2008

Democrats are lining up to explain their vote against Lieberman-Warner, knowing full-well they will get away with blaming Republicans for its defeat. As I posted earlier, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) opposes the bill because it is disproportionately harmful to her state, whose energy mix is far less reliant on hydrocarbons; Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) opposes it as he comes from a coal-heavy state that would like to hold on to what remains of its manufacturing base. Unstated but inescapable is that this bill is the biggest outsourcing or offshoring bill in our history.

As my colleague Marlo Lewis pointed out to me the beauty of this:

"This bill will disproportionately harm states that aren’t as reliant on hydrocarbon or “fossil fuel” energy, and disproportionately harms those that are."

The rest of you will be just fine.

“Congratulations! You have been chosen to participate in a new pilot program with Dominion Virginia Power,” the letter read.  Evidently my utility company, which has been talking for months about needing more power sources, is hard up. 4,550 customers have been chosen to: 1) receive an incentive to allow the company to cycle their central air conditioning on and off in the summer; 2) get a power-cost monitor; 3) get energy audits or energy-efficiency kits; or 4) my option—get programmable thermostats and meters.

What do I get with such an “opportunity”? I get lower rates during off-hours. (They don’t tell me what they are.) But I get higher rates during peak hours (1 to 8pm), and give the utility the authority to modify the temperature setting of my thermostat. Some deal. No thanks, Big Brother.

Do I also get the option to have them build another coal-fired power plant?

Czech President and economist Vaclav Klaus is the keynote speaker at CEI’s annual dinner on Wednesday. Klaus riles the Left with is detailed analogy of modern environmentalists, and particularly global warming alarmists, to past utopians including those with whom he and his countrymen had a less than pleasant experience.

CEI is publishing his book in English, Blue Planet in Green Chains. Here Klaus makes the case starkly, as do Lubos Motl among others with more personal experience than we over here, and physicist Freeman Dyson in his current NY Review of Books piece.

Just last night I picked up Haynes and Klehr’s “In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage” for some bedtime reading. The experienced anti-alarmist will gasp at the parallels there, as well, between the behavior and dialectics of academic elites in the history field and those in the science/climate science arena. The party line was maintained through personal attacks on any who challenged it, the evidence against their dogma disputed at every turn including through mutually exclusive arguments.

Ultimately, the revisionists scrambled into justification mode. Most striking was Haynes and Klehr’s Chapter 5, “From Denial to Justification”, setting forth the fellow travelers’ arguments in the face of undeniable evidence of espionage and Soviet-run stoogery that, look, whatever, the point is that it was all in the name of creating a more just world.

For now, as the alarmist case continues to unravel pick up Klaus’s book, subscribe to Benny Peiser’s CCNet and decide for yourself.

Part two of Chancellor Merkel's ambitious package of measures aimed at reducing German greenhouse gas emissions may be in trouble. Originally set for passage on Tuesday, many of the law proposals are under attack.

Environment ministers from the world's top industrial powers called Monday for more effort to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but little headway was seen in setting more immediate goals.