Breakthrough Institute: After months of attacking clean energy standards and efficiency, now they flip-flop to defense #p2 #tcot

I'm not certain anybody can follow the gyrations of The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) anymore.  Over the last few years, it has attacked essentially every plausible solution to our energy and climate problems — and anyone who tries to end our status quo energy policies.

Now, in the span of a few weeks, it has gone from attacking clean energy standards and energy efficiency, especially efficient lighting, to proudly defending those crucial strategies.  If TBI doesn't even read its own reports, should we?

Readers have long asked me to update the term "jumping the shark" — especially since the term is really supposed to apply only to "the point in a television program's history where the plot spins off into absurd storylines," and I have often been using it for institutions that were not serious to begin with.  Certainly another new Breakthrough Institute article can't be said to be jumping the shark (see The Breakthrough Institute's attack on energy efficiency backfires and Debunking Breakthrough Institute's attacks on Obama, Gore, Congressional leaders, Waxman and Markey, Rachel Carson (!), and top climate scientists).

Charlie Sheen, however, seems a better archetype for a group that was never terribly serious, and now seems to issue incoherent statements primarily for the purpose of getting media attention.  Sheen at least is reveling in his self-parody.  As CBS reports, "Charlie Sheen has announced additional tour dates to his upcoming 'My Violent Torpedo of Truth' tour, which kick starts next month."

TBI, however, has been engaged in a wholesale attack on clean energy standards and energy efficiency for months now, using talking points that right-wing think tanks have pushed for years (see The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism: Heritage even opposes energy efficiency).  This shouldn't be terribly surprising to longtime followers of TBI.  After all, last year they partnered with a right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, to push right-wing energy myths and attack the most basic of clean energy policies, a clean energy standard.

The Introduction to the October 2010 report that TBI's Ted Nordhaus and Michael SHEllENberger co-authored with AEI (and Brookings) states:

New mandates, carbon pricing systems such as cap and trade, and today's mess of subsidies are not going to deliver the kind of clean energy innovation required.

rest at http://climateprogress.org/2011/03/16/breakthrough-institute-full-charlie-sheen-energy-efficiency-standards/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29