Our guest bloggers are Kate Gordon, Vice President of Energy Policy, and Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In tonight’s State of the Union address, President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to American innovation and ingenuity by proposing new investments in clean energy research, development, and deployment. This stands in sharp contrast to the Republican Study Committee, whose plan undermines American competitiveness by chopping away at key programs designed to leverage private investment in clean energy solutions for tomorrow.

President Obama’s clean energy plan would launch the United States into the 21st century by investing in high tech vehicles. This would protect people from pollution, cut foreign oil imports and create jobs. The Republican Study Committee would keep us chained to oil imports by ignoring cars of the future while eliminating investments in high speed rail.

President Obama reiterated that he will “create or enforce commonsense safeguards” to protect Americans from harm. This should include requiring coal fired power plants and oil refineries to cut mercury, carbon, smog and other dangerous pollutants.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment…. I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources.”

The good news: Barack Obama delivered a powerful State of the Union speech advocating an aggressive clean energy strategy (text here).  And he acknowledged a fundamental truth:  advances in clean energy “will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling.” Research and development by itself is ineffectual — hence the need for the standard.

The bad news: The President could not bring himself to utter the words “climate change” or “global warming.”  These omissions were depressingly predictable (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“) and thus, predictably, depressing to climate hawks.

The ‘ugly’ news: The phrase “clean energy” has been redefined.

Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all….

Clean coal, of course, doesn’t exist, and it remains a big stretch to call nuclear ‘clean’, but at least this proposal moves the debate forward significantly.  I don’t know whether a serious clean energy standard has a chance, but this appears to be the only plausible way forward in the climate/energy arena, given the death of a serious carbon price and GOP opposition to any funding increases for R&D or deployment.

Obama did defend environmental regulations:

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… Gingrich told attendees “” including Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a key figure in the state’s first-in-nation Republican presidential caucuses “” that the EPA should be replaced with a new “Environmental Solutions Agency.”

The replacement agency “would encourage innovation, incentivize success and emphasize sound science and new technology over bureaucracy, regulation, litigation and restrictions on American energy”….

Apparently the disgraced former Speaker is going to run for President.  So he has been reaching out to the anti-science Tea Party extremists with wilder and wilder statements and flip flops (see Gingrich: “It’s an act of egotism for humans to think we’re a primary source of climate change”

Gingrich has long been just another pro-pollution conservative eco-fraud pretending to care about the environment while adopting the anti-regulation, pro-technology rhetoric suggested by GOP strategist, Frank Luntz, and popularized by his protege, George Bush (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah” and “Eco-fraud Gingrich has always opposed clean energy, climate action“).

It’s laughable he called for creating an “Environmental Solutions Agency.” We already have an Environmental Solutions Agency that develops innovative new technology — it’s called the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which I helped run in the mid-1990s.  Gingrich tried to kill it when he became speaker in 1995.  But why let facts get in the way of a good speech?

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Pope Benedict XVI recently offered prayers for the international victims of catastrophic flooding. Although 2011 is less than a month old, the human toll of our fossil-fueled climate is staggering:

– Australia is facing a “disaster of biblical proportions,” after weeks of rain. “The extent of flooding being experienced by Queensland is unprecedented and requires a national and united response,” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said. “Dozens of towns have been isolated or partially submerged” by Australia’s extraordinary floods, which have killed at least 20 and are now “flushing toxic, pesticide-laden sediment into the Great Barrier Reef, and could threaten fragile corals and marine life in the world’s largest living organism.” The disaster “is costing Australia at least $3 billion in lost farming and coal exports.”

– Extreme rains have caused “the worst natural disaster to hit Brazil in four decades,” where the “death toll from flooding and mudslides near Rio de Janeiro” could approach 1,000 victims.

– Extraordinary rains “have triggered widespread floods and mudslides” in Sri Lanka, killing 43 and affecting millions, prompting the UN to make a $51 million appeal.

– “Floods and heavy storms in South Africa have killed at least 123 people and left around 20,000 in need of immediate basic relief aid.” Farmers may produce “the nation’s smallest winter-wheat harvest in 19 years” as “floods and heavy rain damage crops.”

– “Three people, two of them children, died on Sunday,” in Mozambique, “when they were swept away by the waters of the Mecutane river, swollen by torrential rains earlier in the day.” Around 35,000 people along the the banks of the Zambezi have been evacuated.

– Continuous rains in the Philippines have killed at least 68 people and left 1.9 million people “reeling.”

– “Mild temperatures melted record December snowfalls across Germany, causing rivers from the Rhine in the west to the Oder in the east to burst their banks, flooding fields and towns, turning streets into waterways, and leaving one person feared dead.”

– “Heavy snow and rain in the U.S. Midwest” likely mean record floods when the snowpack thaws.

“This is no longer something that’s theory or conjecture or something that comes out of computer models,” Dr. Richard Somerville, the Nobel-winning scientist who led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the state of climate science in 2007, explained to ABC News. “We’re observing the climate changing. It’s real. It’s happening. It’s scientific fact.”

China leapfrogs U.S. wind power industry

Chinese turbines are now harnessing more wind power than machines installed in the U.S., according to a trade group Monday.

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This is a ThinkProgress cross-post.

When George Allen served in Congress, he was a favorite of the oil industry. He was one of the largest recipients of oil industry campaign contributions, and a lead sponsor of efforts to expand offshore oil drilling, including off the east coast. He was even feted by oil billionaire Charles Koch at the 2005 secret planning meeting Koch Industries organizes to coordinate conservative and corporate influence.

Allen left the Senate after losing his reelection bid in 2006, started a lobbying business called “George Allen Strategies,” and joined the board of several companies, including an energy company called the Hillsdale Group. But Allen’s relationship with the oil industry didn’t end there. Given that Allen announced yesterday that he intends to run for Senate again in 2012, it’s worth taking note that of the role that oil and polluter industry fronts have had in propping up Allen:

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“The fact that no one has really looked at the Clean Air Act in much of a comprehensive way since 1990″”they feel very strongly and we feel very strongly as members that we need to revisit the Clean Air Act….”

“The whole issue is not just jobs and the economy but how competitive we are in the global marketplace. This is a much broader issue than the health of the American people and lungs and emphysema; it’s how can we balance that in the global marketplace for jobs….”

Decidedly not on Whitfield’s agenda: research and development for clean energy and alternative technologies….

“I’m not a big fan of a lot of government dollars going into research and development for private enterprises … and you’re not going to see the House of Representatives, I’m certain, provide a lot of money for research and development for electric vehicles.”

That is the wisdom of Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), the “top energy lieutenant” of House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), in an extended interview with National Journal Daily, titled “Whitfield Wants a Long, Hard Look at Clean Air Act” (subs. req’d).

How anyone could think there is a post-partisan consensus for a massive increase in clean energy R&D remains a mystery (see “The Chamber of Commerce is so extreme they oppose research and development into renewable energy!“).  Here’s more from Whitfield, who will be central in pushing the House GOP’s dirty air agenda:

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The TV interview that tied James Delingpole’s tongue

The bellicose Telegraph climate sceptic has complained to the BBC of being ‘intellectually raped’ on Horizon during an interview with Nobel prize-winner Sir Paul Nurse

That’s the UK Guardian‘s headline for an amazing BBC show on climate.  The full thing is currently available only to Brits, but you can see the entire Delingpole interview below, starting with the most amazing excerpts:

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Cartoonist Tom Toles titles this gem, “Snowball’s Chance”:

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Chevron, responsible for a multi-billion-dollar environmental disaster in Ecuador, is instead spending millions to shore up political support and to evade the clean up.  Brad Johnson has the story.

Senate disclosure forms reveal that oil giant Chevron spent $2.9 million lobbying the federal government last quarter, eclipsing even Exxon ($2.6 million) and BP ($2.2 million). Chevron’s 2010 lobbying totaled $12.89 million, following a tremendous outlay in 2009 of $20.8 million.

Chevron also recently launched a major greenwashing campaign, “We Agree,” which claims that it shares the public concern that “oil companies should put their profits to good use” and “oil companies should support the communities they’re a part of.” However, Chevron is also spending millions to defend itself in a 17-year-old lawsuit over the billions of tons of toxic waste its now-subsidiary company Texaco dumped into the Ecuadorian watershed.

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