Undaunted by their failure to catch so much as a single guppy, Republicans in Congress are paddling on with their fishing expedition through the Obama administration’s clean-energy initiatives. They are nothing if not dutiful.

The latest faux scandal (what are we up to now? a dozen?) has to do with the Ivanpah solar power plant, currently under construction in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California.

Here’s what we know about Ivanpah, a concentrated solar power (CSP) project being developed by BrightSource Energy. It started construction in October 2010, amid great fanfare from politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. It is technically three separate, contiguous power plants, built in phases, with a total of 170,000 heliostat mirrors, spread across 3,600 acres, aiming sunlight at three solar power towers. It will have a gross capacity of around 392 megawatts and will be, when completed, the largest CSP installation in the world.

In April 2011, the project got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy (DOE), allowing it to scale up its already substantial private funding from, among others, NRG Solar and Google. A little over a year later, according to DOE, the project is about one-third completed and is employing over 1,700 people on site. When it’s finished it will “avoid 574,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to emissions of 110,000 vehicles” and “generate enough clean electricity to power approximately 87,000 homes annually.”

In other words, DOE’s investment has not failed. On the contrary, it’s kind of awesome! Everything’s going according to schedule. Jobs are being created. Barriers are being broken. If it proceeds according to plan, taxpayers won’t shell out anything, California will get tons of clean energy and jobs, and the U.S. solar industry will have a domestic success story. Plus the thing is just gorgeous to look at.

Who could possibly object to American jobs and energy? Serial car thief Darrell Issa and his merry band of fisherman (aka the House Oversight Committee), of course.

Why the concern? This Wall Street Journal piece contains the damning details. At least it contains the damning tone. The details turn out to be pretty unimpressive.

Here’s what happened: BrightSource had been scrambling for this Ivanpah loan for more than two years, since before Obama took office. All signs were positive. Problem was, a couple of deadlines were approaching. On March 31, 2011, the conditional agreement with DOE would lapse, and on April 1, “tortoise moving season” would start and delay the project for six more months, which may well have killed it. So BrightSource started sweating, hiring lobbyists, and pestering the DOE to finalize the damn thing. In early March it even proposed having its then-chairman John Bryson write his old friend, then-White House Chief of Staff William Daley, to plead with him to “quarterback loan closure.”

Is there any evidence that this last-minute volley of lobbying had anything to do with the loan guarantee being approved? No. The letter was never sent to Daley. Buried down in paragraph 20, WSJ reveals that when loan-program director Jonathan Silver caught wind of Bryson’s proposed letter, he responded within hours, telling him to tone it down, cut the “quarterback” crap, and chill out — the loan was “on track” to close before the deadline. (Like many DOE loans, it was held up by a plodding review from a passive-aggressive OMB.)

That’s it. As usual with these faux scandals, the media conspicuously fails to note that the last-minute lobbying and emails to the White House were all about hurrying up the review process, i.e., they came after the guarantees had been approved by DOE. There’s not a shred of evidence that political connections or lobbying affected any of the loan decisions made by DOE staff. Here, as with the other faux scandals, there is only dark insinuation.

Insinuation has no legal power, of course. These shows trials of individual DOE loans haven’t uncovered any wrongdoing, much less anything worthy of official censure or criminal charges. And House Republicans have been fishing for over a year now. But this is post-truth politics — they don’t need the reality of a scandal. That would be an unexpected bonus at this point. All they need is the atmospherics of scandal; they just need to keep floating broad charges and having the media cover them. The purpose is to keep DOE and Obama on the defensive, to hound them, to waste their energy, and to discredit clean energy.

If a thriving American business has to be sacrificed on that political altar, so be it.

——

For kicks, here’s a slideshow from DOE on their clean energy programs:

And here are links to three independent assessments of DOE’s loan program:

• Herb Allison, former national finance chairman for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), led an independent review of the program.
• The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service did its own analysis [PDF].
• The research service Bloomberg Government did an analysis as well.

All these assessments found roughly the same thing: The program is making smart, low-risk investments and has cost over $2 billion less than expected. Unsurprisingly, the media has largely ignored them.

Poverty is not a problem that will just go away. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen science and technology advance beyond anything our grandparents could ever have imagined. Medicine is getting better. Computers are getting faster. Phones are getting smarter. But one thing is getting worse — the number of our fellow humans who struggle each day just to meet their most basic needs.

By the last count, a staggering 1.4 billion people around the globe are living in extreme poverty. And while the U.S. may be a wealthy nation, we aren’t immune to poverty. Too many of our friends and neighbors are fighting just to get by. One in five American children live in homes that struggle to put food on the table — we’re talking about 16.2 million American kids [PDF] who can’t count on a meal every day. That’s not right.

And the shocking truth is that most of us in this country will live in poverty at some point during our lives. This is not somebody else’s problem.

We need our leaders to create long-term solutions that will wipe out hunger and poverty for good — here in the U.S., and across the globe.

And one of the best ways we can do that is by investing in the green economy. Investment in sectors like transportation, water infrastructure, energy efficiency, and renewable energy don’t just create jobs; they create pathways out of poverty.

The key is that jobs in the green economy tend to require less formal education than jobs in other sectors — but they pay better. That’s a powerful combination. It means that even if you grow up in a very poor home — even if you can’t afford the rising cost of a college degree — you can still get a job that pays enough to support a family. Wages for green jobs are 13 percent higher than median U.S. wages — but they tend to be held by folks with less education.

And when you go to that job each day, you won’t be worrying about breathing toxic fumes that threaten your health and your family’s security. In fact, one of the most important ways the green economy helps people living in poverty is simply by protecting their health.

The folks who are hit hardest by pollution are low-income families and people of color — because they live closest to our nation’s largest polluters, like coal-fired power plants. Health care for cancer, lung disease, and respiratory illness caused by air pollution costs our country more than $185 billion a year. And who bears the brunt of these illnesses? Low-income Americans and people of color.

So when I hear that governments around the world are spending $750 billion to $1 trillion a year subsidizing dirty fossil fuels, I have to wonder what in the world they are thinking. For a tiny fraction of that price we could end global hunger over the next 10 years.

It’s not just that it’s flat-out wrong to let our kids go hungry while we bankroll wealthy oil executives. It’s that it doesn’t make economic sense to pour money into an outdated, polluting industry when we could instead support innovative, promising businesses that offer good, safe jobs — businesses that don’t poison us.

That’s why I hope more than anything that our leaders will walk away from Rio with a shared commitment to stop propping up polluting industries — and instead to invest in businesses that that keep our air and water safe and create jobs we can be proud of. Businesses that help mothers and fathers put food on the table — whether they live in America or India.

Our priorities have become skewed. Our economy is broken. And our leaders in Rio have a chance to fix it right now. Watch our video:

Photo by Roger Barone.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney begins a five-day bus tour today. He’ll cross six different states, focusing on economic issues and the “ordinary concerns of the American people.”

As he has throughout the campaign, Romney will likely talk about why he doesn’t believe that clean energy is good for the country. In recent months, the Romney campaign has attacked American renewable energy companies, lied about the clean energy stimulus, and called American green jobs “illusory” — even with 64,000 clean energy jobs in his home state of Massachusetts.

In fact, those jobs are far from illusory. In the six states that Romney plans to visit on his bus tour, there are nearly half a million green jobs across a diverse range of sectors like wind, solar, land conservation, green buildings, and waste-to-energy.

According to 2010 data compiled by the Brookings Institution, there are 418,512 green jobs in the states on Romney’s bus tour. Below is a breakdown of the number of jobs and wage figures as documented by Brookings:

• New Hampshire: Home to 12,886 green jobs. The annual median wage for a green collar worker in New Hampshire is $2,116 more than the median wage for a blue collar worker.

• Ohio: Home to 105,306 green jobs. The annual median wage for a green collar worker in Ohio is $3,566 more than the median wage for a blue collar worker.

• Pennsylvania: Home to 118,686 clean jobs. The annual median wage for a green collar worker in Pennsylvania is $2,327 more than the median wage for a blue collar worker.

• Wisconsin: Home to 76,858 clean jobs. The annual median wage for a green collar worker in Wisconsin is $2,025 more than the median wage for a blue collar worker.

• Iowa: Home to 30,835 clean jobs. The annual median wage for a green collar worker in Iowa is $2,399 more than the median wage for a blue collar worker.

• Michigan: Home to 76,941 clean jobs. The annual median wage for a green collar worker in Michigan is $2,564 more than the median wage for a blue collar worker.

As the Brookings Institution figures show, these jobs pay more, offer more export opportunities, and are growing at a much faster rate than the rest of the economy. More importantly, nearly half of all these jobs are held by workers with a high school diploma or less.

Jobs that benefit the environment are increasingly becoming a part of “ordinary” life in America. As Romney begins his bus tour, will he continue to call these jobs “illusory?”

Max Frankel contributed to this story.

I was once in a meeting with a guy who sold and installed solar panels. When he asked a woman sitting next to him if she’d thought about putting solar panels on her house, she replied that she’d love to, but she couldn’t afford it. His response came with the casual immediacy of the salesman: “That’s what you think.”

The challenge to broad adoption of solar used to be a lack of awareness. Now, it’s often a lack of capital. People understand that solar promises to save on utility costs over the long term, but many are discouraged by the investment cost of installation and the time it takes to recoup. One approach to offsetting those initial costs is the revolving loan fund, a pool of money often from a government body that provides initial capital the borrower can repay from the eventual savings. Once the loan is repaid, the fund invests in another similar project.

Oakland’s Solar Mosaic takes a different tack. Its process, as Greg Hanscom outlined in April, is to create a one-time pool of investors who provide initial capital — a strategy often compared to Kickstarter or Kiva. It’s brilliant in its simple adherence to the tried-and-true: You invest, money is made (in the form of reduced electric bills), you are repaid. (Currently, the pool doesn’t return any interest on the loans, but it’s easy to imagine that it someday could.) The company is still in its beta stage, but it has already tapped over 400 investors for five installations.

The Department of Energy is also optimistic. Yesterday at its SunShot Grand Challenge Summit in Denver, the department announced that Solar Mosaic would receive a grant of up to $2 million. In a blog post the company explained how it planned to use the grant.

Currently, around 25% of the price of solar installations is due to financing and customer acquisition costs, known as soft costs. Mosaic’s unique online crowdfunding platform will help the SunShot Initiative reduce these soft costs while enabling millions of Americans to own a piece of the growing clean energy economy.

Yesterday, we noted that the market for solar is expected to double this year. Much of that will be commercial installation, but a drop in the up-front cost of installation could expand it to homes, multiple-unit residences, and small businesses.

You can’t afford solar? Solar Mosaic’s response should be simple: That’s what you think.

Last year, global investment in renewable energy passed the quarter-trillion-dollar mark, hitting $257 billion, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

In other words, investors spent about $38 for every human being on Earth. Someone needs to tell these job creators that they’re ruining a lot of people’s arguments about the green economy.

Much of the growth came in solar. Between 2010 and 2011, investment in solar firms grew 52 percent to $147 billion, though wind investments dropped 12 percent globally. The United States, which had been getting outpaced in recent years, moved back into second place — spurred in part by fears that tax incentives for renewables would expire and not be renewed.

Perhaps the most optimistic finding from the report:

Renewable power, excluding large hydro-electric, accounted for 44% of all new generating capacity added worldwide in 2011 (up from 34% in 2010). This accounted for 31% of actual new power generated, due to lower capacity factors for solar and wind capacity.

In other words, nearly half of the new power generation in the world in 2011 came from renewable sources. That’s still a small fraction of the electricity generated, but moving in the right direction.

Job creators. Is there anything they can’t do?

A version of this article originally appeared on Climate Progress.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney campaigned in Craig, Colo., this morning, where he slammed the Obama administration for its energy policies. Romney implied in his speech that there are no clean energy jobs in Colorado, an assertion that is blatantly untrue:

And then of course there’s [Obama's] plan for energy. You see, he said he was going to create some 5 million green energy jobs. Have you seen those around here anywhere? No, as a matter of fact he’s gone after energy.

There are actually tens of thousands of clean energy jobs in Colorado. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [PDF], the state had 72,452 jobs in “green goods and services” in 2010. In addition, the American Wind Energy Association also says that Colorado’s wind energy industry alone supported 4,000-5,000 jobs in 2011.

But these wind energy jobs could be at risk. Vestas, the wind turbine manufacturer, which operates four production plants in Colorado, says it will be forced to lay off more than 2,300 workers if the production tax credit for wind is not extended. Up to 37,000 jobs could be at risk nationwide without an extension of this key tax credit.

President Obama was in Iowa last week urging Congress to renew the credit.

Romney has implied [PDF] that he would like to see the credit expire:

… we should not be in the business of steering investment toward particular politically favored approaches. That is a recipe for both time and money wasted on projects that do not bring us dividends. The failure of windmills and solar plants to become economically viable or make a significant contribution to our energy supply is a prime example.

Meanwhile, Romney supports a Republican budget that would maintain billions of dollars in permanent tax credits for mature fossil fuel companies.

The benefits of Colorado’s renewable energy industry are not lost on residents of the state. A January 2012 poll from the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project found that 64 percent of state residents [PDF] believed increasing the use of renewable energy will be good for job growth in Colorado.

Romney’s choice of location Craig, Colo., is not a coincidence. In February, the American Energy Alliance, the Institute for Energy Research, and Americans for Prosperity — Koch-funded oil and coal industry groups — ran a video attacking the president’s energy policies called “The Perfect Storm over Craig, Colorado.”

These and other pro-fossil fuel groups have poured millions into ads attacking clean energy. In April, a ThinkProgress analysis found that Americans for Prosperity, Crossroads GPS, the American Energy Alliance, and the American Petroleum Institute had spent more than $16 million on energy ads against the president’s energy policies. Energy issues made up 81 percent of campaign ads in April.

Well, it’s not the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but it’s a start.

A coalition of U.S. environmental and social justice groups has asked President Obama to step up and attend the Earth Summit, a gathering of international bigwigs next month in Rio. It’ll be an important opportunity to meet influential people from other countries, attend critical meetings, and lead high-level negotiations. Oh, and figure out how to build a green economy, Van Jones-style, around the globe.

Twenty years ago, when George Bush Sr. was hedging about attending the first Rio Earth Summit, a pack of green groups tried to convince him with a spooky video featuring a horse charging through a burning wasteland and James Earl Jones warning ominously of the planet’s imminent demise. He did attend, and had some fascinating conversations, while Barbara enjoyed her stay as well.

This year, many of the major U.S. green groups were weirdly silent about the Earth Summit — until this week, when they sent Obama a letter:

We are writing on behalf of civil society organizations that represent more than 5 million Americans to urge you to commit as soon as possible to lead the United States delegation to the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil in June.

Your presence at this Summit would signal its critical importance to all Americans, demonstrate our country’s deep concern over urgent global issues that will inevitably affect our security and well-being, and highlight our nation’s determination to be a contender in the race to a low-carbon green economy.

The letter [PDF] also asks Obama to roll out a list of commitments from the U.S. to promote the green economy here and abroad. The groups want Obama to push for elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies, sign onto the U.N.’s Sustainable Energy for All Initiative, which aims to bring clean power to developing countries, and crack down on ocean pollution and overfishing.

Twenty-two groups signed onto the letter, including four of the seven groups behind the Horsemen of the Apocalypse video in 1992 (the National Audubon Society, The Wilderness Society, and the Rainforest Action Network are still MIA), and some notable additions, among them the National Tribal Environmental Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

No word yet from the prez on whether he’s accepting the invitation. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reportedly out. So is British Prime Minister David Cameron — never mind that Cameron once pledged to lead the “greenest government ever,” and the U.N. postponed the Earth Summit so it wouldn’t conflict with the other huge event of mind-blowing global importance next month: the British Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. (Seriously, Brits, why do you even still have a queen? You tell me that and I’ll try to explain why we have the Electoral College. Deal?) Also bailing are members of the European parliament, who say they can’t afford the hotels, which have jacked up their rates for the occasion.

The good news is that the presidents and prime ministers of more than 130 other nations have RSVPed for the event. And if Obama does decide to attend, I happen to know that there are still bunks available at one of the beachside hostels at Copacabana, cheap. I’m sure he’d find something worthwhile to do.

Photo by Eric Tastad.

On Thursday, President Obama will visit TPI Composites, a wind manufacturer in Newton, Iowa (population, 15,254). There, he will reiterate his support for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal support program that has helped drive wind’s rapid expansion in the U.S. The PTC is now in peril, as Congress appears unlikely to renew it when it expires at the end of this year. The loss of the PTC would put tens of thousands of current jobs — and almost 100,000 future jobs [PDF] — at risk.

Newton’s experience is illustrative, so let’s recount a little history.

Vulture capitalism

Newton used to be the “washing machine capital of the world,” with five washing machine manufacturers. One by one they closed, until there was only Maytag, which at its height employed around 4,000 Newtonians. Then, in 2006, Maytag was the subject of a bidding war. On one side was Chinese manufacturer Haier Group, in partnership with none other than former Romney employer Bain Capital (Romney was gone by then). On the other was Whirlpool.

Whirlpool won, but it would have been vulture capitalism either way. The Maytag plant was summarily shuttered and the jobs sent out of state.

Manufacturing jobs return on the wind, with bipartisan support

Since then, Newton has turned itself around, in no small part by attracting several wind-turbine manufacturers, including Trinity Structural Towers and TPI Composites.

It’s not an unusual story in Iowa, which is a leading wind-power state. Almost 19 percent of the state’s power came from wind in 2011 and the industry employs some 6,000-7,000 Iowans. According to wind industry estimates, since the state passed a renewable energy standard in 1983, some $5 billion in wind investment has flooded the state.

Unsurprisingly, these developments have left wind power with broad bipartisan support in Iowa. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has defended the wind industry and the PTC against attacks from the right. Even Iowa Rep. Steve King (R), one of the most notoriously bigoted right-wing nutbags in all of Congress, has said, “Now is the time for stability in the wind industry, and the PTC offers just that.” When they were in the state, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Thaddeus McCotter (remember him?) all posed next to a wind-turbine blade made by none other than TPI Composites, to show their support for the industry.

(Side bar: A new analysis [PDF] shows that “adding more wind power to the electric grid could reduce wholesale market prices by more than 25 percent in the Midwest region by 2020.”)

But Romney hates wind

Despite support from Iowa Republicans for wind (and despite that turbine photo-op), Mitt Romney has expressed only contempt for the industry. He would end federal support for solar and wind alike, technologies that, he has said, “make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.” (Y’know, like Iowa’s own TPI Composites, the 700 people it employs, and the town it saved.)

And here he is in Colorado, smirking about the wind industry losing 10,000 jobs since 2009. That’s true, of course — it’s gone from a high of 85,000 to around 75,000 now — but mainly because the industry is nervous about the future of the PTC. Which Romney wants to kill for good. Thus insuring far greater job losses.

The fact is, if Republicans win Congress and Romney becomes president, all federal support for clean energy will dry up and Newton, along with other Midwestern towns that have been revitalized by wind, will suffer yet another devastating blow. I wonder if Iowa voters — sitting in one of 2012′s most important swing states — were thinking about that when Romney came to the state recently to lecture about the deficit.

Frank Knight spent decades keeping Herbie, New England’s tallest elm tree, alive. The tree lived for 217 years and under Knight’s care survived 14 bouts of Dutch Elm diseases.

Two years ago, the tree had to come down. At the time, Knight was 101. As the Associated Press reports:

“His time has come,” Knight told The Associated Press at the time. “And mine is about due, too.”

Knight passed away yesterday. He was 103. And he’ll be buried in a coffin carved from Herbie’s wood, which his family commissioned secretly when the tree died.

Still, environmental issues are getting talked about, often obliquely as part of larger discussions about energy — though the words don’t always mean what you might think they mean. And the words politicians don’t say can tell you as much as the words they do.

Here’s a guide to energy and environmental buzzwords you’ll be hearing, or not, this election year:

Gas prices
Republicans thought they’d get a lot of mileage out of this phrase, but now it looks like it might not get them too far. When gas prices were trending upward earlier this year, Republicans went all out blaming Obama and the Democrats. Now that gas prices have come back down, the Republican messaging has gotten muddled.  Still, the GOP is not quite ready to drop the issue.

Never mind that the president and Congress can’t do a damn thing to control prices at the pump.

Energy subsidies
“Subsidy” is a bad word in Washington these days, synonymous with “taxpayer giveaway” and “crony capitalism.”

If a politician wants to steer money to an industry, s/he’ll instead use words like “investment,” “support,” and “job creation.” See: Republicans defending oil and gas subsidies (an increasingly awkward endeavor), and Democrats defending clean energy subsidies.

If a politician wants to cut off money to an industry, that’s when the word “subsidy” comes out. See: Obama railing against oil and gas subsidies and other Democrats pushing the new End Polluter Welfare Act, and Republicans railing against subsidies for renewables and fulminating about Solyndra (more on that below).

Democrats would seem to have the upper hand with the subsidy buzzword this year, as most Americans are sick of supporting Big Oil and eager to support renewables.

Big Oil
Speaking of, “Big Oil” is a phrase you’ll only hear from Democrats this year. Obama’s particularly fond of it. Republicans don’t have a great rejoinder, as Big Solar and Big Wind don’t yet exist.

Keystone
If you hear a politician say the word “Keystone” this year, you can bet s/he’s a Republican.

Obama has been trying to please everyone on the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline — denying it a permit in January, then praising its southern leg in March. Predictably, he’s just managed to piss everyone off, so expect him to avoid the topic from here on out.

Republicans, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to keep the issue in the news — and they’re getting help from pipeline builder TransCanada, which recently reapplied for a permit. The GOP argues that Obama’s unwillingness to rubber-stamp the pipeline is hampering the economy and making America less energy secure — even though those arguments are false. Currently the GOP is trying to force Keystone approval into a big transportation bill.

Many Democrats, meanwhile, are walking on eggshells around this one. They don’t want to anger the green wing of the base, which showed its might by elevating Keystone into a national issue last year. But they also don’t want to be painted as anti-job or tick off any of the unions that want to help build the pipeline (the labor community is split on the issue). A poll released by Hart Research in February suggested that the Keystone fight is winnable for Dems if they articulate a clear message — say, that the pipeline would create as few as 50 permanent jobs, according [PDF] to researchers at Cornell University, and that much of the oil it transports would be shipped overseas. But savvy, strategic messaging is not a Democratic strong suit of late.

Solyndra
If you hear a politician say the word “Solyndra” this year, you can know s/he’s a Republican.

Republicans will keep harping on the bankruptcy of solar company Solyndra, which got a federal loan guarantee of more than half a billion dollars. They say it shows the folly of the federal government trying to pick winners in the energy sector and boost the economy through stimulus spending, and recent ads from GOP groups go further with salacious (and bogus) Solyndra-related charges. Romney slipped up earlier this year and said “Solyndra” when he meant “Keystone,” betraying the fact that Republicans see both issues primarily as cudgels with which to bash Obama.

Obama has been defending his administration’s Solyndra investment, albeit without mentioning the company’s name. His first TV ad of the campaign season went after his Solyndra critics. In March, he said, “Each successive generation recognizes that some technologies are going to work; some won’t. Some companies will fail; some companies will succeed,” echoing language from his State of the Union address in January. Other Dems have been less sure-footed in their responses to the Solyndra mess. Expect them to avoid the topic like the plague.

Clean energy
“Green jobs” is soooo 2008. “Clean energy” is now the phrase du jour if you want to talk about shifting to an economy based on renewables and efficiency — and so far, only Democrats do.

Obama is running hard on this theme: “I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy,” he’s said more than once. The president regularly visits cleantech companies and highlights the economic promise of cleantech jobs.

Republicans counter by talking about “energy jobs” — the kind that come from building pipelines and mining coal and fracking. “Drill baby drill” talk continues to resonate with the GOP base, while right-wing groups are trying to spark an anti-wind movement. Still, a handful of Republicans from states with big wind potential are calling for extension of a wind-energy tax credit that’s set to expire at the end of the year, recognizing that clean energy can be a job creator.

Poll after poll finds widespread support from voters across the spectrum for renewable power, so you’d think smart politicians would try to tap that vein.

Climate
In 2008, from the presidential candidates on down the ticket, Democrats and Republicans alike offered up plans for combating climate change. But you won’t be hearing “climate change” or “global warming” in many of this year’s stump speeches — and that absence speaks volumes.

President Obama recently told Rolling Stone that he thinks climate will become a campaign issue, but even he doesn’t seem to believe it. He didn’t even bother to mention climate change in his most recent Earth Day address. The president thinks he’ll reach more independents by talking about clean energy, energy innovation, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy (snatched right from the Republican playbook). Many of his fellow Democrats are following his lead and shunting climate into the shadows, still smarting from the ignominious death of climate legislation in 2010.

Mitt Romney doesn’t like to talk about climate change either because he’s flip-flopped on the issue. Most other Republican politicians bring up climate change only if they want to voice their skepticism. Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.) is launching a new group to promote conservative solutions to climate change, but don’t expect that effort to gain much traction this year.

Yes, that’s right, the most critical issue ever to face humanity is getting less attention this election season than dogs.

A version of this post was originally published in SEJournal.