Well, this is unexpected. From the (conservative) Washington Examiner:

On Wednesday, the conservative American Enterprise Institute [AEI] hosted a secret meeting with other Washington, D.C., think tank officials, including members from several prominent liberal ones, to discuss how to build political support for a carbon pollution tax.

The discussion even apparently raised the subject of trying to get the upcoming post-election “lame duck” Congress to address the issue.

Representatives from such liberal groups as Union of Concerned Scientists, Public Citizen, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Brookings Institute, the Climate Action Network and Clean, Air-Cool Planet joined centrist groups such as the Concord Coalition, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and conservatives scholars from AEI and R Street, a group that broke away from the Heartland Institute.

“Liberal groups” like the Union of Concerned Scientists. Got it.

The 5-hour meeting was titled “Price Carbon Campaign/ Lame Duck Initiative.” The first session on the agenda was titled “Congressional Republicans, Romney and Business Leaders: Detoxifying climate policy for conservatives.” This was followed by discussions titled “Progressive/Social Justice Groups,” and “Economists and deficit hawks.”

The second session was titled “Framing and selling a carbon pollution tax.” It included discussions “Building bipartisan support and navigating Ways & Means” and “Honing the case for a carbon pollution tax.”

When asked about the discussion, the AEI responded:

In recent years, AEI has been accused of being both in the pocket of energy companies and organizing to advocate a carbon tax. Neither is true. AEI has been, and will continue to be, an intellectually curious place, where products aren’t influenced by interested parties, and ideas from all are welcome in seeking solutions for difficult public policy problems.

There’s no question that the gathering is a surprise. Despite the AEI’s statement, they’re not exactly known for their embrace of the environment.

But considering ways in which to increase the cost of carbon pollution is not a surprise at all. The recent success of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the Northeast has a number of states revisiting the idea of implementing similar programs. RGGI’s reductions in pollution and energy use while increasing revenue to the states demonstrates the feasibility of the “carbon tax” about which the Examiner is so agog.

In about 15 seconds, the right-wing blogosphere is going to go apoplectic. Remember: Some forms of steam generation are actually good for the planet — like when it ends up coming out of climate-denier ears.

The House of Representatives just set rules for debate on H.R. 2578, the “Conservation and Economic Growth Act,” meaning it will come to the floor for a vote. (Every single bill currently proposed in the House must be titled with the words “economic growth” or “jobs” or both. If it doesn’t, the bill is put out on the Capitol steps and abandoned, where it sings doleful songs to passing children.)

Sorry. Got sidetracked.

Among 2,578 other things having to do directly or vaguely with land management, H.R. 2578 establishes a 100-mile zone within the borders of the United States in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection is given a free hand. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) thinks these measures are so important that DHS head Janet Napolitano deemed the effort “unnecessary” and “bad policy.”

House Democrats, who oppose the measure, have labeled the 100-mile area the “Drone Zone,” creating a website outfitted with intern-crafted, Twilight Zone-style graphics of a Predator drone sort of hovering over middle America. You are meant to be scared by this. As we mentioned yesterday, drones are the go-to bogeyman these days, the barely visible eye-in-the-sky that is taking out terrorists in Afghanistan and Yemen. (The “taking out” is not confirmed by the government; the term “terrorists” is not always supported by the evidence.) So, yeah, Drone Zone. Look out, America! Fine.

Here’s what else H.R. 2578 would do: waive the application of each of the following laws [PDF] on any public land in that area.

• National Environmental Policy Act of 1969
• Endangered Species Act of 1973
• Federal Water Pollution Control Act
• National Historic Preservation Act
• Migratory Bird Treaty Act
• Clean Air Act
• Archeological Resources Protection Act of 1979
• Safe Drinking Water Act
• Noise Control Act of 1972
• Solid Waste Disposal Act
• Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act
• Archeological and Historic Preservation Act
• Antiquities Act of 1906
• Historic Sites Act of 1935
• Wild and Scenic Rivers Act
• Farmland Protection Policy Act
• Coastal Zone Management Act
• Wilderness Act
• Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976
• National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act of 1966
• Fish and Wildlife Act of 1956
• Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act
• Portions of the Administrative Procedures Act
• Otay Mountain Wilderness Act
• Portions of the California Desert Protection Act of 1994
• National Park Service Organic Act
• NPS General Authorities Act of 1970
• National Parks and Recreation Act
• Arizona Desert Wilderness Act of 1990
• Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899
• Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940
• Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
• American Indian Religious Freedom Act
• Religious Freedom Restoration Act
• Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974
• Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960
• Mineral Leasing Act
• Materials Act of 1947
• General Mining Act of 1872

How big is this 100-mile zone? Here’s what the zone looks like for Maine. It’s the striped area.

Click to embiggen.

Again, the suspensions apply only to public land — but in much of the zone a lot of the land is public [PDF]. The total affected area is some 118 million acres, which is why nearly every major environmental organization opposes this aspect of the bill. Maybe the whole point of the drones is so that you’ll be busy looking up as the trucks start dumping toxic waste in the rivers.

If the House approves an amendment to H.R. 2578 that strips out the possibility of drone flyovers, that doesn’t make this thing any better. Drones aren’t the bad thing at the heart of the bill. The bad thing is leveraging concerns about public safety, border security, and job creation to create areas of the country in which duly considered legislation doesn’t apply. The Congress debated and enacted each of these bills, considered the importance of each, and decided to enact them. They shouldn’t be set aside so casually.

Anyway, when it gets to the floor of the House, H.R. 2578 will be debated for 90 minutes. Seems like more than enough time.

Bad news, coal. A massive study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) modeled the impacts of a national energy grid with renewable power comprising between 30 and 90 percent of the mix — including the requisite generation, transmission, and storage. In short:

The central conclusion of the analysis is that renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the United States.

That quote scratches the surface of the NREL’s findings, which follow collaboration with 110 contributors from 35 organizations inside and outside the government. (The list of abbreviations used in the report itself runs two-and-a-half pages.) Another study released in 2010 found that Europe could similarly make a transition to a renewable-heavy energy infrastructure.

The United States currently generates 3.6 percent of our energy from renewable, non-hydroelectric sources, meaning that a target of 80 percent renewable generation by 2050 seems, well, optimistic. Even if the political will for such a transition existed — which it very much does not, as reinforced by those turnpike billboards — such a shift would require a massive investment and shift in energy economics. But it’s by no means impossible.

While this analysis suggests such a high renewable generation future is possible, a transformation of the electricity system would need to occur to make this future a reality. This transformation, involving every element of the grid, from system planning through operation, would need to ensure adequate planning and operating reserves, increased flexibility of the electric system, and expanded multi-state transmission infrastructure, and would likely rely on the development and adoption of technology advances, new operating procedures, evolved business models, and new market rules.

In short: daunting.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t note the most broadly engaging aspect of the NREL’s findings: the projection maps.

The animation above is an inelegant representation of the NREL report’s animated map of possible growth of renewable energy over the next 38 years. More amazing: an hour-by-hour look at energy flow in the year 2050. Watching these provides more than a little sense of living in a world of science fiction. But the more important point is what they demonstrate. We can build the renewable energy we need and even project how it will work in a national grid.

Even in 2050, the NREL projection indicates, coal has a role. But it’s unlikely our self-driving cars will pass any billboards touting it.

Other findings from the full report [PDF]:

• Electricity supply and demand can be balanced in every hour of the year in each region with nearly 80 percent electricity from renewable resources, including nearly 50 percent from variable renewable generation, according to simulations of 2050 power system operations.

• High renewable electricity futures can result in deep reductions in electric sector greenhouse gas emissions and water use.

• The direct incremental cost associated with high renewable generation is comparable to published cost estimates of other clean energy scenarios. Improvement in the cost and performance of renewable technologies is the most impactful lever for reducing this incremental cost.

• With higher demand growth, high levels of renewable generation present increased resource and grid integration challenges.

New York state can continue to participate in a multistate effort to curb greenhouse gases, after a court dismissed a conservative legal challenge to the effort, known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

From a report by The New York Times:

Members of Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and largely financed by oil industry interests, filed the suit last year in state Supreme Court in Albany against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and two state agencies, arguing that the program imposed what amounted to an illegal tax on electric ratepayers.

The group said that by making power companies pay for their carbon dioxide emissions, the program imposed costs that the companies then passed on to consumers. Such “coercive taxes” are illegally levied without approval from the state legislature, the group argued.

But in a decision signed on Tuesday, Thomas J. McNamara, an acting State Supreme Court justice, wrote that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to press their case because they had failed to establish that they had suffered a “distinct” injury from New York’s participation in RGGI (pronounced reggie).

Which is good news. RGGI has provided demonstrable benefits to participating states, including New York, as recognized earlier this year by the Citizen’s Budget Commission.

So Americans for Prosperity, humbled, will recede back into the shadows from whence it came, right? Well, that description of “a group founded and largely financed by oil industry interests” glosses over a key sponsor: the now-famous Koch brothers. If this profile of the group’s increasingly muscular political activity is any indicator, the New York Supreme Court basically just threw a two-inch speedbump in the path of a steamroller.

A steamroller that can also fly.

And that weighs 45 billion tons.

And runs on clean, wholesome, American crude oil.

People involved in climate politics are always throwing polls at each other purporting to “prove” that the public likes this policy or hates that policy or wants this or doesn’t want that. Everyone, at every point on the political spectrum, has a set of polls showing that the public supports their positions. I’ve done quite a bit of poll-pumping myself. The reality is, though, that polling on these issues tells us very little about how the politics will unfold.

To see why, let’s take a look at the newly published results of Brookings’ Spring 2012 National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change [PDF].

Here’s how the results are being pitched: The public rejects the climate policies that economists prefer — market-based options like carbon pricing through a tax or cap-and-trade system — and embraces the climate policies that give economists hives, namely mandates, standards, and regulations. Also, the results show a considerable partisan divide.

Couple things to say about this.

Public: pro-good, anti-bad

First, it is a dismal fact for wonks and economists that the public does not seem to like their preferred policies, but it is definitely a fact:

Click to embiggen.

As you can see, these options split Dems down the middle but are intensely opposed by Independents and Republicans.

By contrast, all those meddlesome policies that offend economists with their inefficiency — a national renewable energy mandate, federal vehicle fuel economy standards, and federal greenhouse gas regulations — received majority support (the first two even from Republicans).

It’s important to understand why public opinion shakes out this way. I don’t think it’s quite right to say the public “disagrees” with wonks; that implies that the public is familiar with the evidence and has weighed the alternatives. Which … no. Most of the public doesn’t know the first thing about any of these policies — whom they might affect, what they might accomplish, how their costs compare to their benefits.

What most poll-taking members of the public understand about a given climate policy is how it sounds on a poll. So, individually and collectively, they gravitate toward policies that sound like more of good things and less of bad things. A policy that says “build more renewables” sounds good. A policy that says “make less pollution” sounds good. “Make cars more efficient”? Great!

Carbon pricing does not sound like more of a good thing or less of a bad thing. It sounds like more of a bad thing: an additional cost, a penalty, government taking something. It is possible to explain to people, if you have a few minutes, why carbon pricing is an economically efficient way to reduce carbon pollution. But — and this is crucial — you don’t have a few minutes! In this media environment, communicating to the public about policy, you’re lucky to get seconds, or any time at all.

Carbon tax advocates are always saying their policy would be more popular if the public was told what would be done with the tax revenue, that it would be invested in renewables, returned as rebates, or used to reduce another tax (a “tax swap”). The Brookings guys note, “this version of the NSAPOCC did not include any specifications on possible uses of revenue from such a tax, which appears to have some impact on support levels.”

But let’s not fool ourselves. If spending the revenue on renewables is popular, it’s because spending on renewables is popular. If spending the revenue on rebates is popular, it’s because getting checks in the mail is popular. If using the revenue to lower taxes is popular, it’s because lowering taxes is popular. At no point does the tax itself become popular. (The cleverness of bundling unpopular policy with popular policy is often overestimated by the bundlers. All Obama’s major initiatives, from healthcare to cap-and-trade to financial reform, have tried it; the result, generally speaking, is net unpopularity.)

Anyway, this is obviously not an argument against carbon pricing, of which I am a dutiful proponent. But advocates need to squarely grapple with the fact that it sounds unpleasant to the public on first blush, and in the vast majority of cases, there isn’t more than one blush.

Poll in a bubble

Second, it’s always worth remembering that the way the average member of the public is exposed to policy options “in the wild” is radically different from the circumstances of taking a poll.

In a poll, policy options are almost always stripped of social cues and associations, information about costs and trade-offs, and political/historical context. They are presented in isolation: “Do you like this thing?”

That is not at all what happens out in the world. The most salient thing about a policy option for most people is who presents it, who supports it, what their peer groups and tribes think about it. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it is these social cues — not independent weighing of evidence and arguments — that guide public reaction.

The pollsters did get at that a bit. They asked about “federal regulations” to reduce greenhouse gases and got 42 percent approval from Republicans; when they rephrased the same thing as “the Obama Administration’s current policy to use the Clean Air Act,” Republican support fell to 28 percent. When Dems heard Obama’s name next to the policy, their support became more intense. Obama’s name, in an of itself, serves as a heuristic.

And that’s just a hint of the effect social/tribal/partisan cues can have on people’s responses. Out in wild world of media saturation, those few voters who hear about climate policies at all are likely to hear about them from partisan sources, being spun one way or the other. They won’t hear “build more renewables” in isolation, they’ll hear it pitched as new taxes and big-government mandates and higher energy prices. There are messages and counter-messages, facts and counter-facts, and for the average low-information voter, the easiest heuristic to use is party or tribal affiliation (“cultural identity,” in Dan Kahan’s terms). When taking policy surveys, people are deprived of that heuristic.

Poll schmoll

These features of policy polls — their lack of trade-offs and counter-messages, their lack of social context — make them a poor guide to the political economy of energy. High support for a policy in a poll says very little about how that policy will fare when it’s introduced to the political scrum, identified with a particular party and set of advocates, and attacked by prominent figures on the opposing side. For a politician or movement trying to push a policy, high poll numbers can be a rhetorical advantage, a slight boost in the power struggle, but that’s about it. No one should fool themselves that good poll numbers are an indicator of deep or enduring public support.

For years Forest Service land in the East was considered irrelevant when it came to oil and gas leasing. But in the last year and a half, the federal government has leased or scheduled for auction more than 384,000 acres at the request of private bidders, more than 10 times as much land as it had leased in the previous two years.

The agency responsible for such auctions, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), had intended to auction another 90,000 acres in four southern states next week, but protests in Alabama prompted that state’s auctions to be postponed.

In the 3,500-person town of Heflin, Ala., more than 200 people showed up to a May 14 meeting to protest the upcoming lease sale; Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R) sent a letter to BLM director Bob Abbey on May 24 asking that he “immediately reopen the protest filing period” and schedule a public hearing on “the different types on energy extraction that could result” from a lease sale.

Anna Berry, Heflin’s mayor, said that while she would welcome a delay of the auction, “We want the Talladega National Forest taken off the table. We don’t think this will benefit us in any way.”

(Activists: there is probably a message in there somewhere.)

For their part, the fossil fuel companies are just totally perplexed about why people are angry.

“Forest Service areas are multiple use lands,” said Dan Naatz, vice president for federal resources at the Independent Petroleum Association of America. “Our concern is Forest Service areas are being more and more managed like national parks, rather than for multiple use.”

Their concern is that our forest areas are being managed like, you know, forests, and not tree-obstructed portals to money. Got it.

What Naatz ignores, of course, is that even drilling in a small area has broader impacts. In 2010, National Geographic looked at efforts to drill in reserved areas of Pennsylvania, activity that is now in even higher demand due to the spread of fracking in the Marcellus shale formations.

Two large national parks are located near the Marcellus: Shenandoah National Park, 20 miles to the east in Virginia, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, near the southern edge in Tennessee. But there are 33 other national historic sites, national historic parks, scenic river areas, and other areas that also could be affected. Thirteen of those units are actually atop the shale formation, [including] sites honoring the nation’s earliest and most recent history: from the Fort Necessity National Battlefield near Uniontown, site of George Washington’s first military campaign, to the national memorial being built in Somerset, to honor the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who were killed on that ground on September 11, 2001.

This was the argument used in the ANWR debate as well: Some things are more important than money.

It’s not always a winning point.

Broadly, what’s happened is that both parties now perceive, accurately, that the public is pro-energy. That’s why both parties are grappling for the “all of the above” slogan.

“Pro-energy,” in the U.S. public’s case, means pro more energy, cheaper energy, cleaner energy, and more secure energy. What the public does not like is the trade-offs between those goals. It doesn’t like hearing that it has to give anything up. It doesn’t like hearing about “anti-energy” penalties and prohibitions. And it never likes favoritism, waste, fraud, or generic “spending.”

Given that all energy policies involve trade-offs between various desiderata, a political party’s ability to sell an energy policy to the public hinges on its ability to evoke the right frames. More/cheaper/cleaner/safer energy always polls well. Restraints, added cost, pollution, and foreign-ness (especially Middle Eastern-ness) do not.

This basic dynamic helps explain why Mitt Romney is not dropping Solyndra. Conservatives still see it as one of their bests attacks on Obama. It evokes Big Government spending, cronyism, waste, and failure (i.e., less energy). It tars the rest of Obama’s clean-energy programs, nay his entire agenda, by association.

The dynamic also explains why the right is going after Obama for allegedly (though not actually) leaving coal and other fossil fuels out of his energy strategy. They don’t want him to capture the pro-energy label. “All of the above,” says Romney, means that Obama is “for all sources of energy that come from above the ground, not for things that come below the ground.” He’s not really pro-energy — he’s just pro-some-energy!

The Dem response has two tracks, one I think is politically smart and one I worry is shortsighted and ultimately self-defeating.

The smart response is to double-down on being the pro-energy candidate. That’s what Obama and his cabinet have been doing. They boast about increased oil and natural gas production while also insisting that clean energy innovation is a key part of an “all of the above” strategy — a part that the GOP is leaving out. Republicans aren’t pro-energy — they’re just pro-some-energy!

This is obviously not what any climate hawk would choose. “All of the above” is, as a matter of policy guidance, absurd. Nonetheless, it is aimed squarely at the bulk of public opinion; that’s the battle that must be fought and won.

The other track of the Dem response is less wise. It amounts to, “They did it too!” History is littered with Republicans enthusiastically grubbing for federal support for clean energy (and dirty energy) projects and companies in their home districts. Their sudden indignation at loan guarantees and the like smells of hypocrisy. I’ve indulged in this kind of thing myself on occasion.

The latest such twist, which Politico says may “undercut attacks on Solyndra,” is focused on a solar company called Konarka.

You see, Romney helped secure the company a $1.5 million loan when he was governor of Massachusetts, and — here’s the twist — it recently declared bankruptcy! Ha ha! Romney “picked winners” in a failed bid at crony capitalism! I’m rubber, you’re glue, bounces off me and sticks to you.

This is an entirely Beltway-focused line of attack, meant to serve journalists the hypocrisy stories they find irresistible. But at what cost? The intent of the attack, as I hear it, is to show that Republicans generally and Romney specifically were “for it before they were against it” — they’ve flip-flopped on alternative energy, from moderate to far right.

Is that what’s coming across, though? When Konarka is called “Romney’s Solyndra,” I suspect political elites do not hear “Romney’s civic-minded attempt to support clean energy.” They hear scandal and vulnerability. They hear that funding clean-energy companies is a dark secret to be embarrassed about; that government support for clean energy is always cronyism; that solar is not a viable business, even with subsidies.

This does not play to cleantech’s advantage. And it’s not true. It is absolutely in the public interest to support clean energy, programs like the stimulus bill and the DOE loan guarantee program [PDF] have been run incredibly well, and solar employs over 100,000 Americans and is rapidly approaching grid parity.

Konarka has been around since 2001. It was a spin-off from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, using organic chemistry and nanotechnology to make thin, flexible solar panels and spray-on solar dyes. In addition to $170 million worth of private funding, it received $20 million in help from the government, including from the Pentagon, the Bush White House, and, in a splashy 2003 press conference, then-Gov. Romney.

Konarka, like Solyndra, was based on a fateful bet against silicon solar panels. The hope was to innovate more efficient non-silicon alternatives and drive down the price enough to compete with silicon. Lots of companies were involved in that bet, as was quite a bit of bipartisan government support. Then along came China with its huge subsidies, manufacturing silicon panels in massive quantities, driving down the per-unit price, flooding the world with cheap product, and undercutting alternatives.

Eventually, silicon prices will rise and alternatives will become more competitive. When that day comes, we will look back on the demise of our domestic solar innovators with great regret. The fight to support them is no embarrassing secret, whether Romney or Obama did it. It was and is in our country’s best public-health, economic, and security interests. It’s a point of pride. It would be unfortunate if, in their enthusiasm to win a news cycle or two, Democrats and their spin doctors implied otherwise.

Wisconsin is a proud state, with a unique political legacy. Its track record of progressive independence and long-standing commitment to political comity make today’s recall election an aberration, a rare example of a Wisconsin turned against itself — and a rare national example of political turmoil.

The last recall election of a governor in the United States was California’s in 2003, a campaign I worked on. A friend from those days, Clark Williams, is today in his home state of Wisconsin working to turn out voters to recall Walker. I asked him how the two elections compared. “Night and day,” he responded, noting the “venom” that has polluted any rational conversation about the election. It’s a common refrain: A recent poll found that one in three Wisconsinites had stopped talking about politics with someone because of their disagreement. There are reports of physical altercations between supporters of either side. This is not exactly the ebullient, cheese-loving Wisconsin we picture.

Neither are the decisions being made by the governor the ones many state residents expected. The fuse for the recall was lit with Gov. Walker’s move to cut collective bargaining rights for the state’s public sector unions, but that’s not the only gripe state residents have with the governor.

The environmental community has its own (good) reasons for complaint. The Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters is very engaged in the recall, with lawn signs opposing Walker throughout the state and a robust collection of “Failure Files” online outlining Walker’s anti-environment policies. And I mean robust. They’re worth a perusal.

For those pressed for time, or on the way to the polling booth, here’s an overview we assembled: Scott Walker’s Murky, Polluted Environmental Record.

An open door to the Koch brothers

We’ll start with everyone’s favorite bad guys: the Kansas Kochs, the Emperor Palpatines working the controls of a sprawling fossil-fuel empire. If you’re not familiar with the Koch brothers, welcome to planet Earth.

Within a month of Scott Walker taking the oath of office, the Koch brothers (who’d contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his campaign) opened a new lobbying office across the street from the state capitol, more than doubling their lobbying force in the state from three to seven people.

Walker, despite having never met the brothers at that point, was very willing to hear them out. When a prankster from the site Buffalo Beast phoned Walker, pretending to be David Koch, Walker happily discussed fundraising plans, his war against the unions, and how much he’d enjoy being flown out to California for some recreation.

In February, the real David Koch reiterated the brothers’ commitment to Walker, saying, “We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”

Weakening pollution standards

So why would the Kochs care about Wisconsin? Simple. Walker’s willingness to roll back environmental protections that get in the way of the Kochs’ profits.

Take phosphorous. The Kochs own Georgia Pacific paper, the Wisconsin plants of which spent years dumping excess phosphorous into the state’s waterways. In 2010, an appeals court ruled that the public could challenge the permit that allowed the company to do so, while the state’s natural resources board adopted new regulations to cut down on the dumping. Enter Walker. His first budget bill included a passage that would reduce the board’s new limits; a separate announcement put a two-year moratorium on the 2010 phosphorous rules.

Stunting wind power

There’s not a lot of reason to oppose wind power, unless you’re simply making decisions to score political points. Ahem.

Prior to Walker’s taking office, the Wisconsin legislature established setback rules determining how far from nearby homes a wind turbine could be built. Gov. Walker — with the support of the now-infamous American Legislative Exchange Council — championed a bill that made those setbacks much, much larger — a jump from about 450 feet to 1,800 feet. The change prompted at least one wind company to cancel plans to build in the state.

Undoubtedly, Walker’s move made fossil-fuel companies smile wanly over their hot, steaming mugs of evil.

Accepting rail money, but not for high-speed rail

To be fair, Walker campaigned on stopping high-speed rail. The campaign owned NoTrain.com, probably because MeHateTrain.com was taken. But that didn’t stop him from asking for $150 million from the federal government for other rail upgrades given that, you know, rail is important to states. Scoring political points by opposing hippie green rail is a good thing, apparently, but that doesn’t mean you have to oppose rail. Or … something?

Facilitating fracking across the country

Wisconsin may not be over the famed Marcellus Shale formation, but that doesn’t mean that Scott Walker can’t get some of that filthy fracking lucre.

Instead, Wisconsin sits atop the remnants of an ancient ocean, the sandstone from which is ideal for fracking. In July of 2011, there were between 22 and 36 sand facilities approved or operating in Wisconsin. Seven months later, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing facilities. Residents who had petitioned the natural resources board to limit the amount of silica allowed in the air around the mines found the board’s Walker-appointed head unresponsive to their concerns. Which was as Walker intended; he explained his choice to head the board as wanting “someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality.” He got it.

Deregulating open-pit mining

What happens if Walker remains in office? That’s to be determined. But he’s already outlined one planned change: deregulating open-pit mining. Open-pit mines create an enormous amount of waste and pollution and are generally tightly controlled by the areas in which they’re present.

As noted above, these issues are just the tip of the melting iceberg — and for the residents of Wisconsin, just one aspect of why Walker faces such stiff opposition. Clark Williams, my friend in the state, says that no matter the reason people oppose Walker, “the narrative remains the same: recall the governor to end the civil war and restore the Wisconsin Way” — that is, working together for the good of the state.

Including, presumably, breathable air, drinkable water, and a state not pockmarked with unregulated mines.

I respond in accordance with internet tradition: a listicle!

5. Conservatives have a long history of advancing environmental progress. In a column directed to Mitt Romney, Thomas Friedman reels off (one suspects from memory) “the G.O.P.’s long tradition of environmental stewardship that some Republicans are still proud of: Teddy Roosevelt bequeathed us national parks, Richard Nixon the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, Ronald Reagan the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer and George H. W. Bush cap-and-trade that reduced acid rain.” This familiar litany is slightly misleading, attributing to presidents what is mostly the work of Congresses, but the basic point is valid enough: In the 20th century, Republicans have frequently played a constructive role on the environment.

4. There is a conservative approach to addressing climate change. Law professor Jonathan Adler has laid it out in the past and does so again in a much-discussed post over at The Atlantic. He suggests prizes for innovation, reduced regulatory barriers to alternative energy, a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and some measure of adaptation.

It’ll be no surprise to Adler or anyone else that I believe the problem is more severe than he does; solving it — as opposed to just “doing something” — will involve a far more vigorous government role than he envisions. But he makes an eloquent, principled case for the simple notion that “embrace of limited government principles need not entail the denial of environmental claims.” Conservatives could, if they wanted, spend their time arguing for their preferred solutions rather than denying scientific results.

3. There are conservatives who believe in taking action on climate change. Even those dismal polls we’re always talking about find 30 or 40 percent of Republicans acknowledging the threat of climate change. And support for clean air and clean energy policies remains high across the board. Heck, some — OK, a tiny handful of — conservatives are even brave enough to say so in public! It’s really only the hard nut of the GOP, anywhere from 15 to 30 percent, depending on how you measure, that is intensely and ideologically opposed to climate science and solutions alike. Oh, and almost all Republicans in Congress.

2. Mitt Romney used to say and do moderate things on green issues when he was governor of Massachusetts. He spoke in favor of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade system for Northeastern states, and introduced the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan. He wasn’t afraid to crack down on coal plants — I never get tired of this remarkable video:

Romney also directed considerable state funding to renewable energy companies and waged open war on sprawl. It’s almost like he was running a state where that kind of stuff was popular.

1. The Republican establishment has gone nuts on climate change and the environment.

This, more than anything, is what American voters need to know about the Republican Party — not what Republicans used to do, or what one or two outliers say, but what the party as an extant political force is devoted to today. The actually existing GOP wants to dismantle the EPA, open more public land to coal mining and oil drilling, remove what regulatory constraints remain on fossil-fuel companies, slash the budget for clean-energy research and deployment, scrap CAFE and efficiency standards, protect inefficient light bulbs, withdraw from all international negotiations or efforts on climate, and stop the military from using less oil.

Which brings me to the piece that drives me crazy, from National Journal‘s customarily excellent Amy Harder: “Campaign Energy Messages Differ; Policies Not So Much.”

Seriously?

No … seriously?

I know journalists don’t headline their own pieces. But the piece itself isn’t much better. Take this bit:

Whether the data is inflated or not, the message that may be coming across most to voters is that there really isn’t much difference between Obama’s policies and those likely to be pursued in a Romney administration.

Ah, so the problem is not that Obama and Romney would have similar energy policies. That’s just the message “coming across to most voters.”

Now, if you’re a journalist, and you determine that voters are receiving a wildly incorrect message, what do you do? Do you write a story about their receipt of the incorrect message? Or do you correct the message?

The fact is, Romney would not pursue the same energy policies that Obama is pursuing. At all. Not even a little bit. It’s interesting, I suppose, that Romney used to run a state (and a state party) where moderate energy policy was demanded by voters. But what matters now is that Mitt Romney serves the present-day Republican Party, which has gone crazy.

The notion that Mitt Romney will rediscover some hidden internal moderate and buck the party on this stuff is just a VSP fantasy. Ever since he started running for president (this time around, anyway), he’s been frantically trying to please the right-wing base. Friedman says Romney’s “biggest challenge in attracting independent swing voters will be overcoming a well-earned reputation for saying whatever the Republican base wants to hear.” But self-styled centrists like Friedman have been saying this kind of thing forever and there remains very little indication that any Republican politician faces a tangible cost for pandering to the right.

Romney will not be elected to follow his heart. He’ll be elected to ratify the GOP agenda. Grover Norquist, a man with as much claim to leadership of the GOP as anyone, made his feelings on the matter extremely clear at CPAC:

All we have to do is replace Obama. … We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.

…

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared. [my emphasis]

Mitt Romney is well-aware — and if he wasn’t before, the primary taught him — that his job is to “sign the legislation that has already been prepared.” The leadership of the party is in Congress. It has declared skepticism of climate science the de facto party position. It has declared open war on clean energy, efficiency, and environmental protections. It has made clear that it will support fossil-fuel companies at every juncture.

That’s conservatives and climate for you. It’s interesting, intellectually, that there’s a history of green moderation in the party; that there’s a conceptual space where titular conservative principles overlap with climate protection; that many self-identified Republicans aren’t as crazy as their leaders; and that Romney used to pander in a different direction. But what’s relevant to voters who value climate and environmental protection is that they won’t get any under a GOP administration or a GOP Congress.