Sens. Kerry and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced the Senate version of ACES, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. The international forestry provisions in the bill “echo those originally included in the House bill,” though it “would allow international offsets to account for a quarter of projects annually rather than the half called for in the House bill,” thus making the private offsets program more reliable, and shifting more responsibility to public deforestation projects.

Read more at the Progress Report, the daily email newsletter from the Think Progress and Wonk Room team.

Republican Rep. Michael Castle announced at a press conference today in Wilmington, Del., that he will seek the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Vice President Biden last year — instantly boosting the GOP’s chances of capturing a Democratic seat.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which handicaps congressional races, called Castle’s candidacy a “major recruiting victory” for the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). Cook moved the race from the “solid Democratic” column to the “toss up” column.

This breaking news from USA Today raises two interesting questions:  First, will RNC Chair Michael Steele denounce him, too?  Second, will Castle continue to advocate for clean energy jobs and climate legislation, or will he try to walk away from his vote like Mark Kirk has in Illinois?

After all, the climate vote is increasingly becoming a litmus test for conservatives (see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 3: RNC Chair Steele withdraws support for Rep. Kirk over his vote on climate and clean energy bill“).

Some hypocrisy on the issue is already clear:

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Someone just e-mailed me the latest example of a seemingly intelligent (albeit conservative) person who has joined the ranks of those successfully duped and confused by the deniers and the status quo media.  Our latest victim’s impressive bio:

Dr. Stephen Leeb is the editor of The Complete Investor newsletter. The Complete Investor newsletter has earned awards for Editorial Excellence for 2004 and 2005 by the Newsletter & Electronic Publishers Association [sic -- Leeb hasn't quite figured out the internets, either].  Dr. Leeb is the author of six books on investments and financial trends. His newest book is Game Over: How to Prosper In A Shattered Economy.

He even seems to know something about energy, “His best-selling book The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself – and Profit – from the Coming Energy Crisis accurately predicted the surge in oil prices.”  Who didn’t, though (other than Michael Lynch, who predicted back in 1996 “real oil prices FLAT for the next two decades)?

But based on the following nonsense he recently wrote and circulated, investors may ask themselves whether he bothers to do the most basic kind of research needed to justify following his advice:

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This joint release is from the Center for American Progress and United Nations Foundation.   Download the full report here (pdf).

New York, NY”” The United Nations Foundation and the Center for American Progress presented today an analysis of “core elements” needed to combat climate change. In a press conference call, U.N. Foundation President Timothy E. Wirth and Center for American Progress President John D. Podesta also spoke about the ongoing U.N.-led negotiations toward a new international climate agreement.

“This report once again demonstrates that attending to climate change is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. Concerted and cooperative international action to get us on a pathway to a global 20 percent renewable electricity standard and halving deforestation by 2020 is the most cost-effective way to achieve our midterm emissions reductions goals. Just as important, improvements in energy efficiency across the board will pay for it all and generate new revenue to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to the impacts of climate change they are already experiencing.” said Center for American Progress President John Podesta.

Achievable gains in energy efficiency, renewable energy, forest conservation, and sustainable land use worldwide could achieve up to 75 percent of needed global emissions reductions in 2020 at a net savings of $14 billion, according to analysis done for the United Nations Foundation by Project Catalyst:

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Since failing to vote gets more attention than wanting to suspend California’s climate and clean energy laws, a lot of people probably know this story:

Meg Whitman, the fourth richest woman in California, thinks she should be governor, presumably because the three richer women are busy. She freely admits that this idea just popped into her head about 18 months ago. Before then she wasn’t a member of any party and hadn’t even voted very often. That’s the kind of delightful English-style eccentric she is. She might as well have decided she was Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

Then a funny thing happened to another part of her brain, the area where memories are stored: It became less and less clear if she had voted before 2002 — she claimed she had — or if she had ever registered as a Republican in another state — another claim she’d made and frequently repeated.

No one had seen any evidence to support either assertion. A reporter asked Multipersonality Meg if she could help.

“Go find it,” Meg snapped.

For what happened next, read the rest of the HuffPost piece, “An Open Letter from Meg Whitman About Voting.”

Less well known is her lack of civic responsibility when it comes to all Californians — and their children and grandchildren. As fellow candidate for Governor, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, explained in a September 24th piece:

strong>Meg Whitman penned an op-ed last week stating she’d suspend California’s landmark climate-change legislation, AB32, on her first day if elected governor. This is backwards thinking, and I disagree.

Fellow Californian and Nobel Prize winner Energy Secretary Steven Chu has already explained what could happens to the state if we fail to adopt aggressive emissions reduction strategies (many of which have been pioneered by the state):  “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”
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Here’s more proof that “The only way for the U.S. to win the clean energy race is to pass the clean energy bill“:

Europe to throw $73 billion behind energy research

Europe will this week launch a campaign to triple funding for energy research to 8 billion euros ($11.7 billion) a year in a technology race with Japan and the United States, a draft document shows.

Solar power should get 16 billion euros over the next decade and up to 30 energy-sipping “Smart Cities” should be built with the backing of around 11 billion euros, added the report by the European Union’s executive, the European Commission.

In total, at least 50 billion euros of additional funding is seen over the next 10 years to ensure a wide range of technology emerges to help the EU meet its goal of cutting greenhouse gases by 80 percent by 2050.

“We need to stimulate our best brains to push back the frontiers of science in materials, in chemistry and physics, in nanotechnology and biotechnology, to find new and better ways of producing and consuming energy,” says the draft obtained by Reuters ahead of the launch on Wednesday.

“We can not sit back and wait for such potentially game changing breakthroughs to emerge from laboratories and make the often long and arduous journey to market,” it adds.

The report looks at how much funding is needed, rather than how businesses and the EU’s 27 member countries would find the money as they emerge from the biggest downturn since the second world war.

But earlier Commission proposals for funding energy projects, such as the 4 billion euros “European Economic Recovery Plan” have made swift progress this year and are now in the later stages of debate by EU ambassadors.

Companies ranging from Germany’s E.ON to Spain’s Gamesa look set to benefit.

Wind energy research should get 6 billion euros over the next decade, nuclear research should get 7 billion euros and energy from biomass and other waste 9 billion.

There should also be 13 billion euros for innovative “carbon capture and storage” technology to trap carbon dioxide from power stations and bury it underground.

Obama orders federal government to cut emissions

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Once upon a time, some serious people used to believe that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) might have a snowball’s chance in hell of being a practical and affordable climate strategy in our lifetime.  Those very sincere people were used by some of the car companies and Bush Administration as part of a strategy to oppose or delay the introduction of more viable alternative fuel strategies, in particular electric cars — see, for instance, the movie “Who killed the electric car?”

That isn’t to say pure EVs were slam dunks as successful mass-market consumer vehicles, particularly with the technology of the 1980s and even 1990s.  HFCVs, however, required multiple technological (and other) miracles to succeed and every plausible competitor, including EVs, to fail first (see “Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end from a technological, practical, and climate perspective” and “The car of the perpetual future” “” The Economist agrees with Climate Progress on hydrogen“).  That is but one reason the absurdly expensive infrastructure will never be built — nor has any independent group ever proposed a plausible scenario under which the infrastructure would be built.  And that’s the fundamental hydrogen cars will not be practical or a cost-effective climate strategy in your lifetime.

Under the leadership of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California briefly flirted with a serious investment in hydrogen cars and infrastructure — the Hydrogen Highway.  A driving force for that alliterative but ill-fated effort was Terry Tamminen, who “headed California’s Environmental Protection Agency and was Cabinet Secretary and Chief Policy Advisor” to Schwarzenegger, who is now “the Cullman Senior Fellow for Climate Change and Director of the Climate Policy Program at the New America Foundation” and author of a recent but outdated attack, “The Myth of Battery Cars” debunked below.

The California legislature in particular sped away from the Hydrogen Highway effort once it became clear that both the fueling station and the cars were insanely expensive and not terribly practical (see “California Hydrogen Highway R.I.P.“)

Today, with rapidly advancing battery and related technology, we know that pure EVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are a core climate solution since electric drives are more efficient, easily powered by carbon-free energy and indeed far cheaper to operate per mile than gasoline (or hydrogen), even when running on renewable power. And they are the key alt-fuel strategy needed to deal with the energy/economic security threat of rising dependence on imported oil and the inevitably grim impacts of peak oil (see “Why electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence“).  That is why pretty much every car company in the world will be introducing one or more models of PHEVs or EVs in the next 2 to 4 years, but we still don’t have a single commercial HFCV anywhere near production (see L.A. Times: “Hydrogen fuel-cell technology won’t work in cars.” Duh.).

In particular, a renewable-energy-based hydrogen fueling system capable of handling even half the cars and light trucks on the road would cost many hundreds of billions of dollars.  And it would have a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today.  Also, the total well-to-wheels efficiency with which a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle might utilize renewable electricity is roughly 20% (although that number could rise to 25% or a little higher with the kind of multiple technology breakthroughs required to enable a hydrogen economy).  The well-to-wheels efficiency of charging an onboard battery and then discharging it to run an electric motor in a PHEV or EV, however, is 80% (and could be higher in the future)””four times more efficient than current hydrogen fuel cell vehicle pathways.

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The US Chamber of Overstated Horrors has been hemorrhaging credibility and members since it blurted out its true agenda with its Luddite call for “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” on global warming.   The Chamber is shrinking faster than the size of Apple Computer’s products.

Pacific Gas & Energy, Public Service Company of New Mexico, and Exelon have already left, leading to more desperate lies from the Chamber, which falsely claimed “We’ve never questioned the science behind global warming.”

The NY Times reports yesterday that the latest company to come to its senses is Apple.  The innovative tech giant issued a blunt letter saying:

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