On Tuesday, Al Gore again called for a “cap and trade” system by warning Americans the country faces a “climate cliff” in addition to a “fiscal cliff.”
“It will be difficult for sure but we can back away from the fiscal cliff and the climate cliff at the same time,” Gore said. “One way is with a carbon tax.”
Gore proposed a “carbon tax swap,” where a cap and trade system would be instituted in exchange for income taxes being lowered. Even conservatives like Grover Norquist had given some credence to this idea before backing off, realizing that income taxes could be raised by future Congresses while a carbon tax — once instituted — would be nearly impossible to undo.
“The most direct policy solution to the climate crisis is a carbon tax, offset by reductions in taxes on wages,” Gore said. “By including the carbon tax in the solution to the fiscal cliff we can [get] away from the climate cliff.”
Al Gore said Tuesday that Hurricane Sandy is a “disturbing sign of things to come” in a warming world and should prompt action to curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
“We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather,” the former vice president said in a statement on his website.
Gore cited Sandy, which slammed ashore late Monday, and smaller-scale flooding in his hometown of Nashville two years ago, noting “both storms were strengthened by the climate crisis.”
“Scientists tell us that by continually dumping 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every single day, we are altering the environment in which all storms develop. As the oceans and atmosphere continue to warm, storms are becoming more energetic and powerful,” he said.
Gore also said that as Sandy approached the East Coast, it drew power from abnormally warm coastal waters and that the storm surge was worsened by sea-level rise.
“Scientists tell us that if we do not reduce our emissions, these problems will only grow worse,” he said.
President Obama’s green jobs training program, which was part of his stimulus, has failed on most key jobs measures, according to a new internal audit that found it was training workers who already had jobs that didn’t need green energy skills, and was failing to place new enrollees in jobs once they finished the training.
The Labor Department’s inspector general also said grantees who received the green jobs-training money did a poor job of reporting their results.
Only 38 percent of those who have completed training got jobs based on it, and only 16 percent kept jobs for at least six months — the key measure of success for the program.
“Outcomes for participants were far less than originally proposed,” the auditors said.
The government earmarked more than $400 million for green jobs training programs, and $328.5 million has been spent so far.
Every time there’s a massive weather event — like Hurricane Sandy affecting much of the East Coast early this week — climatologists are called upon to answer the question of whether this weather is evidence of global warming. And while most would say an individual weather event cannot attributed as evidence of global warming, the link is still being made.
In fact, some climate scientists are taking a closer look at individual weather events and making an effort to quantify climate change’s role in contributing to it.
Although trends in changing climate are generally tracked over years, not just by the weather outside your window, as it’s often put, NPR’s Adam Frank reported several researchers are looking at various aspects of individual weather events and the influence of climate change:
Researchers like Randall Dole of NOAA, for example, might ask what percentage of an extreme event’s magnitude came from a changing climate. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office frames the question differently. He looks at the odds for a given extreme weather event to occur given human-driven climate change. Kevin Trenberth of NCAR takes a third view, asking: Given a changed background climate, how should we expect weather to change?
In his weekly radio address on July 3, 2010, President Barack Obama announced that “the Department of Energy is awarding nearly $2 billion in conditional commitments from the Recovery Act to two solar companies.” Neither of them was named Solyndra.
One of the two companies Obama did name was Fort Collins, Colorado-based Abound Solar, which Obama touted as a company which would create “more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs” at two new plants which “When fully operational … will produce millions of state-of-the-art solar panels each year.” As Amy Oliver detailed at Townhall a year ago, Abound is a classic case of Obama bundler cronyism. In July, just shy of two years after Obama’s address, the company, which benefited from $400 million of Department of Energy loan guarantees, filed for bankruptcy. Yesterday, a Colorado District Attorney announced a criminal investigation.
Discussions on the European Union’s negotiating position at upcoming UN climate talks ended inconclusively last night (25 October) because of divisions over whether tradeable emissions allowances should be carried over to the next period of the Kyoto Protocol.
The first period of the protocol finishes at the end of the year, and most countries do not want it to be extended. At UN climate talks in Durban last year, the EU agreed to organise a second commitment period effectively on its own, in exchange for other major emitters agreeing to a future climate deal by 2015.
The details of that second commitment period must be worked out at this year’s summit, in Doha. But EU member states are divided on the issue of whether to carry over excess credits (AAUs) from the first period into the second period. Poland is blocking adoption of any EU position that would eliminate these excess credits, a move called for by the G77 group of developing countries and all western European countries.
Opponents of carrying over the credits say it would render a second Kyoto commitment period meaningless, because central and eastern European countries were over-allocated allowances due to their rapid de-industrialisation in the early 1990s.
Lawsuit filed against The National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute 10/22/12
Today, the case of Dr. Michael E. Mann vs. The National Review and The Competitive Enterprise Institute was filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Dr. Mann, a Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, has instituted this lawsuit against the two organizations, along with two of their authors, based upon their false and defamatory statements accusing him of academic fraud and comparing him to a convicted child molester, Jerry Sandusky. Dr. Mann is being represented by John B. Williams of the law firm of Cozen O’Connor in Washington, D.C. (http://www.cozen.com/attorney_detail.asp?d=1&atid=1406).
Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”
Nevertheless, the defendants assert that global warming is a “hoax,” and have accused Dr. Mann of improperly manipulating the data to reach his conclusions.
Lord Christopher Monckton, a WND columnist who describes himself as the “high priest of climate skepticism,” says there will be an investigation, and a conviction, if “Al baby” Gore said anything during a weekend visit to a “green” conference in Gibraltar that could be construed as advocating for the financial interests of his company, Generations Investment Management.
While the company remains largely out of the public view, its interests apparently lie in the financial benefits that could emerge should global warming regulations be imposed and so-called “carbon credits” become an issue.
President Barack Obama in 2010 spoke at LG Chem subsidiary Compact Power, an electric battery plant in Holland, Mich., to tout his administration’s decision to pour millions and millions of taxpayer’s dollars into the clean energy industry.
“Our goal has never been to create a government program, but rather to unleash private-sector growth,” Obama said. “And we’re seeing results.”
“This is a symbol of where Michigan’s going. This is a symbol of where Holland is going. This is a symbol of where America is going,” he added.
Much like Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod’s premature Nats gloat tweet, the president’s 2010 Holland speech seems pretty ominous in retrospect.
Why? Because, according to a new report from Target 8, that same electric battery company President Obama spoke at in 2010 is an unmitigated disaster and a shameful waste of tax dollars.
For starters, there’s no work to be done. Employees, who are being paid with the $150 million the Department of Energy awarded the plant, claim they show up and sit around because there’s nothing to do. It has gotten to the point where employees spend most of their time playing cards and/or board games and watching movies to keep themselves entertained.
“There would be up to 40 of us that would just sit in there during the day,” one former LG Chem employee Nicole Merryman, who said she quit in May, told Target 8.
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Despite the well-known failures and struggles of the renewable energy sector, former Vice President Al Gore has managed to profit handsomely from multiple “green” energy investments, according to a lengthy and surprisingly revealing Washington Post article.
And when we say he has done well, we mean he has done really, really well. Take, for instance, the fact that since getting into the business in 2000, Gore’s personal wealth has grown by approximately $98 million:
Gore charted this path by returning to his longtime passion — clean energy. He benefited from a powerful resume and a constellation of friends in the investment world and in Washington. And four years ago, his portfolio aligned smoothly with the agenda of an incoming administration and its plan to spend billions in stimulus funds on alternative energy.
The article continues, listing Gore-related “green” energy companies that have received federal money.
The ice goes on seemingly forever in a white pancake-flat landscape, stretching farther than ever before. And yet in this confounding region of the world, that spreading ice may be a cockeyed signal of man-made climate change, scientists say.
This is Antarctica, the polar opposite of the Arctic.
While the North Pole has been losing sea ice over the years, the water nearest the South Pole has been gaining it. Antarctic sea ice hit a record 7.51 million square miles in September. That happened just days after reports of the biggest loss of Arctic sea ice on record.
Climate change skeptics have seized on the Antarctic ice to argue that the globe isn’t warming and that scientists are ignoring the southern continent because it’s not convenient. But scientists say the skeptics are misinterpreting what’s happening and why.
Shifts in wind patterns and the giant ozone hole over the Antarctic this time of year — both related to human activity — are probably behind the increase in ice, experts say. This subtle growth in winter sea ice since scientists began measuring it in 1979 was initially surprising, they say, but makes sense the more it is studied.
From Breitbart
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