Almost daily Corner bashing part 2: Planet Gore edition

Conservative math:

Sen. John Kerry (how many mansions and private planes do he and Teresa have again??) said: "The house is on fire, and he's [Bush] trying to douse the flames with a watering can. The science tells us that we need to reduce our emissions by 60-80% by 2050 in order to avoid catastrophic damage."

Jeremy Symons of the National Widlife Federation (by the way, has the NWF figured out a way to reduce the substantial, uh, emissions, of methane from cattle and sheep yet?) huffed: "Unfortunately, until we have government mandates to cut global warming pollution from big polluters, this year's good news will be swallowed by the trend of rising pollution levels."

This is another example of the boundless ignorance of the greenhouse gas campaigners: since 1990, GHG emissions from U.S. industry ("big polluters") has been flat; U.S. methane emissions are slightly down in absolute terms, in fact.  The growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions has come overwhelmingly from households and the transport sector—functions partly of rising population (and immigration?? Better not go there if you're a green.).  In other words, when folks say "big polluters," they should look in the mirror. Especially if your name is Kerry or Gore, and you libe in 10,000 square foot houses.

This is both totally wrong and totally irrelevant. First the wrong part. Look at this chart:

What you'll see is that Steven Hayward is calling "residences" "households" and blaming them for the use of all of that "electricity generation". But, like most conservative pundits, he doesn't actually have to know anything to be able to write about important issues, so he gets his point very wrong. Here's the EPA: "Electricity, though produced at power plants, is ultimately consumed in the other economic sectors. When emissions from electricity are distributed among these sectors, the industrial sector accounts for the largest share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation remains the second largest contributor to emissions. Emissions from the residential and commercial sectors increase substantially due to their relatively large share of electricity consumption (e.g., lighting, appliances, etc.), with agriculture consuming little electricity."

So industry is in fact the biggest contributor, and in a growing way, too! Funny that he got that all so backwards! Oops! But let's pretend he was correct, and that industry emissions (in total) had actually been flat for the last 15 years. How does that make what Jeremy Symons says any less true? After all, we have to lower emissions to about 80 percent below their 1990 levels. Achieving that will be impossible if industry emissions stay flat. (Flat, of course, means a zero-percent change, and, surely a fine mathematician, Hayward must know that negative 80 is less than zero.)

Not that pointing out this error will do any good. It is, after all, part of the global warming denialist playbook to pretend, temporarily, to accept the science in order to paint environmentalists as pinko anti-business types. Then, when faced with their actual logical errors, they revert to their more traditional stance of denying that there's any problem to begin with.