Blog

About a year ago, I became convinced that the global warming debate was going the way of other environmental issues during the past 40 years. Dissenting voices were being silenced as America hurtled toward more laws, regulations, and bureaucratic control — which, "informed" opinion makers insist, are the only solutions allowed to any problems global warming might bring. Sadly, this pattern has repeated time and again on a wide array of environmental issues since the 1960s, when the lawyers of the nascent Environmental Defense Fund began lobbying for local, then national, and then international bans on the pesticide DDT. The results in virtually every case have been disastrous: significant losses of both liberty and prosperity and, in some cases, environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.

Greenhouse gas curbs on industries such as power generation and steel could provide a basis for a renewed U.N.-led drive to fight global warming, Akio Mimura, Chairman of Nippon Steel Corp said on Thursday

The First Commandment of climate-change politics is that you can never be green enough – as President Bush learns anew every time he even attempts to address the issue. Critics were quick to claim a victory of sorts after his Rose Garden speech yesterday, while at the same time carrying on about half-measures and delay on "the planetary emergency."

Al Gore received an honorary doctorate from the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne Tuesday but, like the greenhouse gases he is famous for combating, he was invisible to the media. Reporters were shut out of the ceremony where the Nobel Peace Prize winner accepted his degree, which honors the former US vice-president’s efforts to publicize the climate change issue. A select few journalists were invited to attend the affair on the condition they did not report on what was said and did not film the event or take photographs – an edict that went down like a lead balloon with local news organizations.

The U.S. is wrestling with the worst food inflation in 17 years, and analysts expect new data due on Wednesday to show it's getting worse. That's putting the squeeze on poor families and forcing bakeries, bagel shops and delis to explain price increases to their customers. U.S. food prices rose 4 percent in 2007, compared with an average 2.5 percent annual rise for the last 15 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And the agency says 2008 could be worse, with a rise of as much as 4.5 percent.

The "credits" sold by EcoSecurities and its rivals are supposed to fund clean-air projects in the developing world that otherwise wouldn't get built. But the U.N. is worried that players in the market may be gaming the system by putting a green imprimatur on some projects that would have happened anyway, defeating the intent of the U.N. program.

Another cautionary tale about how not to fight climate change: By giving away greenhouse-gas emissions permits for free, Europe may hand power companies windfall profits of up to 71 billion euros—about $100 billion—and undermine the fight to curb emissions.

Then what of the "deniers" we have all heard about, those holdouts in the global-warming debate, complete with PhDs at the end of their names, who refuse to accept the obvious? Gore and company have a ready answer, repeated again and again: Pay no attention. These alleged scientist dissenters are either kooks or crooks who take the pay of the oil companies to spew out junk science and confuse the issue.

Global warming? Don't worry about it. It's over. No longer does Al Gore have to fly around the world in private jets emitting greenhouse gases to save the world from — greenhouse gases. The United Nations World Meteorological Organization is reporting that global temperatures have not risen since 1998.