You can skip George Monbiot's book Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Slightly longer book review: Because there are far too many climate books to read, I confess I apply a litmus test. I look up "hydrogen" in the index. If the writer thinks it's a climate solution, the book can be skipped. I thought I would like this book, since I like many of the columns by the British author, including an early excerpt on the connection of the global warming deniers to big tobacco. But on page 162, he writes, "hydrogen fuel cells are beginning to …

NASA administrator Michael Griffin offered a lame apology for his denier remarks on climate change. The Associated Press reports that Griffin "regrets airing his personal views about global warming during a recent radio interview." That is, he apologized for speaking his mind. Sad. In a related story, the media revealed a recent report on how NASA and the Bush administration are gutting earth observation work crucial to tracking climate change: The Bush administration is drastically scaling back efforts to measure global warming from space, just as the president tries to convince the world the U.S. is ready to take the …

An energy bill is emerging from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but it has some "unacceptable" provisions, according to leading energy and environmental experts. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, has a draft bill online, along with summaries of key provisions. The bill has a variety of important provisions aimed at promoting energy efficiency in electricity and vehicles -- and some useful provisions to promote low carbon fuels. But it has at least two serious flaws. First, it helps subsidize coal to liquids, which is an irredeemably bad idea, as I have argued …

Global warming has long been predicted to make the weather more extreme. Wouldn't it be great if there were an official government index of extreme weather -- of heat, drought, rainfall, and hurricanes -- that would let us know if the prediction had come true? Well, such an index exists: the National Climatic Data Center's Climate Extremes Index. As the figure shows, the most extreme year by far was 1998; 2006 was the second most extreme, followed closely by 2005. The fourteen least extreme years all predate 1981. The weather is becoming more extreme, as predicted: Yet my guess is …

Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has been rolling in green editorials. In mid-April he wrote a major piece called "The Power of Green," in which he made the case for his generation to follow the footsteps of the Greatest Generation to become the Greenest Generation. He writes: We in America talk like we're already "the greenest generation," as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here's the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, …

More and more experts are saying global warming is as grave a threat to our national security (PDF) as terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Some in the media are coming to the same view. The Financial Times set up their coverage with the following scenario, pulled from a Pentagon memo: Picture Japan, suffering from flooding along its coastal cities and contamination of its fresh water supply, eyeing Russia's Sakhalin Island oil and gas reserves as an energy source ... Envision Pakistan, India and China - all armed with nuclear weapons - skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared river …

The Center for American Progress has a terrific new report on "Global Warming and the Future of Coal" by Ken Berlin and Robert Sussman. The report explores what to do about the explosive growth in coal plant construction projected for the coming quarter century -- 1,400 gigawatts of electricity by 2030, with more than 10 percent in the U.S. alone. In the absence of emission controls, these new plants will increase worldwide annual emissions of carbon dioxide by approximately 7.6 billion metric tons by 2030. These emissions would equal roughly 50 percent of all fossil fuel emissions over the past …

It was only a matter of time before Planet Gore got around to the most famous bit of disinformation. The big lie is to tout the fact that the air has gotten cleaner in recent decades while conveniently ignoring the fact that the reason for this achievement is environmental activism leading to tough air pollution standards. Progressives must push back hard on this big lie (something John Kerry failed to do with George Bush in the second Presidential debate). Planet Gore proclaims proudly today: Imagine this headline on page A1 today: "The environment is getting cleaner." Given the daily state …

It depends on the fuel used to drive the conversion process -- according to a new study: In particular, greenhouse gas emission impacts can vary significantly -- from a 3% increase if coal is the process fuel to a 52% reduction if wood chips are used. These results come from the energy life-cycle wizards of Argonne Lab, who have published a new study, "Life-cycle energy and greenhouse gas emission impacts of different corn ethanol plant types," in the open-access Environmental Research Letters. Here is a figure showing "well-to-wheels greenhouse gas emission changes by fuel ethanol relative to gasoline": The greenhouse …

General Motors is apparently serious about introducing a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, which I have repeatedly argued is the car of the future (PDF). The race is now on between Toyota and GM as to who will be the first to introduce this game-changing vehicle. The Chevy Volt is to be the "legacy" of Robert Lutz, GM's vice chair of product development, according to Business Week's "Auto Beat" column. The Volt will go about 40 miles on an electric charge before reverting to being a regular gasoline-powered hybrid. Given that the vast majority of drives are under 20 miles round …