Marc Morano, Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) former environmental communications director, mocked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, to laughter and applause. In his acceptance speech for the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award from the Orwellian-named conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media, Morano argued that the “hoax” of global warming is a “rotting corpse,” based on the Climategate smear campaign he helped promote. Morano asserted that McCain “is bailing out of global warming” and that “you know it’s now politically expedient to be a skeptic when John McCain is running scared”:

You know it’s bad when John McCain is bailing out of global warming! [Laughter.] He’s now claiming — and this is not made up — he just claimed a couple days ago he didn’t even support a global warming bill despite co-authoring two, one in 2003 and one in 2005. He stunned his former aides with his new-found skepticism. That just goes to show you because of the work of AIM, because of all the work of Sen. Inhofe, who I owe a huge debt of gratitude for, he stood on the Senate floor … [applause] — Sen. Inhofe was the chairman of the EPW committee until Barbara Boxer took over — stood on the Senate floor and called mandmade global warming one of the greatest hoaxes of modern times in 2003. You know it’s now politically expedient to be a skeptic when John McCain is running scared. And it’s also worse! Al Franken of Minnesota bailed out on the climate bill last August, again, before Climategate. You know it’s bad when Democrats like Al Franken are bailing.

Watch it:

After helping orchestrate the Swiftboat smear campaign against Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Morano joined Inhofe’s staff from 2005 to 2009, where he coordinated a network of global warming conspiracy theorists. He has since continued his propaganda campaign as an employee of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, an Exxon-funded anti-environment group. Although Morano has reason to celebrate that the fossil-fueled right-wing propaganda machine has infected popular understanding of climate change, reality isn’t paying attention.

McCain’s support for cap-and-trade legislation does seem to have wavered as he runs for reelection, but his stance on the threat of global warming has not wavered. “I believe,” McCain said last year, “that the issue of global warming is one of the most fundamental crises facing the world today.”

Morano’s mention of Sen. Franken (D-MN) is even more bizarre. His claim that Franken is “bailing” on global warming is based entirely on Franken signing a letter calling for carbon pollution tariffs to be set on foreign imports in climate legislation.

Hoping to defend their fossil-industry funders from having to limit carbon pollution, conservative politicians and pundits are increasingly embracing conspiracy theories that global warming is an ideological hoax — even as the consequences of climate change grow more dire. “Challenging science,” Media Matters’ Walid Zafar comments, “seems to be the conservative movement’s equivalent to speaking truth to power.” Today in a Nevada town hall meeting, President Obama took on the conservative deniers, explaining in straightforward language how record snowstorms in the nation’s capital are connected to manmade global warming:

First of all, we just got five feet of snow in Washington and so everybody’s like-a lot of the people who are opponents of climate change, they say, “See, look at that. There’s all this snow on the ground, you know, this doesn’t mean anything.” I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn’t mean that every place is getting warmer. It means the planet as a whole is getting warmer. But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver which supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow. The idea is that as the planet as a whole gets warmer, you start seeing changing weather patterns and that creates more violent storm systems, more unpredictable weather. So any single place might end up being warmer. Another place might end up being a little bit cooler. There might end up being more precipitation in the air. More monsoons, more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more drought in some places, floods in other places.

Watch it:

As Joe Romm notes, the scientific evidence has shown that we get snow storms in warmer-than-normal years.

Read the entire Global Boiling series at the Wonk Room.

In effort to outdo YouTube-quoting CBS, UK mag quotes a right-wing T-shirt!

It’s getting harder to hide the decline of the media with its missing-the-forest-for-the-tree-rings coverage.

From the BBC to the NY Times to the WashPost, we’ve seen major media outlets abandon journalistic standards.  Among the worst was CBS libeling Michael Mann based on a YouTube video “” while reporting his exoneration! And that doesn’t even include the media that just make stuff up, like the UK’s Daily Mail.

You might think the staid UK magazine, The Economist, would be above the sensationalist coverage that gives equal time to discredited disinformers, like The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB), or relies on even more dubious unscientfic sources, like web videos.  But you would be wrong:

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German Industrial Giant partners with U.S. Concentrated Solar Startup

The German industrial giant Ferrostaal will use solar technology from the California startup eSolar in power plants to be built in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa.

The partnership, announced on Thursday, comes a month after eSolar, which is backed by Google and other investors, signed an agreement with a Chinese industrial company to build solar power plants that would generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity.

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Workers stand outside the Rebuilding Center in Portland, OR, which is the nation’s largest nonprofit for salvaged construction and remodeling materials.  The Center offers employees living wage positions with benefits. Portland created more than 20,000 green jobs in 2007 alone. This is a CAP repost.

Clean energy jobs continue to make inroads in the U.S. economy. Growth in these jobs was a robust 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007 compared to 3.7 percent overall, and in January President Obama promised $2.3 billion in Recovery Act Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credits for clean-energy manufacturing projects nationwide that will create tens of thousands of clean-energy jobs. Meanwhile, the stimulus bill is pumping $30 billion into the clean-energy sector, and aggressive smart grid deployment could create 270,000 U.S. jobs and a further 138,000 if our smart grid technologies are exported to a global market.

Some regions have become green jobs strongholds. Here are the top five U.S. cities that are seeing the most growth:

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Texas’s own state climatologist can find no scientific basis in his state’s effort to roll back the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public, as Brad Johnson reports in this Wonkroom repost:

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