Yes but at least they're decorative....

Great news: Federally-permitted lightbulbs a cancer risk

It Isn’t Easy Being Green

FROM-American Spectator

By JOHN C. GOODMAN

The case of the missing 100 watt light bulb — just for starters as we begin to face the next four years.


Did you know you can no longer buy a traditional 100 watt light bulb? Did you know you can’t buy gasoline for your car without ethanol?

These are just two of the ways in which environmental laws and regulations are changing your life. Add to them the myriad regulations that will make it more expensive to heat your home this winter or cool it next summer. To hear the environmentalists tell it, these changes are creating jobs — green jobs. But all the evidence suggests that more jobs are being destroyed than created — all the while making the economy less productive and pushing up the prices of almost everything we buy.

The “green jobs” agenda didn’t start with Barack Obama. It actually started under George W. Bush. But whereas Bush may have tolerated it, Obama is an enthusiastic fan. Over the last four years, we’ve spent billions of dollars on conservation and renewable energy. The supernova bankruptcy of the solar power company, Solyndra (with a taxpayer loan guarantee of $535 billion), is only the tip of the iceberg. The Department of Energy has provided $13.6 billion in similar loans to solar and wind production companies.

If President Obama gets his way over the next four years, things are going to get worse. Much worse.

Read entire article

Electric Car Crash

Via-WSJ

Obama's green energy industrial policy turns up in Chapter 11.

Mitt Romney quipped in the first Presidential debate that the problem with the Obama Administration's green energy investing isn't that it tried to pick winners and losers, but that "you pick the losers." He was being generous. Another big green Administration favorite went belly-up on Tuesday with the Chapter 11 filing by battery-maker A123 Systems Inc.

Massachusetts-based A123 is—or was—part of President Obama's grand design to build a U.S. electric-car industry more or less from scratch. The company was founded by entrepreneurs in 2001 to make lithium ion phosphate batteries and attracted private investment from the likes of Sequoia Capital and GE. Then Washington picked up the green energy fad.

As Mr. Obama put it in August 2009, the government would create an "infrastructure of innovation" by doling out "$2.4 billion in highly competitive grants to develop the next generation of fuel-efficient cars and trucks, powered by the next generation of battery technologies, all made right here in the U.S. of A."

In a September 2010 congratulatory phone call to A123's Livonia, Michigan plant, Mr. Obama called it "the birth of an entire new industry in America."

Democrats were explicit that this was an attempt to rehabilitate the idea that government could nurture new industries. As Michigan Senator Carl Levin said in a 2011 speech, A123's factories "are a forceful rebuttal to those who argue against public investment in this field, people who label this 'industrial policy.' In the not too distant past, that label—'industrial policy'—was the kiss of death for any proposal. That's an ideological hang-up that we've now overcome."

One not-so-ideological hang-up: The technology and market for such an industry didn't and still doesn't exist for commercially profitable levels of production. Electric-battery storage in particular has bedeviled technologists for decades. But rather than fund basic research—arguably a role for government—Mr. Obama and his green friends decided to play venture capitalist and industrial planner. With your money.

The Bush Administration gave A123 a $6 million research grant in 2007. But the company hit the jackpot in August 2009 when Mr. Obama's Department of Energy announced a $249 million grant. No strings attached and not even a taxpayer equity stake. The cash was supposed to build three plants in Michigan that would create "more than 3,000 [jobs] by the end of 2012," according to Mr. Obama.

The A123 batteries needed a market, so the government tried to finance that too. In April 2010, the Energy Department gave Fisker Automotive a $529 million loan to develop and produce plug-in hybrid cars—for which A123 would supply the batteries.

Fisker was supposed to be producing cars this year at an old General Motors-United Auto Workers plant in Delaware. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Delaware himself for the plant reopening. But Fisker has struggled with reliability issues, car recalls and management changes. In August, a Fisker Karma vehicle caught fire in a parking lot in California, thanks to a defective cooling fan. The Energy Department froze Fisker's credit line last year.

As for A123, it also struggled with quality-control problems and competition from low-cost producers in Asia. China's Wanxiang Group offered A123 a lifeline in August, but Tuesday that deal fell apart.

Johnson Controls, the Fortune 500 giant, will now pick up the pieces and finance A123's bankruptcy. Johnson Controls received a $299.2 million grant from the Obama Administration in 2009 to build advanced batteries. Johnson Controls is a respected enterprise, but does a company with a fiscal 2011 net income of $1.6 billion really need taxpayer subsidies?

More than any single failure, the larger lesson here is the eternal one about the folly of government industrial policy. Someday someone will find a way to store electric power for long periods, and someday someone may build a commercially viable electric car. We will be the first to cheer.

But the second to last people in the world to know when that day arrives will work for the Department of Energy, and the last will be U.S. Senators. In 2008 President Obama sold voters a fairy tale about millions of "green jobs" that he could conjure up merely by "investing" taxpayer money. The 2012 election is in part a referendum on whether Americans can be fooled again.

Top Green Admits: “We Are Lost!

FROM-The American Interest

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

George Monbiot of the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian has a must-read column in which he admits that because of a whole series of intellectual mistakes, the global green movement’s policy prescriptions are hopelessly flawed.

Read the whole piece for a thoughtful and brutally clear expose of the intellectual bankruptcy of the green movement from one of the smartest people in it. This is what I’ve been getting at for more than a year here: regardless of what is happening to Planet Earth, the green movement does not have coherent and workable solutions.

Greens like to have it both ways. They warn darkly about “peak oil” and global resource shortages that will destroy our industrial economy in its tracks — but also warn that runaway economic growth will destroy the planet through the uncontrolled effects of mass industrial productions. Both doomsday scenarios cannot be true; one cannot simultaneously die of both starvation and gluttony.

Monbiot gets it, and furthermore concedes one of the main arguments of the anti-green case. The ‘problem’ is not a shortage of carbon rich non-renewable futures. The problem is the abundance of these fuels. We are not running out of hydrocarbons; shale natural gas, tar sands and coal offer enormous reserves that can cover our needs for the foreseeable future. We have an abundance of fossil fuel. Moreover, it seems likely that for a very long time to come, fossil fuels will be substantially cheaper and more abundant that expensive renewables. (One should also note that these new fuel sources are found in places like Canada and the United States rather than Saudi Arabia and Iran.)

More, Monbiot also acknowledges the contradictory and inconsistent nature of the green solutions. He acknowledges that there is no prospect for democratic politics to impose the draconian limits on consumption and economic activity that green dogma requires. Every ‘solution’ the greens have come up with has a fatal flaw of some kind; none of it works, none of it makes any sense. As Monbiot concludes,

“All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.”

This is an awesome admission of categorical intellectual, political and moral failure. For two decades greens have arrogated to themselves the authority of science and wrapped themselves in the arrogant certainty of self-righteous contempt for those who oppose them. They have equated skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some corporate largesse.

Monbiot has worked his way through to a cogent description of the dead end the global green movement has reached, but he has not yet diagnosed the cause. In particular, he remains a staunch Malthusian. In his view, humanity is good at creating new ways to destroy itself, but not at finding solutions to the problems we create. Our ingenuity is magically good at finding new fossil fuels, but we have no skill whatsoever at managing the consequences of our discoveries. The unknown technologies of the future will create horrible new disasters, but they will offer no new ways to contain or manage the disruption they cause.

Economic growth is a cancer, in this view. Its bad effects are permanent and cumulative, its blessings are evanescent and ultimately trivial.

Malthusianism is a religious conviction that desperately needs to think of itself as a science. From Thomas Malthus and his mathematical certainties to Paul Ehrlich with his famine timetables and the Club of Rome with its ‘scientific’ predictions of resource exhaustion, Malthusians have made confident predictions about the future and claimed scientific authority for statements that turned out to be contemptibly silly. That is the brutal fate that often awaits people who can’t keep the boundaries between science and religion straight.

It is happening on a massive and humiliating scale to the world’s greens today. Monbiot’s sober assessment of the consequences is dead on; when the greens digest his analysis and go a bit further to ask how they got into this mess, they will be ready to join something that the world truly and urgently needs: a serious and grownup conversation about how to conserve the beauty and viability of our glorious home as the human race continues to develop the extraordinary intelligence Mother Nature has seen fit to give us.

Wise investment opportunity ?

FROM-Inside Bay Area

Bay Biz Buzz: Feds halt BrightSource solar work in Mojave

Oakland-based BrightSource Energy has been ordered by federal regulators to halt construction on two sections of its solar thermal farm in the Mojave Desert due to fresh concerns about the vast project's impact on dozens of desert tortoises. On April 15, the Bureau of Land Management issued an immediate suspension of activities, according to a BLM filing. BrightSource has been relocating tortoises to other areas and building fences to prevent the reptiles from returning. BrightSource says it believes the project can still be completed by 2013. On Friday, BrightSource filed for an initial public offering of its stock that could raise up to $250 million.

Moonbeam's Death Ray

FROM-The American Thinker

California's Renewable Economic Suicide

By Claude Sandroff

Gov. Jerry Brown, flakier now as a recycled geriatric governor than he was as Governor Moonbeam decades ago, has decided to place his state into economic hospice care.  By proudly signing legislation that would require California to obtain 33% of its electric power from renewable sources by 2020 -- the Renewable Energy Bill -- he is telegraphing  that the state does not have much longer to live.

Already plagued with some of the highest energy costs in America, California businesses are now guaranteed even higher costs.  If you learn about a manufacturing-focused company currently domiciled in California that does not have an exit strategy to relocate to Nevada, Arizona, or Texas, or hear of one that is thinking about moving to California, sell their shares immediately.

"Instead of taking oil from thousands of miles away we're taking the sun," Brown beamed before the signing ceremony.

Of course, the only reason Brown and his fellow travelers would have to import oil from thousand of miles away is because they refuse to exploit California's own colossal petroleum reserves estimated recently by the Energy Information Agency at over 3 billion barrels, six times our yearly imports from Saudi Arabia.  The same source estimates California's proven natural gas reserves at over 3,500 trillion cubic feet, a number that grew by 10% between 2008 and 2009.

Intermittent by nature, wind and solar are only remotely feasible when always-on sources  -- coal, natural gas, and nuclear -- provide the base-load power.  Supposedly pagan lovers of the unspoiled earth, the Californian legislators who are leading us over the precipice of insolvency are willing to devote about 300 times more land for wind farms than the land needed to generate the equivalent amount of energy from a nuclear facility. 

It doesn't seem to bother the typical green zombie at all that a wind farm uses 30 times more concrete and 140 times more steel than the energy-equivalent natural gas facility and that the cement industry is the second largest emitter of CO₂ after power generation, with iron and steel production not far behind.  And the giant 100-meter turbine blades will probably not be made in the US but in India.  

Jerry Brown was flanked by Barack Obama's sunbeam Energy Secretary, Steven Chu.  That Chu would be thrilled to join by Brown's signing is no surprise given that Chu's great hope and dream for energy is to "somehow ... figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." 

Well on his way to having succeeded in accomplishing that goal for the country -- the national average for a gallon of gasoline has risen 108% since Obama's inauguration -- Chu will soon be able to boast about having supported the regime that figured out how to significantly increase the cost of electricity in California.

Brown and the bill's sponsor, Senator Joseph Simitian, believe that wind and solar power will reinvigorate the state and were proud to announce that 100 new jobs would be created in the solar cell facility serving as the Silicon Valley backdrop for the signing.

Only the delusional can get excited about 100 green jobs.  In a depressing study from UC-Berkeley in 2010, only 1% of Californians are employed in the green industry despite one absurd, voter-supported green referendum after another.  After all, before the Renewable Energy Bill we had Arnold Schwarzenegger's AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act and, before that in 2008 Californians voted to float a $10 billion bond to support high-speed rail.

While the rest of the country turned sharp right last November, California doubled down on its radical leftist bet and decreased the number of state-wide republican office-holders.  We now have none.  The same election cycle that brought us a conservative-free ruling class also saw Prop 23 fail to delay implementation of AB 32 in hopes of preserving jobs certain to be lost requiring the state to reduce its CO₂ emissions by 12% below current levels by 2012. 

Indeed the business exodus from California has become so self-destructive and violent a stampede that frustrated CA Assemblyman Dan Logue has organized a fact-finding mission to Texas, in hopes of learning what Texas is doing right and California is doing so wrong, when it comes to jobs creation.

It's hard to guess he'll learn anything we don't already know: California's problems are self-inflicted.  We weren't brought to our knees by earthquakes, fires, floods, or droughts though we have our share of all of these, but by multi-generational, one-party inept liberal governance.  For much of this Californians themselves are to blame.

The effectiveness of California's suicidal economic policies is inversely proportional to their supposed environmental good.  Only the Western world's greatest satirists -- a Petronius or a Swift -- could do justice to the lunatic, self-righteous legislative victories of California's governing left.

Certainly reading the output of this imagined literary genius would be a lot more fun than living in the reality of a dying green experiment, governed by a whacked-out septuagenarian, run by one-party legislature voted in by neighbors unable to discern how quickly our light is dying.

Ahhh

FROM-Desert Dispatch

Sierra Club lawsuit against Calico Solar project rejected

by KAREN JONAS

The California Supreme Court rejected a Sierra Club lawsuit against the Calico Solar Project this week.

The Sierra Club filed a lawsuit in January against the project because it said the California Energy Commission had approved the Calico project improperly and did not take into account potential harm to plants and animals within the project boundary.

A spokesman for the Calico project declined to comment on the rejection of the lawsuit, but Dr. Robert Weisenmiller, chair of the California Energy Commission said in a statement that the commission was pleased that the court upheld the power plant review process for Calico.

The Calico solar plant — located near Newberry Springs on BLM land — will produce a total of 663.5 megawatts of solar energy once it is completed

A Modest Proposal to Fix Global Warming

FROM-American Spectator

By Jed Babbin

As surely as the cherry blossoms will emerge after another cold, bleak Washington winter, so will the global warming muezzins resume calling us to prayer at their green altar. But now, thanks to National Geographic's Charles Choi, we are reminded that if global warming actually occurred, any American president can not only end it but reverse it with the push of a button.

In a brilliant but little-noticed article, Mr. Choi reports that a small nuclear war -- one that employed only 0.03 percent of the world's nuclear arsenal -- would result in reversing earth's long-term warming trend and result in global cooling by 2.25 degrees, according to NASA computer models. It's a wonder that Al Gore didn't think of this a decade ago.

The NASA modelers apparently found that explosions of 100 Hiroshima-sized warheads would produce the desired effect by blasting so much dirt and dust into the atmosphere as to reduce the effect of the sun's rays.

The model is based upon historical fact. The eruption of volcanoes, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, actually caused this effect but more briefly. And we don't want to overdo it. The eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora in 1815 caused widespread famine and unrest. In the NASA model, the one hundred warheads being set off would cool the tropics, Europe, Asia, and Alaska by about 5-7 degrees and parts of the polar regions would actually warm a little. The globe's temperature would be cooled by about one degree Fahrenheit for a decade.

Agriculture would be affected, and the earth would, for a while, be "…a colder, hungrier planet." But how much colder and hungrier will the world be after the nuclear explosions than it would be if, say, a carbon tax scheme such as the one Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi wanted were made law? Or if the Kyoto Treaty were revived to impose cap-and-trade on the world's productive economies while those such as China and India were exempted? Or if we allowed the Arab world rebellions to starve us of oil because we are crippled by liberal group-think that prohibits offshore drilling and the construction of new nuclear power plants?

Mr. Choi doesn't report any NASA modeling on those prospects, but from the economic studies of cap-and-tax and such, we know that food will be more expensive and scarce, people will earn less and subsistence farming may become the new fashion on the Upper East Side.

But there is a better way, and it makes use of the best technology and skills of NASA. We need a Kubrick annex to a new Kyoto Treaty.

Stanley Kubrick, the genius who created Dr. Strangelove based on Peter Bryant's novel, centered us on the idea of the "Doomsday machine," a Soviet superbomb designed to destroy all life on earth by creating the "nuclear winter," a century-long version of the Mount Tambora eruption. It was to be detonated automatically in the event of a nuclear attack on Russia.

Under the Kubrick Annex, all of the signatories to a new Kyoto Treaty would agree that their nation would be the site of one of the hundred Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons modeled by NASA. No nation could be trusted to detonate one on its own soil, so someone of unimpeachable character and authority -- the UN Secretary General -- would have to be the keeper of the keys. And, because the SecGen might be someone such as Nancy Pelosi or Ban Ki Moon, the occupant of that office shouldn't be given more authority than to maintain the nuclear weapons and the computer controls over them that would detonate them all simultaneously and automatically if the temperature of the globe rose more than the agreed amount.

Nations such as China and Russia could easily agree to this, given their geographic expanses. But for smaller countries such as France and Great Britain it would be a far greater burden. So the Kubrick Annex would have to allow them to pay other nations to host the warheads that could otherwise destroy vineyards or sheep moors. The nations would be left to their own to negotiate a fair "nuke and trade" rate of payment.

And, of course, there would have to be a Khamenei Codicil to the Kubrick Annex. Nations (and the Palestinians) that have demonstrated a fondness for suicide bombings would not be eligible to host nuclear weapons or to pay for other nations to host weapons for them unwittingly.

The elegance of this system would be obvious to all concerned, especially the global warmists. They would gain the absolute assurance that global warming will not end life on earth, though they would have to give up their moral superiority to a supervening authority. Unfortunately, this would mean that they would all have to get real jobs, which they can seek in government or academia. The smartest of the lot will seek employment at the UN, where the bureaucracy is so magnificently overpaid that they can only be compared to California public sector union members.

For those of us who believe global warming is a scam, the benefits will be immediate and personal. No longer will we have to endure cocktail party lectures about our duty to trade our 500-horsepower Mustangs for Nissan Priuses and Chevy Volts. No more will our college-age children come home for the sole purpose of measuring our carbon footprints and redesigning our lives' plans to achieve social responsibility. We might even be able to buy incandescent light bulbs again even though they use more electricity than their dimmer mercury-filled counterparts. (We will have to think of another solution to another liberally-manufactured problem to restore our ability to buy toilets that flush rather than stir.)

Think of all the green jobs that would be created. The design and manufacture of hundreds of nuclear warheads and computer controls for them, the transportation, maintenance and all that equipment are sure to require the creation of thousands of jobs in hundreds of countries. President Obama, this is your moment. It is a time for international leadership. And it is all within your grasp. Or not.

No Coal, No Power, No Gas

FROM-American Thinker


By Jeffrey Folks

Let's see if I get this straight. During the early February cold spell in the southern plains, when wind chills in Dallas dipped to minus twenty degrees, Texans were going without power to heat their homes and business even as the state was sitting on massive surpluses of natural gas. Even hospitals were having to switch to emergency generating systems. And this in the state with the largest energy production capacity in the continental US.

How was it that Texas suffered an extended period of rolling blackouts at a time when there's a glut of coal and natural gas waiting to be used?

The answer may be quite simple. It seems that a great deal of natural gas got "stuck in the pipes" because there was not enough electricity to operate the pumps to move it along. And there was not enough electricity to operate the pumps because environmentalists had seen to it that plans for new coal-powered generating plants had been shuttered back in 2007. So without the coal, there was no electricity, and without the electricity, there was no natural gas. And since much of the natural gas was intended to supply electrical power generating plants, there was even less electricity to supply the pumps and everything else.

The Texas power blackouts affected millions of homeowners and businesses, as well as vital services such as hospitals, schools, and police and fire services. An extended loss of power during periods of extreme temperatures endangers everyone. It cuts off emergency responders from those in need, and it leaves citizens freezing in their homes. The loss of power reduces modern society to an anarchic level where each is left to fend for himself.

Unfortunately, environmentalists in Texas who blocked the construction of coal-powered plants and shut down others during the last decade did not consider these consequences. All that they thought of was that coal is "dirty," so coal must go. They did not consider what would take its place. Had the coal generating facilities that were planned a decade ago by Texas Power been in place, the rolling blackouts of 2011 might well have been avoided.

As it happened, plans for construction of eight large coal-powered plants were scrapped in 2007 in a private equity deal crafted by the environmental action group, Environmental Defense. Under the agreement, TXU, the Texas power company, agreed to discontinue plans for eight Texas plants, halt construction of coal-powered plants in other states, reduce its carbon footprint to 1990 levels, and endorse the US Climate Action Partnership agenda. This radical transformation of TXU contributed to regulatory approval for takeover of the company by private equity group KKR (Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts).

It is ironic, considering the freezing temperatures that Texans endured during the first week of February, that an agreement to discontinue construction of coal-powered plants was predicated on the now discredited theory of man-made global warming. In order to lower global temperatures, as they imagined, environmentalists pressured TXU to accept a plan that made it impossible for the citizens of Texas to heat their homes.

Can there be any doubt that the agreement to discontinue eight large power plants was a contributing factor in the rolling blackouts of February 2011? The generating capacity supplied by these plants would not have been dependent on the pumping of natural gas. It would have continued to heat homes and businesses, and to power emergency services, throughout the storm. Instead, the state was left depending on an inherently less reliable mix of power sources.

The Texas blackouts are a foretaste of what the rest of the country can expect, given the concerted effort of the Obama administration to shut down coal generating plants and to place obstacles in the way of coal mining. Just weeks ago, the EPA revoked the permit for Arch Coal's Spruce Number One mine in Virginia, one of the largest coal mining projects in the country. For the past two years, in fact, the EPA has pursued a hyper-aggressive program of enforcement that seems intended to price coal electrical generation out of the market. As in Texas, plans for new coal power plants have been scrubbed. They have been replaced by plants powered by natural gas, and by heavily subsidized wind and solar generation.

The problem is that natural gas plants have not come on line quickly enough to replace the coal generation that has been lost, and wind and solar, which make up only 1% of power generation anyway, are inherently unreliable. The wind does not blow all the time, nor does the sun shine at night.  Had the US retained its reliable base of coal power generation, there would be less danger of further blackouts. As it is, much of the country is in danger of experiencing outages similar to those in Texas.

Ironically, the US is in danger of power blackouts at a time when it is exporting greater and greater amount of coal to China and other countries. Already, America is sending 80 million tons of coal overseas, but plans are underway to increase exports by 10% in 2011. Countries overseas understand that coal is the cheapest and most reliable form of energy available for producing electrical power. At a time when America is curtailing its coal generating capacity, China and India are building one new coal generating plant every week. And America is shipping its vital resources overseas even as its citizens are left, quite literally, out in the cold.

Redford Hypocrisy

Obama's Solar Nightmare

FROM-American Thinker

By Ed Lasky

The Democrats have been busy the last two years, and not just reengineering the healthcare industry, restructuring the auto sector, assaulting Wall Street and the financial sector, harming our public finances.  They have also been trying to transform America's energy industry at our expense. This is Barack Obama at his worst -- picking losers and winners by personal whim, donations for dollars deals, and ideological zeal.

Who have been the losers and who have been the winners?  And have the winners just been taking the taxpayers for a ride while their guy has been driving the bus -- with taxpayers sitting in the back?

The Obama administration has tried to kill off the oil industry. Offshore moratoriums have been unilaterally imposed by executive orders and justified using scientific panel studies that were misrepresented-if not distorted- by the administration. The drilling permitting process has been afflicted with sclerosis. Federal lands are becoming less and less available for development.

Obama does not like carbon; he boasted during the campaign that he would bankrupt coal power plants and that his policies would necessarily boost the price of power. Those words were ignored by much of the media, in thrall to the man they so wanted to win. When the rapture swept journalists into ecstasy who cared about little details here and there about Obama's agenda?

He tried and failed to get a cap and trade bill through Congress. He warned that if that effort failed he would do another end run around Congress and rely on his Environmental  Protection Agency to do his dirty work.

Who knows? Maybe Obama has personalized his gripes and made them the basis of public policy. We know how he feels about George Bush and Dick Cheney -- both with strong ties to the oil industry. Maybe he just doesn't care for the South where much of our carbon wealth is found -- a Republican redoubt that he may have just written off as a political wasteland for him.

Hence, gas prices approaching $4 dollars a gallon -- and this is not yet the summer driving season that typically boosts gas prices as demand increases.

This price hike may make New York Times columnist Tom Friedman gleeful. He considers high priced gas (and Chinese authoritarianism) the answer to all ills. He writes column after column on these topics from the baronial splendor of his homes (here is a photo of one of them; he earned his fortune, by the way, by marrying it). Undoubtedly, he salves his conscience regarding the carbon footprints of his homes with checks to buy carbon credits -- and writes more columns castigating us for our addiction to carbon.

But I digress.

How else have the Democrats been trying to change our power industry? By the old-fashioned way: changing the rules of the game (as noted above) and then using our tax dollars to enrich green schemers. The grand champion of spending boosts by Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress has been a 1014% boost in spending for the "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program."  Then there is something called the Green Jobs Labor Fund-which did not even exist prior to 2009 and has received hundreds of millions of dollars.

But wait...there is more.

A Bright Idea: Rescue the Incandescents

FROM-American Thinker

By Ken Blackwell

Why is Paris known as the City of Lights ? Is it because the U.S. Congress banned Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulbs, so he had to take his invention offshore?

Well, not actually. Thomas Edison was an honoree at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition and he did go up in the Eiffel Tower. The Italian government conferred a knighthood at that event on the man who gave the world a brighter idea.

No, Congress in the 1880s would not have been so foolish as to extinguish Edison 's light bulb. But the liberal Congress in 2007 was so foolish. They passed (and, regrettably, President George W. Bush signed) the BULB Act. That cutesy acronym stood for the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act. By that act, incandescent light bulbs were to have been phased out by 2014.

The BULB Act was co-sponsored by Calif. Rep. Jane Harmon (D) and Michigan Rep. Fred Upton (R). Back in those halcyon days of green legislation, of cost-free environmentalism, few people noticed that one of America 's greatest inventions was about to be banned by act of Congress.

Liberals were, quite literally, turning lights out on America -- at least the incandescent kind. Edison 's invention was being treated like asbestos and lead paint. But once consumers got wind of the coming ban, they began hoarding "real" light bulbs.

Soon, documented stories began circulating highlighting negative aspects of the new, eco-friendly compact fluorescent light (CFL) light bulbs. It was as if the Congress had tried to insert a CFL -- Canadian Football League -- championship game in place of the Super Bowl.

American Thinker alerted readers that CFLs use highly toxic mercury in April, 2007. They may last longer than real bulbs, but watch out if you break one or discard it. CFLs can cause migraines and aggravate epilepsy! What does this say about forcing them on health care providers?

Even the New York Times conceded that government nannying had failed to persuade consumers to shift from incandescents. The reason: they are cheap.

Many voters last fall were incandescent in their outrage of Congress' meddling with the economy, with people's way of life-and livelihoods. U.S. factories that make incandescent bulbs were shutting down, laying off American workers, only to have China pick up the slack.

Rush Limbaugh took up the conservative cudgels. When Michigan Congressman Upton rode back into office on the Republican tide last fall, Rush pointed to the BULB Act as Exhibit A in the case against Upton's becoming chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"This would be a tone-deaf disaster if the Republican leadership lets Fred Upton ascend to the chairmanship of the House energy committee," Rush told his millions of listeners. "This is exactly the kind of nannysim, statism...that was voted against and defeated [in the Midterm elections.]"

Three House Republicans -- Joel Barton ( Texas ), Marsha Blackburn ( Tenn. ), and Michael Burgess (Texas) went so far as to introduce legislation to repeal the BULB Act. Fred Upton not only co-sponsored the BULB Act, but he amassed a record of liberalism on social and economic issues. He even messed with Daylight Saving Time! Now, that's really liberal.

Mr. Upton managed to slip into the chairman's seat in the run-up to the 112th Congress, but only by signaling a new openness to changing the BULB Act. "We have heard from the grassroots loud and clear, and will have a hearing early next Congress," Upton said. "The last thing we wanted to do was infringe upon personal liberties -- and this has been a good lesson that Congress does not always know best..." Well, if Mr. Upton didn't see the light, he surely felt the heat.

In banning the incandescent light bulb, Congress substituted its own judgment for the wishes of the American people. They specifically backhanded the American consumer.

They did something else, and this is perhaps the worst thing they did: They spurned the achievement of one of America 's greatest geniuses. In 1914, when "the lights went out all over Europe ," the U.S. Patent Office announced that Thomas Alva Edison had patented a new idea at the rate of one every two weeks for nearly 40 years! No wonder the home-schooled Edison was called "the wizard of Menlo Park ."

Edison left a brilliant legacy -- patenting not only the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture machine -- but also giving Americans a confidence in their own native inventiveness. The world paid Edison an homage it will never pay to Nancy Pelosi.

Edison left some wise words for America , too. They can inspire us to climb out of the hole that many in government are digging for us:

"Be courageous! Whatever setbacks America has encountered, it has always emerged as a stronger and more prosperous nation....Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward"

The Sierra Club's Mission

FROM-American Thinker


By Chuck Rogér

"Don't you care about global warming?" asked a sign carried by a Sierra Club demonstrator. The preachy admonishment packs the same intellectual weightiness as "Free the color purple!"

Well-adjusted people "care" about neither purple nor global warming. Colors and recurring natural climate phenomena fly below the radars of emotionally healthy minds. Earth's atmosphere did indeed heat up a bit from the mid-1800s until 1995. But for the last fifteen years, there has been no "global warming" to "care about."

Considering the downward average temperature trend for Earth's atmosphere so far this century [1], maybe Sierra Clubbers will take to waving signs warning, "Global cooling: Be Afraid; Be Very Afraid." Interestingly, rumor has it that some Sierra members are forming a new club. The debut demonstration is expected to include enraged psychogeologists protesting the lack of consideration for the welfare of granite. The poor stone is violently hacked from Mother Earth's bosom to satisfy humanity's vulgar desire for "buildings."

Exactly how do zealots react when confronted with stunning proof of the pointlessness of their zealotry? Zealots double down. America has seen this brand of arrogance stepped up a notch in congressional Democrats since the lefty agenda was shellacked on November 2. Global warmists are doubling down as well. Since Climategate revealed the massive dishonesty that shaped the global warming hoax, "climate change" goons have ratcheted up the gooniness.

During the demonstration featuring the "Don't you care about global warming?" sign, another sign demanded "No More Coal." Under the unproven claim that CO2 released by coal combustion causes global warming, the Sierra Club wants to ban the cheapest form of electricity production and replace it with unreliable and unaffordable "green" power sources. Christopher Horner reports that legal actions initiated by the Sierra Club and other radical "green" groups have caused a wind and solar power facility construction binge. But those projects offer zero promise for meeting increasing electricity demand.

The Sierra Club's coal-killing tactics seriously threaten America. The Wall Street Journal reports that coal plants will constitute only 10 percent of new power generation capacity by 2013, a 44-percent drop since 2009. Natural gas is taking up the slack. But because natural gas is also used to manufacture plastics, fertilizers, and other chemicals, the higher demand will drive up gas and electricity prices.

...Which is what the Sierra Club wants.

Sierra-style global warmists have a firm Capitol Hill lobbying foothold from which to push the "no more coal" objective. Many more Climategates may be needed to loosen the grip that environmental dogmatists have on campaign contribution-hungry politicians. Worse still, unless and until Obama leaves the White House in 2013, there's little hope for reversing the president's ruinous national energy policy. A Wall Street Journal analysis summarizes Obama's approach: "Phase One: Inaugurate the era of ‘green' energy. Phase Two: Overturn the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Phase Three: Carbon neutrality."

The Sierra Club is doing Obama's bidding. The organization sues to block new and shut down existing coal plants. In its zeal to "save the planet," Sierra is demonizing life-giving technology. Horner again:

The truth is that countries that don't have modern coal-fired electric power have terrible air, soil and water quality. They fall victim to outrageous levels of infant respiratory disease. Their young people are sentenced to spending their days cutting down forests for wood and wading through dung to form patties for fuel. If poor countries had the coal-powered electricity that the Sierra Club wants to take away from Americans, their economies would radically improve and, to use President Obama's words, would "fundamentally transform" their people's lives by creating wealth and improving the environment.

Unfortunately, the President and his political party pander to activist environmental groups that would litigate, legislate and regulate central coal-fired electricity out of existence.

Nonexistence is precisely what the Sierra Club wants for coal-fired electricity plants. To Earth-worshiping ideologues, it matters not one iota that today's coal-burning process is amazingly clean. Nasty humanity may wither for want of coal, but holy Mother Earth must thrive.

Since 2001 alone, the Sierra Club claims to have killed two-thirds of the 150 coal-fired power plants originally proposed for construction. The hopes and wishes of green zealots are now also bolstered by backdoor EPA regulatory methods that help the Sierra Club further its anti-progress agenda.

So, then, primitivists are poised to control the lives of 310 million people through legal maneuvering, scientifically baseless regulation, and political coercion. The Earth worshipers pose a clear and present danger to America's energy supply, and therefore to the people's health and wealth. Continued coal-fired power plant shutdowns will also result in insufficient power generation at the worst possible times -- during demand-intensive temperature extremes. But human suffering does not concern the Sierra Club.

Three years ago, I witnessed a cocktail-sipping San Francisco area Sierra Club attorney sit and hold court with enthralled listeners. The attorney described the pleasure that she derives from inflicting economic pain on manufacturers and sending "messages" to consumers of capitalists' products. I wondered aloud if her computer, refrigerator, TV, phones, and air conditioners were powered by electricity. Court spectators chuckled. But the jab flew over the head that sported the up-tilted chin, spittle-flinging lips, and angry eyes peering down a nose with nostrils flaring each time the brain recalled a legal victory over planet-hating wretches.

Apocalypse Now! (Or Pretty Soon, Anyway)

FROM-American Thinker

By Jeffrey Folks

November 30 was the last day of the Atlantic hurricane season. Those with six-month memory spans will recall that back in May, forecasters at NOAA were predicting "an extremely active" hurricane season, with 14 to 23 named storms and three to seven major hurricanes. The mainstream media was quick to enlarge NOAA's predictions, speculating that storm damage would exceed that of 2005, the year of Katrina. The environmental radicals who populate mainstream newsrooms were licking their chops, panting at the chance to broadcast images of storm victims hanging out on rooftops and to link the devastation to climate change.

As it was, nothing happened. Of the nineteen named storms, none struck the U.S. Aside from some isolated damage in a few Caribbean and Central American outposts (and, uncharacteristically, in Newfoundland), none did major damage.

Oh, well -- there's always 2011, and it's not too early to start prognosticating. The year 2011 will undoubtedly be a highly active hurricane season, with a number of powerful storms striking populated stretches of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The devastation will be immense. Maybe we will finally learn our lesson and stop drilling for oil, mining coal, and chopping down trees.

Or maybe, since hurricanes have refused to cooperate, environmental radicals can turn to something else.

An article from Science magazine published in September makes the case that human activity is causing the mass extinction of ocean life. Authored by John Alroy of Australia's Macquarie University, the article claims that human activity is responsible for extinction of marine life at a rate many times greater than that of the past. As Alroy puts it (assuming from the start that a "current crisis" exists), "The current global crisis may therefore permanently alter the biosphere's taxonomic composition by changing the rules of evolution."

Wow. Not just adding or subtracting a few species, but "changing the rules of evolution." Apparently, as Alroy sees it, the extinction of marine species results in the destruction of lifeforms farther up the food chain. At the top of that food chain sits man, whose practice of modern agriculture and fishing threatens his own survival.

According to Alroy's cronies in the mass extinction camp, the advance of science and technology has ushered in the Anthropocene Epoch -- a qualitatively new era in the earth's history. Unlike the Pleistocene Era, during which human beings had practically no impact on the earth's ecology -- they were too busy struggling to survive amid plummeting temperatures and the advance of the northern hemisphere's great ice sheets -- the Anthropocene Epoch promises to be a Dr. Strangelove era, in which nasty George Bush-like cowboys ride roughshod over the earth's fragile resources, upsetting nature's delicate balance. This would be the same balance that prevailed, for instance, back in the Great Ice Age, or in the era 250 million years ago when the brachiopod family of ocean creatures was rendered extinct by changes most certainly not anthropogenic.

For the environmental faithful, however, there is a simple solution to the purported damage that humans do to the environment. It is the same solution environmentalists have been hawking for fifty years, ever since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Stop using pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and genetically altered seeds. Stop mining and logging. Stop drilling for oil and gas. Stop manufacturing cars, and stop building suburban homes. Stop consuming meat and dairy products, and stop producing so many flatscreen televisions and everything else that comes out of a factory. And stop having children. Just stop. Stop and stare wistfully off into the pleasant green countryside. Stop and relish your single bowl of rice and locally grown turnip. Huddle there in your damp, chilly cave, warm yourself with your hand-woven linen, and bask in the knowledge that when your brief existence draws to a close, you will have had no impact whatsoever on the earth or its millions of species.

Unfortunately for those species, your efforts at technological self-immolation will have practically no effect. As Alroy himself points out, mass extinction has occurred before in geological history. The fact that humans now have a greater impact on the environment than they did during the age of the dinosaur does not alter the basic equation: throughout the earth's history, species have arisen and then become extinct. The idea that the phenomenon of species extinction can somehow be halted just to please the tender sensibilities of environmental elitists is absurd. And the idea that human activity should be radically curtailed in a vain attempt to halt natural fluctuations in climate or sea life is worse than absurd: it is an irrational form of extremism that serves as the justification for an all-out assault on human liberty.

For the environmental true believer, though, there is too much at stake to allow human liberty to stand in the way of centralized control. The fact is that "environmental crisis" has now been institutionalized to the point where powerful interests demand that the media portray the ecosystem as a fragile structure on the perpetual brink of ruin. In the absence of such fear, vast government agencies would have no justification for existing, hedge funds trading carbon credits would collapse, and generous ethanol, biofuel, wind, and solar subsidies would be withdrawn.

Fortunately for the environmental profiteers, there always seems to be a new scientific theory -- itself generously subsidized by taxpayer money (as is Alroy's research, which is funded in part by the National Science Foundation) -- confirming the need for these parasitical institutions. Now that the theory of man-made global warming has been unmasked as the fraud that it is, get ready for the next-generation justifications for global environmental control. Mass extinction is probably as good a candidate as any.


Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture.

Can environmentalism be saved from itself?

FROM-The Globe and Mail


Margaret Wente

Maybe it was just a bad dream.

Just a year ago, 15,000 of the world’s leaders, diplomats, and UN officials were gearing up to descend on Copenhagen to forge a global treaty that would save the planet. The world’s media delivered massive coverage. Important newspapers printed urgent front-page calls for action, and a popular new U.S. President waded in to put his reputation on the line. The climate talks opened with a video showing a little girl’s nightmare encounter with drought, storms, eruptions, floods and other man-made climate disasters. “Please help the world,” she pleads.

After two weeks of chaos, the talks collapsed in a smouldering heap of wreckage. The only surprise was that this outcome should have come as a surprise to so many intelligent people. These people actually seemed to believe that experts and politicians have supernatural powers to predict the future and control the climate. They believed that experts know how fast temperatures will rise by when, and what the consequences will be, and that we know what to do about it. They believed that despite the recent abject failure of Kyoto (to say nothing of other well-intentioned international treaties), the nations of the world would willingly join hands and sacrifice their sovereignty in order to sign on to a vast scheme of unimaginable scope, untold cost and certain damage to their own interests.

Copenhagen was not a political breakdown. It was an intellectual breakdown so astonishing that future generations will marvel at our blind credulity. Copenhagen was a classic case of the emperor with no clothes.

Mercifully, nobody will pay attention to the climate conference at Cancun next week, where a much-reduced group of delegates will go through the motions. The delusional dream of global action to combat climate change is dead. Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme is dead. Chicago’s carbon-trading market is dead. The European Union’s supposed reduction in carbon emissions has been exposed as a giant fraud. (The EU is actually responsible for 40 per cent more CO2 today than it was in 1990, if you count the goods and services it consumed as opposed to the ones that it produced.) Public interest in climate change has plunged, and the media have radically reduced their climate coverage.

The biggest loser is the environmental movement. For years, its activists neglected almost everything but climate change. They behaved as if they’d cornered the market on wisdom, truth and certainty, and they demonized anyone who dared to disagree. They got a fabulous free ride from politicians and the media, who parroted their claims like Sunday-school children reciting Scripture. No interest group in modern times has been so free from skepticism, scrutiny or simple accountability as the environmental establishment.

Perhaps some good will emerge from the wreckage. (Humility, for example.) Now that global warming has stopped sucking all the oxygen out of the room, some of those who care about the planet will turn to other – and more pressing – problems. There are plenty. Humans are encroaching everywhere on habitats and species. Don’t worry about the polar bears, which have survived hundreds of thousands of years of melting and freezing ice. Worry instead about the lions and tigers, which face extinction within our lifetime. Their problem isn’t climate change. It’s us.

A century ago, there were more than 100,000 wild tigers in Asia. Today there are just 3,200. Civilization is squeezing them, and poachers hunt them for their skin and body parts. This week, the unlikely team of Vladimir Putin and Leonardo DiCaprio headlined a 13-country tiger summit in St. Petersburg that is tackling the challenge of making live tigers worth as much as dead ones.

Then there are the lions. They’re not as scarce as tigers – yet – but their habitats are ideal for ranching, and they face increasing pressure from population growth. Or how about the bluefin tuna? This one is close to home – we catch them and sell them to Japan – and Canada is on the wrong side of the issue. If the World Wildlife Fund could whip up as much alarm over the bluefin tuna as it tried to whip up over fictitious drowning polar bears, I might even be persuaded to send them money again.

Before they were sucked into the giant vortex of global warming, environmentalists did useful things. They protested against massive Third World dams that would ruin both natural and human habitats. They warned about invasive species and diseases that could tear through our forests and wreck our water systems. They fought for national parks and greenbelts and protected areas. They talked about the big things too – such as how the world could feed another three billion people without destroying all the rain forests and running out of water. They believed in conservation – conserving this beautiful planet of ours from the worst of human despoliation – rather than false claims to scientific certainty about the future, unenforceable treaties and radical utopian social reform.

“How high a price must the world pay for green folly?” asked the thinker Walter Russell Mead. “How many years will be lost, how much credibility forfeited, how much money wasted before we have an environmental movement that has the intellectual rigour, political wisdom and mature, sober judgment needed to address the great issues we face?”

The answer is too high, too many and too much. Please grow up, people. You have important work to do.

New Game Lets Computer Geeks Save the World from Global Warming

FROM-The Blaze

read article here

California's Destructive Green Jobs Lobby

Silicon Valley, once synonymous with productivity-enhancing innovation, is now looking to make money on feel-good government handouts..
 
FROM-WSJ

By GEORGE GILDER

By GEORGE GILDER
California officials acknowledged last Thursday that the state faces $20 billion deficits every year from now to 2016. At the same time, California's state Treasurer entered bond markets to sell some $14 billion in "revenue anticipation notes" over the next two weeks. Worst of all, economic sanity lost out in what may have been the most important election on Nov. 2—and, no, I'm not talking about the gubernatorial or senate races.

This was the California referendum to repeal Assembly Bill 32, the so-called Global Warming Solutions Act, which ratchets the state's economy back to 1990 levels of greenhouse gases by 2020. That's a 30% drop followed by a mandated 80% overall drop by 2050. Together with a $500 billion public-pension overhang, the new energy cap dooms the state to bankruptcy.

Conservative pundits have lavished mock pity on the state. But as America's chief fount of technology, California cannot go down the drain without dragging the rest of the country with it.

The irony is that a century-long trend of advance in conventional "non-renewable" energy—from wood to oil to natural gas and nuclear—has already wrought a roughly 60% drop in carbon emissions per watt. Thus the long-term California targets might well be achieved globally in the normal course of technological advance. The obvious next step is aggressive exploitation of the trillions of cubic feet of low-carbon natural gas discovered over the last two years, essentially ending the U.S. energy crisis.

The massive vote against repeal of the California law—62% to 38%—supports an economy-crushing drive to suppress CO2 emissions from natural gas and everything else. In a parody of supply-side economics, advocates of AB 32 envisage the substitution of alternative energy sources that create new revenue sources, new jobs and industries. Their economic model sees new wealth emerge from jobs dismantling the existing energy economy and replacing it with a medieval system of windmills and solar collectors. By this logic we could all get rich by razing the existing housing plant and replacing it with new-fangled tents.

All the so-called "renewables" programs waste and desecrate the precious resource of arable land that feeds the world. Every dollar of new wages for green workers will result in several dollars of reduced pay and employment for the state's and the nation's other workers—and reduced revenues for the government.

read article here

Oil: The Real Green Fuel

FROM-NRO

Jnah Goldberg

It’s counterintuitive, but oil is greener than “green” fuels, and the oil spill doesn’t change that fact.

A rolling “dead zone” off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey.

Alas, I’m not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As terrible as that catastrophe is, such accidents have occurred in U.S. waters only about once every 40 years (and globally about once every 20 years). I’m talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins. Such pollutants cause huge algae plumes that result in oxygen starvation in the Gulf’s richest waters, near the delta.
Because the dead zone is an annual occurrence, there’s no media feeding frenzy over it, even though the average annual size of these hypoxic zones has been about 6,600 square miles over the last five years, and they are driven by bipartisan federal agriculture, trade, and energy policies.

Indeed, as Steven Hayward notes in the current Weekly Standard, if policymakers continue to pursue biofuels in response to the current anti-fossil-fuel craze, these dead zones will get a lot bigger every year. A 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that adhering to corn-based ethanol targets will increase the size of the dead zone by as much as 34 percent.

Of course, that’s just one of the headaches “independence” from oil and coal would bring. If we stop drilling offshore, we could lose up to $1 trillion in economic benefits, according to economist Peter Passell. And, absent the utopian dream of oil-free living, every barrel we don’t produce at home, we buy overseas. That sends dollars to bad regimes (though more to Canada and Mexico). It may also increase the chances of disaster, because tanker accidents are more common than rig accidents.


But wait a minute — isn’t that precisely why we’re investing in “renewables,” to free ourselves from this vicious petro-cycle? Don’t the Billy Sundays of the Church of Green promise that they are the path to salvation?

This is infuriating and dangerous nonsense, as Matt Ridley demonstrates in his mesmerizing new book, The Rational Optimist. Let’s start with biofuels. Ethanol production steals precious land to produce inefficient fuel inefficiently (making food more scarce and expensive for the poor). If all of our transport fuel came from biofuel, we would need 30 percent more land than all of the existing food-growing farmland we have today.

In Brazil and Malaysia, biofuels are more economically viable (thanks in part to really cheap labor), but at the insane price of losing rainforest while failing to reduce the CO2 emissions that allegedly justify ethanol in the first place. According to Ridley, the Nature Conservancy’s Joseph Fargione estimates rainforest clear-cutting for biofuels releases 17 to 420 times more CO2 than it offsets by displacing petroleum or coal.

As for wind and solar, even if such technologies were wildly more successful than they have been, so what? You could quintuple and then quintuple again the output of wind and solar and it wouldn’t reduce our dependence on oil. Why? Because we use oil for transportation, not for electricity. We would offset coal, but again at an enormous price. If we tried to meet the average amount of energy typically used in America, we would need wind farms the size of Kazakhstan or solar panels the size of Spain.

If you remove the argument over climate change from the equation (as even European governments are starting to do), one thing becomes incandescently clear: Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don’t use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil. The great and permanent shortage is usable surface land and fresh water. The more land we use to produce energy, the less we have for vulnerable species, watersheds, agriculture, recreation, etc.

“If you like wilderness, as I do,” Ridley writes, “the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power.”

The calamity in the Gulf is heartrending and tragic. A thorough review of government oversight and industry safety procedures is more than warranted. But as counterintuitive as it may be to say so, oil is a green fuel, while “green” fuels aren’t. And this spill doesn’t change that fact.


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What a Piece of Work Is Man: Hubris and the Scientific Illiterates in the MSM

FROM- Big Journalism
by Rich Trzupek

As a scientist, I try to maintain a relatively respectful tone when discussing the lamentable state of journalism vis-à-vis environmental and scientific issues, though I may pepper in the occasional wisecrack designed to spice things up. But when Science correspondent Eli Kintisch’s Op-Ed piece that recently ran in the Los Angeles Times was brought to my attention, I threw up repeatedly. In this case, nothing but a rant will do.

Kintisch collected a few salient facts, but he just couldn’t seem to put them together. It was like playing Pictionary with your disturbingly dimwitted cousin. You draw a creature with big, floppy ears and a fluffy tail and you trace a series of arcs that indicate hopping, but after cousin Dave peers intently at the picture for half a minute, he turns to you and ventures: “Is it a horse?”

In much the same way, Eli Kintisch observes a world in which air pollution emissions have been drastically reduced over the past forty years, duly considers the state of the planet and then concludes: we need more air pollution!

You’re likely to hear a chorus of dire warnings as we approach Earth Day, but there’s a serious shortage few pundits are talking about: air pollution. That’s right, the world is running short on air pollution, and if we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound.

Cleaner air, one of the signature achievements of the U.S. environmental movement, is certainly worth celebrating. Scientists estimate that the U.S. Clean Air Act has cut a major air pollutant called sulfate aerosols, for example, by 30% to 50% since the 1980s, helping greatly reduce cases of asthma and other respiratory problems.

But even as industrialized and developing nations alike steadily reduce aerosol pollution — caused primarily by burning coal — climate scientists are beginning to understand just how much these tiny particles have helped keep the planet cool. A silent benefit of sulfates, in fact, is that they’ve been helpfully blocking sunlight from striking the Earth for many decades, by brightening clouds and expanding their coverage. Emerging science suggests that their underappreciated impact has been incredible.

And why do we need more air pollution, pray tell? To combat the myth of global warming, of course.

If we there were more fine particulate and aerosols in the atmosphere, more of the sun’s rays would be reflected and we would be able to counteract the evil effects of greenhouse gases. Simple!

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Kintisch is correct in every particular – though I don’t for a minute, nor do thousands of my colleagues. Still, let’s assume that a weak greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide can drastically influence the climate of a planet subject to so many other, much more powerful, influences. Let’s assume that man is capable of understanding all of those complex forces so perfectly that we could introduce precisely the right amount of particulate and aerosols so as to create an ideal climate. Even if all of that were true, Kintisch’s “solution” would still be even more idiotic than it sounds.

We are one major volcanic eruption away from freezing our collective butts off. We live on a planet that, in recent geologic time, prefers Ice Ages far more than our current temperate climate, for reasons that nobody actually understands.

And, oh yeah, about that whole volcano thing: when Eyjafjallajokull erupts (the volcano in Iceland currently playing havoc with air travel in Europe) history tells us that Katla – a far larger and much more dangerous volcano – will blow soon afterwards. When Katla goes, and it’s overdue, it will spew so much ash into the atmosphere that we’ll be begging for a little global warming.

Following Eli Kintisch’s advice, that we should pour even more crap into the atmosphere, would only exacerbate and extend such a catastrophic (and natural) cooling event.

There’s only one word to describe people who actually believe that mankind can control nature: MSM journalists.

The editors of the Los Angeles Times are of course free to print any opinion they choose, but it says something about the state of mainstream journalism when those editors can read a piece like Kintisch’s and decide that it merits publication, rather than dumping it in the circular file alongside would-be contributors who are certain that the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group runs the world, or who report that the CIA has planted a mind-control chip in their cranium.

Opinions like Kintisch’s aren’t cutting-edge, they’re over the edge. But when it comes to science and the environment, the “journalists” struggling to right the sinking ship that is the old media can’t begin to tell the difference.

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Green Emperors Must Stand in Line

FROM- AI

Waster Russel Mead

Sometimes, you don’t have to be an emperor to have no clothes. Just being the Prince of Wales can be enough. After all, in May of 2008 Prince Charles warned the world that we had only eighteen months left to save the planet from spiraling climate disasters. Twenty-three months later we are struggling to cope with the resulting chaos and devastation; fortunately the Prince has given us an extension. On March 7 of 2009 he announced that we have 100 months to save the world. There are 87 months still left — at least by the current count. And who but an evil or foolish climate denier can disagree? After all, the Prince speaks with the Authority of Science — and his tailors are the best and his garments are always very grand.

As the dust settles from the climate upheavals of the last few months — the email scandal, the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, the revelations about the flaws in the IPCC methods and reports — the overall pattern looks more and more clear.

First, there’s significant evidence that something unusual is happening to the world’s climate, and a very strong case exists that it is related to human activity.

Second, some important questions remain. Climate science is a young discipline, and the earth’s climate system is extremely complex. Gathering data, interpreting data, developing and testing models, and making predictions all present non-trivial problems. It is likely that as time goes by and our knowledge and methods improve, many of today’s views on climate will be modified, some significantly. It is impossible to predict from our current knowledge base whether the likely revisions will point to increased risks, decreased risks, or a complex mix of increased and decreased risks. It is possible but by no means certain that the changes in our understanding of climate dynamics will lead to improved ideas about how to reduce the impact of human activity on the world’s climate.

This far, much to the annoyance of some readers, my views are more or less compatible with those of mainstream climate scientists and on these underlying facts of the case I’m pretty close (perhaps a bit more cautious) than the article published in a recent issue of the Economist.

Third, the climate change movement is losing ground; in the English speaking world, in China and India, even in Germany, the political climate is turning more hostile.More...
As someone who has always been less skeptical about the science of climate change than about the politics of the issue, I’m not surprised. I’m not even unhappy; the headline policy proposals that the ‘climate change community’ has generated are by and large unrealistic and ill-advised. Concern about the impact of human activity on the environment makes sense; the political program of the climate lobby does not. It is too global and too grandiose ever to be implemented, and the kind of treaties that the movement has sought cannot be delivered by the international system that now exists.

At the national level, the climate lobby is reeling from a series of setbacks. French President Sarkozy has dropped his support for what would have been Europe’s first carbon tax after concluding that the program was contributing to his steep decline in the polls. Australia’s government was handed an embarrassing defeat over a climate change bill; an opposition leader who sided with the government lost his job when his party revolted. In the United States, even the most optimistic proponents of climate change action have drastically scaled back their dreams; the current Senate bill on cap and trade looks more like a subsidy program for energy companies than like a serious effort to reduce America’s carbon use. Polls in the United States are even less encouraging.

As China and India sense that the global balance of power is changing in their favor and also that the climate lobby has lost political momentum in the West, they are looking less likely to take serious action. And generally, the ongoing financial and economic problems in the world have driven climate change far down the list of global priorities — and made it harder for the climate lobby to raise money from private foundations and guilty rich people.

A poll by the German magazine Der Spiegel found that the percentage of Germans “worried” about the effects of climate change has fallen from 58 percent to 42 percent; German government officials are described as “horrified” by the lack of professionalism at the IPCC and German scientists are demanding the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri.

Characteristically the climate lobby is blaming its troubles on the moral imperfections of other people: short-sighted ordinary people too stupid to comprehend the danger, evil climate “deniers” confusing the peasants with misleading charts, energy producers ready to wreck Planet Earth if that will increase the value of their stock options, and cowardly politicians who won’t walk the plank for the most important issue in the history of mankind. Another, less arrogant and obnoxious way to say the same thing is to say that the climate lobby has been unable to develop a strategy that could work in the world we happen to inhabit.

The current New Yorker offers a classic example of clueless hand wringing: “Why, with global warming, is it always one step forward, two, maybe three steps back?” asks Elizabeth Kolbert, citing a number of the cascading political disasters that have overtaken the movement.
Until the climate change movement understands the flaws in its own strategy, it will continue to experience political setbacks even as it repairs its scientific foundations.

There is nothing surprising about the green crack-up. The changes the climate change movement sought were so dramatic, so complex and so expensive, and required so much coordination in so many different countries, that the climate lobby could only hope to prevail by creating an aura of mass panic about global warming. In my first post about ‘climategate’, I wrote that climate scientists, like Dean Acheson at the start of the Cold War, felt they needed to be ‘clearer than truth’ to sell the public on the dangers they saw. It was this that led the movement and its most visible leaders to stress high profile predictions (like the infamous glacier story) that very publicly blew up in their faces.

This was devastating to the movement; its narrative had been that “We are the scientists, the voices of reason; our critics are ignorant cranks.” Thus the ineffable Rajendra Pachauri, utterly incompetent to manage a high profile global scientific institution in its hour of crisis but serenely convinced of his superior wisdom and virtue, tore himself away from his erotic novel writing to dismiss people who dared question his beloved glacier prediction as “voodoo scientists”.

The critics’ narrative was simpler: “The emperor has no clothes.” Climategate and the IPCC meltdown powerfully reinforced the critical narrative. The pompous, wiser-than-thou establishment had been caught with its pants down. The fact that the mainstream media were slow to appreciate the significance of these developments and were slow to grasp how much things had changed only served to strengthen the impression that the critics were right. The mainstream media looked like the courtiers admiring the emperor’s fine new garments while everyone else could plainly see the skinny imperial knees and the saggy royal rear end. It was a big political win for Matt Drudge, Fox News and all the other kids in the crowd shouting “But he’s not wearing anything at all!”

The underlying problem is strategic, not merely one of PR. It turns out that the actual science, as strong as it is, won’t scare enough of the people enough of the time to enact the sweeping changes the climate lobby wants. That may change over time as evidence accumulates, but the climate movement’s plan for a Big Global Fix probably can’t be adopted no matter what the science says. In the meantime the effort to stampede the herd into the corral by hyping the evidence has not only collapsed; it has given skeptics a strategic boost. Future pronouncements by future green poo-bahs will be met with more skepticism and more cynicism than ever before. To the extent that the green lobby is fighting an entrenched conspiracy of rich oil companies, it has just handed its enemies a powerful set of weapons.


But there’s another little point to consider. I hate to bring this up, but when it comes to the possibly disastrous problems that humanity has so far failed to solve, climate change is neither the most immediate or the most deadly. We live with many unsolved problems. Some are even scarier than global warming — like nuclear proliferation, the development of biological weapons of mass destruction, and the rising volatility of the international financial system. It has been crystal clear for more than a century that modern technology makes war so overwhelmingly destructive that it should no longer be allowed; yet the world is no closer to the elimination of war than it was in 1910. Any or all of these may well do us in before Antarctic ice melt drives tsunamis up the Hudson or climate change creates super-cyclones that empty Florida of everything except walking catfish and Burmese pythons.

Given the many dangers humanity faces, and the limited economic and political resources available to counter them, it’s not as clear as Prince Charles thinks that climate change needs to be the number one issue we address in the next 18 or 87 or however many months he thinks we have left. The United States, for example, has only a limited amount of political capital with China and India. Should we put all of our diplomatic chips on the table to stop global warming, or should we prioritize getting their help in strengthening the nuclear non-proliferation regime, arms control, or local issues — like getting India to be more forthcoming in its negotiations with Pakistan, lessening the dangers of both proliferation and nuclear war? Can an American administration survive if the country believes that it has chosen to ignore China’s trade surplus with the United States in order to prioritize global warming? If President Obama is succeeded by a Republican, it’s unlikely that the US commitment to fighting climate change would grow. How much of his political capital should the President spend on global warming now — as opposing to conserving his popularity and his political majority for worries like re-election and support for his disarmament policies?

“Science” provides no answer to questions like these; the climate change movement has not really thought them through.

I suspect that over time the list of issues that are at least as grave as climate change and quite possibly more urgent will grow. The global economy appears headed into a turbulent era; how much of our political capital should be spent on working with China to avoid devastating world depressions that could get us into big trouble (like war) long before climate change can really hit us? The weaponization of biology as our ability to create organisms and make new diseases explodes is likely to generate a host of arms control issues — and the proliferation of biological WMDs is far easier to arrange and harder to stop than the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Terrorists in particular are likely to find ‘loose germs’ much easier to get hold of or even create than ‘loose nukes’.

In some ways, the greens are like a doctor telling a 95 year old man with heart trouble that he has a slow growing form of prostate cancer that is likely to kill him in 15 years. He doesn’t have to be a ‘cancer denier’ to think that this isn’t the issue he needs to focus on right now.

Prince Charles, Rajendra Pachauri and all the other naked green emperors need to get in line. The human condition in the twenty-first century is far graver and more complex than they seem to understand. They are not the only people with an urgent agenda; climate change is neither the only nor the most imminent threat to civilized life. Humanity needs leaders who can face its problems whole, think about how to address them in context, and above all who can act calmly and deliberately — neither being swept away by every passing panic (remember swine flu) nor taking refuge in denial.

Striking that balance will be hard, but as I’ve written before on this blog, the twenty first century is likely to prove the most challenging era humanity has ever known. To play its not inconsiderable part in the the complicated business of getting humanity through this century in reasonably good shape, the environmental movement needs stronger leadership than, so far, has come to the fore. Not even Prince Charles, Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore seem to be up to the job.

But you’ve got to admire the threads.