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Gallup: Al Gore Is Failing
Paul Bedard, U.S. News and World Report, 5 May 2009

He admits that “it’s counterintuitive,” but Gallup Poll Editor Frank Newport says he sees no evidence that Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is winning. “It’s just not caught on,” says Newport. “They have failed.” Or, more bluntly: “Any measure that we look at shows Al Gore’s losing at the moment. The public is just not that concerned.” What the public is worried about: the economy. Newport says the economy trumps the environment right now, a strong indicator that President Obama’s bid to put a cap-and-trade pollution regime into operation isn’t likely to be politically popular.

Award Winning Boat Anchors
Paul Chesser, American Spectator, 6 May 2009

Irony is so much sweeter when its victims have slathered their false assertions with syrupy  arrogance and  mocking mix-ins.

GM Troubles Repeat British Auto Industry Mistakes of 1970s
Iain Murray, DC Examiner, 4 May 2009

General Motors is now co-owned by the American taxpayer and labor unions.  As a Briton, I find this development astonishing.  It repeats the mistakes of the 1970s  Labor government, which essentially killed off the British auto industry.  America should avoid the same mistake.

Greenbacks for Green Energy Come from Taxpayer Pockets
Fred Smith & William Yeatman, DC Examiner, 5 May 2009

President Barack Obama recently named business consultant Jeffrey Zients as head of a new performance office tasked with reducing government waste. The irony of creating a bureaucracy to trim federal fat aside, we suggest an obvious first target for the incoming performance czar: The Department of Energy’s (DOE) “clean energy” development bank.

Forget the Environment, Dems Just Want You To Show Them the Money
Phil Kerpen, FoxNews, 4 May 2009

The central question in the debate over global warming and cap-and-trade has nothing to do with the environment or even with energy.  It’s all about one thing: revenue.  Kudos to Republican leaders for taking a clear stand that they will oppose any global warming bill that raises federal taxes, but as long as Democrats refuse to make the same commitment, the global warming debate is about one thing: revenue.

Lobbyists Help Dems Draft Climate Bill
Tom LoBianco, Washington Times, 4 May 2009

Democratic lawmakers who spent much of the Bush administration blasting officials for letting energy lobbyists write national policy have turned to a coalition of business and environmental groups to help draft their own sweeping climate bill.

The Bias against Oil and Gas
Robert Samuelson, Washington Post, 4 May 2009

Considering the brutal recession, you’d expect the Obama administration to be obsessed with creating jobs. And so it is, say the president and his supporters. The trouble is that there’s one glaring exception to their claims: the oil and natural gas industries. The administration is biased against them — a bias that makes no sense on either economic or energy grounds. Almost everyone loves to hate the world’s Exxons, but promoting domestic drilling is simply common sense.

Climate Model Predictions: Time for a Reality Check
Dr. Roy Spenser, RightSideNews, 2 May 2009

The fear of anthropogenic global warming is based almost entirely upon computerized climate model simulations of how the global atmosphere will respond to slowly increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. There are now over 20 models being tracked by the IPCC, and they project levels of warming ranging from pretty significant to catastrophic by late in this century.

There are only seven months until the global community plans to adopt a successor climate treaty to the failed Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen, but  negotiators are far apart on the most important issues-binding emissions cuts and paying for a global green energy revolution. Here’s a quick run down of the stakeholders bargaining positions.

On binding emissions reductions:

• Developing countries refuse to reduce emissions. They want developed countries to commit to 40% cuts by 2020.
• The European Union wants developed countries to commit to 30% cuts by 2020.
• The Obama administration proposes 18% cuts by 2020, but it wants significant participation from rapidly growing developing countries such as India and China.
• In the United States Congress, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-California) and Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) have proposed a draft of a legislation calling for the United States to reduce emissions 20% by 2020, although they are meeting heavy resistance from both within their own party and Republicans.

On financing a global green energy revolution:

• Developing countries demand.5%-2% of developed nations’ aggregate GDP, annually, to facilitate climate change mitigation.
• The European Union believes that developed nations need to raise and distribute $230 billion a year through 2020, but it refuses to discuss burden sharing until the U.S. submits a proposal.
• The Obama administration has yet to address climate change mitigation aid to developing countries.
• The Waxman-Markey draft bill does not address climate aid, but it is highly unlikely that the Congress would agree to pay scores of billions of dollars every year for clean energy in China.

It is my strongest hope that this deadlock  persists, so that we all may be spared the burden of an ill-conceived, economically ruinous climate change mitigation treaty.

Think back to 1905.

The Wright brothers had just made history. Coal and wood heated homes. Few had telephones or electricity. AC units were handheld fans. Ice blocks cooled ice boxes. New York City collected 900,000 tons of vehicle emissions – horse manure – annually, and dumped it into local rivers. Lung and intestinal diseases were rampant. Life expectancy was 47.

Today, President Obama wants to prevent “runaway global warming,” by slashing US carbon dioxide emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. According to Oak Ridge National Laboratory data, this reduction would return the United States to emission levels last seen in those halcyon days of 1905!

But America’s 1905 population was 84 million, versus 308 million today. We didn’t drive or fly, or generate electricity for offices, factories, schools or hospitals. To account for those differences, we’d have to send CO2 emissions back to 1862 levels.

The Civil War was raging. Nine of ten Americans were farmers (versus 2% today). The industrial revolution was in its infancy. Malaria halted construction on the Washington, DC aqueduct. Typhus and cholera killed thousands more every year. Life expectancy was 40 – half of what affordable hydrocarbon, hydroelectric and nuclear power helped make it today.

None of this seems to matter to the Obama Administration or liberal Democrats. The 648-page Waxman-Markey climate bill would compel an 80% CO2 reduction, by imposing punitive cap-and-tax restrictions on virtually every hydrocarbon-using business, motorist and family.

That’s making some legislators nervous, as they ponder the health, economic and employment effects of restricting energy supplies and driving up the cost of everything we eat, drink, make and do – especially in 20 states that get 60-98% of their electricity from coal.

So to prod Congress into action, or achieve the 80% target via regulatory edict, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency has decreed that natural, plant-enhancing, life-sustaining carbon dioxide “endangers human health and welfare.” The authoritarian actions it is contemplating would regulate cars, trains, boats and planes; pave the way for regulating farms and factories, hospitals, schools, malls and apartment buildings, computer servers and lawn mowers; and send energy prices skyrocketing.

It is astonishing how casually activists, bureaucrats, politicians and even some corporate executives advocate arbitrary CO2 reduction targets and timetables – as though they were possible, desirable or necessary.

The targets reflect worst-case scenarios generated by computer models. But the models assume human CO2 now drives climate changes that have been occurring for eons. They ignore many natural forces, and inadequately analyze incomplete data, based on our still limited grasp of complex climate processes.

They cannot accurately replicate last year’s regional climate shifts or predict changes even one year in the future. They ignore Earth’s history of repeated climate changes, and failed to anticipate the slowly declining global temperatures of 1995-2008.

Thousands of climate and other scientist say there is no climate crisis, and CO2 plays little or no substantive role in climate change. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 48% of registered American voters now believe climate change is caused by planetary and other natural forces. Only a third still believe it’s due mostly to humans.

Climate realists also recognize that, even if America eliminated all of its greenhouse gas emissions, increasing Chinese and Indian carbon dioxide emissions would promptly offset our draconian cuts.

This alarms Climate Armageddonites. They fear it’s now or never to wrest control over energy and the economic, manufacturing and transportation activities it fuels. Now or never to profit from cap-and-tax laws, renewable energy mandates, and a forced shift away from hydrocarbons that now provide 85% of US energy.

“Socially responsible” corporate groups like the Carbon Offset Providers Coalition are banking on passage of Waxman-Markey or similar legislation. They want to ensure that any CO2 regime is “rigorous and efficient,” to foster high carbon prices, maximum subsidies and strong profits.

President Obama says cap-and-trade will “raise” $656 billion over the next decade. The National Economic Council and other analysts put the tax bite at $1.3 to $3.0 trillion.

This is not monetary manna. The wealth will be extracted from every hydrocarbon-using business, motorist and family.

The intrusive energy rules and taxes will clobber households, manufacturers, farmers, truckers and airlines. The poorest families will get energy welfare, to offset part of their $500-3,000 increase in annual heating, cooling, transportation and food expenses. Everyone else will have to trim health, vacation, charity, college and retirement budgets to pay for energy.

Every increase in energy prices will result in more businesses laying off workers or closing their doors, more jobs sent overseas, more families forced into welfare, more school districts, hospitals and churches into whirlpools of red ink.

Exactly how will they, your family, your business eliminate 80% of CO2 emissions by 2050? Exactly how will you pay those skyrocketing fuel bills?

The Nature Conservancy predicts that, by 2030, “eco-friendly” wind, solar and biofuel projects will require extra land equivalent to Minnesota, to produce the energy we now get from oil, gas and coal. Interior Secretary Salazar’s proposal to have offshore wind turbines replace gas, coal and nuclear electricity generators would mean 336,000 3.25MW behemoths off our coasts – if they operate 24/7/365. Far more if they don’t.

Where exactly will we site those turbines – and get the billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper and fiberglass it will take to build and install the expensive, unreliable, subsidized monsters?

My grandmother used to say, The only good thing about the “good old days” is that they’re gone.

Few Americans will be enthralled by the prospect of returning to that era. Fewer will relish the hefty price tag – and damage to their freedoms, budgets, jobs and living standards.

The White House, EPA and Congress need a serious reality check.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.

The Society of Environmental Journalists inbreeders reported earlier this week about another so-called climate report — “so-called” because it is yet another study that addresses everything except the core issue of whether there is still global warming, and if so, whether or not humans are causing it — released on Monday. This time it’s the Asian Development Bank sounding the alarm in an examination of the risks posed by AGW to five (why only five?) Southeast Asian countries: Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines. I guess Cambodia, Laos and the others aren’t worth the trouble.

The report was funded by the Government of the United Kingdom (another why?) and the methodology used to conjure up all the devastating effects of AGW on SEA was the same used for the discredited Stern Review, named for alarmist bookseller Nicholas Stern. So it’s not surprising that Stern wrote the foreward for the ADB report:

The science is continuing to develop rapidly and as it does further possible impacts will be revealed and risks re-assessed. Interactions between impacts can multiply their effects. Many of the impacts from climate change are not in traditional economic sectors with the result that valuations of their effect is difficult and many are likely to be missed….It is important that the economic analysis on climate change measures what counts rather than merely counting what can easily be measured.

Translation: We reserve the right to continue to make crap up as we think of it.

The report also got a big push from Ursula Schaefer-Preuss, ADB’s obligatory sustainable development mouthpiece. The VP with the Bond girl moniker and the Judi Dench mug had this to say:

Despite the global and regional economic downturn, the Earth is still warming and sea levels are rising. The world can no longer afford to delay action on climate change, even temporarily. Countries must act decisively. The global economic crisis provides an opportunity for the world, and Southeast Asia, to start the transition toward a climate-resilient and low-carbon economy.

All-in-all another nice fictional addition to the climate alarmism theatrics.

Americans for Prosperity has launched an effort to get office holders to pledge not to vote for any climate change legislation that increases federal government revenue. AFP announced earlier this week that many in the Republican Congressional leadership have signed on. The text of the pledge:

No Climate Tax Pledge:
I, ______________________, pledge to the taxpayers of the state of _______________ and to the American people that I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.

It’s a worthwhile exercise, and while I know you have to keep these things short and simple, here is what I would add to the pledge:

I will also oppose any legislation relating to climate change that:

1. Includes a net increase in revenues to rent-seekers like Al Gore.

2. Includes a net increase in revenues to research funding whores like university environmental study centers.

3. Coerces utilities and industries (and therefore their customers) to pay added fees and surcharges that are redirected to other useless, government-mandated programs such as energy efficiency and green jobs.

4. Prevents the construction of new fossil fuel-powered power plants.

5. Subsidizes costly, inefficient sources of energy at the expense of less expensive, more efficient ones.

6. Does not measure results of policies it advocates in terms of their affect on global average temperatures, rather than greenhouse gas emissions.

I could probably think of more but that’s a start.