Is it “conceivable” the media could report the news correctly? No, I’m afraid it is “unlikely.”

Today, in an extended set of remarks at a town hall meeting in Nashua New Hampshire, the President once again strongly endorsed a comprehensive bill that combines energy and climate policy — and sets a price on carbon:

The concept of incentivizing clean energy so that it’s the cheaper, more effective kind of energy is one that is proven to work and is actually a market-based approach.

In fact, he went on and on extolling the virtues of putting a price on sulfur trading in the Clean Air Act:

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A 1995 document the North Dakota coal industry used before the legislature to show how carbon taxes would help wind and hinder lignite development.

In a bald attempt to defend coal industry profits, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) has joined a predominantly Republican push to overrule the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous pollutants. Earlier this month, Pomeroy introduced the Save Our Energy Jobs Act (H.R. 4396), which would rewrite the Clean Air Act so that “[t]he term ‘air pollutant’ shall not include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride.” Pomeroy’s justification for flouting the reality of the global warming threat is the need to defend the coal, oil, and gas industries:

This action could result in significantly raising local energy prices and endanger the 28,000 direct and indirect jobs that are connected to North Dakota’s coal industry, not to mention thousands of jobs connected to our manufacturing and expanding oil and gas industries.

Pomeroy’s claim that “regulations to address global climate change must only be enacted at the direction of Congress” is specious, considering that he voted against the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, which did exactly that.

This is nothing new. North Dakota’s coal industry successfully blocked the state legislature from taking action on global warming pollution in 1995, by noting that it would make wind power more cost-effective than coal. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), while extolling North Dakota’s wind power potential, has decided to side with coal when it comes to actual climate policy decisions, though he has not taken the extreme step of embracing Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) resolution to overturn the greenhouse gas endangerment finding, as Democrats Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) have.

North Dakota’s allegiance to coal has delivered low-price electricity, but at great cost. North Dakota’s largest coal-fired power plant, the Great River Energy Coal Creek Station, is one of the nation’s most polluting plants, spewing over 800 pounds of mercury, 24,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, four million pounds of coal waste, and a staggering 10 million tons of carbon dioxide every year.

North Dakota’s climate is beginning to spiral out of control. In the last twenty years, Red River floods expected to occur at Fargo only once every ten years have happened every two to three years. 2009′s unprecedented flooding made it the third year in a row with at least a “ten-year flood.” Pomeroy has two children — whose future he is putting at grave risk, all for the sake of donors like American Crystal Sugar ($99,025), whose facilities rely on coal plants, and the electric utilities who have given him $210,860.

Somewhere on a Hollywood movie set for Groundhog Day, Part 2: Bill Murray wakes up to find he’s just lived through the hottest decade on record, just as he did in the 1990s, just as he did in the 1980s.  And he keeps waking up in the hottest decade on record, until he gains the kind of maturity and wisdom that can only come from doing the same damn thing over and over and over again with no change in the result.  Ah, if only life were like a movie.

Somewhere in PA:  Punxsutawney Phil saw the shadow of unrestricted fossil-fuel pollution from Homo “sapiens” sapiens today.  That means global warming for another six thousand weeks — and then some (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

If we keep listening to the siren song of delay, delay, delay from the anti-science crowd, then eventually people aren’t going to go through this elaborate charade of wondering whether some large rodent in Pennsylvania can predict the weather — the forecast will always be the same, “bloody hot”:

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Clean-energy investments in the president’s budget would help kick start the economy and build sustainable, long-term growth.  CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss has the details in this repost.

After eight years of sparse investment in the clean-energy technologies of the future, President Barack Obama launched a crash program at the start of his presidency last year to create clean-energy jobs and catch up to our economic competitors who grew their clean-energy industries while Bush slept. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act began this task by investing $70 billion in clean-energy technologies and adopting $20 billion in clean-energy tax cuts, and President Obama’s proposed fiscal year 2011 budget would continue to build on these investments.

The ARRA programs will create more than a million new jobs, increase American energy independence, and cut global warming pollution. ARRA will double the amount of renewable electricity in the United States by 2012, weatherize 1 million low-income homes so that they are more energy efficient, and double domestic manufacturing capacity for wind turbines, solar panels, and other clean-energy equipment.

President Obama’s proposed FY 2011 includes larger investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and advanced research, despite the budget freeze and reductions in other discretionary spending programs. This budget would create jobs, increase American energy independence, cut global warming pollution, and make our economy more competitive.

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Proposal creates infrastructure bank, adds $1B for high-speed rail

President Obama’s proposed fiscal 2011 budget would create a national infrastructure bank to fund major transportation projects and provide an additional $1 billion for high-speed rail projects.

As expected, the request for overall spending on the two largest federal ground transportation programs, highways and transit, remained relatively constant from the previous year. The federal highway program would receive a $200 million bump to $41.3 billion, and transit investment would climb roughly $70 million to $10.8 billion.

The infrastructure bank — called a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund — would be used to expand existing federal transportation investments by providing direct federal funding and seed money for large-scale capital project grants that “provide a significant economic benefit to the nation or a region.”

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The event will be webcast here Wednesday, from 12:00pm – 1:30pm.  Details below.

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The mainstream media takne as a whole acts as a center-right institution that supports the status quo on key issues (see Newsweek stunner: Why the “status quo” establishment media’s coverage of global warming is so fatally useless, Part 1 and Part 2).  That’s why one of the great triumphs of conservative messaging has been selling the myth of the “liberal media” (see “Working the Refs”).

That triumph of myth over reality has, among other things, helped guilt the media into giving equal time (and beyond) to the most extreme conservative views even when they spread disinformation on subjects they have no expertise on whatsoever.  Nowhere is that clearer than in the once venerated Washington Post (see WashPost goes tabloid, publishes second falsehood-filled op-ed by Sarah Palin in five months “” on climate science and 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.

Last week, Think Progress had a story revealing just how successful conservatives have been at selling this myth:

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Certainly, this is the conventional wisdom:

Of course, cap and trade is just a means.  Perhaps something will rise Phoenix-like from its ashes that can achieve the same end and get 60 votes in the Senate.  If not, then indeed, America will be abandoning the global race for 20 million clean energy jobs by 2030 (see Lindsey Graham: “Every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy”).

Today’s guest post is by Bill Becker, the Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

The second year of the Obama Era is young, but we may be seeing the emergence of Obama 2.0 – a president willing to do battle against the dark forces of stasis and negativity. Let’s hope so.

Obama 1.0 didn’t want to get ahead of Congress. Obama 2.0 appears ready to go head-to-head with Democrats who have the numbers to lead but lack the discipline, and Republicans whose only big idea is to make Democrats fail – a job that has turned out to be pretty easy so far.

Now the President seems open to strategy-change and he’s being flooded with fresh advice. In the Feb. 8 issue of TIME, for example, columnist Mark Halperin suggests that Obama “borrow from the playbook of Ronald Reagan” by becoming bigger than life, standing for a few big things and striking themes with which no self-respecting American patriot – Republican, Democrat or Tea Person — can disagree.

Halperin is correct. Obama 1.0 worked at playing the Washington game; Obama 2.0 must prove he can change the game, as he promised in the campaign. He should lead us in a tectonic shift from the politics of fear to the politics of hope.

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