Climatologist Michael Mann works at Penn State.  Penn State is going through a horrific and inexcusable child-sex-abuse scandal.  Ergo….

Yes, two of the top climate science deniers on the web, Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit and Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat, actually went there.

Nobody should be shocked about Watts.  Last year, when a demented, violent individual, James Lee, held people hostage at gunpoint in Maryland, Watts wrote this amazing headline:

And the first line of his post was “Well, you filthy readers, see what happens when we don’t acquiesce?“ He has still never retracted this.  Watts is a guy who just a few weeks earlier had demanded that others on the web “dial back the rhetoric.”

But it was Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit who launched this smear Thursday (click here if you have a strong stomach).  As long-time Climate Progress commenter MapleLeaf wrote at the long thread on this at DeepClimate:

No words can describe my anger at this uncalled for action by McIntyre who is knowingly trying to capitalize on (and benefit from) the suffering and pain of sexual assault victims. Absolutely disgusting in the extreme.

I can almost understand why McIntyre and Watts made such a desperate attack.  They’ve utterly lost the argument on the merits.

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The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2001 that a handful of clean energy technologies returned about $30 billion on an R&D investment of about $400 million.  The United States is an amazing venture capitalist when it comes to clean energy R&D.

But the all-Solyndra, all-the-time stenographers of the status quo at the Washington Post put out this context-free nonsense:

If you read the Post article (wearing multiple head vises), you’ll see that Mufson and the Post don’t understand the first thing about venture capital nor have they done even the minimal amount of homework on the myriad major independent studies of the value of clean energy research.

You’d never even know from the article that most private sector VC investments go bankrupt or have no positive return.  It is a risky business that investors put money into for the few really big wins.  You’d never know that VC  investments are judged by their portfolio return — and by that criteria you would have to say that federal clean energy investments are wildly successful.  I reviewed the data on this in a 2008 post, which I’ll update below.

First, though, let me quote from the Post:

An Energy Department report in 2008 estimated that the federal government had spent $172 billion since 1961 on basic research and the development of advanced energy technologies.

What does Washington have to show for these investments? And should the government even be in the business of promoting particular energy technologies?

Some economists, executives and financiers — as well as Energy Secretary Steven Chu — argue that the government must play a role because certain technologies have non-financial benefits, such as producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions or easing U.S. reliance on foreign oil.

Actually, experts support clean energy investments because they have such huge financial benefits, as we’ll see.

But first, the following chart from that report shows just how grossly misleading the Post’s attack is:

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CEO of NRG Energy:  The fundamental issue of our day [is] climate change….  The people who were opposed to climate change legislation used one of two tactics. They either said, “Well, we don’t believe it’s happening.” Which, of course, is just a bald-faced lie.

Or the second part of the one/two punch is, “We can’t afford to do anything about it because a synonym for the word “green” is “expensive.” But looking forward, electric vehicles will be far cheaper to operate than internal combustion engine vehicles. And solar panels on the roof will provide power more cheaply than taking power from the grid.

That’s from a Yale Environment 360 Interview of David Crane, the CEO of one of America’s’s largest electric utilities.  It produces power for some 20 million U.S. households, and over 90% of NRG’s power comes from natural gas and coal.  But Crane says the future — the near future — will be different.

Climate Progress has written a number of articles on the sharply declining cost of solar photovoltaics (see “Solar is Ready Now: ‘Ferocious Cost Reductions’ Make Solar PV Competitive“).  It’s good to hear from a leading utility executive that the facts on the ground bear our analyses out.

Here are more excerpts from this remarkable interview, including his discussion of “democratization of customer choice” and the key role of electric vehicles:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

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Citizens for Tax Justice has analyzed corporate tax rates from 2008 to 2010. The report [PDF] examines over half of the Fortune 500 companies

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the richest industries get the biggest subsidies, starting with finance and Big Energy.  That’s how the 1% operate.

Notably, 56 percent of the total tax subsidies went to just four industries: financial, utilities, tele-communications, and oil, gas & pipelines.

But hey, Solyndra got a $500 million loan and went bankrupt so that is story the media focuses on over and over again, rather than the big robbery in broad daylight.

h/t Think Progress and Daily Kos