Source:  National Journal

Source: Global Warming Org

Fracking

by Marlo Lewis

Note: A nearly identical version of this column appeared last week in Forbes Online. I am reposting it here with many additional hyperlinks so that readers may more easily access the evidence supporting my conclusions.

The November 2012 elections ensure that President Obama’s war on coal will continue for at least two more years. The administration’s preferred M.O. has been for the EPA to ‘enact’ anti-coal policies that Congress would reject if such measures were introduced as legislation and put to a vote. Had Gov. Romney won the presidential race and the GOP gained control of the Senate, affordable energy advocates could now go on offense and pursue a legislative strategy to roll back various EPA global warming regulations, air pollution regulations, and restrictions on mountaintop mining. But Romney lost and Democrats gained two Senate seats. (more…)

Source:  Senator Inhofe

Washington, D.C. – Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, responded to Senator Harry Reid’s statement today that due to the current heat, droughts, and other hot weather events, skeptics are “not just on the other side of the debate, they’re on the other side of reality.” Senator Reid (D-NV) follows Senator Bernard Sanders (I-VT) and Senator John Kerry (D-MA) who took to the Senate floor last week to argue that current weather events are linked to manmade global warming.

“Today I have the pleasure of welcoming my good friend, Senator Reid, back to the global warming debate,” Senator Inhofe said. “Senator Reid said again today what they’ve been saying for years – that ‘the time to act is now’ – yet Senator Reid hasn’t brought a cap-and-trade bill to the floor since 2008, and he’s the one who said that cap-and-trade had been deleted from his dictionary. (more…)

Source:  AOL Energy

A major European bank closed its US carbon trading business this week in a sign that 2012 is a “make-or-break” year for cap-and-trade programs designed to fight climate change.

London-based Barclays determined the US carbon market, currently comprised of a handful of states, is too small to justify the expense of a dedicated trading desk in New York, according to sources familiar with the decision. Barclays was a major player in US greenhouse-gas trading programs on the East and West coasts and remains active in Europe’s carbon market, the largest in the world. Seth Martin, a Barclays spokesman, declined to comment. (more…)

Source: Watts Up

In a press conference moments ago in Trenton, Gov. Christie announced his support for repealing the state’s cap-and-trade law and withdrawing from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a 10-state regional compact in the Northeast that implements a cap-and-trade energy tax scheme from Maine to Maryland.

“It’s a failure,” Christie said today. “RGGI has not changed behavior and it does not reduce emissions.” (more…)

Source:  SPPI

by Dennis Ambler

Emissions trading schemes export jobs to developing countries.

The UK Guardian reports further loss of steel production in Teesside, North-East England and in Lincolnshire.

“Government talk of economic recovery was undermined on Friday when the country’s largest steel maker announced plans to cut 1,500 jobs in Lincolnshire and Teesside. Tata Steel, which bought the Corus business in 2007, blamed a continued slump in demand from the construction sector but also new climate change legislation for its decision.

Ben Caldecott, head of UK and EU policy at specialist investment house Climate Change Capital, said that although the carbon floor price would benefit investors in low-carbon generation, it did not give certainty because the level could be changed in future budgets. To give investors real certainty, he said, the level of tax should be guaranteed by long-term contracts.”

It is quite possible that Tata Steel may be able to claim more carbon credits under the European Emissions Trading Scheme and may also qualify for payments in India under the UN Clean Development Mechanism.

A description of a previous labor cut back by Tata Steel can be found here.

In the recent UK budget, plans for a jobs-killing carbon tax were announced:

UK Budget 2011: Carbon tax brings higher electricity bills – and nuclear windfalls

“Nuclear and renewable energy companies will scoop huge windfall profits after the government announced plans to raise £3.2bn by 2016 from a new carbon tax funded by higher electricity bills.

The chancellor announced a guaranteed minimum or “floor” price for carbon under Europe’s emissions trading scheme of £16 a tonne in 2013, rising to £30 by 2020. If the market price of carbon slumps, the Treasury’s tax will increase to make up the difference. The UK is the first country in the world to introduce such a mechanism to guarantee a price for carbon.”

The Minister for Energy and Climate Change in the UK is Mr Chris Huhne. He is a member of the UN High Level Climate Finance Panel, with, amongst others, George Soros, Lord Nicholas Stern, Ciao Koch-Weser of Deutsche Bank and French Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, currently favourite to become the new head of the International Monetary Fund. They were tasked with finding policies to raise $100 billion per year to be used to help developing countries “cope with the impacts of human-induced Global Warming”, aka Climate Change. (more…)

Source:  Bloomberg

At least $65 billion might be raised by taxing foreign-exchange transactions and auctioning pollution permits, a United Nations panel said today in a report recommending ways to finance aid for fighting global warming.

The panel, which includes billionaire investor George Soros and Larry Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, said selling carbon-emissions permits would generate $38 billion and a financial transactions tax an additional $27 billion, according to the report released today.

The findings are intended to guide envoys at UN climate talks that start this month in Mexico as they seek ways to pay for $100 billion in climate aid that was pledged by 2020 to poor nations at last year’s summit in Copenhagen. The report found that the goal is “challenging but feasible” to achieve.

“Without agreement on finance, we will not be able to reach agreement on other issues for climate change,” Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s prime minister and co-chairman of the advisory group, said at a press conference in New York. “Now we need the political will to take the decisions.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed the panel, called the High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing, in February. It’s led by Stoltenberg and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The 21-member group also includes Soros, Summers and Deutsche Bank AG Vice Chairman Caio Koch- Weser.

The report didn’t specify what financial transactions would be covered by the tax beyond saying the focus would be on international currency sales. (more…)

Source: SPPI

by Dennis Ambler

Vast sums of money, influence and power are involved in carbon mitigation schemes, and yet there is never any mention in the media of these massive and lucrative conflicts of interest. They appear quite content swallowing the diversionary tactics pushed by the likes of DeSmog Blog and Greenpeace ExxonSecrets with their claims of “oil- company funded deniers”.  It is doubtful that mainstream journalists ever bother to look behind the scenes at these people, yet it is all available on official websites.

It is no wonder that Christiana Figueres wanted the Kyoto Mechanism to continue, when she addressed the UNFCCC Tianjin Conference on the 4th of October, because without it her friends in the carbon business would find their virtual world starting to disappear, as evidenced by the recent problems at the Chicago Climate Exchange. (more…)

Soon after President Obama was elected, Newsweek announced, “We Are All Socialists Now.”   Well, not quite, but the cap-and-traders at the Democratic Socialists of America claim seventy members of the US Congress are.  Notably, Maxine Waters announced during a House committee hearing her desire to “socialize” [take over and run] the US oil industry.

*****************************

Source:  Democratic Socialists of America

American Socialist Voter–
Q: How many members of the U.S. Congress are also members of the DSA?
A: Seventy

Q: How many of the DSA members sit on the Judiciary Committee?
A: Eleven: John Conyers [Chairman of the Judiciary Committee], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez,
Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee, Robert Wexler, Linda Sanchez [there are 23 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of which eleven, almost half, are now members of the DSA].

Q: Who are these members of 111th Congress?
A: See the listing below (more…)

Source:  Red Maryland

Last week I attended a PR event for the new movie Cool It featuring the Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. Cool It based on Lomborg’s book by the same name, is an antidote to Al Gore’s fallacy riddled scare mongering film, An Inconvenient Truth. The film accepts that global warming or climate change (the alarmists are using climate crisis now) is real and it should be dealt with, but that it’s not the apocalyptic event Gore makes it out to be, and that the current Kyoto-style cap and trade approach is not working.

Lomborg argues—correctly—that spending trillions of dollars on carbon mitigation schemes (cap and trade) for a negligible return on investment—literally less than a degree of temperature reduction—is waste of money, which could be used to address more pressing issues like poverty and healthcare

I asked Lomborg what he thought about Martin O’Malley’s plan to reduce Maryland’s greenhouse gasses by 25% of 2006 levels by 2020. Lomborg’s replied “good luck with that.”

The snarky bluntness of Lomborg’s criticism may offend Maryland’s green zealots, but it has the virtue of being true. (more…)

Source: Rasmussen Report

by Debra J. Saunders

President Obama killed the climate change bill. That’s the brunt of the article “As the World Burns, How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change” by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker. Lizza tells the tale of how Washington’s erstwhile “Three Amigos” — also known as K.G.L., for Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. — cobbled together a cap-and-trade climate-change bill that had “the support both of the major green groups and the biggest polluters” — until the deal fell apart.

The story has generated a lot of Beltway buzz and some ire among Senate staffers. But if the White House did have a role in killing the bill, kudos to Obamaland.

The tale starts in March 2009, when the White House announced a “grand bargain.” In exchange for a cap on carbon emissions, Democrats would agree to offshore oil drilling, nuclear power and more natural gas production.

The genius of that strategy is twofold. First, it gives the enviro left and the oil-friendly right a dog in the fight. More important, it ultimately led K.G.L. to bypass GOP senators, who opposed cap-and-trade, and cut a deal with industry, in the hopes that industry would lean on the Repubs. (more…)

Cap-and-trade is dead because the public finally caught on that it is a stealth energy tax, a big reason being that it makes coal – the most economic electricity fuel in many markets – uncompetitive. (more…)

BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

CHURCHVILLE, VA—On the10^th birthday of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, officials are lamenting that the world has made little progress in meeting them. No one should be surprised.

Goal # 1 is to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent. The UN says this clearly within reach if there’s the “political will.” “Economic death-wish” would be a better term. The UN wants us to give up 85 percent of our energy system, and use expensive, erratic solar and wind that would do little to reduce greenhouse emissions.

More importantly, we haven’t gotten the massive warming so long predicted by the computer models. If James Hansen had been correct in his 1988 predictions to congress, the planet would already some 2 degrees warmer today than it is. Nor did the computer models predict the Pacific Ocean’s 2008 shift into a massive cool phase, which now looks likely to cool the planet for the next 30 years. Let’s wait for the current La Nina to fade and see what sort of actual warming cycle we are facing.

UN Goal #2:  Convert at least 40 percent of agricultural lands to ecologically sustainable production, with minimized use of agro-chemicals, and expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off and that maintain high levels of biodiversity. (more…)

Source:  Walter Cunningham

By Walter Cunningham, 8/24/2010

The subjects and style of my writing attracts rebuttals. I usually resist the temptation to respond, but the article by Robert Curl, Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus at Rice University and Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry is just too good to resist. His article is typical of academics with all those advanced degrees, and who know what is best for the rest of us—if we would just listen. In typical global warming alarmist fashion, it attacks the credentials, the economic interests or the politics (or all three) of those who disagree with them, and does not cite any empirical data that would prove their critics do not know what they are talking about.

After citing the National Academy of Sciences endorsement of AGW, Professor Curl emphasizes the credentials of the members and claims the NAS is “objective.” Maybe we’re supposed to ignore bad science if the perpetrators’ credentials are good. NAS is certainly a prestigious organization, but, along with several other scientific organizations lately, it has descended into the world of science politics. (more…)