By Johnathan Serrie

Just months after obtaining more than $400,000 in federal stimulus funds, TR Auto Truck Plaza off Interstate 40 sits idle.

The Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) handed out the $424,000 Environmental Protection Agency stimulus grant for electrical hookups so that truckers wouldn’t have to burn diesel fuel while resting. Both the state and EPA were apparently unaware that owner Rick Lewis had a history of legal and financial problems and had filed for bankruptcy.

What was originally lauded as Tennessee’s first electrified truck terminal is now boarded up.

“It is Solyndra in miniature,” said Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., referring to a Silicon Valley solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy shortly after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. “What I am questioning is the vetting and oversight and the fiduciary responsibility that the federal government — the people who run these programs — have to we, the taxpayer.”

Even before his latest bankruptcy filing, Lewis had a history of financial troubles. He filed for bankruptcy in 2003, a year after a conviction on 31 counts of theft. And Lewis currently faces indictments for allegedly writing worthless checks, according to court records.

Read the rest at Fox News.

By Matthew Mosk and Ronnie Greene

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department’s $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland.

Read the rest and see the video at ABC News.

By Eamon James

Someone affiliated with the Department of Energy has been going back to make changes to press releases posted on the Internet weeks and months ago, CNBC has found.

The changes occurred in two press releases from the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program – the same program that has been the center of controversy surrounding the failed solar company Solyndra.

Both were changed to remove the name of a company that has received negative press attention in recent days, SunPower, and replace it with the name of another company, NRG Energy.

Generally, it is not considered correct procedure to revise old press releases retroactively on the Web. More commonly, government agencies will issue a new press release with a current date explaining any changes that have occurred.

Read the rest at CNBC.

By Ed Morrissey

Conservatives know well that Mitt Romney has so far refused to back away from his contention that anthropogenic global warming is real, and yet the former Massachusetts governor continues to lead the Republican race for the presidential nomination. In seven debates, none of Romney’s competitors have challenged him on this position. This week, however, the blog Moonbattery found a very interesting memo from Romney’s office in 2005 announcing tough new regulations on emissions  and noting a partnership with a familiar conservative b’te noire in this administration (via Sundries Shack):

Governor Mitt Romney today announced that Massachusetts will take another major step in meeting its commitment to protecting air quality when strict state limitations on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants take effect on January 1, 2006. …
Massachusetts is the first and only state to set CO2 emissions limits on power plants. The limits, which target the six largest and oldest power plants in the state, are the toughest in the nation…
In addition to reaffirming existing stringent CO2 limits, the draft regulations announced today, which will be filed next week, contain protections against excessive price increases for businesses and consumers. They allow power generation companies to implement CO2 reductions at their own facilities or fund other reduction projects off-site through a greenhouse gas offset and credits program.

In other words, the Romney administration in 2005 essentially did what Barack Obama’s EPA wants to do now. He imposed CO2 emission caps, “the toughest in the nation,” in an effort to curtail traditional energy production.  Not only did Romney impose these costly new regulations, he then imposed price caps to keep power companies from passing the cost along to the consumer. As we have seen in RomneyCare, regulation and price controls eventually drive businesses into bankruptcy or relocation.

So what has happened to Massachusetts’ electrical production since signing these regulations into law? According to the EIA, whose latest data is for 2009, it dropped 18% in four years, from over 46 billion megawatt hours to 38 billion. International imports, however, went from 697 million megawatt hours in 2006 to 4.177 billion megawatt hours two years later, and to almost 5 billion megawatt hours in 2009, more than twice the amount imported in any of the previous twenty years.

And who advised Romney on these regulations? Why, none other than Obama’s chief science adviser, John Holdren…

Read the rest at Hot Air.

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate

By Devin Powell

By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries.The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” says Nevle, who described the consequences of this change October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.

Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. This depletion of a key greenhouse gas, in turn, may have kicked off Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages.

Read the rest at Science News.

By Stephen Clark

With the Solyndra scandal still swirling, the Obama administration is under pressure to reveal the financial condition of the solar companies that received $4.75 billion in similar federal loan guarantees on the last day of the program.

Republican lawmakers on two House committees are seeking details about the loans given to First Solar, SunPower Corp. and ProLogis. Of those three companies, troubling financial revelations have emerged about SunPower, which sponsored a solar project that received a $1.2 billion loan, more than twice the money approved for Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy last month after receiving a $528 million loan.

The Energy Department says on its website that the $1.2 billion loan to help build the California Valley Solar Ranch in San Luis Obispo County, a project that will help create 15 permanent jobs, which adds up to the equivalent of $80 million in taxpayer money for each job.

Read the rest at Fox News.

By Cory Kampschroer

A small group of demonstrators was on hand in Minneapolis today for the arrival of a global warming author and speaker. Dr. Michael Mann spoke Wednesday at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Mann is a physicist and climatologist and is best known as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends in the past one-thousand years, known as the ‘hockey stick graph.’

Members of the organization, Minnesota Majority, protested Mann’s Minneapolis speech calling it “fraudulent.” Dan McGrath was among the roughly 10 people protesting, calling Mann “among the most guilty parties in what we call the global warming scam.”

Read the rest at KSTP.

Creator of discredited “hockey stick” chart caused US, world much harm, say demonstrators

Dr. Michael Mann was welcomed to Minneapolis today by a group of demonstrators who blame Dr. Mann’s research and publications for damage to the US and world economies and fostering distrust in scientists. The demonstrators believe Mann’s oft-referenced work to prove anthropogenic global warming theory is fraudulent and showed up at the Minneapolis convention center where he was speaking at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America to tell him so.

Mann was made infamous by discredited tree ring research used to create the so-called “hockey stick chart” that purported to demonstrate recent, runaway man-caused global warming. His name came up in the “climategate” email scandal that emerged out of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, in connection to a “trick” employed by Dr. Mann for a paper published in Nature Magazine. That trick involved obfuscating the results of proxy temperature data when it didn’t match actual temperatures recorded by instrumentation. Discovery of that trick called into question the validity of the entire pre-instrumentation climate history constructed from Mann’s work.

The hockey stick chart was the key element in Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and the United Nations’ 1997 Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s 4th Assessment. The IPCC report has been the underpinning of United States and global warming policy for over a decade. Based upon it’s conclusions, governments have implemented expensive carbon taxes and new overbearing regulations designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, cap and trade schemes, a phased-in ban on incandescent light bulbs, the forced relocation of whole populations of people to make room for carbon credit producing plantations and numerous other far reaching and expensive initiatives.

“There are several reasons for the current economic crisis we’re facing in the United States and globally, but a major contributor has been the suppression of energy production and economic activity by overbearing new regulations, taxes and carbon trading resulting from the misguided belief that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are causing extraordinary warming of the planet,” said Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis. “We feel Dr. Mann’s work has contributed to tremendous economic and societal harm,” he said.

“Where did the medieval warming period go? What decline did he hide? What’s the Nature trick?” are the questions Minnesota Free Market Institute president Kim Crockett wants answers to.

Mann wasn’t available with answers.

Instead, Dr. Mann ironically spoke to the Geologic Society about how some climate scientists in the public arena are “attacked” by their opponents and about how climate scientists are “massively out-manned and out-funded in this battle.”

“His ‘poor me’ routine would be laughable in the face of the trillions of public dollars being poured into the green global warming toilet, if it weren’t for the part about trillions of public dollars being poured into the toilet,” said Davis. “These demonstrators aren’t being paid. In truth, they’re paying people like Mann and they’re turning our tax dollars against us, trying to get even more of our money.”

Dr. Michael Mann will be at the Minneapolis Convention Center Wednesday to give a short lecture to the American Geological Society’s annual meeting.

Mann is probably best known as the infamous creator of the “hockey stick” graph designed to show a rapid, recent deviation from “normal” global temperatures,

Mann’s other notable contribution to climate science was his so-called “Nature trick,” in which he obfuscated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures his own flawed tree ring research indicated. Mann had essentially disproved the reliability of his own work, which was the basis for reconstructing the Earth’s past climate record, the very foundation of the theory that the warming period experienced in the 1990s was outside the Earth’s norms.

Mann will address the geologists with a short talk titled, “Climate Scientists in the Public Arena: Who’s Got Our Backs?” at 1:45 PM.

From the synopsis of the talk posted on the AGS website, it appears that Mann will complain about warmists like himself being singled out and lament that scientists of his ilk are “massively out-funded in this battle” (not) over the realities of anthropogenic climate change.

It’s true that Mann has often been the subject of ridicule. In the wake of the “climategate” email scandals, his “Nature trick” of graph-scrubbing received a lot of attention and his hockey stick chart which was the basis for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has been proven false. Both of these facts have made him a target for satire, prompting him to threaten lawsuits against his detractors in the past. Now it seems, he’s hoping to grab some sympathetic ears among the geologists meeting at the Minneapolis Convention Center on Wednesday.

Perhaps Dr. Mann could use a welcoming committee. If you feel like welcoming one of the inner sanctum of warmist climate scientists to Minneapolis with a hand-made sign of some sort, drop by outside the Convention Center around 1:00 on Wednesday, October 12th. Can’t make it that early in the day? The meeting wraps up at 5:30 – 6:00 PM. You could drop by to bid adieu after work instead.

Update: Two facebook events have been established for a Michael Mann Welcoming Committee.

• See here for the 1:00-2:00 demonstration.
• Minnesotans for Global Warming has set up a facebook event for the 5:00-6:00 demonstration.

By Carol D. Leonnig and and Joe Stephens

Newly released e-mails show the Obama administration’s Energy Department was poised to give Solyndra a second taxpayer loan of $469 million last year, even as the company’s financial situation grew increasingly dire.

The department was still considering providing the second loan guarantee to the solar-panel manufacturer in April and May 2010, at a time when Solyndra’s auditors were already warning that the company was in danger of collapsing.

Details of the plan are revealed in e-mails released this week by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the original loan. On Wednesday, the probe intensified as committee Republicans requested that the White House provide all documents, dating back to President Obama’s inauguration, that would show communications between staff members and other officials regarding Solyndra’s original $535 million federal loan guarantee.

Republican leaders said that documents obtained in recent weeks show that Obama’s “closest confidantes” monitored the loan, and that his campaign donors offered advice on the company.

Read the rest at the Washington Post.

by Matthew Boyle

President Barack Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives suffered another major blow late Monday, as the nonprofit National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, announced a plan to lay off roughly 10 percent of its staff through a voluntary buy-out plan.

According to the Denver Post, the lab plans to eliminate between 100 and 150 of its 1,350 jobs. The Obama administration supported the NREL in 2009 with roughly $200 million in stimulus grants. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu visited Golden in May 2009 to promote the NREL as a beneficiary of those funds.

Read the rest at the Daily Caller.

By Martin Gould

GOP claims that the Obama administration’s green energy loan guarantee program is mired in cronyism grew on Friday after a company tied to Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law got the lion’s share of the final government hand-outs made before Friday’s end of the fiscal year.

The decision to guarantee $737 million comes hard on the heels of the loss of more than $500 million of government money due to the bankruptcy of solar panel company Solyndra.

The new grant went to Tonopah Solar Energy, a subsidiary of SolarReserve, which started building Crescent Dunes, a massive solar-thermal plant in the Nevada desert in early September.

Read the rest at Newsmax.

Calls for Honduran credits to be thrown out of ETS following alleged killings, while consultation process goes under review

By Arthur Neslen

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations has called into question the integrity of the EU’s emission trading scheme (ETS), as carbon credits from the plantations remain on sale.In Brussels, Green MEP Bas Eickhout called the alleged human rights abuses “a disgrace”, and told EurActiv he would be pushing the European Commission to bar carbon credits from the plantations from being traded under the ETS. Several members of the CDM board have been “personally distressed” by the events in Bajo Agu’¡n, northern Honduras, according to the board’s chairman, Martin Hession, and have placed under review the CDM’s stakeholder consultation process.

“Plainly, the events that have been described are deplorable,” said Hession. “There is no excuse for them.” But because they took place after the CDM’s stakeholder consultations had been held, and fell outside the board’s primary remit to investigate emissions reductions and environmental impacts, it had been powerless to block project registrations.

At the heart of the issue are the reported murders of 23 local farmers who tried to recover land that they say was illegally sold to big palm oil plantations, such as Grupo Dinant, in a country scarred by widespread human rights abuses.

Read the rest at The Guardian.

By Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss

In a remote desert spot in northern Nevada, there is a geothermal plant run by a politically connected clean energy start-up that has relied heavily on an Obama administration loan guarantee and is now facing financial turmoil.

The company is Nevada Geothermal Power, which like Solyndra, the now-famous California solar company, is struggling with debt after encountering problems at its only operating plant.

After a series of technical missteps that are draining Nevada Geothermal’s cash reserves, its own auditor concluded in a filing released last week that there was “significant doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

It is a description that echoes the warning issued in 2010 by auditors hired by Solyndra, which benefited from the same Energy Department loan guarantee before its collapse in August caused the Obama administration great embarrassment.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

[Carbon Credits Kill, Destroy]

More than 20,000 people were expelled from their homes.

By Josh Kron

According to the company’s proposal to join a United Nations clean-air program, the settlers living in this area left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner.People here remember it quite differently.

“I heard people being beaten, so I ran outside,” said Emmanuel Cyicyima, 33. “The houses were being burnt down.”

Other villagers described gun-toting soldiers and an 8-year-old child burning to death when his home was set ablaze by security officers.

“They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”

According to a report released by the aid group Oxfam on Wednesday, more than 20,000 people say they were evicted from their homes here in recent years to make way for a tree plantation run by a British forestry company, emblematic of a global scramble for arable land.

“Too many investments have resulted in dispossession, deception, violation of human rights and destruction of livelihoods,” Oxfam said in the report. “This interest in land is not something that will pass.” As population and urbanization soar, it added, “whatever land there is will surely be prized.”

Across Africa, some of the world’s poorest people have been thrown off land to make way for foreign investors, often uprooting local farmers so that food can be grown on a commercial scale and shipped to richer countries overseas.

But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.

Read the rest at the New York Times.