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Christopher C. Horner, author of Red Hot Lies, has a new book out from Regnery Publishing. Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America is an exposé of the Green Movement’s rise to political power and the frightening consequences of Obama’s Green-friendly energy mandates. Horner reveals who in Washington is driving this expansion of environmentalist policy and analyzes how new restrictions will harm economic recovery and development in America.
From the Front Flap:
If Obama and his “green” coalition get their way, we’re headed for blackouts, skyrocketing energy prices designed to bankrupt disfavored industries, and even greater government control of our economy.
Obama’s green jobs agenda masks a declaration of war against America’s most reliable sources of energy-coal, oil, and natural gas. He seeks to shut them down and convert America to green energy-mostly wind and solar-in an irresponsible experiment that will guarantee an energy crisis and drive America from recession to depression. The Obama administration, working in collusion with green groups allegedly protecting the environment, unions protecting their paychecks, and local elites protecting their ocean views, is putting the special interests ahead of your interests.
From Chapter One:
“Under Obama’s economic and energy plans, conventional energy is punished by government policy in order to force the adoption of new, Obama-favored technologies. These plans will force us into energy poverty, a return to government-inspired uncompetitiveness, and a surrender of individual and economic liberties.
Modern environmentalism in a nutshell sounds something like this: impose energy taxes that serve as a rationing scheme (the “cap”), along with mandates of what sort of energy people can use, and in what amount. Environmentalists seek to use the state to create scarcity in order to further impose their will over our lives.”
From the Back:
“Power Grab exposes the incestuous relationships between the Obama administration and the piles of taxpayer money it wants to pipeline to the Big Green juggernaut consisting of Big Business and Big Labor. Horner shows that the green agenda isn’t so much about a clean environment as it is about redistributing income from us to them.”
– Stephen Moore, member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board
“Chris Horner was right in his bestselling The Politically Incorrect Guise to Global Warming and Environmentalism. He was right in his book Red Hot Lies that exposed the cover-ups, lies, and intimidation of the global-warming alarmists. And he’s right again in his new book Power Grab, which exposes what the extremists are really after: power over you, your wallet, and even your right to self-government. Power Grab is essential reading for fighting back.
– Congresswoman Michele Bachmann
In the News
Krugman Wrong on Climate Economics
Jim Manzi, National Review Online, 16 April 2010
Krugman Wrong on Climate Science
Robert Murphy, MasterResource.org, 16 April 2010
Climate Change: Always Room for Doubt
Telegraph editorial, 15 April 2010
AB 32 Is a Losing Bet
Margo Thorning, San Jose Mercury News, 14 April 2010
What It Takes To Be a Coal Miner
Iain Murray, In Character, 13 April 2010
Lyin’ for Climate Indoctrination
Paul Chesser, American Spectator, 13 April 2010
EPA Is Choking Freedom
Mark Landsbaum, Orange County Register, 9 April 2010
News You Can Use
Peer Review?
A new report from NoConsensus.org calculates that 21 of 44 chapters in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Nobel-Prize winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cite peer-reviewed sources less than 60% of the time
Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell
Cap-and-Tax Update
It was first reported this week that Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Lieberman (I- Conn.) planned to release a draft of their energy-rationing bill next Tuesday. But today Environment and Energy Daily reports (subscription required) that they will now release it on 26th April. Why? Here’s what Darren Samuelsohn reports: “The trio originally hoped to unveil their proposal during the week surrounding the 40th anniversary of Earth Day next Thursday. But Kerry said that was not the message he wanted to get across. ‘This is not Earth Day-related,’ he said. ‘This is a jobs bill. This is an energy independence, national security bill. It’s not wrapped to one week or another.’
I’m not creative enough to make stuff like this up. What’s more, the Terrific Trio are not going to introduce their draft as a bill and have it referred to a committee. Instead, they’re going to hand it over to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to see if he can come up with the sixty votes needed to pass some version of it on the Senate floor.
Obama on Graham’s Gas Tax
The Hill reported that the White House claims that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill does not contain an increase in the gas tax and that it is not being discussed. That doesn’t quite close the door, however, since Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are calling the gas tax in their bill a “linked fee.” Apparently, neither the White House nor the three Senators consider it a gas tax. But it seems highly unlikely that they can’t get away with it even if they call it a linked fee. Gas prices have gone up by more than a dollar a gallon since Barack Obama was sworn in as President. His administration is pulling the plug on plans put together by the Bush Administration in 2008 to increase oil and gas production in federal offshore waters and on federal lands. If gas prices continue to climb, this could be a potent campaign issue in the fall.
Obama Meets with Enviros
President Obama is continuing to push for a comprehensive energy-rationing bill. This week, the White House held a meeting with heads of a number environmental pressure groups in order to urge them to get behind Kerry-Graham-Lieberman. Some of the environmental pressure groups that aren’t fronts for big business are not going to go along no matter how much Obama pleads. That’s because they see that Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Graham-Lieberman have very little to do with reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They are mostly about transferring vast amounts of wealth from consumers to politically-favored big businesses.
Senate Democrats Push a Trade War
Eight Democratic Senators from States that still have some manufacturing wrote a letter to Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman, stating that a condition of their supporting energy-rationing legislation such as Kerry-Graham-Lieberman is that it include carbon tariffs or something equivalent to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competitors that can use less expensive energy from fossil fuels to produce their goods.
Climategate Update
Myron Ebell
The University of East Anglia “international panel” released its report on the ClimateGate scientific fraud scandal today. At eight pages, it’s not even a thorough whitewash. They don’t even make a minimal effort to rebut the obvious appearance of widespread data manipulation, suppression of dissenting research through improper means, and intentional avoidance of complying with Freedom of Information requests. However, the report makes one concession, which is quite damning: “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.” In fact, the handling of the historical temperature data and production of the Hadley/CRU temperature record by Jones et al. and the handling of the paleoclimatological data and fabrication of the hockey stick by Michael Mann et al. was only possible because they hid their data and methods from professional statisticians. When professional statisticians were able to look at Mann’s methods and data, the result was the Wegman report, which was devastating.
Across the States
Connecticut
The Connecticut General Assembly’s Energy and Technology Committee has passed R.B. 463, which would lower the State’s renewable portfolio standard (a requirement for minimum electricity generation from renewable energy) from 20% by 2020 to 11.5% by 2020. Proponents of the bill argue that renewable energy is too expensive.
California
Los Angeles is teetering on bankruptcy because no one wants to pay for expensive renewable energy, according to the Wall Street Journal. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed electricity rate hikes of 9% to 28% to finance LA’s renewable energy agenda, but the City Council refused. As a result, the Department of Water and Power, which needs the rate hikes to buy expensive renewable energy, withheld $74 million of the $221 million surplus revenue it was expected to transfer to the city. But without the $74 million, city controller Wendy Greuel warns that LA won’t be able to pay its bills within a month.
Washington
Washington Governor Christine Gregoire (D) boasts of having created more than 99,000 “green jobs,” but a new study from the Washington Policy Center puts the lie to the Governor’s claim. In fact, there was little or no difference in the work done by green employees and the non-green employees for 71,000 of the reported green jobs. So taxpayers are paying around $2,400 per trainee to acquire green job skills no different than skills needed for existing non-green jobs.
The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.
Is tax-and-dividend (aka “carbon fee and green check”) a morally compelling alternative to cap-and-trade?
Is it the path to presidential greatness?
Will it be good for the economy?
Will China adopt it if we do?
Yes to all of the above, climatologist James Hansen argues in the Huffington Post.
No, says your humble servant, today on MasterResource.Org.
The University of East Anglia’s carefully selected “International Panel” released their report on the ClimateGate scientific fraud scandal today. At eight pages, it’s not even a thorough whitewash. They don’t even make a minimal effort to rebut the obvious appearance of widespread data manipulation, suppression of dissenting research through improper means, and intentional avoidance of complying with Freedom of Information requests. It appears that they concluded that the only way they could produce a whitewash and protect the interests of the establishment was by making only the most superficial investigation. Perhaps they realized that doing more than taking the representations of Phil Jones and the others on trust would involve them in the moral difficulty of having to choose between being honest and maintaining their exoneration.
The seven panel members only looked at eleven published articles from CRU selected on the advice of the Royal Society. And all eight panel members didn’t read all eleven papers. Instead, “Every paper was read by a minimum of three Panel members at least one of whom was familiar with the general area to which the paper related. At least one of the other two was a generalist with no special climate science expertise but with experience of some of the general techniques and methods employed in the work.” Perhaps the third reader was a chimpanzee. Yes, they have done a thorough and professional whitewash.
However, the report makes one concession, which is quite damning: “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.” In fact, the handling of the historical temperature data and production of the Hadley/CRU temperature record by Jones et al. and the handling of the paleoclimatological data and fabrication of the hockey stick by Michael Mann et al. was only possible because they hid their data and methods from professional statisticians. When professional statisticians were able to look at Mann’s methods and data, the result was the Wegman report, which was devastating.
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As Climategate exploded prior to a December U.N. conference in Copenhagen that failed to produce a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, top environmental officials in Canada tried to paint a happy face on the scandal. The country’s Canwest News Service reports this morning that a top-ranking official with Environment Canada produced a memo for Environment Minister Jim Prentice — just before his participation in Copenhagen — that defended the integrity of the UN IPCC science:
The personal e-mails exchanged by climate scientists wound up in the hands of special-interest groups who say they are skeptical about peer-reviewed research that concludes humans are causing global warming….
But in the memorandum obtained by Canwest News Service, Environment Canada’s deputy minister, Ian Shugart, suggested the skeptics had it wrong. He explained the scientific information in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment of climate-change research was still the best reference tool for the negotiations.
“Recent media reports in the aftermath of the hacking incident at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia . . . has raised some concerns about the reliability and robustness of some of the science considered in the (fourth assessment of climate science released in 2007 by the) IPCC,” said the memorandum to Prentice from his deputy minister…
“Despite these developments, the department continues to view the IPCC (fourth assessment) as the most comprehensive and rigorous source of scientific information for climate-change negotiations.”
We’ve seen since then the birth of numerous other “Gates,” which revealed “rigorous” IPCC science sources such as student dissertations, climbing magazines, publications including Leisure and Events Management, and World Wildlife Fund pamphlets.
Canwest also reported how the Canadian memo cited the evidence from temperature records:
The document also noted that temperature records in the report, which have been challenged by climate skeptics, were based on four different scientific agencies.
“All four data sets provide a very similar picture of the warming over land over the 20th century.”
We’ve now also learned that three of the four datasets that IPCC depended upon for their scientific research were tainted, thanks to evidence revealed from a Freedom of Information Act inquiry by Chris Horner at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And then there was this BBC report about fudge factors and messy data, just after Climategate was exposed.
The Climategate scandal showed how several of the world’s top climate scientists were hell bent on keeping “skeptical” views out of the scientific literature and in particular, the IPCC reports. If you wanted an illustration of how this actually worked in practice, then economist Ross McKitrick has a doozy for you.
Ross realized that one of the IPCC’s central claims, one that could be regarded as foundational, was fabricated and provably false. He wrote a paper demonstrating this and proceeded to be given the run-around by every climatic journal he submitted it to, despite mostly positive reviews. In the end he had to publish it in a statistical journal, where it will likely be ignored by the climate science clique community.
Ross concludes:
In the aftermath of Climategate a lot of scientists working on global warming-related topics are upset that their field has apparently lost credibility with the public. The public seems to believe that climatology is beset with cliquish gatekeeping, wagon-circling, biased peer-review, faulty data and statistical incompetence. In response to these perceptions, some scientists are casting around, in op-eds and weblogs, for ideas on how to hit back at their critics. I would like to suggest that the climate science community consider instead whether the public might actually have a point.
Read the whole thing by downloading Ross’s paper here (PDF link).
Roger Pielke Jr agrees with Ross here, noting:
This is exactly the situation that has occurred in the context of disaster losses that I have documented on numerous occasions. In the case of disaster losses, not only did the IPCC make stuff up, but when challenged, went so far as to issue a press release emphasizing the accuracy of its made up stuff.
Cartoon from Cartoons By Josh.
As threatened, the new CAFE standards have arrived, with the EPA muscling in on territory reserved by statute to the Transportation Department. As Marlo Lewis and I have noted repeatedly, this is an unconstitutional
step on a road to economic devastation.
However, in the light of recent events, this quote in particular caught my eye:
Gloria Bergquist, vice president at the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said . . . “We have a hill to climb, and it’s steep, so we will need consumers to buy our fuel-efficient technologies in large
numbers to meet this new national standard.”
Even with very high gas prices, Americans have been unwilling to buy fuel-efficient vehicles in the same numbers as Europeans, because they rightly regard them as less safe. When the president talks about how
vehicles have not become more efficient over the past few vehicles, he is being disingenuous, because they have actually become much more efficient at providing more horsepower and more mass for the same amount of fuel. That’s what consumers want and in many cases need, but that’s also what makes this a particularly steep hill for the auto manufacturers to climb.
With the principle that the Federal Government can mandate that individuals purchase something now established with the Obamacare Act (although that too is unconstitutional, as my colleague Hans Bader explains), how long before we see an act of Congress aimed at forcing Americans to buy unsafe but fuel-efficient vehicles?
A chicken in every pot and a fuel-efficient car in every garage . . . or else!
Cross-posted from The Corner.
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