November 2007

Here’s another of those inconvenient truths. The Washington Post today reported that Democrats’ proposals to “fix” global warming “will require a wholesale transformation of the nation’s economy and society.”

OK, well, maybe it’ll be a good “wholesale transformation,” hm? Think again.

The Post story says Democrats’ climate fixes would “cost billions of dollars,” and that people will get the bill when so-called cap-and-trade proposals are implemented.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who co-authors a cap-and-trade bill, admitted last week his legislation would cost “hundreds of billions of dollars.” Others, say Sen. James Inhofe, predict trillions of dollars.

The Post article cites an MIT expert who predicted costs will increase 30 percent for natural gas in homes and more for electricity. Reality is starting to bite to such an extent that even Democrat Presidential candidate John Edwards calls Lieberman’s bill what it is, “a massive corporate windfall” for big corporations preparing to game the artificial, government-invented market for profiteering. Guess at whose expense.

Oh yeah, another inconvenient truth. All of this cost and pain will gain us what? “No climate benefit” whatsoever, Inhofe says. Well, even if it’s ineffective, at least it’s expensive.

Steven Mufson reports in today’s Washington Post that Kansans for Affordable Energy, a non-profit funded by coal interests, has taken out full page advertisements in local papers warning that a recent decision by the Governor’s administration to block the construction of two coal fired power plants will make Kansas energy dependent on the likes of Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez.

To which Bruce Niles, of the Sierra Club responded, “This is McCarthyism.”

If baseless alarmism equates with McCarthyism, then what does that say about Al Gore? My colleague Marlo Lewis has documented the Goracle’s tall tales, and a British judge last month ruled that copies of his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, could be distributed in schools only if they were accompanied by a disclaimer listing the film’s factual errors.

NBC is heavily pushing "Green Week" — in celebration of which (and to do my part), I am turning off NBC to the extent it was ever on — offering a steady greengreengreen drone to help mainstream the moonbattery, conveniently in the week before Democratic candidates will have "an environmentally themed debate" (read: global warming).  And, oh, just imagine the fireworks!

Without such "cover" this kind of thing might appear a little frivolous at a time when it is fair to say that a lot of people have decided that there are real, serious threats to foucs on.  I mean, sure, they could have a "terrorism themed debate", but priorities, priorities.  Bill Clinton has put us on notice that the global warming threat is certainly greater than terrorism.

So, there will be two hours of talk about what they'd do about this or that. Strangely, our legislators don't want to have hearings on such "I would do's" that have progressed as far as taking bill form.  As Inhofe's staff director notes ion today's Greenwire, they instead want 9 months of hearings on the parade of horribles, and then to zip legislation through without time to analyze it or serious discussion.

Also, hearings include all sorts of people getting access to microphones.

Recently the press was more ablaze than California with NASA proclamations that the surface area of Greenland had melted in 2007 at a record-high rate. This is true, if the record only extends back only 20 years or so—which is the case of the NASA dataset. If you could peer back a bit further into the past, say back into the 1950s, it is quite likely that the melt area in Greenland then was about the same as it is now, effectively rendering the 2007 melt area hardly newsworthy. Just another NASA climate-change exaggeration.

Continue here! 

The Draft Gore for ‘08 campaign is picking up steam. According to the Draft Gore Newsletter (sign up here!), signatures are piling up (more than 200,000!) in the wake of the Campaign’s full page advertisement in the New York Times last week. Soon, Draft Gore ’08 will debut a 30 second TV spot (view it here!).

Even though I think Al Gore is a demagogue with dangerous ideas, the Draft Gore ’08 team excites me to no end. The Goracle is already batting 0 percent in presidential contests, and an electoral defeat would be just the antidote to the nasty case of sermon-itus he contracted in Scandinavia.