More Global Warming Profiteering by Obama Energy Official

Ex-Gore associate and current Obama energy official Cathy Zoi is exploiting global warming for her own mega-gain.

FROM-Pajamas Media

Christopher Horner

Surprising documents made available to this author reveal that Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi has a huge financial stake in companies likely to profit from the Obama administration’s “green” policies.

Zoi, who left her position as CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection — founded by Al Gore — to serve as assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, now manages billions in “green jobs” funding. But the disclosure documents show that Zoi not only is in a position to affect the fortunes of her previous employer, ex-Vice President Al Gore, but that she herself has large holdings in two firms that could directly profit from policies proposed by the Department of Energy.

Among Zoi’s holdings are shares in Serious Materials, Inc., the previously sleepy, now bustling, friend of the Obama White House whose public policy operation is headed by her husband. Between them, Zoi and her husband hold 120,000 shares in Serious Materials, as well as stock options. Reporter John Stossel has already explored what he sees as the “crony capitalism” implied by Zoi being so able to influence the fortunes of a company to which she is so closely associated.

In addition, the disclosure forms reflect that Zoi holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in “founders shares” in Landis+Gyr, a Swiss “smart meter” firm. She also still owns between $15,000 and $50,000 in ordinary shares.

“Smart meters,” put simply, are electric meters that return information about customer power usage to the power company immediately and allow a power company to control the amount of power a customer can consume. These smart meters are a central component of the Obama administration’s plans to reduce electricity consumption as part of the “smart grid.”

In a rare moment of candor, Obama “Energy Czar” Carol Browner said to US News & World Report last year: “We need to make sure that …[e]ventually, we can get to a system where an electric company will be able [sic] to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air conditioner won’t operate at its peak, you’ll still be able to cool your house, but that’ll be a savings to the consumer.” (emphasis added)

Clearly, DoE funding to encourage the adoption of “smart meters” would very likely lead to much increased sales by Landis+Gyr — and a potential windfall for Zoi. But surely Zoi doesn’t participate in the relevant “energy efficiency” policy?

In fact, as a condition of her employment with the Obama administration, while Ms. Zoi maintained significant security holdings in Serious Materials and Landis+Gyr, she promised to “not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that has a direct and predictable effect on the[ir] financial interest” without obtaining a waiver first.

But then, if she doesn’t participate in decisions that could have a “direct and predictable effect” on her Landis+Gyr holdings and she doesn’t participate in decisions that could have a “direct and predictable effect” on her holdings in Serious Materials, it seems worth asking in which decisions she can participate.

What, precisely, is she doing on our dime, and why is she permitted to carry such obvious conflicts of interest that appear to preclude her from working on nearly any matter of substance under her purview?

Doesn’t Zoi’s involvement in these issues raise serious ethical or legal issues? And what happened to the high ethics and complete transparency promised by the Obama administration?

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EPA choking freedom

FROM- OC Register

Mark Landsbaum

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined." –
James Madison

We've previously suggested what to say to a global warming zealot (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/%20-234092--.html), and even what to say to California's warmist-in-chief, Arnold Schwarzenegger (http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/%20-236562--.html).

Unfortunately, the ultimate discussion on global warming may require talking to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. If you thought zealots and celebrities-turned-politicians could be difficult to persuade, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Those who would remake the economy in their own image and conform your lifestyle to their vision of a globally cooler utopia are advancing their quasiholy mission with the heavy hand of the unaccountable, unelected bureaucracy at the EPA.

Call it government by, of and for the bureaucracy. Where's James Madison when we need him?

There's nothing as insulated, nothing as isolated, nothing as arrogant as a federal bureaucracy. Think this thought: "I'd like to have a reasonable discussion with someone who will consider my point of view." Now think: "IRS. FBI. Homeland Security." Ouch. The EPA epitomizes the aloof, authoritarian worst of all federal bureaucracies. Don't expect a warm reception.

Several key decisions begin this spring, not the least of which is the beginning of EPA enforcement. With this in mind, here are some EPA talking points, in case you're able to get a word in edge-wise:

Presumptions

We start with the understanding that this nation's founders never intended a massive government bureaucracy to dictate how Americans must live, what they can and cannot consume or manufacture, let alone how much of the stuff they exhale may legally be emitted. The EPA begins with the assumption that we've got all of this 100 percent wrong.

Change of venue

Congress, bless its misguided hearts, at least is a representative body held accountable by voters. That's why Congress, once hell-bent on shoving down our throats an economy-killing, freedom-squashing carbon cap-and-trade law, has backed off. Politicians still can be cowed by public outrage. That's also why global warming alarmists shifted the venue from the comparatively responsive Congress to the utterly insulated EPA. Faceless bureaucrats don't stand for election.

Changing rules

Once upon a time this overbearing regulatory agency restricted its intrusions to matters that pretty much everyone agreed needed attention. Air pollution was a serious problem not long ago. It's debatable whether the might of the federal government was the only, let alone the best, solution. But at least real pollution was a real problem. The EPA has changed that game, perhaps forever, by declaring CO2 to be a harmful pollutant that must be regulated.


Quasiscience

The excuse the EPA uses to exert its regulatory version of martial law over everyday activities is that the globe allegedly is dangerously warming, and manmade greenhouse gas emissions are to blame. Nevermind, that temperatures are, at most, flat over the past 15 years. The only place a cause-and-effect relationship exists between rising greenhouse gases and rising global temperatures is in manmade computer models. Looking beyond the problem of garbage in and garbage out, history tells us a quite different story. As for blaming mankind for rising temperatures, there were far fewer people and absolutely no smokestacks or Hummers centuries ago when temperatures were higher and CO2 levels much higher.

Building on sand

The EPA, incapable of distinguishing pollutants from harmless air, based its war on global warming on findings of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a governmental body, not a scientific body. The IPCC drew on scientific studies, except for those it excluded. IPCC hand-picked representatives, some of them scientists, summarized the findings, selectively including and excluding from the already-screened conclusions. The IPCC came up with an unsurprisingly political document drawn from sometimes one-sided, other times flatly flawed, research, while ignoring inconvenient contrary evidence. Since last year, there's been news aplenty about the IPCC report's frauds and mistakes. Good enough for government work, apparently.

Real science

The EPA's declaration of CO2 as a pollutant ignores its amply demonstrated benefits. Even if manmade emissions did cause higher temperatures, the consequences are likely beneficial not dire. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change is a network of scientists not funded by governments that stand to gain control. It was established to examine the same climate data used by the U.N.'s panel. But the nongovernmental panel reached "the opposite conclusion – namely, that natural causes are very likely" responsible for whatever changes have occurred in global temperatures. Even so, its conclusion was: "[T]he net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will be beneficial to humans, plants and wildlife."

Arbitrariness on steroids

The 1970 Clean Air Act, which was improperly invoked to regulate CO2, is explicit in determining the level at which atmospheric pollutants trigger mandatory government regulation. As a result of extending Clean Air Act authority to CO2, 41,900 previously unregulated small entities will require preconstruction permits, and 6.1 million previously unregulated small entities will need operating permits. It's impossible for the feds to clamp down on every car, tractor, lawnmower, commercial kitchen or other mom-and-pop establishment. So here's what will happen: Bureaucrats arbitrarily will decide where to draw the line. A line drawn today doesn't mean it won't be redrawn tomorrow. Authority creep is inevitable, except, of course, in the cases of the well-connected, who game the system or grease the skids. Instead of quoting Madison, we should quote George Orwell: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

'It's too late' defense

It can be argued that the EPA is acting rashly based on wrong-headed legal interpretations, and justified this with rigged research with a blind eye to contrary evidence. It might be argued that the EPA should hold off regulating until underlying scientific claims can be verified. Don't hold your breath. "It is impossible to independently test or verify (England's Climate Research Unit's) calculations because raw temperature data sets have been lost or destroyed," noted Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, who has sued to block the EPA diktats.

Fix is in

The EPA's power grab officially began at the end of March with press releases declaring the agency's "final decision" that issuing "construction and operating permit requirements for the largest emitting facilities will begin." Today, the "largest." Tomorrow "the not-so-large?" The next day, who knows? At this rate you might want to hold your breath. Exhaling soon may be an emission law violation.

Nearly last ditch

Congress will have a chance this spring to reassert authority over the bureaucracy when it considers reining in the EPA. A pending resolution by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, would veto the EPA's "endangerment finding" that declared CO2 to be a harmful pollutant. Stay tuned.

Last ditch.

The EPA's unprecedented claim to sovereignty over things that move and many that remain stationary is being challenged in court by no fewer than 15 states' attorneys general, and private plaintiffs, including 500 scientists, who dispute the IPCC's science. The nut of the challenges is that the government exceeded its authority in declaring CO2 a harmful pollutant, and that underlying science is fatally flawed.

Forecast

We're usually optimistic, but the short-term outlook is bleak, and the long-term is bleaker yet – unless someone derails the high-speed, runaway EPA. Otherwise, James Madison's homeland and yours is in for a stormy climate of arbitrary bureaucrats picking and choosing winners and losers, allowing you less and less to say about it as the government expands its control over American life even further.

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Two Senators and the world upside down

The recent election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts has sent a shock wave across the American political scene which is becoming more and more apparent as the days go by. The idea that one Senator, from one state in a single election could cause such a profound shift in the dynamics of the whole spectrum of domestic policy is staggering.

It is a reminder that a single person, a single event in the course of history can transform everything in what amounts to the blink of an eye. Scott Brown's election has also affected policies of other nations that will have global significance that most people are not even aware of (more on that in a bit). But first I wanted to focus on another Senator who with far less publicity, at least in the United States, also had a sudden dramatic affect on his nation and the world.

Last July I wrote briefly about Stephen Fielding a first term Senator in Australia.

For those of you who have not been following the amazing saga of SenatorStephen Fielding in Australia I post this article by him. This single politician is putting the entire Australian emission scheme on hold by simply asking questions which nobody seems to be able to answer. The people who promote this travesty of science for political power are beginning to have their house of cards collapse around them. One can only hope it buries them in the ash heap of history where they belong. BTW Senator Fielding has a degree in engineering and is a first term Senator.

I then linked to his Op Ed where he explained his problem with the answers he was receiving both in Australia and here in the United States about the science of global warming. I wrote a bit more about him recognizing the possible importance of "A man with the world in his hands?"

It is possible that Senator Fielding in Australia may be the most important person in the world. If whatever answers he receives or does not receive turns him against Australia's emissions scheming (ETS) thus killing it, it could change the entire global political process regarding emissions. Time is the alarmist enemy, perhaps even more than skeptical scientist. People can be ignored or marginalized, but declining temperatures and cold winters are eating away at their falling credibility. The longer that a so called "global solution" is postponed the more likely it will be that people will wake up to the deception. It seems though that this Senator cares more about truth than political expediency which is the most one could hope for given the history of this sad affair.

As it turned out he did not get the answers he was looking for and being the key vote on this important legislation, much like Scott Brown here in the United States on Health Care, not only did the ETS (Australia's Cap and Trade) fail, but the leadership of the minority party was replaced and the public has grown more skeptical of the whole global warming hysteria.

The fact that Australia did not pass this ETS was a big blow to the momentum leading up to the Copenhagen conference causing governments around the world to reevaluate their positions on the issues, then came "Climategate". The Copenhagen conference was pretty much a failure despite the attempted spin but they did reach a somewhat muted agreement called the Copenhagen Accord that at least people could point to as progress. Then came the election of Scott Brown.

From a January 23, 2010 article in India's newspaper The Hindu- "India, China won't sign Copenhagen Accord"

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has written to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon seeking a number of clarifications on the implications of the accord that India -- with five other countries -- had negotiated in the last moments of the Copenhagen climate summit in December, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“That letter, and the defeat of the Democrats in the Massachusetts bypoll, has forced the UN to postpone the deadline indefinitely,” an official said. “With the Democrats losing in one of their strongholds, the chances of the climate bill going through the US senate have receded dramatically.

“So if the US is not going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, which was a very weak target anyway, why should we make any commitment even if it does not have any legal teeth?” the official said.

China also appears in no mood to sign the accord.

All this of course virtually insures that any chance the Democrats had of passing Cap and Trade is now gone since both China and India are not even willing to commit to a non binding agreement.

For all intent and purpose not only is cap and trade dead in the United States but any chance for even a "show" global agreement are dead. As I pointed out last summer The longer that a so called "global solution" is postponed the more likely it will be that people will wake up to the deception.

With "Climategate" now under investigation by the House of Commons in Great Britain, calls for the head of the IPCC to resign over conflicts of interest, shoddy science or actually no science at all in the "Nobel Prize winning" IPCC report, the house of cards is indeed beginning to fall.

A new French Revolution too?

"A poll released Wednesday showed that the public appeared to have turned against the planned tax. The survey by pollster ViaVoice showed 51 percent of the French thought the government should abandon it."






France prepares fresh carbon tax plans

FROM-Breitbart

France renewed efforts on Wednesday to become the first big economy to tax harmful carbon emissions, with the government due to thrash out new plans for the measure to curb climate change.

Ministers were due to draw up amendments to a law that was rejected last month by the country's high court, days before it was to kick in -- an embarrassing setback for President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The tax is aimed at encouraging French consumers to stop wasting energy, but the court ruled that too many exemptions created inequalities and unfairly placed the burden of cuts on a minority of consumers.


Sarkozy had fiercely defended the measure in the face of strong public opposition, calling it a "revolutionary" approach in the fight against climate change and making it a pillar of his 2010 budget.

France would be the biggest economy to apply a direct carbon tax, mirroring measures that exist in Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said he would propose plans to preserve most of the earlier bill, vowing not to hit families and key sectors hard, while seeking an agreement on how to tax heavy industry by July.

"We will not touch households, hauliers or fishermen," Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo told reporters.

Industries such as metals and refineries, seen as major polluters, were spared under the earlier tax plan since they were already subject to European emissions quotas.

Borloo announced plans to launch formal talks with companies and authorities on ways to tax industry fairly, possibly through incentive schemes and tax credits.

After this consultation he aims to present a new bill to parliament by May.

While pursuing environmental reforms on the one hand, Sarkozy risks jeopardising another of his major priorities: making French businesses more competitive.

When the bill was struck down last month, numerous industry bodies said they feared that a new version would penalise them, hurting their competitiveness.

The leading business association, Medef, called on Tuesday for the tax to be postponed to 2011 and said it should be introduced throughout the European Union in order to avoid putting French industry at a competitive disadvantage.

"Such an approach would avoid all distortion of competition," said Medef's leader Laurence Parisot.

She added that an EU-level tax would strengthen Europe's stance in fighting global warming after the Copenhagen climate summit last month, where world leaders failed to reach a climate binding deal.

A poll released Wednesday showed that the public appeared to have turned against the planned tax. The survey by pollster ViaVoice showed 51 percent of the French thought the government should abandon it.

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Now..carbon dioxide induced neighborhood feud

Think of how foolish this is. States suing each other over plant food reduction policies that penalize consumers. When people wake up to the fact that carbon dioxide is not pollution and realize what havock this insanity has played on all aspects of their lives....Gore best be hiding on one of those islands that won't be underwater.

FROM-Bismarck Tribune

N.D. likely to sue Minnesota over carbon tax

North Dakota’s attorney general said he expects the state to sue Minnesota over a plan there to tax carbon created by electrical generation.

After discussing the issue with the state Industrial Commission in a closed session this month, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said “It is very likely that we will be suing the state of Minnesota.”

At issue is a measure by Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission to add a fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide to the cost of electrical generation starting in 2012. The majority of electricity in North Dakota is generated by coal-fired power plants, which emit a large amount of carbon relative to other fuels sources. North Dakota officials argue that the move would place an unfair tax on electricity from the state and discourage its use by Minnesota utilities.

Stenehjem said possible legal action would relate to constitutional protections against restrictions on commerce between states.

The North Dakota Legislature in 2007 allocated $500,000 for litigation on the carbon tax proposal, and the Industrial Commission has protested the plan more than once since then. Stenehjem said that he and other officials have met with the Minnesota governor and attorney general and North Dakota officials have exhausted other means of resolving the dispute. He said that a venue or a timeframe has not been chosen for litigation.

Besides their argument that Minnesota’s move is an illegal attempt to regulate utilities outside of that state, Stenehjem said the plan does not take into account technology here to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants by capturing carbon dioxide or converting coal to cleaner burner forms.

“What they’re failing to recognize is that we’re doing much more than Minnesota” in terms of clean coal research, Stenehjem said. “We don’t need Minnesota to come in and say that they love the environment more than we do.”

He said that state officials have invited Minnesota regulators to visit carbon capture projects here, but no one has accepted the offer.

Carbon dioxide produced by the burning of coal and other fossil fuels has been blamed for global warming

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Brrrr, the thinking on climate is frozen solid

FROM-Times Online

Dominic Lawson

Here’s how it is down our way. The oil tank that powers our central heating is running worryingly low, but for days fuel lorries have been unable to navigate the frozen track that links us to the nearest main road. We would have gained much welcome heat from incandescent light bulbs, but as those have been banned by the government as part of the “fight against climate change”, no such luck.

On the good side, the absence of delivered newspapers — even the faithful paperboy has given up the unequal struggle to reach us — means I won’t be getting any more headaches from attempting to read newsprint under the inadequate light shed by “low-energy” bulbs. Nevertheless, the news has reached our Sussex farmhouse that the Conservatives have already begun the general election campaign, covering hoardings nationwide with pictures of David Cameron looking serious.

Many will be appalled by the promise of months of being force-fed with party political argument. There is something much worse than being confronted with non-stop debate, however: it is the prospect of being offered no choice and no debate when all three main parties have the same policy. This is what happened in the general election of 1992, when the Conservative government and its Labour and Liberal Democrat opponents were united in the view that sterling should remain linked to the deutschmark via the exchange-rate mechanism (ERM). This had been forcing the unnecessary closure of thousands of businesses as Bank of England interest rates went up and up to maintain an exchange rate deemed morally virtuous by the entire political establishment — and, indeed, by every national newspaper.

As everyone now knows (and as we deeply unfashionable “ERM deniers” warned at the time), it would all end in tears. A few months after that general election, the re-elected Conservative government was compelled by the forces of reality to abandon this discredited bulwark of its economic policy, a humiliation that destroyed the Tories’ reputation for competence or even common sense.

Now, almost a generation later, we face another election in which the main parties are united in a single masochistic view: that the nation must cut its carbon emissions by 80% — this is what all but five MPs voted for in the Climate Change Act — to save not just ourselves but also the entire planet from global warming. For this to happen — to meet the terms of the act, I mean, not to “save the world” — the typical British family will have to pay thousands of pounds a year more in bills, since the cost of renewable energy is so much higher than that of oil, gas and coal.

The vast programme of wind turbines for which the bills are now coming in will not, by the way, avert the energy cut-offs declared last week by the national grid. Quite the opposite: as is often the case, the recent icy temperatures have been accompanied by negligible amounts of wind. If we had already decommissioned any of our fossil-fuel power stations and replaced them with wind power, we would now be facing a genuine civil emergency rather than merely inconvenience.

There are other portents of impending crisis caused entirely by the political fetish of carbon reduction. As noted in this column three weeks ago, the owners of the Corus steel company stand to gain up to $375m (£234m) in European Union carbon credits for closing their plant in Redcar, only to be rewarded on a similar scale by the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism fund for switching such production to a new “clean” Indian steel plant. That’s right: the three main British political parties — under the mistaken impression that CO2 is itself a pollutant — are asking us to vote for them on the promise that they are committed to subsidise the closure of what is left of our own industrial base.

The collapse of the UN’s climate change summit in Copenhagen makes such a debacle all the more likely. Countries such as India, China and Brazil have made it clear they have not the slightest intention of rejecting the path to prosperity that the developed world has already taken: to use the cheapest sources of energy available to lift their peoples out of hardship, extreme poverty and isolation. Britons may be forced by their own government to cut their carbon emissions — equivalent to less than 2% of the world’s total; but we can forget about the idea that this will encourage any of those much bigger countries to defer their own rapid industrialisation.

Just as the British public never shared the politicians’ unanimous worship of the ERM totem (which is why the voters’ subsequent vengeance upon the governing Tories was implacable), so the public as a whole is much less convinced by the doctrine of man-made global warming than the Palace of Westminster affects to be: the most recent polls suggest only a minority of the population is convinced by the argument. This has caused some of the more passionate climate change catastrophists to question the virtues of democracy and to hanker after a dictatorial government that would treat such dissent as treason. As Professors Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch warned in Der Spiegel last month: “Climate policy must be compatible with democracy; otherwise the threat to civilisation will be much more than just changes to our physical environment.”

The threat of a gulf between a sceptical public and a political class determined — as it would see it — on saving us from the consequences of our own stupidity can have only been increased by the Arctic freeze that has enveloped not just Britain but also the rest of northern Europe, China and the United States. Of course one winter’s unexpected savagery does not in itself disprove any theories of man-made global warming, as the climate change gurus are hastily pointing out. Steve Dorling, of the University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences — yes, the UEA of “climategate” email fame — warns that it is “wrong to focus on single events, which are the product of natural variability”.

Quite so; but it would be easier to accept the point that a particular episode of extreme and unexpected cold was entirely due to “natural variations” if the UEA’s chaps had not been so adept at publicising every recent drought or heatwave as possible evidence of “man’s impact”, and if David Viner (then a senior climate scientist at UEA) had not made a headline in The Independent a decade ago by warning that in a few years “British children just aren’t going to know what snow is”.

A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

After reading this I printed it off and ran out into the snow to show it to my wife, who for some minutes had been unavailingly pounding up and down on our animals’ trough to break the ice. She seemed a bit miserable and, I thought, needed cheering up. “Darling,” I said, “the Met Office still insists that we are enjoying an unseasonably warm winter.”

“Well, why don’t you tell the animals, too?” she said. “Because that would mean they are drinking water instead of staring at a block of ice and I am not jumping up and down on it in front of them like an idiot.”

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Climate change: the true price of the warmists' folly is becoming clearFROM

I wrote about this a couple of times here and here. The possibility that because policies are so centered around AGW that we would be unperpared for a cooling world. This is becoming more and more likely and the lack of an energy policy in the US is going to make it very painful very soon, as is happening in the UK.



from-UK Telegraph

From the Met Office's mistakes to Gordon Brown's wind farms, the cost of 'green' policies is growing, warns Christopher Booker

Impeccable was the timing of that announcement that directors of the Met Office were last year given pay rises of up to 33 per cent, putting its £200,000-a-year chief executive into a higher pay bracket than the Prime Minister. As Britain shivered through Arctic cold and its heaviest snowfalls for decades, our global-warming-obsessed Government machine was caught out in all directions.

For a start, we saw Met Office spokesmen trying to explain why it had got its seasonal forecasts hopelessly wrong for three cold winters and three cool summers in a row. The current cold snap, we were told with the aid of the BBC – itself facing an inquiry into its relentless obsession with “global warming” – was just a “regional” phenomenon, due to “natural” factors. No attempt was made to explain why the same freezing weather is affecting much of the northern hemisphere (with 1,200 places in the US alone last week reporting record snow and low temperatures). And this is the body on which, through its Hadley Centre for Climate Change and the discredited Climatic Research Unit, the world’s politicians rely for weather forecasting 100 years ahead.

Then, as councils across Britain ran out of salt for frozen roads, we had the Transport Minister, Lord Adonis, admitting that we entered this cold spell with only six days’ supply of grit. No mention of the fact that the Highways Agency and councils had been advised that there was no need for them to stockpile any more – let alone that many councils now have more “climate change officials” than gritters.

Then, with the leasing out of sites for nine giant offshore wind farms, there was Gordon Brown’s equally timely relaunch of his “£100 billion green revolution”, designed, in compliance with EU targets, to meet a third of Britain’s electricity needs. This coincided with windless days when Ofgem was showing that our 2,300 existing turbines were providing barely 1/200th of our power. In fact, 80 per cent of the electricity we used last week came either from coal-fired power stations, six of which are before long to be closed under an EU anti-pollution directive, or from gas, of which we only have less than two weeks’ stored supply and 80 per cent of which we will soon have to import on a fast-rising world market.

In every way, Mr Brown’s boast was fantasy. There is no way we could hope to install two giant £4 million offshore turbines every day between now and 2020, let alone that they could meet more than a fraction of our electricity needs. But the cost of whatever does get built will be paid by all of us through our already soaring electricity bills – which a new study last week predicted will quadruple during this decade to an average of £5,000 a year. This would drive well over half the households in Britain into “fuel poverty”, defined as those forced to spend more than 10 per cent of their income on energy.

Finally, following Mr Brown’s earlier boast that his “green revolution” will create “400,000 green jobs”, there was the revelation that more than 90 per cent of the £2 billion cost of Britain’s largest offshore wind farm project to date, the Thames Array, will go to companies abroad, because Britain has virtually no manufacturing capacity.

At last, in all directions, we are beginning to see the terrifying cost of that obsession with “global warming” and “green energy” which for nearly 20 years has had all our main political parties in its grip. For years governments, including the EU, have been shovelling millions of pounds into the coffers of “green” lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and the WWF, allowing them in return virtually to dictate our energy policy. Not for nothing is a former head of WWF-UK now chairman of the Met Office.

The bills for such follies are coming in thick and fast. Last winter’s abnormal cold pushed Britain’s death rate up to 40,000 above the average, more than the 35,000 deaths across Europe that warmists love to attribute to the heatwave of 2003. Heaven knows what this winter will bring. And remember that the cost of the Climate Change Act alone has been estimated by our Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband at £18 billion every year until 2050 – a law that only three MPs in this Rotten Parliament dared oppose. Truly have they all gone off their heads.

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The cool down in climate polls

FROM-National Post

Terence Corcoran,

As the United Nations' Copenhagen global warming catastrophe fades from memory, its emaciated remains quietly bulldozed into the freezing blue Danske harbour, public opinion had few places to go. And so it went nowhere. In fact, according to new tri-national polls released yesterday by Angus Read, the people of Canada, the Unites States and Britain are rapidly losing confidence in the whole enterprise.

Perhaps the most stunning poll result is the general lack of any confidence or hope or belief that Copenhagen could or would ever produce a binding agreement that would force the world's countries to reduce carbon emissions. To the question "Do you think the Copenhagen Accord will become a legally binding treaty in the future?", only 19% of Americans, 16% of Britons and 12% of Canadians said "yes."

Not that there was a whole lot of good feeling about Copenhagen going into last month's assembly. Under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Copenhagen opened with 170 nations clamouring for attention amid growing public doubts about the validity of global warming theory.

Increasing uncertainty shows up in yesterday's poll numbers. Angus Reid surveyed people in all three countries in November and December, before and after Copenhagen. The drop off in public support for the idea that global warming is a fact mostly caused by human activity looks most pronounced in Canada. In November, 63% of Canadians supported global warming as a man-made phenomenon. By Dec. 23, that support had fallen 52%. Among Canadians, 13% are now not sure.

A similar trend has been noted in the United States, where confidence in global warming theory has dropped to 46%, down from 49% in November -- and down from 51% in July last year. In Britain, only 43% believe man-made global warming is a fact, down from 47% in November and from 55% in July.

In all three countries, there are signs of growing skepticism. Part of the latest fall-off may be attributable to Climategate, the release of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. The emails, exchanged among the world's leading climate theorists, show climate science to be a battleground of conflict and uncertainty.

But there may be more going on in the public mind than emailfed skepticism. The emails, after all, received relatively little mainstream media attention, and they were only released in mid-November. The trend has been underway for months, even years, making it difficult if not impossible for politicians looking for a way out of the global warming policy swamp their governments helped create.

Not one of the three leaders of Canada, America or Britain comes out of Copenhagen looking good -- or looking all that bad -- in the minds of their citizens: 47% in Britain were dissatisfied with Prime Minister Gordon Brown's performance in Copenhagen, while 48% of Canadians were dissatisfied with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's. Given that Mr. Harper was subject of nightly television and daily news reports of Canada's role as a "fossil" at Copenhagen, it could have been worse. Fewer Americans (35%) were dissatisfied with President Barack Obama's performance. On the other hand, only 40% were satisfied.

But the waters on global warming political opinion are even murkier than the simple rankings suggest. Take, for example, the 48% of Canadians who were dissatisfied with Mr. Harper's performance. As many as a quarter of their number do not think global warming is a man-made problem. Some think warming is mostly caused by natural changes in climate, and others think global warming is a theory that has not yet been proven. By deduction, one might conclude that Mr. Harper's performance was unsatisfactory to many Canadians because he did not go far enough in opposing the Copenhagen process.

Whatever the case, it is clear that public opinion on global warming is now as muddled as the science seems to be. While there appears to be growing skepticism about the theory of man-made climate change, there still appears to be a willingness to accept measures to curb climate emissions. For example, 72% in Britain support a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. How is that possible when only 43% in Britain believe warming is a man-made problem?

People may just be confused and turned off by the politics. Mario Canseco, vice-president of Angus Reid Public Opinion, said in an interview yesterday that his impression from secondary sampling is that many people were turned off by extremists on both sides. By that he means that radical seizure of public events at Copenhagen, and the extreme positions taken, has served to confuse people rather than rally them. If the trends in the table below show anything, it is that the radicals are losing the battle.


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Rapid City lawmaker: Schools should teach both sides of global-warming

FROM-Rapid City Journal

Schools in South Dakota should teach both sides of the global-warming debate, Republican state Rep. Don Kopp of Rapid City says.

Kopp plans to push that idea during the upcoming session of the state Legislature with a bill that would require publicly funded schools that teach the threats of global warming to also provide students with the skeptical view of climate change.

"If a school is paid for with public funds, if they teach global warming or show Al Gore's video, as most of our schools here in Rapid City did, then they will have to show the opposing view," Kopp said Monday. "I believe that's only fair. If they only hear one side of the story, that's all they get."

Kopp said he has pre-filed legislation in the South Dakota Capitol that would change the law requiring both sides of global warming to be covered in school classes, if the issue is brought up at all. He doesn't intend to include a penalty for schools that don't follow the law but also doubts it would be necessary.

"If it passes, I assume they (the schools) will follow the law and show both sides of the issue," he said.

House Republican leader Bob Faehn of Watertown expects Kopp's bill to face stiff opposition in the legislature. Education officials and school board members are likely to challenge the idea of state lawmakers determining curricula at the local level, he said.

"I can say that from my experience these types of things usually fail, because the schools don't typically like to be dictated to like that," Faehn said. "It's probably going to come down to the fact that that's really a school-board decision, not ours. But who knows?"

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Clearing the Air on the Clean Air Act and Climate Change

FROM-American Thinker

By Harvey M. Sheldon

Green believers give no indication of slowing their quest for carbon dioxide control. On December 7, 2009, coincident with the convening of the since-failed Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the USEPA made final the "finding" that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, threaten human health and the environment.

According to alarmists and the Obama administration, there is a scientific "consensus" that man's activities threaten our planet with detrimental global warming, dangerous sea-level rise, disease, and more destructive storms. Even though the North Pole had open water in the 1940s, and temperatures were higher both in the middle ages and 7,000 years ago, we are said to be in danger. An atmospheric trace gas (CO2) is the supposed culprit, even though plants depend on it to live and there used to be much more of it in the atmosphere.

On December 9, news reports said "the Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a 'command-and-control' role over the process in a way that could hurt business." The threat is to use the Clean Air Act.

This ploy is basically extortion. As an experienced lawyer, I bristle at this brutish tactic to induce business to plead for the mercy of the regulatory guillotine instead of being drawn and quartered.

I think too many law firms and consultants are playing the politically correct game of being silent and just giving their clients notice of new rules. They stay mum on policy out of fear of criticism or loss of client loyalty. This is short-sighted and not really in the best interest of their clients. Counselors and consultants should give meaningful advice, even if it is sometimes unpopular. Given the evidence of data manipulation and falsification by alarmist "scientists" and many of the assumptions or assertions of the IPCC and the alarmists, this "go along" attitude is looking less like prudent caution and more like disbelieving "good Germans" afraid to confront reality.

Most Americans do not understand the chokehold carbon dioxide control would give government over almost everything we do. Giving government the power to allot carbon dioxide gives it essential control over most means of production. This is "the road to serfdom" that the great F.A. Hayek warned about.

Whether global warming is occurring at a significantly increased and dangerous pace over normal variations because of mankind is the issue. Very credible data show and numerous scientists contend that there is little effect on climate from carbon dioxide emissions, and that mankind's contribution of carbon dioxide to the alleged problem is not predominant to boot. I recommend to all the report "Climate Change Reconsidered" on the web at NIPCC.

Public companies must account to their stockholders for material risks from regulations and proposed laws. At this point, the red tape and cost in the laws proposed to deal with global warming pose a higher risk to the health of most American businesses than the changes that may or may not occur in climate. (Indeed, if you want to discuss real climate risk, perhaps you should be discussing the risk of global cooling, which has serious basis in science.)

American businesses now face the prospect of government regulating how they buy and use energy and produce products, falsely pitched as a way to protect the Earth's climate. They need to challenge such regulation. They need to consider saying that carbon dioxide regulation poses a systemic risk to free enterprise and the health of the economy. The "science" demonstrating that global warming is man's fault lacks credible proofs. The very capacity of the so-called general circulation models relied on by the United Nations' IPCC to predict the future has been disproved in several ways. Other important IPCC assumptions are wrong, too. Now that evidence of conscious manipulation of fundamental historic data has been revealed, perhaps the "skeptic" side will get a hearing. If it doesn't, we will be shooting ourselves in the gut.

If Waxman-Markey passes, the federal government will supervise all forms of industrial, residential, and commercial energy use. That bill will charge for carbon, impose a "cap-and-trade" system, and mandate renewable energy standards and energy efficiency requirements for American business and industry. There will be a tight nationwide system of federal supervision and regulation of energy use and climate control efforts reaching down to local building codes and housing inspectors. The 1,427 pages of the bill are a monument to the ambition of some to have rules for everything.

Indeed, even some of the most ardent alarmists say that the bill will do little to change the future climate. However, it will cost staggering sums and countless wasted man-hours. Furthermore, the emphasis on "green energy" in the bill is an engineering pipe dream because the "green" sources relied on and subsidized are inherently inadequate for the task on a national scale, and emphasis on them also would cause hardship in the third world.

The threat to use the Clean Air Act to control carbon dioxide has a somewhat hollow ring to me. I would call the administration's bluff. Let me explain.

The two principal programs that affect business under the Clean Air Act are the Stationary Source programs of Title I and the Motor Vehicle programs in Title II. (Also, there is a separate "acid rain" program that affects utilities primarily and does not include greenhouse gases.) Under Title I, the basic starting point for the development of regulations is the establishment of "air quality criteria." Once those criteria are in place, the states or federal government plan for an emission-control regime that will achieve a healthy or safe level of the pollutant -- i.e. one that will meet the air quality criteria.

The "finding" of the administrator was not made under Title I. In fact, its legality is highly questionable even under Title II. I seriously doubt the EPA can escape a duty to develop national air quality standards under Section 108(b) of the Act based on statutory history and the case law. Promulgating such standards requires consideration of "all relevant science" before it can occur. In short, if this is made into a fight over genuine science, with rules in play about the competence of evidence and witnesses, I have little doubt that the skeptic view will win.

People need to see the wolves in green clothing for what they are: charlatans. Honest environmentalists need to stop their unquestioning clamor, revisit the science, and recognize the truth, lest the very good cause they serve be seriously harmed.

Americans and American business should not knuckle under to this cynical and corrupt power grab. Before new policy and rules are made, we must demand a thorough airing of the climate science with a fair and honest process by a reliable investigating team. It will not be that hard to root out the fudging and falsification of data.

This is the fight that will define the twenty-first century as either a time when mankind advances due to honest enterprise, quality science, and technical achievement...or we are subjugated by government micro-regulation from manipulative control freaks based on false and slanted data from grant recipients with no scruples.

Mr. Sheldon is a Chicago attorney specializing in environmental law. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School. The views expressed are personal and do not reflect any firm or client.

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The Copenhagen PR scam

FROM-National Post



For those stressed by news that negotiators from 192 countries may not reach a comprehensive global-warming deal in Copenhagen before the Earth summit ends Friday, we say ... stop worrying. These extravagant UN get-togethers always produce some sort of a final accord. Witness Kyoto in 1997, where an all-night session produced a compromise deal -- even if all the signatories have spent the last 12 years ignoring it.

As for those who are stressed by the possibility that negotiators will reach a last-minute agreement containing bona fide emission caps that will beggar industrialized nations for the benefit of developing ones, we also say stop worrying. While delegates might sign away the moon amid the giddy glitter of Copenhagen, the realities of domestic politics they face when they return home-- recession, unemployment, budget deficits --mean their pledges will quickly fade to nothingness.

Prospects of a deal have looked bleak all week. First, developing nations scoffed at a European Union offer of an $11-billion fund to help them tackle climate change over the next three years. Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-Ping of Sudan, who has become a sort of de facto leader of developing and underdeveloped nations at the conference, said the EU offer was the equivalent of "providing no finance whatsoever."

We're pretty sure $11-billion is more than $0-billion, but Mr. Dia-Ping's graceless and ungrateful point was clear.

Then the G-77 group of poor nations -- which only at the UN could, in reality, actually be a group of 130 nations, including China, India and Brazil -- staged a brief walkout to emphasize their point that rich nations must agree to even deeper emissions cuts than they agreed to at Kyoto, while also ceasing to insist G-77 nations commit to any hard cuts at all.

The irony is that, amid all this chaos, the environmental ends of the Earth summit have been largely abandoned. Instead, both sides seem focused on negotiating what amounts essentially to a straight-out inter-regional transfer of wealth.

In fact, it became obvious as early as August that we would see no deal that might actually trim carbon emissions enough to have an impact on global warming. In Copenhagen, there is still grandios e talk of saving the planet by reducing emissions by such-and-such a pie-in-the-sky percentage from 2006 levels, or 2000 levels, or even from 1990 levels (the benchmark at Kyoto). But because developing nations were adamant in pre-conference talks that they would not accept binding caps until they were as rich as developed nations, and because developed nations were unwilling to accept Kyoto-plus cuts in their own emissions until developing nations agreed even just to slow their CO2 production, negotiators let slide the science-based environmental issue and focused instead on the money.

The UN and G-77 decided, effectively, to measure the developed nations' concern for the planet in dollars rather than CO2 concentrations and global average temperatures. Canada's government is one of the few that has been openly skeptical of this scheme from the start -- a fact that Canadians should take as a point of pride, no matter how many mocking "Fossil" awards the environmentalists give to Ottawa.

One reason why the EU's aid offer was rejected out of hand is that the UN and G-77 are demanding $11-billion or more each year beginning immediately, jumping to between $100-billion and $200-billion annually by 2020.

In their analysis of this plan, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has calculated the burden on each Canadian household at $3,000 a year, a burden we suspect few Canadians would welcome just to assuage their climate consciences. (Last week, anti-war activists were scandalized to learn that Canadian military spending works out to $75 per taxpayer per month. What is being discussed at Copenhagen is four times as much--and with absolutely no way of determining whether it has any impact on rising global temperatures.)

Not that there aren't any Canadians who wouldn't pay this amount -- if what they were buying truly was a cooler, more thermodynaically stable atmosphere. But that isn't what's on offer in Copenhagen. Instead, the conference has become a sort of PR exercise, in which cynical Third Worlders try to extract the highest price possible from guilty First Worlders for a symbolic agreement that both sides secretly know will do little except bloat the budgets of poor nations --including dictatorships such as the one that employs Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-Ping.

What we wouldn't give for a leader who understands the Copenhagen fraud for what it is.

Oh wait, we do. His name is Stephen Harper.

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STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media


FROM-OC Register

Editorial: A climate shakedown

Meanwhile, a cap-and-trade bill in Congress is stalled precisely because of its billions of dollars in de facto taxes on U.S. fossil fuel-based systems. An unnamed
As American public sentiment and congressional will to combat global warming wane, climate zealots' strong-arm tactics ratchet up.

The shakedown is underway at the Copenhagen, Denmark, climate conference where 192 nations are discussing how to impose worldwide restrictions on carbon emissions. Some European nations have agreed to send developing nations $3.6 billion a year until 2012 to help poorer countries finance transition from fossil-based fuels to greener alternatives. But the target is $10 billion a year and much more later. The United States is being pressured to kick in a large portion.


Obama Administration source late last week threatened that if Congress won't approve a so-called, market-based cap-and-trade bill, the administration will impose a far harsher, top-down mandate through its regulatory agencies.

"If you don't pass this legislation ... the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. ... And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty," Fox News quoted the administration source.

Even before recently leaked e-mails at the U.K. East Anglia Climate Research Unit raised serious questions about climate scientists manipulating data to advance the theory of global warming, U.S. public support was receding. The latest Rasmussen Report surveys find that only 37 percent now blame human activity for global warming, and only 30 percent say irreversible catastrophe looms if the world doesn't curb greenhouse gases.

We expect as fiscal prudence and common sense advance, global warming zealots will turn up the pressure even more.


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B.O.B. Presents

Best Of the Blogs

Bishop Hill: The Yamal implosion

Green Hell Blog: Boxer pays off GE in climate bill

Digital Diatribe: El Nino is back with the Fury of a Woman Scorned!

Master Resource: A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?

The Carbon Sense Coalition:
The Global Warming Dispute is NOT about Climatology or Pollution – it is about Freedom

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B.O.B. Presents

Best Of the Blogs

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog:Climate Forecast "Out Of Kilter"

C-3 Headlines:High Tech Continues To Prove UN's Global Warming A Pseudo-Crisis: Satellites Find Global Temps Well Below IPCC Hype Level

New Haven County Environmental Policy Examiner:Kirtland Global warming, stimulus bill, health care: three legs of the same stool

The Master Resource: Julian Simon on the Ultimate Resource (forget about ‘peak energy’–worry about peak government)

WUWT:Pielke Senior: Arctic Temperature Reporting In The News Needs A Reality Check

The Migrant Mind:Winters of Discontent in Mississippi
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Six things I've learnt about climate change

FROM-Douglas' Blog
Douglas Carswell MP for Harwich and Clampton

I'm now half-way through Ian Plimer's fascinating book on global warming, Heaven and Earth. Here are six things I hadn't previously known:

1. Over the past million years, way before industrial man came along, the climate has often changed very significantly, very quickly.

2. When climate changes, the shift is from being warm and wet to cold and dry. Or vice-versa. If global temperatures are rising, it's most likely getting wetter, not drier.

3. Warm-wet climates are generally better for life on earth than cold-dry climates.

4. CO2 levels have been far, far higher in the past - yet CO2 levels in the atmosphere don't seem to have been a significant driver of climate in the past.

5. Human activity accounts for a relatively tiny portion of global CO2 emissions. To quote Plimer, "One [submarine] hot spring can release far more CO2 than a 1000 mW coal-fired power station". There are many, many thousands of such springs.

6. Plimer suggests that the really significant drivers of climate change are the sun, ossiclations in the earth's orbit, and volcanic emissions of sulphur dioxide. Indeed, the 1784 eruption of Laki in Iceland put 150 million tonnes of SO2 into the atmosphere - which wiped out crops and caused famine in the northern hemisphere for a couple of years.

Apparently some climate change "experts" are now suggesting we put man-made SO2 particles in the atmosphere to cool the climate. Given what Plimer says about the effect of volcanic SO2 emissions on the climate in the past, that should seriously concern us.

Perhaps it's not climate change we should worry about, but the folly of our response to it. Once again, we presume ourselves to be at the centre of everything - rather than walk-on cameo players in the natural world.

UPDATE: Tom Harris MP has just posted an interesting blog in response to this, which seems to suggest that questioning man-made climate change rules me out as being any sort of "progressive". Seriously.

Surely a true progressive would always be willing to question established thinking? Being progressive is about devolving power over public policy away from the indolent and the self-serving in Westminster - and putting power in the hands of ordinary folk. Those same ordinary folk, incidentally, being forced to pick up the bill for all this action on climate change ...


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A policy to hurt Australia

FROM- Quadrant On Line

by Cory Bernardi

Just for a moment, suspend any semblance of critical thought and accept the cataclysmic version of anthropogenic climate change advanced by the likes of Penny Wong, Tim Flannery and Al Gore.

Ignore too, the tens of thousands of scientists who disagree with the political agenda of the IPCC and just accept the claims of those who have made increasingly alarmist predictions, yet have been proved wrong time and time again.

As you lie awake at night worried by the mere thought of ocean front land in Wagga Wagga, you realise that something needs to be done before it is too late. Australia needs to act now and introduce an emissions trading scheme because climate change is "the greatest moral issue of our time."

As an acquiescent disciple of the new religion, to save the planet you concoct a scheme that will tax every business and every family in the country. Sure, it will raise the cost of food, electricity, construction and transport but that is a price you are prepared for others to pay. You condemn any opponents of your plan as sceptics and heretics, while trying to convince the community that it won't hurt them too much.

In fact, so desperate are you to facilitate the introduction of your multi-billion dollar wealth redistribution system, that you promise to compensate some of those affected by more than it is going to cost them. Surely everyone can see the sense in taking from the wealthy and giving to those who pollute just as much but aren't as well off. Just think of it as spreading the socialist love to save the planet.

Despite the rejection of your scheme by farmers and environmentalists, businesses and families, you plough on regardless. What does it matter if hundreds of thousands of jobs are going to be lost and industries closed if it means we will have less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Desperately looking for support, you enlist those notorious polluters in the investment banking, legal and financial markets to support your cause, conveniently forgetting only months ago you were blaming their excessive culture of greed for the failure of the world financial system. Ignore too, the billions of dollars they stand to make from the creation and administration of the unwieldy bureaucracy and carbon trading scheme you propose. Surely the opportunity to profit wouldn't be the reason they endorse your scheme, would it?

Such is the urgency of the matter at hand, you insist that the Parliament pass your legislation immediately, even though your new scheme won't actually commence for a couple of years. Worse still, you acknowledge that your scheme won't actually make any difference to the climate unless the rest of the world does something similar.

Of course the rest of the world won't be making up their minds for a few months yet. Undeterred, you make the 'decisive and tough' decision to act now, even though you know you are damaging the economic future of your own country.

Now back to reality.

Under any critical analysis, the above scenario would be considered the height of political madness, yet that is exactly what the advocates of Labor’s dishonestly named Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) want to do.

Even the most devout anthropogenic climate change believer knows that Australia acting alone to reduce carbon emissions will not make a jot of difference to the climate. They also know that Australian industry and jobs will disappear overseas in the absence of a truly global agreement.

Under Labor's CPRS, prices for everyday goods will rise and every power point will be come a tax collection outlet for a rapacious Government with an insatiable appetite for interfering in our lives. Worse still, acting ahead of the rest of the world might actually mean that Australia is stuck with a scheme that won't make any difference except to damage our domestic economy.

It's time for a reality check of the political action attached to the climate change debate.

Labor's CPRS is so flawed that it should not be reintroduced into the Parliament until after the global climate change talks in Copenhagen later this year. To pass this Bill, or any incarnation of it ahead of the Copenhagen talks, is sheer folly. To do so, when Labor’s scheme is not even scheduled to commence until 2011, would suggest that politics and politicians have taken leave of their senses.

Any talk of accepting, amending, improving or adapting Labor’s scheme before then is to ignore our national interest.


Cory Bernardi Liberal Senator for South Australia
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Eco-Imperialism – every Environmentalist’s Dream

A must read article

FROM- Buy The Truth

How do you like the government agency that makes official climate predictions, and pushes industry and local government to act on “climate change” to be headed up by a green alarmist and activist? It’s well known that in the USA the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies is headed up by the climate alarmist and activist James Hansen, who encourages criminal misdemeanours in USA and criminal damage in UK. But what of the UK? The situation is even worse. The UK Meteorological Office, whose Hadley Centre runs the IPCC scientific assessment (“Working Group 1”), is now a department of the UK Ministry of Defence. And its Chairman is none other than Robert Napier, a green activist and alarmist with tentacles into some of the world’s most powerful drivers of climate alarmism and social control.

Not only is he the chairman of the Met office, but Napier is Chairman of the Green Fiscal Commission, seeking to impose massive green taxation; he is Director of the Carbon Disclosure Project, which has built the largest database on corporate ‘carbon footprints’ as a basis for discrimination against those who don’t go along with the eco agenda; he is Chairman of the trustees of the World Centre of Monitoring of Conservation, which is bankrolled by the UN Environment Programme to push and ensure compliance with the Green agenda; and he is Chairman of the Homes and Communities Agency, which is seeking to grab land for ecotowns and determining compliance of housing to stringent Green standards. Other recent positions he has held include Chief Executive of WWF-UK, a vast malthusian political pressure group seeking to grab land and stop development around the world; a Director of The Climate Group, a huge international pressure group for the climate change agenda; and a Director of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a secular body seeking to infuse ‘Green’ values into all the major religions, and to designate land as ‘sacred’ to prohibit development, and galvanize religions as a powerful advocacy group for the eco agenda.

This web of organizations over which Napier exercises influence means that Napier is responsible for the generation of climate alarmism, input into the IPCC reports, powerful secular and religious eco advocacy, directing of investments exceeding $55 trillion towards the Green agenda, monitoring of eco compliance, manipulating government fiscal policy towards green taxes, and control of the built environment towards the green agenda. Napier is an eco-imperialist, and for him and his cronies it’s all about total social control for the green agenda – controlling all bases: investment, building, land, religion, government, taxes, propaganda, advocacy, monitoring, climate science and data.....read entire article here

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The Cap-and-Trade Bait and Switch

FROM-WSJ

The climate bill in Congress is not the market solution the president promised.

By DAVID SCHOENBROD AND RICHARD B. STEWART
As a candidate for president in April 2008, Barack Obama told Fox News that "a cap-and-trade system is a smarter way of controlling pollution" than "top-down" regulation. He was right. With cap and trade the market decides where and how to cut emissions. With top-down regulation, as Mr. Obama explained, regulators dictate "every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and often-times is less efficient."

It's no wonder that the House advertises its American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (also known as the Waxman-Markey bill) as "cap and trade." And last Thursday a coalition of environmental groups and unions launched a "Made in America Jobs Tour" to sell it as a ticket to "long-term economic prosperity." But the House bill would, if passed by the Senate this autumn, fail the environment and fail the test of economic efficiency.

Waxman-Markey is largely top-down regulation dressed in cap-and-trade clothing. It purports to set a cap on greenhouse gases, but the cap is so loose in the early years that through the use of cheap offsets the U.S. need not significantly reduce its fossil-fuel emissions until about 2025. Then the bill would require a nosedive in fossil-fuel emissions. This balloon mortgage pledge of big cuts later is unlikely to be kept.

The top-down directives come in three forms. First, electric utilities, auto makers and states get free allowances on the condition that they comply with regulations requiring coal sequestration, alternative energy sources, energy conservation, advanced auto technology and more. Second, many other provisions of the 1,428 page bill mandate outright regulation on subjects ranging from how electricity is generated to off-road vehicles and household lighting. Third, still other provisions provide subsidies for government-chosen technology "winners" such as alternate energy sources, plug-in vehicles and weatherization of old buildings.

Progress on most or all such fronts will be needed, but when, where and how should be decided principally by a cap-driven market, not the "red tape" that candidate Obama deplored.

This government dictation of technology would undermine President Obama's March 19 pledge that, by addressing climate change, we would become "the world's leading exporter of renewable energy." That requires coming up with better, lower-cost technologies than the rest of the world. This won't happen if the government picks the technologies. Recall that, in the 1980s, government established the Synfuels Corporation that spent billions to produce energy alternatives and came up with nothing. More recently, government required refiners to put corn-based ethanol into gasoline on the theory that it's good for the environment. Yet we've learned that wide-scale ethanol production can do more harm than good in regard to air quality and climate change, turn wildlife habitat into corn fields, and raise food prices.

By contrast, the cap-and-trade legislation that Congress applied to acid rain in 1990 produced big dividends for the environment and the economy. It cut the acid-rain causing emissions from power plants by 43% and saved electricity consumers billions of dollars compared to top-down regulation.

A cap and trade can be used to tackle carbon emissions more efficiently than top-down micromanagement of technology. Indeed, cap and trade should be used to regulate major conventional pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. It is not only the smarter way to regulate such pollutants, as Mr. Obama recognized, but it is also necessary because key greenhouse gases and many conventional pollutants come from the same fuel-burning processes. Systems for regulating both kinds of pollutants should work together rather than at cross purposes, as detailed in our recent report for the New York Law School and NYU School of Law: "Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Reform for the New Congress and Administration."

Why has the House turned its back on the cap-and-trade approach? Both parties have played to their bases so that the only way for the Democrats to pass Waxman-Markey was to buy swing votes by picking among technologies such as coal sequestration to please critical constituencies.

While the House represents constituencies, the president must keep the focus on the broad national interest. Candidate Obama's comments on cap and trade came when asked to back up his claim that he would be a "uniter" by naming "a hot-button issue where you would be willing to buck the Democratic Party line and say, 'You know what? Republicans have a better idea here?'" President Obama needs to lead on the principles on which he campaigned and the Republicans in the Senate need to listen. Otherwise, Congress will pass something like the House bill or, worse still, won't legislate at all.

In that case, the Environmental Protection Agency would regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. This would involve even more top-down control than Waxman-Markey. Regulators would be required, for example, to impose source-specific emission limits on every major new or modified source. Government would decide who cuts emissions through a complicated process that would undoubtedly produce the very red tape and inefficiency Mr. Obama warned about. Congress should instead apply to climate change the market-based solution that it successfully applied to acid rain nearly 20 years ago.

Mr. Schoenbrod teaches law at New York Law School, is a visiting scholar at American Enterprise Institute, and was a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Mr. Stewart teaches law at New York University and was chairman of Environmental Defense Fund.



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Reaching a tipping point?

FROM-Bloomberg

Climate Change Measure Should Be Set Aside, U.S. Senators Say

Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.

“The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. “I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem.”

The resistance by Lincoln and her Senate colleagues undercuts President Barack Obama’s effort to win passage of legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions and establish a market for trading pollution allowances, said Peter Molinaro, the head of government affairs for Midland, Michigan- based Dow Chemical Co., which supports the measure.

“Doing these energy provisions by themselves might make it more difficult to move the cap-and-trade legislation,” said Molinaro, who is based in Washington. “In this town if you split two measures, usually the second thing never gets done.”

The House passed cap-and-trade legislation in June.

Leaders of the Democratic-controlled Senate say they are sticking with their plan to combine a version of that bill with a separate measure mandating energy efficiency and the use of renewable sources such as solar and wind power. The legislation also provides for an extension of offshore oil and gas drilling in certain areas, broadening its support.

Reid’s Comment

“I don’t think we are going to take to the Senate floor a bill stripped of climate provisions,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, told reporters in Las Vegas on Aug. 11.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed the renewable-energy legislation, 15-8, in June. Reid has set a deadline of Sept 28 for committees to complete work on climate- change provisions.

Ben Nelson of Nebraska and North Dakota Senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan joined Lincoln in suggesting that the climate measure be put off.

“We should separate the energy bill from the climate bill,” Conrad told reporters this month. ‘It needs to be done as soon as we can get it done,” he said, referring to the energy legislation.

Climate legislation would require 60 votes in the Senate. Most Republicans have said they oppose the cap-and-trade measure, and at least 15 of the Senate’s 60-member Democratic majority have said the House-passed version would hurt the economy and needs to be revamped to win their support.

‘Wishful Thinking’

“At some point, they are going to take a hard vote count,” said Michael McKenna, president of MWR Strategies, a Washington consulting firm. “I think cap-and-trade has a one- in-three chance, but at some point they are going to want to pass something,” he said of the Senate leadership.

Some Democrats want to avoid voting on a measure that would force companies to get pollution permits, said Daniel Weiss, an energy and climate specialist for the Center for American Progress, a Washington public policy group that advises Democrats and supports a cap-and-trade system.

“There is a lot of wishful thinking on the part of some senators,” Weiss said in an interview. “They want to do what is easy, not what is needed.”

The Senate remains under pressure to pass a cap-and-trade bill because failure to act would leave regulation in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency, which has asserted its right to do so under the Clean Air Act, said Kevin Book, a Washington analyst with Clearview Energy Partners, an energy consulting firm. Senate action to head off the EPA is the most likely outcome, he said.

“The second school of thought holds that Senate progress towards climate change legislation is already irretrievably mired in parochial conflicts,” Book said in an Aug. 12 memo to clients. That may lead the Senate to pass stand-alone energy legislation as a way to “achieve climate change objectives without a cap-and-trade program.”

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