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CBS Evening News with Katie Coric pretends to be "balanced" in its coverage of events for each candidate, but did nearly nothing about the "breaking news" of Obama's suggestion to kill the American coal industry

Research can be fun. Not only can you correctly spell the name of the newscasters you decry, you can also find out what the candidates said, rather than what somebody told you they said. The SF Chronicle reported this in early 2008, and even had the full audio up for months. You can still find the audio via the Wayback machine. Here is the money quote:

"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted"

This quote was hardly news, and it was not even particularly controversial news until Governor Palin attempted to make it an issue. Senator Obama stated that coal plants can be built, but plants that pollute above a threshold will have to pay for excess pollutants. The US has been doing it for SO2 since about 1990, and there was been an exchange in Chicago for CO2 since 2003. It is called Emissions trading, sometimes called a Cap and Trade system. Perhaps Governor Palin simply did not read that John McCain also supports such a system.

or his association with Bill Ayers.

The press hit on Ayers quite a bit during the primary season, to the point of public exhaustion -- certainly past the point where people cared reading about it. Why would they drill it again during the fall campaign without any new information? And, before you say there was no new information because the media did not dig, take a moment to examine that logic:

1) The media reported X in the summer.
2) The media was biased because they reported no new information beyond X in the fall.
3) There was no new information beyond X found because the media was biased.

It is too bad there is no HTML <circle> tag to make clear the logic here. A far more reasonable explanation of #2/#3 is that there was nothing new to discuss above and beyond what was hashed over in the primaries. Or maybe there was, the mainstream media suppressed it, and outlets like Fox News simply lacked the resources or basic competence to dig themselves, or they too are part of the conspiracy. Possibly, but the Null hypothesis applies to social studies as well as hard science.

Yet they dove (and continue to dive into) the trivial issue of Sarah Palin's clothing...

I frankly do not care how much Palin spent on clothes, and I agree with you the media spent far too much time attacking her on trivialities, when there were more important issues to discuss.

ignoring that Hillary Clinton spent even more on the clothing she wore during her campaign this past year (or had it donated by various famous designers).

When you make a claim, substantiate it. For good or for ill, news outlets reported $150,000 on clothes. It was out of the ordinary for a high-office candidate, and so arguably newsworthy, and and they had data, so they could print it. Without data, they have to shut up, or print am embarrassing retraction. You, on the other hand, assert something as fact without even a 10 second google search. And it is the other side that is biased? Puh-leeze.

Bias is unavoidable. If you lack the judgement to see it in a given news outlet, you owe it to yourself to seek out many competing sources. T

This clearly establishes that he co-founded GIM. This includes a list of just some of the "environmentally friendly" members of CCX, which GIM owns about 10% of. This highlights just one area of concern, Amtrak, who had to settle with the government over violations of the Clean Water Act. This highlights the fact that Gore makes monthly royalty profits from the Zinc mine on his property, which has come under attack because of the environmental damage that occurs when mining Zinc. Need I go on? If you dig deep enough, you'll find that Al Gore isn't as green as you might think.

Carbon trades at $3.75/ton on the Chicago Climate Exchange http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/. They don't do an avoided emissions credit but they are working on it. For a CFL that replaces a 60 W incadescent at 13 W and lasts for 7 years with 4 hours of use per day the avoided electric use is 0.49 MWh and so using the low conversion rate that the exchange uses for renewable electric power http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/news/publications/p df/CCX_Renewable_Offsets.pdf based on displacing gas turbines this comes to 0.18 ton of carbon, or $0.74.

You can get CFLs for 1.89 bulk retail http://www.1000bulbs.com/products.php?cat=13-Watt- Compact-Fluorescents so just the carbon savings are likely coming close to the cost of production.

At $0.09 per kWh electric cost, one also saves $44 per bulb.

So, why would legislation be needed? I think mainly to get people thinking.

LED street lights are begining to get going with a similar boost in efficiency and greater reliablility http://www.cree.com/press/press_detail.asp?i=11712 95242023.
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Switch to solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Carbon trades at $3.75/ton on the Chicago Climate Exchange http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/. They don't do an avoided emissions credit but they are working on it. For a CFL that replaces a 60 W incadescent at 13 W and lasts for 7 years with 4 hours of use per day the avoided electric use is 0.49 MWh and so using the low conversion rate that the exchange uses for renewable electric power http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/news/publications/p df/CCX_Renewable_Offsets.pdf based on displacing gas turbines this comes to 0.18 ton of carbon, or $0.74.

You can get CFLs for 1.89 bulk retail http://www.1000bulbs.com/products.php?cat=13-Watt- Compact-Fluorescents so just the carbon savings are likely coming close to the cost of production.

At $0.09 per kWh electric cost, one also saves $44 per bulb.

So, why would legislation be needed? I think mainly to get people thinking.

LED street lights are begining to get going with a similar boost in efficiency and greater reliablility http://www.cree.com/press/press_detail.asp?i=11712 95242023.
--
Switch to solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Entrants must submit a commercially viable design (the "Design") to achieve the net removal of significant volumes of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least 10 years without countervailing harmful effects (the "Removal Target"). The removal achieved by the Design must have long term benefits (measured over say 1,000 years) and must contribute materially to the stability of the Earth's climate.

Chicago Climate Exchange. Now, we just have to get more companies to sign on.

'Chicago Climate Exchange,® Inc. (CCX®) is a self-regulatory exchange that administers the world's first multi-national and multi-sector marketplace for reducing and trading greenhouse gas emissions.'