Why I think we're wasting billions on global warming, by top British climate scientist

The MoS has campaigned tirelessly against the folly of Britain’s eco-obsessed energy policy. Now comes a game-changing intervention... from an expert respected by the green fanatics themselves

By Professor Myles Allen

Last week, I was part of a group of academics who published a paper saying that the faster, more alarming, projections of the rate at which the globe is warming look less likely than previously thought.

That may mean we can afford to reduce carbon dioxide emissions slightly slower than some previously feared – but as almost everyone agrees, they still have to come down.

So the time has come to focus on something just as important: that 90 per cent of the measures adopted in Britain and elsewhere since the 1997 Kyoto agreement to cut global emissions are a waste of time and money – including windfarms in Scotland, carbon taxes and Byzantine carbon trading systems.

Do I think we’re doomed to disastrous warming? Absolutely not. But do I think we are doomed if we persist in our current approach to climate policy?

I’m afraid the answer is yes. Subsidising wind turbines and cutting down on your own carbon footprint might mean we burn through the vast quantity of carbon contained in the planet’s fossil fuels a little slower. But it won’t make any difference if we burn it in the end.

We need to rethink. For instance, if you suppose that the annual UN climate talks will save us, forget it.  I met a delegate at the last talks in Doha in December who told me he had just watched a two-hour debate that culminated in placing square brackets around a semi-colon.

Since Kyoto, world emissions haven’t fallen – they’ve risen by 40 per cent. And these vast jamborees – some involving more than 10,000 people – haven’t even started to discuss how we are going to limit the total amount of carbon we dump in the atmosphere, which is what we actually need to do to avoid dangerous climate change.

While failing to delay CO2 levels rising through the 400 parts per million level, Kyoto and the policies which stem from it have achieved the loss of jobs from countries such as  Britain – where we have at least managed a small reduction in the emissions we produce – to others whose factories are far more carbon-intensive.

As my Oxford colleague, the economist Dieter Helm, noted in his book The Carbon Crunch, we may have cut the CO2 actually emitted here, but our reliance on imports means the total emissions attributable to British economic activity have increased by 19 per cent since 1992.

Where Dieter and I disagree is that carbon taxes are the answer. A carbon tax will not stop fossil fuel carbon being burnt. While a modest tax would be good for turbine-builders and the Treasury, in the short-term it will not promote the technology we need to solve the problem.

There’s been a lot of talk about ‘unburnable carbon’ – the carbon we shouldn’t burn if we are to keep global temperature rises below 2C. A catchy phrase, but can we really tell the citizens of India of 2080 not to touch their coal?

And to those on the other side who think that solar and nuclear will someday become so cheap we will choose to leave that coal alone, I’m afraid you have some basic physics working against you.
Let’s get down to some numbers.

Our new research paper gives a revised estimate of the ‘Transient Climate Response’ – a term which measures how much the world will warm in the medium term as carbon dioxide levels double.

We found a range of 1C to 2C, slightly down on the 1C to 2.5C range previously suggested by climate models.

But much more important is another, bigger number: four trillion tonnes. That’s roughly the total amount of fossil carbon locked underground before the Industrial Revolution.

So far, we’ve emitted about half a trillion tonnes as carbon dioxide, and are set to emit the next half-trillion by the early 2040s.

The Transient Climate Response also happens to be a good measure of the warming we get for every trillion tonnes of carbon dumped into the atmosphere. If we emit the lot, we’re looking at well over 4C of warming, which everyone agrees would be pretty tough.

Fortunately, there is a solution. It is perfectly possible to burn fossil carbon and not release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: you have to filter it out of the flue gases, pressurise it, and re-inject, or ‘sequester’, it back underground.

If you’re using fossil carbon to drive a car or fly a plane, you just have to pay someone else to bury CO2 for you.

The only thing that actually matters for climate policy is whether, before we release too much, we get to the point of burying carbon at the same rate that we dig it up.

Nothing else matters – not for climate, anyway. Not efficiency targets, nor even population growth, provided we meet this goal. Unfortunately, turbines, fancy taxes and carbon trading schemes aren’t going to help us do so.

How much is too much? Well, if the Transient Climate Response is 1C-2C, we’ll need to limit future emissions to around a trillion tonnes of carbon to avoid more than 2C of warming.

It could be a lot less or it could be a bit more, but since this is the middle of the range that everyone agrees on, let’s get on with it and revisit the total when temperatures reach 1.5C. That’s when we’ll have more of an idea of where we’re going.

So with a trillion tonnes to go, we need to increase the fraction we bury at an average rate of one per cent for every 10 billion tonnes of global emissions.

That’s not a policy – that’s a fact. For every 10 billion tonnes we emit without increasing this sequestered fraction by one per cent, we will just have to bury more later in order to catch up.

If this is what needs to be done, why not just make it a condition of licensing to extract or import fossil fuels? In forestry, if you fell trees, the law obliges you to replant.

We must use the same principle: a law to compel a slowly rising percentage of carbon dioxide emissions to be sequestered and stored.

Fossil fuel industrialists will need a few years to gear up, but they won’t need taxpayer-funded subsidies.

They’ll simply need to do this to stay in business. All past evidence suggests that when industry is faced with technical challenges it needs to overcome, it’s ingenious at finding ways of doing so.

For our part, all we need to decide is that we want them to start now, rather than letting them carry on as they are – and let them claim in 20 years’ time that it’s too late, and that they need massive subsidies for carbon burial because they’re too big to fail.

You might argue that this would need a cumbersome agreement. Not so. All the countries who take this seriously have to do is make it clear we won’t import goods from China unless they have been made using fossil carbon treated in the same way.

If Apple makes its laptops there, it won’t want them singled out as causing dangerous climate change.

Of course, there will be a cost, passed on to the long-suffering consumer. But making carbon capture mandatory would trigger a headlong race to find the cheapest sources of carbon dioxide and places to bury it.

Frankly, I’d rather pay an engineer in Poland to actually dispose of carbon dioxide than some Brussels eco-yuppie to trade it around.

Even on relatively pessimistic estimates, if the sequestered fraction rises at one per cent per 10 billion tonnes, it would be getting on for 20 years before the cost of carbon capture would exceed the £100 per year and rising that the average UK household already pays in assorted windfarm subsidies.

The impact on petrol prices is even less dramatic: 50 per cent carbon capture, which we might reach by the 2040s, might add 10p to the cost of a litre of petrol. That’s well under what we already pay in fuel taxes which, we are told, are supposed to help stop climate change.

We might eventually decide to build more windfarms, or drive electric cars, or just to reduce our dependence on Russian oil and gas.

But if we enforce carbon capture, these will become economic and energy-security decisions, and nothing to do with climate change.

So there you have it: one policy, that everyone can agree on, which would actually solve the problem without Brussels bureaucrats dictating what kind of light-bulbs we can buy. Sound good to you?

    Climate physics nerds may protest that it can’t be that simple, because each tonne of carbon in the atmosphere has slightly less impact than the last. But then carbon cycle nerds would point out that for each tonne of carbon we burn, a slightly higher fraction remains in the atmosphere as other carbon pools fill up. And as so often happens in science, if we bring these two sets of nerds together they annihilate each other in a brief burst of powerpoint, and we end up with the relationship we first thought of: 1-2 degrees per trillion tonnes of carbon.

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Global warming is 'fairly flat', admits Lord Stern

Lord Stern, who originally warned the Government about climate change, has admitted that global warming has been “fairly flat” for the last decade.

The peer, who first warned the Government of the cost of climate change in his 2006 Stern Report, said that for the last decade global warming has remained stable.

“I note this last decade or so has been fairly flat,” he told the Telegraph Hay Festival audience.

He said the reasons were because of quieter solar activity, aerosol pollution in certain parts of the world blocking sunshine and heat being absorbed by the deep oceans.

Lord Stern pointed out that all these effects run in cycles or are random so warming could accelerate again soon.

“In the next five to ten years it is likely we will see the acceleration because these things go in cycles,” he warned.

He also pointed out that 1998 was an extremely hot year because of the El Nino weather pattern and that this decade is still hotter relatively than previous decades.

Lord Stern said that carbon emissions are rising faster than ever and that global temperatures are more likely to rise by 4C over the long term than 2C, meaning floods and droughts.

He said it was an “illusion” to claim that the short term flat line in global warming means that global warming is no longer a threat.

“It is a dangerous extrapolation of the short term phenomenon into a long term trend when the underlying responses for long term trends in terms of rising greenhouse gases are well understood and clear.”

Lord Stern also said he has written to the Prime Minister urging him to introduce a target to decarbonise electricity by 2030 as part of the Energy Bill, currently going through Parliament.

He said investors need the policy clarity in order to build the infrastructure Britain needs in future.

He also said green electricity will be a key part of meeting emissions targets by running cars, heating and other power generation instead of fossil fuels.

"We desperately need clarity. People making big investments need as much clarity as possible. Government induced policy risk deters investment.”

His comments come as Ed Davey, the Climate Change Secretary, said Europe should commit to a tough new target to halve emissions by 2030.

He wants Brussels to set an emissions reduction target of 50 per cent on 1990 levels by 2030 within an international deal, or go it alone with a 40 per cent goal if an agreement cannot be struck.

This will mean the UK making its own contribution by cutting emissions by 50 per cent by 2025.

But Mr Davey said each country should be able to cut their own emissions how they choose, for example nuclear, rather than having to do it all through switching to renewables.

As a consequence he was against a European Union wide renewable energy target because it is "inflexible and unnecessary," he added.

“We want to maintain flexibility for member states in how they meet this ambitious emissions target. There are a variety of options to decarbonise any country's economy.

"In the UK, our approach is technology neutral and our reforms will rely on the market and competition to determine the low carbon electricity mix. We will therefore oppose a renewable energy target at an EU level as inflexible and unnecessary."

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Secret donors behind a Green/Left think-tanks

Washington institutions esteemed for their independent scholarship don’t disclose donations from corporations and foreign governments.  Secrecy seems to be essential to the Green/Left

Ken Silverstein

The Center for American Progress, Washington’s leading liberal think tank, has been a big backer of the Energy Department’s $25 billion loan guarantee program for renewable energy projects. CAP has specifically praised First Solar, a firm that received $3.73 billion under the program, and its Antelope Valley project in California.

Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees. Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner— a top Obama fundraiser who left his job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”

Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power-house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for corporations— was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.

CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy. But the fact that CAP has received financial support from First Solar while touting its virtues to Washington policy-makers points to a conflict of interest that, critics argue, ought to be disclosed to the public. CAP’s promotion of the company’s interests has supplemented First Solar’s aggressive Washington lobbying efforts, on which it spent more than $800,000 during 2011 and 2012.

“The only thing more damaging than disclosing your donors and having questions raised about the independence of your work is not disclosing them and have the information come to light and undermine your work,” says Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “The best practice, whether required by the IRS or not, is to disclose contributions.”

Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make campaign donations. And unlike lobbyists and elected officials, think tanks are not subject to financial disclosure requirements, so they reveal their donors only if they choose to.

That makes it impossible for the public and lawmakers to know if a think tank is putting out an impartial study or one that’s been shaped by a donor’s political agenda. “If you’re a lobbyist, whatever you say is heavily discounted,” says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert on political ethics. “If a think tank is saying it, it obviously sounds a lot better. Maybe think tanks aren’t aware of how useful that makes them to private interests. On the other hand, maybe it’s part of their revenue model.”

Most think tanks are nonprofit organizations, so a donor can even get a nice tax break for contributing. But it’s their reputation for impartiality and their web of contacts that makes them especially useful as policy advocates. “Think tanks can always draw a big audience to your event, including government folks,” a Washington lobbyist who has worked with several told me. “And people generally don’t think they would twist anything, or wonder about where they get their money.”

While think tanks portray themselves as altruistic scholarly institutions, they emphasize their political influence when courting donors. “If you have a particular area of policy interest, you can support a specific research effort under way,” the Brookings Institution says in one pitch for cash. Those interested in ”a deeper engagement” —read: ready to fork over especially large sums of money— get personal briefings from resident experts and can work directly with senior Brookings officials to draw up a research agenda that will “maximize impact on policymaking.”

The Center for Strategic and International Studies advertises itself as being “in the unique position to bring together leaders of both the public and private sectors in small, often off-the-record meetings to build consensus around important policy issues.” It allows top-tier donors to directly sponsor reports, events and speaker series.

Because most think tanks don’t fully disclose their donors, it’s not always easy to see what sort of benefits money can buy. But during Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings, the Atlantic Council, where he’d been chairman before moving to the Pentagon, released a list of its foreign donors. One of them turned out to be the oil-rich government of Kazakhstan, headed by dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev. Last year, the council hosted a conference on Kazakhstan that was paid for by the Nazarbayev regime and Chevron, which has vast oil interests in the country and is also a major donor to the council. Keynote speakers included Kazakhstan’s former ambassador to the United States and Kenneth Derr, a former Chevron CEO and now Kazakhstan’s honorary consul in San Francisco.

John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and the head of Obama’s first transition team, founded the Center for American Progress in 2003. Last year, Podesta stepped down as CAP’s president—he remains its chair and counselor—and was replaced by Neera Tanden, who served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations. Former Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello heads the CAP Action Fund, an advocacy unit, which operates out of the same offices and shares personnel.

CAP has emerged as perhaps the most influential of all think tanks during the Obama era, and there’s been a rapidly revolving door between it and the administration. CAP is also among the most secretive of all think tanks concerning its donors. Most major think tanks prepare an annual report containing at least some financial and donor information and make it available on their websites. According to CAP spokeswoman Andrea Purse, the center doesn’t even publish one.

Purse told me that CAP “follows all financial disclosure requirements with regard to donors…. We don’t use corporate funds to pay for research or reports.” But she flatly refused to discuss specific donors or to provide an on-the-record explanation for why CAP won’t disclose them.

After growing rapidly in its first few years, tax records show, CAP’s total assets fell in 2006 for the first time, from $23.6 million to $20.4 million. Assets started growing again in 2007 when CAP founded the Business Alliance, a membership rewards program for corporate contributors, and then exploded when Obama was elected in 2008. According to its most recent nonprofit tax filing, CAP’s total assets now top $44 million, and its Action Fund treasury holds $6 million more.

Several CAP insiders, who asked to speak off the record, told me that when Podesta left, there was a fear that contributions would dry up. Raising money had always been important, they said, but Tanden ratcheted up the efforts to openly court donors, which has impacted CAP’s work. Staffers were very clearly instructed to check with the think tank’s development team before writing anything that might upset contributors, I was told.

More HERE




Greenie pesticide freakery

By Rich Kozlovich

All that you know about pesticides is based on lies. Either lies of commission or lies of omission, but lies none-the-less, because in the end, their statements and claims are deliberately worded to encourage people draw false conclusions.  Every negative health claim made by them is blatantly false, which has been the pattern since Rachel Carson made that tactic so popular in her book Silent Spring with her claims regarding DDT and cancer.

“We don’t need pesticides”!  How many times have I heard this?  I always ask the same questions.  First of all; it currently costs around 300 million dollars to bring a pesticide to market.  Initially, the costs for testing were substantially less, but it still comes down to this.  Why in the world would any company spend a dime to produce a product no one needs?  Then I ask; what would make the most frugal people (frugal doesn’t mean cheap.  It means they don’t waste) on the planet – farmers - buy a product they don’t need?

Picture this.  Farmers are quietly sitting on the porch at the end of the day and a sales representative from Dow, or Monsanto, or Bayer, or whomever…..take your pick….comes up to them and says; “I know you don’t have a need for the chemicals I’m selling, but my boss told me I will lose my job if I don’t start selling them.  Can I count on you to buy about $100,000 worth today?”  And of course the farmers (Remember…the most frugal people on the planet!) say….. “Why sure, let me write a check right now!”   Don’t bet your life on that!  Farmers buy pesticides because they’re needed and needed desperately in order to feed the world’s hungry mouths.

But pesticides aren't only used in agriculture.  Pesticides are used extensively in businesses and homes in order to protect the buildings, the people and their property.  Termites, carpenter ants, carpenter bees, cockroaches, rats, mice ….and…. bed bugs all infest structures.   Why have bed bugs become a national plague?  We didn’t’ have them before did we? Yes….actually we did…..all through human history bed bugs have plagued humanity until the advent of DDT.  That truly was the beginning of modern effective pest control.

When the boys came back from WWII bed bugs were ubiquitous.  Why?  Because they were there when they left!  But now something changed.   They came back with DDT and stories of its effectiveness against insect pests.  In 1946 the answer to bed bugs was easy to use, effective, inexpensive chemistry that was readily available to the general public.  The result?  It was the first time in human history any society could rid themselves of this plague!

The greenies are fond of pointing out how bed bugs became resistant to DDT….kind of a snarky …..see, I told you so!  My answer is always the same - so what?  Resistance is the nature of nature, whether it is in plants, animals – including insects, or microorganisms. That is why new research for chemistry is needed continually. That’s like saying we shouldn’t use antibiotics because bacteria become resistant when used too frequently. So then, should we just die instead?   However, as they became resistant to DDT we shifted to two other chemical classifications known as carbamates and organophosphates; both effective even to this day.  So, if they are so effective why do we have bed bugs?  Because we no longer have them in our arsenal of tools needed to protect the public, thanks U.S. Environmental Protection Agency!

We need pesticides, and we need chemical companies to develop new pesticides continually.  Resistance is the nature of nature.   What we didn’t know in 1946 was that we fell into the pattern of all living things regarding resistance.  Whether it's pesticides or antibiotics, resistance in part and parcel of all living things, including plants, animals, insects and microorganisms.  As a result human survival is dependent on research for new products continually.  But that is the crux of the matter isn’t it?  If “radical” thinking supports things that are detrimental to humanity, whether it is about pesticides, agriculture, vaccinations or energy production why would we wish to adopt that as “mainstream” thinking?

The idea of “radical” thinking becoming “mainstream” thinking is frightening, and yet we are willingly going down that road when we in the pest control industry adopt such practices as Integrated Pest Management (IPM) or Green Pest Control.  Neither of which exists in structural pest control.  IPM is an agricultural concept based on threshold limits.  What is it based on in structural pest control?  There is no logical foundation for it in structural pest control.   If there is no logical foundation it doesn’t exist....except the government says it exists....and so it exists illogically.  As for 'green' pest control; that is pretty much whatever anyone wants it to be, because ‘green’ pest control has no universally accepted definition; there is no consensus as to its range; its ideological origins, or the modalities of action which characterize it.

This lack of clarity extends to every philosophical flavor of the day presented by radicals.   They claim what they do is 'for the children'.  Yet when you look around the world it isn't what they do for the children that should stike us, its more like what they do 'to the children', that should get our attention.  We need to start paying attention to the facts, and not the speculative lies and the emotional appeal of the moment presented by these radicals. Lives are dependent on it.

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Tornados caused by cold air colliding with warm air, not carbon emissions

Within hours of a catastrophic tornado hitting Oklahoma, resulting in at least 24 deaths, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) took to the floor of the Senate to blame “Republicans run[ning] off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings.” He claimed “cyclones in Oklahoma” were caused by supposed man-made climate change driven by carbon emissions.

There’s only one problem. Tornadoes are caused by cold air colliding with warm air, not by carbon emissions, writes Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologist and U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Writing on his blog, Spencer noted that “If there is one weather phenomenon global warming theory does not predict more of, it would be severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.”

Spencer explained, “Instead, tornadoes require strong wind shear (wind speed and direction changing rapidly with height in the lower atmosphere), the kind which develops when cold and warm air masses ‘collide’. Of course, other elements must be present, such as an unstable airmass and sufficient low-level humidity, but wind shear is the key. Strong warm advection (warm air riding up and over the cooler air mass, which is also what causes the strong wind shear) in advance of a low pressure area riding along the boundary between the two air masses is where these storms form.”

He added, “contrasting air mass temperatures is the key. Active tornado seasons in the U.S. are almost always due to unusually cool air persisting over the Midwest and Ohio Valley longer than it normally does as we transition into spring.” Reading that, Sen. Whitehouse?

If anything, an uptick in tornado activity in the U.S. is because of cooler air, not warmer air predicted by the rise of carbon emissions. That means, even if increased carbon emissions was dramatically affecting temperature increases, it would have little effect on tornado activity in the U.S.  To underscore this point, Spencer wrote, “More tornadoes due to ‘global warming’, if such a thing happened, would be more tornadoes in Canada, where they don’t usually occur. Not in Alabama.” Which, we would note, would necessarily mean fewer tornados in the U.S. as the tornado “belt” moved north.

But it’s not happening. Primarily, because we cannot control the weather. Cold and warm air masses have been colliding for millions of years, regardless of the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is just a basic function of weather and climate. Tornados are not something new.

All of which makes Sen. Whitehouse’s unscientific claims that Republicans and carbon emitters like power plants are those who drive cars nothing more than pure demagoguery. As Spencer put it, “Anyone who claims more tornadoes are caused by global warming is either misinformed, pandering, or delusional.”

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Heartland Institute Responds to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse

By Joe Bast

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) apparently has been delivering weekly speeches on global warming (alias “climate change”) to an empty Senate chamber for quite some time. Who knew?

His speech on May 20 contained some good news. He reported the “default Republican position is that climate change is a hoax. It’s been said right on this floor, and in committees, and I haven’t seen a single Republican senator stand up afterwards in this chamber to say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s actually not the case.’”

The senator went on to say, “Yet not one Republican has ever gotten back to me, even quietly on the side, to say, ‘You know what? This is really getting serious. Let’s see if we can work on this.’”

This is great news. It means Republicans understand the real science and economics of global warming better than some of us on the skeptical side of the global warming debate could have hoped.

Recently, there have been rumors that a carbon tax – the left’s second choice of ways, after EPA regulations that ban the use of fossil fuels, to shut down manufacturing in the U.S. – might be part of a deficit reduction or debt ceiling agreement being secretly negotiated by Obama and Republican leaders. Thank you, Sen. Whitehouse, for putting those rumors to rest.

Amid the many erroneous claims made by the senator about the science and economics of global warming debate appear ad hominem attacks against global warming skeptics, standard issue for the environmental extremists who dominate this debate. The senator claims, without citing a source, that “more than 95 percent of climate scientists are convinced that human carbon pollution is causing massive and unprecedented change to our atmosphere and oceans.” This is untrue, as anyone familiar with the debate knows. I’ve discussed the myth of consensus here and here.

The senator claims “a lot of those five-percenters [skeptics] are on the payroll of the polluters. You know that. It’s public knowledge. Some of those ‘payroll scientists’ are the same people who denied acid rain, or the dangers of tobacco.” This is shameful. Tens of thousands of scientists, probably most scientists, don’t believe man-made global warming is a crisis or even a problem. Vanishingly few are on the “payroll of polluters,” indeed far fewer than the number of true believers who are on the payrolls of corporations and government agencies that pay them to believe in global warming.

Later in his speech the senator correctly refers to “The Heartland Institute, and the Institute for Energy Research, and the American Enterprise Institute, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, and The Heritage Foundation” as organizations that support the skeptical view. But he then slanders these groups by alleging they are all “front organizations … all just part of the same cheesy vaudeville show put on by the big polluters.”

Speaking only for my organization, The Heartland Institute, I can report that less than 5 percent of our income last year came from companies that either produce energy or have emissions that might qualify them for the title of “big polluters.” This is almost certainly less than the Center for American Progress, the biggest liberal think thank, raises. And unlike CAP, donors don’t dictate what our researchers say. I’m quite sure the same is true of the other organizations Sen. Whitehouse names.

The senator is simply repeating a phony charge against individuals and organizations that disagree with him. He should know better, do his homework, and then apologize to the people he’s defamed.

Sen. Whitehouse reminds us why it’s a good thing there are Republicans in Congress who understand, and not naively and wrongly believe in, global warming.

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