“We Live in the State of Denial, the State of Texas” Censored Rice University Oceanographer John Anderson Tells Climate Progress

In one of the most flagrant recent instances of scientific censorship, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) refused to publish a report chapter unless all mention of climate change and its impact on sea level rise were eliminated.  The author — Rice University oceanographer John Anderson, a leading expert on sea level rise with more than 200 publications — refused.  As a result, TCEQ killed his chapter in The State of the Bay, a regular publication of the Galveston Bay Estuary Program.

Climate Progress interviewed Anderson along with other Texas scientists who revealed that this is not the first time officials removed references to climate change in a state report.  Dr. Wendy Gordon, a scientist who spent 8 years working for the TCEQ and its predecessor agencies, told me she was not surprised by this censorship at all.  She related the story of one of her colleagues whose attempt to incorporate climate change into a state water planning report was “eviscerated by the higher-ups.”

Governor Rick “4 Pinocchios” Perry is a proud denier of climate science, as is his appointed head of TCEQ, Bryan Shaw, so it’s no surprise his entire administration walks in lock step.  No doubt this is what the country should expect from a Perry presidency.  After all, we saw similar climate science censorship the last time an anti-science Texan was in the White House.

What makes this especially tragic is that Texas is one of the states most at risk from unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions — because of its vast low-lying shoreline, its vulnerability to hurricanes, and, of course, its vulnerability to devastating drought and heat wave.

But this is censorship of sea level rise, which is why I call it Flood-Gate.  Indeed, Anderson told me that “In Texas, I find people far less informed on sea level rise than even in Louisiana.   The state is not allowing this information to get out there.”  As he told Mother Jones:

“Sea level doesn’t just go up in Louisiana. We’re the next in line.  We are in fact starting to see many of the changes that Louisiana was seeing 20 years ago, yet we still have a state government that refuses to accept this is happening.”

Here is a 2009 analysis of the “The Socio-Economic Impact of Sea Level Rise in the Galveston Bay Region” by Texas scientists of what a Category 2 Hurricane like Ike would do after sea level rise (SLR) of 0.69 meter (27 inches) — click to enlarge:

And 27 inches is, optimistically, half the current business-as-usual SLR projection for 2100 (see here).

Anderson was particularly “shocked” at how ham-fisted all of this was.  His discussion of sea level rise is focused entirely on  peer-reviewed data that isn’t controversial at all.  Indeed, his discussion focused on sea level rise estimates from thermal expansion of the ocean — even though he is an expert on the West Antarctic ice sheet and thinks we are at great risk of catastrophic sea level rise this century.

The paper stated in the Summary (page 19):  “Current rates of sea level rise … are  approaching 3 mm per year and may well exceed 4 mm per year by the end of this century.”  In fact, SLR is projected to be several time faster than that by the second half of the century.  Anderson was bending over backwards to avoid exactly what happened.

“We can’t even present a conservative viewpoint,” he told me.  Below is the final draft he submitted and the stunning line edits demanded by senior TCEQ officials :
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by David Roberts, in a Grist cross-post

The debate over upcoming EPA regulations is a perfect microcosm of contemporary U.S. politics, in all its unreality and venality. Two rules in particular are in the hot seat at the moment, both of which would crack down on pollution from power plants (yes, I’m about to serve up some alphabet soup, but it’ll be delicious): the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), which would address smog and particulate pollution across state lines (it’s also known as the Clean Air Transport Rule, or CATR), and Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MACT), which would address, as one might expect, mercury and toxic emissions.

Two things have been fairly well established about these rules: Their benefits far exceed their costs and they are enduringly popular with the American people. Yet inside the Beltway bubble, it’s perfectly legitimate to argue that they would cripple the $14 trillion U.S. economy or, incredibly, that preventing them amounts to a jobs bill.

Nonetheless, the public gets it. The latest evidence comes from a nationwide poll conducted by Hart Research and GS Strategy Group, sponsored by Ceres. It found — like so many polls before it — that the public overwhelmingly supports clean air protections across demographic and party lines.

Some of the more striking results:

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Why We Need New Criteria to Rank Truly “Green” Companies

by Auden Schendler

On October 17th, Newsweek will release its attention-getting rankings of the top “green” publicly traded global companies.

Last year, the magazine ranked Dell  #1. Dell is no slouch on operational greening: the company, along with Hewlett Packard, has led the tech industry in lifecycle stewardship, with a willingness to take back and recycle its old hardware, among many other progressive internal waste reduction measures. Dell also leads in the energy efficiency of its products.

But is Dell really the greenest company in the world? It depends on your criteria. The Newsweek analysis looks at operational issues like emissions of nine key greenhouse gases, water use, solid-waste disposal, and emissions that contribute to acid rain and smog. That’s good and important.

But if you read Climate Progress regularly, you know two things: First, that the scale of the climate problem (the response to which is what defines corporate sustainability today) is so large that voluntary corporate action won’t solve it. Second, you know that because of this, how companies operate is vastly less important than how they try to influence policy, policymakers, and public opinion. If the lobbying power of one company — Koch Industries, for example — can more or less single handedly stop climate solutions, then what other companies do as climate activists is clearly critical.

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You may remember Paul Gilding, former executive director of Greenpeace International.  Tom Friedman has been writing columns about him since his 2009 piece on how the global economy is a Ponzi scheme.  I was quoted in that column, too, and as a result, have gotten to know him (see video, “Paul Gilding on The Great Disruption:  “You can’t just have an adaptation strategy. There’s no chance of that working”).

Well, Friedman has a new column today, “Something’s Happening Here,” which asks:

When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street, it’s clear that something is happening globally that needs defining. There are two unified theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of “The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of “The Big Shift.” You decide.

The Big Shift is “the merging of globalization and the Information Technology Revolution” to create a “huge global flow of ideas, innovations, new collaborative possibilities and new market opportunities.”  It basically means anyone, anywhere can make a contribution, get noticed, and rise to the top.

The Great Disruption ain’t so pretty:

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The Treasury Grant Program has been a huge success for the solar industry. By allowing developers and financial institutions to take a cash grant instead of a tax credit — an instrument still hard to monetize due to the economic malaise — solar has become one of the fastest growing industries in America, expanding 102% in 2010 during one of the worst economic times in our nation’s history.

But the Grant Program is set to expire at the end of this year. Although the grants have been a resounding success for the renewable energy sector, the program is politically tarnished because it was created under Obama’s stimulus program.

Allowing this program to get killed by election-year politics would be a major mistake, as it would severely limit the growth of a valuable industry that has boomed in spite of the lagging economy.

A new report out from the business-to-business market research firm EuPD Research shows the immense economic value that could be created with an extension of the program. According to the report, which was commissioned by the Solar Energy Industries Association, a simple one-year extension of the Treasury Grant Program could leverage an additional 37,000 jobs — a 12% increase over the baseline. That could also help bring an additional 2 GW of solar projects online from 2012 to 2016.

A five-year extension through 2016 could result in an additional 114,000 jobs — a 32% increase in employment.   That could result in an additional 7.3 GW of installations over the baseline scenario, as this figure shows:

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“The drought conditions should sure that have plagued farmers this growing season have taken a toll on the area’s peanut crop. Withered blooms, burned pods and few undeveloped peanuts define this year’s peanut crop for many area farmers.” (Photo/Jaine Treadwell)

First, we heard that climate change could decimate the chocolate industry. Now it’s peanut butter. Sending lovers of Reese’s Pieces into a panic, the recent spell of record-setting heat has caused “startling price increases,” according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal:

Wholesale prices for big-selling Jif are going up 30 percent starting in November, while Peter Pan will raise prices as much as 24 percent in a couple of weeks. Unilever would not comment on its pricing plans, but a spokesman for Wegmans Food Markets said wholesale prices for all brands it carries, including Skippy, are 30 percent to 35 percent higher than a year ago.

Kraft Foods Inc., which launched Planters peanut butter in June, is raising prices 40 percent on Oct. 31, a spokeswoman said.

The US Department of Agriculture estimates the current spot price for a ton of unprocessed Runner peanuts, commonly used in peanut butter, at about $1,150 a ton, which is up from about $450 a year ago. A pound of shelled peanuts, meanwhile, would fetch $1.20 currently, one broker said, up from 52 cents a year ago.

Chalk up peanut butter as yet another potential causality of climate change. With heat waves getting worse, and the historic Texas drought expected to last well into the decade, the quality of the peanut crop may continue to get worse:

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As soon as the solar manufacturer Solyndra announced it was closing its doors after receiving a $527 million loan guarantee from the federal government, we knew the politics and the misinformation about the solar industry would get bad.

Leading Republicans have memorized the pro-pollution talking points, calling clean energy an “unproven theory” and “political propaganda” — even after asking the government for hundreds of millions of dollars in support for government-backed clean energy programs in their districts.

And finally, someone affiliated with a conservative media outlet is calling them out. In a column yesterday, Fox News commentator Juan Williams criticized leading House Republicans who seem more interested in bringing down the President than in establishing good government oversight — holding the entire solar industry hostage in the process.

They are so obsessed with discrediting the president that they are condemning the entire solar industry and making themselves into villains.

At a time when unemployment is stubbornly above 9 percent and Congress cannot pass a jobs bill that will get people back to work, the GOP is attacking an industry that employs more than 100,000 Americans. That number has doubled since 2009. And most green energy companies qualify as small businesses.

And with many industries still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. solar energy industry grew 69 percent in 2010. Compare that to overall GDP growth, which was just 3 percent last year.

Stop the presses! Did Fox News really print that? Yes, go ahead and read it again.

These words are unbelievably refreshing to read. By separating the Solyndra debacle from the rest of the fast-growing solar industry (the fastest growing in America), Williams has finally brought some common sense to the conversation, while also explaining that jobs in this sector do indeed exist.

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PM Julia Gillard and Former PM Kevin Rudd.

Australia moves closer to law establishing carbon tax

The Australian government’s goal of implementing a carbon tax passed its toughest test today as the lower house of Parliament overwhelmingly approved a package of bills that institutes a phased-in carbon tax, to be followed by a carbon-trading system.The 18 bills now go to the Senate, where the law is all but assured of passage in mid-November.

According to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the system will reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by 159 million tons by 2020. Australia is the largest per-capita carbon polluter, with an economy deeply dependent on coal.

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Top climatologist Calls Key Allen Critique “clearly wrong.”

Myles Allen, with the complicity of the UK’s Guardian, has put words into Al Gore’s mouth in order to attack the Nobel-Prize winning former Vice President.  What makes this attack a particularly egregious breach of journalism is that Allen and the Guardian could have avoided it had they spent even 30 seconds reading their own damn links.

As we’ll see, what Gore is actually saying about the link between extreme weather and climate change is something countless scientists and independent experts have been saying — and throughout this post I will run through what many of the experts have said.

Indeed, the journal Nature just ran a story just last month with this headline:

Climate and weather: Extreme measures

Can violent hurricanes, floods and droughts be pinned on climate change? Scientists are beginning to say yes.

It is in this context that we have this phony attack on Gore in the Guardian:

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– Bill McKibben’s remarks to Occupy Wall Street at Washington Square Park Saturday.  Video at the end.

Today in the New York Times there was a story that made it completely clear why we have to be here. They uncovered the fact that the company building that tar sands pipeline was allowed to choose another company to conduct the environmental impact statement, and the company that they chose was a company was a company that did lots and lots of work for them. So, in other words, the whole thing was rigged top to bottom and that’s why the environmental impact statement said that this pipeline would cause no trouble, unlike the scientists who said if we build this pipeline it’s “game over” for the climate. We can’t let this pipeline get built.

On November 6, one year before the election, we’re going to be in DC with a huge circle of people around the White House and they’re going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to DC to find out where they have locked that guy up. We have to free Obama, because there is some sort of stunt double there now. So on November 6, I hope we can move, just for a day, Occupy Wall Street down to the White House and get them in the fight against corporate power.

The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way. The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they do, we’ve got no future and nobody else on this planet has a future.

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Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) is the country’s top polluter. Unsurprisingly, then, before releasing his energy plan Friday, the presidential candidate released a new attack ad and op-ed that lay out a strategy of drilling for more oil and gas, rolling back clean air and clean water standards, and spewing out a whole lot of misleading claims about the EPA.

Perry’s plan for developing more oil, gas and coal with limited regulation is straight out of 1911, not 2011. But then again, this is a guy who has stuck with his dangerously ignorant attacks on human-caused climate change — all while his state withers under the worst heat and drought ever experienced in Texas.

In an op-ed published in New Hampshire’s Union Leader newspaper, Perry made it clear he wouldn’t just  “pray away” environmental regulations — he would make every effort to repeal them:

As President, I would roll back the radical agenda of President Obama’s job-killing Environmental Protection Agency. Our nation does not need costly new federal restrictions, especially during our present economic crisis. I would also oppose federal restrictions on natural gas production, including hydraulic fracturing, which is successfully regulated at the state level, and will deliver the energy needed to spark our economic recovery.

Much of my plan can be accomplished by changing the occupant of the White House and removing the liberal, anti-job activists running regulatory agencies in Washington. With the stroke of a pen, I will initiate a review of all Obama-era regulations, begin a comment and review period, and work to eliminate onerous rules that kill jobs with little benefit to the environment.

Somebody call the locksmith. Rick Perry is ready to shut down the EPA and drive out the supposed “anti-job” activists who care about a healthy environment and a livable planet.

Those regulations that Perry and other candidates keep calling “job-killers?” According to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they’re actually having a lower impact under the Obama Administration than they did in 2008 at the end of the Bush Administration (see chart below). Bruce Bartlett, a former senior official with the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, had a great op-ed in the New York Times on the false claims that Republican candidates make about regulations:

In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

Ouch.

Perry continues with the political opportunism by making some very misleading statements about the impact of EPA regulations:

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Meanwhile, American Petroleum Institute Chief Economist says: “Anybody dismissing any type of job is silly.”

by Kate Gordon

Another day, another attack on the growing and popular clean energy sector.

You would think that renewable energy and energy efficiency companies actually creating jobs during a recession would be something to celebrate, not something to disparage. You’d think that the public’s strong support of clean energy programs — including the 62 percent of Americans who specifically support public investment in clean energy jobs — would help to immunize these firms from attack.

But you’d be wrong. Witness today’s Wall Street Journal story, “Green Jobs Brown Out,” which repeats all the same old and misleading criticisms of green jobs and government support of job growth in these critical industries. Let’s take the story apart piece by piece:

“Three years ago President Obama promised that by the end of the decade America would have five million green jobs.”

Actually, the President promised that if America would take strong actions to move the economy from a volatile, fossil fuel-driven path to a low-carbon energy path – actions including passing an economy-wide cap and trade program, implementing a national renewable energy standard, and investing $15 billion/year over ten years – we could create five million jobs in the clean energy sector. The problem? We haven’t passed any of those critical policies, meaning that carbon still doesn’t have a price, and so low-carbon technologies are competing on a playing field heavily skewed toward “cheap” and dirty resources.

Oh, and by the way, ten years hasn’t passed yet.

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37-Year EPA Veteran:  Oil & Gas “Industry is Targeting the Times” Because its Fracking Series “Had an Unprecedented Role in Prodding EPA into Action”

by Weston W. Wilson, environmental engineer, in a Climate Progress exclusive

As the boom in shale gas continues, the country finds itself at a crossroads. How will the government regulate hydraulic fracturing in order to keep air and drinking water safe?

In spite of the importance of these efforts, the oil and gas industry has launched yet another slick, well-funded campaign to resist oversight. Their campaign depicts EPA as an over-reaching bureaucracy driven to regulate companies into bankruptcy, killing jobs and preventing U.S. energy independence. Nothing could be further from the truth. EPA has had a limited role – too limited in fact – in regulating drilling, a responsibility that has been left almost entirely to the states.

The oil and gas industry has also criticized EPA’s effort to conduct a rigorous multi-year study of the potential environmental risks of a drilling technology known as fracking, which is driving the current drilling boom. But isn’t it in everyone’s best interest to have good science guiding a practice that may affect the water we drink and the air we breathe? And isn’t this EPA’s fundamental role?

This is not the first time that the EPA has studied fracking, nor the first time the industry has exerted strong pressure on EPA to soften the outcome.

In the 1980’s the agency set out to determine whether oil and gas industry waste should be considered hazardous waste.  They produced a report that concluded there was no need to make the oil and gas industry follow the same rules as other industries when it came to disposing of their waste because, EPA alleged, the risks from drilling were low. But an early version of the same report concluded the waste was in fact hazardous and should be closely controlled. EPA scientists who had worked on the report blamed political pressure for the reversal.

This same pattern continued during my tenure at EPA.  EPA’s 2004 report on hydraulic fracturing found little to no risk to water supplies. But this was contradicted by evidence of the toxic chemicals used by the industry that could create significant risks. The panel in charge of the final report was filled with industry representatives. Five of the seven members of that peer review panel were current or former employees of the oil and gas industry, including a representative from Halliburton.

Recently, the industry has attacked media venues for raising important questions about drilling practices.

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Food prices are stuck near levels not seen since the late 1970s.  And the United Nations expects that trend to worsen well into the future.

Those are the findings of a joint report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP), “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011” issued yesterday.

The report warns of continued food instability due to fossil energy constraints, climate change, local land pressures, and water availability:

There are also compelling arguments suggesting that, in addition to being higher, food commodity prices will also be more volatile in the future. If the frequency of extreme weather events increases, production shocks will be more frequent, which will tend to make prices more volatile. Furthermore, biofuel policies have created new linkages between the price of oil and the price of food commodities. When oil prices increase, demand for biofuels will increase, thus raising food prices, with the opposite happening when oil prices decrease. Because world oil prices have historically been more volatile.

These are all factors Climate Progress has been warning about for years (see links below).

Most of those impacts will be felt by smaller, import-dependent countries in Africa, according to the UN. Many of those countries have been hit particularly hard by a combination of rising prices and severe drought in the region exacerbated by a warming climate. In East Africa alone, more than 12 million people are facing inadequate food supplies, says Oxfam.

The chart below from the UN report illustrates how difficult the recovery has been for African countries compared with other regions:

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by John Farrell, in two posts that came from Energy Self-Reliant States

The Germans have installed over 10,000 megawatts of solar panels in the past two years, enough to power 2 million American homes (or most of Los Angeles, CA).  If Americans installed local solar at the same torrid pace, we could already power most of the Mountain West, could have a 100 percent solar nation by 2026, while enriching thousands of local communities with new development and jobs.

The following map shows what could have happened had the U.S. kept pace with Germany on solar power in the past two years (installed the same megawatts on a per capita basis).  Sunshine could power 10 states!

Solar Would Power the Mountain West if The U.S. Kept Pace with Germany

The spread of solar has also been in harmony with environmental goals.  Rather than covering natural areas or fertile land with solar panels, 80 percent of the solar installed in Germany was on rooftops and built to a local scale (100 kilowatts or smaller – the roof of a church or a Home Depot store).  Solar in the U.S. also can use existing space.  The following map shows the amount of a state’s electricity that could come from rooftop solar alone, from our 2009 report Energy Self-Reliant States:

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by Cole Mellino

Fall foliage may be changing later due to climate change. As certain regions experience warmer average temperatures, the growth season has been extended, causing leaves to change colors and drop later than in the past. Studies from Europe and Japan show that trees are starting to change colors and drop later, so researchers are looking at whether the phenomenon is happening in the U.S. too.

There have been no comprehensive studies performed in the U.S. yet. But a recent AP story on various pieces of research shows that the trend may be taking place:

Researchers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and at Seoul National University in South Korea used satellites to show the end of the growing season was delayed by 6 1/2 days from 1982 to 2008 in the Northern Hemisphere.

In Massachusetts, the leaves are changing about three days later than they were two decades ago at the Harvard Forest 65 miles west of Boston, according to data collected by John O’Keefe, a retired Harvard professor and museum coordinator who’s continuing to collect data.

In New Hampshire, data collected at the federal Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in Woodstock suggests sugar maples are going dormant two to five days later than they were two decades ago.

In Vermont, state foresters studying sugar maples at the Proctor Maple Research Center in Underhill found that the growing season ended later than the statistical average in seven out of the last 10 years.

Researchers at the National Phenology Network have spent the last four years coming up with standards to be used by observers in reporting foliage color changes. These standards are due out in the next couple weeks. The U.S. Geological Survey is using satellites from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to look at fall foliage from space.

— Cole Mellino is an intern with the energy team at the Center for American Progress

A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post additional links below.

Eurofighter Helps Solar Mirrors Compete With Gas, Torresol Says

Solar-thermal power plants using technology from the Eurofighter jet will compete on price with natural gas- or coal-fired generation within a decade, according to a Spanish company that’s spending $1.3 billion on the gear.Torresol Energy Investments SA opened a prototype plant this month near Seville in southern Spain that uses an alloy developed for the Eurofighter Typhoon and F-18 Super Hornet engines. The metal is used to hold molten salts heated to 565 degrees centigrade (1,050 degrees Fahrenheit), hotter than an atomic plant’s fluid. The main heat receiver is made by a venture of Spanish manufacturer Sener SA and Rolls-Royce Plc.

Torresol, majority-owned by Sener, plans to use the 19.9- megawatt “tower“-style generator as a model for learning how to slash future costs by standardizing components, refining plant operations and building generators side-by-side, Chairman Enrique Sendagorta said.

“With our next tower plant, we’ll be able to reduce the cost of power rather significantly,” Sendagorta said Oct. 7 in an interview in Madrid.

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Todd Gitlin is Wrong:  Occupy Wall Street Protesters Aren’t “Anarchists,” The Tea Party Members Are.

We are seeing an accumulation of “wealth” by the super-rich to shame the Gilded Age.  The richest “400 people have more wealth than half of the more than 100 million U.S. households,” Politifact was grudgingly forced to agree that Michael Moore’s statement was correct.

I don’t think this is disconnected from the question I raised 2 years ago, “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“  As Tom Friedman reported:

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

But I suppose it isn’t a full Ponzi scheme in one respect.  The super-rich have so much wealth that they can insulate themselves from the collapse far longer than everyone else, with their gated and moated communities, multiple homes in multiple climates, security guards, private jets and general insensitivity to the price of anything — and hence insensitivity to the value of everything.

If you have $1 billion, well, even if you lost half of everything, even if you lost 90%, you’d still have an incredible standard of living to pass on to your children, assuming you could stomach the misery of billions.

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A great cartoon from Non-Sequitur by Wiley.

It’s a bit long, so I’m putting the rest of it below the jump:

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For some it’s Columbus Day. But why not also celebrate it as Anti-Flat-Earth Day*.  It’s a holiday so I’m going to repost a classic, “Conservapedia: The theory of relativity is a liberal plot.”

I’m reposting it in honor of the Flat-Earth anti-science crowd — starting with Robert Bryce, of the Manhattan Institute, who tried to make a mockery of Science in the Wall Street Journal concerning a recent experiment related to Einstein’s theory.

But of course we have the larger point that Chris Mooney made in his column on how “Today’s Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today’s Left.”  And that brought out the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green who pulled a Charlie Sheen.

Progressives don’t need an alternative to Wikipedia because we are fact-based and science-based.  Indeed, science is the foundation of progress.  Perhaps that is why so many conservatives are anti-science and why the extremists among them set up the Conservapedia, which claims to be “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia,” and brags “Over 290 million Views & Over 900,000 Edits.”

And yet after all those edits, they still have the same unadulterated nonsense on the theory of relativity and all of science that I wrote about 2 years ago.  And so I would ask you to put on your head vises — or your cranial containment field, if you dropped a dime on the deluxe model — and  go back to the future.

First though, it’s worth noting that the Conservapedia entry for Christopher Columbus states, “As conservative historian Wilcomb Washburn explains, if Columbus had not discovered the New World, the process of European discovery might have been very different. Rather than standing as a symbol of inexorable forces, Columbus is better seen as a representative of the spirit of inquiry, Christian religious zeal, and the notable achievements of Western Civilization.”

Yes, Columbus is a representative of the spirit of inquiry in the same way that Conservapedia is representative of an attempt to destroy that same spirit of inquiry, a spirit that created modern science, one of the most notable achievements of civilization.

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