Today, we’ll be liveblogging an important debate between Waterkeeper Alliance President Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Massey Energy CEO and Don Blankenship. Organized and hosted by the University of Charleston, its organizers promise that the event will “advance the national discussion about U.S. energy policy and its impact on jobs, the environment, the economy, and national security.”

We imagine that Blankenship has his hands full prepping his arguments against climate change research and in defense of coal, but hopefully he had a chance to catch up on this morning’s news that 3 activists are now sitting in trees on a Massey mountaintop removal mine site. Meet those folks here. In Charleston, activists have also hung a large banner from a downtown bridge.

The debate starts at 6:30 EST. You can follow our liveblog throughout the afternoon, and try catching the debate online through the following sites: www.wowktv.com, www.wboy.com, www.wtrf.com, www.wvnstv.com, and www.wsaz.com   

You can also submit questions here: http://www.ucwv.edu/events/energy_forum_question.aspx

The climate denial echo chamber is again in high gear trying to assassinate the character of respected scientist Michael Mann of Penn State. Their latest ruse is to squawk that Dr. Mann is the indirect recipient of federal stimulus dollars.

That is not at all surprising since last year $3 billion in federal stimulus funds was provided to the National Science Foundation in addition to their normal budget of about $6 billion. That means that about one third of all research grants from the NSF nation-wide benefited from stimulus money.

Lets drill a little deeper into this smear campaign. Penn State and the University of Hawaii both shared a grant of $770,000 for a research project called “Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model”.

Of this money, Dr. Mann received $57,000 (or 7.5%) over a three-year period, or $19,000 a year. Clearly these climate scientists are in it for the money…

Check out this fine compendium of the world’s most prominent climate cranks in this week’s Rolling Stone. Tim Dickinson succinctly summarizes the wretched roles played by seventeen of the worst offenders in preventing climate progress.

Among the guilty:

• The Profiteer -Warren Buffett CEO, Berkshire Hathaway
• The Disinformer - Rupert Murdoch CEO, News Corporation
• Burning Man - Rex Tillerson CEO, ExxonMobil
• The Drudge of Denial - Marc Morano Founder, Climate Depot
• God's Denier - Sen. James Inhofe Republican, Oklahoma
• The Pundit - George Will Commentator, ABC

Collect them all at the Rolling Stone. Maybe they should come out with action figures too…

The leading elected “climate skeptic” in the United States got a taste of just how marginalized his world-view is when he breezed through Copenhagen last week.

The infamous Senator James Inhofe flew nine hours to Denmark and left hours later when he could only muster a handful of reporters to hear his conspiratorial views on climate change.

According to Politico, Inhofe’s whirlwind visit was meant to deliver two messages: that climate change is a hoax, and that the US will never pass cap and trade legislation.

Decked out in black snakeskin cowboy boots, Inhofe’s loopy views did not seem to win over the few reporters on hand to hear them in the conference centre stairwell.

A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”

His important work done, Inhofe burned another tank of jet fuel flying back to Washington.

On a completely unrelated note, the Oklahoma politician has received $662,506 in contributions from oil companies between 2000 and 2008, making him the leading recipient of oil funding in the US Senate where he is the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

However, one should not assume Senator Inhofe is soley concerned with interests of the oil industry. He also received $152,800 in coal contributions during the 110th Congress.

Ever wonder why Canada is so resistant to moving on climate change? Maybe it has something to do with the 1,500 climate change lobbyists pounding the halls of Parliament.

An illuminating article from the Montreal Gazette spills the beans on the explosion of carbon lobbyists shilling in our nation’s capital.

According to the Gazette, since 1996, an army of 1,570 lobbyists have descended on our nation’s capital with a specific focus on climate change. Their client list has steadily increased since that year from just 13 to 109, and you can bet that they are not representing Greenpeace.

In the first eight months of this year, the oil industry compromised the largest lobby on Parliament Hill representing 24 different companies and associations and of course all the big oil corporations. This lucrative stable of carbon clients also includes ten massive carbon emitters within the coal and mining industry.

The Calgary Foundation is at it again.

This prominent Alberta charity is once more shoveling money through their "Science Education Fund" to organizations and projects that seem specifically unfriendly to real science, but helpful to the Friends of Science.

The Foundation's latest relevant gift was in the amount of $142,685 paid to the Frontier Center for Public Policy.

The last time we heard of this fund was in 2006, when the Calgary Foundation was using it to channel petro dollars through the University of Calgary to the Friends of Science, with the assistance of Dr. Barry Cooper – long-time friend and mentor of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The Friends of Science were at the time running a public campaigning against climate action while denying that their funding was coming from the oil and gas industry.