Warmists think NO-ONE should spend money opposing them

And conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with, apparently

We hear from the Green/Left "Think Progress":

Today, Republicans in the House energy committee voted not once, not twice, but three times, against amendments recognizing that climate change is real, despite the broad scientific consensus that "climate change is happening and human beings are a major reason for it." They then unanimously voted in favor of the Upton-Inhofe bill to repeal the EPA's scientific endangerment finding on greenhouse pollution. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) succinctly expressed the day's proceedings:

This is a war on science.

The 31 Republicans and three Democrats who voted in favor of H.R. 910 have received a grand total of $343,750 from Koch Industries, an average of more than $10,000 each. Freshman Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Koch's special man in Congress, tips the scales at $79,500.

Wait a minute: If Koch can purchase so much power for only .34 million dollars, why couldn't Gore do so with almost 1000 times the money?

2008: Gore Launches $300 Million Climate Change Initiative

Former Vice President Al Gore is set to unveil a three-year, $300 million climate change campaign Wednesday, one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history, the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin reports

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All aboard the climate gravy train

There was a time when climate scientists were not extremely well paid, but that is no longer the case

Global-warming alarmists often portray climate scientists as poorly paid academics whose judgment is impervious to the influence of money. This seems strange given the billions of taxpayer dollars that have been invested in climate science over the past few years. And as the public-choice school of economics has clearly shown, the opportunity for reward affects even supposedly disinterested professionals.

Therefore, it is fair to ask: Just how well rewarded are climate scientists? As it turns out, by some measures they are paid as well as corporate CEOs.

When it comes to comparing the annual salaries of various professions, there is an obvious problem. Some work extremely long hours - about 2,600 a year for firefighters - while others work far fewer - 1,400 a year for teachers. To iron out this difficulty, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Compensation Survey converts yearly salaries into hourly pay. From that we can see that teachers, at $37.91 an hour, are actually much more highly paid than firefighters, at $21.68 an hour, despite their comparable annual salaries ($53,000 for teachers, $55,000 for firefighters).

What about climate scientists? Well, university lecturers and professors earn an average of $49.88 an hour over a 1,600-hour work year, for a total salary of about $80,000. In the public sector, "atmospheric, earth, marine, and space sciences teachers, postsecondary" earn considerably more than the average university teacher ($70.61 per hour). They also work much less (1,471 hours each year), and despite their lower workload, they pull down about $104,000 a year. Climate scientists' hourly pay ranks them higher than business-school teachers at public universities, who earn $63.35 an hour, but not public-sector law-school professors, who earn over $100 an hour.

So climate scientists are very well compensated, out-earning all other faculty outside of law in hourly-wage terms. What about the rest of the public sector? Astonishingly, only one other public-sector profession - psychiatrist - pays better than climate science, at just over $73 an hour. In other words, climate scientists have the third-highest-paid public-sector job, ranking above judges.

What about the private sector? That's led by airline pilots, who earn about $112 an hour, but work for only 1,100 hours a year, followed by company CEOs at an average of $91 an hour. Physicians and surgeons earn almost as much as CEOs, at $89.51 an hour. Private-sector law-school professors, interestingly enough, earn far less than their public-school counterparts, at $82 an hour. After that come professor-level jobs in engineering, at $76.11, and dentists, at $73.19. These are the only private-sector professions that pay more than climate science. Taking the public and private sectors together, by my reckoning, climate scientist is the tenth-highest-paid profession in the nation.

Bear in mind that these averages are statistical means, and are therefore inflated by extremely high salaries at the top end, particularly in the case of CEOs and physicians. If we look at median earnings - what the earner right in the middle of the pack gets - we see that climate scientists get $75.29 an hour, compared with private-sector CEOs at $75.48 and physicians at $81.73.

The story gets even more interesting when we look back at the figures from 2005, the year before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth launched the current wave of climate alarmism. Back then, university teachers were paid $43.16 an hour, while climate scientists were paid $54.65 an hour. In other words, climate-science compensation has risen by 30 percent in five years, while pay for other university instructors has increased by only 15 percent.

There was a time when climate scientists were not extremely well paid, but that is no longer the case. Not only have their earnings grown far faster than their colleagues', but on an hourly basis they now earn as much as CEOs. When climate skeptics talk about a global-warming gravy train, the numbers back them up.

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Environmental terrorism

From Green/Left would-be Pharaohs who want to destroy the middle class

Marc Morano, editor of CFACT's Climate Depot website, appeared on Fox News with Neil Cavuto yesterday to discuss the recent spike in oil and gas prices in the wake of instability in the Middle East.

Neil Cavuto asked why, instead of getting oil from Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and other Middle East countries, America doesn't drill for more oil domestically. Morano replied, "The Congressional Research Service just did a study of natural gas, coal, and oil. We have more than the entire world, we have more than China, Canada, and Saudi Arabia combined, but 83% of our lands are inaccessible for oil drilling. And we have the Interior Department held in contempt of court for not allowing more permitting out in the Gulf Coast."

Marc pointed out that many environmentalists view high gas prices as a good thing: "Many people, including the environmentalists, are getting exactly what they want right now, and it is a situation they helped create by locking up 83% of our oil."

Specifically, Morano highlighted the views of two Obama administration officials: "John Holdren the science czar, is on record as saying that abundant energy is a threat to America, and Energy Secretary Chu has actually advocated for European style gas prices in the US." (In the UK, gasoline prices are approaching $12/gallon.)

As Marc also pointed out, "Tom Friedman of the New York Times called for a $1 a gallon gas tax in today's paper on top of what we are paying now." Such a tax would be disastrous for consumers' pocketbooks, especially when the nation is already struggling to climb out of a recession.

This is in line with what Heartland Institute and other trusted sources are saying, and what I am seeing happening in CO, MT, and even WY. These people may be interested in "saving" the environment (or the planet or the universe or whatever) but they are also using it as an excuse to "save" the economy - by destroying it so that they can rebuild it to their liking.

I have contended, for at least 20 years now, that the environist leadership's goal is to return the entire planet to a simulacrum of one of the early dynasties of Egypt, where 97% of the population were peasants or slaves, tied to their farms or cities with no education beyond that needed for them to do the work they were assigned, and never traveling more than a few miles from their birthplace; controlled by 2.5% of the population that formed a "middle-management" class (today, a technocratic class), in turn controlled by less than 0.5% of the population that formed the high-born or nobility and royalty (including the priesthood): only they could use the technology and get the education and have the perks of being human.

Destroying the economy and the middle class and working class is a key part of this process. The economics, like the fuel and chemicals, is just a part of it. We can add to that a whole long list of other measures: debauching the middle and working classes through drugs, sex and celebrity worship (the entertainment-communications media), eliminating or debasing their faith in God (new religions, watering down mainstream christianity, humanism, evolutionary "sciences"), conditioning them in various ways to accept corrupt and all-powerful government (replacing God, indeed) and a priesthood of medicine and other sciences, trashing their education (for all but the technocrats needed for the elite to live in high-tech luxury) in a multitude of ways, and many other methods.

The poorer parts of the world will be used to drag down the more wealthy, and then once public opinion is both totally hornswoggled and without any voice, the rest of the world will be reduced to an even worse state - or simply eliminated: a eugenics program such as Margaret Sanger could scarcely dream of. The various movements are but means to an end; the political events all too often stage-managed (even if some do get away from them).

They do not, of course, believe in God, but believe that they can make themselves and their descendants very godlike and as powerful as ancient gods were supposed to be. They have learned from God, of course, just as Satan did, and even pretend to be His servants.

Remember what Moses warned the Israelites about concerning prophets who CAN predict the future and CAN do what seem to be miracles - if they preach anything but what Moses brought down from Sinai. And what Paul warned the Corinthians and Galatians of. They have, to a very large degree, polluted religion just as they have polluted the waters and soil and air - and of course, blamed others for what THEY did.

What is the truth? We have a thousand years worth of clean-coal - if not as safe or clean as fission or fusion, still a sight better than what Britain and Pennyslvania burned for 200 years, and of tremendous fuel-energy and chemical value. We have hundreds of billions of barrels of oil and tens of trillions of cubic feet of methane and other natural gases on-shore; more in North America (US, Canada, Mexico) than known to exist in the rest of the world.

We have the future before us - but only if we can eliminate the albatross of government - the stinking corpse of a foul demon - that hangs around our necks.

More here





The Real Green Agenda

By Rick Manning

The logic of climate change-driven policy continues to elude anyone with a rational mind who is actually concerned about the environment.

Professional environmentalists continually bleat about how we only have one planet, and we have to save it from man-made pollution. They have even gone so far as to declare some penguin species, which live in Antarctica as "endangered" under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in order to use that law as a hammer to stop supposedly dangerous greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

While these advocates may or may not be well-meaning, the one thing we can be certain of is that their policies are actually increasing pollution around the world.

The United States and Western Europe have the most stringent anti-pollution policies in the world. This means that when a widget is manufactured in the U.S., the environmental impact is far less than when it is produced elsewhere in the world.

Additionally, when a theoretical widget is manufactured and sold in the United States, that widget doesn't create other environmental impacts through the burning of fossil fuels as it is loaded and shipped across the ocean to the U.S. consumer.

Yet, the impact of various global warming policies is to force manufacturing overseas to those very countries which have the least effective environmental laws, not only creating more pollution per widget, but increasing that exponentially due to the transportation of said widget.

At the height of the cap and trade debate, economists at The Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis estimated that the movement of the manufacture of goods away from the U.S. due to this "greenhouse gas" proposal would cost 400,000 U.S. manufacturing job due to the projected increased costs, shifting manufacturing away from the clean U.S. environment to less clean ones around the globe.

Currently, Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's global warming war on the U.S. industrial base is using the Clean Air Act as a cudgel against the domestic manufacturing base, discouraging U.S. production, and as a result, encouraging manufacturing in less environmentally friendly political regimes.

The obvious illogic of forcing the world's cleanest manufacturers to offshore their production facilities to China and other less environmentally friendly causes one to question if a cleaner environment is truly the objective of the professional greens.

A simple Google search reveals that the real green agenda is to lower the standard of living in the U.S. to deal with something that they call - ecological debt - a concept developed by a group called the New Economics Foundation.

The theory is that mankind is consuming more from the earth on an annual basis than the earth can replenish, and hence there is an ecological deficit.

Of course, the United States is the guiltiest of the guilty, as the New Economics Foundation claims if everyone consumed at the level of the U.S., we would need more than five earths to sustain the current world population. Great Britain would only take just over three earths, and so on.

When you understand the mentality that capitalism and the standard of living created by the free enterprise system is viewed as the enemy of the environment, the Obama Administration green policies make perfect sense.

While they cannot say it and survive politically, they want America's standard of living lowered for the sake of the world, and they will hide behind a cloak of green rhetoric to accomplish this agenda.

So, the next time you hear one of these government funded "scientists" railing about supposed global warming or climate change or whatever the next public relations iteration is, just remember that environmentalism is not at its core about cleaning up the environment. It is nothing more than an attempt to transfer wealth from the United States to third world countries around the world.

Perhaps the real genius of the green movement is that they have succeeded in putting a smiley face on policies designed to lower the standard of living of those who support them as they continue to push economic suicide.

After all, if they truly wanted less global pollution, the greenies would be pushing for eliminating corporate taxes on all items produced in the U.S., encouraging the manufacture of goods in a place where dumping waste in the streams and the air is frowned upon, instead of places where it is accepted and ignored.

SOURCE







Good Bye, Kyoto

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, after surviving 15 years, mostly spent on life support. It reached its peak in Bali in 2007 at the annual UN gabfest, had a sudden unexpected collapse in Copenhagen in 2009, and has been in a coma since.

Kyoto had its real beginning at the 1992 Global Climate Summit in Rio de Janeiro. I missed that great party, but George Bush the elder went and signed up for the United States. The language of the Global Climate Treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), was vague enough to not be completely objectionable-although we should have known better than to let the camel's nose enter the tent. It has prejudiced the subsequent discussion by focusing only on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The 1997 Protocol, negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, tried to put teeth into the FCCC. And its bite was strong enough so that the United States never ratified it-even during the Clinton-Gore years in the White House. The US Senate, bless their hearts, had voted unanimously, 95 to 0, for the 1997 Byrd-Hagel Resolution against imposing any kind of restrictions on energy use mandated by the United Nations. And during the Obama administration, with the most pro-AGW people in the White House, the Democrat-controlled Senate refused to consider the Cap-and-Trade bill (to restrict emissions of C02) that the House had passed in 2009.

The origin of Kyoto and its demise is a thrilling tale, full of heroes and villains, which has never been fully told. It produced some household words like "Hockeystick," "Climategate," "Mike's trick" and "hide the decline." I was fortunate, if that is the right word, to have been involved continuously in all aspects of Kyoto. Much of it is published in a Hoover Institution booklet "From Rio to Kyoto"-and I am now working on the sequel "From Kyoto to Copenhagen."

The Rise of Kyoto

I trace the main actor behind Kyoto as the UN-sponsored IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Its first full assessment report in 1990 provided the basis for the Rio Summit and its doctored second assessment report of 1996 provided the scientific underpinning for the Kyoto Protocol.

What exactly did the IPCC have to say in 1996, when its printed report became available? Those of us present in Madrid in 1995, when a final draft was approved by the scientists, became aware that the crucial language was changed after its approval and before it was printed. While this has been hotly denied by the perpetrators, the evidence is quite clear; one only has to compare the two documents. Dr. Frederick Seitz, one of America's most distinguished scientists and President Emeritus of the Rockefeller University, had this to say in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on June 12, 1996:

"In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report."

And he had good reason to be upset because here are the phrases that were deleted from the final draft:

* "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

* "While some of the pattern-base studies discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed] to [man-made] causes. Nor has any study quantified the magnitude of a greenhouse gas effect or aerosol effect in the observed data-an issue of primary relevance to policy makers."

*"Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."

* "While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification."

* "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, `We do not know. "

But the following sentence was added in the "revision":

The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate. [IPCC chapter 8, p.439]

The memorable phrase "the balance of evidence" used in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers is essentially meaningless, and certainly not backed by any scientific evidence. It turns out that the two main pieces of evidence, two crucial graphs in the IPCC report , were based on bad information or had actually been doctored [see my Hoover report].

Kyoto: A Money Machine -for Some

The Kyoto Protocol was a fraud right from Day One. Even if it had been punctiliously followed by all of the nations who ratified it, it would have achieved essentially nothing-a measly reduction in the calculated temperature half a century hence of 0.02 degrees C-an amount too small to even measure.

Kyoto was all about politics and money. The terms of the Kyoto Protocol demanded a 5.2% overall reduction from the emission levels of 1990 for industrialized nations. The choice of 1990, however, favored Europe, Britain, Germany, and Russia at the expense of the United States.

Around 1990, Britain switched from primarily coal to natural gas, thus reducing C02 emissions. And at about the same time, the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany took over its Eastern part, closing down much of its inefficient coal-fired electricity production.

The most pernicious provisions of the Kyoto Protocol were permits for emissions trading within the European Union and the so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). CDM permitted industries and others to keep emitting C02 while buying unused credits from other Kyoto nations or by sponsoring projects in developing nations that would reduce emissions.

What a racket this turned out to be. It has made Al Gore a "climate billionaire" who emits C02 copiously from his four residences, jet planes and yachts, but then buys "carbon offsets," emission credits from his own company, set up to trade C02 permits.

The other big money item has been the drive for so-called "clean energy"-with its huge subsidies for wind power and solar energy, widely abused in Europe-but especially in the United States where the subsidies are among the highest.

The poster child for clean energy is probably ethanol-a huge sink for government subsidies, essentially a wasteful scheme to transfer money from consumers to corn growers and refiners. Even environmentalists admit that ethanol does not lead to C02 reductions overall-and has many other undesirable environmental consequences.

Among the worst of the consequences of this "bio-fuel craze" has been the rise in the world price of corn-doubling to $7 a bushel in the past six months-wheat, and other agricultural commodities. It has led to food riots in many developing nations and served to perpetuate poverty throughout the world.

The general restrictions on C02 emissions have also slowed down economic growth by making energy more expensive. All in all, the Kyoto Protocol has caused nothing but disasters.

The Fall of Kyoto

Just as Rio marked the beginning of the Kyoto misadventure, the end became really evident in 2009 in Copenhagen. Even desperate efforts by scientist-alarmists (that went well beyond the IPCC) failed to make an impact. Who still remembers the "Copenhagen Diagnosis" or UNEP's rehash of the IPCC, churned out at the last minute? Ultimately, China and major developing nations rejected all efforts to impose limits on the use of fossil fuels; economic growth proved to be more important than hypothetical climate disasters.

The Climategate revelations may have played a decisive role in shaking the public's faith in the climate science of the IPCC. Not only did a clique of key IPCC scientists hide their raw temperature data and the methodology of their selection and adjustments, but they conspired to delete incriminating e-mails and fought hard against all attempts by independent outside scientists to replicate their results. They also undermined the peer-review system and tried to make it impossible for skeptical scientists to publish their work in scientific journals. In the process, they damaged the whole science enterprise, based on full publication of data and methods, replication of results, and open debate.

No Sequel to Kyoto-We Hope

And what about the future? There is not likely to be an extension of the Protocol or any similar international demand for emission restrictions. The 2010 gab fest, held in Cancun, Mexico, was not even a holding action and the 2011 conference in Durban, South Africa, will surely be an even greater waste of time and money.

But the financial subsidies have established politically important stakeholders who will continue to fight for programs of "clean energy," "renewable energy," and other such programs-all in the name of "saving the earth's climate for our children and grand-children."

One only has to look at the current situation in the United States to realize how bad things have become. Western states, under the leadership of California, have established the Western Climate Initiative. Eastern states have established a similar regime. One of the worst ideas is the so-called Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), which would force electric utilities to generate a certain percentage of their power from "renewable energy." Many of these groups demand a 20% "feed-in" quota by 2020, although politicians are playing all kinds of games with numbers. President Obama is calling for an 80% reduction by 2050. As he promised during the 2008 campaign, under his plan "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."

Probably the worst of all of the proposals may be the scheme to capture and sequester the emissions of C02 from power plants. Fortunately, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) may never come to pass because of technological reasons. In the US, a little more than 50% of electric power is produced from coal burning plants, with the cheapest and most secure fuel we have.

The George W. Bush administration was not much better in this respect than the Obama White House. Remember the "hydrogen economy"? Bush is responsible also for feeding the various interest groups with subsidies-even while he refused to consider C02 as a pollutant.

Unfortunately also, his EPA and his Justice Department did not mount an adequate scientific defense before the Supreme Court in 2007. By a 5-4 decision, the Court called C02 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, but left it up to the EPA to demonstrate that it would constitute a hazard to "human health and welfare." The EPA has now issued an Endangerment Finding based only on the flimsy evidence of the IPCC. But without waiting for the legal challenge to the EF to be settled in court, the EPA is trying to proceed energetically to impose C02 restrictions under the Clean Air Act. It would be interesting to see how the EPA will set the national ambient air quality standard for C02, which is globally determined now by the emissions of China and other developing nations-and no longer under the control of the United States.

The battle against the unreasonable efforts of the EPA has to be fought on several fronts. The Congress, with a Republican majority in the House, is trying to cut off funding for EPA programs that involve dubious efforts to control climate change. In the House, the "Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011" is sure to pass. The US Senate may finally pass the "Murkowski Resolution," which would nullify the Endangerment Finding of the EPA.

On the scientific front, it behooves us to demonstrate to all concerned that the conclusion of the IPCC about anthropogenic global warming is not based on any credible evidence. Future generations will thank us for this service: "skeptics" now labeled "deniers," "traitors," "criminals," and worse, will become the "realists" who correctly recognized Global Warming as a non-problem and saved our economy from going down the drain.

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Slippery carbon claims by Leftist Australian Prime Minister

China IS closing down some older coal-fired power plants -- but because they emit REAL pollution, not because of their CO2 emissions. And the replacement plants emit MORE CO2

A NEW row has erupted over the extent of the rest of the world's action to combat climate change after Julia Gillard cited China's closure of "dirty" coal-fired power stations to back her argument that Australia must act to price carbon.

Opposition climate action spokesman Greg Hunt leapt on the comments, accusing the Prime Minister of failing to mention that China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, was experiencing huge growth in emissions, but the Climate Institute's John Connor backed Ms Gillard's remarks.

He said China's action strengthened the argument for Australia to cut its emissions by 25 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020.

Appearing on the ABC's Q&A program on Monday night, Ms Gillard argued the rest of the world was moving on combating climate change. "There's this image that somehow we're the only ones - simply not true," she said. "You know, China [is] closing down a dirty coal-fired power generation facility at the rate of one every one or two weeks. Putting up a wind turbine at the rate of one every hour. They set their own targets by 2020 of reducing carbon pollution by 40 to 45 per cent per unit of GDP," Ms Gillard said.

Ms Gillard's comments followed closely the words of her climate change advisor Professor Ross Garnaut, who made the point about coal-fire power station closures in China in a recent climate change paper. However, Professor Garnaut went on to say the unsafe and economically inefficient plants were "replaced by larger, and economically and environmentally much more efficient plants".

A briefing to members of the Minerals Council of Australia cited research by economist and Reserve Bank Board member Warwick McKibbin that China's voluntary offer to reduce the emissions intensity of GDP by 40-45 per cent by 2020 would see its CO2 emissions rise by 496 per cent by 2020 on 1990 levels.

"While China has undertaken substantial efforts to increase renewable energy generation capacity, coal-fired power generation will continue to dominate," the note said.

The International Energy Agency projects that China's forecast new coal-fired power generation capacity (600GW) by 2035 would exceed the current entire generation capacity for the US, EU and Japan combined.

Executive Director of the Australian Coal Association Ralph Hillman said stations were being closed in China largely to address health concerns from their mercury emissions rather than their CO2 emissions.

But Mr Connor said China's actions were consistent with international efforts to limit global warming to 2C.

China's latest five-year plan dictates that carbon pollution per unit of GDP should be cut by 17 per cent. This was part of a long-term target to reduce pollution intensity by 40-45 per cent by 2020.

Mr Hunt said Ms Gillard had talked up China's actions on climate change without mentioning that China, "the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is experiencing huge growth in emissions and this is expected to continue for some time".

"If the Prime Minister wants to talk about China, she should release the figures on China's annual emissions growth for the last five years, and the projections on how much China's emissions are expected to increase by over the next five years," Mr Hunt said.

SOURCE

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