The Wonk Room

Obama: ‘It’s Hard To Say’ Why Critics Of Clean Energy Accuse Him Of Socialism

This afternoon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, President Barack Obama challenged the nation to explore the “new frontiers” of the “clean energy economy of tomorrow.” He praised Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for working on legislation to make our energy system “more efficient, far cleaner, and provide energy independence for America.” But Obama challenged critics “whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action,” saying the status quo “endangers our prosperity” and the “only purpose” of those who question climate science “is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary”:

The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized. But I think it’s important to understand that the closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology run counter to the much needed action that we’re engaged in. There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy — when it’s the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs. There are going to be those who cynically claim — make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary. So we’re going to have to work on those folks.

Following the speech, the Wonk Room asked President Obama why such critics accuse the president of socialism. Obama replied:

You know, it’s hard to say. Maybe if you have an answer to that, you’ll let me know.

Watch it:

Among the critics of President Obama’s clean energy agenda who say it will destroy the economy are Glenn Beck, Marc Morano, Fox News, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and even Democratic candidate for the governor of Virginia, Creigh Deeds. Beck believes the White House energy and environment adviser Carol Browner is a socialist. Morano, Inhofe’s former blogger, argued limits on global warming pollution is the “biggest threat to freedom” at the Accuracy in Media conference today. Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer calls the regulation “cap and tax.” Inhofe warns of a “global tax” from the United Nations. And Deeds is now running ads claiming the “cap and trade bill” would “hurt the people” of Virginia.

The reason Obama’s critics accuse him of socialism is because, for reasons of “interest or ideology,” they support a system of economic inequity based on an unsustainable fossil-fuel economy. The current system has reaped great rewards for the ultra-wealthy and the industrial polluters at the expense of the health and welfare of their fellow Americans. To avoid blame for their malfeasance, they must paint Obama as the villain, and his essential reform agenda as even scarier than the status quo, with language that taps into the darkest fears of the American public.

Congressional Budget Office Debunks Glenn Beck’s ‘Lies’: Clean Energy Economy Costs Only A Postage Stamp A Day »

Written by Brad Johnson and Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last night, Glenn Beck accused President Obama of “outright lies,” engaging in a “coverup” of the cost of his green economic agenda. Beck claimed that “buried” Treasury documents from March show that the cost of a cap-and-trade carbon market to regulate global warming pollution is $1,761 per household per year, despite the president’s assurance to the American public in June that “the price to the average American will be about the same as a postage stamp per day“:

I have a question. Did the President of the United States tell the people in Congress about this? Facts are stubborn. Don’t they suck? It is always the coverup that gets you. March 9. June 25. Mr. President, did you tell Congress about prior estimates? That, you know, that you knew about? Or did you just kind of keep it secret and hide it away from them and those pesky American people? I want to show you something that I said a few weeks ago. I was talking directly to the Democrats. I was telling them wake up. “Democrats in Congress, wake up! You are being played and you’re being bypassed.”

Watch it:

In reality, Beck’s figure of $1,761 per household for the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) is not actually based on secret Treasury documents, but on the confabulation of a right-wing blogger at CBSNews.com. Although the Treasury Department has called this story “flat out wrong,” conservatives and the oil industry have heavily promoted this inflated number, much in the same way they wildly overestimated the number of Tea Party activists who attended the Glenn Beck rally in Washington, D.C. last weekend.

On June 19th, the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the ACES Act — legislation crafted by Congress, not by “czars” in the White House — and determined “that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household.” Yesterday, the CBO — a Congressional research arm independent of the “spooky” executive branch — released an updated analysis that lowered its previous cost projection to “$160 per household.” In other words:

The average household would spend 44 cents per day – the price of a postage stamp.

The revised analysis also determined that the least well off Americans would receive a greater net benefit than its previous projections. “CBO estimates that households in the lowest income quintile in 2020 would see an average gain… [of] about $125” per household. By 2050, this net gain would increase to “$355 measured at 2010 income levels.”

A clean energy economy would enjoy massive growth, according the the CBO:

CBO projects that real (inflation-adjusted) GDP [Gross Domestic Product] will be roughly two and a half times as large in 2050 as it is today.

Investing in efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change, the CBO concluded, would reduce this GDP by as little as one cent per dollar. CBO concluded that the impact of the ACES Act on the overall economy would be “modest.” However, the CBO did not analyze elements of the legislation that would increase our energy independence and household savings further:

The analysis does not include the effects of other aspects of the bill, such as federal efforts to speed the development of new technologies and to increase energy efficiency by specifying standards or subsidizing energy-saving investments.

Glenn Beck is spinning a paranoid fantasy in which Democratic members of Congress are either puppets of — or conspirators with — an out-of-control, “racist” and “spooky” President. In the real world, the Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly found that a clean energy future can be ours for less than a (real) postage stamp a day.

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Joe Klein Compares ‘Left-Extremist’ Van Jones To ‘White Supremacist,’ ‘Nazi’

Joe Klein, the prominent Time Magazine liberal columnist, has embraced the right-wing assault on Van Jones, the White House green jobs advisor who resigned this weekend. Stung by a successful boycott for calling the president a “racist,” Glenn Beck led a campaign against Van Jones as a “self avowed communist” who is a “danger to the republic.” Yesterday, Klein said “good riddance” to the “too-angry blowhard” Van Jones, comparing him to a “white supremacist” and a “Nazi”:

Anyway, Jones: He has, in recent years, done some valuable work trying to steer green jobs into poor communities…but there is a bright line in American political life: Self-proclaimed “communists” need not apply. Communism is too odious and foolish a philosophy for anyone reasonable to believe in, or even to use as red-flag hyperbole, as Jones did after the Rodney King riots of the early 1990s, when he said that he’d been a [black] nationalist, but was now a communist. It’s sort of like a Republican President appointing someone who had said, “I used to be a white supremacist, but now I’m a Nazi.” So, good riddance. The work of this presidency is too important to be side-tracked by a too-angry blowhard spouting foolish radicalism.

In the past decade, Van Jones has been at the vanguard of a green capitalism that combines progressive and conservative ideals, “focusing on job, wealth and health creation” in poor and minority communities while healing the planet. His work has helped establish the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, the Green Jobs Act, and community partnerships for job training and retrofit programs in cities across the nation.

Before becoming a leading green capitalist, Jones was a progressive leader in the Bay Area. The “communist” smear hinges on a 2005 interview with the East Bay Express, in which Jones described how he had “renounced” his radicalist politics of the 1990s, when he participated in STORM, a utopian, anti-racist peace collective in Berkeley, CA that drew from Marxist teachings. Jones was radicalized by the 1992 Rodney King trial, in which four LAPD officers were acquitted of police brutality although their beating of Rodney King was caught on videotape. While acting as a legal observer for a non-violent rally in San Francisco protesting the trial and its aftermath, Jones was caught in a mass arrest for which the city later apologized.

Klein’s comparison of Jones to a “Nazi” “white supremacist” is both repugnant and ironic, considering Jones’s record of fighting racism and embracing compassion for all people. Following the Rodney King verdict, Jones worked effectively against police brutality, establishing first the Bay Area PoliceWatch and then the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. The Ella Baker Center successfully campaigned against San Francisco police officer Marc Andaya, who led a team of cops in beating Aaron Williams, “emptying three cans of pepper spray into his face, and hogtying him in an unventilated police van where he died.” With its “Books Not Bars” campaign, the Center also stopped the construction of the Alameda County “Super Jail for Kids” in 2001.

Klein — a compelling writer who has argued for legalizing marijuana, a war crimes tribunal for the Bush administration, and the same green-jobs vision as Van Jones — should be the last person to promote a McCarthyite purge of “left-extremists” from the Obama administration.

Van Jones Seeks A ‘Healing For Our Politics’: ‘Let’s Be One Country’ »

White House green jobs advisor Van Jones is under attack from Fox News as an “avowed radical revolutionary communist” and from ABC News as a “truther” with a “history of incendiary and provocative remarks.” In an attempt to assassinate the character of Van Jones, the right-wing media are distorting his past political activism and cherry-picking Jones’s critiques of the pollution and injustice that still haunt this nation. However, Jones’s true record is one of turning away from anger and finding hope, abandoning division and seeking consensus.

Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas this August, Van Jones argued that “for all of the battleground politics that’s going on,” energy policy should be “the one place that should be a safe harbor for all of us.” Van Jones praised the “bipartisanship” of Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who as a representative from Los Angeles succeeded in getting “the first president ever to sign into law a green jobs act, President George W. Bush.” He recognized that the summit participants came to find a “healing for our politics” in a “common ground agenda”:

Many of you have taken chances to start companies, you’ve written books, you’ve been grassroots champions for the change that we need. And I think you’re seeking not just a healing for our economy or a healing for our planet, but a healing for our politics. And I want to acknowledge that many of us are here because we are seeking something deeper. This is the common ground agenda. It should be the common ground agenda. We should be able to come together as a country on this one. Finally.

Watch it:

Jones then explained that “the values that underlie this clean energy conversation” are “the common ground values of America.” Underlying the call for clean energy is the value that “clean air is better than dirty air for the health of our children.” Underlying the call for energy efficiency is that value that treating our country’s resources “with wisdom and respect is more important than wasting them.” And “if we have the opportunity to fight both poverty and pollution by putting people to work in these new industries, we would be wise as a country to do that.”

To extended applause, Van Jones explained that the Obama administration has committed $5 billion to improving the energy efficiency of low-income households because the same investment “that cut unemployment and cut an energy bill and cuts greenhouse gases is also going to cut asthma, and take asthma inhalers out of little girls’ and boys’ pockets.”

Jones discussed in further detail how President Obama’s clean energy agenda tears down traditional ideological divides by “asking questions progressives like” but “giving answers that conservatives should like”:

We’re asking questions progressives like but we’re giving answers that conservatives should like. We’re asking questions about how to move the needle on poverty and pollution and how we create more economic opportunity especially for people in the lower part of our economy. But the answers are answers that conservatives should like. We’re not talking about expanding welfare, we’re talking about expanding work. We’re not talking about expanding entitlements, we’re talking about expanding enterprise and investments. We’re not talking about redistributing existing wealth, we’re talking about reinventing an existing sector, and creating new wealth by unleashing innovation and entrepeneurship. This should be common ground. We should be able to stand together and be one country on this.

Jones concluded by again making the call for us to “be one country” and connect “the people that most need work” to the “work that most needs to be done”:

There is so much work that needs to be done in this country to retrofit America, to cut these energy bills. And there are so many people who need work. This is our opportunity as a country — and it comes around very rarely — to take the people that most need work, and connect them to the work that most needs to be done, to fight pollution and poverty at the same time, and be one country. Let’s be one country.

During the applause at the conclusion of Jones’s speech, prominent Republican oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens — who in 2004 funded the Swift Boat attacks on Sen. John Kerry — turned to Jones and shook his hand.

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Stung By Boycott, Beck Channels McCarthy: There Are ‘Communists’ Advising The President

On Tuesday night, Glenn Beck invoked the red-baiting of a bygone age, making the claim that there are “Communists in the United States government.” Beck’s McCarthyite rampage came during an extended screed attacking White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs Van Jones, a former Center for American Progress senior fellow and the co-founder of Green for All, an environmental-entrepeneurial organization. After renouncing his “rowdy black nationalism” in 2000, Van Jones “has emerged as the perhaps the nation’s chief proponent of using business-based solutions to create jobs and clean up the environment.” However, Glenn Beck is convinced that Van Jones is a Communist sleeper agent in the White House:

I know there are good decent people, left and right, Democrats and Republicans that watch this program! How much more evidence do you need that we have radicals in the White House? Oh, we haven’t even begun. If you think you need more — We need to at least start having the necessary conversation of: Do we really want Communists in the United States government as special advisors to the president? To be honest with ya, and maybe it’s just me, I don’t even want Communists having lunch with our president. When Putin was having an hour with the president, I know he had to do it, but I wasn’t comfortable with it! Barack Obama did not campaign on openly changing the whole system.

Watch it:

In fact, Obama did campaign openly on a message of change. And hope.

Evidently, Beck is attacking Van Jones to divert attention from his accusations that President Obama is a “racist” who “hates white people.” A successful boycott by Color of Change, an organization co-founded by Van Jones in 2005 but with which he has had no active involvement since 2007, has led to 57 advertisers abandoning Beck’s show.

Glenn Beck Attacks Smart Grid As Socialist Plot To Steal Our Thermostats

Glenn Beck, the conservative ideologue whose show is mocked by fellow Fox News anchors, recently attacked plans to modernize our electric grid. After Carol Browner, President Obama’s climate and energy adviser, said that a smart grid means “we can get to a system where an electric company will be able to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air conditioner won’t operate at its peak, you’ll still be able to cool your house, but that’ll be a savings to the consumer,” Beck argued that would lead to “one-world government” with “Czar Browner” in charge of everyone’s air conditioners:

I can’t wait for the 97 degree day in August when Czar Browner in Washington decides it’s in my country’s best interest to make sure I’m not cooling my house. . . . There’s no way the government would turn down the air conditioning at the wrong place and kill someone.

On Fox News, Beck snorted, “Gosh, that would be great if I could just keep turning the air conditioner up and the government won’t let me do it. That’s fantastic.” Watch it:

In reality, Browner was describing demand-side management technology, the kind of grid modernization that corporate executives from Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott to American Electric Power’s Mike Morris have called an essential advance. Our antiquated power grid, a national embarrassment which threatens our energy future, needs to be upgraded to a digital network just as the analog phone system gave way to the Internet.

Beck’s rant assumes that an “electric company” and “the government” are one and the same. In fact, eight-four percent of the United States retail electric power market is provided by private companies. Over 120 million customers are served by the private market, versus 21 million served by public utilities, most of which are small municipal entities. The concept that Carol Browner would have control over a national thermostat is frankly bizarre:

During his diatribes on his Fox News show and his radio program, Beck also called cap-and-trade — which would establish a multi-billion-dollar private market in pollution allowances — “one of my favorite socialist ideas.” Although global warming is increasing the deadly heat waves that worry him so, Beck further claimed “the only thing that has become incredibly clear on the science of climate change is that they can’t decide whether to call it global warming or call it climate change.”

It’s not surprising that someone who can’t tell the difference between capitalism and socialism doesn’t understand much about science either.

Right-Wing Global Warming Denier Machine Screams: ‘Czar’ Browner Is A ‘Socialist’!

The right wing has discovered that Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s new White House energy and environment adviser, was briefly a member of the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. The commission first convened in November 2007 to “articulate from the world of progressive politics a way forward to address global environmental concerns, climate change and the issues of governance required to deal with these common challenges” at 10 Downing Street, hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Leader of the British Labour Party.

The Socialist International is “the worldwide organisation of social democratic, socialist and labour parties” from Albania to Zimbabwe. Its members include the center-left New Democratic Party of Canada, the center-left Israeli Labor Party, and the ruling Labour Party in Great Britain. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, founded by the U.S. government to support democracy in developing nations, works with Socialist International and other political parties “to help foster open, accountable and responsive political systems.”

Also, it has the word “Socialist” in its name. Not only that, the press is calling Carol Browner the “climate czar.” In a leap worthy of Stephen Colbert or Monty Python, the radical right wing is claiming these are signs that Barack Obama is going to transform the United States into a leftist dictatorship. The spread of this tale is interesting mostly as an examination of the interlocking web of conservative politics and corporate polluters:

January 2: Steven Milloy discovered Browner’s work with SI, emailing the bloggers at GlobalWarming.org, run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing anti-regulatory think tank. Steven Milloy is a one-man scientific denial industry, as publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and a columnist for FoxNews.com and the New York Sun.

January 7: The story of Browner’s “utterly radical socialist agenda” reached the editorial pages of the DC and Baltimore Examiner last Wednesday. The Examiner newspapers are owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz, a right-wing evangelical Christian who built his father’s oil business into a far-ranging media, telecommunications, railroad, energy, and entertainment empire. He has served on the board of the American Petroleum Institute and founded the Discovery Institute, an intelligent-design think tank.

January 8: Newsbusters‘ Noel Sheppard reports that Browner is no longer listed as a member of the commission. Newsbusters is one of the many faces of the anti-regulatory media machine founded by Brent Bozell III (Business & Media Institute, Media Research Center). Bozell has also served on the board of the American Conservative Union. The National Review’s resident global warming denier, Chris Horner, asks, “Hey, comrades, what’s to be ashamed of?!”

January 9: By Friday, right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones called her a socialist agent for world government, as Steven Milloy asks about her “mysterious and Stalinist-like disappearance” from the SI website.

January 12: The Washington Times made Browner’s “socialist ties” its headline story today. The Times was founded by the Unification Church’s Sung Myung Moon, a right-wing evangelical fundamentalist religious leader who blames Jews for the Holocaust. From the Times the headline leapt to the Drudge Report, where Matt Drudge juxtaposed the story with headlines about extreme cold weather. Tipped off by the John Locke Foundation’s Paul Chesser, the American Spectator calls the story “tremendously important” and “truly scary.” At the Heritage Foundation, Nick Loris (who previously equated the New Deal to Nazism) repeated Milloy’s bizarre mention of purges in Stalinist Russia. On his national radio show today, Glenn Beck used story to claim “almost everyone who does believe in global warming is a socialist.”

At Townhall.com, Republican lawyer Carol Platt Liebau reaches McCarthyite levels of rhetorical excess:

It’s just one more piece of proof that some elements in the environmentalist movement (and note: I said some, not all) are merely fronts for the some collectivist, totalitarian, statist impulses that have reared their ugly heads throughout the 20th century with such devastating results for so many.

That’s right, according to conservatives, Carol Browner’s meeting with the prime minister of Great Britain to discuss global warming is equivalent to the genocides of Stalin and Hitler. And it isn’t even January 20th yet.

McCain Surrogate Tim Pawlenty: Human Impact On Global Warming ‘Half A Percent’ »

Appearing on the Glenn Beck radio show yesterday, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) denigrated the science of climate change, saying the human impact on global warming was only “half a percent.” He implied mandatory programs to reduce global warming emissions — like the cap-and-trade programs he has previously called for — would “wreck the economy.” And he said that it’s “understandable” that plans to fix global warming have “faded into the background” because of the “energy crisis”:

But, you know, in my view is this: you can argue that the world, the globe is warming as it always has for natural reasons. But I think the weight of the science indicates that at least some of it — you could argue it’s half a percent or something more substantial — is caused by human behavior. . . But, in the wake of this energy crisis, where people are struggling to pay the bills, that debate on cap and trade has fallen to the background for understandable reasons.

Listen here (and watch the latest global boiling reports):

Gov. Pawlenty has been a “driving force” for a regional cap-and-trade system, so it’s unclear if he’s just pandering to Beck, a notorious global warming denier, or if he’s retreating from principle. This is not the first time an adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has denigrated the prospects for climate change legislation. In July, Steve Forbes told Glenn Beck that cap-and-trade and related proposals are not “going to get very far as people start to examine the details of them.” And in May, Sen. McCain himself agreed with Beck that solutions to climate change can be delayed.

Digg it!

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McCain Adviser Steve Forbes: Cap-And-Trade Wouldn’t ‘Get Very Far’ Under McCain »

Speaking with CNN’s Glenn Beck on Friday, former GOP presidential candidate and current McCain economic adviser Steve Forbes disparaged Sen. McCain’s signature plan to put mandatory reductions on greenhouse gases with a cap-and-trade system. McCain has repeatedly pointed to his record on promoting global warming legislation as a key distinction between himself and the current president. Forbes predicted:

I think cap and trade is going to go the way of some other things, as you may remember, when he came into office, Bill Clinton had a proposal of tax carbons and stuff like that. I don’t think those things are going to get very far as people start to examine the details of them.

Watch it:

On July 9, conservative journalist Larry Kudlow reported that he was told “on deep background” by a “senior McCain official” that McCain was off cap-and-trade. The campaign publicly responded that “any notion that the senator is abandoning or minimizing his support for cap-and-trade is ‘totally false.’” Forbes is signaling that Kudlow may be right, and McCain will follow in the footsteps of George W. Bush. As a candidate in 2000, Bush pledged to impose mandatory reductions of carbon dioxide, but reversed that position once he took the oath of office. In 2001, newly elected Vice President Dick Cheney said of Bush’s pledge, “It was a mistake.”

Contrary to right-wing talking points, a cap-and-trade system is not in fact a tax (or even a “stealth tax”). Critically, cap-and-trade provides “emissions certainty” — ensuring that pollution does not exceed a certain level, whereas a carbon tax would place no such limits. At WorldChanging, Alan Durning explains how the most flexible regulatory system for managing global warming pollution would be using both policy instruments: cap-and-trade and a carbon tax. With the stark need to arrest global climate change as fast as possible, we will need all the tools in the chest.

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Big Oil Stooge Glenn Beck Taking Over Larry King Live Tonight

The Think Progress mothership reports that Glenn Beck “will guest-host CNN’s Larry King Live tonight,” the same time his 7 PM CNN Headline News show repeats. This means:

In inviting Beck to host Larry King, CNN is granting Beck a monopoly over its programming for a full prime-time hour. Counting scheduled replays of both programs, Beck will be on air for a total of eight hours between 7 PM tonight and 7 AM tomorrow morning — a full third of the two networks’ combined airtime.

Beck is one of the most notorious Big Oil apologists and global warming deniers in mainstream media today, famed for his bizarre anti-polar-bear fetish.

More substantively, in just the past few months Beck has:

– Falsely claimed that “global warming now looks like it’s going to be on hold for ten years.”

– Described the disastrous coal-to-liquid gasoline technology as “good for the nation.”

– Told America to “Be thankful for big oil.”

– Promoted false smears against former Vice President Al Gore.

Beck’s ranting against reality is consistent with his right-wing worldview. Check out Think Progress to review Beck’s sorry history of racist, sexist, and bigoted remarks.

Right Wing Doctors Audio Clips To Distort Al Gore’s Comments About Cyclone Nargis »

Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming.

Poor wrote that Gore said in an interview on National Public Radio, “The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China – and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.” (Listen here.)

In fact, the audio clip has been doctored and the conclusion that “Al Gore Calls Myanmar Cyclone a ‘Consequence’ of Global Warming” is false:

Gore Says Myanmar Cyclone Not A Consequence Of Global Warming. The BMI headline ignores that Gore says in the interview that “any individual storm can’t be linked singularly to global warming – we’ve always had hurricanes.”

Gore Properly Described Relationship Between Storms And Global Warming. In the interview, Gore discussed Nargis and the devastating storms that struck China in 2006 (Typhoon Saomai) and Bangladesh in 2007 (Cyclone Sidr). He goes on to say that “the emerging consensus” among climate scientists is that the “the trend toward stronger and more destructive storms appears to be linked to global warming, and specifically to the impact of global warming on higher ocean temperatures in the top couple of hundred feet of the ocean, which drives convection energy and moisture into these storms and makes them more powerful.”

Story Presents False Clip Of Interview. The audio clip included with the online story includes two segments that have been spliced together, out of order, to mislead the listener as to Gore’s actual meaning. The actual transcript (see below) makes it clear Gore was saying that the “consequences” of global warming we’re seeing was the melting of the polar ice cap, which is unequivocally due to anthropogenic climate change.

Business & Media Institute Is Part Of Right-Wing Message Machine. BMI is a right-wing “free-enterprise” front group that is part of Brent Bozell’s conservative media machine, the Media Research Center. Poor describes himself on his Facebook page as a “professional jerk” with “very conservative” political views.

The actual transcript reveals that Gore was speaking in response to a question about conservative pastor John Hagee’s claim in a 2006 interview with Terry Gross that “Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

Poor’s story is being amplified and further distorted by the right-wing media machine. This morning, the Fox News “Fox and Friends” team covered the devastation of Nargis by attacking Gore’s “ill-advised” comments, claiming he is “in hot water again with climatologists.” Steve Doocy hosted Dr. William Gray, who has claimed that manmade global warming is “a big scam.” Here are Doocy’s two questions to Dr. Gray:

Al Gore says that the cyclone that’s killed a lot of people linked to global warming. Is that accurate?

When Al Gore says the big cyclone has killed all those people because of global warming, that’s, according to you, just wrong.

Watch it:

The people truly guilty of “using tragedy to advance an agenda” are Pastor Hagee, Jeff Poor, Matt Drudge, Steve Doocy, and their conservative ilk.

Digg It!

UPDATE: HT Dr. Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground Wunder Blog: Sea surface temperatures were over a full degree Celsius above average in the region where Nargis intensified before landfall, as can be seen from this May 1 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration satellite map:

UPDATE II: Glenn Beck pushed the false story on his CNN show on May 7, and Media Matters exposes that Brett Baier claimed on the May 8 edition of Fox News Special Report: “Former Vice President Al Gore says global warming is to blame for the cyclone in Myanmar.”

UPDATE III: From ConWebBlog:

Poor’s BMI article now notes a “clarification” that “The original audio for this story included two accurate audio clips but placed in the incorrect order. They are now included on this story as separate clips.” Poor posted a version of his article at NewsBusters, but it doesn’t mention that Gore said that “any individual storm can’t be linked singularly to global warming,” it contains the original misleading out-of-order audio clip, and it contains no “clarification.”

Actual Transcript of Al Gore’s Interview with Terry Gross: More »« Less

McCain Seemingly Agrees With Glenn Beck That Solutions To Climate Change Can Be Delayed

On his radio show this week, climate change denier Glenn Beck asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) if “a new peer reviewed study,” which he says shows that global warming “looks like it’s going to be on hold for ten years,” gives America “time to not spend the money on global warming and maybe concentrate on things like Social Security.” “Yes,” replied McCain:

BECK: You know, there’s a new peer reviewed study out today that says global warming now looks like it’s going to be on hold for ten years. Does that buy us any time to not spend the money on global warming and maybe concentrate on things like Social Security and fix some of those things that are right around the corner?

SENATOR McCAIN: Yes, Glenn, but where we may have a disagreement, I believe that the development of green technologies such as General Electric, the world’s largest corporation, has dedicated to the development of nuclear energy as the French are able to generate 80% of their electricity with nuclear power. There’s no reason why America shouldn’t.

Listen here:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2008/05/McCainBeckClimate.320.40.flv]

UPDATE: As Joe Romm explains at Climate Progress, Glenn Beck is misinterpreting a new paper in Nature that modeled the effects of interdecadal oceanic cycles on global surface temperature. In one sentence, the authors used the phrase “next decade” to refer to the period from 2005-2015 versus 2000-2010, instead of the common-sense definition of 2010-2020. The study in fact provides evidence to support that the next decade — 2010-2020 — will be the warmest on record and “is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors’ calculations began in 1960.”

UPDATE II: Joe Romm also calculates what McCain’s nuclear goal means:

To satisfy McCain’s odd desire to be like the French and get 80% of our electricity from nuclear power in the coming decades would require building more than 700 (GW-sized) nuclear power plants by midcentury — more than one a month.

Ali Velshi Hosts Glenn Beck To Promote Liquid Coal »

Recently, CNN’s senior business correspondent Ali Velshi has been promoting coal-based liquid fuel as a response to high oil prices, even though it leads to climate disaster. Yesterday, the Wonk Room noted that Velshi has even implied coal is cleaner than himself. This afternoon, Velshi continued his obsession with liquid coal in a discussion with CNN’s Glenn Beck. Beck is a self-described “big dumb rodeo clown” who believes the United States is a “suicidal superpower” for not turning coal into gasoline:

This can be done — coal to oil — at $55 a barrel. That’s about half of what we are paying right now for oil. We can have cheap oil that is actually good for the nation because it is all home grown. We’re sitting … just Montana is the Saudi Arabia of coal.

Montana does indeed have vast coal reserves. But coal-based fuel is in fact a dangerous and expensive prospect once the high costs of its pollution are factored in — especially its carbon dioxide global warming emissions.

Velshi then noted that his “clean coal” boosterism has raised questions about his journalistic integrity:

Well you know, South Africa, most of the gasoline it uses is produced from coal. I did something on this the other day and the number of e-mails and comments I got about how I’m shilling for the coal industry . . .

After Beck scoffed, “Oh please,” Velshi then made his most accurate pronouncement about coal to date:

I don’t think it’s clean. It’s not cleaner. It just happens to not be oil.

Glenn Beck — whose response to the threat of climate change is to complain that polar bears eat people — was terribly alarmed by Velshi’s moment of truth:

Now hang on just a second. We can sequester the CO2 now. We can make it cleaner than it has been.

In fact, there is not a single coal plant producing electricity or fuel that sequesters carbon dioxide anywhere on the planet. Although we definitely can make coal cleaner, the coal industry is doing everything it can to ensure that the American taxpayer foots the bill. If Velshi were truly interested in the economics of coal, he would host financial analysts that discuss the economic risks of coal power, not global-warming deniers like Glenn Beck.

Watch it:

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Oil Industry Apologists Declare ‘We Like Oil,’ ‘Be Thankful,’ ‘Don’t Blame Oil’

Following a contentious Congressional hearing on record gas prices this week in which oil executives defended their record profits by saying they “are working darned hard,” apologists for the oil industry are attempting to convince people not to invest in a sustainable future.

Mark Davis, substituting for Rush Limbaugh on the Limbaugh radio show, claimed Congressman Ed Markey was “raping these guys rhetorically” at an “obscene” hearing. Davis defends the oil industry:

And all these guys are trying to do is get us more oil because we like oil. Everybody wants to run our cars on baby shampoo or cornpone or whatever. Well, if, if a car’s developed that works the same way, runs the same way, has the same horsepower then maybe we’ll think about that. Until then alternative fuels will remain a fringe pursuit.

Listen:

That’s not quite “all these guys are trying to do.” The oil industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Congress, front groups, and public relations campaigns to block any policies that would lessen our reliance on oil or worse, reduce their tax breaks and government subsidies.

Glenn Beck used his CNN soapbox to tell America, “Be thankful for big oil,” and offered an almost entirely incoherent defense of the companies, admitting that they “make a lot of cash” but that they “get ambulances to the hospital” because of capitalism’s incentives. In Beck’s world, oil companies don’t just need record profits and multi-billion-dollar tax breaks — they should also be getting more gratitude from the American people. He goes on to attack the government:

I’ve yet to see what our government does for us with their rather large chunk of each gallon of gas we buy, and I’ve yet to see them offer to return it or suggest a gas-tax-windfall-tax-tax.

Beck’s inability to “see what our government does for us” is simply evidence of willful blindness. Our government plows all revenues from the federal gas tax into highway and mass transit maintenance and development. And “their rather large chunk” in fact isn’t– as the price of crude oil has skyrocketed but the federal gas tax has remained unchanged, the amount of a dollar of gas that goes to the government has plummeted from 32 cents in 2000 to 13 cents today.

American Petroleum Institute president and CEO Red Cavaney used a USA Today column to tell Americans: “Don’t blame oil companies.” Cavaney also argues that the Democratic plan to roll back billions in oil-company tax breaks to pay for renewable energy incentives that are under the threat of expiring this year, putting “$19 billion of investment and 116,000 jobs in the US at risk.” This plan has been filibustered repeatedly in the Senate by Big Oil’s allies, most recently by a single vote:

These taxes would move us in the wrong direction by taking away income that could be reinvested in more oil and gas.

Caveney is literally arguing that it is the “wrong direction” to take money from oil and gas development and give it to people willing to invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency — reducing our addiction to fossil fuels. The only ones for whom that is the wrong direction are the oil companies themselves, who seem determined to drill faster to climate catastrophe.