Our guest blogger is Jon Gensler, a former U.S. Army captain, LEED accredited professional, and a dual MBA/MPA Candidate at MIT Sloan and the Harvard Kennedy School.

Yesterday, January 27th, 2010, was an inspiring day for me: as a veteran and member of Operation Free, as an aspiring clean energy entrepreneur and businessman, as an environmental advocate, and as a proud American. On the morning before President Obama’s first State of the Union address, national leaders in the business community, the labor community, veterans and national security experts, faith leaders, farming leaders, and more came together at the Clean Energy, Jobs, and Security Forum in the Capitol building to discuss the importance of comprehensive climate and energy legislation, how quickly we as a nation need to respond to truly act in time, and showing a first step in the bipartisan direction that the President called us to take.

There are so many highlights of the day, it would be impossible for me to recount them all, but imagine a conference with opening remarks by Senators John Warner (R-VA, retired) and John Kerry (D-MA), two retired general officers discussing the national security threat posed by climate change, and a keynote lunch address by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dr. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy. We discussed the destabilizing force that climate change has in already weak states, how to engage and benefit from the work of the large US agricultural sector (and not merely with promises of corn ethanol!), and how by addressing the risks that a changing climate brings to all facets of our lives, we can seize the reins of the global clean energy economy — one in which China is already outspending us by laying out $9 billion a month to develop their own clean energy sector. Sen. Graham described the costs of doing nothing very well:

A word of caution and warning: Doing nothing, in my view, does put the planet at risk. Doing nothing continues an irresponsible practice of sending $440 billion year overseas to buy oil from people who don’t like us very much. Doing nothing allows China to own what I think will be the most exciting economic opportunity of the 21st century: the green economy. As we talk, as we argue, as we try to find 60 votes in America, China is doing.

Certainly, the President’s first State of the Union address was a worthy cherry on top, eloquent as always, and full of what I thought to be a heartfelt and serious message. He doesn’t claim to have all of the answers, but claims we need to come together as a nation and try to find them. That seems to me to be the right approach, especially for such difficult problems as the financial, economic, and climate crises that we are facing. We are all going to need to make changes, to adapt the way we have lived and worked in the past to the new realities of the future, and thus it is us as a people who need to shoulder much of the burden of that work.

At the end of the day, feeling good after the President spoke — though waiting for my friends in the environmental community to be up in arms about the calls for offshore oil drilling, nuclear power plants and clean coal — I am perhaps still most inspired by the words of Senator Graham presaging the call the President would make later that evening: “We are trying to find a way forward… but there is no substitute for citizen involvement.” And Secretary Chu: “Policy changes happen when the American people give courage to their representatives.”

Wayne Gretzky, perhaps the greatest hockey player of all time, once said about his abilities in the rink, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.” We know where the puck is going to be. Stand up, America, and get there.

Analysis of actual U.S. data disagrees with Anthony Watts’ primary conclusion.

My guest blogger today is one of the best meteorologists around, Dr. Jeff Masters, former Hurricane Hunter and now Director of Meteorology for the Weather Underground.  There’s so much damn stuff to blog on, I didn’t get around to the amazing new study that, as DotEarth’s Andy Revkin put it, “throws cold water on the allegation that bad weather stations have amplified America’s warming trend” — allegations made by former TV weatherman Anthony Watts who runs the anti-science website WattsUpWithThat.

We knew that the “good or best” weather stations provide data that matches the overall U.S. temperature record (see Must-read NOAA paper — Q: “Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?” A: “None at all.”).  But as Revkin explains, “In essence, the paper, On the Reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record (pdf), concludes that the instrument issues, as long acknowledged, are real, but the poor stations tend to have a slight cool bias, not a warm one.”  Like Revkin, I first saw this on Masters’ Wunderblog, and he gave me permission to excerpt it at length here.

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Coal River Mountain, WV

Yesterday in Washington, DC, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) exhorted citizens to “get angry about the fact that they’re being killed and our planet is being injured by what’s happening on a daily basis by the way we provide our power and our fuel.” In West Virginia, climate activists are not just getting angry, they’re taking action — blocking the demolition of Coal River Mountain by coal company Massey Energy. The activists, members of the aptly named organization Climate Ground Zero, have been living in trees for over a week to prevent bulldozers from reaching the summit:

High up in the trees near the summit of Coal River Mountain, two activists dangle in the air near a mountaintop removal mine site. Eric Blevins and Amber Nitchman are still preventing the expansion of mining on the summit of Coal River Mountain, a mountain that has the best wind energy (and therefore economic) potential in the area.

In 2007, local residents commissioned an economic study of wind power potential for the mountain, which found it could “power 70,000 West Virginia Homes and provide permanent jobs and $1.7 million in taxes to the county every year.” Instead, coal baron Don Blankenship, the “scariest polluter in the United States,” intends to blow up the mountain for its coal. His employees have been blasting the tree-sit activists with air horns and flood lights.

Following hundreds of phone calls from supporters of the non-violent civil disobedience action, Gov. Joe Manchin (D-WV) met today with Climate Ground Zero representatives and “asked the activists to scale down their campaign.” His request comes just two days after state lawmakers “introduced — at Manchin’s request — a resolution attacking efforts in Congress and by the Obama administration to tackle the global warming problem.”

Is clean tech China’s moon shot?

The global race to develop clean technology is not just about who can build the best solar parks or wind farms. It is also shaping up as a contest between Chinese-style capitalism and the more market-oriented approach fancied by the United States and Europe.

The question comes down to this: will China’s highly capitalized command-and-control economy trump laissez-faire in a low-carbon shift that is widely portrayed as the next industrial revolution?

The failure in Copenhagen to agree to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a new global climate treaty when it expires in 2012 has thrown the focus on national measures. And by almost all accounts, the Chinese are coming on strong.

Beijing’s top leaders have made clear their intention to have their nation dominate this new industry, up and down the value ladder.

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President Barack Obama’s discussion of energy policy in his first State of the Union address pandered to corporate interests while demoralizing his progressive supporters. Though Obama made a strong case that real investments in clean energy such as solar technology, advanced batteries, high-speed rail and efficiency are critical to job creation and international competitiveness, he also offered sops to established corporate polluters. Republicans, who spent much of the address refusing to applaud Obama’s call for economic reforms, ecstatically applauded his praise of polluting industry. Embracing the language of the John McCain campaign, Obama described nuclear power, offshore oil and gas drilling, and coal as “clean energy jobs”:

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.

Watch a compilation of Obama’s address and the Republican reaction:

Although Republicans lauded Obama’s praise of heavily subsidized, polluting industries, they scoffed at energy legislation that would address climate change. Unlike Rudy Giuliani, Rep. David Dreier (R-CA), Mitt Romney, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), Obama’s actual supporters were dismayed.

About 12,000 MoveOn members participated in a “live online dial-test of President Obama’s State of the Union speech.” While Obama’s mentions of clean energy innovation were some of his most popular moments, his paean to polluters was by far his worst moment with progressive activists:

Nukes, oil, and coal just aren’t clean. If Obama really is committed to “tough decisions,” he’ll take on the coal companies who are tearing up the Appalachian mountains, the nuclear companies who want taxpayers to take all the risk for accidents and waste, and the oil companies who are burning up the planet for their own profit. And that’s something the people who put him into office could support.

Hard to know whether to laugh or cry:

For those actually interested in the overwhelming evidence, a good place to start is this review of the 2009 scientific literature:  “The year climate science caught up with what top scientists have been saying privately for years.”  It ain’t funny, unless you’re into gallows humor.

This is a repost by Think Progress’s Brad Johnson, about the senator from the state where they had the very first “tea party.”

Speaking at the 2010 Clean Energy, Jobs and Security Forum yesterday, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) invoked the anger of conservative tea partiers in his advice to advocates of climate legislation. His comments came following the shocking election of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who rode a wave of anti-incumbent anger to win the seat previously held by Sen. Ted Kennedy. Kerry told the assembled crowd that if “the Tea Party folks can go out there and get angry because they think their taxes are too high,” then even more people “ought to get angry about the fact that they’re being killed and our planet is being injured” by fossil fuel pollution:

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February 3, 12:00pm – 1:30pm

If you are in the greater DC area, you’ll want to attend this event Wednesday with two leading climate scientists, Christopher Field and Michael MacCracken.  I’ll moderate, and you get a light lunch.  For everyone else, it will be webcast here.

The event will cover the latest in climate science.  The two speakers have unique experience with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is so much in the news these days!

The Science of Climate Change

February 3, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:30pm

About This Event

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The conservative senator from South Carolina has delivered the quote of the week, which I for one will be using again and again.  I think he has exactly the right framing, and I’ll expand on this next week.

At the same time, Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told reporters, “I want to vote for a cap-and-trade bill.”

Graham has consistently shown that he does get it.  Like all of us who speak on this subject a great deal, he sometimes doesn’t quite say things the way he’d like (see “Is there going to be a bipartisan climate, energy security, clean air and clean energy jobs bill this year?“).

But in E&E News PM (subs. req’d), Graham ended any confusion about where he stands on this most important of issues:

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[If you want to let Dr. Seuss Enterprises know what you think of this misappropriation of the Lorax name, you can email them at "drseuss at drseuss dot com."]

This is repost from Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson.  Coal use is not green (see Science bombshell explodes myth of clean coal: Mountaintop “mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses”).  You can watch the entire video of The Lorax below.

In a shameless act of greenwashing, a coal-gasification startup has named itself without permission after Dr. Seuss’s beloved Lorax. LoraxAg, LLC, is a western Massachusetts company that is seeking investors for its “Green Coal Technology” of a coal gasification and chemical production facility. The company, whose principals include Michael Sununu, the son of former New Hampshire senator and governor John Sununu, has raised over $1 million in seed capital to build a high-sulfur coal factory. The name choice was a deliberate attempt to cloak their coal-and-chemical company as an eco-friendly venture:

And, yes, the name is inspired by the Dr. Seuss story, Farina said. “The Lorax is the protector of the truffula trees,” he said. “We think this is the greenest use of coal.”

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