Today is the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth.

As ThinkProgress points out, the right-wing hagiography of the Gipper leaves out the fact that he was “a serial tax raiser” and “nearly tripled the federal budget deficit” and “gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants.”

His overall environmental legacy as President is very poor, as Grist laid out in great deal here.  The only real exception was his work in helping to save the ozone layer.  But his clean energy legacy is an unmitigated disaster that we are still suffering the consequences from today.  Let’s run through the history.

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Sir John Houghton explains how the anti-science crowd operates

The Denier-Industrial Complex cranKs habitually fabricate quotes to smear climate scientists and climate hawks.  Their latest victim is NASA’s Gavin Schmidt — see my post here and Tamino’s “Not a Misquote. A Nonquote” and Deltoid’s “Pearcegate” (who notes that the source of the smear, “tallbloke,” is an “ether crank”).

For the cranKs, it doesn’t matter what a scientist actually said, it only matters what they say he really thinks.

All this reminded me of a February 2010 story in the UK’s Independent, “Fabricated quote used to discredit climate scientist,” that got buried in my backlog of 1,1oo draft posts.

But, as Abba says, “the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.”  The story illuminates the simple modus operandi of the Complex, so here’s an extended excerpt:

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The NYT‘s lead editorial today is worth excerpting at length:

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President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union, proposed ending $4 billion in tax subsidies for major oil companies and using that money to invest in clean energy technologies and projects focused on R&D and deployment.

In this cross-post, CAP’s Emily Bischof lists some of the clean energy programs President Obama proposed during his speech that we could invest in.  These programs would make our country more globally competitive, create jobs, and reduce pollution.
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