Joe Romm at Climate Progress reports that:

Both [John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco] have been told not to make news [at their confirmation hearings], so it could be as boring as Energy Secretary Chu’s hearing.

My eight-part series  on Dr. Holdren’s energy-related views documents a troubled history of exaggeration and intolerance that deserves some hard (and unavoidably) embarrassing questions. We will know in a matter of hours if this turns out to be the case.…

After agreement was reached in December 1997 on the Kyoto Protocol, its supporters pronounced that major carbon reductions were feasible and probable. Just do it, as the Nike commercial said. Build it and they will come, as the Field of Dreams movie said. And during the eight years of George W. Bush, Kyoto supporters complained mightily that we were leaving dollars on the ground, so to speak, while running out of climate and time.

Now under Obama…

The funny thing about carbon pricing is that even if you take the latest IPCC report as gospel, and even if you assume all of the governments around the world implement a perfectly efficient carbon tax, even so the “efficient” carbon tax ends up being fairly low for a few decades, and then it ramps up as atmospheric concentrations increase.  (See William Nordhaus’s new book treatment of his “DICE” model for an excellent exposition.)

The intuition behind this result is that even the scary projections of catastrophic climate change don’t occur for more than one hundred years, and so discounting these future damages to the present leads to a modest externality from current emissions of another ton of carbon dioxide.

This phenomenon explains the fury with which partisans in the climate change debate argue over the proper “social discount rate.” …

Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute recently posted on the spat between environmental purist Joe Romm of Climate Progress and the environmental groups NRDC, EDF, and WRI in regard to a brokered cap-and-trade proposal with certain firms within the energy industry.

Taylor was actually nice to Mr. Romm, an intellectual foe who, after their online debate, said in a blog post at Grist that the Cato Institute was intellectually bankrupt. Stated Romm in his post "Greedwashing":…