ABC had no problem running an ad from Chevron during the Presidential debates. But guess what? They've turned down an ad supporting clean energy from Gore's Repower America campaign.

Here's the text of the offensive ad.

Is there a way to put Obama and McCain to a simple but powerful "truth test" on their stated support for a global climate treaty?

Yes.

Publicly invite them to agree right now to attend the December UN climate change conference in Poland (COP 14) as the president-elect. Then see who commits.

That’s the latest game plan of grassroots group 350.org. Best part? Citizens are charged with emailing the invites. They’ve already fired off 14,765 at the time of publishing this post. The goal is 35,000. Whatever the number, let's hope it's big enough to force a response from both campaigns.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has just handed out its annual energy efficiency rankings for the US states. Here are the top 10:

10. New Jersey
9. Wisconsin
7. Minnesota (tie)
7. Massachusetts (tie)
6. Washington
5. New York
4. Vermont
3. Connecticut
2. Oregon
1. California

Stats: California earned 40.5 total points, out of 50. Wyoming was dead last with zero. Idaho (number 13) earned "most improved." Wisconsin scored in the top ten (a first). Rhode Island was the most energy-efficient as a percentage of its total electrical sales -- achieving a savings of 1.23 percent.

More to the point: The US states, combined, spent two to three times more than the federal government did on energy efficiency -- the most common-sense and available solution to energy and climate change.

If you want to read a sobering and accessible explanation of the financial crisis, go immediately to John Cassidy's piece in the current issue of the NY Review of Books. It's called He Foresaw the End of an Era. The "he" Cassidy is referring to is George Soros, who has just published a book with a very long title: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means.

If the author had been Warren Buffet, the book would already be a bestseller, and the pundits would be echoing its words all over the place. But this strange European named Soros doesn't quite command the same kind of trust with his brand, and in any case his pronouncements are too inconvenient to the conduct of business as usual. Too bad.

Here's what he wrote well before the recent financial meltdown:

Eventually the US government will have to use taxpayer's money to arrest the decline in house prices. Until it does, the decline will be self-reinforcing, with people walking away from homes in which they have negative equity, and more and more financial institutions becoming insolvent, thus reinforcing both the recession and the flight from the dollar.

The Bush administration and most economic forecasters do not understand that markets can be self-reinforcing on the downside, as well as on the upside. They are waiting for the housing market to find a bottom on its own, but it is further away than they think.

Apparently, we haven't reached the bottom yet. Might be worth listening to what else Soros has to say.

Anyone interested in a solution to the triple challenges of oil dependence, global warming and the sagging economy has to read this new book by Van Jones on how (and why) we should birth a green-collar economic revolution in America.

It is true that we cannot drill and burn our way out of our present economic and energy problems. We can, however, invent and invest our way out. Choosing to do so on a massive scale would have the practical benefit of cutting energy prices enough—and generating enough work— to pull the U.S. economy out of its present death spiral. But the true benefits would be much greater than that.

A serious shift in our energy strategy would open a new chapter in the story of human civilization.

Flip through the book and you'll see that the "new chapter" in question reads like a wish list for massive change: cleantech revolution, millions of good jobs that can’t be outsourced, the birth of a just and green American economy.

If you haven't seen the Saturday Night Live spoof of Thursday's Biden-Palin debate, you can click here and have a look. Says Tina Fey's Palin:

We don't know if this climate change -- or whosie-what's-it -- is man-made or if it's just a natural part of the End of Days.

After the laughter in your belly subsides, consider that it was re-broadcast, in part, on Sunday's Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw. Debate moderator Gwen Ifill was on the show, and she said that Palin, who ignored most of her questions, "blew me off I think is the technical term."

Think Progress put together a compilation of clips from the debate showing Palin reading her prepared lines. She was well-trained, taught how to use any question as an opportunity to deliver her talking points.

Friday, in Part 1 of this post, I distilled the recent findings of the MIT study, On the Road in 2035 (pdf), and explained why a significant reduction in US fleet fuel use is still decades away: for even with aggressive market penetration of new technologies, the fleet turnover rate will be slow. I then predicted the energy impact of America's new CAFE standards: by 2037, gas consumption should be about 33% lower than it was in 2007 from the change.

Today, in Part 2, I size up Barack Obama's plan to get a million PHEVs on the road by 2015 and Andy Grove's idea to convert existing light duty trucks to plug-in hybrids.

Barack Obama: 1 Million Plug-In Hybrid Cars by 2015

Part of the Obama-Biden New Energy for Ameria plan is a proposal to put one million PHEVs on the road by 2015. To motivate purchasers, it includes a $7,000 tax credit. But how much impact would one million PHEVs really have on our gas consumption? Truth is, almost none. Given that one million PHEVs would be somewhat less than one half of one percent of the 240 million car fleet, at best it will reduce gas consumption by, well, one half of one percent.

And yet, while the immediate gas savings are minimal, this is still a worthy idea.

Google likes to tout Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) as "the sleeping giant" of clean power. The United States Geological Survey (USGS), it seems, would wholeheartedly agree.

This week, USGS scientists released the agency’s first assessment in more than 30 years of the electric power generation potential of the nation’s geothermal resource.

What'd they find?

If developed, geothermal could generate 556,890 MW of electricity in the United States. That’s more than 200 times the installed geothermal capacity in the nation today, which stands at 2,500 MW.

Will electric cars and tougher fuel economy standards put America on the super-fast track to oil independence? Not necessarily, says MIT in its recent report, On the Road in 2035 (pdf):

Transitioning from our current situation onto a path with declining fuel consumption and emissions, even in the developed world, will take several decades -- much longer than we hope or realize.

The delay, says researchers, is not for lack of technology but for the time involved -- the time to make a radical new technology ready for mass market, the time for such advances to become pervasive and the long wait for old cars hit the scrap heap.

In fact, even with aggressive market penetration rates of new technologies, it will be difficult to reduce the 2035 fleet fuel use by more than 10 percent below fuel use in 2000.

So, as strategies and policies abound for a more fuel-efficient US fleet, it’s time to assess their worth. Here are three of the latest:

On October 1st a long-standing ban on the commercial development of oil shale on federal lands expired. That means America is now on the edge of an abyss, about to take the plunge into an endless fossil future. The steady march toward this awful future of extended oil addiction is a fact hidden in plain view.

It is a march being aided and abetted by half a billion dollars of oil and coal lobby money, by the recent votes of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and by a media more lap dog than watchdog. Though unintended, even all the campaign talk about a clean energy economy is serving to obscure this clear and present danger.

Oil shale is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels known to man. Its extraction releases two to five times more greenhouse gases than conventional crude oil, and uses vast amounts of water. In Western lands where oil shale deposits are abundant, water is already in scarce supply.

America's energy and climate future will be determined by what the nation decides to do with its deposits of oil shale. There are as much as 1.8 trillion barrels of oil locked up in shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. There's more oil in the shale than there ever was in Saudi Arabia. It's value? More than half a trillion dollars over a 25-year period. It's the most important energy issue there is, and almost no one is talking about it.

Here's what you have to do to extract oil shale. Oil workers start by constructing a five foot thick wall around a 1000-foot square foot cube of the Earth. They drill deep holes into the cube at 25 foot intervals and insert massive electric heating coils. The coils are turned on and left on continuously for two or more years at 650 degrees F. Finally, the oil slides out of the shale. You've heard of electric cars? This is electric oil.

If oil shale gets developed, the nation and the globe will be sent on a path to an endless fossil future and a steep acceleration of global warming pollution. Forget clean energy. It will be lights out, game over.