No, it wouldn't do anything for the environment.

But two Hollywood conservatives (yes, there are some) have called upon the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to rescind the prestigious, profitable gold Oscar statuette that it gave ex-Vice President Al Gore et al two years ago for the environmental movie "An Inconvenient Truth."

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FOR THE RECORD:
A Top of the Ticket post Dec. 4 about former Vice President Al Gore and the film “An Inconvenient Truth” incorrectly reported that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Gore an Oscar. Although Gore appeared in the film and participated in the Academy Awards ceremony, the Oscar was given to the movie for best documentary. The post also refers to the “leak” of controversial e-mails concerning research into global warming but did not explain how the documents were obtained. The e-mails were obtained by computer hackers who then leaked their contents to the public by posting them online.

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Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd, both academy members, are among a small, meandering pack of known political conservatives still believed to be on the loose in the liberal bastion of movie-making.

In 2007, Hollywood's academy sanctified Gore's cinematic message of global warming with its famous statue, enriched his earnings by $100,000 per 85-minute appearance and helped elevate the Tennesseean's profile to win the Nobel Peace Prize despite losing the election battle of 2000 to a Texan and living in a large house with lots of energy-driven appliances.

Chetwynd and Simon were prompted to make their hopeless demand this week by the ... 

It may make for strange bedfellows, but religious groups are marshaling a nationwide campaign to support legislation to combat global warming, a bill that many of their fellow conservatives vehemently oppose.

A group of Orthodox Jews pushed the issue during their annual lobbying effort at the White House and on the Hill last month, stressing that U.S. reliance on Arab oil endangers Israel but also pushing the Bible's instruction to tend the garden. Pope Benedict XVI has joined the environmental bandwagon, earning the nickname "the green Pope" for proclamations like his recent, "The environment is God's gift to everyone."

Today, a group called Faithful America launched a grassroots campaign, complete with petitions and the video below, urging Congress to "support a climate bill that addresses the root causes of climate change and makes needed investments in vulnerable communities already experiencing its devastating effects."

The campaign's title, Day Six, is a reference to the creation story in Genesis, when God made human beings stewards of creation. "On the sixth day, we were made in God's image and given responsibility to care for the earth and each other," says the group's website. "Today, we must fulfill that charge."

For 30 years, evangelical conservatives dominated Republican politics, earning them the sobriquet the Religious Right. Now, environmentally conscious people of faith are testing the waters.

In June, they helped push a cap-and-trade bill through the House. With the healthcare debate and Afghanistan consuming the Senate and with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launching an assault on the bill, and suffering defections from green companies, the bill's supporters are hoping the religious enviros can make the difference again.

"The work first emerged among mainline Protestant and liberal Jews and Catholics," the Rev. Fletcher Harper, executive director of GreenFaith, told U.S. News & World Report. "They were looking to reassert a religious voice for the common good and social justice after 30 years of a conservative evangelical take on public issues."

-- Johanna Neuman

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From the front lines in Pittsburgh:

If you're traveling to Pittsburgh in the next couple of days, don’t forget to pack your goggles.

About the same time as President Obama and wife Michelle were stepping off Air Force One in Pennsylvania, protesters in the city were clashing with the cops.

The protesters weren’t even supposed to be out Thursday. Tomorrow is the day of the official march, and scores of groups have obtained parade permits to take to the streets.

Peacefully, they promise.

Don't hold your breath.

Or wait: Maybe you should, after what happened in Pittsburgh today.

Why? Because there’s been talk for weeks of threats by groups of self-described anarchists ...

... to take action against “corporate” sites such as — wait for it — Trader Joe's.

Why else? Because the march Thursday afternoon started out peacefully. Nearly 2,000 people gathered at Arsenal Park, about two miles from the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, where the....

The G-20 summit hasn’t even begun in Steel City, and already the protests have started.

Under stormy skies Wednesday morning, a group of Greenpeace protesters scaled Pittsburgh's West End Bridge and hung a banner that read “Danger: Climate destruction ahead.” The banner, and several members of the group, hung off the bridge until some not-so-amused police officers arrived and arrested them.

All told, police said that 14 members of Greenpeace were arrested in connection with the bridge stunt, as well as a protest at a second bridge, and will be charged with a variety of misdemeanors. The security here is tight, bordering on feeling like a military state. The city, which is paying to have thousands of additional police working this week, has stationed cop cars along each bridge and along the roadways leading into Pittsburgh’s riverfront downtown.

In downtown, as military vehicles and police cars patrolled the streets and set up metal-wall barricades, crews of construction workers spent Wednesday afternoon boarding up shop windows and doors with sheets of plywood. Locals worried about potential violence and traffic nightmares, a sentiment shared in storefronts both small (cafes and mom-and-pop grocery stores) and large (offices used by the Catholic Church’s Pittsburgh diocese).

Such concern was fueled by an online list of more than 100 possible locations for antiwar, anti-government, anti-globalization and -- well, insert your favorite anti- group here -- to protest during the two-day gathering. The list, which can be viewed here, was compiled by a local coalition of protest groups, and locations include Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods grocery stores, Starbucks cafes and a few strip clubs.

“I’m staying home and ...

Public opinion polls are showing a dip in the president's approval. Critics in Congress are piling on his healthcare plan. And lots of Americans are questioning why the mega-billion stimulus plan has not sparked a new era of job creation.

So the White House must have been less than thrilled at the timing of the Group of 8 meetings in Rome this week. Just at a time when he might have been needed politically on the home front, President Obama found himself in meetings with Russian officials in gilded halls in the Kremlin -- where those officials made sure the streets were empty of the usual Obamamania -- talking about climate control to a few European nations but without China, a critical player on the issue, and getting a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI in the august halls of the Vatican.

Even Obama, at a press conference from Rome, wondered about the wisdom of so many G-whatever meetings in so many forums to so little effect.

The one thing I will be looking forward to is fewer summit meetings, because, as you said, I've only been in office six months now and there have been a lot of these.  And I think that there's a possibility of streamlining them and making them more effective.  The United States obviously is a absolutely committed partner to concerted international action, but we need to, I think, make sure that they're as productive as possible.

The president also had a lot to say about healthcare, Iranian nuclear weapons and food security. You can read the full transcript below.

Then it was off with First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, to meet with the Pope, followed by a trip to Ghana, a country Obama praised as "a functioning democracy [with] a president who's serious about reducing corruption, and ... significant economic growth."

-- Johanna Neuman

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Photo: Activists perform in masks of President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Rome this week where the G-8 failed to get developing nations on board for climate control. Credit: Reuters

President Obama signed an executive order this morning that overruled years of George W. Bush's resistance to environmental fuel standards. Asking the Environmental Protection Agency to revisit its earlier decision, Obama signaled to California and a dozen other states that they can now impose their own tough auto emission benchmarks with federal blessings. And he ordered the federal bureaucracy to get going on tougher fuel standards in time for the 2011 model year cars.

"We are at a crossroads," the new president said in fulfilling one of his core campaign promises. "We have the resources to change."

In his first formal event in the East Room of the White House, Obama went through a list of brand name companies -- from Microsoft to Home Depot -- that have recently announced layoffs. Tying the fate of the economy to the urgency of going green, Obama said:

For the sake of our security, our economy and our planet, we must have the courage and commitment to change. It will be the policy of my administration to reverse our dependence on foreign oil while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs.

This was all before noon in the East, before the first week of his presidency was in the books.

In short, Obama made it look easy to go green.

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Getty Images

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Let's see, California or Poland in December? Which would it be?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made his choice. And it wasn't Poznan.

Even for a U.N. Climate Change Conference, which seems to happen somewhere just about every week. What's the carbon footprint of 10,000 delegates all flying to one place to talk about fewer people flying?

Anyway, our gov's not going. But according to our immaculately-informed colleague Margot Roosevelt, Schwarzenegger did send a delegation and a video message.

"We have no intention of backing away from our historic commitment to the fight against global warming because the economy has slowed down," the governor promised the crowd.

Margot, who has one of the most environmentally-friendly desks in a newsroom that has been unofficially declared a Superfund site, has more on the governor's message and the conference, including a link to a participants' blog that anyone can peek in on.

Margot's item is over on our Greenspace blog. But don't drive there; just click here.

--Andrew Malcolm

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Photo credit: Office of the Governor

As previewed on The Ticket earlier, former Vice President Al Gore met with incoming President Barack Obama today in what's become the Midwestern White House-designate, a federal building in downtown Chicago.

They talked about climate change (it's still changing), the transition (it's still transitioning) and how to develop green jobs as part of an economic stimulus plan (still much to do).  But no details yet. This was for the cameras.

Also, no word from either man about a job or assignment for the ex-senator from Tennessee in the administration of the ex-senator from Illinois.

But here's a news video with what Obama had to say about the meeting and its import, with an opening aside trying to salvage the day's media message about the arrest this morning of his homestate's Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges, surrounding the alleged sale of the governor's nomination to fill Obama's vacant Senate seat.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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We've had all kinds of fun all year writing about Al Gore's nonexistent drive for the Democratic presidential nomination and his extinct desire to inhabit the White House and hang new chad on the windows.

He's been a real good sport and hasn't complained once.

But with today's stunning news out of Chicago, we wonder about that extinct part. Barack Obama's transition people have confirmed that after his workout tomorrow, the president-elect will meet with Gore in Chicago. And someone named Joe Biden will attend too.

Is this one last attempt by Gore to convince Obama to step aside and simply cede the White House to the former vice president, who still thinks he really should have won back in 2000?

Gore's said he's done with elective office. But if he could simply talk Obama out of the job, technically there'd be no election. Just a granting. And Gore could become the first....

Incoming Barack Obama senior advisor David Axelrod issued a fairly stern warning to American automakers today that they'll have to come up with a plan to restructure themselves before the industry receives a federal bailout.

"They're going to have to retool and rationalize their industry for the future. And if they don't do that, then there's very little that taxpayers can do to help them," Axelrod said on ABC News' "This Week."

For emphasis, former Bill Clinton Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, an Obama economic transition advisor and brother to Richard M., the mayor of Chicago, echoed the warning, speaking as a surrogate for the incoming White House Obama team on another Sunday morning news show.

"They have to do it," Daley declared on NBC's "Meet the Press." "The responsibility is on the auto industry and the unions to come back with a plan."

Congress last week delayed any vote on any kind of auto industry bailout plan until next month. Congressional leaders told the three major U.S. auto manufacturers to draw up plans by Dec. 2, with Congress returning to Washington the following week to consider a taxpayer assistance package.

Our blogger buddy Mike Dorning has the rest of this developing story over here on the Swamp.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo credit: Model T Ford Club of America

Rep. John Dingell might have seemed like the House of Representative's immovable object. That was until the fierce defender of the American auto industry met an undeniable force.

The House Democratic Caucus voted 137-122 Thursday to bounce the 81-year-old representative from his chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, replacing him with Henry Waxman, the Beverly Hills representative with a much more environmentally-friendly reputation.

Congress-watchers expect the 69-year-old Waxman to help pave the way for long-delayed measures to increase the full efficiency, and reduce the tailpipe emissions, of American-made cars.

Dingell helped stave off such reforms in his more than two decades serving as either the chairman or ranking Democrat on the key congressional committee.

A grim new landscape -- the Big Three auto makers nearly bankrupt and energy scarcity putting fuel efficiency atop the domestic agenda -- helped Waxman eke out the narrow but stunning victory over Dingell.

Dingell seemed to many to be too cozy with the struggling industry, in part perhaps because his wife, Debbie, is an executive at General Motors and a descendant of the struggling auto giant's founding family.

The, uh, outspoken Waxman has been a force in the House since he joined in the post-Watergate class of 1974, making a splash in recent years as a senior member and chair of the committee that looked into the Hurricane Katrina cleanup and the use of steroids in baseball.

--Jim Rainey

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Photo credit: Gerald Herbert / Associated Press

Wow, has Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger bounced back quickly from the devastation of his good friend John McCain losing the presidential election to this Democrat Barack Obama fellow. (See video below.)

Today at a climate-change summit he's sponsoring at the Beverly Hilton, where the climate never changes, California's GOP chief executive, who's tangled with the nation's GOP chief executive over environmental issues, sounded downright giddy over the impending coronation of Obama into the White House.

"I'm excited to report," Schwarzenegger told the session, "that in January all of this will change, because now there is a new administration coming in."

Schwarzenegger played a videotaped greeting from the president-elect and said the two men were "in sync." The Ticket has the video greeting below, showing Obama praising several governors' environmental work, including the Republicans heading up California and Florida.

Our colleague Michael Rothfield has a full story over on L.A. Now.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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