Smog in Mexico City. Even this smog isn't as murky as our government's reasons for inaction on climate change.

The U.S. government has a lovely new climate website to act as a portal for the latest climate change information and media.  It’s obviously for the general public, because it looks nice, it’s moderately useful (for the public), it explains things simply, and people can find out the basics of what global warming is.   It contains pictures and videos and charts and graphs and supposedly, the latest climate change news.  The old government climate change websites are still there:  Climatescience.gov, which for some reason directs you to http://www.globalchange.gov, and where we are told:

Continue to the new USGCRP website at http://www.globalchange.gov
Visit the old USCCSP website at http://www.climatescience.gov/default.php

Confused?  There is also the EPA climate science site, NOAA and NASA’s climate change data center.  There is also the Energy Information Administration, part of the U.S. government too.  So many government agencies and websites on climate change!   You would think that the government would be drowning in global warming information to act upon — yet even with all this glaringly obvious information, the Congress and the president can’t seem to get anything done on climate change legislation.  In fact, Congress might drop climate legislation this year and go with energy-only  legislation.  This will not be adequate to fight climate change at all, and instead will give a big boost to dirty coal.  The energy-only bill also got a failing score from the CBO.

The recently much touted alternative “energy only” bill would not cost fossil industries, but instead would cost taxpayers $13.9 billion a year, according to this scoring by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office – that has been gathering dust since September. This failing grade from the CBO has received no publicity at all. I can’t imagine why, can you?  The bill would authorize a total of $48.6 billion over the first three years. It would add $13.5 billion each year to the deficit.

. . . .  The “energy-only” bill is co-sponsored by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (R) who led the attempt to overturn the recent EPA ruling on greenhouse gases, and it has strong Republican  and Chamber of Commerce support.

This is a terrible idea!  We need climate change legislation now more than ever.  Yet media and public interest seems to be dimming.  Even our government’s interest seems to be dimming, despite their own growing number of websites about it.

The  newest government climate site was announced via a memorandum to only mild fanfare.  In fact, it’s really just a redundant site.   Maybe they are trying to deflect our attention away from the fact that Congress (or Obama) won’t act decisively on all these mountains of data and information on climate change.   e360 from Yale put it more charitably:

The Obama administration is creating an office to coordinate and report the latest climate change data, a unit analogous to the National Weather Service that [...]