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By Chris Horner, American Spectator
President Obama’s budget outline released today includes substantial assumed revenues from a new “global warming” tax, the largest revenue-raising measure in U.S. history – at $300 billion per year from mandating then selling “cap-n-trade” carbon dioxide ration coupons, vastly bigger than the tax to fight WWII even in present dollars ($107 billion per year). It’s spectacularly larger than the last energy tax hike tried by the same crowd, the proposed (and failed) 1993 BTU tax that Al Gore now says cost the Democrats control of Congress ($47 billion as proposed). So much for Obama studying the mistakes of the Clinton-Gore administration’s first year.

He plans on raising from the energy tax imposed in order to avert the end of the world to pay for his social engineering agenda.

This adds a special twist to the old conundrum of “sin taxes” – the demonized vice immediately becomes a virtuous, or at least indispensible, contributor to the public purse. Now, the (faltering) theory of catastrophic Man-made global warming is a necessary catastrophe to claim he’s averting: the Obama administration needs the threat in order to offset, at the bookkeeping level, much of his agenda.

But how, precisely, does he continue the revenue stream when he succeeds at his express goal of this scheme, as told during the campaign to the San Francisco Chronicle, to “bankrupt” coal and those who try to burn it (to produce more than half of our electricity) by ensuring that electricity prices “skyrocket” for those who dare? That’s a problem, but one the tax-raisers will surely find a way around, in the form of raising other taxes…a lot.

Another twist is found in various media reports today of the Obama administration’s line, that some portion (up to 20%) of the annual $300 billion raised by the global warming tax “would go to tax credits for lower- and middle-income working families.”

Don’t forget what this largess represents. It is not aid to improve their lot from current conditions but instead, as I have previously written, in the words of legislation recently floated to implement such a scheme, “compensation, through the issuance of a monthly rebate, for the loss in purchasing power resulting from” imposing the global warming tax. It is an attempt to make some of those hardest hit by this price-hiking and job-killing measure closer to whole before imposition of the tax.

The transfer is a new entitlement and the global warming tax, the largest hike in U.S. history, is in perpetuity, requiring that government always proclaim that they are protecting you from climate catastrophe, as without that premise the revenue source for their social engineering is no more.

If opponents can’t win this giant misstep, I am at a loss at to what they can win in the fight to retain our system, more successful than any of those we seek to emulate with the new rush to a social democratic state.
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By The Daily Bayonet

The Goreacle speaks to the AAAS

Welcome to the hottest weekly round-up since last week’s edition. It’s been a very busy week in the world of global warming changey-hoaxy, so I have a lot of links for you. In fact, if this post were a breakfast cereal I’d tell you that you’re getting 20% more sugary goodness FREE, there’s that much more stuff this week. Dip in and get your skeptic fill of news and laughs, you know you want to.

Global Warming prophet profit Al Gore has told anyone that would listen that the ‘debate is over’, which makes me wonder what debate he’s asking the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to get involved in, exactly?Al likes to get others involved in his global hoax because it turns out he’s actually a shy guy and hates any sort of attention that might demand he answer a question or two about the real science. Tom Nelson discovers a cooling trend in Al’s Internet traffic… perhaps Al needs some new material?Some hunger activists want Al to make another movie, but Action Against Hunger is likely to fail in their bid to draft the scaremeister. Al’s already made as much money from starving people as he can, there is no upside for him to make another movie.Here’s another course of study that Al would have failed had he been eligible for it, which thankfully he wasn’t.Despite Al’s best alarmist efforts, his hoax is failing, despite the best efforts of his trusty servant and warming muppet Jim (Igor) Hansen.Canadian alarmist and irritating hippy David Suzuki faces some awkward questions about just how apolitical his Foundation is. Hey, he’s a geneticist not an accountant. Or a climate expert, even though Ontario is using him as the Powerwise frontman.

if only it was this easy…

Prince Chuckles, the loony-tune royal that dumped the hot model so that he could marry his horse, is going to save the world by flying around in a jet that could transport over 140 people, but will have fewer that 20 aboard.

The Fresh Prince of Green Air

Tom Nelson exposes an alarmist that actually did his research. After years of alarmism, that is.Land sinking or sea rising? Does anyone care, atoll?Spare a thought for the cuddly koala that environmentalists tried to kill twice.Now that the world has no money left, the World Bank can concentrate on its real expertise, global warming.The BBC, promotes alarmist nonsense from Chris Field. The inconvenient truth about ‘climate scientist’ Field is here.The Institution of Mechanical Engineers gets blowback for peddling the global warming hoax.A skeptic and a warmist walk into a synagogue… (click for the ‘punchline’)It’s like alarmists want to lose what little public support remains, now they attack burgers?Think Progress have provided an excellent public service and have created a must-see list of what they term Climate Denial Jokers. Check out the comments where miffed skeptics plead to be added to the list, it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen since the last funniest thing I saw. Unfortunately, The Daily Bayonet failed to make the list, but rest assured I will work ever harder to gain the scorn of the hippies.A warming muppet wants even more civil disobedience, and films an anti-coal commercial, but the big news is that James Hansen fell off the deep end when he used the term ‘death-trains’ to describe coal trains. The ones that provide much of America’s power and stops people freezing to death. Pielke sums up Hansen beautifully.

James Hansen hates jazz, apparently

Alarmist nonsense hurts Africans, again, and Aussie greens turn into deniers about their role in the wild fire tragedy.

Greenpeace gets beaten up by Polish Miners. Those are miners from Poland, not people who dig shoe polish, just to be clear.A global poll conspiracy, or an idiot called Lee? You decide.What do Alec Baldwin and Christie Brinkley have in common? A flat-lined IQ, that’s what.Bill Clinton, a man uncertain of the definition of the word ‘is’, declares that the “climate will crater and we won’t be able to preserve civilization” unless he gets an new intern, freshly oiled and perfumed delivered to his office every day. OK, I made that last bit up, but he was scary-alarmy, not at all hopey-changy.Canadian athletes, already assured that they will have a Gold neutral 2010, are demanding a carbon neutral event too.When Greens go bad (NSFW autoplay video – language)Part Three: Inconvenient Truths

Bjorn Lomborg describes a better way to manage the green agenda:

The inconvenient demise of ethanol, one of Al Gore’s favorite things. Oh, and it wrecks the environment too.

Global warming is bad for lizards. Butterflies too.

A lizard, lounging

The UNIPCC, the oracle for the Goreacle, claims to be the consensus that proves global warming is real. How inconvenient is it then that only 1 in 5 members are actually climate scientists?

350. A dramatic sequel to the shouty “This is SPARTA” movie, or the most important number on Earth?

Another Hansen take-down, courtesy of Planet Moron.

Global warming is actually global cooling, and it has not stopped yet.

It’s the heliospheric current sheet, stupid.

The hits to the green love for compact fluorescent lamps keep coming. First the inconvenient mercury, now CFL’s are found to actually increase carbon emissions.

Windmills, not that good, actually.

busted

All the warmists depend on dodgy computer models for their doomsday predictions. It’s a pity the data they plug into those models is junk, then.

Global warming threats are empty, says a guy in Cleveland.

Global warming and The Caine Mutiny, this week’s must-read.

Nuclear power, not as scary as the greens want you to believe.

Climate is unpredictable, predictably enough.

The BBC decides that the public is simply not scared enough and attempts to correct the situation.

Coldplay? Not so much as it turns out.

Good news, America, the EPA is going to ask you to bend over, again.

Green schemes, studies and scientists are getting gazillions of dollars from the Porkulus Bill. Since the sums are so vast can skeptics stop listening to the green whines about research funded by ‘big oil’? After all, surely if money corrupts science as the greens claim, they must be equally vulnerable to the lure of megabucks, right?

Shockah! The UK’s Guardian prints a skeptical article.

Irish environment minister and skeptic gets support.

Is it safe to eat green pork? CBS finds a vicious cycle, spins. The million snowman march.

Canada’s National Post wants global warming off the agenda.

Australia gets it’s very own skeptics party. That’s a political party, not a drunken celebration; although one does not rule out the other, we are talking about Aussies.

Alarmists missed their moment to be honest. Again.

Alberta Addresses Oil Sands’ Gigantic Footprint. Send mail to #1, Oil Sands Gigantic Footprint, Fort McMurray, AB

Offset that, Gaia!

Minnesota pulls back on green initiatives.

Lessons the UK can learn from this winter.

Kallyvornya’s shedding jobs by the thousand. Welcome to the harsh reality of a green economy.

The climate change fraud.

Want a green home? Prepare to get medieval.

This week’s hottie is brought to you courtesy of a tenuous link to Gore Lied’s decision to run his latest poll using Poll Daddy. I thought Poll Daddy sounded like Go Daddy, and so you have the fast and curvy spokesmodel for Go Daddy, Danica Patrick, for this week’s hottie. After all, every skeptic likes a fast woman.

Written by Garry Reed, Examiner
Some people are truly concerned environmentalists. Some people are eco-scammers.

Let’s find out which you are, if either.

First there were those magnificent “green” light bulbs. You know, those long-lasting but more expensive CFL bulbs that will replace all ordinary incandescent light bulbs through coercive government mandate. (The European Union has already banned them, causing libertarians to ask, “If they’re so incredibly good why do they have to be mandated?”)

They’re environmentally friendly, but only if you don’t drop one. If a bulb hits the deck you have a mini toxic waste dump on your hands. And you get to inhale a dose of mercury vapor if you don’t immediately run, open all the windows and shut down your central forced air heating and cooling system.

Instead of broom and dustpan, cleanup Involves things like a glass jar with a metal lid, plastic bags, duct tape, wet wipes, possibly throwing clothing away and, in some states, taking a trip to your local friendly neighborhood recycling center.

Breaking a CFL bulb is an EPA event. In fact, the cleanup clues above came from the Environmental Protection Agency website.

Then there are wind farms, Dallas Billionaire T. Boone Pickens’ wet dream of millions upon millions of acres given over to row upon row of gigantic wind turbines, subsidized by billions upon billions of our taxbucks. Unfortunately, they’re almost all located miles away from places that need the electricity (like, maybe, cities?) requiring mile upon mile of new transmission lines, which lose power over distance. In reality, the generators produce and the power lines deliver tiny fractions of the juice needed for more than a third world existence. Politically connected rich people (like what’s left of the Kennedy clan) love them but won’t allow them to be built in their own backyards.

Makes one wonder how big of a backyard T. Boone has, and how many more acres will be stolen from their owners by eminent domain.

And all assurances aside, they still kill birds. How many birds, and whether it matters, depends on ideology rather than reality. Environmentalists protested in the 1970s after an oil spill off Santa Barbara that killed less than 100 birds and got most of California’s offshore drilling shut down. Meanwhile, stats show that 10,000 to 40,000 birds are killed by wind turbine blades every year.

The Green message seems to be clear: We hate big oil for killing a handful of birds so we shut them down, but we love big wind so let the killing continue. The fact that “other things” kill more birds than blower blades doesn’t change reality.

Now there’s the problem of “green” solar panels.

Solar power is the Arc of the Covenant of green power advocates. It’s clean, it’s natural, it’s environmentally friendly, it’s renewable, it’s heavily subsidized by our taxbucks, and it’s not big oil.

But it is big on Nitrogen trifluoride.

NF3, as it’s known, is a chemical used for cleaning microcircuits during the manufacture of consumer goodies like flat-screen TVs, iPhones, computer chips and, oh by the way, thin-film solar panels.

Ten years ago it wasn’t considered dangerous enough to make the Kyoto Protocol hit list, so manufacturers concerned about their green image have been using it like crazy. The EPA has actively encouraged its use. Now, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, say NF3 has a potential greenhouse impact “larger than even that of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants.”

Another source described NF3 as “a gas that is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide in contributing to global warming.”

Oops.

So are these examples of environmentalism or eco-flimflamism? Fire up your facts and figures and stats and arguments and counterarguments and “yeah, buts” and let the din of the spin begin. Everyone has an opinion but few have the facts. Most people just keep recycling other people’s opinions of other people’s opinions of other people’s opinions.

To most people, ideology means more than actual science when it comes to environmentalism.

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By Christopher Horner, Financial Post
Barack Obama, on his first foreign trip as President to Canada, will then lecture the United States’ largest trading partner and source of energy imports on the need for a renewed commitment to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Both governments claim to be forging ahead with what’s known as a cap-and-trade system, domestically and internationally, through a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, expected to be signed later this year. In a cap-and-trade system, the government creates a top emissions level — the cap — and assigns quotas to individual sources of emissions, like utilities and factories, dictating emissions levels for each facility. A facility then must either reduce emissions to meet its quota or buy “hot air credits” from facilities that emit less than their quota. This system rations greenhouse gases (GHGs). The European experience provides a cautionary tale. There, cap-and-trade applied to GHGs was far pricier than its proponents presumed, and didn’t bring the promised emission reductions. It was all pain, no gain. Excuses for all of this are plenty, though it is inarguable that cap-and-trade is not well-suited for ubiquitous GHGs like carbon dioxide, which are not “pollutants” in any traditional sense. The attraction of adopting such a scheme is difficult to spot. Except for politicians, who like cap-and-trade because it is an indirect and non-transparent tax — they claim businesses pay for GHG reductions instead of taxpayers. Of course, people pay taxes, not businesses. As a result, voters in Europe, and even their usually timid industry, are rebelling. Cap-and-trade, the key component in the Kyoto policy mix, has demonstrably increased not only energy costs and economic uncertainty but has already sent manufacturing jobs, e. g., steel, and related construction jobs, to the United States. Europe’s failure has exposed Kyotostyle cap-and-trade as ill-suited for a problem that evidence suggests does not exist, as some people believe. Mr. Obama, eager to cast himself as the “anti-Bush,” clearly seeks to lead Prime Minister Stephen Harper toward a new, selectively “global” agreement rationing GHG emissions in, and transferring wealth away from, developed nations. Not coincidentally, this is the same thing our economic competitors both rich (Europe) and otherwise (China, India, Mexico, etc.) would like to see, too. In addition to rejecting such a rationing and wealth-transfer scheme domestically, Obama and Harper should also reject any continuance of the Kyoto process. Kyoto expressly exempts most of the world now, and, as proposed, for the future as well. It also includes certain provisions, such as a 1990 “baseline” year and the collectivizing of emissions, designed to ensure no meaningful obligations rest with any country from the Iberian Peninsula east through Russia. Instead, it transparently targets the United States, Canada and Japan to bear this cross of green. Further, our leaders might acknowledge that people are cooling to global warming. Polls show that Americans and Canadians place the issue at or very near the bottom of their list of policy priorities. Leadership can mean ignoring polls but ignoring the consequences of such policies is foolhardy and poses threats vastly greater than the theoretical results of man-made global warming. Yet Western politicians, generally, remain in thrall to the claim they are saving Mother Earth while slaking the policy thirst of a noisy, if small, mob of green campaigners. Not to mention the demands for “rents” from businesses hoping to cash in on “global warming.”

That mob will increase its pressure this year as a post-Kyoto treaty is tabled. Global warming alarmists fear the process will lose momentum, meaning that, without a false imperative of a deadline, the issue will fade away to its rightful, lower place in the policy hierarchy. This is particularly true should the planet continue cooling, a projection even some warming hawks now admit to.

Of course, it is also possible that Harper and Obama will recognize that this once plausible theory, grounded solely in computer models, has suffered badly under the past decade of observations. As such, in addition to the tremendous uncertainty of the climate science used to justify the enormous taxpayer subsidization of the global warming industry, they might also grasp the tremendous costs of “acting” while lacking evidence of climatic benefit.

A consideration of the evidence is not too much to ask, particularly in these uncertain economic times. If our leaders continue to refuse to face facts we must hold them accountable — people no longer buy into the global warming state of fear. Economic realities and scientific observations have pushed global warming off the agenda, and so should Harper and Obama.

-Christopher Horner is Senior Fellow with Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D. C., and author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.

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By Kris, Smooth Operator
Earlier today Al Gore packaged up his Nobel Peace Prize and sent it via FedEx back to Norway. In a moment of honesty following years of lies, the former Vice-President admitted that global warming was just a clever ruse aimed to put himself back in the spotlight.

“After losing the 2000 election, I felt unwanted and unloved,” explained Gore to a stunned group of reporters earlier today. “I needed something to make me once again important in the eyes of not only America but the entire world.”

Gore ascertained that the best way to accomplish this would be by creating a crisis of global scale and hence what we know today as Global warming was born. Misleading facts were floated to the public and Gore begin his much celebrated worldwide tour aimed to curb this fictions event.

“There is no such thing as Global Warming,” said Gore. “It is nothing more than something myself and a few close friends created so that I could ride in on a white horse and save the day.”

After two straight winters of some of the chilliest weather seen in decades that has lead to widespread belief that Global Warming may in fact not be real, Gore decided that he could no longer continue this farce.

“It doesn’t take a genius to feel the weather outside and realize that Global Warming isn’t happening,” he said.

Now that the shackles are off, Gore has promised to tackle a much more real and potentially deadly threat, Global Freezing.

“Chilling temperatures will destroy the world’s crops, ice walls will crush every major city, and mutant penguins will terrorize mankind. Unless we do something to stop Global Freezing immediately, this is the future will we all pass on to our children.”