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.

The CCX was the topic of thousands of MSM articles over the years, but not a single article reported their recent demise. Hmmm.

By Steve Milloy

Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year.

Although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub of the mandatory carbon trading established by a cap-and-trade law, like the Waxman-Markey scheme passed by the House in June 2009.

At its founding in November 2000, it was estimated that the size of CCX’s carbon trading market could reach $500 billion. That estimate ballooned over the years to $10 trillion.

Al Capone tried to use Prohibition to muscle in on a piece of all the action in Chicago. The CCX’s backers wanted to use a new prohibition on carbon emissions to muscle in on a piece of, quite literally, all the action in the world.

Read the rest at Pajamas Media.

Barack Obama’s setback in the US mid-term elections has killed of any hope of securing a legally binding global climate change deal, John Prescott has said

From the London Telegraph

Negotiators should ditch hopes of enforcable targets on emmissions reductions and push instead for a voluntary framework at the upcoming Cancun summit, the former deputy prime minister said.

After President Barack Obama’s ”shellacking” at the hands of Republican opponents in mid-term elections, there was no prospect of the US Congress approving legal requirements to cut greenhouse gas emissions, said Lord Prescott, who was a key UK negotiator at the Kyoto global warming conference in 1997.

Read the rest at The London Telegraph.

By George F. Will

The collapsing crusade for legislation to combat climate change raises a question: Has ever a political movement made so little of so many advantages? Its implosion has continued since “the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held.” So says Walter Russell Mead, who has an explanation: Bambi became Godzilla.

That is, a small band of skeptics became the dogmatic establishment. In his Via Meadia blog, Mead, a professor of politics at Bard College and Yale, notes that “the greenest president in American history had the largest congressional majority of any president since Lyndon Johnson,” but the environmentalists’ legislation foundered because they got “on the wrong side of doubt.”

Read the rest at the Washington Post.

Harry Reid’s latest energy bill is designed not to pass

Wall Street Journal Editorial

President Obama’s undeniable success in passing liberal legislation hasn’t translated into greater popularity for himself or the Democratic Congress. So perhaps he’ll get a bump in the polls now that he’s suffered his first setback on one of his signature promises.We refer to the failure of cap and tax, which Mr. Obama once modestly promised would signal “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave the plan, if not the planet, up for dead this month, and last week he unveiled a new energy bill whose major provisions include a Cash for Clunkers replay for home appliances and a $5.8 billion subsidy for natural gas vehicles.

In other words, the green lobby has suffered a landmark defeat, and the recriminations in the liberal press are remarkable. Either Mr. Obama didn’t sell it well enough, perfidious Big Business intervened (never mind that many CEOs were supporters), the obtuse middle class won’t sacrifice for the global good, or evil Republicans . . . Everyone is to blame but the policy itself.

In fact, the bill went down for lack of Democratic votes, in particular those from Midwest coal and manufacturing states. Voters in those states have figured out that cap and tax is a redistributionist exercise from the carbon-dependent heartland to the richer coasts. A Democrat-Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia-is also leading the charge to repeal the EPA’s climate “endangerment” regulation that imposes cap and trade though the backdoor.

Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal.

By Perry Bacon Jr.

Conceding that they can’t find enough votes for the legislation, Senate Democrats on Thursday abandoned efforts to put together a comprehensive energy bill that would seek to curb greenhouse gas emissions, delivering a potentially fatal blow to a proposal the party has long touted and President Obama campaigned on.

Instead, Democrats will push for a more limited measure that would seek to increase liability costs that oil companies would pay following spills such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico. It also would create additional incentives for the development of natural gas vehicles and would provide rebates for products that reduce home energy use. Senate Democrats said they expected to find GOP support for the bill and pass it in the next two weeks.

Read the rest at the Washington Post.

By Darren Samuelsohn

Senate Democratic leaders are set to roll the dice this month on a comprehensive energy and climate bill, including a cap on greenhouse gases from power plants, even though they don’t yet have the 60 votes needed to move the controversial plan.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) confirmed Tuesday that he would gamble on the high-stakes legislation – much as he undertook health care and Wall Street reform – that for now remains in the rough-draft stage but that will soon be the subject of intense negotiations.

Read the rest of this story at Politico.

By Ben Geman

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said he would “absolutely” seek to keep greenhouse gas limits alive in a House-Senate conference if the Senate approves energy legislation this summer that omits carbon provisions.”It would be open in conference to consider because our bill has it,” Waxman told The Hill Wednesday.

Waxman authored a sweeping climate and energy bill that the House narrowly approved last year that merges an “economy-wide” cap-and-trade system with other provisions to boost alternative energy and energy efficiency.

Read the rest of this story at The Hill.

Standoff suggests Senate would give up on climate change law that would result in far more limited proposals

By Suzanne Goldenberg

Barack Obama’s hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law.

The standoff suggests the Senate would formally give up on climate change law, and recast energy reform as a Gulf oil spill response, that would roll in far more limited proposals such as a green investment bank, or a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions that would apply only to electricity companies.

Read the rest of this story at The Guardian.

The Kerry-Lieberman energy bill would enervate America

By Pete duPont

A year ago the Waxman-Markey energy regulation bill passed the House. Now before the Senate is the Kerry-Lieberman energy regulation bill, which includes many of the same damaging provisions–government control of many aspects of energy generation, distribution and prices.The debate on this bill is of course colored and influenced by the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, fire and collapse in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.

In response, the federal government has suspended drilling deeper than 500 feet in the Gulf for six months, suspended exploratory drilling off Alaska’s coast and canceled oil leases off the coast of Virginia and in the Gulf–significant decisions that will reduce our oil supplies in the years ahead. All work has been suspended on 33 previously inspected and approved Gulf deepwater drilling rigs. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana reports that will mean 3,000 to 6,000 immediate job losses and perhaps 10,000 more in the months ahead.

As noted in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, beyond jobs there will be significant economic consequences from the shutdowns. According to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, 1,400 jobs will be lost for each platform shut down, for a total of some $330 million a month in lost wages.

So with this current catastrophe influencing our energy policies, where is America going? The Kerry-Lieberman bill is a bit less bad than the Waxman-Markey legislation, but only a bit.

Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal.

By Darren Samuelsohn

President Obama’s chief of staff opened the door on Friday for a limited Senate climate bill that focuses on capping greenhouse gases from power plants.

Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal that “a whole range of ideas will be discussed” when Obama hosts senators at the White House next Wednesday, including placing a mandatory limit solely on the heat-trapping emissions from electric utilities.

“The idea of a ‘utilities only’ [approach] will also be welcomed,” Emanuel told the newspaper in an interview.

Read the rest at Politico.

The folly of O’s oil-spill fix

By Ben Lieberman

President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas.

That’s a Harvard University study’s estimate of the per-gallon price of the president’s global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.

So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?

Good question, because such measures wouldn’t do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.

The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s now-famous words, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste — and what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Read the rest at the New York Post.

President Obama delivered his first Oval Office speech on the heels of his latest visit to the Gulf region – the fourth since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in April. With such an environmental and economic crisis present, the president needs to exert leadership to protect our precious coastal resources and clean up the spill, says Nicolas Loris, a research assistant at the Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.

His message was the wrong one, says Loris. Instead, he continued to politicize the crisis by pushing for cap and trade legislation and to establish a separate claims fund — financed by BP — that will do very little to address the issue at hand. President Obama is right in saying that the Gulf region will bounce back, but not with the policies of cap and trade and banning offshore drilling that he’s suggesting.

Read the rest at National Center for Policy Analysis.