Jason Lewis today, who in turn was filling in for Rush Limbaugh. Most discussion on the program centered on Global Warming. In the first hour, Sue’s guest was Chris Horner, author of Red Hot Lies. I followed to talk about GlobalClimateScam.com in the second hour and came back to discuss Minnesota Majority in the last half-hour. Listen here:

Sue Jeffers

Sue Jeffers filled in for

• Hour 1: Sue’s guest Christopher Horner discusses his new book disputing global warming.
• Hour 2: Sue continues the global warming discussion with Dan McGrath of Minnesota Majority.
• Hour 3: Sue talks about running for office with Jim Schottmueller and Dan McGrath.

Notes on the “Hockey Stick:” Global Warming Bombshell; Breaking the Hockey Stick; Documenting Global Warming Fraud; Hockey Stick a New Low in Climate Science; Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance (McIntyre / McKitrick report)

Hugh Hewitt

By Hugh Hewitt 

In a recent blog post, Michael Barone observed that the policies pursued by the Department of the Interior have real world consequences that result in political shifts. Barone wondered whether President-elect Obama’s selection of Colorado Senator Ken Salazar to be the new Secretary of the Interior telegraphed the new president’s desire to avoid the political alienation of the west which Bill Clinton’s appointee Bruce Babbitt triggered during his long tenure at Interior in the ’90s.

Senator Salazar is widely viewed as a moderate, and as a genuine westerner with the westerner’s belief that land use policy promoting economic growth, recreation and resource stewardship is possible. While there is a deeply entrenched and very savvy environmental movement in the mountain west and pacific northwest, the long tradition of the region is to find ways to allow development and environmental protection to coincide. That balance worked well until the ’90s and the rise of an aggressive litigation strategy by environmental activists that uses provisions of the federal Endangered Species Act (“ESA”) to compel species listings and “critical habitat designations” which greatly impede development and infrastructure construction. The legal clashes continued throughout the eight years of the Bush Administration, and an increasingly politicized career bureaucracy at the United States Fish & Wildlife Service teamed with environmental activists to battle Bush appointees, landowners and public interest property-rights lawyers in a series of controversies that culmininated in the great polar bear listing debate of 2007 and early 2008.

I wrote about the polar bear debate here, here and here, and the short version is that an exhausted Bush team finally gave up and yielded to very speculative scientific models and declared the polar bear “threatened” in the spring. Almost immediately the consequences of the listing became evident with demands for sharply curtailed oil and gas exploration in Alaska and, much more ominous, assertions that land use and industrial projects in the lower 48 would also be faced with new regulations because their emissions would accelerate global warming which would in turn accelerate ice destruction which would further imperil the polar bear’s continued survival.

Read the rest of this article at Town Hall.

Captain Planet and the Planeteers

By Pete Chagnon and Jody Brown

Officials with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) say president-elect Obama’s picks for energy secretary, EPA administrator, and energy and climate czar are troubling.

 

President-elect Obama has chosen Steven Chu as energy secretary, Lisa Jackson as Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and Carol Browner (formerly EPA administrator under Bill Clinton for seven years) as his energy and climate czar. But while the mainstream media and Obama supporters are applauding the picks, at least one critic suggests those offering the accolades are not fully informed.
 
According to Iain Murray, a CEI senior fellow in energy, science, and technology, “the people who don’t really care about the economic effects of their policies” are the one singing the praises of Obama’s choices to head up his energy program. Murray is author of The Really Inconvenient Truths — a critical look at global warming.
 
Murray tells Fox News that by picking more former Clinton appointees, Obama has undercut his promise to bring a new voice to the debate on environmental issues. “This is the sort of thing that indicates that Obama is going to be very, very much a part of the environmentalist establishment,” he stated.
 
In addition, Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at CEI, points out that all the appointees are dedicated environmentalists. “They are all committed, I believe, to what president-elect Obama says is his agenda, which is to spend an awful lot of taxpayer money on creating so-called ‘green jobs,’” says Ebell.

Read the rest of this article at OneNewsNow.

Industry study: Cap on greenhouse gas emissions would cost state 21,000 jobs

By Bob Geiger

Warning that Minnesota could lose 21,000 jobs and pay higher electricity costs by 2015, a group of business organizations and utilities announced Thursday that it will oppose a cap-and-trade system designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.The warning, issued by Partners for Affordable Energy (PAE), comes just eight months after the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group (MCCAG) recommended using such a system to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The PAE-commissioned study is significant because it was issued less than one month before the Minnesota lawmakers convene in January to start plugging a projected state budget deficit of nearly $5.3 billion through mid-2011.

PAE’s website, www.poweringourlives.com, encourages visitors to e-mail pre-written “talking points” to state lawmakers reflecting concern about the effects of higher energy costs contained in a survey by Washington, D.C., consultancy CRA International.

Members of PAE include the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, Iron Mining Association of Minnesota, Minnesota Agri-Growth Council, Minnesota Forest Industry, North Dakota lignite coal industry and 50 utilities, including Great River Energy, Minnesota Power and Otter Tail Power.

“Any of these parties have a vested interest in old technology. It’s not surprising that an economist would come out with startling numbers,” said Kevin Reuther, legal director for the nonprofit MCEA.“I really hope that they’re not going to take the tack of the tobacco industry,” Reuther continued.At the heart of the debate is a cap-and-trade system, with government-set caps on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions, and auctions at which utilities can purchase credits for emissions.Designed to guarantee that emission-reduction mandates are met, the system would give utilities and other greenhouse-gas emitters a financial incentive to convert to environmentally friendly technology over time.

“We support all types of energy: Coal, nuclear, wind, solar and biomass. But we feel like Minnesota has a ban on nuclear and coal,” said Christina Pierson, executive director of PAE.

“You have to have three kinds of power so that you can continue to have a consistent energy supply,” she said. “Base, peak and intermittent.”

Base and peak power supply comes largely from coal-burning, nuclear-fueled and natural gas-fired energy plants, which environmentalists increasingly oppose in favor of energy generation from such renewable sources as wind, solar, hydro and biomass.

Coal represents the largest percentage of electricity generation in Minnesota, followed by nuclear, hydro power and small but growing wind, solar and other renewable energy sources.

CRA International’s study, which warns of job losses even if so-called “green jobs” are added to the economy, also predicts rising energy costs for Minnesota residences and businesses if a cap-and-trade system is put in place.

The study forecasts business and residential electricity increases of 33 percent and 17 percent, respectively, by 2015 under a cap-and-trade policy, while consumer household spending in the state would fall $2 billion.

Read the rest of this article at Finance and Commerce.

Study: Half of warming due to Sun! –Sea Levels Fail to Rise? – Warming Fears in ‘Dustbin of History’

POZNAN, Poland - The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.  Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The U.S. Senate report is the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition rising to challenge the UN and Gore. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists’ equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices and views of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. [See Full report Here: & See: Skeptical scientists overwhelm conference: '2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC' ]

Full Senate Report Set To Be Released in the Next 24 Hours – Stay Tuned… 

A hint of what the upcoming report contains:    

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.   

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” –  Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology  and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”  

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.  

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.  

“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” – Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico  

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA. 

“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.  

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Read the rest at the United State Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.

By Carleton Bryant 

More than 650 scientists from around the world dispute the claims made by the United Nations and former Vice President Al Gore about global warming, saying that science does not support that climate change is a manmade phenomenon, according to a posting on the Senate environmental committee’s press blog.

According to the posting, a full Senate report on the dissenting scientists’ views is to be released within 24 hours.

Is it hot in here, Al, or is it just you?

I’ve found that you’ve really got to pay close attention to how people talk about global warming or climate change. Most scientists agree that climate change indeed is occurring — they just differ on the reason why it is occurring.

As for myself, I’m no scientist (or a Nobel Prize-winning former vice president), but I think that if you’re trying to find out why things are heating up, the sun would be a good place to start, especially since there’s plenty of scientific data showing that the earth has been running hot and cold for thousands of years.

(One time I walked into my kitchen and it felt unusually warm. At first I thought it might be due to a build up of greenhouse gases from the trash can. Then I thought, “Is the oven on?” It was.)

Read the rest of this piece at the Washington Times

By Philip Brasher

Farmers are being warned they could pay a stiff price for their contributions to global warming.

That could happen if the Environmental Protection Agency goes forward with regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the federal Clean Air Act, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Under the law, livestock operations of all sizes and farms with as few as 500 acres of corn could exceed emissions thresholds and would be required to pay for permits, USDA says.

These fees could amount to as much as $20 for every hog and $175 per dairy cow, says Rick Krause, who follows climate policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Ron Sparks, a Democrat who is Alabama’s agriculture commissioner and president of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, says the fees would drive livestock farmers out of business.

“At a time when we are becoming more and more reliant on other countries for our food, we should be looking for ways to help farmers, not punish them for producing the food we put on the table for our families,” he said.

To farmers, it may sound outlandish that they would have to get permits for greenhouse gas emissions, or even that they are contributing to global warming, but here is the logic:

The Supreme Court ordered the Bush administration to declare whether greenhouse gas emissions harm the public, and if so to regulate them as a dangerous pollutant. The Bush administration hasn’t taken action, but President-elect Barack Obama’s advisers have indicated his EPA will move forward.

Read the rest of this story at Tuscon’s Citizen.

By Andrew Bolt 

Global warming believers told us this year to look at the Arctic – and heed the awesome lesson.

And, boy, were they right.

In fact, Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull especially should check it out, from the North Pole to Canada, which went to the polls last week.

Of course, the reason the religious told us to look north was that they were sure a warming world had reached a deadly “tipping point”.

Last year’s summer melt had been so fierce that climate scientists warned that the warmed seas gave us a 50-50 chance of an ice-free Arctic this summer.

“It’s hard to see how the system may bounce back,” fretted Washington University’s Ignatius Rigor.

Countless headlines around the world blared this latest “proof ” of global warming (which, sshhh, actually halted in 1998). The ABC and Fairfax flew reporter Marian Wilkinson up to file scary reports from an ice-breaker, declaring: “Here you can see climate change happening before your eyes.”

Eco-explorer Lewis Gordon Pugh even announced he’d paddle a kayak all the way to the Pole to draw attention to this terrifying loss of ice.

But, oops. Pugh actually had to quit paddling when he found 1000km more ice in front of him than he’d expected.

Indeed, there was at least 9 per cent more Artic ice this summer than last, and the refreeze so far this autumn is so extraordinary there’s a third more ice than there was this time a year ago.

Canadians have sure felt this cold, too, enduring a miserable summer.

Perhaps it was this growing mismatch between the heat the alarmists predict and the cool we actually feel that explains the mood of Canadians on election day. Or maybe the financial crash made people suddenly leery about grandiose green promise that costs money and jobs.

Whatever, voters last week gave the Left-wing Liberal Party its worst hiding in a century, returning the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper.

Read the rest of this story at Herald Sun.

From Utah’s Daily Herald 

A week ago Utah joined in announcing a plan to fight global warming — but the real danger lies in cooling: the cooling of the world’s climate, and the chilly outlook for the state’s economy.

The Western Climate Initiative has trumpeted a cap-and-trade system to cut carbon emissions and thus fight “greenhouse gasses.” Joining the Beehive State in the proposal are six other Western states and four Canadian provinces.In cap-and-trade programs, businesses are allowed to pump out certain levels of substances such as carbon dioxide and methane. If emissions exceed statutory levels, the businesses have to pay the government. If they are under that level, they can trade those credits to other enterprises.

Utah would have to pass legislation to implement these ideas. But they couldn’t have been announced at a worse time.

The news indicates that, if anything, our planet is growing not hotter but colder. Recently, NASA’s Ulysses project reported that the intensity of the sun’s solar wind — a flow of charged particles — is at its lowest point of the Space Age. This adds to the mounting evidence that the Sun’s activity is decreasing, and could signal the start of an era of cold weather, as in the Little Ice Age from the mid-16th century to the middle of the 19th century.

Four major agencies that keep track of the Earth’s temperature agree that the Earth cooled 0.7 degrees Celsius in 2007, the biggest such dip on record. In short, as Utah and other states panic over global warming, global cooling may be the bigger threat.

The real danger posed by the notion of global warming is that it will put the economy into a deep freeze. Utah’s own experts already predict a sluggish economy, at best, through 2009. The Legislature has just finished slashing $270 million from the state’s budget. Meanwhile, the “meltdown” in the credit markets has Washington scrambling for answers. This is the worst time in the past half-dozen years to place added strains on the state’s economy.

Read the rest of this piece at the Daily Herald.

By Tim Cronshaw

Hororata farmer Gavin King would rather slaughter his sheep and cattle than pay an estimated $168,000 a year in carbon tax for belching and farting livestock.

He said few farmers seemed to realise the full implications for their farm business of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to reduce global warming.

Many farms would fall over depending on the final tax rate and it would severely hurt service industries, he said.

“We could survive, but I am not going to pay carbon tax on my animals farting and burping.

“I will kill all of them before I do that if it goes to that level, too right.”

King said he was prepared to pay carbon tax for greenhouse emissions from fuel used on the farm, but not for livestock emissions of methane and nitrous oxide. “I cannot accept a tax on animals doing a natural thing,” he said.

“They have evolved over thousands of years burping and farting and to think we can change that in a short time is stupid. Several hundred years ago there would probably have been more animals than today.”

He said for him, going into cropping would require more energy-consuming machinery.

“Farmers do not think it will happen, but once it is legislated the tax has to be paid, and if you do not pay, the IRD will send you a penalty and another demand and then we are dealing with a faceless bureaucracy.”

King calculated his “conservative” carbon cost for his livestock based on Meat & Wool New Zealand figures for methane and nitrous oxide rates of 360kg for sheep and 350kg for cattle.

If carbon traded at $25 a tonne, he estimated that he would pay $9 in tax for each sheep stock unit, comprising a wintered ewe and a store lamb (36% of $25/t is $9) and double that if it was $50/t.

Each beef cow, equivalent to six sheep stock units, would cost $52.50 ($8.75 a stock unit) at $25/t or $105 at $50/t.

King has 8840 sheep stock units and 1595 cattle stock units, so his yearly tax could range from $93,525 to $187,050, he said.

Carbon is trading on the open market in Europe for about $45/t and at this rate he would be facing a $168,000-plus emissions tax for livestock each year.

The Government proposes to have farmers begin paying the tax in 2013. Farmers will be liable for 10% of the tax bill, with the Crown paying the rest up until 2018. After this, the subsidy will be gradually phased out. From 2031 farmers will pay the full cost.

King said he was not prepared to pay 10% of the livestock portion ($16,834.50, compared with the Crown’s $151,510.50 at current $45/t) of the carbon tax as a matter of principle.

He also objected to the idea that New Zealand might have to balance its carbon book by buying credits from big polluting countries such as China and Russia, which had developing-nation status and big stands of forest.

Read the rest of this story at New Zealand’s 2008 “Site of the Year,” Stuff.

Related Reading

• Stock and Land:  ‘Rudd’s carbon tax bad governance,’ says Vic ag scientist
• Wall Street Journal: Kangaroo Courtship: Australia’s Latest Plan to Fight Global Warming
• Queensland Business Review: Rural Industries Face Hit With Emissions Trading
• Heartland Institute: Farmers to Bear Brunt of Global Warming Legislation

By Roy Innis 

The U.S. civil rights revolution of the 1950s and ’60s was one of the greatest social and political liberations in history. It gave African-Americans and other minorities new opportunities and new levels of success in virtually every walk of life.

But today we face unprecedented new challenges to indispensable but often neglected rights enunciated in our Declaration of Independence: “That all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

These fundamental rights are under assault in subtle, often insidious ways. Sometimes it is with the best of intentions, by good people who don’t realize they are impairing other people’s rights, hopes and dreams. At other times, it is by people who are willing, even determined, to sacrifice individual rights in the name of a proclaimed threat or greater common good.

One critical challenge involves restrictions on access to energy and economic opportunity – and thus on liberties and rights – in the name of protecting the environment.

Energy is the master resource of modern society. It transforms constitutionally protected civil rights into rights we actually enjoy: jobs, homes, transportation, health care and other earmarks of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. With abundant, reliable, affordable energy, much is possible. Without it, hope, opportunity, progress, job creation and civil rights are hobbled.

Laws and policies that restrict access to America’s abundant energy drive up the price of fuel and electricity. They cause widespread layoffs and leave workers and families struggling to survive, as the cost of everything they eat, drive, wear and do spirals higher. They roll back the progress for which civil rights revolutionaries like the Rev. Martin Luther King struggled and died.

They create unnecessary obstacles to the natural, justifiable desire of minority Americans to share in the American Dream. They prevent us from resolving conflicts through compromise and impose needless and unfair burdens on our poorest families. These regressive, energy-killing laws and policies deny minority and other poor families a seat at the energy lunch counter and send us to the back of the economic bus.

The Congress of Racial Equality and I care deeply about our environment. But we also care about having jobs, and affordable food, heat and transportation. We care about impoverished Third World families achieving their dreams.

We want to know that the environmental values we cherish really are threatened the way environmental activists say they are. And we want to know that the solutions they advocate really will safeguard those values, at reasonable cost, without creating enormous new problems, like global grain shortages.

Today, unfortunately, these common-sense requests are under assault by activists who want to eliminate fossil fuels, base public policies on unfounded ecological scare stories, and stifle debate by attacking anyone who challenges their assertions.

Energy reality must no longer be denied. Fully 85 percent of all the energy Americans use comes from fossil fuels. Add in nuclear and hydroelectric power, and we’ve reached 96 percent. Biomass (3 percent) is mostly waste from paper mills and sawmills.

A mere 0.8 percent is wind and solar power. These renewable sources are not alternatives to fossil fuel use. They are supplements. Just to provide electricity to meet New York City’s needs would require blanketing Connecticut with 300-foot-tall wind turbines that generate power only eight hours a day, on average. That is neither economically nor ecologically sustainable.

Read the rest of this piece at The Washington Times.

There’s a lot most people don’t know about compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). The advertising message tells people that CFLs are “green” solutions that will help save the planet, and a few bucks on household electric bills. It’s also a common belief that the bulbs last five years between replacements. This notion probably stems from the 5- year guarantee on GE’s CFL bulbs. Here’s the catch: The guarantee is based on 4 hours of use per day for five years, and the bulb must be mailed back with receipt and proof of purchase for a refund if it fails to last 7,300 hours. The price of postage may exceed the cost of replacing the bulb and this expense is borne by the consumer. Probably not many get sent back, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they do not last the advertised five years under normal conditions. Some have been reported to burn out in a year or less.

CFLs, as many consumers have discovered to their dismay, do not function properly with dimmer switches. They need the full voltage to operate and attempting to use a CFL with a dimmer switch voids it’s warranty.

According to GE, CFLs should not be used in an enclosed fixture, like a ceiling fan light because this can cause them to overheat. Applications that produce vibration should also be avoided, so CFLs are a poor choice for garage door openers and are doubly bad for ceiling fans. Additionally, CFLs tend to literally burn out at the end of their life, melting plastic and other components, emitting smoke and toxic vapor. In rare instances this has led to house fires.

Compact fluorescent lights are known to cause radio frequency interference with wireless networks and cordless phones.

Beginning in 2012, thanks to a new federal law enacted in 2007, Edison’s incandescent light bulb, the very symbol of American innovation for over a century will be banned. Many people are unaware of the approaching light bulb ban, probably due, at least in part to the fact that Congress designed the ban to take effect seven years after it was passed. Compact fluorescent lights will soon be the only electric lighting option for household use.

Most people have heard that CFLs contain mercury, but they’ve probably also heard the message from CFL manufacturers and some government agencies that the amount of mercury in each CFL is small and not a serious concern.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Terrence Thorn

If the last decade of the 20th century saw a “dash to gas,” then the first decade of this century is seeing the U.S. gas industry “power walk” in the same direction. Fueled by cheap prices, lower investment costs, and the fuel’s lower emissions, the late 1990s saw a surge in the construction of natural gas fired power plants. Almost 90 percent of the U.S. power generation capacity that has been added since 1998 is natural gasfired. Already, some areas use natural gas to generate a large portion of their electricity – nearly 50 percent of the power in California and Texas, and 40 percent in Florida. Natural gas also is becoming a much larger part of U.S. electricity generation, rising 34 percent between 2002 and 2007. Today, a second natural gas renaissance is being predicted. And unlike the 90s, this expansion will occur in an era of sustained high natural gas prices.

High Prices Despite Record Production

The price of natural gas in the U.S. has roughly doubled in less than a year. A hot summer that increases demand for air conditioning and draws down storage levels, or an active hurricane season, will lead to further spikes in natural gas prices.

Even with normal summer conditions, during a normal winter some analysts expect the delivered price of natural gas to spike to $15 per thousand cubic feet – over a 50 percent increase over last year. Distracted by $100 fillups and high oil prices, American consumers are largely unaware of the gas price shock awaiting them when they fire up their furnaces this winter. Consumers should brace themselves for some of the largest natural gas rate increases in memory.

These price increases have occurred despite the fact that U.S. natural gas production increased 6 percent from the first half of 2007 to the first half of 2008. Almost all of the increase came from shalegas plays in the Arkoma, Anadarko, Fort Worth, and Permian basins of the MidContinent Area. Yet despite the supply success, the U.S. natural gas balance is tightening. Demand for natural gas in North America is increasing at about 3 percent per year. U.S. industrial gas demand is up as manufacturers become more competitive due to a weak dollar. Robust fertilizer production and the surge in ethanol production have also contributed to increased demand. Also supporting the high price environment is the fact that North America is receiving fewer shipments of liquefied natural gas as supplies head toward markets like Spain and Japan, where they can attract a much better price. LNG imports were a key factor in building U.S. gas inventories to alltime highs before last winter, but imports have languished so far this year.

Why Gas Is the Only Game in Town

Roadblocks to building new coal and nuclear plants in the U.S. are fueling expectations for a natural gas boom. Dozens of proposals for new coal and nuclear plants have been shelved, cancelled, or delayed because of rocketing construction costs, financing risk, regulatory uncertainty, and public concern over global warming and toxic pollution.

Opposition is also rising to new coalfired power plants built without the capacity to capture greenhouse gas emissions. Citigroup Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley have said they are uncomfortable financing new coalfired electricity plant construction because of the growing concern over emissions and potential carbon controls. Nuclear power projects are also losing steam, despite generous new federal incentives. By the end of 2009 the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects to receive 21 applications to build 32 new reactors. So far it has received only four applications to build seven reactors. As states reject coal and nuclear plants, the power market will increasingly turn to natural gas. Ironically, the expansion of wind energy has provided a boost for natural gasfired generation as a backup resource when the wind fails.

The final push towards gas will come from programs to regulate carbon emissions. The U.S. Natural Gas Council predicts that a carboncapping system, such as the one Congress considered this year, could lead to a 20 percent increase in gas consumption over the next decade – an increase of almost 3 trillion cubic feet per year.

Read the rest of this story at Energy Tribune.

With energy prices spiraling out of control, and Congress thus-far failing to take any corrective action on problems their policies brought about in the first place, many organizations are stepping up the pressure on lawmakers and the president to deal with our energy price problems immediately. Minnesota Majority is among them and is launching a statewide ad campaign and a new website, ActNowOnEnergy.com.

Gas prices remain near $4 a gallon and home energy costs have jumped shockingly just ahead of the home heating season. Consumers can expect to pay 25% more for natural gas and up to 50% more for electricity in the coming months. All this price “gouging” is the result of policies ostensibly motivated by environmentalism and brought about by Congress. Some representatives have seen the damage caused and are moving to attempt swift amends.

Last week, many lawmakers were ready to vote for the American Energy Act (H.R. 6566), a bill that would have expanded access to all of America’s energy options and bring relief at the gas pump, the grocery store and on home energy bills. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had other ideas.  Fearing that her agenda of restricting America’s energy supply would be upset should this bill come to a vote on the House floor, Pelosi turned off the lights and went on a national book tour, pushing her new book, “Know Your Power.” She seems keen to wield hers.

Rather than debate what has become a serious problem for many American families, Pelosi and her anti-energy cohorts abruptly adjourned session. It should outrage Minnesotans that the majority of our congressional delegation voted to adjourn rather than address America’s energy crisis (click here to see how Minnesota Representatives voted).

When pro-energy lawmakers refused to leave the House chamber and continued to debate the issue, Speaker Pelosi ordered the lights, microphones and cameras turned off to stifle the pro-energy message being espoused. Despite the darkness and lack of CSPAN coverage, over 50 lawmakers remained in the chamber and pitched their energy plan to tourists or whoever happened to come through the Capitol. These determined representatives remained at this vigil for days, calling on Speaker Pelosi to reconvene session or for the President to force Congress back to work on the energy problem by calling a special session. The protest was at first largely ignored by the media, but the ad-hoc event quickly gained momentum in alternative outlets like talk radio and the Internet until it couldn’t be ignored any longer and exploded onto TV sets around the nation.

Pelosi was called on to account for her actions in an interview on ABC, and she explained that her “flagship issue” is global warming. She went on to justify killing debate on American energy, deriding calls for an up or down vote on the American Energy Act as a “parliamentary tactic when nothing less is at stake than the planet, the air we breathe, our children breathe.”

Yesterday, the president met with the Coalition for Affordable American Energy, an organization just established in June to combat high energy prices. In his remarks at the meeting, the president said, “Last month I acted and I lifted an executive branch restriction on offshore oil exploration. And then I called on Congress to join me and to lift the legislative ban — to end the legislative ban. Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership in Congress decided to go on a five-week vacation, a recess, rather than act on behalf of the American consumer, the American small business owner.

“Members have now had an opportunity to hear from their constituents, and if they listen carefully I think they’ll hear what I heard today, and that is a lot of Americans from all walks of life wonder why we can’t come together and get legislation necessary to end the ban on offshore drilling. And so today I join House Republicans in urging the Speaker of the House to schedule a vote on offshore oil exploration as soon as possible.”

There are numerous organizations now behind the push to address America’s energy issues. The people of this country are rising up and demanding immediate action. Minnesota Majority helps in that push with it’s ad campaign and Take Action Tools like the petition at ActNowOnEnergy.com which makes it easy for constituents to contact their elected officials.

By Paul Driessen 

T. Boone Pickens is being lionized for his “socially responsible” efforts to legislate national “clean” wind and solar energy mandates.

We’re “the Saudi Arabia of wind,” he argues. We need to “overcome our addiction to foreign oil,” by harnessing that wind to replace natural gas in electricity generation, and using that gas to power more cars and buses. If Congress would simply “mandate the formation of wind and solar transmission corridors, and renew the subsidies” for this renewable energy, America can achieve this transformation in ten years, he insists.

Pickens’ pitch makes good ad copy, especially in league with Senator Harry Reid’s bombast about oil, gas and coal “making us sick.” However, his policy prescriptions would impose vast new energy, economic and environmental problems.

Hydrocarbon fuels created America, gave us the technologies and living standards we enjoy today, enabled us to eradicate diseases that plagued earlier generations, and boosted our life expectancy from 50 in 1900 to nearly 80 today. They still provide 85% of our energy, and we could greatly reduce our reliance on oil imports if we would simply end the outrageous policies that keep our nation’s abundant energy resources locked up.

We have enough oil, natural gas, oil shale, coal and uranium to provide power for centuries. We have a growing consensus that we need to drill, onshore and off. But partisan intransigence and absurd environmental claims prevent us from utilizing them. Instead, we’re offered bromides like wind.

Wind contributes more every year to our energy mix. However, it still provides only 1% of our electricity – compared to 49% for coal, 22% for natural gas, 19% for nuclear and 7% for hydroelectric.

Wind power is intermittent, unreliable, noisy and expensive (even with subsidies). Many modern turbines are 400 feet tall and carry 130-foot-long, 7-ton blades that slice up raptors and other birds. They operate only 8 hours a day, on average, compared to 85% of the time for coal, gas and nuclear plants. They rarely provide power during peak summer daytime hours, when air-conditioning demand is highest, but wind speed is low to nonexistent.

Using wind to replace all gas-fired power plants would require some 300,000 1.5-MW turbines, covering Midwestern “wind belt” acreage equivalent to South Carolina. The noise, scenic impacts and bird kills caused by such an “eco-friendly” energy source defy imagination.

Building and installing these turbines requires 5 to 10 times more steel and concrete than is needed to build far more reliable coal or nuclear plants to generate the same amount of electricity, says Berkeley engineer Per Peterson. Add in the financing, steel and cement needed to build transmission lines from distant wind farms to urban consumers, and the effects multiply.

That means vastly more quarries, mines, cement plants and steel mills to supply those raw materials. But radical greens oppose such facilities. So under the Pickens proposal, we would likely import more steel and cement, instead of oil.

Moreover, since adequate wind is available only a third of the time, we would also need expensive gas-fired generating plants that mostly sit idle, but kick in whenever the wind dies down. That means still more money, cement and steel – and still higher electricity prices.

A successful oilman, investor, deal-maker and speculator, Pickens’ large natural gas holdings position him to make billions from selling gas for backup electricity generation under his wind energy proposal – especially if drilling bans remain in effect, keeping gas prices in the stratosphere. Launching the enterprise with the backing of federal mandates and subsidies minimizes his financial risk and attracts “free market” investors, by putting the risks for this fanciful scheme on the backs of taxpayers.

In short, Pickens’ proposal is “true green” – in the financial and public relations arenas, though hardly in the ecological sphere.

Pickens says we can’t drill our way to freedom from foreign oil. But that’s true only if we keep our best prospects off limits to drilling. Open ANWR and the OCS, and the situation changes dramatically.

Read the rest of this article at Town Hall.