Give Barack Obama credit for one thing. When it comes to global warming and coal, he exhibited extraordinary candor about the economic pain his proposals would cause. Unfortunately for John McCain’s prospects, Obama’s candor was kept hidden for the better part of the year. It wasn’t until late Sunday evening that word surfaced of Obama’s extremely impolitic comments to the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board last January. Had they been well known before the last, dying gasps of a seemingly interminable campaign, the McCain team might have been able to gain real traction in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Lucky for Obama, the Chronicle editors inexplicably failed to publicize Obama’s revelations.
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Whomever is elected tomorrow will face — and probably support — the next enviro-whacko catastrophe, the Dingell-Boucher bill. If you liked McCain’s global warming bill, you’ll just love this.
For more than three years, a number of politicians and media observers have prophesied about the fracturing of the coveted “Evangelical Vote” over the issue of environmental stewardship. And during the same period, a handful of evangelicals have toiled to persuade the faithful that manmade global warming is such a serious threat that it deserves top priority in their social witness.
Snow fell on London this last week, a beautiful blanket of snow — the first to fall in the month of October since the year of grace 1922 — while the Mother of Parliaments gave third reading to an extraordinary piece of legislation, which will put a huge new bureaucracy in place to monitor and fight global warming, sucking taxes from a shrinking British economy.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
Over at my Web site I've posted a long, blow-by-blow account of how Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and his administration repeatedly enlisted the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to pay for his global warming alarmist agenda (a "new energy economy") and for his efforts to keep the federal Bureau of Land Management from leasing for oil and gas exploration on the Roan Plateau. It's sometimes a dry recitation but there are a ton of documents linked that I obtained from the governor's office and from CDNR.
The quick-'n-dirty summary: Almost immediately after he took office Ritter had a "Climate Action Plan" he wanted to pursue, which included two new positions in his administration: a cabinet-level climate policy adviser to create "a bold and visionary climate action policy," and a liaison to the Public Utilities Commission to "develop a climate-wise utility policy." He asked for, and got, two annual grants from Hewlett for $200,000 ($400,000 total) to fund the positions. Ritter worked through Hewlett's environmental program director Hal Harvey — a far-left, Obama-supporting (and -contributing) environmental extremist who founded the Energy Foundation and is president of the crackpot enviro/population control-advocating New-Land Foundation — to pay for his climate people. I guess the state budget process would not come up with the money fast enough for Ritter.
Within a few months Ritter had another environmental cause to fight: obstructing and delaying the Bureau of Land Management from leasing the rights to oil and natural gas exploration on the rich Roan Plateau. It had been ten years already since BLM was given the mandate to lease the Naval Oil and Shale Reserves, and it was finally ready to start doing so after years of environmental study and review. But that still wasn't long enough for Ritter, his eco-cronies, Reps. Mark Udall and John Salazar, and Sen. Ken Salazar (pictured). All got involved in trying to further delay BLM.
Part of the strategy was for Ritter's administration to make the case for much slower "phased leasing" of acreage on the Roan, as opposed to the BLM's somewhat quicker but still limited and methodical approach. The governor's Department of Natural Resources sought out (and found) a cheap economist who would be willing to put together a vague case that showed phased leasing was a better idea that would reap better revenues for the state. And can you guess who they asked to pay for said cheap economist? Yep — the Hewlett Foundation, with Hal Harvey more than happy to help out. In fact, Harvey wanted to help so much that he gave campaign contributions to both Salazars and Udall as well.
The congressmen worked at the federal level to implement Ritter's phased leasing goals, with Sen. Salazar's legal counsel begging for the suspect economic analysis to buttress his case. But the congressmen's and Ritter's efforts fell short of their goals, as BLM moved forward with the leasing, which netted nearly $114 million for both the federal and state governments — "the highest grossing onshore oil and natural gas lease sale in BLM history in the lower 48 states."
Nevertheless, it's a sorry tale of how environmental extremists will fight together to the death for measures that would cripple our access to our own sources of affordable energy.
On Monday, the British House of Commons passed the Climate Change Bill, marking a solemn undertaking to reduce British emissions by 80% by mid-century (unless decided otherwise) by the clear majority of 403 to 3.
Today, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) demanded that oil companies reduce the price of gasoline.
There's "joined-up government" for you.
Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday – the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922. The Mother of Parliaments was discussing the Mother of All Bills for the last time, in a marathon six hour session.
"Going green" doesn't have quite the cachet it used to, at least on Wall Street.
China raised the price of its co-operation in the world's climate change talks yesterday by calling for developed countries to spend 1 per cent of their domestic product helping poorer nations cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Earlier this year, I wrote an eco-satirical column under the pseudonym Ethan Greenhart, in which I (or rather, Ethan) called upon Greens everywhere to pray for an economic downturn. The column argued that nothing would benefit our human-ravaged planet more than a “big, beautiful, stock-crashing, Wall Street–burning, consumer-baiting, home-evicting, bank-busting recession.”
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