While the Obama administration is working to restore American innovation, particularly through Secretary Steven Chu’s Department of Energy, the Tea Party movement is increasingly attacking 21st-century jobs on all fronts. Rush Limbaugh is leading the charge against the breakthrough Chevy Volt, Republican governors are killing high-speed rail, Glenn Beck is cooking up conspiracy theories about smart grid technology, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is trying to kill the wind industry, and the entire right-wing movement is convinced green jobs are going to destroy the United States economy.

At a National Press Club speech today, Secretary Chu warned that China is outpacing the United States in innovating clean technology, and pointed to a new report from the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that recommended an integrated federal energy policy to spur domestic progress. “I believe innovation adds to the wealth of society,” he said. “Science and technology are at the heart of innovation.”

In a blogger call following the speech, the Wonk Room asked Secretary Chu about the right wing’s opposition to clean technology innovation. Chu derided this desire to turn back the clock, saying that the “United States is still the greatest innovation machine in the world”:

You know, what can I say? I disagree.

The people who are saying we don’t want to change are holding a view that when a new technology comes along it’s going to displace an old technology. The people whose business depends on old technology might get nervous. They can adapt and innovate or fight the change. That used to work when we weren’t so interconnected. In this new very flat world of multinational corporations, virtually all of western Europe, Japan, Korea, China are saying, “This is our future.” If we don’t go in this direction, we will be importing many of the technologies we could be exporting. I just installed an on-demand water heater and there were no American manufacturers. There were Korean, Japanese, European manufacturers. Kind of scary.

The American people need to be convinced. Or I should say: Does everyone else know something we don’t know or do we know something everyone else doesn’t know?

I believe the right direction is to develop these technologies. The United States is still the greatest innovation machine in the world. There will always be people who don’t want to go in a new direction, but you can’t go back to 1950 when we were exporting oil. We have to press forward. It’s very important to get that message out. This is how we have always achieved. Not by clutching to the past but by seizing the future.

“We are no longer the leaders in manufacturing, but more startlingly, we are no longer the leaders in high-tech manufacturing,” Chu said in his Press Club speech. However, he saw room for hope. “The good news is that if I look across the country, young people are seeing the energy and climate challenge and going into science and technology.”

As the 19th year of international negotiations on climate change begin today in Cancun, Mexico, Fox News continues to deny the civilizational imperative to end global warming pollution. On Saturday, Fox News Watch’s Jon Scott and Greg Gutfield cited last year’s Climategate smear campaign to attack climate scientists and activists. “Maybe it’s time for the granola-crunching press to change its doom-and-gloom message,” Scott argued. Gutfield then read a bowdlerized version of his “racist homophobic globalphobe” blog post distorting the results of a study by UC Berkeley psychological researchers on global warming messaging:

So climate change experts having finally got the message. And the message is: their message sucks. In fact, their “Scare the hell out of us” screed was so awful, researchers claim, that it actually undermined their mission. Which, I always thought, was to scare the hell out of us. Yep, according to Cal-Berkeley shrinks, dire predictions about global warming can “backfire if presented too negatively.” Of course that raises one question: how do you offer dire predictions, positively? “Hey, were all gunna die. LOL.” Which leads me to a theory: these Berkeley researchers are idiots. Look the fact is, people like me questioned global warming evidence because we’d seen this media hysteria before – with the ice age, the dangers of nuclear power, artificial sweeteners and DDT.

Watch it:

As previously noted in the Wonk Room, the study by Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg actually found that effective climate messaging combines hard facts about the dire nature of global warming with optimism about human ingenuity to address it — which is the honest story that Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Desmond Tutu, and other climate activists have been telling for decades. Their study also found that the parody presented by the right wing — that those concerned about global warming pollution are hysterical doomsayers — will effectively drive some people into skepticism about the existence of the threat.

Gutfield’s mention of DDT is telling — that right-wing historical revisionism designed to discredit Rachel Carson is soundly debunked in Merchants of Doubt, the book that describes how propagandists have used the same tactics for decades to block policy from everything to cigarettes to global warming.

“In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world.”

“Projections of global warming relative to pre-industrial for the A1FI emissions scenario” — the one we’re currently on. “Dark shading shows the mean ±1 s.d. [standard deviation] for the tunings to 19 AR4 GCMs [IPCC Fourth Assessment General Circulation Models]  and the light shading shows the change in the uncertainty range when … climate-carbon-cycle feedbacks … are included.”

Note:  The Royal Society is making its “entire digital archive free to access” (!) through Tuesday, so download the articles in their special issue on 4C warming ASAP.

One of the greatest failings of the climate science community (and the media) is not spelling out as clearly as possible the risks we face on our current emissions path, as well as the plausible worst-case scenario, which includes massive ecosystem collapse. So much of what the public and policymakers think is coming is a combination of

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So I was voting for Campus Progress, CAP’s youth arm, which has a chance to win $50,000 to train and support young journalists — by clicking here, which, by the way you can do every day through Tuesday.

And I came across another worthy group in the progressive slate vying for funds in the Pepsi giveaway:

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You may recall Amazongate, the phony scandal spun up by anti-science blogger Richard North (see “Sunday Times retracts and apologizes for shameful and bogus Amazon story smearing IPCC“).  That wasn’t even the only instance where a newspaper apologized for an erroneous story by North (see “UK Telegraph retracts and apologies for bogus Tata story“).

North continues to try to defend his misreporting, but the UK’s Press Complaints Commission slapped him back twice on Friday.  Joss Garman has the story in this Left Foot Forward re-post.

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Canadian diplomats in Washington have quietly asked oil-industry players such as Exxon Mobil and BP to help ensure that oil from Alberta continues to flow into the U.S. marketplace, Postmedia News has learned.

In a series of newly released correspondence from Canada’s Washington embassy, the Canadian diplomats describe recommendations from Environment Canada to clean up the oilsands as “simply nutty,” proposing instead to “kill any interpretation” of U.S. energy legislation that would apply to the industry.

Oh, Canada, surely you can’t be seri0us.

In honor of the late Canadian-American actor and comedian Leslie Nielsen, our neighbor up north replies, “I am serious … and don’t call me Shirley.”

To which I reply, well stop calling them oilsands.  The phrase makes it seem like, oh, I don’t know, maybe up through the sand came a bubblin crude, oil that is, black gold, Texas tea, Athabasca euphemism (see CP commenter, Jim Eager, here).

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Japan to help India build 24 green cities

Japan will contribute in terms of credit and technology in an ambitious and ground-breaking infrastructure project which will build 24 green cities in India’s western region. The project is part of the proposed $90 billion Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor mega-infrastructure project which aims at boosting the economic growth along the about 1500-km-long stretch that joins the most important cities of India, New Delhi and Mumbai.

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Americans For Prosperity president: We have to make the EPA “a political albatross for members of Congress.”

At an October blogger briefing at the Heritage Foundation, Americans For Prosperity president Tim Phillips explained his organization’s plans for defending global warming pollution.  Brad Johnson lays out the strategy for the anti-science, anti-EPA, polluter-funded group that is a driving force behind the Tea Party.  This is what climate hawks will be up against the next two years.

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Another great cartoon from Marc Roberts:

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