Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
I've almost made it home from a long trip which included a stop in Denver earlier this week, where Gov. Bill Ritter has produced an energy- and economy-sapping plan, produced largely by his cabinet-level climate czar, Heidi Van Genderen. She is the former Wirth Chair in Environmental and Community Development Policy (look who's sitting in it now) at the University of Colorado at Denver, but unlike most gubernatorial advisors, she is not paid for by taxpayers. Instead her position, for what looks like a two-year period (at $80,000 per year unless some bonuses are coming), was paid for by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has promised the governor $400,000 over two years to help push their global warming agenda. The money also funds another position on energy policy.
The Center for Climate Strategies worked a little differently in Colorado than in other states. Instead of being hired directly by the executive branch like every other state has, instead CCS worked through the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Climate Organization to further their greenhouse gas reduction proposals. The vehicle was different, but the results were the same as everywhere else, and the plan looks remarkably similar to the Van Genderen-led action plan issued in Gov. Ritter's name.
I discussed it on the Independence Institute's public affairs program Independent Thinking:
Global Warming Kills Famous Lake-Monster
Will Kyoto Bury Coal?
Reaping the Wind
Climate models are being developed with very little ability to test out of sample. Furthermore, the climate science bandwagon has come about solely because of supposed anthropogenic climate change, which means that their funding is intrinsically tied to climate change happening and being man-made. A more self-interested group I could not find anywhere, even looking at the researchers who were paid by big tobacco companies to tell us cigarettes are safe.
A Kansas Senate committee endorsed an energy bill Monday that would allow two coal power plants in southwest Kansas after stripping out what would have been the state’s first limits on carbon dioxide emissions.
The Utilities Committee’s 6-2 vote sent the measure to the full Senate for debate, probably later this week.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PADxXWJ6Ns 285 234]
The red-hot Congressional love affair with the alternative fuel ethanol is starting to leave many supermarket customers feeling mighty blue these days as they pay inflated prices for grocery staples.
Even worse, it's likely to dramatically increase the cases of chronic hunger, malnutrition and starvation in the poverty-stricken nations of Africa and Southeast Asia in the months ahead.
Too much can never be said of the great climate change policy farce. As many parts of the world suffer through harsh cold spells, record snow and deep-freeze conditions, governments and politicians continue to pursue hilariously contradictory policies to make the world colder still. Or so they claim. What's really going on is another matter. Consider the latest news on oil and coal.
In the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and other countries, there is official endorsement of carbon taxes and carbon trading to raise the price of carbon-based energy so as reduce emissions. How bizarre, then, to read the statement signed by finance ministers from these same nations calling for lower oil prices.
Spain and Italy, the European Union’s worst performers under the Kyoto treaty effort to curb carbon dioxide emissions, will not meet their commitments by 2012 unless taxpayers dish out up to $10 billion to buy carbon credits, mostly in the developing world.
The two Mediterranean countries are responsible for around 75 percent of the E.U.-15’s excess carbon dioxide discharges. By 2012, according to Kyoto, those discharges were supposed to be cut to 8 percent below 1990 levels. Although both countries have imposed strict additional limits on their carbon-intensive industries (in addition to other emergency measures), they will still need to offset the carbon dioxide produced by their expanding economies by buying carbon credits through the so-called flexible mechanisms.
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