Ford to unveil electric Transit Connect van today

Ford’s decision to offer an electric version of its award-winning Transit Connect van is giving a boost to a small Oak Park company, Azure Dynamics, and is expected to create new jobs in metro Detroit.

Ford will unveil a Transit Connect Electric commercial van as well as a Transit Connect Taxi powered by compressed natural gas today at the Chicago Auto Show.

Both vehicles, based on the Transit Connect that won North American Truck of the Year for 2009, are expected to go on sale late this year.

Ford and Azure work together on gas-electric hybrids, but the Transit Connect Electric will be the first electric vehicle for both companies.

U.S. proposes new climate service

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Companies will continue punting on major infrastructure investments and the jobs they create as long as Congress dawdles

Sean Pool is a Special Assistant for Energy Policy at American Progress.

Businesses leaders are rallying around bipartisan climate action.  One reason is that the cloud of uncertainty hovering over clean energy legislation is holding up billions of dollars of private investment that could be creating jobs and spurring technological innovation today.

Peter Darbee, CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric (one of the country’s biggest gas and electric utilities), explained in an op-ed yesterday that as companies wait to see what Congress will do, they are holding off on putting needed capital into infrastructure, manufacturing, and R&D facilities “”investments that would amount to another (privately funded) stimulus package:

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One oft-quoted communications expert calls this attack on the IPCC, “the worst, one sided reporting I have ever seen.”

[Please Digg this post by clicking here.]

UPDATE:  Climate scientist Ken Caldeira has just sent me an email titled, “I can’t believe the New York Times has done it again …” that I’ll reprint in its entirety at the end.

You can contact the NY Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, at public@nytimes.com.

The NYT has published arguably its worst climate story ever, “U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted last year as “an expert on environmental communications,” emailed me that the piece is “the worst, one sided reporting I have ever seen.”  When I called him up, he went further saying:

In this article, the New York Times has become an echo-chamber for the climate disinformation movement.

You might think it impossible for any newspaper — let alone the one-time “paper of record” — to run a story raising “accusations of scientific sloppiness” about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that never quotes a single climate scientist.

You might think it inconceivable that the NYT would base its attack on the accusations and half-truths provided by “climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists” where

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A good start to global progress on climate safety

Dr. Andrew Light, in this CAP repost, explains how the commitments already made by the world’s nations leave us only 5 gigatons short of the 2020 target scientists agree is necessary to minimize climate change damages.

This past December, 192 countries gathered for the 15th meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark. Ambitions for the Copenhagen meeting were high. UNFCCC members had agreed at their 13th meeting in Bali, Indonesia in 2007 that December 2009 would be the deadline to determine a course of action forward on a plan for global reduction of carbon dioxide emissions following the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

The UNFCCC’s midterm goal for climate safety is stabilizing temperature change increase caused by humans to no more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. According to analysis from Project Catalyst hitting this goal requires a 17 gigaton decrease in annual greenhouse gas emissions to 44 gigatons per year from the projected increase of global emissions of 61 gigatons by 2020 if we continue polluting at current rates (Figure 1).

The tense two weeks of negotiations in Copenhagen””preceded by an intense year of international negotiations once the Obama administration came into office””resulted in the creation of the Copenhagen Accord. This is not yet a legally binding agreement, but it does fulfill President Barack Obama’s promise prior to the Copenhagen summit that the United States was committed to getting a political agreement out of the meeting that could be implemented immediately and serve as the first step in a process to eventually produce a new international accord setting us on a pathway to climate safety.

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h/t NewEnergyNews

See also 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.”

Click here to watch the event live.

Todd Stern, U.S. special envoy for climate change, will be speaking about the lessons of the COP-15 summit in Copenhagen last December, the significance of the Copenhagen Accord that was negotiated there, and the path forward over the coming year and beyond. This will be Stern’s first public speech since the January 31 deadline for inscribing mitigation targets and actions in the Copenhagen Accord.  An expert discussion panel follows the address.

Here are the full details:

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Our guest blogger today is Donald A. Brown, Associate Professor for environmental ethics, science, and law at Penn State.  He blogs at ClimateEthics (a Time magazine Top 15 pick).

If ethical and justice arguments about why climate change policies are necessary are taken off the table in the climate change debate, it is like a baseball pitcher unilaterally agreeing to not throw any fast balls or breaking balls during a World Series game.

Yet, as we will explain, there is almost a complete absence of ethical arguments for climate change policies in the US debate about proposed approaches to climate change. This failure to expressly examine the ethical issues entailed by arguments made by opponents of climate change action has important practical consequences.

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