The Wonk Room is reporting and tweeting live from the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

At the beginning of the Cancun climate talks, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and other Republican senators questioned the threat to the developing world from climate change, telling President Obama to kill the global climate impacts fund he helped establish last year. Inhofe’s letter argued that the scientific findings about “eventual impacts of climate change in developing countries were found to be exaggerated or simply not true.” In an exclusive interview, Mawusé Hountondji, the executive director of Jeunes Volontaires pour l’Environnement in Benin, told the Wonk Room that the reality is terribly different, but that he hoped politicians would rise to the challenge of leadership:

This year, for example, we are crushed by the impact of climate change. The people who are crushed are those who are very poor, do not have the money to adapt. The politicians who say climate change is not important, I think it is killing people. There are many many people dying because of climate change effects. If I have a message, it is that they must try to do their best. Because this is a problem of future generations.

In French we talk about generation de deux mille cinquante [Generation 2050]. In fifty years — President Obama, President Sarkozy, if you take their age plus fifty, I’m not sure that in fifty years they will be around. But the children will be there. And what kind of world do we want to give them? So that is my message. They must try today through Friday to give us a good document, a better negotiation, and we will be free and ready to help them to do their job.

Watch it:

Catastrophic rains this fall put two-thirds of Benin underwater, as “the worst floods in living memory” killed at least 60 people, left 150,000 people homeless, and caused an outbreak of cholera. “Areas previously thought not to be vulnerable to flooding have been devastated and villages wiped out.” “Even before the floods, an estimated 1 million people in Benin suffered food shortages and more than one-third of children under five were chronically malnourished,” according to a U.N. report.

Hountondji leads the efforts in Benin of Jeunes Volontaires pour l’Environnement (Young Volunteers for the Environment), an international youth organization working in 17 countries in Africa from Togo to Cote d’Ivoire to fight environmental degradation and poverty.

But the deal needs a clean-energy fix

If you look at the numbers alone, the tax cut deal looks to have robbed Republicans blind….

If you’re worried about stimulus, joblessness and the working poor, this is probably a better deal than you thought you were going to get. “It’s a bigger deal than anyone expected,” says Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

I agree with Ezra Klein here — and Bob Greenstein.  This is a good deal whether you care about the economy, the poor, the jobless — or the key economic factors that determine whether Obama is reelected vs. a right-wing Republican taking office (with a GOP Senate and House) and undoing even the half a loaf Obama has achieved to date.

Readers know that I yield to no one in my disappointment with the Barack ‘no narrative’ Obama.  His messaging is catastrophically bad, as is the White Houses’s overall communications strategy (see links here).  And  I just can’t see how history or future generations will ever forgive him for letting die our best chance to preserve a livable climate and restore US leadership in clean energy  — without a serious fight (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“)

But the savaging he has been receiving over the tax deal from folks I often agree with — like Paul Krugman and Bernie Sanders and the gang at HuffPost — is beyond explanation (though Krugman tempered his criticism on the PBS Newshour last night once he saw the complete terms of the deal).  Even on strictly political grounds, Obama has done vastly better than one could have imagined — given the blunder (by Congressional Democrats, not Obama, according to Greg Sargent) in refusing to vote on extending the tax cuts for those making under $250,000 a year before the election.  That mistake — coupled with the obvious fact that every single Republican will vote in lockstep against any bill that did not at least temporarily extend all the tax cuts — made Obama’s choice obvious.  See also TNR‘s “The Tax-Cut Deal Is Actually a Win for the Democrats.”

Indeed when you remember that we live in the real world — where neither Obama nor Reid nor Pelosi is very good at creating a big picture narrative for progressive policies — the final deal is remarkable.  Obama got a $900 billion stimulus that creates or saves 2.2 million jobs and — from a bunch of former anti-stimulus “deficit hawks.”  Moreover, the public knows who was on the side of the wealthy in this deal and who was on the side of the middle class.

And — or, rather, ‘but’ — the final bill may even be bigger.  Indeed it must be.   We must extend the clean energy tax breaks and incentives — or if we follow Jon Coifman’s advice to “Steal the Republican Playbook “” Now.” we must not “raise taxes on clean energy jobs in the middle of a recession.”

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Patrick Michaels of the pro-pollution Cato Institute is a fountain of nonsense (see Scientific American editor slams science denier Patrick Michaels for misusing their unscientific online poll).  So when Michaels, who recently said Big Oil funds some 40% of his work, is up against someone who really knows what he’s talking about, like climatologist Ben Santer, it’s a true mismatch.

Climate Decrocker Peter Sinclair has the video of the recent smack down on the Hill:

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So I was chugging through my back issues of Nature, when I came across a review of Charles Seife’s must-skip book, Proofiness:  The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception.  This paragraph derailed me:

Seife coins the term “proofiness” to refer to the misuse of numbers, deliberate or otherwise. He dubs the simplest quantitative sins “fruit-packing”. These include: “cherry-picking” the data, as he says Al Gore did when describing climate change in An Inconvenient Truth….

When in doubt, pick on Al Gore, because 1) the media loves a good Gore smear and 2) you don’t have to do your own mathematical homework because you can be sure the media won’t bother.  You’re only telling them what they already believe, even if it isn’t true, which in this case, it isn’t.

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By CAP’s Richard W. Caperton.

The ultimate goal of global climate negotiations is to come to agreement on how much our carbon emissions need to be reduced, and create a framework for achieving those reductions.  Even if we do someday achieve these goals, though, we will still need to identify detailed ways to actually get the world onto a low-carbon path.  One of these tools will be “feed-in tariffs”.

A feed-in tariff is a policy tool that allows renewable energy generators to sell their power to utilities at a pre-determined, fixed price for a long period of time.  Worldwide, 75% of solar PV and 45% of wind deployment are directly linked to feed-in tariffs.

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California, Oregon, and Massachusetts Lead List of Top 10 Clean-Energy States

With the arrival of the newly elected 112th Congress, likelihood of any significant progress on a focused federal clean-energy strategy in the United States is doubtful – and that’s not good news for the U.S. in its leadership battle with China, Japan, Germany, and other nations in this increasingly critical global industry.  But against this uncertain federal landscape, U.S. states continue to lead the charge in driving clean-energy innovation and advancing the clean-energy economy.

Clean Edge’s first annual U.S. Clean Energy Leadership Index, announced today, provides the industry’s most comprehensive and objective analysis and ranking of how all 50 states compare across the spectrum of clean-energy technology, policy, and capital. And while West and East Coast states dominate the top 10 rankings, innovation and investment opportunities are found across the map in places such as Colorado, Iowa, Texas, and Michigan.

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George Monbiot eviscerates the Daily Mail’s David Rose — “with the help of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team” – in this Guardian re-post.
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At the beginning of the Cancun climate talks, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and other Republican senators questioned the threat to the developing world from climate change, telling President Obama to kill the global climate impacts fund he helped establish last year. Inhofe’s letter argued that the scientific findings about “eventual impacts of climate change in developing countries were found to be exaggerated or simply not true.”

In an exclusive interview, Dr. Hasan Mahmud, Bangladesh’s State Minister for Environment and Forests and a PhD environmental scientist, told Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson that the Republican view of the world was dangerously false:

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This is a cross-post by Lee Fang.

This year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ran one of the largest, most partisan, corporate-funded attack campaigns in its history.  It worked closely with Karl Rove’s network of attack groups, while raising $75 million dollars to smear Democrats, including Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), and others. The Chamber’s ads were particularly sleasy; many were patently untrue, while others criticized Democrats for supporting legislation that the Chamber actually asked them to support.

Part of the Chamber’s strategy has been to manipulate the press and the wider public by falsely portraying itself as a community of small businesses and local chambers of commerce. Meanwhile, local chambers are upset that they are being unfairly associated with the U.S. Chamber’s far right partisanship. Politico reported today reported on the growing rift:

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