In a wide-ranging Op-Ed, former Vice President Al gore pushes back against the climategate conspiracy, urges the Senate to take action and encourages the public to replace whichever public officials fail to take action. Here is the money graf:

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.

In a separate piece, entitled How the G.O.P. Goes Green , Thomas Friedman was able to get some choice quotes from Senator Graham:

“I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are 30 or younger this climate issue is not a debate. It’s a value. These young people grew up with recycling and a sensitivity to the environment — and the world will be better off for it. They are not brainwashed. … From a Republican point of view, we should buy into it and embrace it and not belittle them. You can have a genuine debate about the science of climate change, but when you say that those who believe it are buying a hoax and are wacky people you are putting at risk your party’s future with younger people. You can have a legitimate dispute about how to solve immigration, but when you start focusing on the last names of people the demographics will pass you by.”

Both pieces are must-read.

Political Hotsheet:

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to view global warming as an urgent problem. Fifty-two percent say it should be a high priority, compared with 22 percent of Republicans. Nearly 40 percent of Republicans say global warming is not a serious issue.

There is also a gender divide: Men are far more likely to say global warming is not serious (30 percent say so) than woman (16 percent).

Here are the results:

Dec09aglobalwarming –

Talking Points Memo reports:

A good government group is calling on the State Department to investigate the role of former ambassador Peter Galbraith in drafting Iraq’s constitution in 2005 while he held a lucrative stake in a Kurdish oil field.

The letter from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to the State Dept. Inspector General asks whether State approved Galbraith’s activities, and cites a recent New York Times exposé that built off work of the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv.

The Times reported that Galbraith, advising the Kurds during the 2005 constitutional talks, helped secure “clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.”

Here is the letter:

David Roberts flagged this exceptionally bad NYT article which attacks Vice President Gore for… putting his money where is mouth is. He summarizes:

Professional Gore haters, who make their living peddling lies, cast an absurd charge against Gore. The charge goes in the headline. It goes in the first paragraphs of the story. Then in paragraph 32 it’s revealed that the charge is baseless. And John Broder wasn’t embarrassed to have this appear under his byline.

Oh, and to state the obvious: even if it were true, nobody but a professional Gore hater could possibly find anything wrong with someone investing in the very solutions they say are necessary to save the world. The non-Gore-demented might even find that a perfectly predictable way for a capitalist to respond.

I wonder how John Broder covered the release of the Pickens Plan, which advocates federal policies designed to drastically increase the amount of natural gas used as transportation fuel. Boone Pickens, of course, is the founder of the Orwellian Clean Energy Fuels Corporation, which is the largest provider of natural gas for transportation in the country. Did Mr. Broder point out this apparent conflict of interest?  Here is what he wrote:

Mr. Pickens, 80, the founder and chairman of BP Capital Management, is the major supporter of a national energy plan announced last month to wean the United States of its dependence on foreign oil by turning to domestically produced natural gas. He has pledged $58 million for a marketing campaign that he hopes will force the presidential candidates into a discussion of his ideas.

No mention whatsoever of the fact that Mr. Pickens is one of the biggest investors in natural gas in the United States, and stands to profit substantially if his plan is enacted. Why the discrepancy, Mr. Broder?

Cameron Scott at The Thin Green Line points out that this story was pushed by Marc Morano, one of the least credible individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of running circles around. Why is the New York Times running stories being pushed by Marc Morano? Are they trying to destroy their own credibility?

Cameron also asks another good question:

Republican lawmakers—including Kyl, Cornyn, Coburn and Hatch—as well as a few Democrats are heavily invested in oil and gas and coal companies. For the GOP, the oil and gas is the sixth largest recipient of investments; automotive is the eighth and other energy companies are 24th and 25th. (See the Democrats’ profile here: oil and gas ranks seventh and automotive 25th.)

James Inhofe, long the lead cheerleader of climate denialism and Morano’s longtime boss, had at least 10 percent of his assets in fossil fuel in 2007.

Where are the articles on that?

Unfortunately, the Times wasn’t alone in leveling this baseless attack.

The London Telegraph ran a shorter version of the same story, as did other outlets.

And once newspapers are talking about the story, it must be news. Right, Mika? Diane Sawyer seems to think so as well.

Gore’s response to this criticism has been spot on. He told Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski, “Of course I invest according to my beliefs and values.” And he told Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer, “I am proud to [have] put my money where my mouth is for the past 30 years.”

I’m eagerly looking forward to the day when Brzezinski, Sawyer or Broder challenges Senator Inhofe or T. Boone Pickens, or Exxon-Mobile for that matter, about their obvious conflicts of interests.

Update: Brad Johnson points out that Diane Sawyer repeatedly invoked Glenn Beck in her attack of Gore. He also takes note of the fact out that Beck mentioned the Diane Sawyer segment three times, and clearly enjoyed the recognition from Sawyer.

NYT: Energy Firms Deeply Split on Bill to Battle Climate Change.

Nothing especially new here, but it is a shame they give Don Blankenship of Massey Energy the last word.  Blankenship, who never passes up an opportunity to say something stupid, doesn’t disappoint:

“A lot of coal-using utilities seem to be on the wrong side of this issue,” said Don L. Blankenship, the chief executive of Massey Energy, the largest producer of Appalachian coal, who has called climate legislation a hoax and a Ponzi scheme. “How can they be so confident that man is changing the world climate?”

Daniel Weiss of the Center for American Progress makes a point worth considering:

Some supporters of global warming legislation believe that the division in the once-monolithic oil and gas industry, as well as other splits among energy producers, could improve the prospects for the legislation.

“It’s much harder to pass clean-energy legislation when big oil and other energy interests are united in their opposition,” said Daniel J. Weiss, climate policy director at the liberal Center for American Progress. “The companies that recognize the economic benefits in the bill can help bring along their political supporters.”

All in all, a pretty good summary of the state of play, but nothing new.

Desmogblog has details. Here are the ads:

I’m not sure whether or not lobbying for policies you know are disastrous is illegal but it damn sure should be (emphasis mine):

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

This is some of the most sinister and corrupt business imaginable. Please read this article.

Update: Glenn Hurowitz weighs in:

The amazing thing about this story is not that industry deceived journalists about the threat of climate change, but that journalists are still buying industry deceptions to this day – just different ones.

Having finally lost the battle about the reality of climate change, these same industries and their backers in Congress have come up with a different deception: that bold action on climate change would somehow negatively affect the economy.

Update 2: DeSmogBlog has more.

John Tierney of the New York Times makes an audacious claim:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because…2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

Claim number one is questionable at best. It remains unsubstantiated. Claim number two is backed up with this:

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

The argument seems to be that the the transition to a clean energy economy is inevitable, so making a fuss about it and trying to speed it along is foolish. But if the transition to a global clean energy economy is inevitable (I think it is), then why not structure regulations and incentives in a way that will push the United States closer to the front of that curve? It seems to me that by falling further and further behind the rest of the world we’re setting ourselves up to play a big game of catch-up. Fortunately for Mr. Tierney, the rest of us aren’t willing to wait around and play catch up. We’ll go ahead and regulate carbon emissions and offer incentives for clean energy production now, rather than fall further behind and wait on the inevitable transition he predicts down the road.

I headlined a story above last night indicating that Rep. Waxman expects his cap and trade bill to pass by August. Joe Romm, in a piece dissecting the WaPo and NYT stories on Friday’s crucial EPA finding, offers a prediction on when a cap and trade bill will pass in the United States Congress:

I expect a cap-and trade bill will pass Congress in the next 12 to 15 months — with the support of most midwestern Dems.

Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Ed Markey, two other key players in the upcoming fight, are on board with Markey’s assessment, expecting the process to take no more than six months.

The New York Times has details:

The government has identified 10 corridors, each from 100 to 600 miles long, with greatest promise for high-speed development.

They are: a northern New England line; an Empire line running east to west in New York State; a Keystone corridor running laterally through Pennsylvania; a major Chicago hub network; a southeast network connecting the District of Columbia to Florida and the Gulf Coast; a Gulf Coast line extending from eastern Texas to western Alabama; a corridor in central and southern Florida; a Texas-to-Oklahoma line; a California corridor where voters have already approved a line that will allow travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours; and a corridor in the Pacific Northwest.

Only one high-speed line is now operating, on the Northeast corridor between Washington and Boston, and it will be eligible to compete for money to make improvements.