Slams GOP for a “vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic.”

President Obama promised today to trim the federal deficit by $4 trillion over a dozen years through new spending cuts, tax hikes and tax reform. But one thing he said he wouldn’t do is stop investing in clean energy.

Obama gave his big deficit reduction speech today (text “as prepared for delivery” here).  One of his harshest economic critics, Nobelist Paul Krugman, liked the style — and on substance said it was “Much better than many of us feared.”

On energy it was pretty good too.  As E&E News (subs. req’d) reports:

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In recent polls, Donald Trump has vaulted to the top of the GOP presidential contender list by becoming a ‘birther’.  Amazingly, he “might be serious” in his candidacy, Salon warned yesterday.

So it’s worth remembering that before he punched the birther ticket, he joined the climate denial team — which is arguably more important for a”credible” GOP nominee.  After all, most GOP contenders aren’t foolish enough to be open ‘birthers’, questioning Obama’s legitimacy to be president based on no evidence whatsoever (see The top 5 ways the ‘birthers’ are like the deniers).

But pretty much every serious GOP contender is now a climate zombie (see Tim Pawlenty: “Every one of us” running for president has flip-flopped on climate change).  And Trump certainly has the hair for zombie-dom, if nothing else.

Anyway, here’s the flashback to February 2010:

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UPDATE:  In the comments, Lynas says Breakthough Institute made the initial mistake.  They must have fixed it before I saw it.  But there are so many errors that it’s still not clear who got what wrong.

And the winner of the most egregiously error-riddled paragraph published in a presumably fact-checked newspaper op-ed this year:

According to some recent number crunching by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist environmental think tank, phasing out Japan’s current nuclear generation capacity and replacing it with wind would require a 1.3-billion-acre wind farm, covering more than half the country’s total land mass. Going for solar instead would require a similar land area, and would in economic terms cost the country more than a trillion dollars.

No, it’s not Charlie Sheen weighing into the energy debate.  And no, there aren’t any typos.  Sadly, this breathtaking collection of whoppers is by none other than Mark Lynas, author of the excellent book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.

I’m not quite certain what is more depressing — that Lynas wrote this paragraph in the first place and has since reposted it at the Economist‘s online nuclear debate (a debate that is, typically, poorly framed).  Or that not one person at the LA Times, Economist, or McLatchy thought the numbers looked funny or self-contradictory enough to spend even 10 seconds on Google to fact-check them.  Or that even two days later the head-exploding errors are still there.

See how many errors you can count before reading the rest of the post.

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As the Wonk Room has been reporting, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are orchestrating campaigns to radicalize New Hampshire state politics. But another radical organization called the Free State Project (FSP), founded by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center’s Jason Sorens, has also infiltrated New Hampshire.

Members of the Free State Project, an effort to take over New Hampshire’s political process with a radical anti-government agenda, are attempting to dismantle the state’s clean energy economy. Dan and Carol McGuire, a husband-and-wife team that moved to New Hampshire in 2004 and subsequently won seats in the 400-member state house, have introduced legislation to eliminate passenger rail service and clean energy financing.

The New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority (NHRTA) secured $4.1 million in federal money after a vision of a national rail network was introduced by President Obama in February. But, in March, FSP’s Rep. Dan McGuire (R) proposed legislation to repeal NHRTA. Dan McGuire said that NHRTA “is not something that can make money” and that “is why the private sector is not involved.”

McGuire, a libertarian ideologue, ignored all the benefits of commuter rail — relieving traffic congestion through New Hampshire’s “capital corridor” and spurring economic development. Chris Williams, president of the Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce, noted that “[n]o one is saying we ought to take away public funding for roads and airports and have the private sector fund that.”

The Republican-controlled state House passed McGuire’s repeal legislation in early March, and the bill is up for a vote in the Senate this week.

In February, Dan’s wife and fellow Free State Project member Rep. Carol McGuire (R) sponsored HB 1554, which would repeal the state’s Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program that allows towns and cities to create clean energy and efficient districts. PACE was signed into law in August 2010 and established a voluntary loan system, enabling towns and cities to finance new renewable and energy efficient projects.

Carol said PACE was “not good public policy,” claiming that the “program benefits the few at the expense of everybody else.”

These assaults on the environment by State Reps. Dan and Carol McGuire’s in New Hampshire are not an accident but a carefully orchestrated play by the Free State Project. In 2003, members of this libertarian website — who have dubbed themselves the “Porcupines” — decided through an online ballot that New Hampshire would make the best state for a revolution. Among many reasons, FSP members landed on New Hampshire because it has “the largest state legislature in the US, providing the highest ratio of representation and easy access to politics.”

The Free State Project then launched a campaign to get 20,000 members to move to New Hampshire, where “FSP leaders” would direct “newcomers to real estate offices, schools and business opportunities” to make the biggest impact. In 2003, Don Gorman — a former leader of the Libertarian caucus in the New Hampshire House and self-proclaimed FSP transition leader — trained people to run for the 400-member House, and lesser offices too, saying, “[w]e want them to get involved in the volunteer fire department, the playground committee, [and] the library board.”

Although there’s no evidence that thousands of anti-government radicals have flooded the Granite State, that is the story of Carol and Dan McGuire. In 2004, Dan McGuire was coordinating libertarian events in Oregon and Washington for FSP. After FSP called for its members to make the pilgrimage, the McGuires moved to New Hampshire. Dan got involved with local politics — becoming the Chairman of the Epson Town Planning Board. Carol won a seat as a Republican in the New Hampshire House in 2008. Dan was subsequently elected as a Republican to the state House in 2010.

Less radical state legislators are working to save PACE. But the same can’t be confidently said for NHRTA. The work of FSP’s Dan and Carol McGuire — as well as Koch’s AFP and ALEC — are indicative of a larger pattern sweeping the nation, where the advancement of a healthy environment is sacrificed for all, in favor of stubbornly advancing dirty energy that only benefits the few — the wealthy.

-Paul Breer

El Alto, city of rural migrants whose crops failed when the climate changed

Rural Bolivians migrate to El Alto when their crops fail because of droughts, erratic rainfall, heatwaves, frosts and floods. Climate change – and Pachamama – are driving them into the city

The UK Guardian’s John Vidal has doing a series of pieces on Bolivia and climate change.  It really drives home the point that for most people in the developing world, “adapting” to human-caused climate change is simply going to mean abandoning their homes:

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New Calif. law mandates more electricity from renewable sources

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law today requiring power companies to generate 33 percent of all electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar power by 2020.

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Lee Fang in a Think Progress repost.

In recent weeks, gas prices around the country have surged to levels unseen since the 2008 oil spike. However, market fundamentals are not driving the nearly $4.00/gallon gas prices. In fact, under the Obama administration, oil production is at record highs and there is adequate global supply of crude. As Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commissioner Bart Chilton has explained, rampant oil speculation, which is at its highest level on record right now, is to blame for current prices.

Currently, the public knows very little about the oil speculation industry because a conservative majority on the CFTC has refused to implement a mandate from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill to curb abuses.

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In my piece on the Cornell study, my subhed was “Leakage of methane from fracking boosts shale gas global warming impact.” I didn’t note until several paragraphs later that “Natural gas is composed largely of methane,” which comes from the second sentence of the study itself.

But as our bunny friend Eli pointed out yesterday, it seems like not everybody covering the subject is entirely clear on that:

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Saying that “net speculative positions are four times as high as in June 2008,” investment banker Goldman Sachs “issued a warning that the price of oil has grown out of control due to excessive speculation.” The world’s largest commodity trader, Goldman Sachs told its clients that it believed speculators like itself had artificially driven the price of oil at least $20 higher than supply and demand dictate. They even admitted that their work to drive up prices has harmed the American economic recovery, pointing to “nascent signs of oil demand destruction in the US.”

Ed Schultz, who’s been one of the few voices in the media sounding the alarm about unregulated speculators, yesterday bashed Fox News for selling the “drill baby drill” line in response to the surge in the oil markets. Former commodities trader Dan Dicker explained to Schultz that the CFTC is failing its mandate to control Wall Street:

Bottom line, it is not supply and demand.

Watch it:

Dicker warned that $5 gas is probably unavoidable as things stand. “There’s nothing really to stop it.”

GS: “Net speculative positions are four times as high as in June 2008″

Goldman Sachs rocked oil markets for a second day Tuesday by calling for a nearly $20 fall in Brent crude oil, saying speculators had pushed prices ahead of fundamentals.  It was the second warning of a steep market reversal from the long-term commodity bull in as many days. On Monday, Goldman recommended clients close a trade heavily weighted toward U.S. crude futures.

I’ve never been one to say that speculators are the primary driver of oil price fluctuations.  Fundamentally, we are at or near the peak in conventional oil production — and that means oil prices will inevitably see higher highs and higher lows (See Science: “Peak oil production may already be here”; HSBC Bank: Oil will be gone in 50 years).  And obviously we have a unique amount of unrest across North Africa and the Middle East.

But if the world’s biggest commodity trader commodity trader says speculation is playing a role, one has to listen — especially since Goldman has been predicting higher oil prices for longer than most:

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AS A state senator in Massachusetts, Scott Brown voted for a regional pact to ratchet down power companies’ carbon dioxide emissions. But as a US senator in Washington, Brown last week voted to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of the authority to regulate any greenhouse gases. This is not the first time Brown has done a Jekyll-Hyde switch between Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill “” in 2006 he voted for Mitt Romney’s health care plan, only to oppose the national version of it in 2010. But the turnaround on greenhouse gases is especially disappointing to any Massachusetts voters who thought they saw in Brown a conservative on fiscal issues who was also a conservationist when it comes to protecting the environment.

That’s the opening to a stinging Boston Globe editorial, “For Brown, a sad turnaround on environmental matters.”

Of course, the vote can’t be described as a total surprise, given that just last month, Brown made clear how close he is to conservative pollutocrat David Koch, “Your support during the election, it meant a ton. It made a difference and I can certainly use it again.”

Here’s more from the Globe:

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