Today, President Barack Obama announced that “the federal government will reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution by 28 percent by 2020.” These cuts are long overdue, and promise a sea change in government procurement and practices, with the promise of major savings from energy efficiency. In a statement, Obama emphasized the goal of shifting “federal energy expenses away from oil and towards local, clean energy”:

As the largest energy consumer in the United States, we have a responsibility to American citizens to reduce our energy use and become more efficient. Our goal is to lower costs, reduce pollution, and shift federal energy expenses away from oil and towards local, clean energy.

Putting Obama’s State of the Union “dirty fuels are clean” gaffe behind them, the White House made it clear that “clean energy” means renewable sources like “solar, wind, and geothermal,” not oil, coal and nuclear.

The 28 percent target is a compilation of commitments from 35 departments and agencies, submitted to the White House by January 4, in accordance with Obama’s October 5 executive order 13514. The Treasury Department “is hoping to cut its emissions by a third,” Daniel Tangherlini, assistant secretary for management and chief financial officer, told reporters.

The scale of this commitment is immense. The federal government “runs 600,000 vehicles and 500,000 buildings” — 160,000 vehicles and 300,000 buildings in the Defense Department alone. Defense is committing to cutting emissions in non-combat areas by 34%. These non-combat installations and fleet “account for around a quarter of Defense’s energy consumption and roughly 40% of its emissions,” according to Dorothy Robyn, deputy undersecretary for installations and the environment:

In 2008, the department spent $20 billion on its energy bill, and another $14 billion in 2009 after oil prices slipped. While the department will report energy use from its combat, or operational activities, Robyn said the sector would not be subject to a reduction target.

Today’s announcement is a key first step for the government, especially in the realm of national security — so we won’t be sending money to terrorist havens even as our military are fighting there.

Terrorists try very hard to spread their disinformation.  A key goal is to get others to spread it for them, especially ones who are holed up in a cave somewhere.  Thus terrorists craft their disinformation into a sensational message that they hope gullible members of the global media will repeat.

So who got suckered into repeating the message of the number one terrorist in the world?

Amazing.

But Limbaugh isn’t alone.  It’s a top story on Drudge.  And here’s FoxNews:

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The Brits manage to make our anti-science reporters, columnists, and media seem like Walter Cronkite.  One of the most notorious is James Delingpole and his “paper,” the UK’s Telegraph, who recently helped launched a major effort to intimidate and harass climate scientists.

Delingpole is a self-described “libertarian conservative” who likes “recreational drugs.”  He’s the Glenn Beck of climate writers who puts out stuff like, “Build-a-bear: the sinister green plot to turn our kids into eco-fascist Manchurian candidates.”  Seriously (see “Right wing bullies Build-A-Bear into removing videos about manmade climate change“).

For Delingpole, every transgression by scientists — real or imagined — is a scandal.  In his Monday column he jumped the shark gate, with his piece “After Climategate, Pachaurigate and Glaciergate: Amazongate.”  Later I’ll deal with the “substance” of that piece, which begins absurdly, “AGW theory is toast.”

Right now I want to focus on what it best described as Delingpole-gate.   George Monbiot elaborates in his Wednesday blog post, “James Delingpole leads Telegraph into vicious climate over email“:

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Synthetic biology breakthrough improves diesel fuel production

A team of researchers from government and private industry has engineered a molecule that sidesteps expensive processing to produce diesel fuel from biomass.

“The fact that our microbes can produce a diesel fuel directly from biomass with no additional chemical modifications is exciting and important,” said Jay Keasling, lead researcher on the project and CEO of the Energy Department’s Joint BioEnergy Institute.

“Given that the costs of recovering biodiesel are nowhere near the costs required to distill ethanol, we believe our results can significantly contribute to the ultimate goal of producing scalable and cost-effective advanced biofuels and renewable chemicals,” Keasling added.

The discovery, which was described in a paper published today in Nature magazine, was made by a team consisting of Keasling and colleagues at JBEI, along with researchers at LS9, a privately held biofuels company based in south San Francisco.

Here is the abstract of the Nature article, “Microbial production of fatty-acid-derived fuels and chemicals from plant biomass” (subs. req’d):

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The status quo media has a new anti-science columnist, Ed Wallace.  He had a column yesterday in Business Week, “Is Global Warming a ‘Crock of S*%t?’ “  Here is a typical pearl of disinformation:

Then, on the last day of 2009, Wolfgang Knorr of the Earth Sciences Dept. at the University of Bristol released new research showing the possibility that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not risen in the past 160 years. Maybe he’s wrong, but at least he published his views for peer review in the Geophysical Research Letters.

Not even close.  As anyone with access to Google knows, that is not what Knorr said at all (see “Yes, the atmospheric CO2 fraction has risen at a dangerously fast rate in the past 160 years, reaching levels not seen in millions of years“).  See also the single most famous chart of observational data in the entire climate arena (above), the Keeling Curve of “Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2).”

Knorr’s study merely suggested the fraction of human-emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere may have stayed flat for 160 years.  It had a bad headline and confused many folks for a few days, but it was pretty quickly straightened out for anyone paying attention.

To write this piece and not even bother using Google for 30 seconds to fact-check it is a sign of utter disdain for the truth.

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This is a TP repost by Brad Johnson.

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:

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