Last week, over 150 business leaders from major American companies came to the capital to tell Congress to “pass comprehensive climate change and energy policy legislation this year.” One of the corporate titans who participated in the We Can Lead effort was Jeffrey Hollender, the co-founder, executive chairman, and “chief inspired protagonist” of Seventh Generation, the leading producer of green household products. In an exclusive interview with the Wonk Room, Hollender had strong words for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, explaining that it made sense for prominent companies like Nike and Apple to cut ties to the chamber over its opposition to climate action:

I think the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn’t act in in the best interest of business. They represent what was historically best for business. They represent exactly what’s the polar opposite of the future of business. The chamber is a voice of the energy industry, of the coal industry. As you’ve seen in the last couple of days, Nike gives up its position on the board, Apple resigns — businesses will increasingly abandon the chamber because they are just so wrong on this issue. Not that they’re not wrong on most issues, but they’re more wrong on this issue than they usually are.

Watch it:

Hollender further described membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a “reputational risk“:

These companies, like Nike and Apple, are taking a leadership position with their own energy efficiency initiatives. They don’t want to see a playing field where companies who abuse and pollute get benefits, and companies that are more efficient don’t. So, part of it is making sure the playing field is leveled. But I also think it’s undeniably important that the consumers of these companies would be embarrassed if they knew that Nike was sitting on the board of the chamber. I mean, I think it’s a reputational risk to be associated with the chamber, given their behavior.

Pausing in the Russell Senate building between meetings with senators from some of the 20 states in which Seventh Generation has manufacturing facilities, Hollender explained why capitalists like himself support the efforts of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to craft legislation with a cap-and-trade and energy efficiency provisions to cut global warming pollution and promote clean energy investment. Responding to critics who claim that advocates of a green economy are “socialists” who want to “kill capitalism,” he said, “the fact that we should be responsible for the effect we have on other people, anyone who tells you that’s anti-capitalist is crazy.”

Hollender concluded that Congress should pass clean energy and climate legislation immediately, because it’s “right for business, right for the economy, right for jobs, and good for the future of the country.”

First a favor:  Please digg my original debunking of Superfreakonomics by clicking here.

I’m trying to draw as much attention as possible to the post since the book comes out Tuesday, it has a huge media blitz, and will be heavily reviewed.   My post already been referenced by Nobelist Paul Krugman on his blog (“A counterintuitive train wreck“) and Mother Jones (“The Freaky Science of SuperFreakonomics“) and Think Progress (“SuperFreakonomics Gets Climate Change Super Freaking Wrong,“Ž” among others.

What’s interesting is that since my original post and various other debunkings around the web, the publisher has stopped Amazon from allowing people to search the book.  It’s fairly common for publishers to allow such searching, though not all do — see Amazon bestseller list here.  But I don’t know of a single instance where searching was allowed and then stopped.  It seems to me the publisher must be concerned that bloggers and others could actually see and quote the myriad errors and sheer illogic and patent nonsense for themselves and not bother buying the book, which at least for now has dropped down to #9 on Amazon (it was 3 or 4 over the weekend).

Obviously, a book that contains the sentence, “Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception,” is anti-scientific.  But probably the worst thing about the book from the point of view of spreading anti-scientific disinformation is the use of the phrase “global cooling” in the subtitle, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.  Millions of people who never even buy the book will now be subjected to that long-debunked piece of nonsense in book reviews and elsewhere.  The book hits the trifecta of global cooling mistakes:

1. The climate chapter begins with a full page pushing the myth that there was some sort of scientific consensus about global cooling in the 1970s.  Not — see “Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus.”  The chapter leads off with a NYT article, but, as we’ve seen, even The NYT‘s climate coverage in 1970s was a megaphone for science, not ‘global cooling’ alarmism.
2. The chapter pushes the “we’re cooling now myth.”  On page 186, Levitt and Dubner write, “Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.”  Sadly, it isn’t “little discussed” — the deniers and media have been pushing this for months now, so it doesn’t even qualify as a contrarian view, just utter rubbish, the kind of conventional wisdom these guys used to debunk.  See The BBC asks “What happened to global warming?” during the hottest decade in recorded history! and Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid! and NYT‘s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation.
3. The chapter pushes the dystopic notion that the only “cooling” strategy we need to address global warming is pumping massive amounts of acid rain pollution into the atmostphere, which I (and Caldeira and Robock) debunk in Part 1 and Part 2:

Frankly, it’s not possible for one person to debunk every error and illogical statement in just that one chapter — and I haven’t even gotten to the economics, which has one of the biggest blunders of all, as we’ll see.  Fortunately, lots of other people are joining in.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has a thorough debunking of the science here,  summarized below:

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Toyota plans a shorter-range plug-in hybrid

Toyota Motor Corp. is on track to start testing the prototypes for its first crack at plug-in hybrid cars later this year, a spokeswoman said yesterday.

By Jan. 1, the company expects to release 500 plug-in versions of its Prius onto American, European and Japanese roads, said Toyota spokeswoman Cindy Knight. The cars will use lithium-ion batteries, not the nickel-metal hydride packages seen in Priuses today.

The pilot will kick off a three-year effort by the Japanese auto giant to get data on how these cars fare in the real world: how they’re charged, how their batteries perform, and what sort of mileage they get. In recent years, Toyota has resisted pressure to develop a plug-in, even using commercials suggesting that plugging in hybrid vehicles is a bother.

Engineers will use the new plug-in data to design a more widely produced plug-in version of the Prius, but they don’t intend to copycat other companies’ plug-in efforts, said Tom Stricker, director of the energy and environmental research group for Toyota North America.

The Chevrolet Volt, which General Motors Co. has slated for release late next year, would get a range of 40 miles on all-electric power before firing up its gasoline engine. GM says it based the range on statistics showing that 75 percent of American commutes are less than 40 miles. Early forecasts are that Toyota will aim for an all-electric range of 10 to 15 miles instead.

Batteries are the most expensive part of any electric-drive vehicle, Stricker said, and Toyota has decided that a 40-mile range is too much.

I believe a shorter all-electric range makes sense for early plug ins from both a design and cost-effectiveness basis (see “CMU study suggests GM has wildly oversized the batteries in the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid” and “Has GM overdesigned the Volt: Is a 40-mile all electric range too much?“)  Here’s more:

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Okay, this isn’t news to CP readers:

• WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ
• WashPost, Fred Hiatt turn op-ed page into a “joke” with yet another falsehood-filled piece attacking climate action and clean energy “” by GOP quitter-in-chief Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin!
• WashPost op-ed page remains the home of un-fact-checked disinformation about clean energy and global warming
• The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages

But for the wider world, it’s nice that the uber-popular website Gawker has weighed in with, “The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America,” which I reprint below:

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NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center has issued its latest monthly, “State of the Climate: Global Analysis,” which found:

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for September 2009 was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20^th Century average of 15.0°C (59.0°F). This was the second warmest September on record, behind 2005, and the 33^rd consecutive September with a global temperature above the 20^th Century average. The last below-average September occurred in 1976.

Significantly, September was only 0.04°C (0.07°F) off the 2005 record.

This near-record September comes fast on the heels of the second warmest August on record and warmest June-July-August for the oceans.  I previously noted that NASA reported hottest June to September on record.

What is most interesting about this report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the temperature report from the lower troposphere (“the lowest 8 km (5 miles) of the atmosphere”) — the satellite data that began in 1979 analyzed by the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS).

UAH and RSS say September was also the second warmest in their records — a mere 0.01°C off the 1998 record.  NOAA reports that the lower troposphere warming trend for September is

• +0.13°C/decade (UAH)
• +0.18°C/decade (UAH

So yes, the satellite data also shows that the lower atmosphere is warming, contrary to what you may have heard.

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