Tim Wirth.Photo: Center for American Progress Action FundCross-posted from Climate Progress. U.N. Foundation President Tim Wirth told Climate Wire this week that President Obama has a "last window of opportunity" to avert catastrophic climate change -- assuming he gets reelected: I don't know who and where the climate leadership in the administration is. It doesn't exist. There is no resolve in the Obama administration to do anything, and I think they look at Congress and say, 'We can't do anything, so why break our pick now?' Hey, if the White House waits long enough, all the ice will melt and …

With Michele Bachmann, it's the cumulative craziness that blows one away.Photo: IowaPolitics.comCross-posted from Climate Progress. Sure, the extremist wing of the GOP has been saying crazy things about climate for a while. But the anti-science wing is now in charge (Speaker of the House John Boehner: "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical"). And it has been able to make climate craziness a litmus test for the presidency. Just three years ago, the GOP nominee was a climate hawk who campaigned on a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions -- …

Also: Rommgelina doesn't have the same ring.Photo: Ammar Abd Rabbo Cross-posted from Climate Progress. We don't get to marry Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. We're not going to be as successful as Oprah Winfrey or Steve Jobs. So we generally grade ourselves on the basis of what we think was plausibly achievable, not what is theoretically possible. On that basis, the Durban Agreement or Durban Platform (details here) was a pretty big success, committing the entire world -- not just rich countries -- to develop a roadmap for reductions, along with a serious Green Climate Fund. It's worth noting that the alternative …

Cross-posted from Climate Progress. Politicians, pundits, and the public have all been told by the media and others that public belief in global warming has dropped sharply. Except that it hasn't, as polling by Stanford, Ipsos, and Reuters make clear. National survey of American public opinion on global warming via Jon Krosnick, Stanford University. Yes, other polls, notably by Gallup and Pew, do seem to seem to show a sharp drop. But in exclusive interviews with Climate Progress, two leading experts on climate, public opinion, and media coverage -- Jon Krosnick and Max Boykoff -- explain what's really going on. …

Cross-posted from Climate Progress. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2001 that a handful of clean energy technologies returned about $30 billion on a research and development (R&D) investment of about $400 million. The United States is an amazing venture capitalist when it comes to clean energy R&D. But the all-Solyndra, all-the-time stenographers of the status quo at the Washington Post put out this context-free nonsense: If you read the Post article (wearing multiple head vises), you'll see that Mufson and the Post don't understand the first thing about venture capital (VC), nor have they done even the minimal …

Cross-posted from Climate Progress. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued yet another clarion call for urgent action on climate. Their 2011 World Energy Outlook (WEO) release should end once and for all any notion that delay is the rational course for the nation and the world. The U.K. Guardian's headline captures the urgency: World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose forever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change We must start aggressively deploying clean energy now through myriad policies, including a price on …

Cross-posted from Climate Progress. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman had another good column in The New York Times yesterday, "Here Comes the Sun." He makes three key points. First, solar is rapidly coming down the cost curve -- I've sprinkled a couple of the Climate Progress charts on this throughout this post. Second, fracking is overhyped. Third, the only thing that can stop the solar revolution in this country is fossil-fuel-driven politics: We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That's right, solar power. …

The New York Times has its head in the sand when it comes to climate and energy.Here are excerpts from two erroneous and contradictory pieces in this week's dreadful New York Times special section on energy: NYT 1: According to the most recent estimates of the Energy Department, world energy demand is going to increase by 50 percent by 2035, largely because of increased consumption in China, India, and the rest of the developing world. Renewable energy will rise as a percentage of energy used, to 15 percent from 10 percent [by 2035], but that will not provide for the …

The New York Times is one of many major news outlets blowing the story of the century. The one-time "paper of record" cut coverage sharply since its peak in 2006 and 2007, and failed to connect the dots -- heck, a headline this week even blamed the recent record-setting Thailand floods on Thai "officials," not "an unusually heavy monsoon season"! Yet the paper never mentions the collapsing media coverage in the Elisabeth Rosenthal article that takes up nearly the entire front page of the Sunday Review asking (subhed in print edition): Where Did Global Warming Go? Even as other countries …

Voters support candidates who support climate action.Image: Earth Hour GlobalStanford public opinion expert Jon Krosnick and his colleagues analyzed the 2008 presidential election and the 2010 congressional election. They found: "Democrats who took 'green' positions on climate change won much more often than did Democrats who remained silent," Krosnick said. "Republicans who took 'not-green' positions won less often than Republicans who remained silent." I asked Krosnick by email about the implications of his research for the president, who has all but dropped "climate change" from his vocabulary. Krosnick answered: Our research suggests that it would be wise for the president, …