GlobalWarming.org

CEI and the Pacific Research Institute recently co-hosted a Capitol Hill briefing on “California’s Meltdown” – the unprecedented combination of flawed economic, energy and environmental policies that have left the state with a massive budget deficit and facing even tougher times ahead.

Our keynote speaker was Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), a first term member of the House of Representatives but a 22-year veteran of the California state legislature. He was introduced by Cooler Heads Coalition chairman and CEI Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell:

After his speech Rep. McClintock took several questions from the audience:

The event continued with a panel discussion moderated by CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr. and featuring commentary by Tom Tanton of the Pacific Research Institute, Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District and Anthony Randazzo of the Reason Foundation:

Fred and the panel also took questions afterward:

The Fecklessness of Climate Diplomacy
William Yeatman, RealClearWorld.com, 16 July 2009

The fecklessness of climate diplomacy was on full display last week at the Group of Eight summit of industrialized countries in Italy, where the international community simultaneously vowed to limit global warming and disavowed the necessary action to do so.

Al and Friends Create a Climate of McCarthyism
Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian, 16 July 2009

Discussions about global warming are marked by an increasing desire to stamp out “impure” thinking, to the point of questioning the value of democratic debate. But shutting down discussion simply means the disappearance of reason from public policy.

Could We Be Wrong about Global Warming?
Doyle Rice, USA Today, 16 July 2009

Could the best climate models — the ones used to predict global warming — all be wrong? Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience.  The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery

In today’s RealClearWorld, CEI Energy Policy Analyst, William Yeatman, talks about international attempts at climate diplomacy.  Read the piece here.

President Barack Obama’s White House Science Advisor Dr. John P. Holdren (also known as “Dr. Doom”) is back in the headlines. A clever blogger has made available passages from a book that Holdren cowrote more than 30 years ago, about how the world is going to end, which is his favorite topic. The excerpts from the book document Holdren’s wacky solution to the supposed apocalypse: population control.

During his long and infamous career, Holdren has warned that the end is nigh on account of “ecocide,” global warming due to direct heating from power plant, global cooling due to particulate aerosol emissions, nuclear winter, population growth, and now, global warming due to greenhouse gases. Needless to say, Holdren has been proven wrong time and time again.

Despite this long and infamous career, Obama chose Holdren to be his top adviser on science policy, but I bet the President will come to regret his decision. Holdren’s record of zany zingers will make excellent scandal fodder for as long as he remains at his post. To read more about Holdren, click here, which will take you to a webmemo on Holdren I wrote in January.

The unveiling of a chart that exposes the bureaucratic nightmare also known as “healthcare reform” has made a media splash on the blogosphere and cable news channels, as well it should. In this day and age, bait-and-switch policies are made too simple by the complexity of trillion dollar legislation. This sad state of contemporary policy-making was evidenced last month, when the House of Representatives narrowly passed a 1,500 page major cap-and-trade climate change boondoggle that no one had bothered to read.

A picture, however, is worth a thousand words (perhaps even 1,500 pages) which is why the healthcare chart is such a powerful symbol-it visualizes the impact of a major policy that absolutely no one understands, with the obvious exception of Members of Congress and the lobbyists who wrote it.

The office of the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives compiled a similar type of chart to inform the debate over the climate change bill late last month. A copy is shown below.

Today, Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi shines a light on Obama “science czar” John Holdren’s disturbing past pronouncements — which Marc Scribner wrote about here just yesterday. Holdren, as Harsanyi notes, participated in the famous bet between eco-doomsayer Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, over whether the price for five selected metals would rise or fall. (The bet is the foundation for the design of CEI’s Julian Simon Award.)

Holdren was asked by Ehrlich to pick five natural resources that would experience shortages due to human consumption. He lost the bet on all counts, as the composite price index for the commodities he picked, like copper and chromium, fell by more than 40 percent.

Then again, it’s one thing to be a bumbling soothsayer and it’s quite another to underestimate the resourcefulness of mankind enough to ponder how “population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution . . .,” as Holdren did in “Ecoscience” in 1977.

The book, in fact, is sprinkled with comparable statements that passively discuss how coercive population control methods might rescue the world from … well, humans.

When I called Holdren’s office, I was told that the czar “does not now and never has been an advocate of compulsory abortions or other repressive measures to limit fertility.”

If that is so, I wondered, why is his name on a textbook that brought up such policy? Did he not write that part? Did he change his mind? Was it theoretical?

Harsannyi presents one possible explanation, which is hardly satisfactory in any morally sensible way.

When, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about his penchant for scientific overstatements, he responded, “The motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time.”

“Motivation” is when Holdren tells us that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Or when he claimed that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century when your run-of-the-mill alarmist warns of only 13 inches.

“Motivating” — or, in other words, scaring the hell out of people — about “possibilities” is an ideological and political weapon unsheathed in the effort to pass policies that, in the end, coerce us to do the right thing, anyway.

For more on Holdren, see here.

In a piece in today’s State Journal-Register, noted economist and commentator Walter Williams asks: “Why the rush to OK ‘cap and trade’ in the Senate?”  He addresses the major push now under way to pass the Waxman-Markey climate legislation through the Senate since it passed the House a couple of weeks ago.  In this quote he lays exactly what is at stake with this issue:

“Cap and trade” is first a massive indirect tax on the American people and hence another source of revenue for Congress. More importantly “cap and trade” is just about the most effective tool for controlling most economic activity short of openly declaring ourselves a communist nation and it’s a radical environmentalist’s dream come true.

He also mentions the EPA cover up story CEI broke just before the bill passed the House.  The EPA stifled the release of an internal report by one of its analysts that conflicted with what we have been told about global warming, for what look to be purely political reasons.  Take a look at the column, and related links, and see what you think.

It’s Getting Cold Out There
Debra Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 July 2009

No wonder skeptics consider the left’s belief in man-made global warming as akin to a fad religion – last week in Italy, G-8 leaders pledged not to allow the Earth’s temperature to rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Climate Bill Ineffective
Kathryn Gaines, Human Events, 13 July 2009

House Democratic leaders must be in a state of shock. The EPA announced that the Waxman-Markey Bill, the cap-and-trade bill, would not “materially effect global carbon concentrations in the atmosphere.” Why then are Americans being asked to take on $9 trillion ($9,000,000,000,000) worth of spending from 2012-2050 for nothing?

The Cap-and-Tax Disaster
Sarah Palin, Washington Post, 14 July 2009

There is no shortage of threats to our economy. America’s unemployment rate recently hit its highest mark in more than 25 years and is expected to continue climbing. Worries are widespread that even when the economy finally rebounds, the recovery won’t bring jobs. Our nation’s debt is unsustainable, and the federal government’s reach into the private sector is unprecedented.

In the News

Congress Gives Your Money to T Boone Pickens
Tim Carney, Washington Examiner, 10 July 2009

Warming Debate Simmers While Obama Poses in Europe
The Oklahoman editorial, 10 July 2009

Global Warming Alarmism Enriches Al Gore, Bankrupts the Rest of Us
Ron Smith, Baltimore Sun, 10 July 2009

Democrats Walk a Fine Line on Tariffs
Zack Hale, National Journal, 9 July 2009

Greenpeace Defaces Abe Lincoln with Alarmist Banner
News Wire Services, 9 July 2009

Smart Grid or Strong Grid?
Robert Michaels, MasterResource.org, 8 July 2009

Climate Czarina Tells GM, “Put nothing in writing”
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner, 8 July 2009

G-8 on Climate Change: Non-change I Can Believe in
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 8 July 2009

Markey’s Moment
John Carlisle, American Spectator, 6 July 2009

Au Revoir to the American Car
Myron Ebell, Washington Times, 5 July 2009

Green Nonsense
Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 5 July 2009

Solar Power Is Looking Dim
Iain Murray, Washington Examiner, 3 July 2009

News You Can Use

The Gore Effect

At ClimateDepot.com, Marc Morano reports on the latest incidence of the “Gore Effect,” the remarkably frequent occurrence of exceedingly cold weather whenever and wherever former Vice-President Al Gore travels to talk about global warming. Next week, Gore will be in Melbourne to launch a new alarmist organization, “Safe Climate Australia”; this week, temperatures in Melbourne hovered around zero degrees Centigrade. For a detailed history of the “Gore Effect,” click here.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Senate Begins Work on Energy Rationing Bill

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing on cap-and-trade legislation on Tuesday, 7th July. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar all testified on behalf of the Obama Administration in favor of cap-and-trade, but the Republicans’ only witness, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, stole the show. His written testimony and that of the other witnesses can be found here. In response to a question from Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the committee’s ranking Republican, Administrator Jackson said that the EPA’s analysis was that actions by the United States alone to reduce emissions will not affect global C02 levels. Secretary Chu disagreed with the EPA’s analysis.

EPW Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) had announced that the committee would start marking up their bill on 22nd July and that she planned to be finished before the August recess, which is scheduled to begin on 7th August. But then Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that all committees needed to be finished with their pieces of comprehensive energy-rationing legislation by 18th September. That quickly slipped to 28th September. So now it looks like the EPW Committee won’t begin marking up its version of Waxman-Markey until September.

Green Jobs Nonsense

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s European Affairs Subcommittee held a hearing Wednesday on the European Union’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation set the record straight in his testimony, which can be found here. Ben told me that Senator Barbara Boxer, who is a member of the full committee but not the subcommittee, came in towards the end of the hearing and remarked that despite all of California’s economic problems, the one bright spot is the state’s alternative energy jobs. “Where would we be without them?”  Good question.  What is the effect of raising the costs of production by raising energy prices? Higher prices, fewer sales, lower production, job losses, less investment in new production, less money in people’s pockets to spend on other things. Unemployment in California, which used to be below the national average, is now well above the national average at over 12%.

The EPA Cover-Up-the Saga Continues

Sam Kazman
On June 23d, the last day for public comment in EPA’s Endangerment Docket, CEI unveiled a series of amazing EPA emails which demonstrated that the agency had squelched an internal report critical of its position on global warming. We sent out our first news release on this the next morning. A day later, Rep. Joe Barton and other Republicans held a press conference on the issue, and Reps. Sensenbrenner and Issa issued statements decrying the cover-up. CEI also released a draft version of the concealed report.  The next day, as the House debated the Waxman-Markey bill, Rep. Barton brought the issue up during floor debate as well. At EPA, meanwhile, senior analyst Dr. Alan Carlin was given permission to post the final version of his report on his own website-EPA still refused to post it on the agency website.

CEI subsequently filed the final report with EPA, demanding that the agency reopen the comment period to allow the public to respond to both the report and to EPA’s atrocious behavior.  We have yet to hear back from the agency.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supported our request, accusing the agency of running a “shell game” on the endangerment issue.

On the Senate side, Senators Inhofe, Barrasso and Thune weighed in with questions for EPA and requests for an IG investigation.  The issue was raised yet again during the Senate EPW July 7 hearing, at which Administrator Jackson lamely claimed that Dr. Carlin’s views had been circulated within the agency.  She did not explain why his report had been buried.

In terms of press coverage, there’ve been a growing number of articles, starting with a DowJones Newswire report and extending to other web and print media as well.  Two excellent pieces are a CBSNews Political Hotsheet article and a Wall St. Journal column by Kim Strassel.