Obama in 2008: “Under my plan… electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket.”

By Dennis Cauchon

Electric bills have skyrocketed in the last five years, a sharp reversal from a quarter-century when Americans enjoyed stable power bills even as they used more electricity.

Households paid a record $1,419 on average for electricity in 2010, the fifth consecutive yearly increase above the inflation rate, a USA TODAY analysis of government data found. The jump has added about $300 a year to what households pay for electricity. That’s the largest sustained increase since a run-up in electricity prices during the 1970s.

Electricty is consuming a greater share of Americans’ after-tax income than at any time since 1996 — about $1.50 of every $100 in income at a time when income growth has stagnated, a USA TODAY analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data found.

Read the rest at USA Today.

By Jo Nova

Good news. The talented strategists left the UNFCCC team before COP17 in Durban. The A-graders saw the trainwreck coming and moved on.

Everyone knows it’s a herculean task to get 190-odd countries to sign anything, and with a typical pragmatical approach the UN drafting team have gone for … not just a new “International Court” (crikey!) but rights for Mother Earth (can we be sued by a rock?), and oh boy, the holy grail, the whole kit and caboodle … we demand Peace On Earth, and a  Partridge in a Pear Tree, as Part 47a, and starting by morning tea tomorrow.

Monckton  reports that the funereal collapsing Durban talks still held the highest of ambitions. Godlike even. The real action behind the posters of parrots and pleas to save pygmy corals, or spotted limpets is the plea to make some unelected bureaucrats the totalitarian Kings of The World.

In part it’s chilling, a New International Court — which could presumably try you for crimes against coastlines, clouds, or (more likely) against endangered windfarms. Those with their hands on the legal wheel want the power to direct money (was that $1.6 Trillion?)  from the richest nations to their friends, patrons, or pet causes. If they became the anointed Kings, it would swiftly become a crime to speak doubts of climate models upon which billions of trades depends.  The darkest evil always comes cloaked with helpful intentions.

Fortunately, what’s left of the UN strategic team is even lower caliber than B-grade, beyond Z, somewhere into hexadecimal.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the grown-ups in the IPCC-support-team left the party sometime after Copenhagen, and the Z++ team are left to guard the bones. No one can take this wild ambit claim seriously.

Read the rest at JoNova.

From the Blaze

On Tuesday, a skydiving team from the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) parachuted down on Toti beach, near the city where the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is taking place.

The skydivers carried two signs, one reading “Climategate 2.0 Science Not Settled”, the other “No New Treaty CFACT”. According to a CFACT press release, the dramatic entrance into Durban, South Africa, was to bring attention again to the Climategate 2.0 emails, which were leaked last month.

“Media covering COP17 are kidding themselves if they think they can ignore and wish away Climategate 2.0,” said CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker in the press release.  “Lord Monckton, the folks from Climate Depot and I will carry our message by parachute if that’s what it takes to wake up this conference and place the Climategate evidence of corrupted science where the world must see it.”

Read the rest at The Blaze.

The closing this week of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which was envisioned to be the key player in the trillion-dollar “cap and trade” market, was the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s effort to pass the controversial program meant to combat global warming.

“It is dead for the foreseeable future,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and the Environment with the Competitive Energy Institute, which had fought the measure.

Read the rest at Fox News.

From Plains Daily

North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem is announcing a lawsuit against the State of Minnesota over the latter state’s restrictions on using power from coal plants, among other sources.

“It is unfortunate it has come to this. As Minnesota seeks to rebuild its economy, it will need energy,” said Stenehjem in a press release. “Much of that energy will need to come from sources outside Minnesota.”

In its lawsuit, North Dakota alleges that the Next Generation Energy Act violates the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, unconstitutionally interfering with North Dakota’s energy production. The NGEA imposes prohibitions on energy imported from North Dakota, and while the law does make some exemptions the State of North Dakota is alleging that those exemptions benefit only Minnesota-based businesses and projects.

Read the rest at Plains Daily.

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.

[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.

By James Delingpole

If Michael Crichton had lived to write a follow-up to State of Fear, the plotline might well have gone like this: at a top secret, state of the art laboratory in Switzerland, scientists finally discover the true cause of “global warming”. It’s the sun, stupid. More specifically – as the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long postulated – it’s the result of cosmic rays which act as a seed for cloud formation. The scientists working on the project are naturally euphoric: this is a major breakthrough which will not only overturn decades of misguided conjecture on so-called Man Made Global Warming but will spare the global economy trillions of dollars which might otherwise have been squandered on utterly pointless efforts to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, these scientists have failed to realise just how many people – alarmist scientists, huckster politicians,  rent-seeking landowners like (the late Michael Crichton’s brilliant and, of course, entirely fictional creation) the absurd, pompous Sir Reginald Leeds Bt, green activists, eco-fund managers, EU technocrats, MSM environmental correspondents – stand to gain from the Man Made “Climate Change” industry. Their discovery must be suppressed at all costs. So, one by one, the scientists on the cosmic ray project find themselves being bumped off, until only one man remains and must race against time to prove, etc, etc…

Except of course in the real world the second part wouldn’t happen. No one would need to go to the trouble of bumping off those pesky scientists with their awkward, annoying facts and their proper actual research. That’s because the MSM and the scientific “community” would find it perfectly easy to suppress the story anyway, without recourse to severed brake cables or ricin-impregnated hand-washes or staged “suicides”.

This is exactly what has happened with the latest revelations from CERN over its landmark CLOUD experiment, whose significance Lawrence Solomon explains here:

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun – not human activities – as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

Read the rest at The London Telegraph.

By Angela Delli Santi

Federal environmental regulators are urging Gov. Chris Christie to reconsider a decision to pull New Jersey from a 10-state greenhouse gas reduction program.

Christie announced withdrawal from the program Thursday.

Read the rest at the Daily Journal.

Candidates need to be ready to blow away the arguments

By Steve Milloy

If you’re thinking of becoming a Republican presidential candidate – and who isn’t these days – you can plan on being pressed on the climate issue. In the wake of last week’s new report from a panel of the National Research Council (NRC) reiterating its old talking points on climate, The Washington Post editorialized that all (read “Republican”) candidates for political office should be quizzed about whether they agree with the “scientific consensus of America’s premier scientific advisory group.”

Although this threat is intended to intimidate Republicans who tend toward queasiness when confronted with environmental issues, the attack is easy to parry and then even to counterattack – that’s why Al Gore and his enviros duck debating so-called “climate skeptics.”

First, let’s dismiss a couple of faulty premises of The Post’s editorial.

While it is true that the NRC operates under the umbrella of the National Academy of Sciences, the NRC panel that authored the report has nothing to do with the prestigious individual scientists who make up the National Academy of Sciences membership. NRC panels are highly politicized and often stacked, and no climate skeptics were included in the panel that wrote last week’s report.

Next, science doesn’t work on a consensus basis. We don’t accept that the Earth revolves around the Sun because most scientists or a group of scientists have agreed to say so. Science is driven by data, not groupthink.

In actuality, the NRC report is more an exercise in political science than climate science.

Read the rest of this op-ed at the Washington Times.

Steve Milloy is the author of Green Hell.

By Paul Chesser

Living in a home with four kids and two dogs, one child’s “clean” can mean “unacceptable” to an adult — think barely visible shower scum or machine-washed plates without phosphates.

And necessary energy levels and types mean different things to different people: A back-to-nature maiden who practices what she preaches needs much less than a multitasker who watches her LCD TV while researching on the Internet and listening to her iPod.

And as we know from years of observation of political discourse, one man’s “standard” is another’s moral abhorrence.

Put them together in a “Clean Energy Standard” (CES) and you ask for real trouble.

But that’s not stopping Sens. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who on Monday — as Chairman and Ranking Republican respectively of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — issued a “white paper” that solicits comments on what should constitute a CES. You might remember that in his State of the Union address last January 25, President Obama proposed that the federal government impose an 80 percent standard by the year 2035.

Read the rest at the American Spectator.

By Jo Nova

The good news is that skeptics are the majority, the bad news is that we’ll all have to pay the tax anyway. The IPA commissioned a Galaxy Poll in Australia and only one third of Australians believe that man-made global warming is real. Despite the advertising, the propaganda, the Nobel Prizes, the support of major institutions, the ABC censorship of skeptical science news, and the educational indoctrination at schools, most people are unconvinced.

Despite the falling polls, today the Gillard Government committed itself to getting a “carbon price” – the nice way of saying “tax”. (Note the poll attached to that story: Do you support a carbon tax? 84% say NO.)

(see full article for poll results)

It’s a question of youth

From the full results it’s clear that belief is mostly a “young” naive thing, and that by the age of 30 people are waking up to the truth.  Half of the 18-24 year olds think that man is to blame, but only a quarter of the over 50′s do.  The old cats who’ve been there and done that are wiser to exaggerated scare campaigns. Half of the 25 -34 year old group answered that they are not sure.

Read the rest at JoNova.