It turns out that “Global warming not always to blame for extreme winters.”
It’s a good thing we spend so much more on climate-related research than, say, AIDS, or the world would go without such wisdom.
Julie Walsh
Gordon Brown warned yesterday that energy companies could still face a windfall tax unless they offered a much bigger rebate for the poor and pensioners facing big rises in fuel bills.
The prime minister was being questioned in the Commons by David Marshall, Labour MP for Glasgow East, a week before the budget as pressure grows from MPs for action against energy firms. The companies have hit back by warning that a windfall tax could affect their commitment to investment in renewable energy.
NEW YORK — "It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals," the playwright Henrik Ibsen once remarked. "Let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians."
After years of being labeled everything from devotees of a neo-Flat Earth Society to the equivalent of Holocaust deniers by an opposition that refuses to seriously engage them — i.e. declaring unsettled science settled, refusing to publicly debate spurious claims made in one's Academy Award winning documentaries, repeatedly using scorn as a crutch to steady lack of reason — the global warming skeptics gathered at the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change held at the Times Square Marriott certainly appeared fully on board with Ibsen's proposition.
With the ink barely dry on plans by the European Commission for fighting climate change, members of the EU have already started a game of tug-of-war to pull the legal proposals in their favor.
"It's most important that the national targets … take into account solidarity and [economic] convergence," said Arturas Paulauskas, Environment Minister for Lithuania, one of the EU's newest and least developed members.
The EU's climate-change plans "are not the place to deal with cohesion and solidarity — that is what cohesion funds and the [EU] budget are for," retorted Hilary Benn, environment minister for Britain — one of the EU's richest and most developed economies.
EU industry commissioner Guenter Verheugen is pushing for EU leaders at their summit next week to agree that energy intensive industries should have a special status when it comes to the bloc's pollution-reducing emissions trading scheme (ETS).
German daily Handelsblatt reports that Mr Verheugen next week, during the 13-14 March summit, will argue that industries due to be heaviest hit by the emissions scheme – a system that was tightened up at the beginning of the year – should be exempted.
New York, March 4—Let's start with some possible news from Heartland Institute's International Climate Change Conference. In the context of man-made global warming, climate sensitivity asks how much temperatures increase if one adds a specified amount of a greenhouse gas. In general, most climatologists accept the proposition, all things being equal, that if one doubles carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the average temperature will go up by +1 degree centigrade. But all things are not equal.
A record 23 countries will participate in the Group of Eight summit meeting to be held in July in Toyakocho, Hokkaido, government sources said Wednesday.
The upcoming meeting will become the largest so far after it was decided to invite 15 nonmember countries to participate in "expanded dialogue" that will focus on climate change and African development, according to the sources.
During meetings involving the G-8 member countries, Japan–the host of the summit–will propose a plan to establish the "Toyako Process" (Lake Toya Process) in which 20 countries, including major greenhouse gas emitters, will discuss a post-Kyoto Protocol framework, the sources said.
| Western citizens want to use the limited land to produce ethanol rather than food for the poor. |
| Food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, the Philippines and Vietnam. Price controls and food rationing in Pakistan and China. Are we back to the Malthusian trap as prices of agricultural and food commodities from wheat and corn to dairy products and meat have risen in the last few years to historically unprecedented levels? |
All right, let’s talk about the money.
After I asked readers to focus on the substance of the skeptics’ arguments at this week’s conference on global warming, readers insisted that I should have focused on the financing of the sponsor, the Heartland Institute. Others objected to my (and my colleague Andy Revkin) even writing about a conferenced sponsored by this group. I’m used to this sort of criticism, but I still find it baffling. Do the critics really think there’s more money and glory to be won by doubting global warming than by going along with the majority?
I believe that even if the case for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming was completely disproved, some groups will never give it up. The reason is this: advocates of big government need lots of money for their government programs. Policies such as universal health care are hardly cheap, and “pay-go” is very restrictive.
Taxing big oil companies for them is a start—the tax title is under consideration again. But to fund monumental, New Deal-like programs, trillions of dollars are needed.
In comes cap and trade. Auctioning carbon emission allowances would provide a colossal new revenue stream.
They will most likely start this frog in cold water, so the first projections of consumer costs will be low. But, as with the origins of the federal income tax, this can later be ramped up to blood-sucking proportions.
The coming together of several sectors in favor of cap and trade policies has created the perfect storm. Though industry has often been a force against big government, some in the energy industry currently support cap and trade, expecting handouts and windfall profits. It makes for strange bedfellows—environmental pressure groups aligned with Big Oil. And major banks, large investment firms, and farmers want a piece of the action, too.
Stopping cap and trade is possible. But as with the demise of the immigration/amnesty bill, it will require the American people to speak out against a cap and trade tax.
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