There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy
By 16 concerned scientists (see end of article)
A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”
In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
Washington, D.C. – Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works commented on President Obama’s State of the Union Address.
“President Obama has clearly received the message that his global warming agenda is gone, dead, done with the American people – that’s why he was touting oil and natural gas so much in his State of the Union address tonight,” Senator Inhofe said. “He understands that especially in a weak economy, Americans want the hundreds of thousands of jobs, the affordable energy prices, and the increased energy security that domestic fossil fuel development brings. But while he talks the talk, he is clearly still determined to achieve his global warming agenda by shutting down oil, gas and coal development so that energy prices will, as he said himself, ‘necessarily skyrocket.’
“President Obama congratulated himself tonight on decreasing imports of oil from the Middle East, but failed to mention that his policies of energy austerity, which have caused gasoline prices nearly to double since he took office, are responsible for it. If he is determined, as his Energy Secretary Steven Chu said, to ‘boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe’ he is well on his way to achieving that goal. He claims to care about energy security, yet he stopped the Keystone pipeline – and the 20,000 American jobs it would have created – which would have done more than any other project to increase our energy security and revive our economy.”
The failed Range Fuels wood-to-ethanol factory in southeastern Georgia that sucked up $65 million in federal and state tax dollars was sold Tuesday for pennies on the dollar to another bio-fuel maker with equally grand plans to transform the alternative energy world.
LanzaTech, a New Zealand-based biofuel company, paid $5.1 million for the plant in Soperton. Its main financial backer: Vinod Khosla, a California entrepreneur who also bankrolled Range Fuels, and helped secure its government loans, before Range went bust last year.
LanzaTech hasn’t received the same type of loans, but the company has received $7 million from the U.S. departments of Energy and Transportation to assist in the development of alternative fuels.
I, like many of you, did a few cartwheels when I noticed the headline on Drudge that said:
“Congress Overturns Incandesenct Light Bulb Ban…”
The dreaded “green” light bulb ‘mandate’ that was created in 2007 was dead! I began to proclaim the good news from the highest mountains in the land of Facebook without even reading the article.
Shame on me for doing so…
I shortly found an article in Forbes that popped my bubble. So did Congress reverse the light bulb ban? No, No, not really…
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.
My six year-old, parroting her teacher, proclaimed, “If we don’t fix Climate Change, we’re all gonna die!” At that moment, I decided to write YOU’VE BEEN GORED, the book that lampoons Al Gore and his hypocritical ‘ALpostles.’
The environment has become the hottest political issue of our time. And when anything is politicized, falsehood flourishes. The volume of lies, disinformation, propaganda, hypocrisy and exaggeration far exceeds the quantity of material pollutants and is more hazardous.
Green has become the convenient, safe, lucrative cause for politicians, corporate weasels, celebrity eco-frauds, power-hungry government agencies and fast-buck swindlers hustling everything from gas-to-water engine conversion plans to carbon offset credits.
There’s a combination gold-rush/Armageddon’s a-comin’ zeitgeist that’s very troubling. It’s like watching the panicked crowd flee from Godzilla. Their mindless fear is more dangerous than the monster.
Statistics of doom are conjured and accepted without vetting. Idiotic “solutions” are clutched in desperation. Most terrifying of all, leaders are anointed and followed without scrutiny.
U.N. prepares for urgent battle to extract $100 billion from U.S.
By Michael F. Haverluck
The U.S. and other developed nations are reconsidering their commitments to fight global warming before the upcoming 17th Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa.
The United Nations wants representatives of world governments and international organizations to advance its agenda to fight climate change at Durban 2011. But despite Barack Obama’s full-fledged support for the green agenda early in his presidency, he has become increasingly hesitant to engage in some of the U.N.’s costly climate programs.
A major topic on the Durban agenda, Nov. 28 through Dec. 9, is the extension of the Kyoto Protocol. The agreement binds 37 developed nations to reduce greenhouse emissions from 1997 to 2012 through implementing regulations.
But doubts about global warming science, as well as the declining world economy, have contributed to many developed countries getting cold feet.
“Of the major players in the Kyoto Protocol, my sense is that the EU is the only one still considering signing up in some fashion to a second commitment period,” said U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern while discussing Durban 2011 at a meeting on global warming in Mexico City. “Japan is clearly not, Russia is not, Canada is not and Australia appears unlikely.”
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.
The White House’s green technology revolution is sitting in an auto lot in Butler, Pa., and nobody is buying.
“Nobody comes in to ask, nobody comes in to look. The American people are smarter than the government. They’re not buying that car,” said Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, who owns the auto lot where one of General Motors’ combined electric-and-gasoline powered Volt autos sits unwanted, unsold and unused.
The Chevy Volt would cost its buyer almost $40,000 “even after a $7,500 federal check and that’s more than twice the price of a comparable Chevy Cruze, Kelly told The Daily Caller. “I just pay interest on it, insure it, and in another week or month, we’ll scrape snow off it.” (SEE ALSO: Obama to go around Congress on “regular basis” to “heal the economy.”
His lonely Volt, however, isn’t truly alone. There are 3,370 Volts sitting in auto lots around the country, up from 2,600 on Oct. 3, according to cars.com, one of the nation’s largest automotive classified sites.
The Chevy Volt was to be a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s green technology industrial revolution, and of his 2012 re-election campaign.
It, and similar green technology products, were expected to employ up to two million people by 2010, according to Obama’s economic advisers. The electric car boosters at the Department of Energy, for example, predicted production of up to 120,000 Volts per year from 2012 onwards, according to a Feb. 2011 update of the DOE’s ambitious report, “One Million Electric Vehicles By 2015.”
The car is the “flagship model of the government-industrial complex,” said Patrick Michaels, a senior research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. But sales data shows “this thing is not selling like they thought it would.”
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…
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.
The top two executives of a solar-energy company that filed for bankruptcy after getting $528 million in loan guarantees from the Obama administration said Tuesday that they will invoke their constitutional rights against compelled self-incrimination when they appear at a Congressional hearing.
The chief executive of Solyndra, Brian Harrison, and Bill Stover, the chief financial officer, hired lawyers in preparation for the hearing this week before the House Energy and Commerce committee and got advice not to say anything, according to a representative of the lawyers.
The offices and the homes of some executives of Solyndra, a California solar-panel manufacturer, were recently raided by the F.B.I. as part of a criminal inquiry into the bankruptcy. The company said in a statement that it was “not aware of any wrongdoing by Solyndra officers, directors or employees in conjunction with the DOE loan guarantee or otherwise.â€
Bill Clinton turned up the heat on the leading Republican presidential contenders Tuesday, saying their opposition to acknowledging climate change makes the country “look like a joke.â€
“If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial†about climate change, the former president said on the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative’s seventh annual meeting in New York City.
“I mean, it makes us — we look like a joke, right? You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in the country if you admit that the scientists are right? That disqualifies you from doing it? You could really help us there,†Clinton added.
Kicking off the three-day conference, Clinton called the lack of debate in America on climate change “really tragic.â€
“We need the debate in America and every country between people who are a little bit to the right and people who are a little bit to the left about what the best way is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, what is the best , most economical way to do it, what will get more done quicker,†he said.
President Obama on Green Jobs at 2011 State of the Union Address
Obama Regime Steals Billions from Taxpayers – Blows it on Failed Green Projects
By Jim Hoft
The Obama Administration spent nearly half of the $38.6 billion ($17.2 billion) set aside for his green energy programs and was only able to create 3,545 permanent green jobs. This comes out to a staggering $4,853,000 per job.
Obama continued to push green energy initiatives in his 2011 State of the Union Address.
The Obama Administration has blown billions of taxpayer dollars on green energy and has only succeeded in producing a few thousand jobs.
The green-jobs revolution may be going up in smoke.Despite billions of dollars in federal investment and cheerleading from President Obama, even the most ardent supporters of a transformed, job-generating energy sector based largely on wind, solar and other renewable sources acknowledge that their dreams have not translated into reality. The records for other countries chasing green employment opportunities have been equally unimpressive.
Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, told MSNBC last month that, despite impassioned support from liberal Democrats and environmentalists, “green jobs” initiatives “have been about a lot of talk, and not a lot has been happening on that.”
The absence of a promised boom in environmental jobs has become a talking point among Republicans who are campaigning to unseat Mr. Obama in the 2012 election.
Mr. Obama “keeps talking about green jobs,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said during the GOP candidates debate Wednesday night. “Where are they? Let’s have real jobs.”
Talk of green jobs was conspicuous by its absence from Mr. Obama’s jobs speech to a joint session of Congress on Thursday night. He gave the address on the same day that the FBI raided California solar-energy company Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy and laid off at least 900 full-time employees.
There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy
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