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Bully Boys Waxman and Markey Promote ‘Endangerment’ of Economy, Democracy

by Marlo Lewis, Jr.

This week (March 3, 2010) was the deadline Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) set for Mark Crisson, President and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), to explain why APPA is urging Senators to support Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Congressional Review Act resolution to veto the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The Senate may vote on the Murkowski resolution as soon as next week.

waxman-and-markey

Now, aside from the merits of the issue, which I’ll get into in a moment, Waxman and Markey’s behavior is out of line. Waxman and Markey (W/M) are Members of the House of Representatives. What business is it of theirs if the APPA lobbies Senators about a bill pending in the Senate? Senators can conduct their own inquiries without any assistance from W/M. And why didn’t W/M copy Sen. Murkowski or at least Senate Energy Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) on their Feb. 25 letter to Mr. Crisson? Failure to “cc” any of the principals in the Senate flouts one of the most basic rules of legislative courtesy.

Besides being busybodies, Waxman and Markey are bullies.

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Tags: american public power association, appa, Barbara Boxer, cap-and-tax, cap-and-trade
Posted Mar 5th 2010 at 9:51 am in Congress, Environment, News, Politics | 84922144 Comments2010-03-05+17%3A51%3A02Marlo+Lewis%2C+Jr.

Newly-Elected Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli: Activist!

by Christian Josi

During his campaign for Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli committed himself to acting with an aggressive conservative agenda. He promised voters that he would the office to aggressively fight governmental overregulation and interference wherever he could find it.

Ken_Cuccinelli_04-1024x680-1

In other words, he pledged to use the office of Attorney General for good, rather than evil. After just over one month in office, he’s off to one hell of a start.

Last week, AG Cuccinelli boldly petitioned the EPA to convene a proceeding to reexamine their “Endangerment Finding” which claims that human activity has increased atmospheric greenhouse gases to a point that people’s lives are at risk. As such, they claim, the federal government must impose new caps on emissions and other climate protection policies in the energy sector.

Cuccinelli believes, rightly, that regulations based on the findings of the EPA in this sketchy case would be both legally questionable and detrimental to Virginia’s economy. (Much of the research that the EPA has based these findings upon has come from the questionable climate-gate materials). Accordingly, the AG also has petitioned a federal appeals court to review the EPA’s findings.

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Tags: Attorney General, carbon emissions, climate change, climate gate, EPA regulations
Posted Feb 27th 2010 at 12:03 pm in Environment, News, Politics, State Politics | 81338128 Comments2010-02-27+20%3A03%3A16Christian+Josi

Bin Laden Weighs in to Prop Up Flagging “Climate” Issue

by Christopher C. Horner

So the Washington Post reports that bin Laden is still furious about the U.S. causing global warming.

osama-bin-laden

Al Jazeera, which originally broke the communiqué story, did so with a headline drawn from the Tiger Beat school of style: “Obama deplores climate change”. AJ writes, “In an audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera, bin Laden criticised George Bush, the former US president, for rejecting the Kyoto pact and condemned global corporations.”

Oh, dear. We’re still on that kick again, one I think even the Post has dropped.

In 2002 Obama similarly parroted the Western media rant fashionable at the time that we “refuse[d] to sign the Kyoto agreement “, four years after Clinton signed it. Even the New York Times issued a correction, in November 2006.

Indeed the Post notes that “Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic.” OK. So he’s losing it. At least he didn’t invoke Haiti.

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Tags: climate change, global warming, greenhouse gases, Osama bin Laden
Posted Jan 29th 2010 at 10:37 am in Uncategorized | 66954103 Comments2010-01-29+18%3A37%3A29Christopher+C.+Horner

Greens Flip: Senate Cap-and-Trade Bill ‘Not a Serious Proposal’

by Christopher C. Horner

This story in E&EM News PM (subscription required), “Murkowski floats plan to force Senate vote on cap and trade next week”, is spectacular.

boxer_kerry

Here are the money lines, all noting Sen. Murkowski’s clever plan to simply call the Left on their rhetoric and posing about the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill S. 1733, a bill that was marked up in the Environment and Public Works Committee in a somber yet urgent November affair, reporting it to the Senate floor and, oh yes, the Copenhagen conference:

“‘Boxer-Kerry is a non-starter, and the amendment — if that’s what it said — it would expose that,’ said Murkowski spokesman Robert Dillon. ‘We obviously don’t want to pass the bill; we’re confident that it would fail.’ Holding a vote on the Kerry-Boxer bill would ’show the sense of the Senate, where it is,’ Dillon said….

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Tags: cap-and-trade, carbon caps, carbon emissions, Center for American Progress, climate change
Posted Jan 15th 2010 at 2:59 pm in Congress, Environment, News, Politics | 5909071 Comments2010-01-15+22%3A59%3A40Christopher+C.+Horner

Hide the Job Decline: $500k in Stimulus Funds to ClimateGate Professor

by Mike Flynn

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (the Stimulus Bill) has been such an epic failure, that even the mainstream media has started to notice. The White House has tacitly acknowledged this and recently announced that it would no longer ‘count’ jobs ‘created or saved’ by the Stimulus. The basic problem is that the bulk of the spending went to programs or projects that have nothing to do with economic growth.

091212_michael_mann

The latest example of this is a $500,000 grant to Michael Mann, Professor at Penn State University and unintended c0-star of the ClimateGate e-mail scandal. The leaked e-mails revealed collaboration among scientists to stifle dissenting views on the extent of man-made global warming.

Mann is also the creator of the “Hockey Stick” graph, which purported to show a sharp increase in recent temperatures. That work has been thoroughly discredited by researcher Stephen McIntyre. Yet, in June 2009, the National Science Foundation awarded Mann a three-year $500,000 to further study the climate’s response to human activity. According to the grant award:

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Tags: cap-and-trade, climate gate, greenhouse gas effect, greenhouse gases, hide the decline
Posted Jan 14th 2010 at 3:17 pm in Environment, News, federal spending | 60034111 Comments2010-01-14+23%3A17%3A44Mike+Flynn

ClimateGate Just Got Much, Much Bigger

by Christopher C. Horner

Over at ICECAP.us Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo has posted an item on a “Russian Bombshell” highly relevant to the ClimateGate scandal. The Russian media first posted the story and now some Brits are loving it.

gore_fraud

The long and the short of it is best summarized by the Telegraph’s James Dellingpole: “What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.”

That is, we have yet further evidence that the data is being cooked to make the long-running claim of an increase in global temperatures, and now to diminish the apparent cooling of said temps. As the gang at EU referendum tout, “it is in Soviet Union that the CRU, NOAA, NASA show the greatest warming.”

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Tags: cap-and-trade, carbon caps, carbon emissions, climate change, climate data
Posted Dec 16th 2009 at 1:29 pm in Environment | 47538122 Comments2009-12-16+21%3A29%3A50Christopher+C.+Horner

ClimateGate: Facts Are Important Things

by Carly Fiorina

This week, diplomats from around the world are gathering in Copenhagen for the global climate change summit—an event that has been marked by controversy in the wake of the “climate-gate” scandal that has recently and rightly gained significant international media attention.

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This scandal has provoked many questions that I believe deserve answers. Among other things, it would seem that information relating to climate change research may have been held back from the public— and key decision-makers, too. This could of course impact the appropriateness and effectiveness of policy that the US, and indeed world leaders, might pursue. Before moving forward, given the potentially significant economic consequences associated with some of the steps under consideration, I personally think it is important to get a handle on all the facts, whether they be good, bad or ugly.

Unfortunately, Barbara Boxer and her colleagues in Congress who seek to pass major cap and trade legislation that analysis shows is a job killer take a different view—and have different questions they want answered.

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Tags: Barbara Boxer, cap-and-trade, carbon emissions, climate change, climate email
Posted Dec 9th 2009 at 9:32 pm in Environment, News, Politics | 43990107 Comments2009-12-10+04%3A32%3A06Carly+Fiorina

ClimateGate: Scientists Behaving Badly

by Publius

Over at the Weekly Standard, the always impressive Steven Hayward has a good summation of where we are in Climate Gate:

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Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.’s upcoming Copenhagen conference–which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol–collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama’s magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a “communications” problem, but after Al Gore’s Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails–more than 1,000 of them–reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”

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Tags: cap-and-trade, carbon caps, carbon emissions, climate change, climate emails
Posted Dec 6th 2009 at 3:21 pm in Environment, Media Criticism, News, Politics | 41870106 Comments2009-12-06+22%3A21%3A29Publius

Al Gore and the Great Debate: Will He or Won’t He?

by Christopher C. Horner

The notion of remaining silent is not one readily associated with Al Gore. But, by his steadfast, years-long refusal to do anything other than pontificate about his views, such as defend them in an exchange with anyone who might know what they’re talking about, he does seem to be adopting some form of the adage “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt”.

the-goracle

So, today the Competitive Enterprise Institute has launched its Gore Debate Challenge. As CEI’s press release notes:

“For years, Al Gore has steadfastly refused to debate the global warming issue. Most recently, he ignored a put-up-or-shut-up challenge on the Glenn Beck Show from climate policy expert Lord Christopher Monckton, a former British government adviser. Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute hopes to change all that with the release of a new video campaign. In it, CEI offers Mr. Gore a $500 check, together with the proceeds of a world-wide email pledge-a-dollar drive, all aimed at persuading Mr. Gore to accept Lord Monckton’s challenge.

“To our knowledge, Mr. Gore hasn’t been in a debate since he ran for president,” said Sam Kazman, CEI General Counsel. “But given that he and his allies are seeking the biggest tax increase in history in the form of new energy taxes and rationing, he ought to at least have to courage to engage in a face-to-face defense of his position,” Kazman stated.

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Tags: Al Gore, al gore debate challenge, carbon emissions, climate change, Copenhagen conference
Posted Nov 16th 2009 at 2:23 pm in Environment, News, Politics, Uncategorized | 3167073 Comments2009-11-16+21%3A23%3A31Christopher+C.+Horner

2010: The Kyoto Election

by Christopher C. Horner

Mexico Al Gore

The New York Times reports this weekend that:

“SINGAPORE — President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.”

Read down the article and note the several claims by participants offering the greatest exhibits imaginable at the running absurdity — now in its 18th year! — that is this movable feast of conferences in Rio, Barcelona, Bangkok, Bali, Buenos Aires, Bonn, and next month Copenhagen: We had to declare it a failure in advance in order to ensure its success. Mmm. Yes.

But here’s the far larger point, and Team Tea Party and simpatico coalescences should take note and begin organizing accordingly:

This also makes the Kyoto II, the proposed twenty five-year extension of a five-year plan that was the Kyoto treaty, an inescapable issue for the 2010 U.S. mid-term elections.

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Tags: 2010 midterm elections, Al Gore, carbon emissions, climate change, Copenhagen Summit
Posted Nov 15th 2009 at 2:07 pm in Environment, Obama, Politics | 3130652 Comments2010%3A+The+Kyoto+Election2009-11-15+21%3A07%3A13Christopher+C.+Horner

Obama as Climate Strongman: Taking the Chavez Adoration a Step Too Far

by Christopher C. Horner

So it seems that both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill House bill and Senate EPW Committee-passed version of Kerry-Boxer both have buried in them what the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott describes, in revealing the measure, a “nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.” Requires might seem strong, in that you would assume a moderate president or simply one not engaged in an effort to “fundamentally transform America” would feel no obligation to seize a loophole installed for such an activist leader.

Hugo_Chavez

But you would be wrong, on both counts. The provision is quite clearly installed for green pressure groups to sue to force the chief executives’ hands to seize all manner of power otherwise unavailable to him under our system but desired by the greens and whatever they can convince the federal court’s 9th Circuit is in our interests. That is, the bill actually does mandate that a “climate emergency” be declared by the federal government when global greenhouse gas concentrations – which are not something which the bill or the United States can control and over which we have a decreasing influence each day – reach 450 parts per million. Which the bill’s authors knew would already be the case by the time the bill was adopted.

At that point President Obama, using powers he worked to craft and signed into law, would “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions…to address shortfalls” in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions. Again, it isn’t in the U.S.’s power to bring global concentrations to any particular level, and even if we disappeared off the face of the earth no global warming computer model relied upon by the alarmist industry even says that it would detectably impact the climate.

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Tags: Barack Obama, carbon emissions, climate change, coal plants, global warming
Posted Nov 10th 2009 at 1:31 pm in Congress, Environment, News, Obama, Politics | 2823817 Comments2009-11-10+20%3A31%3A35Christopher+C.+Horner

Kyoto II, the Obama Administration and the Constitution

by Christopher C. Horner

I have one item of suggested reading before passing judgment on the occasionally strident internet-sensation that is the commentary by Lord Monckton on the draft negotiating text for an anticipated U.S. signature in December — certain to be delayed, to July — on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol (discussed with Monckton on BreitbartTV here). That instrument is of course the “global treaty” assigning economically damaging responsibilities to 35 industrialized countries (the titans Iceland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Slovakia…) but not 155 others (such as tiny China, India, Mexico, South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia…) .

343_cartoon_obama_at_un_small_over

The reason I suggest this is because one of the more hot-button items Monckton raises, the Kyotophile desire to get around at least half of the allegedly out-dated concept of Article II “advice and consent”, has, despite certain parties insisting that Monckton’s commentary offers nothing of interest…move along now…for more than a year been telegraphed by Obamaphile activists. It was even alluded to in a paper by someone who now carries the title of our nation’s “Climate Envoy” (really). And now the Obama administration is reported to have briefed European diplomats to be ready to accommodate certain delays and procedures that this would require.

First, allow me to note one particular, relevant specific on which I differ with Lord Monckton’s assessment. That is the notion that the administration would just adopt Kyoto through domestic legislation. He may just be short-handing it here, which if so, I understand, but it is important to get the specifics on the record. It is of course the point of the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bills to adopt Kyoto’s principal obligation of carbon dioxide emission reduction, though these bills’ only international components are direct and indirect wealth transfers of a few billion dollars a year to other countries. There are no substantive sovereignty implications, outside of certain energy security concerns.

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Tags: Al Gore, cap-and-trade, carbon emissions, climate change, Copenhagen
Posted Oct 26th 2009 at 7:30 am in Environment, Justice/Legal, Politics | 2085019 Comments2009-10-26+14%3A30%3A27Christopher+C.+Horner

‘Cool Cars’ Guaranteed To Make You Hot Under The Collar

by Bob Barr

I admit it. I like electronic gizmos. When I’m not driving (and even sometimes when I am), my BlackBerry is never more than an index finger away. In the car, I can’t go a mile without scanning for an Old Gold hit that takes me back to the “Good Old Days” on my Sirius-XM satellite radio system. I use my GPS system a lot (though less often than my wife would like me to, but I’m a man and I hate to admit I don’t know where I’m going). I pay for all these gadgets, and woe be unto the person who tries to take them from me.

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The California Air Resources Board (“CARB” to those folks who love acronyms) is considering regulations that would cause serious disruptions to electronic devices being transmitted from a vehicle, and for devices in the vehicle trying to receive electronic signals. The regulations that would do this are included in a program cleverly called “Cool Cars,” which would require all cars sold in the Golden State starting in 2012 to have their windows coated with a metal-oxide based glazing. It is this process that would wreck havoc with electronic devices in those vehicles.

All this is the result of California’s fixation with so-called “global warming” and the state’s obsession with attempting to reduce carbon emissions. Obviously, these folks at CARB haven’t seen the scientific evidence that carbon dioxide makes up at most 4% of the entire “greenhouse gas” layer in our atmosphere; and of that 4%, all of mankind’s activities (yes, including operating internal combustion engines) accounts for only about three or four percent. This means that mankind is guilty of producing only between .12 and .16 percent of greenhouse gasses. Not the dire emergency the greenies would have us believe it to be; but then again, why let scientific facts serve as a speed bump on the way to the complete Nanny State.

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Tags: California Air Resources Board, carbon emissions, climate change, cool cars, global warming
Posted Oct 26th 2009 at 6:03 am in Environment, Featured Story, Politics, State Politics | 2090251 Comments2009-10-26+13%3A03%3A39Bob+Barr

Global Warming Silence: Wellesley Walkout

by Christopher C. Horner

There was a good turnout at Wellesley College last night for my talk “A Quick Tour of the Ultimate in Political Correctness: The ‘Global Warming’ Issue, Agenda and Industry”, hosted by the College Republican Club… once presided over here by Hillary Rodham on her way to a thesis about Saul Alinksy, whose ghost as we see still lingers.

The students were gracious particularly given the trying circumstances in recent days, including a faculty member (department-head level) expressing in a fairly open forum, with occasional lapses of civility, her sentiments about the club members and their decision to screen “Not Evil Just Wrong” Sunday, followed by hosting me on Wednesday. Oddly – read on – her peculiar take on campus tolerance and diversity included an often salty angst over the students supposedly showing no interest in actually having debate or discussion.

That she had been originally approached to speak on a panel adds to the mystery. She said, in short, no professor would want to participate with someone “like that” (er, me). The school administrators have now agreed to address the issue of this instance and similar, fairly regular treatment of a political minority. But, having failed to interest any faculty in sharing a panel let alone debating the merits, the students finally asked a different faculty member to at least speak after the film. He declined and offered instead an informative lunch with his faculty colleagues. The ones who don’t want open discussion or debate (the real kind) except when they do (the purely aspirational type).

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Tags: Al Gore, Barack Obama, climate change, Dr. Richard Lindzen, global warming
Posted Oct 22nd 2009 at 6:12 pm in Environment | 1955440 Comments2009-10-23+01%3A12%3A36Christopher+C.+Horner

EPA’s Next Priority: Meat Control?

by Tim Slagle

The really nice thing about having left-wing comedy hosts is that Democrat officials have absolutely no problem appearing on their talk shows. It’s really nice to have these people interviewed in a comfortable non-confrontational setting, because the darndest things will come out.

Bill Maher in a rare hard-nosed moment, presses EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to answer a tough question about whether the EPA intends to regulate meat. After she dodges the question, Bill asks it again.

Now I could be wrong, because she was stuttering badly, but didn’t the United States EPA Administrator say that she is looking into Meat Control? She certainly advocated a restriction on food grown outside of the US.

But MEAT CONTROL? I’ve met a lot of vegetarians in my travels. I don’t really care about those who practice it themselves, although I often question their logic. I look at vegetarianism as a sort of religion, and have no problem with it being practiced in the privacy of one’s own cat-filled home. But in America we have a separation of church and state, and if you intend to force me to conform to your religious dietary restrictions, I’m going to make a little noise.

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Tags: beef tallow, Bill Maher, carbon dioxide, climate change, EPA
Posted Oct 5th 2009 at 11:25 am in Culture, Environment, Political Humor, Politics | 12698101 Comments2009-10-05+18%3A25%3A04Tim+Slagle