It's Just a Heat Wave ... Alan Caruba

It's Just a Heat Wave

By Alan Caruba

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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 Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

Political payback – Oregon style ... Paul Driessen

Political payback – Oregon style

OSU tries to expel PhD candidate children of scientist who ran against Cong. Peter DeFazio

Paul Driessen

 Confused visitors will be forgiven for thinking Oregon State University is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Congressman Pete DeFazio and the “progressive-socialist” wing of the Democratic Party. Or for likening what’s going on there to political retribution as practiced in Third World thugocracies.

The idea that three outstanding students – PhD candidates at OSU – could face dismissal, and worse, shortly before receiving their degrees, is simply shocking. That this could be happening because their father had the temerity to challenge an entrenched 12-term Democratic congressman (and OSU earmark purveyor) could make people think the university is in Zimbabwe, not America.

Dr. Art Robinson is president of the nonprofit Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, on the family farm in southwestern Oregon, 180 miles from Corvallis. OISM focuses on biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine and aging – and improving emergency preparedness and basic education.

After his wife died in 1988, Robinson raised and home-schooled his six children – all of whom became remarkable scholars, collaborating on research and a popular DVD series on math and science for home-schooled students and their parents. Five of the children have BS degrees in chemistry; one a degree in mathematics. Two earned doctorates in veterinary medicine; one a PhD in chemistry.

The three youngest are all at OSU, working on PhDs in nuclear engineering. They entered the field at a young age, helping their father write and publish the “pro-science, pro-technology, pro-free enterprise” newsletter, Access to Energy, which explains and advocates nuclear energy.

Dr. Robinson is well known for the Oregon Petition Project, which says “there is no convincing scientific evidence” that humans are causing “catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere” or disruption of its climate. It urges Congress to reject the Kyoto global warming agreement – and has been signed by more than 32,000 Americans with university degrees in physical sciences (including yours truly and over 9,000 PhDs).

The petition, and Robinson’s support for DDT in combating the malaria pandemic, drew anger and outrage from the political Left, climate chaos industry and “mainstream media,” giving him his first brush with the politics of personal destruction. But it did not prepare him for the lengths and depths his opponents would go to “discourage” his political activities.

With our nation drowning in debt, energy prices skyrocketing, and unaccountable pseudo-scientific agencies like EPA and Interior hobbling economic growth with endless delays and red tape, Dr. Robinson decided to run for Congress. As a scientist and thoughtful, Christian family man, with proven math and budgetary skills – he felt he could bring much needed expertise and perspectives to the House of Representatives.

He challenged DeFazio, who initially figured he would have a cakewalk against this political neophyte. But Robinson raised $1.3 million from over 5,000 individual donors (against DeFazio’s $1.5 million from special interests, MoveOn.org and other contributors), gave numerous speeches and ran a highly effective campaign. With polls showing his lead narrowing, an increasingly desperate DeFazio struck back.

Bristling with a sense of entitlement, the congressman ran print, television and radio ads, painting Robinson as a nutcase who would promote racism, put radioactive wastes in drinking water, end Social Security and Medicare, close schools, repeal taxation of oil companies and destroy Oregon jobs. With help from Rachel Madow and MSNBC, DeFazio claimed Robinson lived off Social Security in a survivalist compound and was funding his campaign with cash from money launderers and drug dealers.

Despite the libelous attacks, Robinson garnered a very respectable 44% of the vote – and promptly announced that he would run for DeFazio’s seat again in 2012. If the soft-spoken father of six thought DeFazio’s campaign had been in the sewers, what happened next beggared belief. Now the targets became Robinson’s three youngest children.

During the election campaign, OSU President Edward Ray and other faculty and administrators improperly used the campus to campaign for DeFazio and against Robinson. Then, almost immediately after the 2010 election, they launched a series of despicable and unprincipled actions designed to ensure that Joshua, Bethany, and Matthew never receive their degrees – regardless of their outstanding academics, examinations and research, or the thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars they had invested.

Even though they have been working on their PhDs for almost five years at OSU, and have about a year to go, Joshua has been forbidden access to the equipment he built for his PhD work, while Bethany has been told she will be dismissed from school. Matthew, who turned down a nearly “full ride” from MIT to go to OSU, has been there for two years – but now is waiting for the ax to fall on his work, and on his thesis professor, Dr. Jack Higginbotham, who came to the students’ defense.

Nuclear engineering professor Higginbotham has been at OSU 24 years; he is president of the OSU Faculty Senate and director of a large NASA program on the campus. His inside knowledge of what the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics deans and certain faculty were doing to railroad the Robinson children made him Public Enemy Number One to the department Torquemadas who are trying to destroy his career and get him fired for his impertinence.

Right now, Higginbotham’s salary and career hang by a thread, preserved only by attorneys he has hired to protect himself from OSU attacks. The Robinsons’ studies have been severely disrupted. Meanwhile, however, public outcry in favor of Higginbotham and the students has grown in intensity, especially in Oregon, and a group of prominent alumni donors has offered to pay for the student’s remaining PhD work and legal costs to settle the dispute. (Higginbotham is a nuclear power guy; the culprits are in “nuclear medicine” and generally anti-nuclear power.)

Rather than being chastened, though, President Ray and his staff have refused even to speak with the alumni group. University administrators have become incensed that their actions are now public knowledge, and that alumni and other donors are vocally supporting Higginbotham and the children. Ray and his entourage have circled the academic wagons, stonewalled public inquiries and refused to talk to the Robinsons

They appear to think they own the university, and “academic freedom” means they are entitled to deny academic degrees to children of parents whose politics differ from their own. As more alumni join this effort, however, and the university’s reputation becomes increasingly radioactive, OSU appears to be wavering. Perhaps a dose of sanity may yet take center stage.

Oregon State is a prime example of what happens when educational institutions fall under progressive-socialist control, and dependency on taxpayer handouts from political overseers in Washington. DeFazio and his fellow congressional Democrats gave OSU a reported $27 million in earmark funding during the last legislative cycle alone. That’s $9 million per Robinson student denied a PhD.

No wonder President Ray and the Nuclear Engineering deans have given new meaning to “payback,” while DeFazio smirks in silence in the congressional office that he seems convinced should be his for life.

In depressing testimony to how far America has strayed from its Constitution and founding principles, we have reached the point where congressmen can lavish key supporters with tax dollars – and in return get votes, campaign contributions, rallies and volunteers on our campuses … and be assured of vicious retribution against the families of anyone rash enough to run against them.

If you want to read all the gory details in this sordid case, visits www.OregonStateOutrage.com. If you want to tell OSU what you think of its actions, send a message to President Ray at pres.office@oregonstate.edu and todd.simmons@oregonstate.edu in the OSU press office.

If you thought the last Robinson-DeFazio bout was a humdinger, stick around. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

Earth Day and Environmental Insanity ... Alan Caruba

Earth Day and Environmental Insanity

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has been paying any attention to the environmental movement has got to have concluded it is insane.

• While the United States stands poised on defaulting on its ever-growing debt—the highest in the nation’s history;

• While wars and insurrections are waged in the Middle East, across northern Africa, and in the Ivory Coast;

• While Japan struggles to deal with a major earthquake and nuclear plant meltdown;

• While Islam wages terrorism worldwide, and

• While European nations attempt to deal with their own financial crisis, the environmentalists—Greens—engage in the most absurd frauds and nonsense since the Dark Ages.

In news from the United Nations—a misnomer if ever there was one—Bolivia is proposing a UN treaty that will give “Mother Earth” the same rights as accorded to human beings. It has just passed a domestic law that grants these rights to bugs, trees, and all other natural things in its own country.

According to the Bolivian proposal, humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” the Earth in ways that threaten the “well-being and existence of many beings” such as malaria-bearing mosquitoes, lice and ticks that spread disease, trees that provide timber for shelter and countless other uses, venomous snakes, and every other creature upon which we depend for food---beef, chickens, and fish, to name just three.

The Bolivian law, if successful, will end the extraction of all natural resources in that nation, thus effectively plunging it into insolvency. That is a definition of insanity. It is also a description of the United States of America where access to its vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil is being systematically denied by the government.

This is occurring as the Environmental Protection Agency continues its effort to declare carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that must be regulated, despite the fact that is vital to all life on Earth.

In America, there has been a resurgence of bed bugs, formerly controlled by DDT. The EPA recently awarded $550,000 in grants to the University of Missouri, Texas A&M University, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Rutgers University, and the Michigan Department of Community Health, for bed bug “education, outreach, and environmental justice departments.” So, instead of authorizing the use of a pesticide to rid us all of bed bugs, it wants to “educate” us to live with them. That’s insane.

The U.S. Forest Service scientists will hire field crews “to gather information on the conditions of forests from approximately 1,000 sites in five western states, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, “for a comprehensive study on the health of trees in urban areas.” No mention of the millions this will waste, but it is heralded as part of Obama’s “America’s Great Outdoors Initiative.”

At the same time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has just announced that the department will spend $1 million in “cost-sharing funding for children’s programs in 18 States and Puerto Rico, furthering USDA’s commitment to connect young people around the country with America’s great outdoors.” Why?

A rational nation that’s $14 trillion in debt, borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, would not do such things, but the United States does while its President calls for higher taxes. And why not? The Obama administration spent up to $200 million to promote Obamacare. While that was happening, 26 States joined in demanding its repeal and a U.S. federal court judge declared it unconstitutional.

As the nation struggles to reverse an unsustainable trend toward financial doom, Greens are trumpeting an “Extended Producer Responsibility” program to achieve “waste reduction and increased recycling” that would make manufacturers “liable for the cost of recycling TVs and other electronics at the end of their useful lives” and alter the way they package goods. This is not the manufacturer’s responsibility and will increase the cost of everything everyone purchases.

On Earth Day, everyone will be exhorted to engage in “A billion acts of Green” and to purchase “Green” products, all of which cost more than everything else one purchases in the normal course of everyday life.

We are only now recovering from the greatest fraud of the modern era, “global warming.” The United States wasted an estimated $50 billion on so-called scientific research, all of which existed for the purpose of advancing this hoax. It is rarely mentioned any more except for its fraudulent new name, “climate change.”

As we approach April 22nd, designated “Earth Day”, it would be well to recall that it is the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, a devotee of Karl Marx and a man who plunged Russia into more than seventy years of Communism until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Environmentalism, worldwide and in the United States of America, is devoted to the collapse of every scientific and technological advance of the past century, along with the capitalist system that made them possible.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

http://www.factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2011/04/earth-day-and-environmental-insanity.html

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 Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

The Great "Climate Change" 2011 Rip-Off ... Alan Caruba

The Great ‘Climate Change’ 2011 Taxpayer Rip-Off
By Alan Caruba

Unless I am seriously mistaken or misinformed, the rate of unemployment in the U.S. remains high and the foreclosure rate on homes is approaching the level of the Depression years. Two major bond rating companies, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s just warned that, if the federal government doesn’t stop spending and borrowing, America’s Triple-A highest ranking will be down-graded.

Along with all the other things in the federal budget wish list for 2011 are millions to be spent on climate change.

It helps to understand how obscene this is if you pause to consider (1) there is not one damn thing anyone can do about climate change, (2) climate change has been researched and studied since the late 1980s, enough to fill an entire wing of the Congressional Library to hold all the reports, and (3) the only climate change Americans really need to know about is what the weather will be tomorrow.

With a tip of the hat to Climatequotes.com and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) report on “research development, fiscal year 2011”, let me share just a few of the ways the Obama administration intends to squander your money.

The magic number is $2,481,000,000 and it represents specific amounts devoted to "climate change" research or other programs requested for the 2011 budgets by an alphabet soup of federal agencies that include the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, Department of Energy (DOE), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of the Interior (DOI), and the Department of Agriculture (DOA).

The figures cited all come from chapter 15 of the AAAS report and you can access it via Climatequotes.com

NOAA’s total budget request is for $5.6 billion, an increase of 17%. It intends to devote $437 million for climate research funding, an increase of $77 million over last year.

Over at the National Science Foundation (NSF), its budget of $7.4 billion (that’s a lot of science!) includes a request for $480 million for Atmospheric and Earth Sciences, $765.5 million for NSF’s Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability program and $19 million for a joint program with DOE “to promote education in clean energy research. An additional $10 million would fund “Climate Change Education” in the nation’s schools. It’s not education, it’s indoctrination.

The Department of Energy which currently is projecting that permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico won’t be forthcoming until, maybe, June. DOE seems oblivious to the fact that the price of oil is set to hit $100 a barrel and higher costs will hit everyone driving anything using gasoline or diesel fuel. Fuel oil prices will rise and any business that uses oil or anything made with oil will be forced to raise its prices. In short, everything.

DOE, however, is in no hurry and, of course, the Obama administration is dead set against ANWR or off-shore exploration and extraction of the BILLIONS of barrels of crude oil projected to exist.

However, DOE is set to receive $28.4 billion in 2011 and that includes $4.6 billion for research and development in its Office of Science and $2.4 billion for energy research and development. Its Office of Biological and Environmental Research is devoted to atmospheric science, including “climate modeling”, which would be allocated $627 million. Last time I checked, oil, coal, and natural gas were not found in the “atmosphere”, but rather were extracted from deep within the Earth.

The entire global warming hoax was and is based on “climate modeling”, all of which consistently found that the Earth was warming at an alarming rate. Except that the Earth is NOT warming. It has been cooling since 1998. And DOE intends to waste $627 million on more modeling. It is worth noting that the most sophisticated models of the National Weather Bureau still cannot predict with any confidence what the weather—not the climate—will be next week.

The Environmental Protection Agency, gearing up to regulate all utilities that produce carbon dioxide and all other industries that do the same, has zero authorization to do so under the Clean Air Act. It is CO2 that is designated by the warmists as the chief culprit for the global warming that is NOT happening.
Despite this, EPA has requested $169 million “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”, with $43.5 million in new funding for “regulatory efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” through the Clean Air Act. And it wants $22 million for its Global Change Research Program. It is time to shut down this rogue agency before it totally destroys the economy.

Even the Department of Agriculture wants $159 million for “climate change research”, an increase of 42% and $179 million for renewable energy, to “help farmers.” Farmers are heavy users of fossil fuels to operate the machinery needed to till, plant, and harvest crops. They need reliable energy, not "renewable" energy.

The Recovery Act of 2009 has managed to blow more than $600 million on climate change research and billions on greenhouse gas mitigation.

This is just the tip of the ‘climate change’ rip-off in terms of billions wasted or soon to be wasted on “research” that can only be deemed an obscene diversion of taxpayer money that will not benefit a single taxpayer, generate any new jobs except for those in government agencies, and further bankrupt a bankrupted nation about to have its credit rating reduced.

The “scientists”, “regulators”, and “administrators” feasting off this federal largess should be handed a shovel to earn a living on one of those “shovel ready” projects we were told about.

Beyond that, if Congress was really intent on cutting back on spending, they could begin by defunding or shutting down the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and all the other federal grifters with their snouts rooting around in the climate change trough.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Do you believe in magic … climate numbers? ... Paul Driessen

Do you believe in magic … climate numbers?
Should temperatures pulled out of a hat be the basis for energy and economic policies?
Paul Driessen

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Average annual global temperatures have risen a degree or two since the Little Ice Age ended some 150 years ago. Thank goodness. The LIA was not a particularly pleasant time.


Prolonged winters, advancing glaciers, colder summers, more frequent storms and extended cloudiness reduced arable land, shortened growing seasons, rotted grain in wet fields, and brought famine, disease and death. Coming after the prosperous Medieval Warm Period – when farmers grew wine grapes in England and Vikings raised crops and cattle in Greenland – it must have been quite a shock.


The LIA underscored how much better a warmer planet is than a colder one. Moderate warming above today’s norm would likely bring expanded cultivation during longer growing seasons in northern latitudes, fewer people dying from hypothermia during frigid winters, and many other benefits.


What caused the Medieval Warm Period to end, and the Little Ice Age to come and go, is still debated. Even the best scientists don’t fully understand what alignments of solar, cosmic, oceanic, atmospheric and planetary forces control this millennial warm-cool rhythm.


In any event, the initial warming of 1850-1900 was followed by perhaps an additional overall 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) of warming during the twentieth century. However, it was not a steady rise in temperatures, proportionate to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, as “manmade climate disaster” themes suggest. Instead, Earth warmed noticeably1900-1940, cooled slightly 1940-1975 (“most scientists” worried about another little ice age), warmed again 1975-1995 (“most scientists” feared global warming), and exhibited little change from then to the present.


The 20-year late twentieth century warming supposedly justifies demands that we stop using hydrocarbon fuels, halt US economic growth, hold back Third World development, ban incandescent light bulbs, blanket the planet with unreliable wind turbines and solar panels, make recompense to poor nations for emitting CO2 and “causing global climate disruption,” and even consider “geo-engineering” (putting dust particles or tiny mirrors into space to block the sun’s rays) to prevent warming that stopped in 1995. Even though no reliable or factual evidence shows that this recent warming was (primarily) human-caused!


These are important issues for the next Congress (and others) to grapple with. But an even more fundamental question is rarely raised, and almost never addressed.


How much credence can we give any claim that average global temperatures have risen or fallen X degrees over a certain period, or that this year or decade is “the warmest ever,” or “since record-keeping began” – especially when the alleged difference is measured in tenths or hundredths of a degree?


The answer: Not much. The truth is, we cannot trust the hype and numbers that routinely come out of the IPCC, NOAA, NASA, CRU, White House and other branches of the climate crisis industry.


Certainly, satellites have gathered arguably reliable atmospheric temperature data since 1980. However, they obviously provide no insights into pre-1980 warming and cooling trends. And for 1850 to 1930, we must rely on scattered land and oceanic thermometer measurements; historic anecdotes, diary entries and paintings that give only general descriptions of climate, heat waves, floods and blizzards; and “proxy” records like tree rings. Even together, this evidence is so sparse, scattered and of uneven quality that it cannot and must not be used to drive major energy, economic and environmental policy decisions.


Calibrated thermometers were invented in 1724, but they provide only random measurements for vast continental land masses until well into the twentieth century – and across much of Africa, Asia and South America even today. No one can calculate 1850-1950 average global temperatures from that. To fill in the huge gaps, scientists often utilize tree rings. However, annual tree growth is determined as much by rainfall as by temperature. Far worse, researchers have been caught selecting twelve trees out of hundreds from Siberia, to generate desired “warming trends,” and splicing thermometer measurements onto tree ring data that suddenly showed inconvenient “cooling” trends.


Temperature data from the 71% of Planet Earth covered by oceans is even more sporadic. Today, buoys and satellites cover large expanses that previously were measured only by ships traveling different routes, during favorable times of the year, using a variety of methods to measure seawater and air temperatures. But even today only a small portion of Earth’s oceans are measured regularly or accurately.


Compounding these problems, 55% of the 12,000 surface temperature stations operating in 1990 have been closed down – and many of the now missing stations were in Siberia and other cold regions. This alone has created a significant 20-year “warming” bias, notes former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Tim Ball.


Today, nearly half of the world’s remaining stations are located in the United States, on 1.9% of the Earth’s surface. The vast majority are in the Lower 48 States. And as meteorologist Anthony Watts has documented, most of those stations are near parking lots, air conditioning exhaust ports, highways, airport tarmac and other artificial heat sources – all of which skew the recorded temperatures upward. His report, “Is the US surface temperature record reliable?” is a real eye-opener.


However, none of this sobering reality deters climate chaos alarmists, who consistently show a penchant for distributing dire news releases on the eve of important global warming votes and conferences.


2000-2010 was “the hottest decade ever,” and 2010 “is shaping up to be the hottest year on record,” NASA and NOAA breathlessly announced … on July 28, prior to hoped-for Senate votes and the Cancun summit. “World temperatures in 2010 may be the warmest on record. 2010 will be one of the two warmest years, going back to 1850,” Britain’s Meteorology Office intoned … in late November.


“This year will be the third warmest year on record, since 1850,” the World Meteorological Organization declaimed … on December 3. Other organizations issued similar headline-grabbing alarums.


But before you say kaddish or “requiescat in pace” for Mother Earth, keep the previous caveats in mind and note a few other realities. One, only a few hundredths of a degree separate the 2010 decade from the similarly very warm 1930s – and NASA and other researchers refuse to release their raw temperature data and analytical methods, so that independent researchers can examine their calculations and claims.


Two, most of 2010 was marked by El Nino, the warming phase of the periodic climate pattern across the tropical Pacific Ocean that typically makes summer months warmer than usual. Three, the pre-Cancun pronouncements were based on January-through-October temperatures, and an assumption that November and December will be “average.”


Four, the climate and record books are not cooperating with that assumption or the hype, headlines and summit on Climate Armageddon. South Florida just had its coldest night in 169 years, Wales its coldest since recordkeeping began; and in the middle of its global warming gabfest, Cancun set four record low temperatures in a row. Other local cold records are falling all over the Northern Hemisphere, hot on the heels of record cold and snow during the 2009-2010 winter in both hemispheres.


But then “climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection,” IPCC Working Group III co-chair Ottmar Edenhofer reminded us recently. In fact, “the world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit, during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.” [emphasis added] Keep that in mind, too, next time someone says we have a climate crisis.


Magic is delightful when it’s Criss Angel or Harry Potter. Magic temperature numbers – pulled out of hats, computers and fertile imaginations – are a lousy, fraudulent, redistributionist way to set public policy.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

The EPA Versus the USA ... Alan Caruba

The EPA Versus the USA
By Alan Caruba

It seems almost beyond reason that a single U.S. agency could so hate America that it was prepared to ignore the Constitution, distort a Supreme Court decision, and impose its will on the nation in the name of totally discredited science.

That, however, is what the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking to do while Americans are distracted by the Christmas celebrations.

The agency’s objective is to regulate so-called greenhouse gases (GHG) on January 2, 2011. More specifically, it would regulate emissions from power plants and other large emitters, but in reality it would end the role of coal as the provider of 50% of the electricity Americans require.

It is essential to understand that the primary GHG is carbon dioxide (CO2) and it was this gas, naturally produced by the Earth and vital to all vegetation and life on Earth, that was falsely identified as the “cause” of “global warming.” Humans individually exhale some six pounds of CO2 every day.

First, there was no “global warming”; only the normal and natural warming that had been in effect since around 1850 when a 500-year “little ice age” ended in the northern hemisphere.

Second, the Earth is now in a normal and natural cooling cycle, though with the added concern that it is also at the end of an 11,500 year interglacial cycle between the last major ice age and the next.

Third, the data put forth by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been almost entirely discredited, based as it was on rigged research by corrupted university centers and governmental agencies. Some people need to go to jail, but it is unlikely because the fraud was so vast in its extent.

On November 22nd, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy editorial, “The EPA Permitorium” noting that “The scale of the EPA’s current assault is unprecedented, yet it has received almost no public scrutiny. Since Mr. Obama took office, the agency has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules.”

It can be said that, in terms of its original mission, cleaning the nation’s air and water, that the EPA succeeded, but like any government agency, the EPA has also sought to constantly expand its powers and has, from its beginning, also seen as part of its mission the restriction of virtually all chemicals—invariably called toxic—with a particular emphasis on pesticides that protect human health and property.

Too much exposure to any chemical is inherently toxic. The proper use of any chemical is beneficial.

The reason there is a nationwide infestation of bed bugs after a half century or more in which this insect had been virtually eliminated is that the EPA has restricted the use of almost every pesticide that might exterminate bed bugs. Now multiply that against EPA restrictions on a host of chemicals vital to the manufacture of thousands of products.

The effort of the EPA to regulate CO2 and other GHG gases has no basis in science and none in law. The Clean Air Act does not authorize it.

Moreover, by its own admission, restricting GHGs would only reduce global temperatures—if that were even possible—by 15 ten-thousandths of a degree Celsius in the next century.

The EPA has also proposed new rules calling for a reduction in the national ambient air-quality standard for ground-level ozone, a precursor of smog, from 75 parts per billion to between 60 and 70 parts per billion, a cut of up to 20%.

To most people that means nothing, but the reality is that hundreds of U.S. cities and counties don’t meet the current standard and compliance would destroy what is left of an ailing U.S. economy. If you think unemployment is bad now, it would increase as so-called “emitters” of GHG either undertook costly measures to reduce their emissions or just closed their doors.

Along with those who tried to impose a Cap-and-Trade Act on the nation in order to limit so-called GHGs and profit from it by creating a bogus exchange for the sale of “carbon credits”, the EPA is seeking to exercise a totalitarian control over every aspect of the provision and use of energy in America and it is all based on lies.

Congress can put an end to this nightmare by overturning the EPA’s “Endangerment Rule” and with it the GHG regulations. A new Congress can and should defund as much of the EPA as possible.

The use of fossil fuels---coal, oil, and natural gas---accounts for 85% of America’s energy sources. The EPA proposes to limit or end their use. As such it is an enemy of the people and Congress must act to stop this insane agency before it destroys the nation.

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Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Alan Caruba's commentaries are also posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

The Wrong Solution? ... Paul Driessen and Robert Carter

Lomborg’s wrong solution to a partly real problem
The best Plan B is to prepare for and adapt to all future climate changes
Paul Driessen and Robert Carter
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Bjorn Lomborg has been energetically courting publicity for his new film, “Cool It.” The film has attracted minimal box office sales thus far, but he has been publishing articles at an impressive clip, in a quest for more exposure, influence and funding.

He correctly observes that public discussion about global warming is largely between two entrenched camps of opinion. Lomborg is also right about our needing a “Plan B” climate policy that defuses the current rancorous and unproductive debate about “the manmade climate problem.”

His first camp is inhabited by warming alarmists, supported by the majesty of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most major institutions in western society have joined their funereal fugue (and funding pipeline) in supportive chorus.

In Lomborg’s other camp, empiricists (including a majority of independent scientists) argue implacably that we still await actual, factual evidence that our planet is still warming at all – let alone dangerously, let alone because of human carbon dioxide emissions.

Reality, of course, is a lot more nuanced. For example, it is simply incorrect to say, as Lomborg does, that most independent scientists argue that “global warming was a fabrication.”
The truth is, all competent scientists agree on three things. Earth has been warming since the Little Ice Age ended 150 years ago, and its climate changes frequently. Human activities (not just CO2 emissions) definitely affect local climate, and combined together have the potential to affect global climate, perhaps measurably. Third, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, albeit a minor one.
The real scientific debate is not about any of this. It is, rather, about the direction and magnitude of global human effects, and their likely significance when considered in the context of natural climate change – which has been occurring ever since Earth developed its oceans, atmosphere and climate many eons ago.

After spending more than $100 billion since 1990 to support research by thousands of scientists, we are still unable to isolate and measure human influence on global temperature. That influence remains buried deeply in the noise and natural variation of Earth’s climate system.

Lomborg is either ignorant of this fact, or chooses to ignore it. He simply assumes “the manmade climate problem” is real – and proceeds to offer a “solution.” He now asserts that governments should allocate yet more money for more research, this time into new renewable technologies for power generation, so that “green” energy will eventually (and presumptively) become cheaper than hydrocarbon-based energy!

There are two major problems with this. First, technological innovation is not enhanced by governments attempting to pick winners, but by encouraging and rewarding private investment and entrepreneurship in truly free markets.

Spending taxpayer money on problems that government wants to solve generally means the “problems,” and the funding recipients, are chosen for political reasons. As failures like Europe’s Concorde, Australia’s pink batts home insulation program and America’s Synfuels Corporation attest, they rarely achieve the desired result, but breed enormous cost, waste and corruption.

Second, the amount of capital invested in attempting to improve the efficiency of “green” energy over the last three decades is many tens of billions of dollars in tax credits and other subsidies. The results are lamentable, and fraught with waste and corruption on an embarrassing scale.

Even when the sun shines or wind blows, solar-cell and wind-turbine power remains inefficient, unreliable, destructive of landscapes, and at least three times more expensive than conventional alternatives. These technologies survive solely because governments are in political thrall to small, but noisy and powerful, Green voter minorities and their rent-seeking corporate allies.

Can anyone seriously support pouring yet more unrequited money down this drain?

Lomborg also seems to have missed the fact that the debate over global warming has moved on. The ClimateGate emails were followed by the wholesale discrediting of the IPCC as a source for reliable scientific or policy advice. Moreover, new scientific papers continually weaken the already tottering hypothesis that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous climate disruption.

Many independent scientists and commentators now realize that the real hazards we face come from natural climatic events and changes – rather than from hypothetical, computer-modeled “manmade global warming.”

The appropriate response to climate hazards, whether natural or human-caused, is to adapt to events, as and when they happen. Two recent books (Adaptive Governance and Climate Change, by Ronald Brunner and Amanda Lynch, and Climate: the Counter Consensus, by Robert Carter) describe this approach in detail. As former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson puts it, “First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.”

Public debate about global warming has been dominated for far too long by scientists, economists and social scientists who proceed from the assumption that human CO2 emissions are causing dangerous warming. Most are unable to assess the latest science themselves, or have accepted verbatim what the world has now come to realize is the deeply flawed, alarmist advice of the IPCC.

The time has come to listen instead to the majority opinion of qualified independent scientists. They conclude that climate hazards are overwhelmingly natural problems, and thus should be dealt with by the time-honored civil defense technique of preparing for adverse events in advance, and adapting to them when they occur.

Whether the hazards are short-term (hurricanes and floods), intermediate (drought) or long-term (warming or cooling trends), preparation must be specific and regional in scale, for the hazards themselves vary widely by geographic location. If governments prepare properly for the full range of natural climatic hazards to which their countries are regularly exposed, this “be prepared” approach will also address the risk of future human-caused climate disruptions, should they ever occur.

Preparation and adaptation for all climate change is the simple, commonsense, cost-effective and precautionary Plan B that all governments can, and should, support.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death. Professor Robert (Bob) Carter is an emeritus fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia, chief science advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition, and author of Climate: the Counter Consensus.

The Climate Mafia Gather in Cancun ... Alan Caruba

The Climate Mafia Gather in Cancun
By Alan Caruba

On November 14, 1957, leaders of the American and other Mafia organizations gathered at the home of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara in Apalachin, New York; approximately one hundred Mafiosi from around the United States, Canada, and Italy attended.

Up to then, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had refused to acknowledge that the Mafia even existed, but a succession of prime time television appearances before Congressional committees by members of the Mafia made it abundantly clear that crime in America was, indeed, organized and led by some very colorful and ruthless descendents of the Sicilian Mafia.

It is time for the U.S. government to acknowledge that a climate mafia has existed since the gathering in Kyoto, Japan, to establish the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The December 11, 1997 treaty was, upon ratification, to go into force on February 16, 2005. Its expressed purpose was to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the purpose of avoiding “global warming”, but its real purpose was to create an entirely bogus system of emissions trading to be known as “the carbon market.”

On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate, responsible for the ratification of international treaties, unanimously passed (95-0) a resolution rejecting the Kyoto Treaty on the grounds that it “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.”

As this is written, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is striving to secure authorization to regulate GHG emissions despite massive evidence that they pose no threat to the environment and despite the fact that this authority would, as in 1997, cripple and likely destroy an already ailing economy.

There was no “global warming” then or now. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was deemed the chief cause of “global warming” when, in fact, it plays little or no role in climate change. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a criminal enterprise set up as a mechanism to facilitate the sale of bogus “carbon credits” and to transfer billions from industrialized, developed nations to those that have failed to keep pace. This latter scheme is little more than extortion.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC for their efforts to further this fraud. This demonstrates just how vast the effort to impose it had become. In the U.S., “Cap-and-Trade” legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, sponsored by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) was passed in the House and sent to the Senate. Political pundits say it is unlikely to come up for a vote.

In November 2009, the leak of thousands of emails between the scientists leading two university-based climate research centers responsible for the data published by the IPCC demonstrated they had deliberately rigged the data to assert a “global warming” that did not exist then or now. It was quickly dubbed “Climategate.”

The Climategate revelations doomed last year’s conference in Copenhagen that was intended to further the “global warming” fraud. It was attended by President Obama who said, “Today we’ve made (a) meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.”

There is no threat of climate change beyond those natural climate events such as hurricanes and blizzards over which humankind has no control.

Abandoning the term “global warming” and substituting “climate change” does not change the fact that there has been NO dramatic increase in the Earth’s overall temperature and ignores the fact that, since 1998, the Earth has entered a predictable and natural cooling cycle.

The President was lying then and continues to lie today about “climate change.”

Billions worldwide have been wasted on the needless reduction of GHGs. Billions here in the U.S. have been diverted to two of the most unpredictable and least effective means of energy production, wind and solar power.

Billions have been wasted on the U.S. mandate that ethanol be mixed with the gasoline Americans purchase, despite the fact that ethanol releases more CO2 into the environment than gasoline without it. Due to expire on December 31st, it would save an estimated six billion dollars. Even Al Gore has disowned ethanol.

The IPCC meeting in Cancun began on November 29 and will generate a lot of hot air for two weeks.

The Earth doesn’t need less carbon dioxide; vital to all crops, forests and vegetation. It needs more. The world doesn’t need less energy production. It needs more; vital to the economies of developed and developing nations.

The future of six billion people on planet Earth depends on the failure of the Cancun conference.

Alan Caruba

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Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Climate change no longer scary in Europe ... Dr. Hans Labohm

Climate change no longer scary in Europe
It’s not the climate, but the tide of opinion that’s changing in Europe and around the globe
Dr. Hans Labohm

The upcoming climate change (and wealth redistribution) summit in Cancun – coupled with Bjorn Lomborg’s ongoing publicity campaign for his new film – makes one thing painfully obvious. The fight against the delusion of dangerous man-made global warming remains an uphill struggle.

For decades the climate debate has been obfuscated by cherry-picking, spin-doctoring and scare-mongering by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other climate alarmists, including the environmental movement and mainstream media. Their massive effort to overstate the threat of man-made warming has left its imprint on public opinion.

But the tide seems to be turning. The Climate Conference fiasco in Copenhagen, Climategate scandal and stabilization of worldwide temperatures since 1995 have given rise to growing doubts about the putative threat of “dangerous global warming” or “global climate disruption.” Indeed, even Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and one of the main players in Climategate, now acknowledges that there has been no measurable warming since 1995, despite steadily rising atmospheric carbon dioxide.

People are paying attention, and opinion polls in many countries show a dramatic fall in the ranking of climate change among people’s major concerns. They are also beginning to understand that major rain and snow storms, hurricanes and other weather extremes are caused by solar-driven changes in global jet streams and warm-cold fronts, not by CO2, and that claims about recent years being the “warmest ever” are based on false or falsified temperature data.

In various parts of the world, the climate debate displays different features. The US and other parts of the non-European Anglo-Saxon world feature highly polarized and politicized debates along the left/right divide. In Europe, all major political parties are still toeing the “official” IPCC line. In both arenas, with a few notable exceptions, skeptical views – even from well-known scientists with impeccable credentials – tend to be ignored and/or actively suppressed by governments, academia and the media.

However, skepticism about manmade climate disasters is gradually gaining ground nevertheless.

In my own country, The Netherlands, for instance, it has even received some official recognition, thus dissolving the information monopoly of climate alarmists. The Standing Committee on Environment of the Lower House even organized a one-day hearing, where both climate chaos adherents and disaster skeptics could freely discuss their different views before key parliamentarians who decide climate policy.

This hearing was followed by a special seminar organized by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, using the same format but focusing on scientific topics. The Academy will soon publish a report about this seminar.

Europe often brags about its emission trading scheme (ETS), regarding itself as the vanguard of an international climate policy. In the European view, the Copenhagen climate summit should have produced a worldwide extension and sharpening of its ETS. But the vast majority of countries in the world refused to follow Europe’s example, so the meeting turned into a fiasco. Its follow-up in Cancun at year’s end will surely produce a similar result. And for good reason.

Contrary to official claims, Europe’s experience with ETS is dismally bad. The system is expensive and prone to massive fraud. More importantly, it serves no useful purpose.

The European Environmental Agency tracks Europe's performance regarding the reduction of CO2 emissions. Its latest report states: “The European Union's greenhouse gas inventory report … shows that emissions have not only continued their downward trend in 2008, but have also picked up pace. The EU-27’s emissions stood 11.3% below their 1990 levels, while EU-15 achieved a reduction of 6.9% compared to Kyoto base-year levels.”

On the face of it, the scheme seems to be pretty successful. However, much of the downward trend was due to the global economic recession, not to the ETS. Moreover, both climate chaos proponents and climate disaster skeptics agree that the scheme will have no detectable impact whatsoever on worldwide temperatures – perhaps 0.1 degrees – though this crucial piece of information has been carefully and deliberately shielded from the public eye.

What about renewable energy as an alternative? Consider these EU costs for various sources of electricity in cents per kilowatt-hour: nuclear 4, coal 4, natural gas 5, onshore wind 13, biomass 16 … solar 56!

Obviously, the price tag for renewables is extremely high, compared to hydrocarbons. The additional costs can be justified either by imminent fossil fuel scarcity (the “oil peak”), which would send petroleum and coal prices through the roof, or by the threat of man-made global warming. But on closer inspection neither argument is tenable.

The authoritative International Energy Agency does not foresee any substantial scarcity of oil and gas in the near to medium future, and coal reserves remain sufficient for centuries to come. As to global warming, the absence of a statistically significant increase in average worldwide temperatures since 1995 obliterates that assertion.

Meanwhile, recent peer-reviewed studies indicate that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere (natural or man-made) have minimal effects on climate change – while others demonstrate that, on balance, this plant-fertilizing gas is beneficial, rather than harmful, for mankind and the biosphere.

All this argues for a closer look at the cost/benefit relationship of investing in renewable energy projects, to prevent a massive waste of financial and natural resources on unreliable and thus uncompetitive forms of energy. Since every cloud has a silver lining, the ongoing economic crisis might give extra impetus toward that end.
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Hans Labohm is a former professor at the Dutch Institute of International Relations and guest teacher at the Netherlands Institute for Defense Studies. He has been an IPCC reviewer and has written extensively on global warming, petroleum economics and other topics.

Energy Claims and Realities ... James Tonkowich

Energy claims and realities
What will happen to jobs, living standards and families under restrictive energy policies?
By James Tonkowich

Pennsylvania is lucky. Even amid this prolonged recession and depressingly high unemployment (9.5% in PA), families and businesses in the Keystone State are still paying just 9.4 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity.


That’s due in large part to the fact that Pennsylvania gets 53% of its electricity from coal. A lot of people vilify that black rock. But just think how much easier it is to cool our homes and cook our food at this price – or operate a factory, farm, office, store, hospital, school, church … or government agency.


Of course, 9.4 cents per kilowatt hour might seem like a lot to pay, compared to Indiana (where people pay only 7.1 cents), Kentucky (where electricity costs just 6.3 cents), or West Virginia (where it’s a rock-bottom 5.6 cents a kWh).


But just think how much harder all that would be if we lived in California, which generates just 1% of its electricity with coal, and people pay 13 cents per kWh; in Rhode Island, which gets no electricity from coal, and they shell out 16 cents a kWh; or just across the Delaware River in New Jersey, where families and businesses have to cough up 14.9 cents per kWh, largely because the state uses coal to produce just 15% of its job-creating electricity.


California already has its own cap-tax-and-trade global warming law, renewable energy mandates that get tougher and costlier every year, and programs that spend billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing major wind and solar energy initiatives. The once-Golden State also has the second highest unemployment rate in America (12.4%), a budget deficit of almost $20 billion, and some $500 billion in unfunded pension liabilities for government workers! It ranks 49th out of 50 among states for “business friendliness.”


Its burdensome rules are justified by assertions that they prevent climate change caused by rising CO2 levels. I’m no scientist, but thousands of scientists disagree. Last year’s leaked emails by top US and British alarmist researchers show that the science of global warming has become politicized to the point that scientists who disagree, or remain unconvinced, are condemned as heretics – and alarmists are actually manipulating thermometer data and computer models to get the “climate crisis” results they want. That is dishonest and wrong.


Moreover, even California’s total contribution to the planet’s carbon dioxide levels is tiny. Pennsylvania’s is smaller still. Even if the Golden State or Keystone State totally eliminated its CO2 emissions, China’s and India’s emissions would completely replace those painful, job-killing reductions in just a few months.


According to some climate experts, even if the entire United States cut its CO2 emissions by 83% by 2050, as required by pending congressional legislation – that would, at most, reduce global temperature increases by a mere 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.


Worse, that 83% reduction would send CO2 emissions all the way back to 1910 levels (1870 levels, if you consider population and technology changes since 1900). So we’re talking about truly painful cutbacks, and real pain at the pump, electric meter and bank account.


California’s actions are already forcing companies to lay off workers. A federal law would do the same on a national scale. Millions of workers would lose their jobs, as energy prices skyrocketed and we are forced to switch from fossil fuels that provide 85% of our energy, and replace them with expensive wind and solar power that requires huge subsidies, works only 30% of the time, on average, and currently provides just 1% of America’s energy.


Does anyone honestly think we can cap-tax-and-trade, regulate, litigate and otherwise penalize oil, natural gas and coal use – and not cause serious, even massive, harm to Pennsylvania’s economy? To the economies of the other 26 states that rely on coal for 47-98% of the electricity that generates their jobs, opportunities, prosperity and modern living standards?


States like Arkansas (47%), Colorado (65%), Illinois (48%), Indiana (95%), Kentucky (94%), Missouri (81%), North Dakota (91%), Ohio (85%), West Virginia (98%) and Wisconsin (66%), to name just a few. Penalizing coal use would cost millions of American jobs, and increase families’ energy and overall cost-of-living by thousands of dollars a year, according to studies by the Brookings Institute, Heritage Foundation, Congressional Budget Office and other analysts.


As a theologian and former pastor, I embrace God’s command to be wise stewards of His creation, to care for the Earth and our fellow human beings. We are not to waste the resources with which He has blessed us, but we are to use them for our benefit.


We are also supposed to prevent or solve environmental problems. However, we are given the wisdom to make sure the problems are real, serious and imminent, before we spend billions trying to solve them – and before we create new problems that impact the environment in new ways and hurt families still more.


Increasing energy, food and transportation costs, and sending millions into unemployment lines, in the middle of a recession, is certainly an example of creating new problems. So is installing thousands of wind turbines that cover millions of acres, require vast raw materials and kill thousands of birds, to produce electricity that is too expensive and unreliable to power modern factories, shops, homes, hospitals, schools and cities.


We need to think this through very carefully, before we enact costly policies that threaten to do much more harm than good.
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The Rev. Dr. James Tonkowich, a former pastor, is a senior fellow of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Greenwashing America ... Alan Caruba

Greenwashing America
By Alan Caruba

Every time you see some product being sold as “Green”, allegedly safer or beneficial for the environment, you can be sure that it is more expensive than a comparable product that does the same thing without making this claim.

Everything you eat, drink, wear or use begins as a “natural” product. It is absurd to think that calling it “Green” improves it in any fashion. Countless inspections before anything reaches the marketplace ensure product safety. To put it another way, a carrot is a carrot is a carrot.

Recently I received a news release from a public relations firm touting clients selling Green products such as “Parsley Plus All-Purpose Cleaner”, along with “stylish organic bed linens, “natural and organic clothing”, a “99.6% natural line” of shampoos, and, “100% Bamboo towels.”

In a similar fashion, every time you hear a corporation claiming it is concerned about the environment you can be sure that it is trying to protect itself against lawsuits from environmental groups or Environmental Protection Agency action that will eat into its profits and dividends.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Misleading Claims on ‘Green’ Labeling” cited a study asserting that “more than 95% of consumer products examined committed at least one offense of ‘greenwashing’, a term used to describe unproven environmental claims, according to TerraChoice, a North American environmental-marketing company that issued the report.”

“Environmental-marketing company”? By reading further down in the article, one learns that “TerraChoice was recently acquired by Underwriters Laboratories, an independent product-safety certification organization”, adding that both companies “could benefit if more manufacturers seek third-party verification of the eco-claims.” You think?

Consumers Union, an independent testing company, has built its reputation on its review of various products. Underwriters Laboratories has done the same, but there is no reason to believe any Green product claim, particularly since TerraChoice has announced it is probably a scam. Not surprisingly, third party certification has been offered by some major environmental organizations as yet another way to raise a few bucks.

It is no accident that the term “greenwashing” is akin to “brainwashing”, a term that came out of the Korean War when it was learned that American prisoners of war were subjected to “re-education” by their captors.

Communists have always been big on re-education, a practice of nations such as China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, and others where you were expected change your mind and learn to love Big Brother. The alternative was that you either stayed in their concentration camps or were systematically murdered for the crime of having been an intellectual, a landowner, or a bourgeois capitalist.

Communism murdered more people in the last century than all its wars combined.

Environmental organizations, in league with an unquestioning mainstream media, have been greenwashing and brainwashing the public for decades. It usually takes the form of scare campaigns and, in the case of supermarket products, it is directed a chemicals, plastics, how livestock is raised, or some other totally superfluous “issue” that has nothing to do with the quality, price or safety of the product. The object is always the same, to lay a guilt trip on the consumer, i.e., to greenwash them.

Green product claims go hand-in-hand with the metastasizing Green regulations whose bottom line raises the costs of everything in America these days. Angela Logomasini of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is an expert on regulatory affairs. When it comes to the environment, Congress passed 1,163 new laws between 1973 and 2006. Ms. Logomasini found that only 85 of those statutes reduced government regulation, while 795 increased it. The remaining were deemed to lack significant regulatory impact.

Five of the fifty volumes containing the federal regulatory code are devoted exclusively to environmental regulation and an additional twelve also address environmental regulation in some respect. The Small Business Administration concluded that environmental regulation is the leading regulatory expense for businesses with fewer than 20 employees, averaging $3,296 per worker.

Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency that generates the new laws and regulations is totally out of control. It has been on a regulatory binge anticipating a Congress controlled by Republicans. Nothing rational explains President Obama’s continued reference to greenhouse gas emissions, Green cars, and, especially, Green jobs when so many Americans are out of work..

The EPA, created by Richard Nixon with an executive order in 1970, has to be downsized to its original mandate, ensuring clean air and clean water. When it began to define rain puddles as navigable waters and ordinary dust as a pollutant, you have to know just how crazed and dangerous it has become.

It will take a generation or two for Americans to shake loose of the insanity that is environmentalism. Long seen as a religion, it seeks total control over every aspect of your life.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

Environmental injustice en Español ... by Rev. Sam Rodriguez

Environmental Injustice en Español
Liberal Latino pressure groups’ campaign will drive up energy prices, kill jobs and hurt families
Rev. Sam Rodriguez

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Nineteen Latino activist groups recently asked Congress and President Obama to oppose any attempts to delay or scale back proposed Environmental Protection Agency air pollution and climate regulations.

The groups’ letter cites EPA claims that “rising temperatures caused by human activities” would lead to higher levels of ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in smog. This they assert, again citing EPA claims, would lead to health problems in cities with large Hispanic populations, because low-income and minority communities are often less able to pay costs associated with heat-related health threats.

Therefore, they argue, any legislation that affects the proposed Clean Air Act initiatives “will severely jeopardize” public health and productivity in our communities. These initiatives are needed to ensure “environmental justice” and avoid “disproportionate impacts” from climate change in minority communities, by emphasizing renewable energy, better weatherization and “green jobs.”

My organization, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, represents over 25,000 congregations and 16 million Hispanic Evangelical Christians. We were not consulted or asked to sign the letter. If we had been, we would have offered some very different insights and perspectives.

First, the legislative actions alluded to in the letter result from Congress’s failure to enact climate change, cap-and-trade and energy legislation. The House of Representatives did pass a complex, partisan, thousand-page monstrosity that no one read before legislators narrowly approved it. A similar bill died in the Senate, as the public began to rebel over its scope, growing scientific questions about “dangerous global warming,” and previous hurried votes on unread stimulus and healthcare bills whose hidden costs and regulatory landmines became apparent only after President Obama signed them into law.

EPA intends to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide – and thus major energy users, CO2 emission sources and huge sectors of the American economy – in the absence of congressional action, based on its assertion that this vital plant-fertilizing gas somehow “endangers human health and welfare.”

Many members of Congress, many states and numerous citizens are loath to give a single federal agency such vast powers. They insist that any such decision must be debated fully and openly, subjected to high standards of scientific evidence – and read carefully by lawmakers and voters, prior to any vote.

Second, many of the assertions made in the Latino activists’ letter and EPA documents are questionable, convoluted or based on a deplorable lack of understanding of energy, health and economic realities.

Yes, poor families, including many Hispanics, find it hard to pay for healthcare, including heat-related problems. However, driving up the cost of energy (and thus the cost of literally everything we eat, make, drive and do), impairing job creation and retention, and virtually ensuring brownouts and blackouts in the midst of heat waves and cold snaps, would undermine the very health, economic and environmental justice goals the Latino groups claim to champion.

Global warming could arguably increase summer temperatures and heat waves. However, heat-related health problems would become far worse if families cannot afford air conditioning, or wind-generation makes their electricity as unreliable as in many Third World countries. Those conditions would make even a 0.01 degree rise in average global temperature deadly.

Moreover, far more people die during the winter, especially when they cannot afford adequate heat. For millions of Hispanic and other minority families that live in our northern states, this would become a serious health threat, because the proposed EPA rules would dramatically increase heating costs. Worse, they would do so for little health or environmental benefit, because automobile, factory and power plant emissions have already been reduced way below 1970 levels – and most mercury emissions and microscopic soot now come from volcanoes, forest fires and overseas sources.

Although atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been rising steadily, even scientists who worry about “dangerous” warming now acknowledge that there has been no warming since 1995. This undermines EPA’s claim that carbon emissions pose a health threat. And even if the United States eliminated nearly all its CO2 emissions, global levels would continue to rise, because China, India and other emerging economic powerhouses are using far more coal and oil energy.

Indeed, EPA itself admitted in a June 3, 2010 Federal Register notice that regulating emissions from US cars and trucks would reduce average global temperatures by an undetectable 0.002 degrees by 2100. The agency also admits that regulating factories, power plants, cement kilns, and large office and apartment buildings under its onerous global warming rules and permitting requirements would “slow construction nationwide for years” and cause “adverse impacts” on US economic development.

In other words, EPA’s new rules might result in jobs and “cash for caulkers,” perhaps with much of the funding channeled from taxpayers through the Latino groups that wrote the letter. But the rules would cost millions of factory, construction and other jobs – for little or no environmental benefit.

Official US unemployment remains mired at 9.6 percent. That’s the 14th consecutive month it’s been over 9.5% – the worst streak since the Great Depression. EPA’s rules would only make this worse.

One of the groups signing the letter claims Latino voters are willing to pay more to protect the environment. Are Hispanics really that eco-conscious? A 2009 Wilson Research Strategies poll found that 76% of black Americans are unwilling to pay more than $50 more per year for electricity, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A September 2010 Ipsos Public Affairs poll found that half of all Americans are unwilling to pay even $60 more per year in total energy costs.

If only reality were so kind. Studies by the Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation, Congressional Budget Office and others found that the House-passed climate bill would add $1,500 to $3,000 to the average family’s annual energy bill! It would raise electricity rates 90-130% and gasoline prices 60-140% after adjusting for inflation. EPA rules would have similar impacts.

We should not be surprised. Over in Britain, where they have already imposed a host of “green energy” and “climate protection” laws, energy prices are already soaring, 5.5 million households have been driven into “fuel poverty” – and 25,000 more elderly people died during the winter than during the summer.

The fact is, when energy and regulatory compliance costs increase, building construction slows, businesses stop hiring or lay people off, the cost of everything we do soars higher, the vaunted Hispanic entrepreneurial spirit is stifled, and poor people’s hopes of achieving the American Dream are thwarted. This is not “environmental justice.” This is perverse, unnecessary and unacceptable.

Speaking of polls, a brand new Pew Hispanic Center survey found that Latinos are far less enthusiastic about heading to the polls this November than in 2008. That makes the timing and thrust of this activist letter smell like an effort to energize these reluctant voters and buttress White House and EPA agendas on energy, climate change and a new “green economy.”

Weatherproofing homes and improving energy efficiency are generally good things. But if cash for caulkers is the quid for the quo of activist groups promoting government agendas that drive up energy costs and kill jobs, we have a serious problem. For then politicized groups and their leaders profit at the expense of those they claim to represent. That is environmental injustice en Español. And it is wrong.

Rev. Sam Rodriguez
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Rev. Sam Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and co-chair of the Affordable Power Alliance, a humanitarian coalition of civil rights, minority, small business, senior citizen and faith-based organizations that champion access to affordable energy: http://www.affordablepoweralliance.org/