[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.

Global warming is now such a serious threat to mankind that climate change experts are calling for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions.

By Louise Gray

By Paul Chesser

Well 10:10.org apparently is not only embarrassed about their bloody schoolroom splatter flick, but also by the first “apology” they issued for it, as it’s been removed from their Website. “Oh well, live and learn” has been replaced by something a little more serious (which was posted on Monday — for a while both “apologies” were online simultaneously).

The first “sorry” certainly had an “Age of Stupid” tone about it, which is the title of high-flying Franny Armstrong‘s aviation-causes-global-warming crockumentary from last year. 10:10′s Franny helped make the Splattergate video as well, which she was extremely giddy about as Friday’s release date approached.

Read the rest at the American Spectator.

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.

By Sindya Bhanoo

To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving would simply have to increase, according to a report released Thursday by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The research also appears in the March edition of the journal Energy Policy.

The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.

In their study, the researchers devised several combinations of steps that United States policymakers might take in trying to address the heat-trapping emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consumes 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.

Most of their models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 a ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 a ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel or both.

In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.

“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”

Read the rest of this revealing piece at the New York Times’ DotEarth Blog.

Editor’s note: It seems it’s not really about carbon dioxide or fossil fuel. It’s about making the unwashed masses drive less – even if it’s an electric car. Elitists to peasants: “Get in the trains and stay out of my way!”

We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

By Leo Hickman

When I recently interviewed James Lovelock for the G2 section of the Guardian, we spoke for nearly two hours about the various events of the past few months – a period in which he’d remained silent because he’d been over-wintering with his wife Sandy in her native Missouri. There was a lot to talk about: the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia, the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, the intense scrutiny placed on the IPCC, and the rather nippy winter experienced across much of the Northern Hemisphere. As is inevitable with an interview appearing in the newspaper, space was at a premium so the quotes used were tightly edited. But, just as I did with my interview with Al Gore last year, I have decided to publish a transcript of his key points here online for anyone interested in hearing in much more detail what Lovelock had to say on some of these controversial and much-discussed topics. 

Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the stolen CRU emails [he later clarified that he hadn't read the originals, saying: "Oddly, I felt reluctant to pry"]: 

I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.

I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do. You’ve got to have standards.

You can make mistakes; they’re helpful. In the old days, it was perfectly OK to make a mistake and say so. You often learned from it. Nowadays if you’re dependent on a grant – and 99% of them are – you can’t make mistakes as you won’t get another one if you do. It’s an awful moral climate and it was all set up for the best of reasons. I think it was felt there was far too much inequality in science and there was an enormous redress. Looking around the country [at the wider society] this was good on the whole, but in some special professions you want the best, the elite. Elitism is important in science. It is vital.

Read the rest at the London Guardian.

By Richard of EUReferendum

It’s been a heady few months for climate sceptics – or “deniers” as the opposition loves to call us. Starting with “climategate”, through a progression of “gates” with much else in between – including the apparent collapse at Copenhagen – it seemed as if we had the warmists on the run.Certainly, we’ve scored some hits and, aided and abetted by Mother Nature who has been generous in her deliveries of global warming this winter, we have seen a turnaround in public opinion, with a distinct loss of enthusiasm for the surfeit of alarmism on offer.

The successes have led to a certain amount of triumphalism amongst the sceptics, with a feeling in certain quarters that we are winning the game. But any such sentiment is, to say the very least, premature. In fact, a more realistic appraisal might suggest that we have not even dented the underlying agenda.

Herein lies a certain definitional problem, as we have certainly dented the confidence of many so-called climate “scientists”, worried some of the hangers-on and made serious inroads into the intellectual argument, challenging the science.

But as to the “agenda”, this has nothing to do with science or even climate change. The climate change scare is merely a front used to conceal on the one hand and, on the other, to legitimise a far more sinister movement which has at its root politics, power and money. And its agenda might have suffered a few setbacks and some delays, but it is essentially intact.

Read the rest of this piece at EUReferendum.

By Aaron Kline

Deliberately timed to coincide with the start of the United Nations’ climate conference in Copenhagen, the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday declared that carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas that’s essential to life on Earth, poses a threat to human health and welfare. This determination clears the way for the federal government to begin restricting energy production and restructuring the entire American economy.

 

The EPA cited a 2007 Supreme Court ruling declaring that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act, but the science upon which that ruling was based has now been called into question when emails and internal documents between the UN’s leading climate change scientists were leaked to the public. Contained with in the files was evidence of suppression, manipulation and destruction of climate data. The emails revealed that the entire historical climate record that is the basis for all determinations of climate change is based on inaccurate data and has been manipulated to match a political and economic agenda.

 

If the EPA acts unilaterally to restrict carbon dioxide emissions, the impact on the economy could be even worse than a cap and trade law enacted by Congress. The reasons for this move by the Obama Administration’s EPA appear to be two-fold: First, to establish authority for President Obama to make enforceable agreements at the UN’s climate conference even in lieu of a treaty or Congressional approval; and Second to give the administration leverage to coerce the Senate into enacting a cap and trade law just to lessen the economic damage that could be wrought by the EPA’s heavy-handed restrictions of CO2.

 

At this moment, our national economy is under threat by carbon regulation schemes on three fronts: The Copenhagen conference designed to create a world carbon regulatory authority which could undermine our sovereignty; The cap and trade bill that’s been passed by the House of Representatives and now awaits Senate approval; and the Obama Administration’s decision that it can regulate carbon dioxide via the EPA even without approval by Congress.

 

For a preview of what this could mean to American families, one can look to Germany, where due to restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions, electricity costs three-times more than in the US and gasoline is now $8.00 per gallon.

 

You must make your voice heard loud and clear right now. This is no longer a far-away possibility. It’s happening as you read this. Time’s up.

 

Take Action: If you don’t think it’s a good idea to dramatically slash domestic energy production at a cost of trillions of dollars and untold American jobs over the politics of a discredited climate scare, pick up your phone and call the White House right now. Tell the Obama Administration you won’t stand for this unparalleled fleecing of the American public. Call (202) 456-1111 to be heard today.

 

Visit NoCapAndTrade.com for more ways to take action.

By Andrew Bolt

Greens candidate Clive Hamilton says global warming sceptics will prove to be not just worse than Holocaust deniers, but deadlier than the Holocaust’s genocidal killers. After all, Hitler killed only 17 million people:

Instead of dishonouring the deaths of six million in the past, climate deniers risk the lives of hundreds of millions in the future. Holocaust deniers are not responsible for the Holocaust, but climate deniers, if they were to succeed, would share responsibility for the enormous suffering caused by global warming… So the answer to the question of whether climate denialism is morally worse than Holocaust denialism is no, at least, not yet.

Wow. Faced with such unfettered madness, I can’t even get angry. I knew Hamilton was strange, but now the only question left is what such a hysteric is doing as a Professor in our universities?

Odd that Hamilton is the one to raise the Nazi analogy, given, first, that his own totalitarian instinct seems oddly familiar:

The implications of (a rise of) 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of emergency responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.

Read the rest of this piece at Australia’s Herald Sun.

By Jennifer Loven, AP

President Barack Obama and other world leaders agreed today that next month’s much-anticipated climate change summit will be merely a way station, not the once hoped-for end point, in the search for a worldwide global warming treaty.

The 192-nation climate conference beginning in three weeks in Copenhagen had originally been intended to produce a new global climate-change treaty. Hopes for that have dimmed lately. But comments by Obama and fellow leaders at a hastily arranged breakfast meeting here on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit served to put the final nail in any remaining expectations for the December summit.

“There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen which starts in 22 days,” said Michael Froman, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for international economic matters.

The prime minister of Denmark, Lars Loekke Rasmussen, the U.N.-sponsored climate conference’s chairman, flew overnight to Singapore to present a proposal to the leaders to instead make the Copenhagen goal a matter of crafting a “politically binding” agreement, in hopes of rescuing some future for the struggling process.

A fully binding legal agreement would be left to a second meeting next year in Mexico City, Froman said.

Obama backed the approach, cautioning the group not to let the “perfect be the enemy of the good,” Froman said. Addressing the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum later, Obama talked of the need to limit greenhouse-gas emissions “in Copenhagen and beyond.”

Froman said the Danish proposal would call for Copenhagen to produce “operational impact,” but he did not explain how that would work or to what it would apply.

Despite the cooperative-sounding words, the two-year process of crafting a landmark treaty has been stymied by deep distrust between rich, developed nations and poorer developing nations such as India, Brazil and China.

The developed nations hold that all countries must agree to legally binding targets to reduce heat-trapping gases. Developing countries say they can make reductions a goal but not a requirement, and they want more money from wealthy nations to help them make the transition.

A major bill dealing with energy and climate in the U.S., a domestic priority of Obama’s, is bogged down in the U.S. Senate with scant hope it would be completed by next month, giving the American president little to show in Copenhagen.

Between that and the developments in Singapore, there may be little reason for Obama to travel there. White House aides had been saying privately that the outcome of talks during Obama’s weeklong Asia trip, including a three-day visit to China that starts Sunday night, would help determine whether Obama might go to Copenhagen.

Obama arrived late Saturday night in Singapore for the annual 21-nation APEC summit that had begun without him early that morning. In remarks to the group today, Obama reached out by announcing that he would host the 2011 gathering in his native Hawaii.

Read the rest of this story at Denver Post.

Once again, take this story with a grain of salt. They may well press ahead with a full-blown treaty and a politically binding” agreement can cause all kinds of havoc as well. – GCS Editior

By IBD Editorial Board

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a “climate emergency.” As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the “trigger” placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee.

As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points out, the Kerry-Boxer bill requires the declaration of a “climate emergency” if the concentration of carbon dioxide and other declared greenhouse gases in the atmosphere exceeds 450 parts per million (ppm). It was at about 286 ppm before the Industrial Revolution and now sits at around 368 ppm.

That figure was picked out of a hat because the warm-mongers believe that’s the level at which the polar ice caps will disappear, boats can be moored on the Statue of Liberty’s torch and dead polar bears will wash up on the beaches of Malibu.

The Senate version includes a section that gives the president authority, under this declared “climate emergency,” to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions … to address shortfalls” in achieving greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions.

What the “appropriate actions” might be are not defined and presumably left up to the discretion of the White House. Could the burning of coal be suspended or recreational driving be banned? Sen. David Vitter, R-La., asked the EPA for a definition and received no response.

Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Chris Horner says “this agenda transparently is not about GHG concentrations, or the climate. It’s about what the provision would bring: almost limitless power over private economic activity and individual liberty for the activist president and, for the reluctant leader, litigious greens and courts” packed by liberal Democrat appointees.

Read the rest of this article at Investors Business Daily.

By Chuck Norris

Halloween just got scarier — much scarier.

Flying deep under Washington’s radar is an upcoming (December) global climate change conference in Copenhagen, the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

It all sounds pretty politically benign, doesn’t it? Not according to Christopher Monckton, who was a science policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Monckton spoke to the Minnesota Free Market Institute.

“I have read that treaty,” Monckton said, “and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word ‘government’ actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to Third World countries in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, ‘climate debt’ — because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. And we’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. … And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. How many of you think that the word ‘election’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘vote’ or ‘ballot’ occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once.”

Monckton then warned that if Obama were to sign the treaty, he would be flushing U.S. sovereignty down the global toilet. He further pointed out that even though ratification of our president’s signature on that treaty would need 67 votes in the Senate, it could pass via a simple majority as an amendment to the cap-and-trade bill.

PolitiFact (as well as many left-leaning blogs) quickly criticized Monckton’s conclusions as conspiratorial and climate-skepticism rhetoric, based upon the notion that the treaty is a draft and not a finalized document. The apologetic of PolitiFact leaves the impression that the current draft is the roughest of cuts, but in reality, it is the result of seven sessions of deliberations and revisions from several subgroups, including representatives from developed and developing countries “with a view to modifying it in the direction of consolidation and convergence.”

As I myself read through the latest draft of the 181-page treaty, I noticed many lines that could warrant Monckton’s and others’ concerns. Phrases such as “creation of new levels of cooperation,” “a shift in global investment patterns,” “adjust global economic growth patterns,” “integrated system of financial and technology transfer mechanisms,” “new agreed post-2012 institutional arrangement and legal framework,” “new institutional arrangement will provide technical and financial support for developing countries,” “global fund,” etc., are messages that make one wonder how far this political body’s arm would reach into our country and force our hands into others.

Then there are red-flag statements such as these:

–”Ensuring that global crises, such as the financial crisis, should not constitute an obstacle to the provision of financial and technical assistance to developing countries in accordance with the Convention.” (Page 11)

–”The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following: …” (Page 18)

–”Particular effort should be taken to enhance cooperation amongst intergovernmental organizations.” (Page 47)

–”A special fund shall be established: (a) For the economic and social consequences of response measures. … (b) To assist countries whose economies are highly dependent on income generated from the production, processing and export, and/or on consumption of fossil fuels.” (Page 138)

Now, if that isn’t one powerful intergovernmental or global-governmental group overseeing and manipulating America’s and others’ economic and political conditions, I don’t know what is.

Read the rest of this column at Townhall.

Interview with Lord Monckton by Minnesota Majority: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3