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Joe Romm of the liberalista Center for American Progress (posting at Climateprogress.org) has spent much time promoting the global warming environoia legislation of his facial and ideological likeness, Rep. Henry Waxman, during the last few days. But yesterday, marking the first 100 days of Obama, he became more reflective (appropriate for a lazy Sunday) over the historic significance of the first black/green president. While three months ago liberals and media formerly known as mainstream marveled simply over his election, Romm already places Obama high in the historical ranks while demoting others:

Obama has clearly demonstrated he has a serious chance to be the first President since FDR to remake the country through his positive vision.  Indeed, if Obama is a two-term president, if he achieves even half of what he has set out to, he will likely be remembered as “the green FDR.” (Romm’s emphasis)

As an interesting side note, President Reagan, who is held in some esteem with historians these days, will almost certainly be relegated to a second-tier, if not third-tier, president by the painful dual realities of global warming and peak oil.  After all, it was Ronald Reagan who put conservatives strongly and permanently on the pro-pollution, anti-efficiency, anti-clean-energy side, where they remain today. It is Reagan, more than anyone else, who put the GOP on the self-destructively wrong side of scientific reality (though Newt Gingrich is a close second).

Romm goes on to rebuke the “establishment” media who “doesn’t get global warming” (but Joe — they try so hard!). But that’s just Joe being Joe. Meanwhile, take a look again and dare to tell me that Romm and Waxman were not built from the same transparencies in the scaremongering Identikit.

In North Carolina legislators and environmental regulators have redirected gas tax revenues from road maintenance and repair to politically-motivated efforts such as propping up The Climate Registry and Attorney General Roy Cooper’s case against the Tennessee Valley Authority. The John Locke Foundation’s Roy Cordato puts it all together from stories published in Carolina Journal, JLF’s newspaper:

The Climate Registry’s mission has nothing to do with the emissions regulated by the state. As reported by (CJ’s David) Bass, the Climate Registry’s “goal is to persuade companies, organizations, and state and local governments to report their greenhouse gas emissions in hopes of curbing climate change.” On its Web site, CR states that “the Registry supports both voluntary and mandatory reporting programs.”

In other words, part of the registry’s goal is to have carbon dioxide, which supporters believe is causing global warming, declared a pollutant by state and federal governments. As an aside, there has been no net warming since 1998. What Carolina Journal has uncovered is that DAQ allocated $100,000 simply as a donation to CR’s activities. Half of this money was from DAQ’s gasoline tax allocation, i.e., from the pockets of drivers who are slamming into potholes across the state because DOT cannot find the resources to have them filled.

Cordato also highlights how gas tax income for the state was detoured to high-priced lawyers working on the TVA case, in which Cooper — with no other grounds for litigation — sued the neighboring utility on “nuisance” grounds.

Bass’ second story focuses on a much greater sum — $1 million. This also came from DAQ’s allocation of gasoline taxes, but apparently with some resistance. In the April issue of Carolina Journal, Bass reports on $1 million of gas tax money that was transferred to Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office. The purpose of this transfer was to help fund the AG’s lawsuit against the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federal government agency that produces electricity from coal-fired power plants, as do most power plants in North Carolina. The state was suing the TVA for pollution problems in North Carolina that are allegedly being caused by emissions from the TVA plants.

As Bass reported, this rather large sum of gas tax money ultimately went to pay the cost of very high-priced law firms. The Ayres Law Group and the Resolution Law Group were hired by the AG’s office at rates of up to $515 per hour with work by paralegals (nonlawyers typically trained at community colleges) being billed at $100 per hour. Among the extravagant expenses reported was a bill for almost $7,000 by the Resolution Law Group for a one-month stay by a paralegal in a king suite at the Embassy Suites Hotel at the Chevy Chase Pavilion in Washington, D.C. This is a high-end luxury resort hotel.

So, how bad are the roads in your state? Are gas tax revenues being derailed to instead to pay agenda-driven, high-priced lawyers, and to promote the climate alarmism agenda? Chances are good that they are.

Texas, once known for its oil tycoons and cattle barons, is now a stage on which renewable-energy moguls preen and strut. But whereas demand for Texas oil and cattle was market-driven, the State’s renewable boom is a creature of politics.  Robert L. Bradley, Jr., an historian of political capitalism, chronicles the lastest chapter in the Lone Star State’s patronage of Big Green here.

Okay, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Jon Wellinghoff didn’t actually say America doesn’t need coal-fired and nuclear power plants. He stopped short of openly embracing the We Can Solve It! agenda of ”repowering” America” with zero-emissions, non-nuclear electricity in 10 years.  He is not an avowed apostle of Gorethodoxy.

But he’s close enough for government work. Wellinghoff told reporters (Greenwire, subscription required) that we “may not need any [new coal and nuclear power plants], ever.” One reason being that new coal plants will be “too expensive.” Huh?

If coal plants are too costly, then why have eco-litigation groups fought so hard to stop coal plants from being built?

Silly me, Wellinghoff undoubtedly means that once Congress enacts the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, it will be too expensive to own and operate a coal plant. 

Wellinghoff, after all, is a member of Team Obama, and when the President was a candidate, he candidly admitted that his cap-and-trade plan would cause electricity prices to “skyrocket” and would ”bankrupt” anyone foolish enough to invest in coal-based power.

Wellinghoff believes that wind, solar, and biomass are poised to take off as sources of “distributed” generation, turning coal and nuclear baseload power into an “anachronism.” Funny, that’s what eco-visionaries told us in the 1970s. Yet, despite decades of taxpayer and ratepayer support and market-rigging rules, non-hydro renewables today provide about 3% of all U.S. electric power.

Does it worry you that folks like Obama and Wellinghoff are the anointed stewards of our economy in these troubled times? It does me.

Exploding Myths on Energy, Environment
Drew Thornley, DC examiner, 22 April 2009

This year’s official Earth Day poster depicts a polar bear climbing a wind turbine that sits atop a sheet of ice floating at sea.  A catchy picture, to be sure, but hyperbole will not advance energy-policy discussions-especially when environmental goals must be balanced with the need to cope with a recession and rising unemployment.

Getting a Rise out of Us
Chris Horner, Washington Times, 21 April 2009

The Washington Times’ front-page story “Rising sea levels in Pacific create wave of migrants” (Page 1, Sunday) outrageously peddles a talking point circulated by activists such as former Vice President Al Gore. The article’s claim that human-induced climate change and sea-level rise spawned a migration of refugees from South Pacific island nations was found unsupportable by the only court to examine its merits (Dimmock v. Secretary of State (UK) for Education and Skills, UK High Court, Oct. 10, 2007).

EPA’s Endangerment Finding: Legislative Hammer or Suicide Note
Marlo Lewis, DC Examiner, 21 April 2009

EPA’s just-published endangerment finding puts a swagger in the step of cap-and-tax advocates in the Administration, Congress, and environmental groups. They believe the endangerment finding gives them a legislative hammer with which to beat opponents into submission. This is too clever by half.

Fears Over Higher Costs Dominate the Climate Debate”
Dino Cappiello & H. Josef Herbert, AP, 21 April 2009

As Congress begins to debate climate change in earnest, the science is taking a back seat to economics: How much will it cost to slow the Earth’s warming because of man-made pollution – and what’s the cost of doing nothing?

The CO2 litigation campaign that begat Massachusetts v. EPA turns out to be too clever by half. As Roger Pielke, Jr. and Michael Shellenberger astutely observe, Team Obama’s threat to regulate greenhouse gases via the Clean Air Act (CAA) unless Congress enacts cap-and-tax legislation is tantamount to a promise to commit political suicide. However costly cap-and-tax might be, litigation-driven CAA regulation of greenhouse gases is potentially far more damaging to the economy. Instead of being a hammer that beats opponents into submission, EPA’s forthcoming endangerment finding–the first step in regulating greenhouse gases under the CAA–should strengthen Congressional Republicans’ resolve to fight cap-and-tax. By doing so, they will ensure that Obama and his allies bear all the blame for raising consumer energy prices, destroying jobs, and de-stimulating the economy. For further discussion, see my post on MasterResource.Org.

Christina Hoff Sommers writes about a looming liberal war on science. Based on a campaign promise Obama made to feminist groups in October 2008, Sommers foresees the Obama Administration moving to artificially cap male enrollment in math and science classes to achieve gender proportionality — the way that Title IX currently caps male participation in intercollegiate athletics. The result could be a substantial reduction in the number of scientists graduating from America’s colleges and universities.

Critics have long argued that the Title IX cap is in tension with the Supreme Court’s warnings against proportional representation. In a ruling by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court said that it is “completely unrealistic” to argue that women and minorities should be represented in each field or activity “in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.” (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)). In an earlier ruling, Justice O’Connor noted that it is “unrealistic to assume that unlawful discrimination is the sole cause of people failing to gravitate to jobs and employers in accord with the laws of chance.” (See Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust Co. (1988)).

But the Title IX athletics regulation mandates proportional representation. It contains three alternatives for compliance, but two of them are illusory in the long run. The first way (and only permanent way) to comply is to adopt a quota that artificially caps male participation. The second and third ways, which are only short-term fixes, involve continuous expansion of participation by, or satisfaction of all desire to compete by, the “underrepresented” sex. In a world of finite resources, these latter two ways can only work for a short period of time. I used to work at the agency, the Office for Civil Rights, that administers this regulation, and I think that it would be a mistake to apply standards designed for allocating resources among all-male and all-female sports teams to the very different context of math and science classes, which are coed.

But this is not an Administration that is very good with math and numbers. Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office says it will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run. His budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, and breaking his promises to enact a “net spending cut” and not raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 a year.

Some liberal publications are suspicious of scientific advances. The agronomist Norman Borlaug, who pioneered the Green Revolution, saved perhaps a billion lives in the Third World by developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops through biotechnology. For this, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Medal of Honor. For this, he was smeared in the liberal magazine The Nation, which has an irrational phobia of biotechnology and genetic engineering, as being “the biggest killer of all.”

Similarly, the Danish researcher Bjorn Lomborg was demonized and investigated after accurately pointing out that global warming is less of a threat to human health than AIDS and malnutrition.