The outrage over — and debunkings of — the error-riddled book Superfreakonomics continue, even as coauthors Levitt and Dubner slowly concede their mistakes.

Perhaps the most scathing takedown to date comes from Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, the Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, on RealClimate, in an “An open letter to Steve Levitt.”  Pierrehumbert accuses his U of C colleague of “academic malpractice in your book.”

So far, Dubner has apologized to me for one false accusation in his Sunday, October 18 post attacking my accurate debunking of his book (see here).  Now he has finally conceded on his blog that one of the many key errors I pointed out in his book — that climatologist Ken Caldeira did not believe or ever say that “carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight” (see here).  He still has not retracted the countless other mistakes I and others have pointed out.  Indeed, Berkeley economist Brad DeLong urged both authors to “abjectly apologize” for the whole chapter.

And Dubner has not retracted the claim that is still being parroted by the deniers and delayers around the web that I did a “smear” on the book.  It is clear for all to see now that there never was a smear. Everything I wrote in my original debunking was accurate – see Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and patent nonsense “” and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places.

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Since 2001, the Senate has debated at least eight energy or global warming bills where there was no analysis by EPA, Congressional Budget Office or the Energy Information Administration completed in advance of Committee deliberations.

Our guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and energy team interns Jaren Love and Michael McGovern.  This is a Wonk Room repost.

Senate Republicans are demanding lengthy economic analyses of progressive clean energy policy, despite having spent careers voting for and against major energy legislation without such delay. This week the Republican members of the Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted its debate on the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733), claiming that the Environmental Protection Agency’s analysis of the economic impacts was not sufficiently thorough. Before they launched their boycott, committee ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Sen. George Voinovich demanded a “full analysis” that satisfied their particular requirements:

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Our guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and energy team interns Jaren Love and Michael McGovern.

Senate Republicans are demanding lengthy economic analyses of progressive clean energy policy, despite having spent careers voting for and against major energy legislation without such delay. This week the Republican members of the Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted its debate on the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733), claiming that the Environmental Protection Agency’s analysis of the economic impacts was not sufficiently thorough. Before they launched their boycott, committee ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) demanded a “full analysis” that satisfied their particular requirements:

As we’ve noted in previous letters and requests, getting a thorough, comprehensive economic analysis of the Kerry-Boxer bill is an essential component of a meaningful legislative process. To accomplish that, EPA needs to do a series of model runs examining key provisions in the bill, with a number of sensitivity analyses on critical issues, including, among others, the availability of offsets, potential growth in nuclear power, and the extent of emissions reductions by developing countries. Anything less than a full analysis of this kind will be unacceptable.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chair of the Senate Republican Conference, piled on: “We want to participate in any clean energy bill, but we’re not willing to do that until we know what it costs.”

“It undermines the credibility of the process,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH). “It’s not constructive to the process to proceed without knowing what it costs.”

On Monday, senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) joined Inhofe to demand a “complete and substantive analysis of any bill that attempts to address this issue” and “complete data and a thorough vetting” before the EPW Committee took action.

Yesterday, senators Gregg, Susan Collins (R-ME), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sent a letter to the EPA saying, “We cannot support legislation” without “a clear picture of the bill’s impacts on our economy,” saying the EPA analysis needs to be completed “prior to any action in EPW.”

Their arguments fall flat, however, because these and other senators routinely voted on energy and global warming bills without any analysis. Since 2001, the Senate has debated at least eight energy or global warming bills where there was no analysis by EPA, Congressional Budget Office or the Energy Information Administration completed in advance of Committee deliberations. In several cases, there was no full analysis before the bill was voted on by the entire Senate: Read more

In September, I wrote a post “Newsweek gets duped by Big Oil “” for real “” in worst Big Media story of the year.”   The Newsweek piece by Rana Foroohar was titled “Big Oil Goes Green for Real” with greenwashing lines like “So how should we take the spate of new green announcements from the world’s major oil firms?”  Not.

What I didn’t realize is that Newsweek was not getting duped by Big Oil — it was getting cash from the American Petroleum Institute in return for “access,” as journalism and ethics experts told E&E News (subs. req’d).

Newsweek since 2007 has sold advertising packages to the oil industry’s biggest influence group that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.

American Petroleum Institute ranks among advertisers that have reached a spending threshold that allows them to attach their name to a Newsweek event and have their top executive as a panel speaker. API President and Chief Executive Jack Gerard was the sole industry speaker joining Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Reps. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) and Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) at an “executive forum” the magazine and API held at the U.S. Capitol in March.

Newsweek and API have teamed on four forums so far and are planning another — “Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?” — for Dec. 1, when the Senate could be holding a floor debate on climate legislation. An invitation sent yesterday to lawmakers’ offices said Gerard again would be a panelist and that requests to speak were “currently pending confirmation with notable members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate.” Lawmakers receiving invitations included Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

I urge all lawmakers to shun this event.

TPM Muckraker also has a good story on part of this, “Newsweek And Oil Lobby Team Up To Host Climate Change Event With Lawmakers,” which noted:

In February 2008, the news weekly and the oil lobby held a panel discussion on “Globalization Trends and Energy and the Growing Competition for Resources.” That event featured Foroohar, the author of the recent Newsweek story lauding big oil, as well as Tony Emerson, the managing editor of Newsweek International, API’s then-CEO Red Cavaney, and an energy specialist for the Chamber of Commerce. Emerson, moderating, described API as “an advertising partner.”

Remember, the API is spending millions to spread disinformation about the climate bill (see here) and create fake grassroots campaigns against it (see “Leaked memo: Big Oil manufacturing ‘Energy Citizen’ rallies to oppose clean energy reform“).

The E&E story, “API’s partnership with Newsweek raises ad cash and ethics questions,” is so shocking that I will excerpt the rest of it at length below:

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China Sets Its Sights on Green Cars

The parent of SAIC Motor, the biggest automaker in China, plans to invest 6 billion yuan to develop and manufacture clean-energy vehicles over the next couple of years, Xinhua, the official news agency, has reported.

Of the investment, which will be equivalent to about $880 million, one-third will go to research and development of green cars and the rest will be invested equally in green vehicle and component manufacturing, Xinhua quoted Hu Maoyuan, the SAIC chairman, as saying late on Tuesday.

SAIC, the Chinese partner of General Motors and Volkswagen, will introduce its self-developed hybrid Roewe sedans next year and electric cars by 2012, the state-run Shanghai Securities News reported Wednesday, quoting an unidentified company executive.

The automaker, which is based in Shanghai, may outsource batteries for its green cars and is in discussion with potential partners including BYD, the newspaper said.

BYD, a Chinese automaker 10 percent owned by a unit of Berkshire Hathaway, rolled out its plug-in hybrid car, F3DM, in China late last year. Chery Automobile, another Chinese automaker, rolled out its first electric car, S18, in February.

Beijing announced a plan earlier this year to subsidize the purchase of clean-energy vehicles for public transportation fleets in 13 cities to help its automobile industry develop green technology. The plan is to promote the use of electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles by public transport operators, taxi companies and postal and sanitary services in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Subsidies will be based on the gap in prices between energy-efficient vehicles and those with traditional engines, with subsidies running as high as 600,000 yuan for a large commercial bus powered by a fuel cell.

New business group backs climate-change bill

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Al Gore is in the spotlight again with his must-read solutions book “” “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” And that means the daggers are out.  But who would have imagined that one of the first pieces would be by the NYT’s John Broder, who repeats the false claims by “Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics,” that “Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first ‘carbon billionaire,’ profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.”  I’m going to repost a piece by Media Matters from May that looks at one of the despicable origins of this smear, “O’Reilly Factor guest host Laura Ingraham presented clips of Al Gore’s recent congressional testimony that had been edited to remove his statements that he donates the money he makes from his climate-related work to a non-profit organization.”

But first I’m going to repost a response to the NYT piece by Grist’s Dave Roberts:

In case we need more evidence that an urgent economic transformation is required to avoid catastrophic climate change, it can be found in a new study commissioned by World Wildlife Fund International.

Conducted by Climate Risk Pty. Ltd. of Great Britain and Australia, the study concludes:

Runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialization over the next five years [emphasis added]“¦  World governments have a window that will close between now and 2014. In that time they must establish fully operational, low-carbon industrial architecture. This must drive a low-carbon re-industrialization that will be faster than any previous economic and industry transformation”¦Today, only three out of 20 industries are moving sufficiently fast enough.

By “low carbon re-industrialization”, the authors mean energy efficiency and clean generation technologies, low-carbon agriculture, and sustainable forestry. They have identified 24 critical resources and industries the world will need to develop quickly to avoid climate catastrophe. Among their conclusions:

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