I don’t see anything even remotely controversial about this:

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Or this:

He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

Everything Lord Stern said in the interview is true, as far as I can tell. But once Drudge blows the whistle, conservatives won’t let facts get in the way of their marching orders.

Here are a few early responses from conservative bloggers and pundits.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

I consider creeping elitism from horse’s asses a much more elitist threat than methane from cow’s butts.

Vladimir at Red State:

Hold on. If we eat less beef, pork and poultry, we’ll be eating a lot more beans, broccoli and cabbage, and producing a heck of a lot more methane ourselves. Since each fart is worth 23 times its weight in carbon dioxide, won’t we be accelerating Global Warming?

Andrew Stuttaford at National Review:

Dietary rules and restrictions are a part of many religions, so it’s at least consistent that Lord Stern, one of Britain’s most prominent climate alarmists, is making sure that his particular millennial cult is not left out.

It as almost as if these three folks had absolutely nothing of substance to say, but they went ahead anyway, since Drudge has the story on blast.

Think Progress:

On C-Span’s Washington Journal this week, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the godfather of global warming deniers, said that he will travel to the climate change summit in Copenhagen this fall to present “another view.” “I think somebody has to be there — a one-man truth squad,” he said. Throughout the program, Inhofe went through his tattered global warming denier claims: that climate change is a “hoax,” that CO2 is not a pollutant, and — latching on to the latest false right-wing talking point — that clean energy legislation will cost American families $1,700 a year. At the end of the interview, Inhofe explained what guides his views.

Union of Concerned Scientists:

An article in today’s Washington Post exposed the coal and oil industry interests behind recent anti-climate-change advertisements.

In a “smoking is good for you” twist on reality, the ads actually call for higher levels of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas driving global warming. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded libertarian think tank, released similar ads last year.

Here is one of the ads:

Texas Vox:

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has circulated a draft amendment to the Interior Appropriations bill—the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual spending bill—calling to prevent the Agency from regulating stationary sources of greenhouse gases, despite a mandate from the US Supreme Court two years ago to do just that.

The amendment would ignore worldwide scientific consensus that indicates carbon dioxide emissions from both stationary and mobile sources as a major threat to public health and welfare. Logic, science, and the law agree! Global warming pollution from power plants and oil refineries is just as harmful as that from cars and other passenger vehicles. According to major scientific bodies, such as the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon dioxide emissions—no matter what its source may be—are warming the planet, as well as threatening public health and the welfare of our citizens.

Filed Murkowski Amdt –

Center for American Progress:

Energy efficiency is the “low-hanging fruit” of energy policy, and is the quickest, easiest, and most cost-effective way of driving new investment, creating jobs, saving consumers money, and cutting pollution. Energy efficiency alone could cheaply—and often profitably—provide two-thirds the necessary greenhouse gas reductions to reduce carbon emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050—a level based on the science-driven conclusion that the risks of dangerous climate impacts rise sharply as planetary warming exceeds 2°C from preindustrial levels. The American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454—which passed the House and is now pending in the Senate—recognizes and invests in the economic benefits of energy efficiency.The bill would provide up to $65 billion in allowances from 2012 to 2020 for state and local government energy efficiency programs (see chart). These funds are in addition to other investments in energy efficiency from utilities and the federal government. The state and local programs in ACES would create up to 137,000 jobs in 2015 from energy efficiency investments that year [1]. It would save consumers up to $63 billion on their electricity bills from 2012-2020, while reducing enough greenhouse gas pollution during this period to equal taking 26.5 million cars off the road.

Here is a chart of state-by-state data on energy savings, cost savings, job creation, and pollution reductions from efficiency investments under the American Clean Energy and Security Act:

efficiency_and_jobs_chart –

Find more videos at EnviroKnow TV.

Electric Power Research Institute:

EPRI released its first Prism and MERGE analyses in 2007, providing a technically and economically feasible roadmap for the electricity sector as it seeks to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades. This 2009 update reflects economic and technological changes that have the potential to affect projected emissions and the technologies to address them. The update is also more comprehensive in that it includes new technologies and analysis features.

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movingcoolerexecsum –

Press Release at Cambridge Systematics.

More details at Greenwire.

New Scientist offers a history lesson:

As an antidote to this year’s Darwin-mania, we celebrate a piece of science from 1859 that wasn’t remotely controversial at the time, but which underpins the hottest political potato of our era: climate change. In May 1859, six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Irish physicist John Tyndall proved that some gases have a remarkable capacity to hang onto heat, so demonstrating the physical basis of the greenhouse effect. Charles Darwin had journeyed round the world and ruminated for 20 years before presenting his inflammatory ideas on evolution. Tyndall spent just a few weeks experimenting in a windowless basement lab in London.

Time Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world hit newsstands the other day. Out of 100 individuals named, 11 have a direct connection to energy, sustainability or environmentalism. Here is a list of the 11, with an excerpt from each piece and a link to their full entry in the Time 100.

T. Boone Pickens, by Ted Turner:

Boone and I have a lot in common. We’ve both made a lot of money, and we’ve also given a lot of it away. For all his accomplishments, I respect Boone most for his vision, generosity and can-do attitude. He recognizes that investing in renewable energy isn’t just the right thing to do for the environment; it’s the smartest and most prudent financial investment we can make in these times. It’s a win-win opportunity, and when we’re talking about our kids’ and grandkids’ future, I’m listening to the man with the plan.

Ted Turner, by T. Boone Pickens:

Ted is America’s largest private landowner: 2 million acres from coast to coast. And that’s not including his properties in Argentina. He’s an environmental poster child for people who dream about pristine prairies and use terms like self-sustaining and zero carbon footprint. Just as important, his landholdings are profitmakers that generate income from ecotourism, forestry, ranching, farming and oil and gas leases.

Alexander Medvedev, by Dmitri Trenin:

If Alexei Miller, Gazprom’s CEO, is the company’s public face and conduit to the Russian political leadership, Alexander Medvedev, head of Gazprom Export, is its link to the outside world. One-third of the gas consumed in Europe passes through Medvedev’s hands, and 60% of Gazprom’s total revenues come from exports.

Robin Chase, by Craig Newmark:

The culture of the internet, at its best, involves people working together to make life better. Sometimes called cooperative capitalism or social entrepreneurship, it is practiced every day by millions of individuals and a small but growing number of for-profit companies. For years, Robin Chase, a co-founder of Zipcar, has run such a business, in which people share a community-based pool of vehicles. Customers use Zipcar, which rents cars by the day or hour (when public transportation won’t quite do the job) and makes smart use of technology like GPS to connect people with autos and trucks that are parked near them.

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