Officials Urged to Grill Al Gore About His Rich-Get-Warmer, Poor-Get-Colder Global Warming Offset Proposals

Climate Regulations and Carbon Offsets Would Harm Poor and Minority Households, Says Project 21

Members of the black leadership network Project 21 urge elected representatives to use Al Gore's appearances today before the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to ask the former Vice President about his own lavish energy consumption -- and his advocacy of a society in which only the wealthy could enjoy amenities most Americans currently take for granted, like home heating. Gore's proposals would result in a society in which the rich get warmer and the poor get colder.

While Gore is a long-time proponent of personal energy conservation and draconian regulations to mandate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research revealed that Gore's mansion in the exclusive Belle Meade neighborhood of Nashville uses more than 20 times the national household average of electricity.

In response, Gore's office said the Gores "do the carbon emissions offset" -- such as making environment-related investments -- that allegedly neutralize the environmental harm related to their extraordinarily-high energy use.

Gore receives his offsets as a benefit from a company that he co-founded -- Generation Investment Management -- and reportedly does not pay for them himself. Interestingly, Carbon Neutral Company, which provides Generation Investment Management with its offsets, says its offsets "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... in the short term."

If Gore's "buying offsets" strategy were to be adopted nationally, the average consumer would essentially be expected to pay twice for heat and power: first for the energy itself, then for offsets to atone for them.

Such double-billing would be particularly harmful to poor households, which, disproportionately, are minority.

"Al Gore may sleep well at night thinking he's not contributing to global warming, but if he expects everyone to be able to buy their way out of the sin of using electricity, natural gas and driving their cars to work and errands without having to cut back on necessities he is badly mistaken," said Project 21 fellow Deneen Borelli. "From the looks of their utility bills, the Gores kept their home warm and toasty this winter. Have they thought about the single mother who provides for her family on a paycheck-by-paycheck basis? I don't think she could afford an offset to heat her home without cutting back on something vital such as nutritional food and health care for herself and her children."

According to the federal Energy Information Agency, in an analysis released during the Clinton-Gore administration, imposing the restrictions mandated by the United Nation's Kyoto Global Warming Treaty would cost the U.S. economy $400 billion per year and would raise utility bills by 86 percent and gasoline by 66 cents a gallon.

An econometric study commissioned by the National Black Chamber of Commerce and other groups found that Kyoto regulations could put 3.2 million American jobs at risk -- including 864,000 jobs held by blacks and 511,000 held by Hispanics.

Already this winter, eight states, including Gore's Tennessee, report they have run out of money to help poor households pay for heating bills. Households that cannot afford to heat their homes, let alone pay for offsets.

"People are already freezing because they can't pay their bills and aid to help them is already stretched too thin. Al Gore would only make things worse if he imposed increased regulations on public utilities," said Project 21 member Kevin Martin. "If he wants to create a society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, Gore's got the right idea with his global warming offsets and regulations."

Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, has been a leading voice of the African-American community since 1992.

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A TALE OF TWO CULTURES AND THEIR CHANGING CLIMATES

Discussing: Yancheva, G., Nowaczyk, N.R., Mingram, J., Dulski, P., Schettler, G., Negendank, J.F.W., Liu, J., Sigman, D.M., Peterson, L.C. and Haug, G.H. 2007. "Influence of the intertropical convergence zone on the East Asian monsoon". Nature 445: 74-77.

What was done

The authors derived a 16,200-year-long palaeoclimatic record with nearly annual time-resolution from a sediment core extracted from Lake Huguang Maar (21ø9'N, 110ø17'E) in southeast China, based on continuous measurements of sediment titanium content and magnetic susceptibility and the acquisition of accelerator mass spectrometry 14C dates of five leaves and four bulk sediment samples.

What was learned

Yancheva et al. report that comparison of the titanium record they obtained from Lake Huguang Maar with the titanium record obtained by Haug et al. (2001) from the Cariaco Basin on the Northern Shelf of Venezuela "reveals similarities, including both a general shift towards drier climate at about AD 750 and a series of three multi-year rainfall minima within that generally dry period, the last of which coincides with the final stage of Maya collapse [AD 910] as well as the end of the Tang dynasty [AD 907]."

What it means

The ten researchers say the two sets of observations from opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean suggest the occurrence of "global climatic changes" - in this case a worsening period of reduced precipitation interspersed with socially-devastating multi-year droughts - driven by "migrations of the intertropical convergence zone," which a number of studies, in addition to theirs, place at the approximate time-of-transition from the Dark Ages Cold Period to the Medieval Warm Period....

Consequently, the study of Yancheva et al. adds further credence to the ever-more-hard-to-deny fact that a non-anthropogenic-induced millennial-scale oscillation of climate is what produced the Roman Warm Period, Dark Ages Cold Period, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, and the Current Warm Period.

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Another way politics distorts science

Excerpt from a statement by Roy Spencer, the former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama

During my fifteen years as a NASA employee, I was well aware that any interaction between scientists and the press was to be coordinated through NASA management and public affairs. Understandably, NASA managers do not appreciate first reading of their scientists opinions in the morning newspaper. I understood that my position as a NASA employee was a privilege, not a right, and that there were rules I was expected to abide by. Partly because of those limits on what I could and couldn't say to the press on the subject of global warming, I voluntarily resigned from the government in the fall of 2001.

Some level of political influence on government-funded climate science has always existed, and likely always will exist. The influence began many years ago when the government climate research programs were first established. For instance, I once heard a high-level government official say that his success at helping to formulate the Montreal Protocol restricting the manufacture of ozone-depleting chemicals was an example of the kind of success that global warming research could achieve to help restrict fossil fuel use. This is clearly a case of political and policy biases driving a scientific research agenda...

Government agencies and their managers have a long history of requiring employees to coordinate research results with management and public affairs officials before talking to the press. As a NASA employee of fifteen years I accepted this as part of my responsibility to support NASA's mission as a "team player" in support of overarching agency goals, and I believe there are good reasons for maintaining such a practice.

A much bigger political influence problem is the governmental bias towards a specific type of climate research that supports specific political or policy outcomes. This research is almost always biased toward the finding of climate destabilizing mechanisms, rather than climate stabilizing mechanisms. Because it takes a higher level of complexity in any physical system to produce self-regulation and stabilization, such findings do not naturally flow out of the existing research. An active effort, analogous to the Department of Defense "Red Team" approach, could be utilized to alleviate this inequity. Given the immense cost (especially to the poor) of proposed carbon control policies that most economists foresee, it is not helpful for tax dollars to be funneled in a research direction that unfairly favors certain political or policy outcomes.

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More Non-Scientific BS From GW "Scientists"

Post below lifted from Strata Sphere

When scientists outright lie about science where can people go to expose this outrageous behavior? For example, here is a story proposing a whole new, unfounded and unsusbtantiated theory that biological clocks are tied to the length of day (or when the Sun finally returns being fully overhead at the equator during the Spring Equinox) and nothing else:

Spring officially starts on Wednesday at 0007 GMT when the sun passes north over the celestial equator but scientists say the biological clocks of animals and plants are running ahead of time, perhaps upset by global warming. Orange trees, olives and peaches are blooming weeks ahead of schedule in Greece, geese are cutting down on migrations in Canada and the United States and bears have been unable to hibernate in Bulgaria.

Animals and plants take advantage of all sorts of signals and indicators so they can maximize their resource intake. Many plant seeds will not sprout until they have experienced fire or a freeze in the soil. Many animals cue on temperature so they do not leave to early from the warmer climates or arrive too late to take advantage of the food that is abundant. By saying migrations are `early' because of Global warming is a lie - they are exactly on time because palnts animals use more than the length of day to make seasonal transitions.

Is this wrong? Hell no - it is NATURAL! By using temperature AND daylight length animals optimize their travels. Implying this is new or different or bad is a lie. So where do we go to deal with scientific balderdash? This is not the first time migrations have begun this early - not by a long shot. When snow covered Greenland was mostly green land, migrations were probably earlier than this year. But that was long before man could be the fantasy scapegoat for natural processes.





THE END OF BRITAIN AS WE KNOW IT

Householders who keep putting out their bins on the wrong day could be caught out by secret spy cameras hidden in tin cans and bricks and branded "envirocriminals". Ealing Council in west London is using the hidden cameras to catch people committing "major envirocrimes" such as graffiti and fly-tipping on main roads. However council tax payers who put out their bins on the wrong day could also be caught up in the push. The cameras, which cost around œ200 each, are triggered by built-in movement sensors. The council, which is Conservative controlled, said in a newsletter to local residents: "To catch vandals and envirocriminals, cameras disguised as anything from tin cans to house bricks will instantly email images to the council's CCTV control centre."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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