Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman turned heads today when he declared at a Heritage Foundation event that there are "questions about the validity of" climate science and "not enough information right now to be able to formulate policies" to address climate change. While acknowledging the overwhelming consensus among scientists on climate change -- and even suggesting we defer to it -- Huntsman concluded that the debate still needs to "play out within the scientific community."

While the comments may seem like a subdued version of the climate-change skepticism expressed by nearly all of this year's Republican candidates, they're surprising given that Huntsman distanced himself from the GOP field in August by tweeting that he "trust[ed] scientists on global warming" and cautioning Republicans against becoming the "anti-science party." Huntsman has also renounced cap-and-trade schemes  after implementing a cap-and-trade program to curb greenhouse-gas emissions as governor of Utah. The  "Energy Security" section on Huntsman's website stays quiet on climate change.

While Huntsman may be the latest Republican candidate to veer toward the climate skeptics after expressing more moderate positions, he's certainly not the first. Mitt Romney said "we don't know what's causing climate change" after previously saying humans were contributing to global warming. Ron Paul, who once allowed that human activity might play a role in climate change, now calls global warming a "hoax." And Newt Gingrich, who joined Nancy Pelosi in 2008 to urge government action on global warming (see below) now says the ad is "probably the dumbest single thing I've done in recent years. It is inexplicable." (In an interview with Glenn Beck today, Gingrich softened a bit, saying "I think that there is evidence on both sides of the climate change argument.")

These shifts in position, of course, could be in response to new evidence such as leaked emails from climate scientists, but they also smack of the need to play to the base during primaries. A Pew Survey last week found that while there has been "sharp increases in the percentages of independents and moderate and liberal Republicans who say there is solid evidence of global warming" since 2009, "opinions among conservative Republicans have changed little since 2009," with just over 30 percent believing there is solid evidence for climate change.

On Wednesday, a fascinating and eclectic group of scientists, journalists, policy makers, and entrepreneurs converged at the "Energy Innovation 2010" conference in Washington, sponsored by the Innovation Technology Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute. Speakers and moderators included the New York Times' Andy Revkin,  DOE Under Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi, MIT's William Bonvillian, Tom Kerr of the International Energy Agency, NPR's Richard Harris, Time's Bryan Walsh, longtime staffers for Sens. Richard Lugar and Jeff Bingaman, and many others.

One thing that immediately struck me was the stark change in tone from recent past conferences: After two years of fairly disappointing outcomes at the U.N. climate summits in Copenhagen and Cancun, and after watching hopes for cap-and-trade or other measures to regulate carbon fizzle in the U.S. Congress, a growing slice of those favoring investment in clean-energy are working hard to ditch the association with "climate," which now seems to many a losing political issue. As the Breakthrough Institute's Ted Nordhaus put it, "We need to free energy from the polarizing climate debate."

Thus, the new framing is that energy innovation is about building a stronger America; it's about leading the next global innovation wave. It's not about creating in the short-term "green jobs"  (a term we don't hear so much anymore), but about recognizing that long-term economic prosperity will require greater investment in science and engineering education. (Tom Friedman was not present in person, but clearly in spirit.) And so, the ensuing conversations focused not on temperature targets or sea-level predictions, or even on the imperative of loosening America's dependence on Middle East oil, but largely on trying to sleuth out just what is innovation, where it comes from, and how to nurture it.

Over the last 100 years, America has had a pretty good track record at leading global innovation waves: developing and commercialzing the technologies for the combustion engine, aviation, the telephone, television, computer, and the Internet. How did that happen, and how can we make it happen again? The historic role of generous, sustained funding from the federal government, in particular the Department of Defense, in the early stages of developing the aforementioned technologies was several times mentioned. (Over at Time's Ecocentric blog, Bryan Walsh has posted a chart of government R & D investment over the last 50 years in various sectors, including basic energy research, which many argue is now too low.) The recent policy paper "Post-Partisan Power," co-published by theBreakthrough Institute,  Brookings Institution, and American Enterprise Institute, is just one of myriad recent pleas for greater "federal innovation investment," which the authors now calculate at $4 billion and recommend bumping up to $25 billion. Needless to say, it's hard to argue against throwing more money at an important challenge, but also hard to imagine that money materializing in the next two years. But let's say it does. Where and how should we spend it?

One relevant upcoming report will be the International Atomic Energy's global study on green energy investments, which according to senior energy analyst Tom Kerr will look at both comparative national policies supporting basic and applied research and at policy tools to drive adoption  of new technologies. When it comes to questions of how to build up a massive solar-panel manufacturing base in five years, we're collectively in awe of China. But when it comes to figuring out how to get utilities and customers to actually adopt new technologies at home, Kerr suggested we might learn more from boring Old Europe.

The Hindustan Times reports that Pakistan's ambassador to the United States thinks that Indian military activity in the Himalayas may have contributed to his country's recent catastrophic floods: 

In an unusual remark, Pakistan's Ambassador in Washington Hussain Haqqani has said that one of the reasons for recent devastating floods in his country could be human activity on the heavily-militarised Siachen glacier. Haqqani told the American lawmakers that snowmelt pattern on the glacier was changing over the past few years, because of intense military activities and scientists in his country were studying whether this was adding to warming factor leading to bizarre climatic changes. Besides, the activity on the glacier, Haqqani said other contributing reasons for unprecedented rains in his country could be greenhouse gas emissions.

I would imagine that the troops on Siachen are probably a drop in the bucket of the larger climate factors causing the floods, but Haqqani is probably right to worry about a connection between climate change and his country's security.

Update: Haqqani has responded to FP, saying the remark was taken out of context: 

"The Hindustan Times picked on half a sentence in a detailed briefing that focused on the possible relationship between climate disruption and Pakistan's floods. I referred to militarization of the Siachen Glacier only in response to a question about glacier melting and only in the context of the possible connection between human activity and enhanced glacier melting."

If you're the kind of interior decorator who spends weeks agonizing between "white zinfandel" and "baby's breath" for the dining room walls (two hues indistinguishable to anyone who hasn't poured over the Benjamin Moore catalogue), you might consider enlisting in Eduardo Gold's latest project to combat the effects of climate change in the Peruvian Andes.

As one of 26 winners in last year's "100 Ideas to Save the Planet" competition, sponsored by the World Bank, Gold proposed an alternately ingenious and implausible plan to stall -- and perhaps even reverse -- the steady melting of Andean Glaciers: paint them white. Now, though Gold has yet to recieve his prize money, the wheels on this project are already turning in Peru. By coating the increasingly bare (and increasingly brown) rocks at the summits of the once-snowy mountain range, Gold hopes to simulate the eco-saving powers of a true glacial surface: the white veneer, if all goes according to plan, should reflect the sun's rays, sending them back out into the atmosphere and preventing warming effects at the Earth's surface. (If you're already clamoring against using chemical-laden paint in  a pristine natural setting, rest assured: Gold's hue of white -- unlike Benjamin Moore's -- will be 100 percent environmentally friendly, composed of lime, egg white, and water.)

Gold "has no scientific qualifications" -- and it sometimes shows. At one point, he summarizes the science behind his proposal with a simple, and perhaps simplistic, formulation: "cold generates more cold, just as heat generates more heat." He also aspires to eventually "re-grow" the ebbing glacier -- an example, it's hard not to think, of ambitious entrepreneurship getting the best of realistic science.

Nevertheless, Gold "has studiously read up on glaciology," and his idea has won as many supporters as it has skeptics. The white-washing project appeals for obvious reasons to environmentalists: 22 percent of the glaciers in Peru have already disappeared in just three decades and doomsday forecasts predict the remaining 78 may be gone in twenty years. But Gold's biggest fans may be the Peruvians themselves.

Painting, after all, calls for painters: the venture is predicted to create 15,000 jobs over five years. Those who live in the glaciers' shadows (or, more aptly these days, their puddles) have experienced the dramatic shifts in climate in recent year, and -- for the sake of a return to normalcy -- seem to be willing to hear out even the most unusual proposals for change.

The work will be slow-going: Gold has set his sights on completing one summit, Chalon Sombrero, this summer, and then gradually moving on to other peaks. But with a page from Tom Sawyer's book, he just might be able to pick up the white-washing pace...

Historian Walter Russell Mead dings the New York Times for allegedly not writing about the controversy over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its embattled leader Rajendra K. Pachauri, and a related story about stolen emails at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit and the fallout that has damaged the reputation of its head, Phil Jones. He points to a story in today's Washington Post headlined "Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda." [UPDATE: See Mead's thoughtful response, and my response to his response.]

I have worked with Mead and know him as a careful writer and steward of the facts. So I will assume he's not fully informed, and I hope that he'll change his mind after reading this. Because the real story here could just as easily be headlined, "Climate skeptics seize on editing errors, poor IPCC communications to manipulate willing British press and credulous blogosphere." (For the scientific take and full context for what is happening, read this careful explanation by a group of climate scientists at RealClimate.org.)

Read on

I'm not sure an appearance by Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe was really needed to ensure that the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen ends in failure. The delegates seem to be perfectly capable of taking care of that inevitability on their own.

Inhofe is an idiot and his consistent misrepesentation of climate science is disreputable, but I have to say that he made some good points here in his Copenhagen press conference:

In the U.S. Senate, a senator or group of senators can block legislation through what's called a filibuster...Breaking a filibuster requires 60 votes. As is obvious, McCain-Lieberman supporters, even with a bill full of holes and exemptions-in other words, a pale shadow of its former self-didn't even come close to crossing that threshold." They needed 60, they got only 44.

Here we are six years later, and nothing has changed: cap-and-trade failed in 2003, it failed in 2005, and it failed in 2008. As we look ahead, an economy-wide cap-and-trade bill stands no chance of passing. I want to be sure the 191 countries understand this: again, an economy-wide cap-and-trade bill stands no chance of passing.

Mind you, Inhofe is crowing about this situation, not bemoaning it. And then he follows with a bunch of misleading claims about "ClimateGate," almost of all of which were demolished by this "exhaustive" AP investigation.

I think he's also wrong in claiming that there is "no chance" the Senate will pass some sort of cap-and-trade bill. I think there will be a bill at some point next year.

That said, it just might get so watered down in the process of getting to 60 votes that it becomes a meaningless exercise. A lot of folks who follow the climate-change issue closely say: that's fine, let's just get SOMETHING passed and we can always ratchet the caps down later. But if the narrative becomes that the last bill didn't "work," so why bother passing legislation that might hurt the U.S. economy without saving the planet, then that strategy will backfire.

AXEL SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images

Dan Drezner howls at the Maldives government's brilliant stunt of holding an underwater cabinet meeting (more photos here and here) to make the case that "if we can't save the Maldives today, you can't save the rest of the world tomorrow," and wonders if "a rational, cost-benefit analysis of how to allocate climate change resources between mitigation and adaptation" would really redound to the benefit of such small-island countries.

I doubt it -- and the world has already pretty much already decided to let these nations drown. Back in 2007, when I attended the U.N.'s high-level meeting on climate change, one of the issues on the table was what level of global warming we could all tolerate. Was it 1 degree celsius, which was already upon us? One-point-five? Two?

The island countries, which have their own caucus in the General Assembly, were calling for 1.5 degrees (and still are). I remember being shocked, however, at their level of disorganization. Given that climate change is such an existential threat to them, why did they only announce their press conference on the matter 15 minutes beforehand, and why did they only send their U.N. ambassadors, rather than the heads of state? I think I was one of three members of the press in attendance.

The Maldives' new president, Mohammed Nasheed, seems a little more media-savvy than his predecessor, the dictator Mamoon Abdul Gayoom. He has to be: The highest point in the Maldives is just under 8 feet, and the country's average elevation is somewhere between 4 and 7 feet. But that's the average -- most of the country is still lower than that, and the U.N.'s climate panel estimated in 2007 that sea levels would rise anywhere from 7.2 to 23.2 inches, which would make the Maldives extremely vulnerable to storm surges or major sea swells (it should be noted that the U.N. report emphasized that its sea-level projections were "not an upper bound"). If current trends hold, by the end of this century, the bulk of the country's 300,000 inhabitants will have to find other places to live.

But in calling for the 1.5 degree target, Nasheed seems to be fighting a battle he's already lost. In the end, a rough scientific and political consensus has settled around 2 degrees -- and even with that, very little has been done to make the emissions cuts needed, and there are certainly no binding commitments to do so. Would 2 degrees of warming doom the Maldives? I don't know. But it sure looks to me like the world's power brokers are willing to roll the dice on this one.

I see that the Obama administration is indicating some flexibility on its climate change plans. Specifically, it might be willing to delay forcing businesses affected by a future cap and trade system to pay for carbon permits. Instead, an auction system would be phased in over time.

I used to think to accept anything less than a 100 percent auction of carbon permits was scandalous. As FP noted in September:

Cap-and-trade systems work by putting a ceiling on carbon emissions, and then allocating permits that give companies the right to pollute a given amount. From an environmental standpoint, it doesn’t much matter how you initially distribute the permits, as long as the cap is stringent enough. But most economists think that, unless you first auction these off in a transparent process, you’re basically enabling a massive corporate giveaway, raising the likelihood that well-connected corporations or industries will get sweetheart deals, and failing to capture revenue that can pay for other priorities.

I was disabused of this notion today by Stuart Eizenstat, a former diplomat who negotiated the Kyoto Protocol on behalf of the Climate administration. Eizenstat and I served on a panel this morning at the Carbon TradeEx America conference, a really interesting meeting devoted to exploring the future direction of climate change and its impact on policy, business, and, of course, the environment.

Eizenstat, who testifies frequently on Capitol Hill, was adamant that 100 percent auction was a nonstarter in Congress. There was no way, he said, that corporations would sign on to a climate change regime if they weren't given enough time to adjust to the costs they would incur.

That said, I wonder why the White House would want to signal flexibility this early in the game. Would it be tactically smarter to play your cards closer to your chest in the hopes of getting a better deal from industry in the end? Or is it wiser to try and get business on board from the beginning, so that the opposition doesn't have time to coalesce and build? Readers, what do you think?

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

Sesame Street, the U.S. television show, used to have a segment called "one of these things is not like the others."

Can you spot the anomoly in this list?

• James Schlesinger
• Charles Duncan
• James Edwards
• Donald Hodel
• John Herringon
• James Watkins
• Hazel O'Leary
• Federico Pena
• Bill Richardson
• Spencer Abraham
• Samuel Bodman
• Steven Chu

You guessed it: Steven Chu is the only name on this list that is followed by the letters P, h, and D. He's also the only one with a Nobel Prize, and the only one who has run a major laboratory. Frankly, he is a badass -- and he will be looking to get things done on climate change.

The current U.S. energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, is the only other scientist on the list, but he has an Sc.D degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Basically, it's the same thing as a Ph.D, but Bodman has long since stopped practicing chemical engineering.

Photo: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Cue the "hot air" jokes.

The United Nations plans to go casual for the month of August in a bid to cut back on electricity use. The idea, inspired by a similar initiative in Japan called "Cool Biz," is that you can turn down the air conditioning when everybody isn't wearing wool and stuffy ties:

The campaign calls for raising the thermostats in most parts of the U.N. Secretariat building from 22.2 C to 25 C [77] and from 21.1 C to 23.9 C [75 F] in the world body's conference rooms.

The initiative would save some 2 million tons of steam during the month of August, or the equivalent of 300 tons of carbon dioxide in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, [a U.N. spokesman] said.

I love this quip from David Malone, a former Canadian ambassador:

If the rise in the temperature could cut back on the interminable negotiations running late into the evening for often disappointing results, then the outcome of the initiative would be a very good one."

If it works, the U.N. plans to ask its employees to bundle up in the winter. Now if they can just take care of that smoking problem...

LLUIS GENE/AFP/Getty Images

I can't imagine how La Scala intends to stage An Inconvenient Truth:

La Scala officials say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been commissioned to produce an opera on the international multiformat hit for the 2011 season at the Milan opera house. The composer is currently artistic director of the Arena in Verona.

After all, the movie was basically an extended PowerPoint presentation. Are they going to put Al Gore's slides up where the libretto usually goes? And what's the plot?

Germany's environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, issued a statement today with some strong criticism for George W. Bush's big climate change speech. But the harshest words were actually in the title of his press release:

Gabriel criticises Bush's Neanderthal speech. Losership, not Leadership".

With a title like that, why even bother with a statement?

(Hat tip: The Lede)

RAVEENDRAN/AFP/Getty Images

J. Scott Armstrong, a forecasting expert and climate-change skeptic from the Wharton School of Business, thinks he is smarter than former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore. Armstrong believes he can "make more accurate forecasts of annual mean temperatures than those that can be produced by current climate models," and has repeatedly challenged Gore to put money on the proposition. Today is Gore's deadline to take him up on the wager.

If Gore accepted the bet, both men would deposit $10,000 into an escrow account that would be distributed by the winner to the charity of his choice in 2018, when the contest would end. The prize goes to whomever has the closest-to-accurate predictions of average temperature, over one to 10-year horizons, at 10 independently chosen weather stations around the globe over the course of the next decade.

Armstrong's Global Warming Challenge came in June of last year, as Gore revelled in the success of his film An Inconvenient Truth and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was preparing its most grim predictions on climate change to date. Armstrong and a colleague published a paper (pdf) entitled "Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists Versus Scientific Forecasts" blasting the IPCC models as unscientific.

Armstrong initially challenged the former veep to answer the wager by December 1, 2007, but was rebuffed by Gore's representatives. Armstrong, in a letter to Gore, then granted an extention of the wager deadline until today, March 26th, 2008. Gore has again declined (click here for the Armstrong's account of the exchange between the two camps), but he still has a few hours in which to change his mind.

I hope he doesn't. Gore is right to dismiss this antagonistic offer. Subjecting complex scientific issues to a game of gotcha only heightens the conflict surrounding the issue, and doesn't bring us any closer to bridging political divides or solving problems that most scientists agree will plague us for generations to come.

But if Armstrong wants people to put their money where their mouths are, perhaps he would agree to this wager: Both he and Gore can purchase vacation homes of equal value, Gore's house on high ground, and Armstrong's on the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu. Then we'll see who's really full of hot air.

Ethanol is a product that would not exist if Congress didn't create an artificial market for it. No one would be willing to buy it... Yet thanks to agricultural subsidies and ethanol producer subsidies, it is now a very big business - tens of billions of dollars that have enriched a handful of corporate interests - primarily one big corporation, ADM. Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality."

-John McCain, November 2003

I support ethanol and I think it is a vital, a vital alternative energy source not only because of our dependency on foreign oil but its greenhouse gas reduction effects.

-John McCain, August 2006, Grinnell, Iowa

The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes, researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to biofuels as a response to global warming.

-Associated Press, February 7, 2008 

McCain has more often than not spoken against subsidies for corn-based ethanol, and he therefore claims he's been consistent on this issue. Sort of. Here's him trying to explain his ethanol flip-floppery to Tim Russert back in 2006, when he was still planning to contest Iowa. Judge for yourself whether you find it convincing.

As for Barack Obama, winning Iowa was the linchpin of his electoral strategy, and pander he did. And Hillary Clinton? She says she opposed ethanol subsidies on behalf of her New York constituents, but supports them as a presidential candidate—big time.

Nobody, in other words, looks good on this issue right now.