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.”

Read the rest at the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

[Interesting article, but the warmist bias of the writer is apparent]

Some states have introduced education standards requiring teachers to defend the denial of man-made global warming. A national watchdog group says it will start monitoring classrooms

By Neela Banerjee

Reporting from Washington — A flash point has emerged in American science education that echoes the battle over evolution, as scientists and educators report mounting resistance to the study of man-made climate change in middle and high schools.

Although scientific evidence increasingly shows that fossil fuel consumption has caused the climate to change rapidly, the issue has grown so politicized that skepticism of the broad scientific consensus has seeped into classrooms.

Read the rest at the Los Angeles Times

By the P/O’d Patriot

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…

Read the rest at Gateway Pundit.

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.

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.

Subsidies fail to help sector take root

By Ben Wolfgang

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.

Read the rest at the Washington Times.

Wind Turbine

By Ed Morrissey

When Barack Obama spoke of “necessarily bankrupting” coal-fueled electricity producers, he claimed that the explosion in “green jobs” would replace the workers dislocated by penalizing fossil fuels.  So far, though, there is little evidence of any explosion in green jobs, or even significant job creation at all.  As Politico reports, the Obama administration is having to fall back on “saved and created” language to describe its big investment in the green-collar field:

President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina on Monday to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy.

The catch? Nearly three years into Obama’s presidency, the White House can’t point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting.

Monthly Labor Department employment reports say nothing about the new clean energy workforce, while an effort to document how many Americans actually make a living in the “green collar” field may not be done by November 2012.

Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers suggests 225,000 clean energy jobs were either created or preserved through the third quarter of 2010 thanks to more than $80 billion in the economic stimulus package. But those are estimates at best.

At $80 billion, that would mean a cost of $355,555.56 of public subsidy per job created … or “saved.”  At best, as Politico states.

Read the rest at Hot Air.

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.

From Fox News

From the administration that brought you “man-caused disaster” and “overseas contingency operation,” another terminology change is in the pipeline.The White House wants the public to start using the term “global climate disruption” in place of “global warming” — fearing the latter term oversimplifies the problem and makes it sound less dangerous than it really is.

White House science adviser John Holdren urged people to start using the phrase during a speech last week in Oslo, echoing a plea he made three years earlier. Holdren said global warming is a “dangerous misnomer” for a problem far more complicated than a rise in temperature.

Read the rest at FoxNews.com

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.

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 Environmental Protection Agency is poised to seize new power to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide unless Congress acts to stop them. 

Carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor a threat to human life or the environment. Despite new predictions that the Earth is entering a new cooling phase, the EPA intends to cap carbon dioxide emissions to stop nonexistent global warming. The impact this will have on business, jobs and the economy is staggering. Carbon dioxide is emitted as a byproduct of virtually every energy source. Everything from transportation, heating, electricity, manufacturing and more will be impacted.  

Senator Lisa Murkowski plans to bring to the Senate floor on June 10th, her resolution to disapprove the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated using the Clean Air Act. The resolution is brought under the rules of the Congressional Review Act. It cannot be filibustered and needs only 51 votes to pass. 

Senate passage of S. J. Res. 26 will send a strong message to the White House and will put pressure on the House to vote on the resolution. It appears that the vote will be very close and could go either way. It’s critical that Senators hear from their constituents.

Take Action!

• Click here to contact your Senator
• Rallies are planned around the nation on Thursday, June 3rd at the local offices of Senators who will be back home for a Senate recess from May 28th through June 7th. Visit your senators’ local offices in person and register your support for the Murkowski Resolution.
• Visit NoCapAndTrade.com for more information.