We’ve mused on public opinion before, since it (along with the ridiculous notion that there is complete consensus among scientists) is used to justify draconian and economically absurd global warming remedies. But check out this piece running in the LA Times from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger:

As the election enters its endgame, Democrats and their environmental allies face a political challenge they could hardly have imagined just a few months ago. America’s growing dependence on fossil fuels, once viewed as a Democratic trump card held alongside the Iraq war and the deflating economy, has become a lodestone instead. Republicans stole the energy issue from Democrats by proposing expanded drilling — particularly lifting bans on offshore oil drilling — to bring down gasoline prices. Whereas Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires, Republicans at their convention gleefully chanted “Drill, baby, drill!” Obama’s point on conservation and efficiency was lost on an electorate eager for a solution to what they perceive as a supply crisis.

Democrats and greens ended up in this predicament because they believed their own press clippings — or, perhaps more accurately, Al Gore’s. After the release of the documentary film and book “An Inconvenient Truth,” greens convinced themselves that U.S. public opinion on climate change had shifted dramatically, despite having no empirical evidence that was the case. In fact, public concern about global warming was about the same before the movie — 65% told a Gallup poll in 2007 that global warming was a somewhat or very important concern in comparison to 63% in 1989. Global warming remains a low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Center for People and the Press’ top 20 priorities.

In case you missed it, Al Gore made his latest news splash last week at the Clinton Global Initiative where he encouraged today’s youth to engage in “civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”  You can read our post on it here.

And see this week’s cartoon here:

• Unable to resist a good line for a bad cause, Al Gore likens the fight against global warming to the Wall Street crisis and says “I think we need to bail-in renewable energy and green buildings, and invest in a future that is a better alternative.”
• The New York Times, which has been way behind the public on drilling, editorializes that “The time has come to end the sniping and posturing and give an increasingly restive electorate an energy policy that includes something besides drilling.”
• Surf’s Up Down Under: Study says Australia could get 35% of power supply from waves
• “Sun-drenched Africa Not Reaping Benefits of Solar” … but of course it’s the fault of western nations
• Latest scare study: Methane time bomb!
• File under “unintentional admission”: Letter writer says “socialists had nothing to do with creating the carbon dioxide global warming threat as outlined by scientists around the world” — indeed, socialism does retard economic growth, which involves energy use

Al Gore is indeed fighting the moral war of our time — at least in his head. He now urges young people toward civil disobedience to stop construction of coal plants that don’t use carbon-capture technology. (He also calls it “stock fraud” for a carbon-emitting company to talk about, you know, the holes in the case against carbon as it relates to global warming.)

C’mon. Only in the mind of a wild-eyed zealot would there be cause for civil disobedience. And if the cause is so just, why leave it to young people to get criminal records? Why not go for Nobel 2 by getting arrested on the front lines? Not such a brave general, apparently. And not such a wise one, many would argue.

UPDATE (September 26): This morning, IBD takes a good swipe at Gore and points out how far off base he may be, given the concerns over solar wind:

On the same day Gore spoke, scientists involved in NASA’s Ulysses project reported that the intensity of the sun’s solar wind was at its lowest point since the beginning of the space age — one more indication that the sun, the biggest source of energy affecting the Earth, is getting quiet.

The weaker solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, but the cause is unknown. Sunspots, which normally fluctuate in 11-year cycles, are at a virtual standstill. In August, the sun created no visible spots. The last time that happened: June 1913.

The results of the Ulysses spacecraft’s mission, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory project scientist Ed Smith, show that “we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated.”

The consequences for Earth are enormous. The lack of increased activity could signal the start of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. It leads to extended periods of severe cooling such as what happened during the Little Ice Age.

It turns out those who talk the biggest game on going green, at least in the UK (and we suspect here as well), don’t practice what they preach:

People who believe they have the greenest lifestyles can be seen as some of the main culprits behind global warming, says a team of researchers, who claim that many ideas about sustainable living are a myth.

According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad. The carbon emissions from such flights can swamp the green savings made at home, the researchers claim.

Stewart Barr, of Exeter University, who led the research, said: “Green living is largely something of a myth. There is this middle class environmentalism where being green is part of the desired image. But another part of the desired image is to fly off skiing twice a year. And the carbon savings they make by not driving their kids to school will be obliterated by the pollution from their flights.”

Sort of makes you respect the honesty of the Never-Greens, doesn’t it? Speaking of people who like to write green checks with other peoples’ green, the New York Times editorial page today lauds 10 states for curbing greenhouse gas emissions to blunt the effects of rising global temperatures. Even then, the paper has to convince itself that the proceeds of economically undesirable cap-and-trade plan won’t be diverted:

There is a real danger that auction proceeds will be diverted to state budgets rather than used to accelerate the transition to a clean-energy economy. New York, in particular, has a history of playing fast and loose with the public’s money, so we are encouraged that the State Assembly has approved a bill that would prevent tampering with the proceeds. The State Senate should quickly follow, and others in the initiative should, too.

After managing to convince itself that politicians will — in just this one case — show restraint, the paper lauds states for taking the lead on global warming. Pretty ironic for a business built entirely on the destruction of trees to take such a high and mighty tone. Had the paper endorsed a more economically defensible plan such as a carbon tax it would be easier to take their position more seriously. But resting one’s hopes on cap-and-trade plans, which are sure to create slush funds for political shenanigans, is no better than talking green and living … well, some other color (not brown!)

Hat tip: Is It Getting Warmer?

Reaction from free-market papers continues to show displeasure — ok, well, maybe giddy taunting — over Sen. Joe Biden’s anti-coal explosion (see here).

The Wall Street Journal leads off with an editorial that pulls no punches:

Coal happens to be the indispensable workhorse of the U.S. power system, providing about 50% of the country’s electricity. Many Democrats nonetheless despise coal — because of pollution before the era of scrubbers, but especially now because of carbon emissions. Al Gore favors an outright moratorium on coal-fired power in the name of climate change. Meanwhile, any scheme to tax and regulate carbon — like the cap-and-trade program backed by Mr. Obama and John McCain — would hit coal first and hardest, effectively banishing it from the U.S. energy mix.

Mr. Biden, then, only stated an obvious if politically unutterable truth. The real costs of green ambitions won’t be paid by well-heeled coastal liberals, but will fall disproportionately on the Southern and Midwestern states that depend on coal for jobs and power. The blue-collar voters of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia and so forth will get hurt most — notwithstanding Mr. Biden’s campaign reinvention as the scrapper from Scranton.

The paper’s editorial concludes with this thought: “That an eminence like Mr. Biden is clueless about coal suggests how little official Washington has thought through the consequences of its anticarbon agenda.”

Amen.

Then there’s this political take from Investors Business Daily, which remains on top of anti-coal, anti-oil, and generally anti-energy sentiments:

Biden has joked that the difference between him and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is that she’s “good-looking.” One of the real differences is that Palin wants to develop America’s abundant domestic energy resources — all of them.

She cut through red tape to get a pipeline built to supply the lower 48 states with natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope.

Biden, Obama and other Democrats want to go through the motions. You can drill here, but not there, and drill where there’s no oil. Obama wants to inflate your tires. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is too busy saving the planet to help her countrymen with their energy bills.

IBD recaps the landmark move, er, un-move:

In a stunning defeat, congressional Democrats were forced to allow the quarter-century-old offshore drilling ban to expire. But the fight has only begun, with the struggle now shifting to state legislatures.

Sen. Joe Biden flatly stated that coal is killing you, just months after Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it’s making us sick. So what about it? Is coal killing us?

We doubt anyone would suggest huffing coal particulates for kicks and giggles, and if they did, it would be best not to heed their call. But here’s something that Senators Biden and Reid may have missed, probably because they are not on the Senate committee overseeing the Department of Health and Human Services.

Here’s a little factoid: Our life expectancies are at an all-time high. Here’s the recap from the Washington Post in June:

The overall U.S. life expectancy of 78.1 years was up 0.3 years from 2005. Life expectancy for women was 80.7 years, and for men, 75.4 years. The disparity between the sexes — 5.3 years — has been declining since it peaked at about eight years in 1979.

No, coal isn’t going to kill us. But the rhetoric might. (Or, is it the silent, sneaky killer that actually makes us live longer so we won’t figure out that it’s killing us?)

Sen. Joe Biden, the vice presidential nominee for the Democrats, weighed in on clean coal and renewable energy caught in this ropeline clip:

BIDEN: Absolutely. Before anybody did. The first guy to introduce a global warming bill is me, 22 years ago. The first guy to support solar energy is me, 26 years ago. It came out of Delaware. But guess what. China is burning three hundred years of bad coal unless we figure out how to clean their coal up. Because it’s going to ruin your lungs and there’s nothing we can do about it. No coal plants here in America. Build them, if they’re going to build them over there, make ‘em clean because they’re killing you.

Transcript courtesy of Think Progress

Ben Smith of Politico has this report and analysis:

“I am going to put in place the priorities and policies that will create jobs in Ohio. One important way that we are going to create jobs here is with the development of additional nuclear plants and through investments in clean coal technology,” he said. “[Obama’s] running mate here in Ohio recently said that they weren’t supporting clean coal.”

Biden spokesman David Wade responded by calling McCain’s statement “yet another false attack from a dishonorable campaign.”

He continued: “Senator McCain knows that Senator Obama and Senator Biden support clean coal technology. Senator Biden’s point is that China is building coal plants with outdated technology every day, and the United States needs to lead by developing clean coal technologies.”

But the error here does seem to be Biden’s, and his remarks, and his apparent return to his primary position Tuesday, were striking because just three days ago, he praised the possibilities of coal to a crowd at the United Mine Workers of America annual fish fry in Castlewood, Va.