The Washington Post also commemorates astronomer James Hansen's testimony of 20 years ago that started the global-warming panic. They fall for the spin, big time. Here's how the drama opens:
There have been hotter days on Capitol Hill, but few where the heat itself became a kind of congressional exhibit. It was 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, and the warmth leaked in through the three big windows in Dirksen 366, overpowered the air conditioner, and left the crowd sweating and in shirt sleeves.
James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist, was testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He was planning to say something radical: Global warming was real, it was a threat, and it was already underway.
Hansen had hoped for a sweltering day to underscore his message.
"We were just lucky," Hansen said last week.
Hmmm. As noted below, Hansen's cohort then-Sen. Tim Wirth has made clear that this was as close to orchestrated as they could make it — even attempting to time the temperature market (perhaps that's what Hansen meant by getting "lucky") — and the aforementioned "overpowered" air conditioner actually had just been turned off and the windows left open before hearing time.
Clearly, someone is lying. Or revising history. And we know Hansen would never, ever revise history. Especially about temperatures. Oh, right, he actually has an extensive history of revising past temperatures, both on his own initiative (revisions in 2000 and 2007 resulted in recent temps ticking upward, both times with corresponding drops in earlier temps exaggerating a warming trend) and not so voluntarily (August 2007, when the false warming trend he'd inserted in U.S. data, beginning as luck would have it in 2000, was uncovered, and corrected…for once, without a NASA press release!).
Hopefully Congress can get to the bottom of it. The key question might just be whether publishing such disinformation is a prosecutable offense. Possibly you know an astronomer who can tell you.
President George W. Bush took a bold halfway step Wednesday to support more oil and natural gas production in the United States. He urged Congress to pass legislation that would open the 85% of federal offshore waters that are closed to exploration. Currently these areas are closed by congressional moratoria and by presidential executive order. The President wants the Congress to act, but he didn’t rescind his father’s 1990 executive order, which was extended by President Clinton to 2012. So forgive me if I’m under whelmed.
When the House in 2006 passed a bill to open up the Outer Continental Shelf, the Bush Administration was a lot less than helpful. That bill would have given States veto power over oil production off their coasts and it would have shared federal royalties equally with the States that allowed production. It was a good bill, but didn’t go anywhere in the Senate. The Democratic-controlled 110th Congress isn’t going to touch it.
That is, unless it’s forced to take it up. Rep. John Peterson (R-Penna.) is trying to offer an amendment to the Department of Interior Appropriations bill that would allow offshore exploration. His amendment was defeated in subcommittee on a straight 6 to 9 party-line vote earlier, but when he tried to offer it again on Wednesday at full committee markup, the bill mark up was cancelled. Apparently, the Democratic leadership is fearful that some Democratic Members are wavering. Peterson has clearly picked up support since last year among Republicans. His amendment was defeated then by a 29 to 37 vote, with six Democrats voting yes and six Republicans voting no.
The main obstacle has been the Florida delegation. Even though the 2006 bill provided a 125-mile buffer zone off Florida’s coasts, it wasn’t enough for most Florida Members or for Senator Mel Martinez (R-Fla.). Now, Florida Republican House Members are changing their minds.
So has Senator John McCain (R-Az). As part of his presidential campaign, this week he came out in favor of more offshore oil and gas production as long as the affected States have veto power. But he still opposes drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife refuge in Alaska.
The environmental pressure groups repeat over and over that “we can’t drill our way out of the problem”. That supposedly is because the U. S. has only three percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, but uses twenty percent of the world’s oil. True, but that’s because we haven’t explored 85% of our Outer Continental Shelf or ANWR or quite a few other federal lands in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska, including the National Petroleum Reserve. Yes, that’s right, oil exploration has been blocked by lawsuits in most of the National PETROLEUM Reserve. It’s too environmentally sensitive and ecologically unique.
CBS and MSNBC last week carried an Associated Press story on groundbreaking new research suggesting that earthquakes are getting worse because of rising temperatures caused by climate change.
It turns out that the “research” in question was performed by Dr. T. J. Chalko, a huckster who has claimed that global warming will cause the world to explode.
CBS, MSNBC, and the Associated Press are three of the largest, most respected sources of journalism in the world. What does the Chalko debacle tell you about the state of science reporting in America? A simple Google search would have revealed Chalko’s wacky fraudulence in ten seconds. Yet none was performed; instead, an easily identifiable hoax was passed as the truth.
So next time you read an alarmist headline, remember the name “T. J. Chalko”.
Sen. John McCain caps his weeklong push for U.S. energy independence with a trip Friday to Canada, but his own environmental plan discourages use of Canadian oil and drastically increases American reliance on oil from the Middle East and other potentially unfriendly places.
A year after the Tennessee Center for Policy Research exposed Gore’s prodigious personal use of electricity at his Nashville mansion (20 times the national average), the center reported this week that Gore’s personal electricity consumption during the past year actually increased by 10 percent.
The late Natalie Grant Wraga once wrote, "Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values."
In this presidential election year, the Democrats really do seem to think they can fool most of the people all of the time. Gasoline prices have reached well over $4 in much of the country, but instead of fulfilling the duties given to them by the voters in 2006 and allowing access to more domestic sources of oil and gas, Democrats have thrown a new headline-grabbing smear at Big Oil.
With gas prices rising and billions of additional dollars flowing to the Middle East to buy oil, energy policy is turning into a battleground in the race for President. On June 17, the presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain, laid down the gauntlet with a speech in Houston, talking about his vision "to free America once and for all from our strategic dependence on foreign oil."
In New York last week, Senator Thomas Morahan (R-Rockland) introduced S. 8390, the “Greenhouse Gas Pollution Control Act,” which calls for an 80 percent reduction in the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. An identical version of the bill already was passed by the State Assembly. Like similar climate laws passed in California and Washington, the “Greenhouse Gas Pollution Control Act” omits real policy, and instead delegates the task of planning future emissions reductions to state regulators.
New Hampshire Governor John Lynch (D) signed a bill that makes the Granite State the newest party to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state cap-and-trade climate change program in the Northeast. Experts say that RGGI is guaranteed to raise utility bills. However, they are not sure if it will decrease emissions, because it only applies to a portion of electricity generating units in the region. As a result, demand is likely to increase for electricity from unregulated, cheaper, more carbon-intensive wholesale sellers of power, a phenomenon known as “emissions leakage.”
The environmental movement, only recently poised for major advances on global warming and other issues, has suddenly found itself on the defensive as high gasoline prices shift the political climate nationwide and trigger defections by longtime supporters.
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