In mid-August my book on persuasion and communications will come out. I’ve been working on it for a quarter century (!) and it is easily my most useful and best written book. So I’ll be writing more about persuasion and messaging over the next few months.

While many people thought Obama was a great communicator when he was elected, in fact he is mostly a good speechmaker — when he puts in a lot of effort, which he rarely does anymore.

His messaging has been dreadful for most of his presidency, and he has delivered far too few memorable lines or speeches. Based on my discussions with leading journalists, as well as current and former Administration staff, this White House is the worst at communications in the past 3 decades (see “Relax, climate hawks, it’s not about the science. The White House is just lousy at messaging in general“).

Indeed, the Obama WH is the worst of both possible worlds.  They are dreadful at messaging BUT they think they are terrific at messaging, so much so that they shut down anybody else in the administration that might actually be good at messaging. How else to explain things like “public option” and “cap-and-trade” and “winning the future”? (see “Can Obama deliver health and energy security with a half (assed) message?“)

Last week linguist George Lakoff co-authored a good HuffingtonPost piece dismantling Obama’s big economic kickoff speech in Ohio. The whole piece is worth reading but let me just focus on the most elemental mistake —  repeating your opponent’s message.

It is now very well known from the social science literature that you can’t debunk a myth by repeating it with a simple negation — see “The difficulty of debunking a myth” and “The Debunking Handbook Part 1: The First Myth About Debunking.” In fact, the literature suggests that for many people that merely reinforces the myth over time.

But here we have Obama just repeating Obama’s main point/narrative/frame, particularly on regulations. As Lakoff explains, Obama “unintentionally feeds” Romney’s narrative, in part “by accepting and reinforcing many of Romney’s central frames (often by negating them)”:

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According to a  Swiss study, “the larger the (wind) turbine is, the greener the electricity becomes.” The study claims that for every doubling of the size of the turbine, “global warming potential per kWh (is) reduced by 14%.”

The study was conducted by Marloes Caduff and his associates at the Zurich Institute of Environmental Engineering in Zurich, Switzerland.

Caduff et al. claim that there are two main reasons for the benefits of larger turbines. First, producers, now with decades of experience under their belts, are better at creating the massive blades, supports and motors. They “now have the knowledge, experience and technology to build big wind turbines with great efficiency.”

Second, recent advances in materials have allowed the turbines to dramatically increase in size without a corresponding increase in mass. That way, blades can be larger and capture much more wind while the tower and other parts can remain unchanged.

According to the researchers, the combined effects of these reasons allow for bigger and better turbines to be produced without using significantly more materials or drastically increasing transportation and assembly costs. The increased size of the turbines actually saves materials by reducing the number of total turbines needed to produce the same amount of power.

Wind energy is one of the fastest growing sources of energy on the planet and source of pride for alternative energy supporters. It now supplies about 2% of global energy needs and that number could rise as high as 10% by 2020. In the calender year 2011 alone , the global power capacity from wind increased by40,654 MW.

A recent study out of the UK indicated that the costs of off shore wind production could drop by up to one-third by the end of the decade.

If accurate, the study indicates that the general trend in the wind industry over the last 30 years has been the correct one.

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by James P. Lenfestey, via the Star Tribune

Under the headline “U.S. energy lobby hits the campaign trail,” the Financial Times reported on June 6: “The American Petroleum Institute [API] has announced rallies in 15 states, most of them key battlegrounds for the presidential election, and has been advertised widely.”

The API’s so-called nonpartisan arm organizing these events, “Vote 4 Energy,” is headed by Jack Gerard, a close friend of Mitt Romney and, should Romney win the presidency, a top candidate to be his chief of staff.

And, according to Kantar Media CMAG, “more than 80 per cent of the 16,991 negative ads broadcast across the U.S. in April concerned energy and overwhelmingly opposed Mr. Obama.”

Others have reported that lobbying expenditures for energy-sector companies increased by 92 percent from 2007 to 2009, when climate-change bills were actively debated in Congress.

This is not to mention the constant chattering against climate science on Fox News, right-wing radio, websites and faux think tanks bankrolled by energy billionaires like David and Charles Koch and a few others.

Anyone still wonder why climate change is not at the center of the U.S. presidential campaign? Or why there is not one iota of optimism that the once-promising Earth Summit on sustainability underway in Rio de Janeiro this week will produce any agreement of substance?

Meanwhile, the beleaguered scientific and economic community is increasing its already harsh alarms about climate change and its costs. The June 7 edition of the respected scientific journal Nature, under the headline “Return to Rio: Second chance for the planet,” despaired over the lack of promise for the Earth Summit: “It is hard to avoid a certain sense of gloom, if not doom,” the editors wrote. “Despite progress on some issues — ozone loss, for example — the disconnect between science and politics seems to be growing, not shrinking.”

The conservative British magazine The Economist agrees. Its June 16 special report, “The Vanishing North,” dispassionately discussed the pros and cons of Arctic economic exploitation as the ice rapidly disappears. Nevertheless, it opined that “the world would be mad to ignore” the “grave” dangers: “The impact of the melting Arctic may have calamitous effect on the planet.”

Yet, voters hear little about these “grave dangers” in regular election coverage, and few have an inkling that a once-promising, planet-saving Earth Summit is going on at all.

The disconnect between politics and climate change is especially pronounced in America, where the fossil-fuel lobby is entrenched and aggressive, with a history of bending the facts and winning elections, and where one of the two major political parties has taken the shameful ostrich position that all the world’s climate scientists are simply wrong.

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about possible ways that climate change could affect baseball. This time I want to talk about how a sport can impact the climate.

From constant travel to keeping the stadium lights on, every sport is energy intensive. But NASCAR — in which drivers race vehicles 500 miles at speeds of 200 miles per hour — takes energy intensity to a whole new level.

NASCAR is arguably the second most popular sport in America. Though it lacks some of the broad appeal of other sports, the 75 million people that watch it each weekend put the sport behind only the NFL in popularity. And that popularity has its environmental impact beyond what the casual fan might think about.

For example, NASCAR race cars are not subject to the EPA regulations that govern other vehicles on the road. They do not have catalytic converters mandated for every other car on the road. And until 2007, NASCAR used leaded gas — a toxic fuel that has hasn’t been used in the rest of the U.S. since the 1980′s.

On average, NASCAR cars get between 2 and 5 miles per gallon of gas. How Stuff Works explains:

“In a single typical NASCAR race weekend, with more than 40 cars at high speeds for 500 miles (804 kilometers) — plus practice laps — at 5 mpg of gas, you’re looking at, conservatively, about 6,000 gallons (22,712 liters) of fuel [source: Finney]. Each gallon burned emits about 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of carbon dioxide, so that’s about 120,000 pounds (54,431 kilograms) of CO₂ for a race weekend [source: FuelEconomy]. Multiply that by roughly 35 races per year, and NASCAR’s annual carbon footprint is in the area of 4 million pounds (1.8 million kilograms).”

Four million pounds certainly isn’t going to tip the climate over the edge, but its still a heck of a lot of CO2 spewed into the atmosphere. And that number doesn’t even include the fleet of diesel powered support vehicles that accompany each racing team at every event around the country.

NASCAR has been mildly cooperative in making its sport more “green.” In 2011, they introduced an ethanol based additive, E15, into the racing fuel. This increased the power generated by the fuel, but it did so by reducing efficiency significantly.

Beyond just the fuel, NASCAR cars go through a lot of tires. In fact, each team uses approximately 8-10 sets of tires per weekend. The tires are made primarily with synthetic rubber and therefore require oil to produce. According to the Rubber Manufacturers Association, it takes about 7 gallons of oil to make one tire.

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