Republicans are raising questions about why the EPA apparently dismissed an analyst’s report questioning the science behind global warming

By Judson Berger

A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency’s alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin’s report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

“He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he’s ordered an investigation. “We’re going to expose it.”

Read the rest at Fox News.

House Vote On Passage: H.R. 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (aka the single largest tax increase in American history)

The complete roll call vote with contact info is provided at GlennBeck.com.

By Michelle Malkin

The Obama administration doesn’t want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don’t want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion, thousand-page “cap and trade” bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda.

The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.” In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.
 
On March 12, Carlin’s director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having “any direct communication” with anyone outside his office about his study. “There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc.” On March 16, Carlin urged his superiors to forward his work to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which runs the agency’s climate change program. A day later, McGartland dismissed Carlin and showed his true, politicized colors:
 
“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision….I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”
 
Contrary comments, in other words, would interfere with the “process” of ramming the EPA’s endangerment finding through. Truth in science took a back seat to protecting eco-bureaucrats from “a very negative impact.”

Read the rest at One News Now.

HR 2454, the “Cap and Tax” bill known as ACES was brought to the floor of the United States House of Representatives today. A 300 page amendment to the over 1,000 page bill was brought forward at 3:09 this morning and a final, official copy of the bill was not available to House members during debate on passage of the bill.

House Republicans repeatedly inquired about the whereabouts of a printed copy of the final bill and were rebuffed by the DFL chair. In short, virtually no one had read the bill being considered for final passage.

Shortly before 6:30 PM CST, a roll call vote on final passage was called. The bill was passed by a vote of 219 – 212. 211 Democrats voted for passage with 43 Democrats voting no. 8 Republicans voted in favor of passage with 168 of them voting no. One Democrat didn’t vote and 2 Republicans didn’t vote.

The cap and trade bill will now move to the U. S. Senate for their consideration. If it passes there, it’s on its way to becoming law by the stroke of President Obama’s pen.

Far more Democrats voted against the bill than Republicans voted for it, which is telling in a broad sense when considered in light of the wishes of the American electorate – most of whom oppose this bill.

One could say that a lack of Republican unity was responsible for the bill’s passage. Had the tiny minority of Republican congressmen who voted in favor of the bill abstained, or voted no, the bill would have failed.

Take Action: The bill’s next stop is the U. S. Senate. Contact your Senator now and urge a ‘No” vote on the Cap and Tax Swindle.

Turning carbon into cold cash

The American people are under assault by officials in the federal government. Under the specious guise of saving the planet, they intend to fleece the people to benefit political allies, powerful money interests and a political agenda that is in direct opposition to the American way of life.

By President Obama’s own admission, with a cap and trade scheme like the Waxman- Markey Bill, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

The Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill, also known as ACES (the American Clean Energy and Security Act – HR 2454), is projected to impose annual energy cost hikes in excess of $1,000 per household. The total cost to the flagging American economy is projected at $650 billion to over $1 trillion.

Even if the hotly contested claims of carbon-driven manmade global warming were to be believed, the touted climate benefit of the Waxman-Markey bill is that global surface temperatures will be one tenth of one degree cooler than currently projected in one hundred years.

ACES comes with an incredible price tag and promises no significant short or long-term benefit to either the American people or the global climate. This bill is nothing but another attempt to at a massive power and money grab by Washington’s elite.

To enrich a few powerful financial beneficiaries, like producers of wind turbines, and carbon trading firms such as the one former vice president and climate-alarmist-in-chief Al Gore profits from, Waxman-Markey is poised to decrease our national gross domestic product by $7 trillion dollars or more and cost another 1.9 million jobs, while adding sharply to the average families’ financial burden. Electricity rates could increase as much as 90% (nearly double what you now pay), Gasoline prices could rise 75%.

If this cap and trade scheme prevails, a select group of the rich will get richer on the backs of hard working American families who will literally see no benefit, not even after paying for this scheme for one hundred years.

A vote on this bill could come up in the House as soon as Friday. Call your congressman and senator today. Let them know that you wont stand for this despicable, fraudulent fleecing of America’s honest hard-working families.

Minnesota readers, click here to contact your elected officials.

All others, click here to contact your elected officials.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 42% of U.S. voters now believe human activity is the cause of global warming, while 40% say it is caused by long-term planetary trends.

While the numbers are close, this is the first time more voters see human activity as the primary cause of global warming since January. In May, voters blamed planetary trends by a 44% to 39% margin.

Republicans by nearly three-to-one say global warming is caused by planetary trends, while Democrats believe human activity is to blame by the same margin. Voters not affiliated with either party are almost evenly divided on the question.

The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is expected to vote as early as next week on legislation aimed at dramatically reducing carbon dioxide pollution, which supporters of the bill say causes global warming.

Read the Rest at Rasmussen Reports.

By Bjorn Lomborg

The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it terrifies our kids.

Al Gore famously depicted how a sea-level rise of 20 feet (six meters) would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, Bangladesh, and Shanghai, even though the United Nations estimates that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that, and do no such thing.

When confronted with these exaggerations, some of us say that they are for a good cause, and surely there is no harm done if the result is that we focus even more on tackling climate change. A similar argument was used when George W. Bush’s administration overstated the terror threat from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

But this argument is astonishingly wrong. Such exaggerations do plenty of harm. Worrying excessively about global warming means that we worry less about other things, where we could do so much more good.

We focus, for example, on global warming’s impact on malaria ― which will be to put slightly more people at risk in 100 years ― instead of tackling the half-billion people suffering from malaria today with prevention and treatment policies that are much cheaper and dramatically more effective than carbon reduction would be.

Exaggeration also wears out the public’s willingness to tackle global warming. If the planet is doomed, people wonder, why do anything? A record 54 percent of American voters now believe the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is.

A majority of people now believes ― incorrectly ― that global warming is not even caused by humans. In the United Kingdom, 40 percent believe that global warming is exaggerated and 60 percent doubt that it is manmade.

But the worst cost of exaggeration, I believe, is the unnecessary alarm that it causes ― particularly among children. Recently, I discussed climate change with a group of Danish teenagers. One of them worried that global warming would cause the planet to “explode” ― and all the others had similar fears.

In the U.S., the ABC television network recently reported that psychologists are starting to see more neuroses in people anxious about climate change. An article in the Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal extinctions from global warming.

In her words: “I don’t like global warming because it kills animals, and I like animals.” From a child who is yet to lose all her baby teeth: “I worry about [global warming] because I don’t want to die.”

The newspaper also reported that parents are searching for “productive” outlets for their eight-year-olds’ obsessions with dying polar bears. They might be better off educating them and letting them know that, contrary to common belief, the global polar bear population has doubled and perhaps even quadrupled over the past half-century, to about 22,000.

Read the rest at The Korea Times.

By Marc Morano

A public appeal has been issued by an influential U.S. website asking: “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers.” The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S. The anonymous posting, dated June 2, 2009, referred to dissenters of man-made global warming fears as “greedy bastards” who use “bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool” to “distort data.”

The Talking Points Memo article continues: “So when the right wing f***tards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events – how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?”

Read the rest at Climate Depot.

By Pat Anderson

This week, as Governor Pawlenty was making his historic announcement, I was part of a delegation of Minnesotans attending the Third International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute. This is the third conference in little over a year to draw attention to the widespread and growing dissent over the alleged “consensus” on “Global Warming” or “Climate Change.”

The conference coincided with the release of  “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.” The report thoroughly documents the challenges to the global warming thesis, from problems with the models, to faulty temperature record observations and other data and with competing theories about the biology and physics of the effects of the gasses that impact the climate.   The entire 800+ page report is available for free online at the Heartland Institute web site.

At the same time that there are serious doubts about the science, the costs of government regulation touting environmental benefits in reducing carbon and greenhouses gasses are becoming clearer.  And they are high.  According to the Heartland Institute, reducing greenhouse gas emissions “even modestly” is estimated to cost the average household in the U.S. approximately $3,372 per year and would destroy 2.4 million jobs. Electricity prices would double, sending more businesses into bankruptcy and others overseas to countries that aren’t burdened with high regulatory costs.  Much of the funding for “climate change” will do nothing to help the environment at all, instead going directly to radical environmental groups who will use those resources to create sophisticated propaganda and lobbying campaigns to promote an anti-business, anti-growth agenda.  If supporters of the free market do not continue to work to expose the fact the very basis, for the theories of  global warming and climate change are in dispute, we will be fighting an uphill battle for our future economic prosperity down the road.  

Pat Anderson is President of the Minnesota Free Market Institute.