Greetings from the Red Hot Lies road tour — but this one I had to share.

A Climate Audit reader catches James Hansen & co. at the Goddard Institute in an embarrassing error. Watts Up With That has the update:

Update: Thanks to an email from John S. - a patron of climateaudit.org - we have learned that the Russian data in NOAA’s GHCN v2.mean dataset is corrupted. For most (if not all) stations in Russia, the September data has been replicated as October data, artificially raising the October temperature many degrees. The data from NOAA is used by GISS to calculate the global temperature. Thus the record-setting anomaly for October 2008 is invalid and we await the highly-publicised corrections from NOAA and GISS.

Will the election of Barack Obama increase the chances that Democrats in Congress will reimpose a moratorium on oil exploration off most of the nation's shorelines?

Not if Obama listens to the views of his voters.

Almost 50 percent of the people polled who voted for Obama favored "drilling for oil offshore in U.S. waters where it is currently not allowed," while 45 percent of them opposed it, according to exit polls conducted Tuesday on behalf of major news organizations. Voters for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) supported offshore drilling by a margin of 90 percent.

Despite the margin, the exit polls indicated that the Republican Party's efforts to seize the upper hand on the energy issue fell short, despite entreaties to "drill, baby, drill" from McCain supporters at the GOP convention and on the campaign trail. Only 7 percent of voters polled said that energy policy was the most important policy facing the country, and they split their votes 50 percent for Obama and 46 percent for McCain.

Read rest…

Calls for a clean-energy system in the U.S. have long met with sticker shock. Now, the cost of making the transition -- hundreds of billions of dollars -- is being touted as a selling point.

President-elect Barack Obama and his energy advisers have been making the case that a multibillion-dollar government investment in everything from wind turbines to a "smart" electrical grid is just what's needed to help revive the economy. The lure is millions of government-subsidized "green jobs."

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama argued that spending $150 billion over the next decade to boost energy efficiency would help create five million jobs. The jobs would include insulation installers, to make houses more energy-efficient, wind-turbine builders, to displace coal-fired electricity, and construction workers, to build greener buildings and upgrade the electrical grid.

Stephen Harper

The U.S. gets most of its imported oil from Canada — and the last time I checked, they were not a member of the axis of evil, and are thus a pretty nice place to get oil from. Oil sands, however, are a bug-a-boo with the greens. So, will President Obama play nice with our neighbors in the Great White North, or will he bow to environmental extremism? Canada would like to know:

Coal is the redheaded stepchild of the American energy business. Yes, coal is dirtier than the other fossil fuels. Yes, it pollutes the air and emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than oil or natural gas. And of course, coal mining is a dirty business that scars the earth.

But the U.S. has a surfeit of coal. On a percentage basis, the U.S. has more coal than Saudi Arabia has oil. The U.S. sits atop some 242 billion tons of coal, about 28.6 percent of the world’s coal. At current rates of extraction, the U.S. supply could last 234 years. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, sits astride a mere 21.3 percent of the world’s oil, and at current rates of extraction will run out in about 69 years.