“Congratulations! You have been chosen to participate in a new pilot program with Dominion Virginia Power,” the letter read. Evidently my utility company, which has been talking for months about needing more power sources, is hard up. 4,550 customers have been chosen to: 1) receive an incentive to allow the company to cycle their central air conditioning on and off in the summer; 2) get a power-cost monitor; 3) get energy audits or energy-efficiency kits; or 4) my option—get programmable thermostats and meters.
What do I get with such an “opportunity”? I get lower rates during off-hours. (They don’t tell me what they are.) But I get higher rates during peak hours (1 to 8pm), and give the utility the authority to modify the temperature setting of my thermostat. Some deal. No thanks, Big Brother.
Do I also get the option to have them build another coal-fired power plant?
The global warming debate arrives in the Senate next week, and it's about time. Finally, the Members will have to vote on something real, as opposed to their buck-passing to courts and regulators, and their easy trashing of President Bush.
Gordon Brown is facing a fresh tax rebellion as Labour MPs demand the repeal of a £200 increase in vehicle excise duty on environmentally unfriendly cars purchased in the past seven years.
Czech President and economist Vaclav Klaus is the keynote speaker at CEI’s annual dinner on Wednesday. Klaus riles the Left with is detailed analogy of modern environmentalists, and particularly global warming alarmists, to past utopians including those with whom he and his countrymen had a less than pleasant experience.
CEI is publishing his book in English, Blue Planet in Green Chains. Here Klaus makes the case starkly, as do Lubos Motl among others with more personal experience than we over here, and physicist Freeman Dyson in his current NY Review of Books piece.
Just last night I picked up Haynes and Klehr’s “In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage” for some bedtime reading. The experienced anti-alarmist will gasp at the parallels there, as well, between the behavior and dialectics of academic elites in the history field and those in the science/climate science arena. The party line was maintained through personal attacks on any who challenged it, the evidence against their dogma disputed at every turn including through mutually exclusive arguments.
Ultimately, the revisionists scrambled into justification mode. Most striking was Haynes and Klehr’s Chapter 5, “From Denial to Justification”, setting forth the fellow travelers’ arguments in the face of undeniable evidence of espionage and Soviet-run stoogery that, look, whatever, the point is that it was all in the name of creating a more just world.
For now, as the alarmist case continues to unravel pick up Klaus’s book, subscribe to Benny Peiser’s CCNet and decide for yourself.
Part two of Chancellor Merkel's ambitious package of measures aimed at reducing German greenhouse gas emissions may be in trouble. Originally set for passage on Tuesday, many of the law proposals are under attack.
Billions of pounds are being wasted in paying industries in developing countries to reduce climate change emissions, according to two analyses of the UN's carbon offsetting programme.
Environment ministers from the world's top industrial powers called Monday for more effort to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but little headway was seen in setting more immediate goals.
The Group of Eight rich nations will likely agree to an "aspirational" target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 but shun mid-term goals at a July summit, the top U.N. climate official said on Sunday.
I was watching the Big Oil execs testifying before Congress. That was my first mistake. If memory serves, there was lesbian mud wrestling over on Channel 137, and on the whole that’s less rigged. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz knew the routine: “I can’t say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not.”
Environment ministers from Group of Eight rich nations and other major greenhouse gas emitters will meet in Japan's western city of Kobe from May 24 to 26 to try to build momentum for talks on issues including long-term targets to reduce the emissions that cause global warming.
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