Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) is “sick” of the “insider baseball crap” dominating the Senate debate over global warming and energy reform. In an interview with Grist, the first-term congressman stated in no uncertain terms that the country is at risk from global warming and our economy is at risk of losing the clean energy race. Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Perriello has not one lick of sympathy for those in the Senate who deny these threats:

That’s more insider baseball crap. I don’t really care. I’m sick of starting with what can we get through the Senate; let’s start with what solves the damn problem. Until the Senate gets its head out of its rear end and starts to see the crisis we’re in, our country is literally at risk. Our economy is at risk, because these jobs are being created overseas. It should have the same urgency with this problem that it had bailing out Wall Street. We are swearing an oath to do what’s necessary to protect this country, not do what’s necessary to get a bill through the Senate.

Perriello repeatedly expressed his belief that Congressional inaction on jobs, national security, and scientific “challenge of our era” is due to a lack of courage and responsibility:

– This is the challenge of our time—the jobs opportunity, the national security challenge, the scientific challenge of our era. Any plan that uses market forces to signal a carbon-constrained environment is going to move us in the right direction. People who don’t support this kind of aggressive energy independence are just selling Americans short.

– We’re so far behind China, Europe, and other areas in the energy jobs of the future because neither party has had the guts to take this on. There are so many spineless people in D.C.

– Every week the Senate doesn’t act, it either freezes that investment and innovation or it sends it overseas. We’re giving up jobs. The Senate—the ridiculous tactics of the Republicans and the timidity of the Democrats—is standing in the way of the kind of job creation we need.

– Unfortunately, good ideas, ideas that could save our country, sometimes take 30 minutes to explain and only 30 seconds to demagogue. In between those two things is leadership, and we haven’t had the moral courage to take this on.

Perriello’s support for cap-and-trade legislation has made him a target of Republicans and polluters, who have mocked him with ads about snowstorms and flooded his office with forged letters of opposition.

Goodbye, Hummer

The world might be saved: It looks as if the Hummer is destined for the junkyard. The plan by General Motors to sell the muscular brand to a Chinese company went up in a puff of exhaust smoke on Wednesday after government officials in China said that they had never received the necessary application for approval and thus couldn’t grant it.

We suspect the deal collapsed because the Chinese Communist Party “” which rarely shows much shame “” is worried about China’s image as the most polluting nation on the planet. If true, that is good news.

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Earlier this week, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works considered the 2011 budget request for the Environmental Protection Agency. During the questioning of EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) responded to the litany of Republicans denying the science of global warming:

The reason that this debate is so important is that it reminds me in some ways of the debate taking place in this country and around the world in the 1930s. And during that period with Nazism, fascism growing — a real danger to the United States and democratic countries around the world — there were people in this congress and the British parliament saying don’t worry, Hitler is not real. It’ll disappear. We don’t have to be prepared to take it on. Fortunately, there were other people in this country, Roosevelt, Republicans who said, “You know what, we are going to have to be prepared for a war.” Winston Churchill in England led the effort there. But because we were as slow as we were, millions of people probably died unnecessarily. Global warming is real. If we do not get our act together there will be devastating impacts for our kids and our grandchildren, causing among other things trillions of dollars in order to repair that damage if it is repairable at all. And the longer we delay, the longer we have this senseless debate, the less prepared we will be.

Watch it:

Right-wing climate-conspiracy bloggers called Sanders’ remarks “completely irresponsible rhetoric” from the “climate change cult.” Fox News jumped in, Tucker Carlson telling Sean Hannity that “real questions have been raised about global warming”:

It’s so . . . The truth is people denying the Nazi threat in the late ’30s were the left, for whatever that is worth. This is a classic — rather than engaging the other side, the other argument, you write them off as bigots or racists. This is a sign of weakness not strength. He knows that real questions have been raised about global warming.

Watch it:

Following World War I, isolationism drew supporters of all political stripes , although hard-left Communists and Socialists with ties to revolutionary Russia were, unsurprisingly, among the loudest opponents of fascism in the 1930s. After Hitler invaded Poland, however, the leading isolationists were right-wing opponents of President Franklin D. Roosevelt like Charles Lindbergh, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, the segregationist Rep. John Rankin (D-MI), Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH), and former president Herbert Hoover. As Sanders noted, the mobilization against the threat of fascism involved both parties — confronting the climate threat must as well.

Despite the efforts of Fox News to promote conspiracy theories about climate science, their unrelenting attacks have no relation to the fact of manmade global warming, which indeed will bring more devastation the more we delay.

Transcript: Read more

Has the WSJ’s vaunted ‘firewall’ between straight news and ideological-driven editorials been breached?

I’d like your help debunking this atrocious piece of media misreporting, “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel.”

Yes, the WSJ piece wins the prize for the most unintentionally ironic headline since it is the media’s self-destructive push to oversimplify that has led to repeated libeling of Michael Mann and other climate scientists (see “Newsweek staff who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet” and “Abandoning all journalistic standards, CBS libels Michael Mann based on a YouTube video “” while reporting his exoneration!”

I am running a full response by Dr. Mann below.  It seems the least I can do in response to the umpteenth false attack on his reputation.  It simply boggles the mind — and raises serious questions of journalistic bias for the paper — that the WSJ can run this error-riddled attack on Mann and the Hockey Stick without even mentioning any of these three central facts:
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Public health organizations oppose Murkowski resolution; DOT finds Murkowski will block cleaner, more efficient cars; Murkowski struts past protesters to attend lobbyist fundraiser for her; American public power association misleads its members

Opposition continues to grow to the Dirty Air Act — Senator Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) Resolution of Disapproval of the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, S.J. Res 26.  CAPAF’s Director of Climate Strategy, Daniel J. Weiss, has the story.

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Another species on the brink — thanks to human-caused global warming — is abandoned

The American pika, a mountain-dwelling mammal in the West, does not do well in temperatures above 78 degrees.

I typically focus on what the science tells us about the catastrophic impacts humans face if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.  If self-preservation won’t motivate us, whatever empathy we can muster for our furry friends surely can’t.

Still it seems to me that the apparently ‘expendable’ pika deserves at least one blog post, no?  Here’s the story, from MSNBC:

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