In the future, the only jobs left will be green.  Last year, the NY Times reported, “In the energy sector alone, the deployment of new technologies, like wind and solar power, has the potential to support 20 million jobs by 2030 and trillions of dollars in revenue, analysts estimate.”

Averting catastrophic climate change will generate far more jobs by 2050, as we must deploy more than 10,000 GW of clean energy (see here).  Failing to avert catastrophic climate change will probably generate more jobs, especially post-2030, since we still have to make the transition off fossil fuels, but on top of that we will have to have to make probably 10 times as much investment in sea walls, levees, relocating people and cities, and the like (see Real adaptation is as politically tough as real mitigation, but much more expensive and not as effective in reducing future misery).

The inevitable transition to a low carbon, low-fossil-fuel, water- and resource-efficient economy is apparently lost on many in the media.  We expect confusion and misinformation on this point from the right wing media (see Conservative Media Inanely Declare Solar Power ‘Doesn’t Work’).  It is surprising, though, when even NPR runs the headline, “Is Obama’s Bet On Green Jobs Risky?”

In fact, the only “risky” move is failing to aggressively pursue clean energy, failing to quickly reduce dependence on petroleum before peak oil forces us too, and failing to embrace a sustainable economy before the global Ponzi scheme collapses.

NPR and many other media outlets have confused the (very high) risks inherent in investing in any single company with the (super-low) risks of placing a large bet across the full portfolio of green tech, as I discuss here.

The rest of this post imagines Labor Day a couple of decades from now, updating an earlier piece, “When the global Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green.”

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TruthOut has published an amazing tell all by a former GOP Congressional staffer, Mike Lofgren.  The piece, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” is reprinted below in its entirety.  It opens:

Barbara Stanwyck: “We’re both rotten!”

Fred MacMurray: “Yeah — only you’re a little more rotten.” — “Double Indemnity” (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten — how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election?  Both parties are captives to corporate loot.

…. To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics.

Lofgren retired in June 17 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served for 16 years as a professional staff member on the GOP side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees.

James Fallows, the great columnist for The Atlantic, explains, “Lofgren’s name is barely known to the general public, but among people who have covered or worked in the national-security field, he is a familiar and highly esteemed figure.”

Most of Lofgren’s analysis won’t come as a surprise to most Climate Progress readers, but it is still a must-read for its bluntness and its source.  Read it and weep … for the nation and the world.

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In his bid to cast doubts on the seriousness of climate change, University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer creates a media splash but claims a journal’s editor-in-chief. 

The science doesn’t hold up.

by Kevin Trenberth, John Abraham, and Peter Gleick

Reposted from the Daily Climate

The widely publicized paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell, published in the journal Remote Sensing in July, has seen a number of follow-ups and repercussions.

The latest came Friday in a remarkable development, when the journal’s editor-in-chief, Wolfgang Wagner, submitted his resignation and apologized for the paper.

As we noted on RealClimate.org when the paper was published, the hype surrounding Spencer’s and Braswell’s paper was impressive; unfortunately the paper itself was not. Remote Sensing is a fine journal for geographers, but it does not deal much with atmospheric and climate science, and it is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should have received an honest vetting.

Friday that truth became apparent. Kevin Trenberth received a personal note of apology from both the editor-in-chief and the publisher of Remote Sensing. Wagner took this unusual and admirable step after becoming aware of the paper’s serious flaws. By resigning publicly in an editorial posted online, Wagner hopes that at least some of this damage can be undone.

Unfortunately this is not the first time the science conducted by Roy Spencer and colleagues has been found lacking.

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Krugman:  ”It would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.“

The Nobel prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, had a great piece on his blog Saturday, “Broken Windows, Ozone, and Jobs.”

This was the same point I was (briefly) making in my Friday post on Obama’s dreadful decision: “The standard would not have any noticeable negative impact on the economy and, if anything, would have driven investment and innovation even in the short term.”

Krugman explains why this is especially the case in the severe economic downturn we are now in:

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