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President Obama had some fun in his energy speech this morning, poking gently at Republican candidates who seem to think oil is the be-all and end-all of energy without alternatives by characterizing them as "founding members of the Flat Earth Society."

He specifically took aim at Newt Gingrich, who has repeatedly ridiculed the President for his stance on algae as an alternative fuel.

I've always thought it odd that Gingrich would call algae biofuel investments "cloud cuckoo land," but no low is too low for Newtie, I guess. Only, he might want to rethink that line of attack, given that ExxonMobil and Chevron have substantial investments and relationships in algae fuel development startups.

Oops, and as it turns out, it seems Newtie himself had an investment in "cloud cuckoo land."

You know what's coming next: Gingrich used to hold interests in a company that developed algae-based biofuels.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based startup was called GreenFuel Technologies Corp., which raised more than $70 million in venture capital funding before closing its doors in 2009. Among its largest backers was Draper Fisher Jurvetson, through a fund in which Gingrich was a limited partner.

It certainly is true that Gingrich didn't personally make the GreenFuel investment decision, but he did choose to back the DFJ management team that believed in GreenFuel. Does that mean Gingrich now believes folks like Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson are "intellectually incoherent?" And, if so, doesn't that throw Gingrich's own judgment into doubt?

Might be time for Newtie to sail off the edge of that flat earth into the sunset.

In my last C&L post on climate change, I ‘predicted’ (if that’s the right word) that at the current rate of global warming/global dimming by 2030, global temperatures could rise more than two degrees, twice as fast as previous models suggested they would, and trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet – after which nothing could be done to stop the eventual death of the entire planet by the end of the century, which no would be around to see anyway. Pretty grim stuff, really.

First, the bad news. Happy New Year, it’s 2010.

Our politicians, just about all of them from every country, are like children playing on a beach while the tide goes out and fish flop on the sea bed, ignoring the signs of a coming tsunami, too busy squabbling over toys and kicking sand in each other’s eyes. Our current technology is shackled to oil interests, with alternative energy and its technology insufficiently advanced to make much of a difference. According to the figures whizzing by ever so quickly on an excellent website, Worldometer, we’ve consumed nearly 170,000,000 MWh of energy today alone, 156,700,000 of which is from non-renewable sources. We’ve got 15,676 days left until oil runs out completely.

That’s slightly less than 43 years. That’s all – 43 years, and we’ll have sucked those wells dry as a witch’s... bones. My grandmother was born in 1910, she saw the car replace horse-drawn wagons, and by the time she died, she’d witnessed the birth of the internet and a man walking on the moon. A child born this year, 2010, a mere hundred years later, could possibly see that happen in reverse... should we survive that long. By 2030, energy, water and food shortages will be heading toward a ‘perfect storm’, with major upheavals, destabilization and riots worldwide as food prices will rise to become unaffordable to the majority, starvation increases and millions of refugees flee climate ravaged regions.

We are consuming the world’s resources like a plague of locusts, ripping through the earth’s metals, fossil fuels, timber, and by 2030, we’ll have consumed the lot. A study of 1700 species over 35 years, from 1970 to 2005, have declined in numbers 28 percent overall, with a 51 percent decline in tropical species. We’re consuming fresh water at an unsustainable rate, just to produce stuff – the U.S. using 2,483 cubic meters, about the size of an Olympic swimming pool, every year. The amount of land necessary to support one human being is 2.1 hectares. Demand in 2005 amounted to 2.7 hectares per person. The United Arab Emirates, a tiny country of only 32,268 square miles with 6 million people – about one acre per person – needs 23 acres of agricultural land, pasture, forests, fisheries and space for infrastructure, as well as absorb all the waste products and greenhouse gases, for each and every one of those inhabitants. The U.S. is the second-most demanding country per inhabitant, with Kuwait taking bronze. We’re consuming everything we need for long term survival – trees and animals do more than provide us with wood and food, they protect coasts, conserve the soil, replenish the air we breathe, provide us with medicines. Mostly trees, we’ve still got plenty of animals – if you don’t mind domestic sheep and cows replacing more useless wild things. And maybe not so much the trees, either, palm oil production destroying tens of millions of hectares of rain forests along with killing 50 orangutans a year, pushing Sumatran tigers and rhinos and the Asian elephant into functional extinction within ten years.

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The same people who insisted the first stimulus package was plenty (remember that famous "bipartisan" compromise?) and that the economists who said otherwise (Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, etc.) were overreacting now quietly agree: It really wasn't enough. It wasn't enough, and now it will be even more politically difficult fr Obama to go back and ask for more - just as Krugman warned.

Despite signs that the recession gripping the nation's economy may be easing, the unemployment rate is projected to continue rising for another year before topping out in double digits, a prospect that threatens to slow growth, increase poverty and further complicate the Obama administration's message of optimism about the economic outlook.

The likelihood of severe unemployment extending into the 2010 midterm elections and beyond poses a significant political hurdle to President Obama and congressional Democrats, who are already under fire for what critics label profligate spending. Continuing high unemployment rates would undercut the fundamental argument behind much of that spending: the promise that it will create new jobs and improve the prospects of working Americans, which Obama has called the ultimate measure of a healthy economy.

"Our hope would be to actually create some jobs this year," Obama said in an interview with The Washington Post in the days before taking office.

Obama has defended his economic approach -- which includes the $787 billion economic stimulus plan and record investments in health care, alternative energy, education and job training -- as necessary to stabilize the shaky economy and point the way to job growth.

So far, the White House has counseled patience even as the political debate surrounding its economic policies grows more urgent. Officials point out that job growth will not come until robust economic expansion takes hold, which they expect will happen as stimulus funding works its way through the economy. Still, the flagging job market is likely to stir calls for further stimulus efforts as polls show voters growing increasingly wary of federal spending in the wake of a costly series of financial- and auto-industry bailouts and amid current efforts to expand health-care coverage to the uninsured, which is estimated to cost at least $1 trillion over the next decade.

With many forecasters projecting unemployment to remain above 10 percent next year and not return to pre-recession levels of roughly 5 percent for years after that, Obama is likely to be confronted with defending the effectiveness of his economic policies as the nation endures its worst employment situation in a generation.

Analysts say the high levels of joblessness would be accompanied by increases in child poverty, strained government budgets, and black and Latino unemployment rates approaching 20 percent.

"I find it unfathomable that people are not horrified about what is going to happen," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. "I regard all this talk about how the recession is maybe going to end, all the talk about deficits and inflation, to be the equivalent of telling Americans, 'You are just going to have to tough it out.' But we're looking at persistent unemployment that is going to be extraordinarily damaging to many communities. There is a ton of pain in the pipeline."

The final federal benefits extension, the one that's the end of the line? They make you prove you're looking for work and require you to accept any job they find that pays as much as your unemployment check.

You know, as if it's your fault you're unemployed during a major recession and you're just too lazy to look.

I guess that was part of the "bipartisan" solution. You'd think they'd be smart enough to figure out that if they're funding a third benefits extension, duh! It's because there aren't any jobs. On the other hand, you get to brag to the voters back home how you're making those bums pay - and in addition, you get the sheer fun of kicking people when they're down. So there's that, too!

At least some countries are getting it: (h/t Orangutan)

Finnish Fortum and the City of Stockholm have been feverishly working to design a pay-to-pump electric car infrastructure. Sweden took a baby step ahead this week when start-up company Sust (Sustainable Innovation AM) declared its intention to quickly make the country a test market for the world's electric hybrid and pure electric car manufacturers. They'll have to beat off Israel abroad.

But Sweden isn't particularly far ahead in building electric infrastructure in Scandinavia. Norway takes that prize - it has longer had THINK and Buddy electric cars tootling around the streets of Oslo and other cities, and has both built 20 and promised 400 more recharging stations. Both Sweden and Norway have a secret weapon compared to most other countries.

It's thousands of old motor-warming posts that are stationed up and down the countries' long, cold and even desolate northern highways, where you may be more likely to meet a moose than a fellow traveler. The advantage of the motor-warmer stations is that they are estimated to cost only about US$ 35 each to upgrade with the grounding and currency requirements to recharge cars. Everything else - freeway exit and entrances, especially - are already in place.

But we're talking about allowing off-shore drilling and tax subsidies to oil companies for alternative energy "exploration".

T. Boone Pickens is a billionaire oil man and a career corporate raider who loves George Bush so much he donated $250,000 to his 2004 inaugural ball. He was, and still is, fully behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq and makes no bones about it. So why is he now pushing for the use of alternative energy sources like wind and solar in his Pickens Plan?

It might be because he sees the soaring price of gas and how it is crushing the average American and decided to invest billions of dollars of his own money on a bet that it will pay off. His holdings in natural gas would make his a very healthy profit, should we convert to using it more. Don't get me wrong, I support anyone who wants to lower our dependence on oil and clean up our environment, but if you watch the above video and go to the PP website you'll see that the environment doesn't get much play. In fact, considering his push for OCS drilling, I'd say the environment isn't the overriding issue, just ridding us of our dependence on foreign oil.

Carl Pope, Executive Director of The Sierra Club has praised his plan, going so far as to say Pickens is "out to save America" -- and I have no problem with that -- but do financial motivations vs. environmental motivations matter? Should we just be thankful that someone has stepped up to the plate, even if it means that the ultra-wealthy will once again control our energy resources, or do we strive for more ownership in the future of our own energy policy and demand more emphasis and accountability on our environment? In the end, will Pickens' plan even work?

Not for nothing, President Bush and Dick Cheney have to despise alternative energy. They made (and continue to make) fortunes from oil and must see this as a direct threat to their livelihoods. And now that a hybrid almost killed the President, it must make it even worse.

Detroit News:

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford's hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

"I just thought, 'Oh my goodness!' So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front," Mulally said. "I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?"

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Just to be a jerk, Glenn Beck yesterday used his show to demonstrate -- like a number of his fellow right-wingers -- his utter contempt for Earth Hour: running his klieg lights at full blast to show how much energy he could waste. Yeah, that's the kind of responsible rhetoric we need more of. Whatever.

But the really special moment in the broadcast came when he started talking about wind power as an alternative form of energy with Tom Borelli of the "Free Enterprise Action Fund" -- a right-wing anti-environmental outfit -- about the Obama energy plan, and this burst out:

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Beck: You can't make wind energy work without nuclear energy as well. Wind stops --

Borelli: You know that, but Congress doesn't know that.

Beck: Use your common sense! Hey America! Use common sense here! Let just try this out!

Wind, when it blows, makes energy. When it stops, you can't store it, so what's making the energy? Wind energy doesn't work without something else making energy for when the wind stops, which it does -- especially if Al Gore controls the temperature, and all the winds and everything else, so we never have blowy days!

Agh!

The problem with Beck is that he packs so much ignorance and misinformation into a single rant that it's hard to figure out where to start. Suffice to say that one can easily find out that there are numerous strategies for dealing with the unreliability of wind power:

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