If you happened to be watching the PBS News Hour tonight, you probably thought the show had been hijacked by Fox News. At first, their climate segment seemed to be about Koch-funded former “skeptic” Richard Muller and his conversion to scientific reality.

But then PBS decided that the way to “balance” a former skeptic who merely confirmed what climate scientists have demonstrated repeatedly for decades was by quoting nonsense from Sen. James Inhofe and then giving an extended interview to former TV weatherman and current A-list disinformer Anthony Watts.

UPDATE: For the video (and transcript) of the show, click here. It should forever kill the absurd notion that false balance is dead — or that the News Hour has some sort of liberal bias. Not that this is news — see the CP post from May, “False Balance On Climate Change at PBS NewsHour.”

Even worse is PBS’s completely unbalanced, extended interview online with the long-debunked Watts, headlined “Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message.”

The URL for that interview is even worse: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/09/why-the-global-warming-crowd-oversells-its-message.html. Seriously!

You can write the PBS ombudsman here.

UPDATE 2: PBS defends itself here, sort of. They do promise this: “Spencer will have another blog post today offering the views of other scientists in the broadcast concerned about the threats of climate change.” Uhh, “other scientists”? Now Watts is a scientist?

Again, the actual “news” in the on-air segment was about how a Koch-funded skeptic, Muller, had in fact demonstrated that the global warming crowd has been underselling its message.

Given the staggering laziness of PBS’s “journalism” in this segment, it’s worth quoting what Muller actually wrote in the NY Times:

Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.

In short, a Koch-funded study has found that the IPCC “consensus” underestimated both the rate of surface warming and how much could be attributed to human emissions!

Now this underselling could have been the basis of an interesting story, but PBS decided to turn this into a pure he-said/she-said between “skeptics” and “believers,” as they label the two “sides” —  destroying any possible chance of delivering actual scientific information to its audience.

Here is the video of the truly head-exploding interview with Watts:

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Today a Virginia judge ruled that the University of Virginia (UVA) doesn’t have to release the emails of climate scientists like Michael Mann to the anti-science American Tradition Institute (ATI).

The anti-science crowd knows that they can’t win on the science. Indeed they seem to have written off smart people entirely. But like someone addicted to cigarettes, they have been trying to reproduce the high from the massive Climategate exercise in smoke blowing.

To do that, the deniers need fresh emails to razzle dazzle the gullible so they won’t see the climate change that is all around them.

The good news is that ATI doesn’t get to read climate scientists’ emails. Here is what climatologist Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, wrote on his Facebook page:

Breaking: A victory for science! ATI loses ATI/UVa FOIA case. Judge issues final order. Affirms the university’s right to withhold scholarly communications and finds that the documents & personal emails of mine demanded by ATI were indeed protected as the university had contended.

I am gratified for the hard work and vigorous defense provided by the university to protect scholarly communications and raw materials of scholarship. Fortunately Virginia has a strong exemption in the public records act that protects research and scholarly endeavors. The judge ruled that the exemption under Virginia’s public records protecting information in furtherance of research on scientific and scholarly issues applies to faculty communications in furtherance of their work.

This finding is a potentially important precedent, as ATI and other industry-backed front groups continue to press their attacks on climate scientists through the abuse of public records and FOIA laws and the issuing of frivolous and vexatious demands for internal scholarly deliberations and personal correspondences.

How extreme is ATI? Last year they were singled out for criticism by the traditionally staid American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The AAAS Board issued a statement on “Personal Attacks on Climate Scientists”:

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by Silvio Marcacci, via CleanTechnica

America has some of the best offshore wind resources in the world — especially along the Atlantic coastline. But while the promise is massive, zero turbines are currently spinning in U.S. waters.

Fortunately, federal and state governments have made significant progress toward the first offshore turbines and have put America at a turning point toward harnessing the more than 1,300 gigawatts (GW) of energy generation potential identified along our coasts. Harnessing a realistic fraction of offshore wind’s potential — 52GW — could power 14 million homes with clean electrons while creating over 300,000 new jobs and $200 billion in new economic activity in some of our biggest cities.

These findings come from “The Turning Point for Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy,” a new report from the National Wildlife Foundation (NWF) outlining the energy and economic benefits offshore wind could create in the U.S., highlighting progress made to date, and detailing policy action needed to realize the industry’s potential.

by Jorge Madrid, via EDF’s California Dream 2.0

Economy and jobs are the top issue on Latino voters’ minds, according to the 2012 “Latino Decisions Poll,” a theme that will be featured prominently in this week’s Hispanic Heritage events in DC.

It’s all the more reason to discuss a powerful engine of opportunity in this country called the clean “green” economy – it is here, it is real, and it is one of the few bright spots in an economy desperate for a comeback.

In 2010, I wrote “Green Can Grow Latino Business,” arguing that the clean economy will create new demand for goods and services, new supply chains and niche markets, and opportunities to create new business models and reinvent old ones.

This is a boon for all would-be entrepreneurs, including Latinos — the nation’s fastest growing demographic. Further, new business creates jobs, and jobs create more demand for goods and services, and the virtuous cycle continues.

The results?  Despite the persistence of a national recession, the clean energy sector grew at double the rate of national economy from 2003-2010, attracting record-level investment and venture capital last year, and boasting twice the export value of traditional sectors.  In total, “Green Goods and Services” as defined by the U.S. Department of Labor accounts for 3.1 million U.S. jobs, with more than one-third of those jobs in the struggling construction and manufacturing industries.

In my home state of California, where Latinos make up 38 percent of the state’s population, the numbers are even more striking:

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Photo: Jiri Rezac / Greenpeace

by Kiley Kroh

Today, Shell Oil announced it will postpone efforts to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean after the company’s oil spill response barge failed another round of testing. The company says it will resume operations next year.

The decision to halt operations comes a week after the company began preparatory drilling in the Chukchi Sea – and was forced to suspend operations just one day later due to a massive ice pack covering approximately 360 square miles drifting toward the site.

The ongoing problems with the company’s oil containment barge, a critical piece of oil spill response equipment, is just the latest in a series of setbacks in Shell’s quest to tap oil under the Arctic Ocean. These problems raise serious questions about its preparedness to drill in some of the harshest conditions on the planet.

Though Shell has vowed to spend the remainder of the season drilling as many “top holes” as possible in order to quickly resume drilling operations next year, the most glaring challenges will not dissipate. As detailed in the Center for American Progress report, Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling: America’s Inability to Respond to an Oil Spill in the Arctic, the dearth of supporting infrastructure throughout Alaska’s North Slope — including ports, roads, railroads, and permanent Coast Guard facilities — coupled with the lack of sound science and extremely volatile conditions make offshore operations extremely difficult and hazardous. The remote location, harsh and unpredictable conditions, and absence of proven clean-up technologies designed for Arctic conditions would make large-scale response efforts nearly impossible.

Citing many of these challenges and deficiencies, insurance giant Lloyd’s of London issued a report earlier this year warning that responding to an oil spill in a region that is “highly sensitive to damage” would present “multiple obstacles, which together constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk.”  Soon after, German bank WestLB announced it would not provide financing to any offshore oil or gas drilling in the region, saying the “risks and costs are simply too high.”

The prospect of drilling in Alaska’s Arctic Ocean – and the threat of an oil spill – has drawn the concerns of Alaska Natives who depend on the Arctic Ocean for their livelihood. In addition, the U.S. Coast Guard and the scientific community have expressed doubts about the lack of knowledge about oil spills in the region.

After five years and $4.5 billion invested in Arctic Ocean drilling, Shell’s delayed drilling plan is an illustration of how difficult and dangerous it is to drill for oil in the world’s last great frontier.

Watch our recent documentary on these challenges in the Arctic:

Kiley Kroh is Associate Director of Oceans Communications at the Center for American Progress.

Last week, Representative Fred Upton (R-MI) quietly omitted key language from a bill that would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The text, which affirms “established scientific concern over warming of the climate,” was taken out and described as merely a “little” change by Upton.

If, like Upton, a lawmaker doesn’t believe that climate change is happening (and has the power to wipe out all language stating the problem), then it’s easy to move forward legislation attacking anything that might actually solve the problem. And that’s what we’ve seen over the last year, with House lawmakers voting more than 300 times on bills targeting the Environmental Protection Agency, international climate initiatives, and key clean energy programs.

Unless, of course, constituents put the pressure on to uphold environmental values.

But if you don’t closely follow the news cycle, it can be hard to keep up with all these votes. There’s a new resource that tracks the voting records and statements from members of Congress on climate issues: Climate Scores.

While environmental groups have come up with election-year resources on these issues over the years, Climate Scores seems to be the first dedicated site to tracking these votes full time. The site not only displays votes, it also provides ways to contact a lawmaker through official channels or social media to encourage them to do better on climate.

“Our goal is to keep Congress accountable on climate change legislation and to create lasting policies that tackle this pressing issue,” states the website.

The outlandish comments about climate change from lawmakers like Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe and Wisconsin Representative Jim Sensenbrenner are well documented. But there are many other lawmakers with similarly bad voting records on climate and energy issues who don’t make the headlines nearly as much. While Climate Scores doesn’t track campaign donations, the site does offer a database of votes. Some have raised issues with the accuracy of the site in its first iteration. But if maintained properly, it has potential to become a good resource for tracking lawmakers’ records on climate.

Go to Climate Scores, use it, provide your feedback. We need to build resources like this in order to hold our lawmakers accountable. In the meantime, the League of Conservation Voters Scorecard is still the most comprehensive resource for tracking the environmental record of politicians.

John D. Boswell, the man who created the fantastic Symphony of Science series, just released a new video on climate change. The piece mixes together quotes from Bill Nye, David Attenborough, Richard Alley, and Isaac Asimov, into a delicious musical sound-bite highlighting climate science and solutions. I hope this makes your Monday morning more enjoyable:

by Mark Muro, via the Brookings Institution

With Washington mired in unproductive argument this fall, it’s a great time to look elsewhere in America for smart, constructive problem-solving.

Specifically, it’s a great time–in the realm of energy policy–to look at what’s going on in U.S. states, many of which have been at the forefront of implementing innovative clean energy solutions.

Which is why my group at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings (working with the team at Ken’s Coalition for Green Capital) recently posted a new brief on the growing interest among multiple states in state-level clean energy finance banking—a new innovation in U.S. energy finance and sub-national pragmatism.

Written by Reed Hundt of the coalition, Devashree Saha, and ourselves, the new brief (part of our Brookings-Rockefeller Project on State and Metropolitan Innovation) describes Connecticut’s path-breaking design of the nation’s first “green” bank and proposes ways other states might get into the act.

They probably need to. Financing the broad deployment of clean new energy and energy efficiency solutions remains one today’s most challenging energy policy problems.

Energy efficiency projects remain complicated to finance given their large up-front costs and the limited capital resources available to consumers while the delivered cost of energy from renewable energy projects–even though its has been dropping rapidly–is still generally more expensive than the delivered cost of energy from conventional sources, making the widespread deployment of these projects problematic. Most notably, clean solutions tend to falter in the marketplace because neither their full social benefits not their dirtier competitors’ full social costs are priced in, leaving those dirtier solutions cheaper.

Yet, here is where Connecticut innovated.

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The House is slated to vote this week on the latest GOP bill to thwart White House environmental policies that Republicans call economically burdensome. [The Hill]

The GOP bill combines a number of measures that have already passed the House to curtail policies that Republicans contend will thwart coal-mining and coal-fired power generation. It would nix the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and take aim at other air pollution rules; restrict planned EPA rules governing management and disposal of coal ash, a waste product from coal plants; and restrict potential Interior Department rules on coal-mining wastes; among other provisions.

Thousands of farmers are filing insurance claims this year after drought and triple-digit temperatures burned up crops across the nation’s Corn Belt, and some experts are predicting record insurance losses — exacerbated by changes that reduced some growers’ premiums. [Associated Press]

Drought conditions are costing homeowners bundles of money as their foundations crack, shift or crumble because of the clay-heavy Midlands earth pulling away from homes because of a lack of moisture. [Omaha World Herald]

More than 2,000 homes in Wyoming face a high or the highest possible risk from wildfires, which endanger $659 million of home value, according to an analysis firm in its inaugural wildfire risk report. [Star Tribune]

As one of the hottest summers ever recorded drew to a close, Jay Portnoy watched patients stream into Children’s Mercy Hospital and Clinics in Kansas City, Mo., coughing and wheezing with asthma, 20 admissions per day for the week that started with Labor Day, he said. [Washington Post]

The chance to save the world’s coral reefs from damage caused by climate change is dwindling as man-made greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, scientists said in a study released on Sunday. [Reuters]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she’s hopeful of negotiating a solution to a dispute with China over solar panels, even after the European Union launched an anti-dumping probe. [Washington Post]

The hole in the ozone layer, the earth’s protective shield against ultraviolet rays, is expected to be smaller this year over the Antarctic than last, showing how a ban on harmful substances has stopped its depletion, the United Nations said on Friday. [Reuters]

A powerful typhoon passing over southwestern Japan has left tens of thousands of homes without power and brought transportation to the region by sea and air to a standstill. [Associated Press]

At the moment only 4.5 per cent of transport fuel in the UK is from biofuels, but that will rise to ten per cent by 2020. The biofuel is largely mixed in with diesel or petrol sold at the pumps. [The Telegraph]