So enjoy this from the National Association of Manufacturers and promise to come back when we’re feeling more lively.

Gotta hand it to those climate-change activists, they really know how to botch timing. As what seems like the perfect storm gathers — Al Gore’s hubris and T Boone’s wind-energy gold rush — there’s this news from Alaska: it might be the coldest summer ever in Anchorage. Whoops!

Knowing what we do today, those in Congress against drilling are derelict in their duty and don’t deserve to keep jobs in November.

– So writes Investors Business Daily, which points to 90 billion barrels of oil within our own country’s ability to drill

That’s the issue taken up by Steve Milloy, who’s none too pleased with the oil tycoon’s latest venture into forcing America’s heartland to become a wind farm:

Pickens’ involvement in the alleged swiftboating of John Kerry seems to have been forgiven and forgotten by the paper. But the Times went absolutely over-the-top when it observed that the billionaire Pickens wasn’t in it for the money because “he doesn’t really need it.”

It’s too bad we can’t generate electricity from such hilarity, half-truths and hypocrisy. Pickens and his new friends could power us — as Buzz Lightyear might say — to infinity and beyond.

That’s probably harsher than we would go with here. But it is indicative of the frustration and sense of betrayal many defenders of commonsense energy policy feel now that one of their leading champions seems to have ditched them for a quick (ten billion) buck(s).

There Heritage Foundation has run the key facts:

While American oil consumption has grown only 15% since 1973, electricity use has shot up 115%. Right now the U.S. has 760 gigawatts of power to meet consumption. We will need 135 gigawatts of new capacity over the next decade to keep the lights on, but right now only 57 gigawatts of power are planned. No matter what Barack Obama and Al Gore tell you, alternative energy sources cannot meet demand. Solar is still only one-tenth as efficient as the cheapest fossil fuels. Today 97% of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro power. Wind provides 1% and solar .01%.

And some people want to make fossil fuels more expensive. Go figure.

“But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ “

“. . . So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.”

“In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn’t noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.”

“If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don’t you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now? “

Of course, what we’ve heard ad nauseam are the alarmists claims of disaster. Not evidence, just as Evans points out.

“The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming.”

– Australia’s Dr. David Evans, via the Orange County Register

With his “wizened Texas drawl” billionaire oilman T Boone Pickens is starring in a $58 million TV advertising campaign touting his … um, odd … energy plan and saying we can’t drill our way out of high energy prices. As the NYT’s Timothy Egan writes today:

By implication, anybody who tells you otherwise — including the fellow Texan he helped put in the White House — is a fraud.

This is a political parable for the ages: the guy who was behind one of the knockout punches to John Kerry four years ago is now doing Democrats the biggest favor of the election by calling Republicans on their phony energy campaign.

“Totally misleadin” is the way Pickens describes Republican attempts to convince the public that if we just opened up all these forbidden areas to oil drilling then gas prices would fall. He’s not against new drilling, but he is honest enough to say it wouldn’t do anything.

If this seems like a “wizened” energy guy just spending tens of millions to support a strong moral conviction, consider this factoid:

But, more importantly, Pickens is betting $10 billion in constructing what he says will be the world’s largest wind farm in the gusts of West Texas. If the mighty winds of the American midsection were harnessed, it could free up plentiful natural gas for vehicles — a relatively quick step away from foreign oil.

$10 billion is an awfully big bet, which would explain why he’s pouring tens of millions of dollars and a lot of his credibility on Capitol Hill to supporting the Pickens Plan. Unfortunately for the rest of us, creating a giant windfarm in the middle of America might not be as great as it first seems — there are indeed times when wind ebbs and flows, potentially making the energy produced more expensive than planned. And, more to the point, opening up the offshore drilling will have the practical effect of (even slightly) decreasing our dependence on foreign oil and signaling our resolve to oil-producing countries.

Those are lessons not learned from the current Congressional party in power right now. This morning’s Wall Street Journal takes a very different view from that of Pickens and his NYT admirers, arguing:

The upward pressure on oil prices is caused by rising world-wide consumption and limited growth in supplies. Yet at least 65% of America’s undiscovered, recoverable oil, and 40% of its natural gas, is hostage to the Congressional drilling moratorium.

The Democratic leadership is trying to smother any awareness of their responsibility for high prices. They are also trying to quash a revolt among Democrats who realize that the country is still dependent on fossil fuels, no matter how loudly quasimystical environmentalists like Al Gore claim otherwise.

Basically, we’re back to saying: Drill Here, Drill Now.

You can smell the politics right now. There’s John McCain’s TV ad and simmering fight over a summer gas-tax holiday. Then there’s Al Gore’s latest crusade to change the course of millions of years of evolution in less than a decade — while at the same time getting caught in an embarrassing pollution scenario. Then there’s Nancy Pelosi, saying Bush is a total failure but herself failing to move on domestic drilling.

There’s more today. Via Instapundit, we learn that Democrats who are unwilling to lessen our pain at the pump have found a way not to pay their fair share:

“The committee hosting the Democratic National Convention is using the city’s gas pumps to fill up on fuel, avoiding state and federal highway taxes, officials said today. ‘There’s something there that just doesn’t seem right to me because, in a sense, you’re saying then that the officials who pass the laws are not willing to live by them, and that concerns me,’ Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz said.”

Finally, this morning, there’s the shame of having to take lessons from the French on energy policy.

Given the evidence above, consumers’ negative reaction to high prices at the pump, the fact that Drill Here Drill Now has become bigger than MoveOn, and polling shows Americans are more concerned by energy than the environment at the moment, the political question is: Will Democrats and moderate Republicans cave to a handful of nuts pushing disastrous global warming schemes, or will they cool the rhetoric and focus on more pressing policy concerns and sound solutions?

To get an inside view of those attending the Netroots Nation conference down in Austin last weekend, the Campaign for America’s Future and Democracy Corps took a poll of which issues were most important. According to CQ Politics’ Eric Pfeiffer, “Of those who participated in the survey, 19% said ‘Energy and global warming’ was their top concern, with “The war in Iraq” garnering 11 percent for a fourth place finish.”

That is startling. Just shy of two-to-one attendees at one of the most active political groups in America believe that global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism. Clearly that activist base doesn’t reflect Americans’ preferences by and large, but it is startling nonetheless.

Hmm. The growing popularity of domestic drilling has found itself smack dab in the middle of the presidential race with this video. We hope that the underlying issue won’t get lost in the politics.