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Is Lou still on his angry crusade about the pathetic state of American mass media and how it covers energy and environmental issues? Why yes, I am, and thank you ever so much for asking. Two examples of this particular flavor of media malfeasance leapt onto my screen this morning, and they so neatly illustrate what we're facing in the infowar that I felt they deserved my time and your attention.

Global recession? Must be time for the media's alternative-energy backlash My father used to say of his profession that newspaper editors are the people who come down from the mountaintop at the end of the battle and shoot the wounded. A massive credit crunch and a drop in the price of fossil fuels can mean only one thing to the editors of the traditional media -- an excuse for their favorite activity in the whole world, the backlash story. Faster than you can say "Joe the Plumber" isn't a licensed plumber, his name isn't Joe, and he has a tax lien against him, you can be sure that if the media ever lets itself fawn over you for even a nano-second, it will turn its coverage on a dime and run the minute a few whispy short-term clouds appear in the horizon. And so we have the New York Times story, "Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds," which is supposed to be a clever headline, but the NYT, which accompanies the story with a picture of wind turbines, seems to have missed the irony that wind turbines like strong winds.

The Huffington Post has an interesting post on the main problem facing the Democrats in the upcoming US elections - the conservative media (and the usual vote rigging tactics being put into play once again)

Once again, the week's most important energy news has gone unreported by media in the U.S. Most of the U.S. news media still doesn't understand that the important energy news is happening outside the United States. Once again this week, cameras rolled as the White House and Congress bickered for partisan advantage, this time over offshore oil drilling. Meanwhile, half a world way, three events - one indicative of the growing risk of a shooting war over energy - were completely ignored.

Thom fits recent events in Georgia into a historical context and into the competition for oil. This is a very, very serious situation, what's going on in Georgia, and I want to take it, bring it out to the whole great big picture because the media won't do it. The corporate media won't do it. And the Republican Party definitely won't do it and the Democrats probably won't do it because they're all, by and large, to one degree or another, complicit in how this all came about. So let's just kind of play the way back machine here, all the way back to 1860. In 1860, I think it was 1865 or 1867 [1859], the first oil well, Colonel Drake drilled the first oil well in the United States in Titusville, Pennsylvania, the first gusher and thus began the American era of oil. And we had a hell of a lot of oil in the United States. Pennzoil was the Pennsylvania Oil Company.

"The ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is bringing the mainstream media a little closer to the peak oil debate. It's been out there on the business pages for a while, but it is beginning to make its way into news pages - via comment columns, and in a roundabout way, of course. It's still at the flirtatious stage, but its beginning. It's a hot topic, and few mainstream writers are actually throwing their weight behind the concept of Hubbert's peak (M King Hubbert, left). Right now, they are mentioning peak oil to deny it, but doing so with words that clearly agree with the concepts behind the issue. Perhaps it's a coded way of informing people in the know that the writer is in on the bigger picture, but can't actually come out and say it. Or at least not right away."

The Filipino crew of a boat laden with suspected stolen oil seized in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta region has been shown to journalists. The military "paraded" them in front of local media in Warri, but they denied stealing crude oil.

A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen "earth summit" has even been attempted before in human history. I've been trying to think of examples. Things like the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion come to mind - a hoax out of Russia around the turn of the last century. It has been very consequential in the lives of Jews, and remains an issue in most Middle Eastern countries today, where state media continue to present this most vicious of all anti-Semitic slurs as historical fact.

A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen "earth summit" has even been attempted before in human history. I've been trying to think of examples. Things like the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion come to mind - a hoax out of Russia around the turn of the last century. It has been very consequential in the lives of Jews, and remains an issue in most Middle Eastern countries today, where state media continue to present this most vicious of all anti-Semitic slurs as historical fact.

Wildcat strikes spread to oil refineries and power plants across Britain on Tuesday, after hundreds of workers were sacked, media reports and company officials said. Thousands of workers demonstrated outside the Lindsey terminal in Lincolnshire, northeastern England, where almost 650 contract workers were sacked by French oil giant Total last week. "As far as we are concerned, they are victimised and locked-out people, and it is an official dispute from the moment those notices arrived," said Paul Kenny, head of the GMB union. In a statement, Total called for unions to resume talks over the sacking of 647 workers. "Total is actively encouraging talks to be opened between its contractors and the unions about how to facilitate the return to work of its contracting companies? former workforces," the French company said.

The Western media reported last week on how the German company Urenco shipped nuclear material to Siberia, where the highly toxic waste was stored in containers in the open air. The company has stopped deliveries and will store the material with higher standards in Germany in the future. The radiation warning sign was so small that few passers-by took note in the commuter rail station in Kapitolovo, Russia. Fifty-six steel canisters were sitting there on a summer day three years ago. Just a stone's throw away, people were waiting for trains to take them to downtown St. Petersburg.

The Western media reported last week on how the German company Urenco shipped nuclear material to Siberia, where the highly toxic waste was stored in containers in the open air. The company has stopped deliveries and will store the material with higher standards in Germany in the future. The radiation warning sign was so small that few passers-by took note in the commuter rail station in Kapitolovo, Russia. Fifty-six steel canisters were sitting there on a summer day three years ago. Just a stone's throw away, people were waiting for trains to take them to downtown St. Petersburg.

In the elusive search for the reliable energy source of the future, the prospect of clean coal is creating a lot of buzz. But while the concept-to scrub coal clean before burning, then capture and store harmful gases deep underground-may seem promising, a coalition of environment and climate groups argue in a new media campaign that the technology simply doesn't exist. The Alliance for Climate Protection and several other prominent organizations-including the Sierra Club and National Resources Defense Council-launched a multipronged campaign to "debrand" the clean part of clean coal, pointing out that there's no conclusive evidence to confirm the entire process would work the way it's being marketed. In the campaign's TV ad, a technician sarcastically enters the door of a clean coal production plant, only to find there's nothing on the other side. "Take a good long look," he says, standing in a barren desert, "this is today's clean coal technology."

As Mike wrote a while back, even the Prius can't save Toyota. On Monday the world's biggest car-maker announced that, in contrast to 2007's 2.3 trillion yen operating profit, for the past year the company made an operating loss of 150 billion yen. Furthermore Toyota confirmed they are freezing the scheduled opening of their new Mississippi factory, which was expected to produce new Prius models for the US market. However, the Australian Federal Government believe their deal with Toyota to build a hybrid Camry plant in Victoria is still on track. They are kicking in $35 million AUD on the proviso that it does proceed. The New York Times reports that Toyota's president, Katsuaki Watanabe told the media conference, that "The change in the world economy is of a magnitude that comes once every hundred years," going on to comment, "We are facing an unprecedented emergency." Such that the company apparently has unplugged electric hand dryers at some offices in an effort to cut costs.

The new bailout plan passed by Congress may have put the nail in the coffin on Pickens' dangerous energy proposal. The financial bailout bill passed by Congress may have once and for all put an end to T. Boone Pickens' energy plan. Let me explain. Until the financial meltdown obliterated all other news coverage, T. Boone and his energy plan were everywhere. His book, The First Billion Is the Hardest, is number two on the bestseller list. During the Republican and Democrat Conventions his press conferences were attended by a fawning media, virtually all of who filed stories with the theme "oil man turns wind energy advocate." Indeed, even the more than casual reader might come away believing the Pickens Energy Plan was all about wind energy. T. Boone's web site does little to contradict that impression. It displays nothing but wind turbines.

Dave Roberts has a good post at Grist on an NYT article on the coal industry - Is America ready to quit the enemy of the human race?. "Is America Ready to Quit Coal?" So asks a must-read story by Melanie Warner in the Sunday New York Times. And so, slowly, fitfully, that possibility -- the possibility not just of cleaning up coal or using less coal but eliminating coal -- creeps its way into the American public consciousness. The headline isn't the only thing worth celebrating. I would quibble with some details, but overall this piece comes closer than anything I've ever seen in the national media to getting the big story right.

The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the news media are not sufficiently addressing the severity of climate change at a meeting of U.S. environmental journalists earlier this week. R.K. Pachauri, head of the 2,500-member IPCC, said that unless policies are enacted soon to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, the global perils from shifting weather patterns and sea level rise will become worse in the coming years. To communicate the dangers of climate change, Pachauri urged the annual gathering of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) to report how the most recent IPCC assessment will affect local communities.

Got your attention now? That amount of oil equivalent, three cubic miles, is how much the world uses in a year if you take into account all sources of energy, says Ripudaman Malhotra of SRI International's Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory in Greentech Media. What's more, is that by 2050 at current rates of increase the world will consume nine cubic miles of oil. Pretty sobering, but what is more sobering (it does indeed feel like cold water thrown on the renewable energy industry) is that to replace that amount of energy usage with renewable sources is nigh impossible. Here's Malhotra on the challenge laid before us in a nutshell:

The arrival of more fuel-efficient cars and trucks promising cleaner air and more energy independence is being set back as automakers worldwide scramble to hoard cash in an industry meltdown. Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Japan's Nissan Motor and France's Renault, on Wednesday warned that automakers "can't find the financing" for aggressive development of so-called green cars. In a keynote speech at the L.A. Auto Show media preview, Ghosn said companies must husband cash to survive an auto recession expected to last until 2010.

It will come as a shock to most Americans and the media, but as the election reaches a crescendo on the issue of preparedness and energy, neither presidential candidate - nor anyone in local, state or federal government - has developed a contingency plan in the event of a protracted oil cut-off. It is not even being discussed. Government has prepared for hurricanes, anthrax, terrorism and every other disaster, but not the one threatened daily - a protracted oil stoppage, whether caused by terrorism, intervention in the Persian Gulf or a natural disaster. It is like seeing a hurricane developing without a disaster plan or evacuation route. Our allies have oil shortage interruption contingency plans, but America does not.

From SUV's to long commutes, the American lifestyle is based on cheap gasoline. Cheap energy allows us to live far away from our jobs and to engage in conspicuous consumption contests based on who has the biggest automobile. Now, gas prices have skyrocketed, and higher prices at the pump are hitting us where it hurts. Since we also have a presidential election coming up in November, our pain at the pump has been hijacked and turned into a political issue. There are no quick-and-easy solutions to high gas prices, but the Republican candidate, John McCain, is promoting opening up our coasts to offshore drilling as just that: an easy solution that will result in immediate relief.

T. Boone Pickens is one of America's biggest independent oil producers, so he could be forgiven if he simply chose to sit back and pile up his profits. But the Texas entrepreneur is convinced that America must break its dependence on oil as a major source of energy, and has announced that over the next few weeks he is going to outline in the major media a plan for doing exactly that. He is right on the money, and I am going to listen carefully to what he has to say.