Climate Change Dictionary

PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.

SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.

DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.

CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce `panic for profit.'

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Leftist Nutcase Prize, unrelated to "Peace" in any meaningful way.

DATA, EVIDENCE: Unnecessary details. If anyone asks for this, see "DENIER," above.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for "DATA" by "DENIERS." Also skilled at affecting an aura of "Smartest Person in the Room" to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.

JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge.

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BBC told to ensure balance on climate change

Climate change sceptics are likely to be given greater prominence in BBC documentaries and news bulletins following new editorial guidelines that call for impartiality in the corporation's science coverage.

The BBC has been repeatedly accused of bias in its reporting of climate change issues. Last year one of its reporters, Paul Hudson, was criticised for not reporting on some of the highly controversial "Climategate" leaked emails from the University of East Anglia, even though he had been in possession of them for some time.

Climate change sceptics have also accused the BBC of not properly reporting "Glaciergate", when a study from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that glaciers would melt by 2035 was discredited.

But the BBC's new editorial guidelines, published yesterday after an extensive consultation that considered over 1,600 submissions by members of the public, say expressly for the first time that scientific issues fall within the corporation's obligation to be impartial.

"The BBC must be inclusive, consider the broad perspective, and ensure that the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected," said BBC trustee Alison Hastings.

"In addition the new guideline extends the definition of `controversial' subjects beyond those of public policy and political or industrial controversy to include controversy within religion, science, finance, culture, ethics and other matters."

However James Delingpole, a prominent climate change sceptic, yesterday said that he predicted little movement in the BBC's environmental stories.

"It's highly unlikely that they'll be more balanced in their coverage," he said.

"It's a whole cultural thing at the BBC - that people who don't believe are just `flat earthers'. Whenever they invite dissenters like me on to debates, they surround us with `warmists'. On Any Questions, for example, Jonathan Dimbleby does his best to be impartial, but this is a man with a wind turbine in his garden."

In 2007, a BBC Trust report called Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century said: "Climate change is another subject where dissenters can be unpopular . The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus. But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC's role to close down this debate."

The BBC Trust is also currently conducting a separate review into impartiality in the corporation's science coverage, led by Professor Steve Jones from University College London, which will report in the spring of next year.

Professor Jones has been asked to consider whether the BBC's output "gives appropriate weight to scientific conclusions including different theories and due weight to the views expressed by those sceptical about the science and how it was conducted or evaluated."

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First do the research

Bjorn Lomborg

CLIMATE committees across the world are mistakenly putting the cart before the horse

ADVOCATES of drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions now speak a lot less than they once did about climate change. Climate campaigners changed their approach after the collapse of the Copenhagen climate change summit last December, and the revelation of mistakes in the UN climate panel's work, as well as in response to growing public scepticism and declining interest.

Although some activists still rely on scare tactics - witness the launch of an advertisement depicting the bombing of anybody who is hesitant to embrace carbon cuts - many activists now spend more time highlighting the "benefits" of their policy prescription. They no longer dwell on impending climate doom but on the economic windfall that will result from embracing the "green" economy.

You can find examples all over the world, but one of the best is in my home country, Denmark, where a government-appointed committee of academics recently presented their suggestions for how the country could go it alone and become "fossil fuel-free" in 40 years. The goal is breathtaking: more than 80 per cent of Denmark's energy supply comes from fossil fuels, which are dramatically cheaper and more reliable than any green energy source.

I attended the committee's launch and was startled that Denmark's Climate Commission barely mentioned climate change. This omission is understandable since one country acting alone cannot do much to stop global warming. If Denmark were indeed to become 100 per cent fossil-free by 2050, and remain so for the rest of the century, the effect, by 2100, would be to delay the rise in average global temperature by just two weeks.

Instead of focusing on climate change, the Climate Commission hyped the benefits that Denmark would experience if it led the shift to green energy. Unfortunately, on inspection these benefits turn out to be illusory.

Being a pioneer is hardly a guarantee of riches. Germany led the world in putting up solar panels, funded by E47 billion ($66bn) in subsidies. The lasting legacy is a massive bill and lots of inefficient solar technology sitting on rooftops throughout a cloudy country, delivering a trivial 0.1 per cent of its total energy supply.

Denmark itself has also already tried being a green-energy innovator; it led the world in embracing wind power. The results are hardly inspiring. Denmark's wind industry is almost completely dependent on taxpayer subsidies, and Danes pay the highest electricity rates of any industrialised nation. Several studies suggest that claims that one-fifth of Denmark's electricity demand is met by wind are an exaggeration, in part because much of the power is produced when there is no demand and must be sold to other countries.

The sorry state of wind and solar power shows the massive challenge that we face in trying to make today's technology competitive and efficient. Direct-current lines need to be constructed to carry solar and wind energy from sunny, windy areas to where most people live. Storage mechanisms need to be invented so that power is not interrupted whenever there is no sunshine or wind.

Proponents of carbon cuts argue that green-energy technologies only seem more expensive because the price of fossil fuels does not reflect the cost of their impact on the climate. But allowing for this would make little difference. The most comprehensive economic meta-study shows that total future climate impacts would justify a tax of around E0.01 per litre of petrol ($0.06 per gallon in the US) an amount dwarfed by the taxes already imposed by most European countries.

Despite the fact changing from fossil fuels to green energy requires a total economic transformation, Denmark's Climate Commission claimed that the price tag would be next to nothing. The commission reached this conclusion by assuming that the cost of not embracing its recommended policy would be massive.

The commission believes that, during the next four decades, fossil-fuel costs will climb sharply because sources will dry up and governments will place massive taxes on fossil fuels. But this flies in the face of most evidence. There is clearly plenty of cheap coal for hundreds of years, and with new cracking technology, gas is becoming more abundant. Even oil supplies are likely to be significantly boosted by non-conventional sources such as tar sands.

By the same token, the prediction that governments will impose massive carbon taxes has little basis in reality. Such assumptions seem like a poor framework on which to build significant public policy and seem to ignore the substantial cost of eliminating fossil fuels, which is likely to amount to at least 5 per cent of gross domestic product a year.

The shift away from fossil fuels will not be easy. Policy-makers must prioritise investment in green-energy research and development. Trying to force carbon cuts instead of investing first in research puts the cart before the horse. Breakthroughs do not result automatically from a combination of taxes on fossil fuels and subsidies for present-day green energy: despite the massive outlays associated with the Kyoto Protocol, participating countries' investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP did not increase.

The change in message after the disaster of the Copenhagen summit was probably inevitable. But the real change that is needed is the realisation that drastic, early carbon cuts are a poor response to global warming no matter how they are packaged.

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What on earth is Bob Ward?

James Delingpole

A few days ago I had the rare pleasure of listening to quite possibly the most revoltingly parti pris, cloying, wrongheaded, disgraceful and thrillingly, collectably awful radio programme since the days of Lord Haw Haw. It was on ABC – Australia’s answer to the BBC: you can read the transcript here – and purported to present a reasonable and balanced view on Climate Change, courtesy of an “expert” named Bob Ward.

Bob Who? Well indeed. If you were to judge only by the sycophantic treatment he received at the hands of interviewer Robyn Williams (someone so instantly irritating he makes the other, more famous irritating Robin Williams seem an unparalleled delight of charm and understatement, by comparison), you would imagine he were some sort of cross between Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, plus maybe a bit of Svante Arrhenius and Joseph Fourier for the specialist Climate Change bits.

Actually, though, Bob Ward is a PR man. He used to work for the Royal Society, from which Warmist redoubt he once famously had the chutzpah to write to Exxon ordering them to stop funding “climate change deniers”. Now he works for something called the Grantham Research Institute, a “research department” at the London School of Economics (LSE) funded by an American hedge-funder called Jeremy Grantham and headed by the economist and former treasury official Lord Stern.

Grantham is, of course, a passionate believer in the green orthodoxy. He has made his money and if he wants to put some of it into an organisation promoting belief in the AGW religion then that’s his prerogative. But let’s not delude ourselves that the Grantham Institute is exactly a neutral source of information on this issue. Taking its lead from Lord Stern’s (tragically flawed) report, it is committed to the ideological position that man-made “Climate Change” represents a major, immediate threat which must be dealt with urgently through costly intervention. There is not much tolerance for “climate scepticism”, let alone “denial” at the Grantham Institute.

Which is why it came as rather a surprise to many ABC listeners to hear the Grantham Institute’s angry baldie attack dog Bob Ward being feted like the ultimate arbiter of neutral authority. Among them was Tom Harris, who eviscerates both Ward and Robyn Williams here in this magnificent Fisking of the fawning interview.

And when Ward asserts that dangerous global warming is "the kinda [sic] thing that I think most people would not want to risk if there is a cost effective solution to reducing emissions", why didn't Williams ask Ward what such "a cost effective solution" would be? Is it perhaps because no one can complete a meaningful cost/benefit analysis when future climate states are even less understood than the economic and social impacts of both climate change or energy rationing due to the sort of greenhouse gas controls Ward promotes? Ward's statement is also self-evident - no one would oppose eliminating risk, no matter how small, in any field if a "cost effective solution" could be found. But then to formulate such a solution we first need to know accurately the balance of cost and benefit - which, for climate change, we do not.

Next, Ward attributes nonsense to climate skeptics:

Anybody who seriously argues that carbon dioxide and methane are not greenhouse gases; that increasing the concentrations in the atmosphere doesn't warm the world; I mean they're basically fighting against 200 years worth of science..

and....

Now, you've got to be very, very blinkered in your view if you are saying "I know for sure there will be no increase in temperature and there's no risk."

Why didn't Williams ask Ward to tell the listening audience who has made these sorts of absolute statements? Is it because no one actually has? Certainly, Ward's primary targets for vilification in the interview, Professors Carter, Lindzen and Plimer, never have. Even with his relatively weak science background, Ward must know that.

Ward's conclusion is classic:

… what's worrying about this is they [climate skeptics] are creating confusion at a time when we have to make very serious decisions because the climate responds slowly to changes in greenhouse gas emissions and actually the decisions we gonna [sic] make today about emissions are about what kind of climate we'll see 20, 30 years from now and has very large implications if we make the wrong decisions.

Given Ward's overconfidence about a science that he admits is grossly uncertain, Williams should have jumped at the chance to ask him an obvious question, which is:

Since the impacts of major greenhouse gas decisions are delayed for decades, shouldn't we take the time to carefully consider what leading experts such as Carter, Plimer and Lindzen are saying? Why rush decisions when the consequences of being wrong are so high? Either we are headed towards climate catastrophe or we are on the verge of wasting trillions of dollars worldwide on a non-issue. Either way, we owe it to our children and grandchildren to perform due diligence on the issue before making any decisions at all.

Harris’s demolition is well worth reading in full. What I personally found most amusing about the interview was its arrant hypocrisy. Here is Ward’s dismissive verdict on “sceptics”:

…They write newspaper articles and go and appear on the media because what they are really interested in is influencing public debate rather than debating the intellectual basis of their objections.

But isn’t this exactly what Bob Ward does all the ruddy time, popping up like a bad smell on TV and radio whenever a rentaquote spokesman is needed to talk about ‘Climate Change’? He’s a PR man, let us remind ourselves, not a scientist (although he can claim an unfinished PhD thesis in Palaeopiezometry).

His job – for which he no doubt receives a salary a heck of a sight bigger than any of his “denier” oppos, like me – is by its very nature about swaying public opinion using traditional PR techniques like exaggeration, blustering and economy with the actualite. It’s not like Ward-y spends his days poring over radiosonde data or measuring ice caps or poking around in polar bear poo. He’s a hatchet man. He’s quite good at it.

That’s probably why they chose him. Because he looks a bit like an angry pit bull and he’s quite a scary thing to confront when you’re up against him in a debate, trying to get awkward scientific truths across like the fact that Global Warming hasn’t actually happened since 1998.

Bob Ward is not afraid to play dirty. One of his favourite tricks is to deploy the Press Complaints Commission weapon. He has inflicted this torture device more than once on Christopher Booker, reporting him for some doubtful inaccuracy or other which the PCC almost certainly won’t have either the intellect or the ideological neutrality to judge fairly, but which will result in his unfortunate victim being tied up for days answering pointless questions about tiny details for the PCC’s kangaroo court. If you see him try it on me, you’ll know why.

For further stories about Bob Ward in action, read Bishop Hill – another victim of Ward’s vicious campaigning – here, here, here. The Bishop also rightly condemns Ward’s disgraceful – and quite possibly actionable – assault on the distinguished and thoroughly decent Professor Bob Carter on the abovementioned ABC radio suck-up.

Roger Pielke Jr, meanwhile, has an amusing story about the Grantham Institute’s pathetic inability to provide anyone – other than the inevitable Bob – to debate with him on his visit to London next month.

Here is my view — If the Grantham Institute insists on having Bob Ward going around in blogs and in the media seeking to criticize my work — as he did on the disaster issue and has done so more recently — then they have an obligation to come out from behind him to actually engage in intellectual debate. The alternative would be to inform Mr. Ward that they do not wish to back up his various attacks.

I understand that people are busy. So I have offered up two weeks worth of dates for the Grantham folks to find a single faculty member to defend Ward’s frequent attacks on their behalf. Apparently they can not or will not put someone up. (And it does indeed have to be a faculty member. I have debated Mr. Ward before and, not surprisingly, he was unprepared to actually debate. So I won’t repeat that experience again.)

Since the Grantham Institute folks have been given the opportunity to debate issues openly and in public, I will be very surprised to see Bob Ward rejoining his attacks on me in blogs and in the media. That would be pretty uncool. The offer of a public exchange, which I am sure would be of wide interest, will remain open to those hiding behind Mr. Ward.

This is far, far more than I ever wanted to write about Bob Ward and I promise never to sully my typing fingers in this way ever again. Why did I do so? Simple. Because as we approach endgame in the great Climate Change Pseudoscience Fraud, people will understandably want to know how this massive con trick was able to penetrate so deep into the public psyche.

For the full disgraceful story you must wait for my forthcoming book Watermelons. In the meantime, let me offer the case of Bob Ward as an example of how the poison spread.

Let me make one thing clear: I’m not criticising Ward on the grounds that he is a PR man. He is as entitled to speak out on “Climate Change” as I – a mere Oxford Eng Lit grad blogger and hack – am. But note, pray, one key difference. If ever I am called to debate about climate change on the BBC or wherever I will always be introduced as a climate change “sceptic.” Ward, on the other hand, though as virulent an activist as anyone on my side of the debate, will be introduced as a spokesman for the Grantham Research Institute – thus lending him an aura of dignity, neutrality and lofty expertise he simply doesn’t merit.

The effect of this imbalance is distorting and dangerous. I have lost count of the number of environmental news reports in serious newspapers which quote Bob Ward as though he were THE ex-cathedra authority on all matters to do with “Climate Science.” Presumably, on the same grounds, every time there’s a meat recipe they should ring up for the views of Paul McCartney; and every time there’s a story about heroism in Afghanistan, they should court the vital opinion of Parliament Square “peace activist” Brian Hawes; and every time there’s a piece about the Pope they should ring up Ian Paisley. After all they’re just as reliable and just as unbiased.

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From Desperate Housewives to Desperate Climate Liars

By Alan Caruba

Not long ago, the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Harold Lewis, caused quite a stir in science circles when he resigned from the American Physical Society. Physics is an exacting science, bound by immutable laws that are true throughout our universe. It was not widely reported to the general public, but Lewis who had been a member of the American Physical Society for 67 years, made his reason quite clear after having received an APS statement supporting global warming.

The entire global warming fraud has tainted groups like the American Physical Society and the American Meteorological Society among others that lent their prestige and support to it.

This brings us to an opinion editorial by Michael E. Mann that was published in The Washington Post on October 8 titled, almost comically, "Get the anti-science bent out of politics." Mann gained notoriety among climate scientists for his "hockey stick" graph that alleged a steep rise in the Earth's temperatures while ignoring other critical factors in its long history such as the medieval warm period. It wasn't science. It was propaganda, a deliberate falsehood.

The global warming hoax would not have lasted as long as it did if governments all over the world didn't throw millions of public funds toward so-called climate change science that was, in reality, simply a huge windfall of money for any scientist who wanted to cash in on it. And many did.

What has Mann worried is that, if Republicans gain control of Congress or even just the House, he is going to be hauled before Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) who will be the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mann believes that a "hostile investigation of climate science" will ensue.

He's wrong. What will ensue will be an investigation of the manipulation of science for the purpose of advancing political agendas hostile to the welfare of the nation.

Right now, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is threatening to regulate carbon dioxide, the gas blamed for "causing" global warming if the Senate does not pass the hideous Cap-and-Trade Act, the greatest increase in taxes in the history of the nation.

Desperately, Mann says, "My employer, Penn State University, exonerated me after a thorough investigation of my e-mails in the East Anglia archive." Yeah, sure, we can be completely confident that Penn State University is going to investigate itself after it and Mann benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in climate science funding.

Decrying the potential House investigation and one by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (the University of Virginia was a previous employer), Mann declared there had been "a twenty-year assault on climate research, questioning basic science and promoting doubt where there is none." None? When a relative handful of internationally renowned climate scientists stood their ground against the Climategate hucksters and the likes of Al Gore, they were labeled "deniers" and calls to jail or execute them were common.

Like any trapped rat, Mann repeated the global warming mantra that "The basic physics and chemistry of how carbon dioxide and other human-produced greenhouse gases trap heat in the lower atmosphere have been understood for nearly two centuries. Overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is heating the planet, shrinking the Arctic ice cap, melting glaciers, and raising sea levels."

All this is FALSE. The Earth has been COOLING for the whole of this decade, Arctic ice is growing, glaciers are not melting, and sea levels are not dramatically rising. But Mann was not through; he claimed that "scientists are in broad agreement on the reality of these changes and their near-certain link to human activity."

For the past four years, leading climate and other scientists from around the world have attended the unreported or under-reported international climate change conferences sponsored by The Heartland Institute of Chicago, publishing data and holding seminars that reveal the true science that undermines the lies put forth by Mann and his fellow conspirators.

Desperately Mann said "the attacks against the science must stop. They are not good-faith questioning of scientific research. They are anti-science."

The central methodology of science is to question hypotheses and to test them in order to determine their accuracy. The "science" of the climate hucksters has utterly failed and, in point of fact, their efforts have been "anti-science" as they strove to foist a political agenda on the world that enriched themselves, their universities, and those who invested in the carbon credit exchanges created to enrich others.

How ironic and how pathetic it is to read Mann's closing statement that "My fellow scientists and I must be ready to stand up to blatant abuse from politicians who seek to mislead and distract the public."

Why then are President Obama, former Vice President Al Gore, and others of their ilk still talking about "climate change", the new code words for global warming? The answer is to mislead and distract the public.

SOURCE






California's green nightmare

It's hard to know where the fairy tale of "green jobs" first came from. It was probably a clever marketing scheme by radical environmentalists who realized that their anti-growth climate change agenda wasn't going to sell among the American electorate if workers realized how many jobs would be eviscerated by the new taxes and regulation. So, from somewhere out of Madison Avenue or K Street, the left devised the green jobs story line: we can impose a $1 trillion new tax on the U.S. economy over the next decade, and it will save jobs, as hundreds of thousands of Americans begin assembling windmills and solar paneling.

If we want to see how green policies work in the real world, we don't have to look any further than America's left coast. California has become the poster child of green jobs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger boasted in his 2007 State of the State Address that "California has taken the leadership in moving the entire country beyond debate and denial [on global warming] to action. As goes California, so goes the nation."

He's right. California is the nation's laboratory in green job initiatives of the type that so many politicians in Washington, D.C., and the states see as America's economic passport to the future. The Golden State was first in the nation in renewable energy standards, it is the home of the most stringent cap and trade legislation (called AB 32) to reduce carbon emissions, and it has poured hundreds of millions of state tax dollars into renewable energy research.

So where are all the green jobs? A new 2010 study by the University of California-Berkeley comes to the sobering conclusion that "the green economy accounts for just 1 percent of California's jobs."

That's right: of the roughly 15 million California workers, only about 159,000 have green jobs (and this was an expansive definition of green jobs, including trash sorters at the dumpsters). That same study did find that green employment is "growing about 50 percent faster than the economy overall." But that's mostly a reflection of anemic job generation in California's industrial base, and not a sign that green jobs are going to sprout all over the state like avocado plants.

California's heavy "investment" in green job projects -- on the types of initiatives that President Obama is all gaga over on the national level -- hasn't added at all to overall state employment. As of June, California had 2.2 million unemployed workers and the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the nation at 12.3 percent. Even if the state were somehow to quadruple its green jobs, the Golden State would still have an unemployment rate above the national average.

Nor has "going green" helped the state's finances. The budget deficit in Sacramento is expected to reach $20 billion and the state's credit rating of A- is the worst of any state in the nation, while its default risk is rated on par with that of Libya. California voters are partly to blame. In 2008 they approved a $9.95-billion ballot initiative to build a high-speed "green" rail project from San Diego to San Francisco and beyond. The state can't pay its bills already. Most rail experts believe the actual cost will be multiples higher than anticipated, and that's only for the construction costs. The train figures to be an albatross around the neck of the state budget every year in operating subsidies, much as Amtrak is in Washington. By the way, you can take a Southwest flight from San Francisco to San Diego for as little as $59.

Amazingly, even Gov. Schwarzenegger's own economics team concluded this year that the state's green regulatory structure is a menace to the state's economy. The governor's office study concluded that California's already iron-fisted environmental and workplace regulations translate into about $176 billion in lost output and nearly 4 million lost jobs. This study was so embarrassing to the legislature and the Schwarzenegger administration that it was suppressed for many months, until several Republican legislators demanded its release.

Meanwhile, California's celebrated AB 32 climate change law will take effect in 2012. But it is already causing an outsourcing of manufacturing, construction, and utility investment in anticipation of the new regulations. A Riverside construction company, CalPortland Cement, announced in late 2009 it was closing its plant because of AB 32's impending regulations. The CEO wrote: "A cement plant cannot be picked up and moved, but the next new plant probably won't be built in California," but rather in Nevada or China.

Last year, researchers at the college of business at California State University in Sacramento estimated that higher energy prices from AB 32 will increase consumers' food, utility, and housing costs by $50 billion. That's the equivalent of a 4.5 percent sales tax on most consumer items Californians buy. Small business costs would rise by $60 billion annually to pay for a policy that will have at best a microscopic impact on global temperatures.

The Golden State is also first in the nation in stifling renewable portfolio electricity standards. These are expected to raise electric power costs on every Golden State business and homeowner by 2 percent, which is like a $250 tax on a typical family. Another expensive initiative, the 1 million solar roofs project, will pour tens of millions more scarce tax dollars into green programs the debt-drenched state can't afford.

How does this all translate into jobs? Well, of course, it doesn't, and last year California Republicans held field hearings in Reno, Nevada, to discover where all the businesses have fled. The presidents and founders of more than 100 businesses, all formerly in California, almost all said much the same thing. Although taxes are excruciatingly high in the Golden State, the businesses said they could tolerate those if it weren't for the regulatory climate. They couldn't stomach the anti-business attitude of so many of the California regulators. One former manufacturer in Los Angeles complained that "the regulators come onto your facility, and they want to shut you down. They view businesses as enemy combatants." Earlier this year, the EPA chased out of town the last steel foundry in Los Angeles, a firm that had hired hundreds of Southern California workers with good wages for decades.

Joseph Vranich, a business relocation expert, has a database of firms that move in and out of California. "Thanks mostly to California's hostile regulatory climate," he says, "for every three new businesses that move into the state of California, about 100 move out." He's compiled an exit list of A-list home-grown California-based companies that are expanding operations elsewhere. It includes Intuit, StarKist, Facebook, Northrop Grumman, and Apple. Perhaps even more embarrassing is that when California's investments do generate new jobs, they are increasingly located outside the state. In June, the hot Silicon Valley firm MiaSol‚ reported that its planned home for one of the largest solar factories in North America, a 500,000-square-foot 1,000-worker plant, will be built in Atlanta.

Similarly, CalStar Products has erected its newest green plant in Wisconsin. Since then, it has been awarded nearly $2.5 million in federal clean energy tax credits through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the company said, "We expect to build additional plants down the Mississippi Valley and East Coast over the next couple years" -- and conspicuously, not in California. Another green firm announced it will build its new plant in Wales. Other states and nations are getting rich on California's green spending. Much like Europe, California is discovering that for every green job that has been created, several more conventional hardhat jobs have disappeared. The term "green jobs" is a fancy way to say 12 percent unemployment.

Even the politicians in Sacramento are starting to realize the tomfoolery of one state trying to stop planetary global warming all on its own. So Mr. Schwarzenegger has been trying to persuade the governors of other neighboring states like Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington to sign a Western state cap and trade treaty. The other governors have declined, no doubt having observed how well climate change legislation has worked in California.

The whole fight of jobs versus greens comes to a climax in November, when voters will decide on a ballot initiative to suspend the state's global warming law until unemployment falls back to 5.5 percent.

The initiative is polling well, but green groups around the country are raising millions of dollars to defeat the measure. This is Waterloo for the Green Movement. If California rejects expensive job-killing remedies to climate change, other states will surely follow. California, ironically, could be the state that says, "Whoa: jobs first."

SOURCE

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