Source: SPPI

by Dennis Ambler

The Banks are after our money again. 

“Using public funds to remove risks” means that the wealthy may take any level of risk to further enrich themselves, because if anything brings huge losses, the taxpayers will be forced to bail them out.  If the risks result in huge returns for the wealthy, the taxpayers received zero.  Investment and loan guarantees by governments to large corporations and banks are wealth transfers at best, theft at worse.

this account comes from the Climate Group website: The Climate Group.

Date:July 23, 2011

“NEW YORK: On July 20, The Climate Group and Theodore Roosevelt IV of Barclays Capital hosted a roundtable dialogue with Andrew Steer, Special Envoy for Climate Change at the World Bank with senior members of the financial sector, to discuss how public sector funding could be used to stimulate the nearly $1 trillion of private sector investment needed to address climate change worldwide. (more…)

Source:  IBD

When the Environmental Protection Agency said in late June that it would force Western coal-fired power plants to install haze-reducing pollution-control equipment at a cost of $1.5 billion a year, it said it had to in order to settle a lawsuit by environmental groups.

One organization involved in the suit, the Environmental Defense Fund, has a long history of taking the EPA to court. In fact, a cursory review finds almost half a dozen cases in the past 10 years.

The odd thing is that the EPA, in turn, has handed EDF $2.76 million in grants over that same period, according to an IBD review of the agency’s grant database. (more…)

Source:  UK Mail

By Christopher Booker

Who would possibly have thought it? The latest news is that the world may be threatened by a sharp drop in temperatures, possibly so severe that it could herald a new mini ice age.

And one reason being put forward for this is that all the pollution being chucked out by thousands of coal-fired power stations may be blocking the sun’s heat from the Earth.

Dr Robert Kaufman of Boston University blamed China this week. ‘During the Chinese economic expansion there was a huge increase in sulphur emissions,’ he said. And this was the cause of global cooling. (more…)

Source:  FOX News

The NASA scientist who once claimed the Bush administration tried to “silence” his global warming claims is now accused of receiving more than $1.2 million from the very environmental organizations whose agenda he advocated.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Washington, D.C., a group claims NASA is withholding documents that show James Hansen failed to comply with ethics rules and financial disclosures regarding substantial compensation he earned outside his $180,000 taxpayer-paid position as director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (more…)

Source:  Heritage Foundation

In November 2009, a dozen protesters triggered a traffic jam in an intersection of Chicago’s financial sector by laying down in a circle in the middle of the road, locking their arms together inside pieces of pipe. They were protesting the city’s climate exchange, part of a scheme to regulate CO2 emissions through permits. Ironically, it was a case of a left-leaning plan being attacked by the far left.

After a few hours, the activists were arrested, including among their ranks members of groups like the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). According to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website, about six months later, the agency awarded LVEJO a $25,000 environmental justice grant, which was to be directed to “…work[ing] in coalition with their partners to implement 3 areas of Climate Change Mitigation…” The first “area” is to “…conduct a grassroots Clean Power Campaign in the Chicago Region to address coal power plant emissions…” (more…)

Source:  Global Warming.Org

by Marlo Lewis

One hundred eighty-six Members of Congress have signed on to H.R. 1830, the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions (NAT GAS) Act of 2011, better known at this Web site as the Pickens-Your-Pocket Boonedoggle Bill, in honor of its chief lobbyist and beneficiary, billionaire T. Boone Pickens.

The bill would provide targeted tax breaks to subsidize the manufacture and purchase of natural gas vehicles, installation of natural gas refueling infrastructure, and production of compressed and liquefied natural gas for use as motor fuel. The bill includes no overall budget authorization. Moreover, many of the provisions modify current sections of the tax code, which in turn refer to other sections, and the Congressional Research Service inexplicably has yet to provide a bill summary. So the total amount of the tax breaks is anybody’s guess. (more…)

Source:  American Thinker: Adventures in the Climate Trade

By Norman Rogers, Heartland Institute

“Global warming, now called climate change, is a big industry with academic and commercial branches.  One way or another the government provides the money to keep it in business.  The academic side supports thousands of scientific workers churning out some good science larded with lots of junk science.  The commercial side is busy turning out tank cars filled with corn ethanol and covering the landscape with windmills.  Nobody would be doing any of this without government subsidies and mandates.” (more…)

Source:  Nature News

Money not the problem in US climate debate

Environmental groups spent nearly as much as their opponents to lobby for cap-and-trade legislation, but still lost.

by David Adam

Environmental groups and their supporters spend more money on climate-change and clean-energy activities and campaigns than sceptical right-wing groups and their industry supporters, according to a report by a US social scientist, who questions some of the most common reasons given for US political inaction on global warming.

According to the report, conservative think-tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations raised some US$907 million during 2009, and spent a total of $787 million on their activities, with $259 million of that devoted specifically to climate and energy policy issues. Over the same period, national environmental groups had revenues of $1.7 billion and spent $1.4 billion on their programmes, which included $394 million devoted to climate and energy issues. (more…)

Source:  SPPI

by Dennis Ambler

Dr Richard Somerville seems to have made a lot of noise in the Congressional hearings. This is one summary of his appearance.

“The most effective minority witness, IMO, was Dr. Richard Somerville, whose testimony updates the continual — and predictable — refrain that ‘climate change is even worse than we previously predicted.’ Much of Somerville’s testimony is drawn from a report he co-authored called the Copenhagen Diagnosis.”

Dr Somerville is an active promoter of the climate change agenda and is a member of the Advisory Board at the Aspen Global Change Institute. He is its former chairman and was IPCC AR4 WG1 Co-ordinating Lead Author for the Historical Overview of Climate Change Science. The Aspen Institute is particularly well funded and the Global Change Institute seperately receives “generous funding” from government and several foundations. (more…)

Source:  Greenie Watch

Chris Field, the co-chair of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) working group told a St. Louis paper that American money spent on the IPCC “is a very good deal for the governments and for the world.”

Field, echoed the recent warming alarmist party line of communicating better. He said he and the other smart people like him need to explain the science better to those less fortunate. And he said “the scientific community” should be more nurturing and help “people understand” both the importance of the IPCC, and “how science works.”

Field may be hiding a bit of information that might help us “understand how his science” is paid for. (more…)

Source:  UK Independent

The doom-sayers are becoming more fashionable just as experts are coming to the view it has all been one giant false alarm.

The human appetite for bad news knows no bounds. That is why gossip is usually malicious and why, on a grander scale, prophets of doom are always guaranteed a credulous audience. Conversely, good news – however well attested – is generally squeezed in the margins of newspapers.

For example, The Independent buried in a few paragraphs a story with the headline “Population growth not a threat, say engineers”. But at least The Independent found some space to cover the publication of a report last week by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers entitled Population: One Planet, Too Many People? – I could find nothing about it in other newspapers.

The reason for that distinct lack of column inches is that the institution answered its own question in the negative. No, there are not (and will never be) too many people for the planet to feed. As the report’s lead author, Dr Tim Fox, pointed out, its verdict is not based on speculative guesses about the development of new agricultural processes as yet unknown: “We can meet the challenge of feeding a planet of 9 billion people through the application of existing technologies”. For example, Dr Fox pointed out, in Africa, no less than half the food produced is destroyed before it reaches its local marketplace: with refrigeration and good roads, the developing world could avoid this horrendous waste. (more…)

Source:  American Thinker

By Norman Rogers

Can scientists become “Deadly Ninjas of Science Communication”?  That was proposed by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War Against Science,” and a member of the board of directors of the American Geophysical Union.  Mooney advocated this idea in a presentation at the Union’s December 13-17 fall meeting in San Francisco.

Mooney is concerned that global warming skeptics are getting the upper hand in the ongoing debate.  Mooney has an unquestioning belief that disaster will overtake the world if we don’t mend our CO₂-emitting ways.  Many other speakers at the meeting, like Mooney, suggested that if scientists improved their communications skills, the skeptics could be defeated.

At the same fall meeting four years ago, Al Gore spoke to ten thousand assembled scientists.  The scientists treated him like a rock star.  Why would the scientists love Al Gore?  His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was full of scientific errors.  But this is about not biting the hand that feeds you.  When Al Gore spreads global warming hysteria, financial and political support for climate science increases.  Scientists become guests on TV shows instead of lab drones.But a dark cloud is gathering over climate science.  Public fear of global warming is declining.  Most of the activist scientists gathered in San Francisco were blind to the possibility that there is any defect in their scary product.  It must be that forces of darkness (perhaps Republicans or coal companies) are financing skeptics.  Apparently the skeptics, cleverly disguised as grassroots activists, have an uncanny knack for propaganda. (more…)

Source:  UK Guardian

Miriam Pemberton cites an October report titled “Military vs. Climate Security: The 2011 Budgets Compared,” revealing that the U.S. climate change budget has more than doubled—from $7 billion to $18 billion—since 2008.

Also see:  http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_money.html?Itemid=0

By Dennis Ambler

This excellent article by Art Horn in the Energy Tribune, takes the lid off the massive amounts of money being spent by government on “climate change”, at a time of severe financial constraints.

“As a meteorologist and climate change (what happened to global warming?) investigator, I constantly hear the charge that we who do not kneel at the altar of Al Gore are simply hired hacks for “Big Oil.” We are clueless stooges who will say anything for money. This old and tired argument is used over and over again by people who don’t do any research to back up that claim, they simply “know it’s true” because they read it in the New York Times or Newsweek or saw it on some television program. I wonder how many of those making this charge drive a car, use plastics, fly on planes or use virtually any product that we in our hydrocarbon based society enjoy? I’d bet all of them. (more…)