Responding to the announcement that former White House green jobs advisor Van Jones will be the recipient this Friday of an NAACP Image Award, Fox News relaunched its smear campaign against the environmental leader. According to NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous, Van Jones is an “American treasure” who has been “one of America’s most effective and inspiring bridge-builders,” finding “creative solutions to the ecological and economic crises.” However, the Fox & Friends morning show — hosted by Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade — took the announcement as an opportunity to run “some of his most spectacular sound bites that we’ve strung together in a montage form”:

. . . You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black child . . . the white polluters and the white environmentalists are basically steering poison into the people-of-color communities . . . Wait a minute, aren’t you an oil company? Aren’t you killing —s in Nigeria? Hold on a second . . . some cowboy cliques in the police department who have a frat boy mentality . . . the President of the United States sounded like a crack head . . . like a crack head trying to lick the crack pipe for a fix . . . the answer to that is they’re a—s. And Obama’s not an a—e . . .

Watch it:

It is certainly true that Van Jones has been a harsh, sometimes incendiary critic of polluters and social and racial injustice. But he has always confronted the difficult issues of race and pollution with humor and compassion:

“You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black child” Excerpted from a 2006 speech about social justice, Van Jones expresses his anger that both white and black young men are suffering in this country, and asks for concern, love, and compassion for young men.

“the white polluters and the white environmentalists are basically steering poison” Clipped from a January 2008 interview, Van Jones was explaining how the environmental movement evolved over the 20th century with the influence of Silent Spring and the environmental justice movement. He talks about how he is part of the “third wave” of environmentalism that is “solution oriented” and “investment oriented,” and how to make it “rainbow from the beginning.”

“Wait a minute, aren’t you an oil company? Aren’t you killing —s in Nigeria?” Date unknown. In a marginally longer excerpt used by Glenn Beck to connect progressives to terrorists, it is apparent Jones is criticizing the misleading greenwashing campaigns by companies like Royal Dutch Shell, who paid $15.5 million to settle lawsuits against the company for complicity in human rights abuses against the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta, including executions and torture.

“some cowboy cliques in the police department who have a frat boy mentality” In 2005, Bay Area Police Watch president Van Jones criticized members of the San Francisco Police Department who “ignored the diversity training” and created homophobic, misogynistic, and racist videos. Twenty officers were suspended, and the creator of the videos has since resigned. The chief of police called the videos “egregious, shameful, and despicable.”

“the President of the United States sounded like a crack head” Excerpted from his hour-long 2008 address to the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, Jones mocked President Bush for begging the king of Saudi Arabia to increase oil production. Before stepping down from his White House position, Van Jones apologized.

“the answer to that is they’re a—s” Cut from a February, 2009 lecture to the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative. Responding to a question about why Democrats “need” 60 senators to pass their agenda but Republicans didn’t, Jones explained that the Republicans are “assholes,” a “technical, political and scientific term” which he said also applies to himself. Before stepping down from his White House position, Van Jones apologized.

Not only were the Fox & Friends crew uninterested in context in their continued smear against Van Jones, they were unconcerned with accuracy. “Most of those were from before the time he was a green czar,” Doocy said, “and then of course they came to light and of course he had to resign from the Obama Cabinet.” In fact, Jones, who was never a member of the Cabinet, made none of the comments while at the White House.

More important than any impolite language, of course, is the reality of the dirty, deadly influence of polluters on our society, economy, and politics — which even the propaganda machine of Fox News cannot hide. Van Jones will receive his Image Award in a live broadcast Friday on Fox.

Transcript: Read more

UPDATE: Dr. Ben Santer says, “Mr. McIntyre’s unchecked, extraordinary power is the real story of Climategate.”

UPDATE:  Dr. Ben Santer, one of the country’s leading climatologists, has a devastating essay on “Climate Auditing – Close Encounters with Mr. Steven McIntyre,” at RealClimate, which I reprint at the end.

UPDATE 2:  Turns out McIntyre shills for Big Oil after all (see below).

Dr. Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has a long, but ultimately unconstructive essay on her website, “On the Credibility of Climate Research, Part II:  Towards Rebuilding Trust.”

Aside from some factual misstatements and the false equivalence that suffuses piece, the essay makes no useful contribution to the climate debate because it fails the two great tests of any serious essay on the subject: Read more

I have long been a fan of Van Jones (see “Van Jones and the English Language).  I was delighted when the President picked him to be green jobs adviser last March.

The agenda of the people who smeared him is a matter of public record “” see Fox News blurts out its agenda: “Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through”¦. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions,” and then put “the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

So I’m delighted to report that, “Today the Center for American Progress announced that Van Jones is rejoining the center as a Senior Fellow and leader of the Green Opportunity Initiative, a new CAP project,” as a CAP press release explains.  Here’s the rest of the PR, followed by WashPost interview:

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Guest blogger John Atcheson just retired from a long career in government service, most recently as a Senior Analyst working for the DOE on weatherization. His job consisted primarily of  analyzing innovative policies to increase the effectiveness of the Weatherization and State Grant Programs.

Yesterday, the NY Times ran a story on a report by DOE’s Inspector General pointing to problems in the implementation of the scaled up the Weatherization Assistance Program under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  To be sure, the implementation has not been as fast as some expected. And as usual, “bureaucrats” received the brunt of the blame.

But the bottom line is that the program has moved with speed and is poised to move much faster from this point forward.  Since it’s Winter Olympics time, let me offer an analogy:  The NYT is reporting on the pace of ascending the mountain on the ski lift, while ignoring the pace at which the skiers will descend – and the benefits that will accrue.

Here are the facts.

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Kerry insists US to move on climate

Senator John Kerry vowed the United States would overcome the odds and approve action on climate change, as the United Nations set talks for April to help break a diplomatic logjam.

Without offering a timetable, Kerry on Tuesday rejected assertions that it had become politically impossible for the Senate to finalize the first US nationwide plan to curb carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

“I’m excited. I know that’s completely contrary to any conventional wisdom,” said Kerry, a close ally of President Barack Obama and chief architect of the legislation.

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IPCC errors are “trivial mistakes”

THE EARTH is warming. A chief cause is the increase in greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Humans are at least in part responsible, because the oil, gas and coal that we burn releases these gases. If current trends persist, it’s likely that in coming decades the globe’s climate will change with potentially devastating effects for billions of people.

Contrary to what you may have read lately, there are few reputable scientists who would disagree with anything in that first paragraph.

That’s the opening of a pretty good editorial on climate from the paper that has all but destroyed the credibility of its opinion pages (see and the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to “¦).

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Our guest book reviewer is John Atcheson who has more than 30 years in energy and the environment with government, private industry, and the nation’s leading think tanks (see “Utility decoupling on steroids.”)  He is working on his own novel about climate change.

Sometimes, fiction is the best way to win friends and influence people — H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and George Orwell’s classic, 1984 come to mind.  Each provoked a visceral reaction that galvanized the culture around it, changing forever the way issues such as class and totalitarianism were perceived.  Neville Shute’s On the Beach made the consequences of nuclear war real, and therefore, unthinkable.

In a scientifically illiterate culture such as ours, these kinds of myth-based meta-narratives may be the best way to communicate complex scientific issues like climate change.  Myths, as Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell revealed, are not necessarily false, nor are they automatically at odds with science.  At their best, they provide another way of viscerally experiencing a truth.

A spate of novels and movies that feature climate change as either an overt part of the story-line, or an implicit backdrop against which mythical heroes strive may be creating the critical mass for a cultural awakening that allows climate change to be perceived at that pre-rational level – the kind of limbic awareness that motivates change. Or so we can hope.

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Green jobs leader Van Jones is returning to the Center for American Progress as a Senior Fellow and leader of the new Green Opportunity Initiative. Van Jones, the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Green for All, resigned from the White House last summer under a storm of fossil-fueled right-wing accusations that he was a “communist-anarchist radical” infiltrating the government, based on misrepresentations of Jones’ past activism.

Jones will also be the recipient this Friday of an NAACP Image Award, celebrating Jones’ achievements as “one of America’s most effective and inspiring bridge-builders” to find “creative solutions to the ecological and economic crises.” According to NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous, Van Jones is an “American treasure“:

Van Jones is an American treasure. He is quite simply one of the few Americans in recent years to have generated powerful new ideas that are creating more jobs here. He penned the national bestseller, “The Green Collar Economy,” which provided the definitive blueprint for retooling American industry to create pathways out of poverty and generate a national economic recovery. He was a driving force behind passage of the 2007 Green Jobs Act. In fact, Van’s ideas have helped lead to the creation of tens of thousands of jobs across the industrial Midwest and throughout the nation’s decaying urban and rural areas.

John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress explains the Green Opportunity Initiative to be led by Van Jones:

Van is a pioneer in the effort to promote a clean, sustainable economy that works for all Americans. I’m proud that he’s coming back to CAP to focus on creating economic opportunity in distressed communities through the Green Opportunity Initiative and that he will be giving voice to those issues once again.

Jones will also have “a one-year joint appointment as a distinguished visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he will teach a seminar on environmental and economic policy.” Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the Center for African American Studies, told the Washington Post that Van Jones is “the leading voice in the environmental justice movement.”

With FoxNews’s Neil Cavuto calling me a “warmist” today, this ThinkProgress repost seemed appropriate.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns the fourth largest stake in News Corp “” the parent company of Fox News “” making him the largest shareholder outside the family of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch. According to the Financial Times, News Corp announced today that it is purchasing a $70 million dollar stake in Prince Alwaleed’s Rotana Media, a Middle Eastern music and news conglomerate. Boasting about the increased cooperation between the Murdoch empire and his own media corporation, Prince Alwaleed said, “This is a qualitative leap not just for Rotana but for the whole Arab world.” Because Prince Alwaleed has publicly acknowledged that he has forced Fox News to edit its coverage he disliked, conservative activists have attacked the business partnership as “really dangerous for America.”

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Today, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works considered the 2011 budget request for the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson spent most of the hearing listening to Republicans deny the science of global warming, as Democrats talked about protecting their constituents from toxic pollution and creating new clean jobs. In his opening statement, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) lashed out at the Republican attacks that regulation of greenhouse gas pollution would destroy the economy:

Every single time in this nation, when we have confronted great damage to our air or to our water, it is always the same mantra: “it will kill jobs.” And every single time when we look back 10 years later, 20 years later, we’re so thankful that we actually created jobs by cleaning up our waterways, we created jobs by cleaning up our air, and we’re going to create jobs by cleaning up carbon dioxide pollution as well.

Watch it:

Merkley said “it absolutely infuriates me that we’re spending a billion dollars a day on oil from the Middle East and countries like Venezuela” so that “dictators in far-away countries can build shiny new towers.” Borrowing a turn of phrase from Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Merkley argued we should create “red, white, and blue jobs” in this country by “creating renewable energy and keep those dollars in our economy.”

As the Center for American Progress has found, our oil dependence is a dangerous habit.

Transcript: Read more

The NOAA chart FoxNews put up is discussed here.

In January I went on Neil Cavuto’s show because it was cold outside.  Today — barring a last-minute cancellation (which happened last week) — I’ll be going on again around 4:05 thanks to the Senator even the Washington Post mocked as “the last flat-earther.”

UPDATE:  Yes, Cavuto kept me on about twice as long as usual, but then proceeded to cut me off repeatedly, which I confess I wasn’t prepared for because he hadn’t done this before.  Next time I’ll have a different strategy.  I’ll let the comments from the Fox crowd run since it is important to get that perspective every once in a while — and it also helps you see what you’re missing on all those other blogs that have been taken over by the anti-science crowd!

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Every month brings more evidence the world’s greatest ice sheet is disintegrating much faster than the “consensus” forecast (see Satellite data stunner: “Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass”¦. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise”). Guest blogger Nick Sundt has the latest news in a piece first published here.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported Monday that “every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. “  The finding comes on the heels of the warmest January on record for the Southern Hemisphere.

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Plenty of time for Congress to act first

Today’s guest blogger is Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress.

Big oil, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and senators including Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are whipping up hysterical fears that the Environmental Protection Agency will use its existing authority under the Clean Air Act to immediately restrict global warming pollution for even the smallest of emitters.  For instance, NAM President John Engler makes the ridiculous claim that “If EPA moves forward and begins regulating stationary sources, it will open the door for them to regulate everything from industrial facilities to farms to even American homes.”

In fact, EPA’s efforts are simply following the law of the land established by the  Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA.

To calm the hysteria, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson sent a letter to eight Democratic senators assuring them that EPA will pursue a very deliberative process for establishing limits on global warming pollution from the largest polluters first, which would leave ample time for Congress to establish a more comprehensive pollution reduction program before EPA standards take effect.

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Loan Guarantee for a Big Solar Power Plant

The United States Energy Department on Monday offered a $1.37 billion loan guarantee to a company planning to build a large-scale solar power plant in the Southern California desert.

The loan guarantee, for BrightSource Energy of Oakland, Calif., is the largest given for a solar project. BrightSource’s 392-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is the first utility-scale solar power plant to undergo licensing in California in nearly two decades. It would use solar thermal technology, in which mirrors concentrate sunlight to heat a fluid and generate steam, and if built it would be the world’s largest such plant.

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I continue to believe strongly that if we want to compete with the Chinese and the Indians and Europe when it comes to clean energy, unless you price carbon, you don’t send the right signals to the marketplace. I hear that from the utilities””Jim Rogers at Duke Energy and John Rowe from Exelon””and from industry leaders like Dow Chemical, GE, and others. It’s a mainstream idea.

It’s tempting to believe that a robust energy-only bill like we’ve passed out of the Energy Committee would reduce our carbon emissions, but based on all the scientific analysis I’ve seen, it wouldn’t. It would drive some innovation; it would send resources into research and development; it would improve our capacity to expand our transmission system. But it wouldn’t drive down carbon emissions, and for that reason I’m not willing at this point to give up on a price on carbon.

This interview of Sen. Udall by David Roberts was first posted at Grist.org.

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Today’s guest blogger is Max Weiss, an Intern on CAP’s Energy Opportunity Team.

Many military leaders and Afghan and Iraq veterans have warned that global warming and oil dependence will harm U.S. national security.  A new video “Climate Patriots,” by the PEW Project on National Security and Energy, warns that climate change is the enemy we’ve been forgetting to fight.  It includes American military leaders and retired officers who are very concerned about the security impact of inaction:

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Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson today announced she expects the EPA to weaken its proposed standards for global warming pollution from stationary sources and delay implementation until 2011. Responding to a letter from eight Democratic senators with strong ties to coal, oil, and industrial polluters, Jackson previewed changes to the rule to regulate greenhouse gases which her agency proposed last September she expects to make in its final form. Under the Clean Air Act, the finalization of the greenhouse gas endangerment finding originally expected in March — now, according to Jackson’s letter, in April — will trigger permitting requirements for stationary sources.

Jackson’s proposed “tailoring” rule would have limited permitting requirements to emitters of 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, instead of the automatic statutory amount of 250 tons. The 25,000-ton threshold covers only 14,000 industrial pollution sources nationwide, 11,000 of which are currently covered by the Clean Air Act permitting requirements already.

However, today Jackson announced that the “decision-making process has moved far enough along that I can make several central points based on modifications I expect to make in finalizing EPA’s previous proposals,” including a 2011 start date and a “substantially higher” threshold than 25,000 tons:

– No stationary sources will be required to get a Clean Air Act permit to cover its greenhouse gas emissions in calendar year 2010.

– EPA will phase-in permit requirements and regulation of greenhouse gases for large stationary sources beginning in calendar year 2011.

– In the first half of 2011, only those facilities that must apply for Clean Air Act permits as a result of their non-greenhouse gas emissions will need to address their greenhouse gas emissions in their permit applications.

– Greenhouse gas emissions permit for other large sources will phase in starting in the latter half of 2011.

– Until 2013, the threshold for permitting will be substantially higher than the 25,000 ton limit that EPA originally proposed.

– The EPA will not subject the smallest sources to Clean Air Act permitting any sooner than 2016, after Obama has left office, even if he wins a second term.

Many of the world’s top climate scientists have warned that global emissions of greenhouse gases “almost certainly need to decline extremely rapidly after 2015” if there is to be a good chance of avoiding catastrophic warming.

The conservative Democratic senators who questioned the economic consequences of the EPA’s endangerment finding were led by Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and included Robert C. Byrd (D-WV), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Pat Casey (D-PA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Carl Levin (D-MI), and Max Baucus (D-MT). Senators Ben Nelson (D-NE), Blanche Lincoln (D-NE), and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) joined numerous Republicans in supporting a bid to overturn the scientific endangerment finding entirely.

If the endangerment finding is overturned, Jackson notes in her letter, “it would undo the historic agreement among states, automakers, the federal government, and other stakeholders” for higher fuel-economy standards, “leaving the automobile industry without the explicit nationwide uniformity that it has described as important to its business.” Not to mention the health and economic costs of failing to reduce our deadly dependence on oil.

Download Jackson’s letter to conservative Democratic senators.

The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) report ignored dynamic ice-sheet disintegration, which was already happening (see Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”).  The IPCC therefore low-balled sea level rise estimates, suggesting seas might rise “only” a foot or two this century, greatly delighting the anti-science crowd (see “Debunking Bj¸rn Lomborg:  Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise“).

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Today’s guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow at American Progress.

Last month, an NREL study showed that America could generate 20% percent of its power just with wind by 2024.  That would require about 300,000 MW or 300 GW.  The ultimate potential is much, much higher — 30 times higher (!) — as Tom Kenworthy, CAP’s Senior Fellow based in Colorado, explains.

Thanks to improvements in wind turbines over the last decade and a half, the United States has the potential to generate more than three times as much electricity from wind as previously thought, according to a new analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

The assessment of onshore wind energy potential found that the U.S. could produce almost 37 million gigawatt-hours yearly. According to the American Wind Energy Association, that’s nine times our current annual electricity consumption.

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Scientists who challenged the possibility of catastrophic sea level rise in coming decades have retracted their argument. Mark Siddall, whose paper claimed sea level rise from global warming could not be more than 82 centimeters (32 inches) by 2100 — despite other estimates of up to 1.9 meters — asked for the conclusions published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience to be retracted, accepting corrections from researchers who had made the higher estimates. The Guardian misleadingly presented the news with the headline, “Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels“:

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown.

If all one read was the introduction, a reader might get the false impression that sea level rise from global warming is in doubt. The misleading Guardian headline was picked up — as per usual — by the Drudge Report and Marc Morano’s conspiracy site Climate Depot. Right-wing bloggers, unsurprisingly, latched on to the headline without any comprehension of the story:

Betsy Newmark: Another global warming claim that has had to be retracted because of problems with the data.

Sammy Benoit: OOPS Never-mind! Climate scientists withdraw IPCC-related article claiming sea is rising.

JammieWearingFool: Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels.

Jules Crittenden: Warmal scientists are compelled to admit (again) that they don’t know what they’re talking about, retract study that predicted up to a nearly three-foot sea level rise by 2100.

Law professor William A. Jacobson: But now the seas are not going to rise? My dream of a waterfront home is melting away faster than the glaciers.

Caleb Howe: Yet another card removed from the geodesic dome of cards that is AGW hysteria.

However, the retraction instead admits that the paper’s calculations for an upper bound to future sea level rise were incorrect, and sea level rise could be much worse. Siddall’s study, “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change,” used paleoclimate reconstructions to predict that sea level rise from global warming would be constrained to between 7 cm and 82 cm (3 to 32 in) by the end of the century, in line with the estimated sea level rise in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which excluded possible effects from ice sheets.

Unfortunately for the future of human civilization, the best scientific estimates of future sea level rise continue to worsen, as it becomes evident that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass much more rapidly than estimated before 2007. December’s “Global sea level linked to global temperature,” published by Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences projects a catastrophic rise of 0.75 to 1.9 m (2.5 to 6 feet) by 2100:

Figure 3: Projection of sea-level rise from 1990 to 2100, based on IPCC temperature projections for three different emission scenarios. The sea-level range projected in the IPCC AR4 for these scenarios are shown for comparison in the bars on the bottom right. Also shown in red is observed sea-level (Vermeer 2009). The estimate from Siddall 2009 that contradicted Vermeer has been retracted.

Over the past twenty years, actual sea level rise has been at the top of estimated limits since the first IPCC report in 1990. By 2200, scientists warn, the oceans could rise by more than three meters, submerging cities like Los Angeles, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and lower Manhattan.