Pick A Side: Joe Lieberman Or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Conservatives want members of Congress to look like the mug on the right, never like the young woman on the left

Connecticut Democratic primary voters basically kicked Joe Lieberman out of the party by denying him the 2006 Democratic nomination for the Senate seat he had held since 1994. He ran on the Connecticut for Lieberman Party that year. He would like to see Joe Crowley, who lost the Democratic renomination bid on June 26, do the same thing. Crowley outspent his progressive opponent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez $1,410,228 to $30,94, but she worked harder and smarter and beat him 15,897 (57.48%) to 11,761 (42.52%). Ever since her inspiring victory over an avatar of the grotesquely corrupt status quo establishment, the grotesquely corrupt status quo establishment and their media lapdogs have gone on the attack against her and other progressive reformers working to displace other incumbents associated with the grotesquely corrupt status quo establishment. So, no one should be surprised that Joe Lieberman, now a lobbyist working for the ultimate grotesquely corrupt status quo establishment law firm, Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, who's best known client is... Don the Con, the illegitimate "president." Lieberman is also the co-chair of the American Internationalism Project, part of the far right American Enterprise Institute.

Lieberman represents a very special kind of bipartisanship-- the opposite of the kind of bipartisanship practiced by legislators like Alan Grayson, Pramila Jayapal, Ted Lieu and Karen Bass (entailing working across the aisle to find issues that both parties can support for the good of their constituents)-- and instead can be defined as selling out your own party's values and principles and embracing those of the other party. That, in fact, sums up Joe Lieberman's entire political career. Example: while actual Democrats were trying to stop the confirmation of anti-education extremist Betsy DeVos of Secretary of Education, it was Lieberman who introduced her to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee. A high ranking staffer for one of the committee members-- hint: not Doug Jones (D-AL)-- told me that members were revolted when Lieberman came into their offices and even more revolted when Trump announced he was likely to replace James Comey as FBI Director with Lieberman.

No one was surprised when Lieberman, writing for the conservative Wall Street Journal-- of which Grason quipped, "the Wall Street Journal: you can always tell whom they fear by whom they smear"-- a couple of days ago went on a vicious, McCarthyite attack against Ocasio-Cortez. "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hurts the party, Congress and even America," he wrote. What he meant by "the party" isn't open to the reader's interpretation, although it should be since the Democratic Party now has the most inspiring weapon in politics since Bernie Sanders-- something that petrifies both of the grotesquely corrupt status quo establishment parties. Lieberman, 76 and... tired, defines the grotesquely corrupt status quo establishment as "the mainstream," so he isn't reaching when he writes that "Ocasio-Cortez advocates [policies] so far from the mainstream, her election in November would make it harder for Congress to stop fighting and start fixing problems." He didn't acknowledge the dysfunctional state of Congress today, not the role Joe Crowley-- not to mention his own decades-long role-- has played in that dysfunction.

He then went on to try to make a case for Crowley doing what he did-- running as an independent in the general. "On Election Day, his name will be on the ballot as the endorsed candidate of the Working Families Party. But for Mr. Crowley to have a chance at getting re-elected, he will have to decide if he wants to remain an active candidate. I hope he does." The Working Families Party" has pleaded with him not to further disgrace them by running against Ocasio-Cortez. The heart of Lieberman's OpEd, was his attack on policies that benefit anyone other than the grotesquely corrupt status quo establishment. Keep in mind, Lieberman was one of the most anti-Bernie "Democrats" in the country during the 2016 election cycle. Here he was on Fox News:

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform, like hers, is more Socialist than Democratic. Her dreams of new federal spending would bankrupt the country [wrong] or require very large tax increases [wrong], including on the working class [wrong]. Her approach foresees government ownership of many private companies, which would decimate the economy and put millions out of work.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t speak much about foreign policy during the primary, but when she did, it was from the DSA policy book-- meaning support for socialist governments, even if they are dictatorial and corrupt (Venezuela), opposition to American leadership in the world, even to alleviate humanitarian disasters (Syria), and reflexive criticism of one of America’s great democratic allies (Israel).

She has received the most attention for calling to “Abolish ICE,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This makes no sense unless you no longer want any rules on immigration or customs to be enforced. I have not heard anyone say that. Nonetheless, at least three credible candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination rushed to endorse Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s position.

Republicans are calling Ms. Ocasio-Cortez the “new face” of the Democratic Party. That’s why Nancy Pelosi has tried to put distance between Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and House Democrats. “They made a choice in one district,” Mrs. Pelosi said. “It is not to be viewed as something that stands for anything else.” She knows that if Democrats are to regain a majority, it will be by winning swing districts with sensible, mainstream candidates. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is making that task harder across America.

Joe Crowley’s re-election would be evidence that Democrats are capable of governing again. His voting record shows that Mr. Crowley is a progressive [laughably wrong]. I know him as a bridge builder and problem solver, which is exactly what Congress needs more of in both parties.

Crowley has refused to remove his name from the Working Families Party ballot slot, despite the Working Families Party asking him to. We asked some of the Blue America-endorsed candidates for their perspectives on this. First to respond was Tom Guild who is running on very similar all-American, working family issues that Ocasio ran on-- in Oklahoma City. They work as well among voters there than they work in the Bronx and Queens. "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a breath of fresh air," he told me. "She prevailed against big money and is not responsible for the problems that others have created-- paralysis, placing our democracy at risk by coveting and hoarding big donor money, and selling out working people and the middle class by doing the bidding of the modern moneychangers in the American political temple. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Crowley is the same old, same old and a charter member of the DC Swamp. Progressive change will make things better for people who are struggling to survive and throw the corrupt moneychangers out of the temple. Alexandria beat the tired and failed political establishment playing by their rules, and may be able (with a little help from her friends) to shake up Washington and get the country moving in a positive direction. Experience makes it crystal clear that for many years Lieberman and Crowley made a functioning national government dysfunctional. Why would we want to go back to that future?

Kansas Democrat James Thompson made an addition after the post was completed: "My first thought is who cares what Lieberman thinks? He is a corporate crony owned by the establishment in both parties. If Ocasio is the breath of fresh air then Lieberman is the dying breath of a decaying establishment that can’t see past its next Corporate PAC endorsement." And then there's this nice video, nice message from the Sanders Institute. I bet you can guess why we're running it here, right?

Electricity from Plants — An Off-the-Grid Way of Lighting Your Room, a Street, a Park

Prometheus, bringer of fire, was punished for the crime of rendering less the sum of human wretchedness (Byron). Can we replace his gift with another? Or will we let the fire we burn, burn us?

by Gaius Publius

In the beginning, before we emerged into civilization, we were given fire as a source of energy — all we had to do was light it.

Now at the other end of our civilized life, we have all the fire we want — all we have to do is not light it.

People are generally pessimistic about the chance our species will escape unscathed the gift of fire that we now so greatly overuse. They think that the warming of the earth will doom most of us in a kind of Great Dying — taking our billions in number down to a fraction of that — and doom the rest who remain to lives more like the Old Stone Age than the NextGen Age of the iPhone 44.

Those that aren't pessimistic about climate solutions fall generally into one of two camps — the party of the "wizards," those who believe that the magic of science will save us without requiring much change in the way we currently live; and the party of the "prophets," those who think that humans must entirely rethink themselves, their lives, their culture, before any solution is possible.

As a small example, wizards see a "smarter grid" and "greener power plants" as a way of serving national energy needs, while prophets see local solutions — rooftop solar, independent village- and town-sized energy facilities — as the only way our species can stay nimble and survive.

Note that the problem being solved by wizards and prophets isn't just a science problem — how to produce our energy — but also a political problem as well. How can a village or town save itself if the national government makes all solutions impossible, as one political party is deliberately does; or promises national solutions that can't possibly work in time, as the other seems to do?

For a nice introduction to these two schools of thought, go here (h/t Naked Capitalism).

Lighting a Room with a Plant

This piece offers a kind of marriage of these two camps, a technologically innovative solution (something wizards will applaud) that nonetheless can be deployed entirely locally (solving the prophets' dilemma).

With this technology, one can light a room with a plant. No plug; just a plant. The technology exists (has existed, in fact, for more than a century) and efforts to scale it up, from a room to a house, a street, and a park, are underway.

The following short video explains it all.

From Deezen.com:

Dutch designer Ermi van Oers has created a lamp that uses a living plant to generate its own electricity – and plans to scale up the technology to power entire smart cities.

Presented at Dutch Design Week, the Living Light uses microorganisms to convert the chemical energy that a plant naturally produces during photosynthesis into an electric current.

Van Oers designed the lamp to be fully self-sufficient, so it can function off-grid, rather than needing to be plugged into an electrical socket.

She has already began to apply the technology – known as microbial energy – to public spaces, and is collaborating with the municipality of Rotterdam to light up one of its parks.

"The potential is huge," she told Dezeen. "Street lights could be connected to trees. Forests could become power plants. Rice fields in Indonesia could produce food and electricity for the local population."

Of course, these are early days for this technology, and the efficiency isn't great — efficiency defined as how much light you get from how much plant.

Van Oers acknowledges that "the technology is still new, and that the Living Light can only produce a small amount of energy in its current form. The plant photosynthesises around the clock. But the lamp takes a day to produce enough energy for half an hour's charge – although this can vary depending on the condition of the plant."

Nevertheless, the wizards among us will appreciate that photovoltaic cells weren't very efficient in their early days as well.

And the prophets among us, who understand that freeing ourselves from the death grip of the already rich is the only way solve this problem, will appreciate the simplicity and independence of this solution. Once the technology is mature and available, no politician-dominated utility commission, for example, can forbid you to use it.

Another Easter Island Solution

This is a form, by the way, of my proposed "Easter Island solution" to global warming:

You're a villager on Easter Island. People are cutting down trees right and left, and many are getting worried. At some point, the number of worried villagers reaches critical mass, and they go as a group to the island chief and say, "Look, we have to stop cutting trees, like now."

The chief, who's also CEO of a wood products company, checks his bottom line and orders the cutting to continue.

Do the villagers walk away? Or do they depose the chief?

There's always a choice ...

Cities, town, villages — and individual people — can simply act on their own and do it. In this case, ignoring the chief deposes the chief. It's a form of secession. And there is always a choice.

For more information, see here. For the underlying technology, the use of microbial fuel cells, see here.

GP
 

Obama's Clean Power Plan: "So Weak As to Be Potentially Destructive"

Do you trust your climate future to the heart of a CEO? (source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

There's plenty of political news these days, and it's being well covered in these pages. (My own crystal ball gazing piece is still a question without an answer — is something hidden going on with Democratic "insiders" that will soon change the balance of power in the presidential race? The ripples are certainly there. Plus, I'll have comment on that rumored Biden-Warren rapprochement in a bit.)

So let's turn to climate, the one issue that ought to be front and center, since in a decade or less it's going to be the only conversation anyone on the planet is having. (If you're a reader who circles the circles of influence, and you think this stuff matters, you may want to be paying attention. We're not talking theory when we talk climate; this will get very real — California real — very fast. Climate collapse is not a linear process.)

Why Obama's "Clean Power" Plan Is Dangerous

I've long suspected that the "Clean Power" plan, which in my view is suspiciously named after the methane industry's self-branding — "Natural Gas, America's Clean Energy" — is in fact a methane industry enrichment proposal. Even the EPA seems to be in on the branding.

It's not that the Obama plan does nothing; it's that it does the least it can do while appearing to be more than it is. Which makes it, according to Brad Johnson writing at Jacobin, "potentially destructive." I'll have my own explanation of why Obama's plan is destructive below. Johnson and I — and climate scientist James Hansen — are in complete agreement.

Johnson opens by writing about the plan's virtue (singular):

The information necessary to understand the rule is impressively buried on the EPA website amid “fact sheets” that list out-of-context factoids and fail to cite references from the one-hundred-plus-page technical documents or ZIP files of modeling runs. The structure of the plan is complex (for example, states can choose to comply with “rate-based” pollution-intensity targets or “mass-based” total-pollution targets) and carefully designed to satisfy a wide range of stakeholders.

With sufficient inspection, the plan’s impact on climate pollution — its entire purpose — emerges: the rule locks in the rate of coal-plant retirement that has been ongoing since 2008, and that’s about it:

Under both the rate-based and mass-based approaches, the projected rate of change in coal-fired generation is consistent with recent historical declines in coal-fired generation. Additionally, under both of these approaches, the trends for all other types will remain consistent with what their trends would be in the absence of this rule.

Now, that’s a pretty good accomplishment in political terms. The administration is seizing on the ascendant power of the natural-gas industry to codify an existing economic trend at the expense of the presently weak coal industry. Coal-plant pollution has been protected from air-pollution regulation for generations; some of the plants in operation today were built during the Great Depression. These plants — immensely profitable for their owners — are not only climate killers, but destroyers of the lives of anyone who lives downwind of their poisonous effluvia.

The "rule locks in the rate of coal-plant retirement that has been ongoing since 2008, and that’s about it."

So the plan is an attempted coal-killer, though not a very aggressive one. After all, locking in the current rate of coal plant retirement is not the same as accelerating that rate. But it's a lot better than letting coal experience a "market"-based comeback if or when the price of alternative fuels rise.

And note the downside of this plan. Johnson (my emphasis):

From the perspective of actual reality, however, the proposed rule is so weak as to be potentially destructive. It is built around the premise that the United States will extend its commitment to fracked gas for decades to come, even as the climate targets Obama personally signed onto can only be met if the dismantling of all fossil-fuel infrastructure begins immediately.

Thus the contradiction built into the plan, and the danger. Obama's own climate targets can be met only if all fossil-fuel infrastructure is dismantled, starting immediately. Remember, no investor in methane (natural gas) infrastructure expects it to be dismantled. Not one.

Physics Bats Last

In other words, climate change isn't something that can be negotiated. To paraphrase Bill McKibben, Physics bats last. McKibben:

President Obama is visiting Alaska this week — a territory changing as rapidly as any on earth thanks to global warming. He’s talking constantly about the danger that climate change poses to the planet (a welcome development given that he managed to go through virtually the entire 2012 election without even mentioning it). And everything he’s saying is right: we are a nation, and a planet, beset by fire, flood, drought. It’s the hottest year in earth’s recorded history. July was the hottest month ever measured on planet earth.

But of course the alarm he’s sounding is muffled by the fact that earlier this year he gave Shell Oil a permit to go drill in the Arctic, potentially opening up a giant new pool of oil.

It’s as if the health teacher giving the anti-smoking talk to junior-high assembly had a Marlboro dangling from her lip.

To most of us this seems like a contradiction. ...

[David] Balton [the State Department’s diplomat for ocean issues ]— and Obama, and almost everyone else in power — makes the same simple-but-deadly category mistake. They think the relevant negotiation is between the people who want to drill and the people who don’t. But actually, this negotiation is between People and physics. And therefore it’s not really a negotiation.

Here's what that means...

"Stop Now" means Stop. Now.

Echoing Brad Johnson, I wrote above:

Obama's own climate targets can be met only if all fossil-fuel infrastructure is dismantled, starting immediately.

Colloquially translated, that means "Stop Now." Not, stop when David Koch and Rex Tillerson (methane-owning Exxon's CEO) find it convenient to cease being profitable. Now.

Here's the benefit of stopping and the downside of not stopping from a physics standpoint. James Hansen, in a recent peer-reviewed paper, published this diagram:

Figure 4. Decay of atmospheric CO2 perturbations.
(A) Instantaneous injection or extraction of CO2 with initial conditions at equilibrium. (B) Fossil fuel emissions terminate at the end of 2015, 2030, or 2050 and land use emissions terminate after 2015 in all three cases, i.e., thereafter there is no net deforestation. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0081648.g004 (source; click to enlarge)

It's the (B) part we're interested in, so look at the graph on the right side of the figure. This gives three "stop now" (i.e., year when "Fossil Emissions = 0") scenarios. The graph goes out to the year 2500, so first, find 2100 on the X-axis and draw an imaginary vertical line. We're not interested in time after that. The Y-axis is atmospheric CO2 concentration. We're at 400 ppm now and headed higher at an accelerating rate of 2.1 ppm per year.

We know that polar ice, both Arctic and Antarctic, is melting (again, at an accelerating rate) in our current, 400-ppm world. If we stay above 400 ppm until 2100, the planet will have stored enough heat to melt all standing ice, likely sooner than anyone expects. We know from the table in this piece that melting all glacial ice represents 80 meters of sea level rise (about 250 feet) — not something we want to happen.

The good news is that a "stop now" scenario — which in practice means "go to zero emissions in the next ten years" — lets the climate system remove that added CO2 using natural processes. Note that each "stop now" scenario has CO2 ppm declining over time.

Now the bad news — what if we stop "later"?

• Stop after 2015 — CO2 is 350 ppm in 2100
• Stop after 2030 — CO2 is still close to 400 ppm in 2100
• Stop after 2050 — CO2 is about 450 ppm in 2100

A century of emissions over 400 ppm means warming continues — not holds steady, continues — and it's basically over for us. We're now scrambling as a species in a very different and likely uncivilized world. (If you're interested in a couple of "stop slowly" scenarios, see Figure 5 of the same paper; cutting emissions by 6% per year with reforestation produces a very workable decline.)

Johnson concludes (my emphasis):

Dismantling the global fossil-fuel economy is a civilization-scale fight. Fossil-fuel industrialists have every incentive to resist democratic control to prevent their economic extinction. And that extinction is what climate policy needs to bring about, not forestall — global warming won’t stop until we stop burning fossil fuels. The Obama years have been spent in skirmishes and accommodations that have served mainly to delay the inevitable, seismic conflict between extractive capitalism and democratic society.

The modest accomplishments for climate and environmental justice in the Clean Power Plan will have little meaning unless they turn out to be the first salvos in a relentless assault on the carbon economy. In 2008, Obama envisioned that he would oversee from the White House “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

That moment has not yet come.

Nor will it under the "Clean Power" plan alone. For "that moment" to come would take something built upon the "Clean Energy" plan — for example, denying Shell's application to drill in the Arctic. Didn't happen.

If you're in any way in position to influence policy, or a friend of someone who is, take note. This is not something a compromise or "deal" will address.

GP

Good News: Energy Policy And The Innate Flaws Of Conservatism

Yesterday Gaius did a post about the rate of ice collapse in Antarctica. In light of that piece, I'd like to introduce you to an uncharacteristically good news post at Vice's Motherboard by Nafeez Ahmed, How Solar Power Could Slay The Fossil Fuel Empire By 2030. Please read it in the context of what Matt Cartwright (D-PA) is doing in Congress to combat the dangers of the fracking industry and what freshman Ted Lieu (D-CA) says his top priority is in Congress: "I am going to wake up every day thinking about how we can mitigate climate change, because if we don't solve the problem, it will eventually kill us."

Ahmed begins with a premise from Clean Disrution of Energy and Transportation, a new book by Tony Seba, a lecturer in business entrepreneurship, disruption and clean energy at Stanford University and a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur: "In just 15 years, the world as we know it will have transformed forever. The  age of oil, gas, coal and nuclear will be over. A new age of clean power and smarter cars will fundamentally, totally, and permanently disrupt the existing fossil fuel-dependent industrial infrastructure in a way that even the most starry-eyed proponents of ‘green energy’ could never have imagined... By his forecast, between 2017 and 2018, a mass migration from gasoline or diesel cars will begin, rapidly picking up steam and culminating in a market entirely dominated by electric vehicles (EV) by 2030." I'll take it! 

Not only will our cars be electric, Seba predicts, but rapid developments in self-driving technologies will mean that future EVs will also be autonomous. The game-change is happening because of revolutionary cost-reductions in information technology, and because EVs are 90 percent cheaper to fuel and maintain than gasoline cars.

The main obstacle to the mass-market availability of EVs is the battery cost, which is around $500 per kilowatt hour (kWh). But this is pitched to fall dramatically in the next decade. By 2017, it could reach $350 kWh-- which is the battery price-point where an electric car becomes cost-competitive with its gasoline equivalent.

Seba estimates that by 2020, battery costs will fall to $200 kWh, and by 2024-25 to $100 kWh. At this point, the efficiency of a gasoline car would be irrelevant, as EVs would simply be far cheaper. By 2030, he predicts, “gasoline cars will be the 21st century equivalent of horse carriages.”

It took only 13 years for societies to transition from complete reliance on horse-drawn carriages to roads teeming with primitive automobiles, Seba told his audience.

Lest one imagine Seba is dreaming, in its new quarterly report, the leading global investment firm Baron Funds concurs: “We believe that BMW will likely phase out internal combustion engines within 10 years.” (Investors at rival bank Morgan Stanley are making a similar bet, and are financing Tesla.)

Two days after his JP Morgan lecture, Seba was addressing the 2014 Global Leaders’ Forum in south Korea, sponsored by Korean government ministries for science and technology, where he elaborated on the prospects of an energy revolution. Within just 15 years, he said, solar and wind power will provide 100 percent of energy in competitive markets, with no need for government subsidies.

Over the last year Seba has even been invited to share his vision with oil and gas executives in the US and Europe. “Essentially, I’m telling them you’re out of business in less than 15 years,” Seba said.

For Seba, there is a simple reason that the economics of solar and wind are superior to the extractive industries. Extraction economics is about decreasing returns. As reserves deplete and production shifts to more expensive unconventional sources, costs of extraction rise. Oil prices may have dropped dramatically due to the OPEC supply glut, but costs of production remain high. Since 2000, the oil industry's investments have risen threefold by 180 percent, translating into a global oil supply increase of just 14 percent.

In contrast, the clean disruption is about increasing returns and decreasing costs. Seba, who dismisses biomass, biofuels and hydro-electric as uneconomical, points out that with every doubling of solar infrastructure, the production costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels fall by 22 percent. “The higher the demand for solar PV, the lower the cost of solar for everyone, everywhere,” said Seba. “All this enables more growth in the solar marketplace, which, because of the solar learning curve, further pushes down costs.”

Globally installed capacity of solar PV has grown from 1.4 GW in the year 2000 to 141 GW at the end of 2013: a compound annual growth rate of 43 percent. In the United States, new solar capacity has grown from 435 megawatts (MW) in 2009 to 4,751 MW in just four years: an even higher rate of 82 percent.

Meanwhile, solar panel costs are now 154 times cheaper than they were in 1970, dropping from $100 per watt to 65 cents per watt.

What we are seeing are exponential improvements in the efficiency of solar, the cost of solar, and the installation of solar. “Put these numbers together and you find that solar has improved its cost basis by 5,355 times relative to oil since 1970,” Seba said. “Traditional sources of energy can’t compete with this.”

...[I]ncreasing efficiencies and plummeting costs of lithium ion (li-on) batteries are already making night-time residential storage of PV and wind power cost-effective. Every year, li-ion battery costs drop by 14-16 percent. By 2020, experts believe that li-on will cost around $200-250 per kilowatt per hour (kWh) in which case, according to Seba: “A user could, for about $15.30 per month, have eight hours of storage to shift solar generation from day to evening, not pay for peak prices, and participate in demand-response programs.”

At the current rate of growth, Seba’s projections show, globally installed solar capacity will reach 56.7 terrawatts (TW) in the next 15 years: equivalent to 18.9 TW of conventional baseload power. That would be enough to power the world, and then some—projected world energy demand at that time would be 16.9 TW.

Paul Gilding, who has spent the last 20 years advising global corporations like Ford, DuPont, BHP Billiton, among many others on sustainable business strategy, agrees that the trends Seba highlights imply “a disruptive transformational system change” that outpaces the “assumptions built on the old world view of centralised generation.” Author of The Great Disruption, Gilding said that “it’s the systemic interactions of software, new players, disruptive business models and technology that accelerates the shift,” and which “will be self reinforcing”-- not just cheap prices.

...While solar  has already reached ‘grid parity’, becoming as cheap or cheaper than utility rates in many markets, within five years Seba anticipates the arrival of what he calls ‘God Parity’: when onsite rooftop solar generation is cheaper than transmission costs. Then, even if fossil fuel plants generated at zero costs (an impossibility), they could never compete with onsite solar. So after 2020, the conventional energy industry will start going bankrupt.

The costs of wind, which complements solar at night and in winter, is also plummeting and will beat every other energy source, except solar, in the same time-frame, according to his analysis.

“We are on the cusp of the largest disruption of industry and society since the first industrial revolution. Large, centralized, top-down, supplier-centric energy is on its way out. It is being replaced by modular, distributed, bottom-up, open, knowledge-based, consumer-centric energy,” said Seba. “The transition has already started and the disruption will be swift. Conventional energy sources are already obsolete or soon to be obsolete.”

Conservatives will continue fighting against this scenario, as they have fought against every single step forward since the beginning of time. That's how they get their name "conservatives." And ultimately they always lose. Now it's just a matter of how much damage they will cause the rest of us-- and if they cause so much damage that they finally make the planet uninhabitable.

The Environment Has Many Enemies In Congress-- And Fred Upton Is The Most Dangerous Of All

There may be more than one reason so many voters in southwest Michigan want this to be Fred Upton's last term. First elected in 1986 (when Ronald Reagan was president), there's a general feeling that Upton's been in Congress too long and that he's now "one of them," not "one of us." He's become a creature of the Beltway and he pushes policies for K Street lobbyists and big special interests rather than for working families back in Kalamazoo, Portage, Niles, Benton Harbor/St. Joseph or Paw Paw. Or maybe it's because 69% of MI-06 residents say they opposed shutting down the government in order to stop Obamacare, something Upton voted for. People in southwest Michigan know he doesn't give a damn what they think… he's all about DC now and the only politics he's come to pay attention to are the politics inside the GOP House caucus.

Or maybe it's because Upton's role as one of the single most pollution-enabling politicians in the entire world has finally started sinking in. Filthy air, filthy water, Climate Change and global warming, all have Upton's paw prints all over them. The non-partisan, non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council-- which boasts 1.4 million members-- made yesterday Fred Upton Day. Their political Action Fund is in the midst of exposing the worst Members of Congress. "For some members of Congress casting dirty votes and accepting campaign contributions from polluters is a normal day in Washington," they explained last month. "But, this August, as members return home to face voters, the NRDC Action Fund will expose some of them for exactly who they are: dirty deniers. Beginning August 4, the NRDC Action Fund will name “Daily Dirty Deniers” each weekday, featuring members (#DailyDenier$) who allow polluters to foul our air by casting dirty votes and accepting dirty money."

The NRDC Action Fund will highlight 20 total members during the August recess which leads into the unofficial kickoff to election season. The “Daily Dirty Denier$” campaign is focused on bringing attention to these member Congress while they are home and trying to convince voters they have their best interests in mind. We will expose:

House members who have now voted almost 200 times in just this Congress to weaken or eliminate environmental protections;

• How outside polluter money is being used to support #DirtyDenier$;
• Why polluters lost in 2012 and why they will lose again in 2014; and
• Support for climate action specifically among the rising American electorate.

We'll get to Upton in a minute. These are the other dirty crooks they've exposed so far: Ed Whitfield (R-KY), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Henry Cuella (Blue Dog-TX), Steve Daines (R-MT), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Tom Latham (R-IA), Rob Portman (R-OH), Mike Coffman (R-CO), John Boozman (R-AR), John Kline (R-MN), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Scott Brown (R-MA), John Shimkus (R-IL), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Tim Walberg (R-MI), and, of course, Miss McConnell (R-KY).

Today’s Dirty Denier$ is Rep. Fred Upton, a Republican from Michigan and Chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Upton has used his leadership position to try to move the nation backward, and his record on clean air and climate change keeps getting worse.

Upton has been all over the map on the facts about climate change. In 2011, he said he didn’t believe humans are contributing to global climate change. Since then, he’s been mostly silent on that basic issue, but he’s been loud in his opposition to doing anything about climate. He has used extreme rhetoric to characterize the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan, calling it “an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs” and a “train wreck.”

And consider that one of the first bills that Upton sponsored upon assuming the chairmanship of the committee would have permanently blocked EPA from doing anything at all to address carbon pollution. Moreover, the bill would have increased America’s dependence on oil by undermining efficiency standards for motor vehicles, and cost consumers $58 billion. Upton has also given his blessing to multiple bills to undo various aspects of the Clean Air Act.

The dirty fuel interests that have given nearly $2 million in campaign contributions to Upton over the course of his career are no doubt pleased with his record. However, the same can’t be said for his constituents back home. According to recent polling from the NRDC Action Fund in key states including Michigan, overwhelming majorities of voters in that group of states support strong action to stop dangerous carbon pollution. This includes 53% of Republicans. Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder has said, “People may not agree about why climate change is happening, but it is certainly affecting Michigan.”

Michigan has a lot to gain from a clean energy policy. In 2013 alone, Michigan announced more than 1700 jobs in the renewable energy sector, placing it 12th in the country for new job creation. And in a signal that better days are ahead for both the economy and the environment, 380 of those jobs were in clean vehicle manufacturing.

Our advice: It’s time for Congressman Upton to once again reinvent himself. It’s time to stop being a Dirty Denier$ and start being a clean energy champion for his state.

Obviously there's no chance whatsoever that Upton-- an hereditary multimillionaire, scion of the job-exporting Whirlpool fortune-- will be taking that advice to heart. So our advice is to replace him with progressive Democrat Paul Clements.

After the statement from the Natural Resources Defense Council we reached Clements in Kalamazoo and he told us that "when the Los Angeles Times singled Congressman Upton out as the #1 enemy of Planet Earth, they weren't exaggerating. He has used his role in Congress to raise millions from special interests, over $644,000 from the oil and gas industry alone, and advocated for those that fund his campaigns, not his constituents. He has led the extreme fight against the EPA, stopped any progress on Climate Change, and fought against creating the sustainable hi-tech jobs that will employ thousands in Michigan. He's voted against requiring companies to report dangerous chemicals found in our drinking water and has taken over $20,000 dollars from a company that has one of America’s most toxic waste sites here on the Kalamazoo River, which puts our Great Lakes in danger. The technology and the incentives are there to protect our planet and create the jobs of the future in the Midwest, but we can't do it with backwards, bought and paid for, members like Congressman Upton in Congress."

Blue America wants to remind you that you can help Paul Clements replace Fred Upton here.

Solar Energy In L.A.-- And Japan

Monday night I was at the Hammer Museum for a screening of Shaun Kadlec's and Deb Tullmann's fantastic new film, Born This Way, a documentary on the gay and lesbian underground in Cameroon. Afterwards I ran into Mayor-elect Eric Garcetti. Eric's an old friend and one of the smartest politicians I've ever met. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and he studied Urban Planning at Columbia. I doubt L.A. has ever elected anyone as qualified to be mayor in its entire history. I hadn't talked to Eric since he beat out the DWP shill he ran against in the runoff. I've been dying to talk with him about how the DWP systematically rips off solar energy users in L.A.-- but I restrained myself... for now.

The DWP is going to be one of many tough problems Eric is going to face as mayor. I know he already knows what crooks they are and I figured I don't have anything substantive add anyway. My home solar system was designed to eliminate my electric bill and it did but after nearly a year it started creeping back up again and is now at around 50% of it was before I covered my roof in solar panels, I can never get a straight answer out of the DWP crooks. Lucky for Cambridge, Massachusetts they have MIT on hand to make sure ratepayers there don't get the DWP treatment. They've developed a new tool to assess a city's solar power potential. “In this project we developed a new simulation-based technique to reliably predict the annual electricity yield from an arbitrarily oriented and obstructed photovoltaic (PV) array located anywhere on the planet.”

SA+P researchers have developed a new interactive map to show a city’s property owners how much electricity can be produced on their rooftops from solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, how the financial investment will pay off and how much pollution will be reduced.

The new tool shows that if photovoltaic panels were installed on all good and excellent locations in MIT’s hometown of Cambridge, the city could generate about a third of its electricity needs via PV for about $2.8 billion. The technology has been found to predict electricity yield to within 4 – 10% of actual measured results.

So far the biggest solar power generation stars have been Germany and China. But now Japan, transitioning away from nuclear, has started making a dent-- a big one. Before Fukushima only 1% of Japan's energy needs came from solar. By next year Japan will be the world's second largest solar market after China.

According to a report by energy analyst IHS on Japan's energy mix, Japan's solar installations jumped by "a stunning 270% (in gigawatts) in the first quarter of 2013." That means by the end of 2013 there will be enough new solar panels equal to the capacity of seven nuclear reactors. Such massive growth will allow Japan to surpass Germany and become the world's largest photovoltaics (PV) market in terms of revenue this year.

"Japan is forecast to install $20 billion worth of PV systems in 2013, up 82% from $11 billion in 2012," IHS said. "In contrast, the global market is set for tepid 4% growth. The strong revenue performance for Japan this year is partly driven by the high solar prices in the country." Germany still leads with the total number of units and capacity, however, with its 32,192 megawatts. Japan is now closer to the U.S.'s 8,069 megawatts at 7,429 megawatts, according to London-based BNEF.

Solar energy in Japan has come to dominate thanks to government incentives now offered to the producers of renewables and rules which require public power utilities to buy alternative power at above-market rates. A deal forged by the last government desperate to wean Japan from its addiction to oil and nuclear power led to the implementation of a very generous feed-in tariff (FIT) for renewable power generators.

Starting at 42 yen per kilowatt hour last July and now reduced in April to 37.8 yen (39 cents) the FIT is more than twice those of Chinese and German offerings.

...The provenance of the hardware has also seen a sea change with domestic panels now outselling cheap imports. Japan has a strong solar panel manufacturing industry and companies like Sharp, Kyocera, Sanyo, and Mitsubishi Electric would benefit from the new energy polices and emphasis on solar power, according to IHS.

Those same failing companies are now banking on a technological edge to push the quality up of made-in-Japan solar panels while keeping prices down. Doing so could make solar one the few bright points of the Japanese electronics industry. Sharp recently unveiled new solar panels that it claims not only use just 1% of the expensive silicon used in conventional models but are thin enough and clear enough to replace windows.

Others are focusing on efficiency. To make solar electricity affordable on a large scale, researchers have long been trying to develop a low-cost solar cell, which is both highly efficient and easy to manufacture with high output-- silicon-based solar cells typically have an efficiency of around 21% for converting sunlight into electricity.

According to Panasonic its prototype solar cell has achieved the world's highest conversion efficiency at 24.7%, verified by tests performed at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

"How long the boom in solar can last in Japan is hard to tell, but as land runs out, there will be slowdown," says Hoshi. "Of course there are still the rooftops to exploit as mobile carrier Softbank is doing. It's renting rooftops for solar-- a very smart and interesting business model. Perhaps, unlike previous attempts to deregulate Japan's electric utility industry, this should be a success."

Meanwhile, The U.S. generated 730 million kilowatt hours of solar electricity in the first two months of 2013-- so not the sunniest months anywhere-- 227% more than the same period in 2012, according to new EIA data. That's already 10% of the total amount generated for all of 2012.

There's A Hydrogen Powered Car In Your Future-- If You Live Long Enough

The History Channel has been ultra-parsimonious with online clips from their series The Men Who Built America and there are so many bit and pieces I wish I could share here-- like how Rockefeller, Carnegie and J.P. Morgan sat down in 1896 and decided populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan was too dangerous to their financial empires and they would have to underwrite stealing the election for corporate whore William McKinley. Another few scenes I have searched and searched for on YouTube-- in vain-- show how ruthless Oil Baron John D. Rockefeller, when confronted with the rise of a new energy source-- electricity-- tried every trick in the book to discredit it, undermine it, and destroy the industry in its crib.

I drive a 2009 Toyota Prius. I love it for the fuel efficiency-- I fill up once a month-- and because it's quiet and does everything I want a car to do. But I always feel kind of funny driving a car that isn't made in America. Lee Rogers, the guy who ran against Buck McKeon last year, has been trying to talk me into getting a Chevy Volt, a fully-electric car, which is what he drives. He even did a guest post about the Volt for us last April. And my friend Daisy-- plus a neighbor down the street who has one-- have been trying to persuade me that the way to go is the new Tesla sedan. It does zero to sixty as fast as a BMW M5... but its effective range is 265 miles per gallon.

The financial (and other) incentives in states like California make it a no-brainer to buy an electric car and I'm on the verge of trading in the Prius and picking between the Volt and the Tesla. The question raised yesterday by Reuters got my attention though. They're asking if electric cars are heading towards another dead end. Actually, the article isn't asking; it's asserting. They claim hydogen-powered cars will overtake electric cars. No one is mentioning John D. Rockefeller but the conventional wisdom is that "consumers continue to show little interest in electric vehicles, which dominated U.S. streets in the first decade of the 20th century before being displaced by gasoline-powered cars... [due to] high cost, short driving range and lack of charging stations."

The public's lack of appetite for battery-powered cars persuaded the Obama administration last week to back away from its aggressive goal to put 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015.

The tepid response to EVs also pushed Nissan's high-profile chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, perhaps the industry's most outspoken proponent of battery cars, to announce in December a major strategic shift toward more mainstream gasoline-electric hybrids, which overcome many of the shortcomings of pure EVs.

The move was widely seen as a tacit acknowledgement by Ghosn that his all-or-nothing, multibillion-dollar bet on EVs is falling far short of his ambition to sell hundreds of thousands of battery-powered Nissan Leafs.

Instead, Nissan plans to follow rival Toyota Motor Co, the world's largest purveyor of hybrids, which now is poised to leapfrog pure EVs altogether to pursue what might be the next big green-tech breakthrough: pollution- and petroleum-free fuel-cell cars that convert hydrogen to electricity.

Vice Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada, the "father of the Prius" who helped put hybrids on the map, said he believes fuel-cell vehicles hold far more promise than battery electric cars. "Because of its shortcomings-- driving range, cost and recharging time-- the electric vehicle is not a viable replacement for most conventional cars," said Uchiyamada. "We need something entirely new."

In the race to identify the Next Big Thing in automotive technology, the stakes are enormous.

For example, Nissan, with French partner Renault, has committed $5 billion for development and manufacture of EVs and batteries-- a risky bet that could take years to pay off-- while Toyota has spent an estimated $10 billion or more over the past 16 years to develop, build and market an ever-expanding range of hybrids, led by the popular and now profitable Prius.

While neither Nissan nor Toyota is likely to pull the plug on electric cars, it is clear from their recent moves that both companies are looking beyond EVs to meet future transportation needs.

Both automakers began advanced green-car engineering programs in the mid-1990s, with Toyota introducing the first-generation Prius hybrid and Nissan unveiling the battery-powered Altra in late 1997.

Toyota brought the Prius to the United States in 2000, but it took Nissan another 10 years to follow the low-volume Altra and other modest electric-car projects such as the Hypermini with the handsomely funded 2010 launch of the Leaf.

With Uchiyamada overseeing continuous refinement of the Prius, Toyota took a 10-year lead in the green-car derby. Along the way, though, Toyota effectively subsidized billions of dollars in development, manufacturing and marketing costs through the first two generations of the Prius, according to former Toyota executives.

While it took the Toyota hybrid six years to catch fire with U.S. consumers, the latest sales data points to the widening chasm between the two companies' radically different approaches to electrification.

In the past year, Toyota has broadened its hybrid portfolio to 12 models, including four versions of the Prius, now in its third generation. Toyota in 2012 sold 327,413 hybrids in the United States and 1.2 million globally. Worldwide sales of its hybrids now approach 5 million.

The Prius accounts for more than half of those sales, making it the most successful green car in history and one of the few exceptions to the public's yawning indifference to green vehicles and technology. The Leaf, on the other hand, has been the rule rather than the exception.

Nissan unveiled the Leaf two years ago and to date has sold just under 50,000 worldwide. It sold 9,819 last year in the United States, well under its target of 20,000.

As part of a year-end sales push, Nissan slapped incentives of almost $6,000 on the Leaf, and in January slashed the starting price by more than $6,000, to $29,650. Some Nissan dealers in Los Angeles are advertising Leaf lease rates as low as $199 a month with $1,999 down, according to industry research firm TrueCar.

"When new technologies are launched, sales do not grow as quickly as everyone expects," said Mitsuhiko Yamashita, Nissan executive vice president and head of research and development. But "with EV technologies continuously improving and with prices falling, there is a possibility that sales could explode."

That isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

Nissan may be mildly encouraged that the Leaf is the best-selling pure EV in the United States. But total EV sales last year were only 14,687, representing 0.1 percent of total U.S. sales of 14.5 million. In comparison, hybrid sales in 2012 climbed to 473,083, or roughly 3.3 percent of the market. And of every three hybrids sold last year in the United States, two were a Toyota or a Lexus.

Fueled by government subsidies and tax incentives, hybrid sales in Japan have rocketed to 40 percent of the industry total, with the Prius a top seller. Hybrids, however, have been far less popular with consumers in such major markets as Europe and China.

The outlook for pure electric vehicles is even more cloudy.

At the moment, Ghosn's heady 2009 prediction that electric vehicles would capture 10 percent of the global market by 2020-- 6 million battery-powered cars a year or more-- doesn't seem remotely within reach.

Yet the gradual tightening of global fuel-efficiency standards from 2020 on is forcing automakers to assess their options, including the application of advanced technology.

Says Nissan's Yamashita: "It is not possible to meet (future) regulations unless vehicles are electrified."

The harsh reality of the market and the public's underwhelming demand for EVs, however, illuminate Nissan's recent decision to shift more of its green-tech investment into hybrids.

In December the company announced it plans to introduce 15 new hybrids globally by early 2017.

At the time, Ghosn said, "We are going to continue to heavily promote electric cars, but at the same time, we are business people, we are pragmatic people. We will also develop and deliver hybrids because there are markets and consumers that require hybrids."

Last September, Toyota publicly walked away from plans to build several thousand electric cars, scaling back projected volume to a mere 100 battery-powered minicars.

Both Japanese automakers, meanwhile, have forged new alliances to develop hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars, Toyota with BMW and, in a deal announced last week, Nissan with Daimler AG and Ford Motor Co.

In the meantime, despite massive investments in battery technology and vehicles, even the most ardent EV adherents seem a bit ambivalent about the future of battery cars.

"We don't regret it yet," says Nissan's Yamashita of the company's multibillion-dollar gamble on EVs. "We might in a few years. No, we probably won't."

Meanwhile, a report out of the U.K. predicts that they expect to have 1.6 million hydrogen-powered cars on British roads by 2030. Daimler, Ford and Nissan are all working to develop a common fuel cell system that could lead to affordable fuel cell cars by 2017. Car companies have been working on this though, for 60 years, before oil man George W. Bush screwed the whole innovation thing up, causing U.S. automakers to cede their early lead in hybrids to the great financial benefit to Toyota.

In a hydrogen fuel cell car, hydrogen gets drawn through a catalytic membrane: an electron gets stripped from the hydrogen to power the car. The waste product-- water-- goes out the tailpipe. The crucial component is a thin membrane laced with expensive elements that helps conduct the chemical reaction. The fuel cell stack, in theory, can weigh less than batteries. Filling fuel cell cars-- assuming a refueling station is nearby-- takes minutes, not the hours needed for a typical EV.

Like all electrics, fuel cells cars are also efficient. Internal combustion engines are often 15 percent efficient. That heat coming off your car engine? It’s waste heat, fuel you bought but didn’t use productively. Fuel cells can be 50 percent plus efficient.

When you think of all of those factors, you ultimately come to the conclusion that fuel cells are still in play because, well, it’s a cool idea. Harnessing energy through chemical reaction has been a dream since Sir William Grove invented the first fuel cell in 1839. (Note: some automakers like BMW have developed hydrogen cars that run on combustion, but we’re talking about hydrogen fuel cells here.) Fuel cells are arguably akin to nuclear power and geothermal. They really represent a whole new way of harvesting energy. With combustion, we’re really burning plant matter that baked for eons.

Are there challenges? You bet. Chemical companies today create hydrogen by cracking methane, a process that results in a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases. Hydrogen is a notoriously challenging gas to deliver down pipelines. Catalytic membranes get fouled and fail.

“The present hydrogen fuel cells are losers… Losers,” Nobel Laureate Burton Richter told me in 2009. “They have to go back to the R&D lab.”

The cost of hydrogen fuel cell cars also remains astronomical. I drove a GM prototype in L.A. once. I asked how much it cost while driving down Sunset Boulevard. “About a million,” the GM spokesperson said.

But how do they drive? Easily the best car I have ever driven was an F-Cell Mercedes.

The road is hard, but fuel cells represent one of the few avenues where innovation can open the door to astounding changes. And at a minimum, it gives engineers something to shoot for.

OK, now I better pick between the Tesla and the Volt.

Ask David McKinley (R-WV) Who's Going To Clean Up The Poop

Unless you're a reader of the Wheeling News-Register you probably missed the report of multimillionaire West Virginia Congressman David McKinley addressing the Wheeling Rotary Club last week. "The federal Environmental Protection Agency is 'one of the biggest threats to our society,' McKinley told his fellow Rotarians on Tuesday." David McKinley, a freshman congressman who's already taken in $3,603,130 and whose biggest source of funding are the polluters who would give anything to kill the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA, keep in mind, doesn't just hug trees; they're charged with keeping our drinking water clean and the air with breath safe, goals McKinley's funders find reprehensible-- since it costs them money to not pollute the air and water and devastate the planet in pursuit of their own private fortunes. And although he's just a freshman, notice who the biggest recipient in Congress of legalistic bribes from the mining interests is. Yes, David McKinley, took in $290,478, even more than Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor. So, sure, to McKinley is a big threat-- to his career.

His opponent this year is Sue Thorn, a grassroots activist who consistently stands up for ordinary working families-- especially mining families-- and not for the big money mine owners. As we've expained before, Steve Israel and the DCCC aren't contesting West Virginia's first CD and is doing nothing at all to help Sue-- after spending millions to elect an especially rabid reactionary, state Senator Mike Oliverio in 2008. Oliverio, whose corruption can be smelled from one end of the state to the other, is the ideal Steve Israel Democratic candidate. He has a long record of shilling for Big Business and Wall Street banksters and prides himself on being virulently anti-Choice and hysterically antigay. He was co-chair of the West Virginia chapter of ALEC and, for some reason Bush publicly thanked him for helping get Sammy Alito confirmed to the Supreme Court. And if you still don't get the point, in 2010 2010, the state GOP chair, Doug McKinney, referred to Oliverio's over-the-edge conservatism by saying, "Sen. Oliverio has always been a conservative guy. He votes with the Republicans on committees. We've joked for years he needs to come over to the party who thinks like he does." Israel's plan is to let McKinley win again this year and then run Oliverio in 2014 (when Obama's name isn't on the ballot). By the way, Nancy Pelosi claims she selected Israel to run the DCCC because of his reptilian nature.

Of course McKinley isn't the only Member of Congress trying to kill the EPA. Almost no Republicans back it and more than a few Blue Dogs and New Dems agree with them. Few people think of Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander as an extremist, but when it comes to environmental safety regulation he is. As Joshua Holland pointed out in his book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, was moved by a very modest climate change proposal to warn that the law, if enacted, would "deliberately kill jobs and make Americans poorer." And, no, that wasn't David McKinley or Michele Bachmann or Jim Inhofe or Louie Gohmert. It was what passes for a mainstream conservative in 2012.

Since global warming became a front-burner issue, conservatives have taken the old argument that environmental protections hurt the economy to dizzying new heights. According to some of the more feverish voices within the movement, it’s not just that protecting the environment comes with painful “unintended consequences.” They argue that the entire point of environmentalism-- and the raison d’être of environmentalists-- is to bring capitalism to its knees.

No, really. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who called the science of global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” put it best when he argued that “the real purpose” of the Kyoto Climate Accord was not to curb carbon emissions but to “harm Americans, especially the poor and minorities, causing higher energy prices, reduced economic growth, and fewer jobs.” Longtime Alaska representative Don Young went a step further. “Environmentalists,” he told Alaska Public Radio, “are a socialist group of individuals... I’m proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.”

Yet it was Jeffrey Kuhner, an entertainingly unhinged columnist for the right-wing Washington Times, who best spelled out this fascinating conspiracy theory in a column titled A Convenient Lie. “Radical environmentalists,” he wrote, “are forging a new socialist post-democracy that is slowly undermining representative government.” He continued, "The myth of global warming along with the Environmental Protection Agency have become the hammer and sickle of eco-Marxism-- the new green-red alliance that seeks to destroy capitalism and the sovereign nation-state.”

Again, this dark conspiracism is simply the logical extension of the long standing conservative argument that environmental regulations impose crushing costs on businesses.

Nobody disagrees that protecting the environment comes at a cost to firms’ bottom lines. To the degree that they can, these businesses pass some of those costs on to consumers. But after that, anything that hurts a company’s profit margins can certainly impact the growth of a business and limit new hires.

Yet that entire narrative asks you to look at only one side of the ledger. It’s a big lie of omission. What they don’t tell you is that environmental regulations are necessary for the free market to function. Without them, polluters can impose massive costs on the rest of society in order to derive a tidy profit for themselves. Robust environmental protections fix a significant “market failure,” and even the most devout worshippers of Randian economics acknowledge that addressing market distortions is an appropriate role for the government. For many years, this has been the central progressive argument: that you have to count the external costs of underregulation as a kind of hidden tax that we all end up paying. Strong environmental protections force polluters themselves to absorb the costs of whatever damage they cause. It’s really the “free market” way.

In recent years, progressives have also turned the environment versus jobs narrative on its head. Transitioning to a new, more sustainable, green economy, they argue, will not only protect the delicate rose of capitalism for future generations, it’ll represent a new source of economic growth in the twenty-first century, creating millions of high-paying green jobs for industrious Americans.

I have a puppy named Daisy. She poops, and I clean up after her. It’s the right thing to do. She’s my puppy, I feed her, I enjoy her company, and if I don’t pick up her leavings, then either someone else has to do it or my neighbors will end up paying a price. It would be great to live in a society where everyone routinely did the right thing, but that’s not realistic. Picking up after one’s dog is pretty gross, and some people simply don’t want to do it. So my city, like most, mandates it, and if I don’t do the right thing, then I risk a penalty, a fine.

At the heart of environmental economics is a basic question: what happens with the poop of our industrialized society? Will the dog owners of corporate America clean it up on their own dime or will the rest of us be forced to make a choice between hiring someone to pick up the crap or stepping in it when we sally forth? In economic terms, if they don’t clean up after themselves, we as a society pay an externalized cost. It’s a market failure because we’re not part of the decision-making process. We can’t make a rational cost-benefit analysis weighing the burden of regulation against the pollution costs of an industrial activity. And because we-- rather than the firms that pollute-- bear much of the costs for the damage they do, the polluters themselves don’t weigh the costs and benefits accurately either.

The World Bank notes, “The effects of pollution can generally be classified into four major categories: health impacts, direct and indirect effects on productivity, effects on the ecosystem, and aesthetic effects.” The World Bank authors continued, "For example, a factory may emit soot that dirties surrounding buildings, increasing maintenance costs. The higher maintenance costs are a direct result of the factory’s use of a resource-- air-- that from the plant’s point of view is free but that has a cost to society."

The World Bank, which was not populated by dirty socialists when I last checked, concluded with a commonsense statement that the Corporate Right refuses to acknowledge: “Such externalities are real costs and benefits attributable to the project and should be included” in the cost-benefit analysis every time.

Progressives favor robust environmental protections not to undermine capitalism or hurt businesses, but to force firms to “internalize” those externalities. We want those regulations for the same reason that most communities require dog owners to pick up their own poop: it’s not only the neighborly thing to do, but it’s also fundamentally wrong for people to get to enjoy playing with their cute little puppies while the rest of us have to pay the street-cleaners’ overtime.

...Progressives have promoted the creation of green jobs not only to protect the environment, but also to disprove the claim that we have to sacrifice prosperity to protect our ecosystem.

The idea, broadly speaking, is to transform our carbon-based economy to one that is run on clean and sustainable power; it would include increasing our energy efficiency and cutting down on our waste. And it would require a lot of work, from manufacturing new and cleaner technologies to upgrading our electrical network with “smart grid” technology. It would create jobs, lessen our dependence on oil (domestic as well as foreign), and reduce climate-changing emissions before it’s too late. Economist Robert Pollin and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst estimated that 1.7 million net new jobs could be created in just two years with an investment of $150 billion in new green infrastructure-- less than the average cost of keeping troops in Iraq for the same amount of time. They identified six areas that are ripe for investment: retrofitting buildings, expanding mass transit and freight rail, building a smart electric grid, and investing in wind power, solar power, and next-generation biofuels. I can’t think of anyone anywhere on the political spectrum who believes these things are bad. Conservatives simply think that the private sector will get us there on its own, eventually, and it’s true that many firms are investing in new technologies for the green market.

The question is: how long would the private sector take? Today, clean and sustainable energy technologies are far more expensive than burning coal or gas and will continue to be in the immediate future. In 2008, the European Commission did a study of the costs of generating electricity using various technologies. With today’s fuel prices, the cost of a megawatt-hour is as follows: gas goes for 50–75 euros; oil costs between 95 and 125 euros, and coal is a bargain at 40–55. But biomass energy costs 80–195 euros, wind goes for between 75 and 140, hydropower costs as much as 215 euros, and solar costs between 170 and 880 euros for a megawatt-hour. (Nuclear energy is cheap, and its lobbyists have pushed it as a green energy source; the problem is they still don’t know what to do with the radioactive waste.

So an efficient green economy that frees us from our dependence on fossil fuels is a good that most of us want, but the private sector won’t be able to deliver it as soon as we’d like. It’s a classic place for the government to intervene. And governments around the world, including our own, are doing just that. Yet it’s also a race, and whichever economy leads that race will have a real advantage-- with more leading-edge technology and a large market share-- for decades to come.

Big Oil, however, with its fingers deep into congressional pockets, wants to drill, baby, drill-- and it can rely on “free market” rhetoric to make it happen. Consider a case in point: the planned Cape Wind offshore energy project miles off the coast of Cape Cod. The “wind farm,” with 130 high-tech turbines, is expected to create 1,000 jobs during the construction phase and 150 permanent new positions on Cape Cod and the surrounding islands. It will also generate 420 megawatts of power, enough to meet 75 percent of the needs of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and the surrounding islands.

It faced stiff opposition, ostensibly of the Not In My Backyard variety from residents who thought the wind turbines would be an eyesore and ruin their ocean views (the late Senator Ted Kennedy, sadly, was part of the effort to kill the project). But Forbes noted where a good chunk of the money behind the campaign was coming from. William Koch, an oil mogul and one of the most prominent conservative philanthropists in the United States, had put up $1.5 million to oppose the wind farm. Forbes noted the “irony” of his opposition: "Koch, through his Oxbow Group ($1.5 billion sales), had once made a mint off eco-friendly power plants by using laws that required power companies to buy Koch’s power for above-market rates. He sold them for $660 million in 2000. But, alas, he now says the project’s economics, requiring heavy government subsidies, don’t add up."

Subsidies, of course, are the only way that moving to clean, renewable energy in the near future does “add up.” Phillip Warburg and Susan Reid of the Conservation Law Foundation responded to the claim by stating the obvious. “Federal and state subsidies for renewable energy projects,” they wrote, “have been created for the express purpose of helping wind and other forms of clean energy compete with long-subsidized conventional fuels, such as coal and oil, as well as nuclear power.”

Oh... and John Shimkus (R-IL), the congressman who allowed Mark Foley to have his way with the pages, is even crazier than David McKinley when it comes to coal.

UPDATE: Who Is Bob Murray And Why Does He Want To Buy A West Viirginia Congressional Seat For David McKinley?

Perhaps you've heard something about a coal baron accused of pressuring his employees to vote for his pet congresscreep. The coal baron is murderer Bob Murray and his pet congresscreep is David McKinley (R-WV).

One of Congressman David McKinley's biggest backers stands accused of breaking campaign finance laws by pressuring his employees to donate. Last month, coal baron Bob Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, drew fire for forcing his miners to attend a Republican rally without pay. Now a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission charges that Murray routinely pressured his white-collar workers to give to candidates and his political action committee.

The New Republic published company fundraising memos, and staff writer Alec MacGillis says they were confirmed by sources inside Murray's mining empire.

"They were expected to give. They were expected to give to the PAC, as a deduction from their paycheck. Typically, 1 percent of their pay would go to the PAC. They were also expected to give to Mr. Murray's separate personal fundraisers."

MacGillis says his sources were afraid to reveal their names. But he says they and the memos describe relentless fundraising coercion, often including thinly veiled threats. He says his sources also told him that at least some of the money was essentially coming from the company itself, laundered through an employee bonus program.

"Their understanding that they got from their superiors was that this would be made up to them. The sense that my sources had was that the discretionary part of the bonus was to some degree dependent on their participating."

Campaign finance watchdogs in West Virginia say the charges against Murray are particularly important because of his history. Julie Archer is project manager for the West Virginia Citizen Action Group. She says Murray uses his donations to build political connections, which he in turn uses to fight enforcement of federal environmental and mine-safety laws. She alleges that Murray has threatened Mine Safety and Health Administration officials who were investigating his mines.