Taxing Cows

By Alan Caruba

Just how crazed is the Environmental Protection Agency? When I say “crazed”, I mean just how far out of touch with reality, with science, with the economy, with common sense, and with the American people is the EPA?

Ever since the Supreme Court made one of the greatest blunders since the Dred Scott case, declaring carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that could be regulated by the EPA, that deranged agency has been pushing a tax on CO2 emissions from cows, pigs, and other farm animals on which we depend for milk and meat at the local supermarket.

According to Encarta, in 2005 there were an estimated 95,848,000 cows in the United States. Presumably, there are comparable numbers of pigs, goats, and other critters that emit belches and farts sufficient to destroy the Earth with the CO2 they emit. Nor should we overlook the six pounds of CO2 that the 307 million Americans exhale daily.

Since there is NO global warming and the Earth has been cooling for the past decade, the proposal that these farm animals be taxed constitutes a criminal act, devoid of any justification.

Since CO2 plays virtually no role whatever in so-called “climate change”, taxing farm animals is a violation of the known science and an assault on the economy in the name of the greatest hoax of the modern age.

It is not, however, a matter of “saving the Earth” so far as the EPA and the rest of the Obama administration is concerned. It is MONEY. And money is POWER.

The proposal, floated in late 2008, would impose a per-cow tax on any farm or ranch with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs that would require a payment of about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle, and $20 for each hog.

Suffice it to say that dairy farmers across the U.S. are being forced to send many of their herd to the slaughter house because the price of milk has fallen to the point where it is unprofitable to maintain them. Owners of even a modest-sized cattle ranch would face additional costs of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. Add a tax on cows and you end up with a nation that has to import more milk than oil.

Taxing farm animals is a great way to bankrupt dairy farmers and cattle ranchers, along with all those who raise hogs. After that, it is only a matter of time before Americans would all have to become vegetarians because the cost of meat would put an end to that part of our diet.

As bizarre as the EPA proposal is, the effort by the Democrat-controlled Congress to impose a Cap-and-Trade bill on the nation in the name of reducing CO2 emissions dwarfs the farm and ranch proposal.

The Heritage Foundation has crunched the numbers on Cap-and-Trade concluding that job losses would exceed 800,000 annually for several years. Durable-manufacturing employment would decrease by 28 percent. Machinery-manufacturing job losses would exceed 57 percent. The same would hold true for textile-mills, electrical equipment and appliance manufacturers, paper and paper product jobs, and jobs involving plastic and rubber products.

Cap-and-Trade isn’t just a job-killer, American Solutions estimates that it would increase gasoline prices by 74 percent, electricity rates by 90 percent, natural gas prices by 55 percent, and add $1,600 a year to the cost of living of a typical household.

The result would be to make the Great Depression look like a day at the park, but minus the hot dogs and ice cream.

This is what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have planned and they want the bill passed before Congress goes home for its summer recess.

At that point, the destruction of the U.S. economy would be complete and there would be no reason for Congress to return.

Does this seem an extreme conclusion to you? No, it is the reality the nation faces.

Source

Paddling Furiously Against a Tide of Climate Lies

By Alan Caruba

The whole notion of “global warming”, a dramatic increase in the overall temperature of the Earth, always struck me as the most absurd nonsense.

I knew enough about climate trends to know that they are subject to cycles ranging from a full-fledged ice age to the interglacial period of the past 11,000 or more years. I confess I have no idea how early hominids survived the last ice age unless most were in the warmer climes of Africa and Asia, but those in North America and Europe surely faced enormous odds.

The way the “global warming” advocates claimed daily that everything, just everything, was the result or proof of this enormous hoax always seemed to me sufficient proof that (a) they had no idea what they were talking about, (b) they were making lots of money telling these lies, or (c) had climbed on the “global warming” wagon in order to enhance their careers in some fashion.

A small group of climatologists and meteorologists waged war on the lies and they did so for a very long time. Global warming is the invention of the United Nations which launched it with the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 via its Environment Program in association with its World Meteorological Organization.

Al Gore climbed on board around 1992 with his farcical book, “Earth in the Balance” in which he advocated an end to the internal combustion engine among other absurd ideas. Apparently, stupidity is no obstacle to receiving a Nobel Peace Prize as he did in 2007, sharing it with the IPCC.

One non-profit, free market think tank, The Heartland Institute, took up the challenge of debunking “global warming” despite the animus of the mainstream media and various environmental organizations that exist for no other purpose than to smear those courageous enough to challenge the hoax. The Institute is headquartered in Chicago and led by Joe Bast.

In 2008, it sponsored for the first International Conference on Climate Change, a two-day marathon of seminars led by some of the world’s leading authorities on climate, all of whom offerred scientific papers demonstrating that the IPCC and others had simply fabricated the “evidence” for “global warming.” I attended and I did so again in March of this year for the second Conference. Those newspapers and other media that covered the event devoted most of their time trying to make it look like a gathering of screwballs.

By then, however, the public had long grown weary of the many “solutions” to “global warming”, the primary one of which involved the UN Kyoto Protocol that demanded that industrial nations like America, the United Kingdom and European nations all severely limit the use of energy on the grounds that “greenhouse gas” emissions such as carbon dioxide, were causing “global warming.” The great lie of the Protocol is demonstrated in the way it exempts China, India and third world nations from participating. The other lie is that C02 plays any role in climate change. It doesn’t.

People all over the world had begun to notice that, since 1998, the world had grown cooler and, in fact, it has been in a cooling cycle. Snow fell in desert kingdoms where it never had been seen before. Glaciers were expanding along with the ice in both the Arctic and Antartcic. Polling organizations in the United States began to report that Americans increasingly felt that “global warming” wasn’t happening despite the torrent of desperate propaganda to prop up this vast deception.

On June 2nd in Washington, D.C., The Heartland Institute is sponsoring another international conference because it knows that “global warming” is being used to impose a huge tax on Americans in the form of the “Cap-and-Trade” 900-plus-page bill just voted out of a House committee. This bill requires the same limits on energy use as the UN Kyoto Protocol.

In 1997 the U.S. Senate voted unanimously against signing on to this villainous treaty, but now we have a Congress and White House controlled by Democrats who, like Al Gore, continue to lie to Americans about “global warming.”

Prepare to read and hear it slandered by the craven “journalists” who continue to report that a warming that is not happening is happening.

Among those participating will be Harrison Schmitt, PhD, a former U.S. Senator and NASA astronaut. The indominable S. Fred Singer, PhD, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project will speak as will Willie Soon, PhD, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Courageous men like Richard S. Lindzen, PhD, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Patrick Michaels, PhD, a senior fellow on Environmental Studies with the Cato Institute, will speak as well as Roy W. Spencer, PhD, the Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

This is not a full account of the distinguished speakers, but it is absolutely necessary that those in Congress hear what they have to say regarding the “global warming” hoax. If they do not, the continued destruction of our nation’s economy will continue apace and more millions in our nation’s schools will continue to be taught lies about the Earth’s climate.

It costs lots of money to underwrite the costs of these conferences and, if you have some to spare, you should donate at http://www.heartland.org/donate/index.html and become a member and supporter of this brave think tank.

In the interest of full disclosure, Heartland has in the past provided me with a small grant to continue my own work on behalf of my clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns”, The National Anxiety Center. We too are dependent on donations to continue our work. If you know anyone who can provide a grant let them know about the Center.

We are all at a critical moment in the history of the greatest hoax of the modern era, masterminded by the United Nations and designed to do as much harm as possible to freedom-loving, industrialized nations like America.

Source

Die, Global Warming, Die!

By Alan Caruba

Ever since the “global warming” lie began, for at least two decades or more, I have been writing about what a huge hoax it was and is. For all that time I believed that if the truth got out and reached enough people, they would conclude it was a lie.

The entire credibility of major so-called environmental organizations and institutions such as the United Nations rests on whether there ever was a greater than natural warming cycle; one that would cause harm to the world. Patiently I pointed out that the most recent natural warming cycle had begun around 1850 following a lengthy little ice age of some five hundred years duration.

In the United States, despite all the braying about warmest years and such, the height of the warming cycle appears to have been in the 1930s, causing havoc among farmers, particularly in the Midwest. In 1998, meteorologists and climatologists began to take note of a cooling cycle. It has been gaining momentum since then. Yes, the Earth is cooling, not warming.

Despite this, the White House and the U.S. Congress—at least its Democrats—have been telling everyone that, because of global warming, the United States government must impose draconian regulations and restrictions on “greenhouse gas” emissions, by which they primarily mean carbon dioxide (CO2). The claim, utterly false, is that CO2 is “forcing” a warming that will kill us all if we don’t reduce energy and other emissions.

The utterly vile politicians advancing this—I will not name them because the very act causes nausea—had better begin to pay some attention to public opinion on the subject because the Gallup, Zogby and Rasmussen polling organizations all are reporting that large majorities of people no longer believe their lies.

In a recent edition of U.S. News & World Report, one of the three weekly newsmagazines, all of whom have slavishly repeated lies about global warming, Paul Bedard who writes “Washington Whispers” risked employment by reporting that Al Gore’s vast, self-enriching campaign to advance the lies about global warming is losing out to the truth.

“They have failed,” said Gallup Poll editor, Frank Newport. “Any measure that we look at shows Al Gore’s losing at the moment. The public is just not that concerned.”

Turns out that people are more concerned about the economy. And well they should be given the insanity being perpetrated by the White House and Congress. If there is a God in Heaven, there has to be a huge backlash in the 2010 midterm elections.

As Newport points out, “some 41% believe global warming claims are exaggerated,” adding “that’s the highest we’ve seen.” Zogby and Rasmussen report comparable results, give or take some percentage points.

Zogby asked people what they thought of the “cap-and-trade” legislation that would regulate CO2 emissions and got the following results: Support 30% Oppose 57% Not sure 13%.

In late April, Rasmussen reported that, “Just one-out-of-three voters (34%) now believe global warming is caused by human activity, the lowest finding yet in Rasmussen Reports national surveying. However, a plurality (48%) of the Political Class believes humans are to blame.”

The “Political Class” is the enemy. They are the scoundrels that stand to line their pockets by investing in companies that will benefit from “cap-and-trade” and Obama’s lies about “clean energy.” They are buying into solar and wind energy companies that are receiving billions in federal subsidies and grants. Anybody who invested in ethanol production has already lost their shirt.

The Waxman-Markey Climate Bill should make of their names the equivalent of Benedict Arnold because both are advancing legislation that would destroy the nation’s economy. The bill requires the nation to reduce its CO2 emissions by 2050 by 82% below current levels. That means a vast reduction in energy use, i.e. coal, natural gas, and oil.

Why would they advocate reducing emissions to avoid a global warming that is not happening? Why are so many in Congress wedded to this hoax? And will Americans permit them to get away with this?

Instead of doing everything possible to encourage energy companies to find and extract the energy reserves the United States requires to function and grow, the White House and Congress is doing everything in its power to restrict energy use.

Die, global warming, die! If this greatest hoax does not die, the United States will be forced to commit economic suicide.

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com and a weekly commentary at http://www.anxietycenter.com, the website of The National Anxiety Center.

“Clean Energy” is a Dirty Lie

By Alan Caruba, Warning Signs

What does it take to be a dedicated environmentalist—a Green—these days?

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” An example would be a belief in “global warming” despite the fact that the planet has been cooling for a decade.

“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.” This describes anyone who says that carbon dioxide, CO2, is responsible for a warming that is not occurring or that this gas could cause it.

“To deny objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” This is how Congress can restrict access to national energy sources—oil, natural gas, and coal—while claiming it wants the USA to be “energy independent.”

The definition above comes from George Orwell’s “1984” and describes “double think” in his allegory of Communism.

President Obama’s environmental beliefs and policies are a composite of outright lies and high on the list is his promise of “Green jobs.” This is based on his intention to radically transform our society from one in which energy jobs in areas such as oil production and mining are replaced by those providing wind and solar energy.

The auto industry is getting a makeover as General Motors brands that sell well are forced by government fiat to be abandoned for those few that people want or can afford.

Regarding so-called Green jobs, Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, recently pointed out that a study in Spain that was released in late March made clear that, “Spain has spent billions in taxpayer resources to subsidize renewable energy programs in an effort to jumpstart its ailing economy and what they have gotten in return are fewer jobs, skyrocketing debt and some of the highest and most regressive energy prices in the developed world.”

The lies Greens are telling, whether in Spain are here in the USA, always produce the same results. For every “Green job” created by the Spanish government over the past decade, 2.2 other jobs were destroyed as a result. To not expect the same result here is to be willfully ignorant.

All the talk of “clean energy”, wind and solar, is now shifting into high gear with the introduction of the Waxman-Markey legislation on March 31. It is touted as “a new direction for America’s clean energy future and fighting global warming.” At the risk of being repetitive, there is NO global warming. The Earth is now ten years into a cooling cycle.

This is possibly the most dreadful piece of legislation to be put before Congress in the history of the nation. It is the deliberate reordering of American society because without adequate energy, the economy will implode and the lifestyles that Americans take for granted, all based on affordable electricity and fuel for transportation will cease to exist.

It is based entirely on the “global warming” lie. It is based entirely on the lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the driving force behind “climate change.”

Clean jobs are just one more of the endless lies that Greens tell in order to put an end to America’s capacity to compete in the global marketplace.

Clean energy is the term applied to wind and solar energy, deemed “renewable”, amidst more lies about the oil and coal which most surely will neither be renewable nor even available if Congress and the White House continue to put the national lands under which they exist off limits to all exploration and extraction.

Totally supported by government subsidies and mandates for their use, wind and solar energy represents barely one percent of the electricity Americans use every day.

In countless ways, the Greens are working to destroy America’s ability to have the energy it needs to survive and grow. Our economy, already suffering from government mandates that destroyed the nation’s housing market, will utterly collapse when it can no longer access the energy required for the future.

Clean energy is a dirty lie.

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com and a weekly commentary at http://www.anxietycenter.com, the website of The National Anxiety Center.

Lovelock's Last Gasp: Gaia Theorist Says We're Doomed

By Alan Caruba

It is the height of vanity to think the Earth will come to an end shortly after one’s mortal life ends. Some people think that, without them, the Earth cannot survive and we call these idiots environmentalists and, sometimes, megalomaniacs.

A perfect example of this is James Lovelock, the man credited with coming up with the Gaia Theory that says the Earth is a living creature and, of course, that humans are some kind of horrid cockroach infestation that is destroying it.

Now in his 90s, Lovelock has written “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warming.” This book is an extension of all the other astonishingly bad “science” that has brought fame and fortune to Lovelock as he and other alleged scientists began warning that “global heating may all but eliminate people from the Earth.”

Like Al Gore and James Hansen, two other prominent “global warming” charlatans, Lovelock continues to say that the Earth is warming while, for the past ten years, the meteorological satellites and other measurement instruments have reported a distinct cooling trend. At the same time, the Sun which is the primary instrument of the Earth’s climate cycles, has gone “quiet.” It is currently into one of its well known cycles of low to no sunspot activity.

At the heart of all environmentalist propaganda is the view that humans are causing “global warming” and destroying the Earth by doing things like raising crops and animal stocks to eat, using the abundant oil, natural gas, and coal sources as energy for transportation and the maintenance of our lives and industries, and generally fouling everything we touch from our rivers, oceans, land areas, and other species.

“Simply cutting back fossil-fuel burning, energy use, and the destruction of natural forests will not be a sufficient answer to global heating,” says Lovelock, oblivious to the reality of a cooling planet; one that is on the cusp of a predictable ice age since we are now about 11,500 years into an interglacial period since the last one.

Why anyone credits Lovelock with having any special knowledge or insight is beyond my understanding. He made his early reputation for his discoveries in the transfer of infectious disease and advances in the measurement of trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The man is not a climatologist or meteorologist.

Lovelock and others keep telling people that carbon dioxide will be the death of all of us, claiming erroneously that it is critical to the amount of heat that exists in the Earth’s atmosphere, but CO2 is barely 0.038 percent of the atmosphere, a very minor player that shows up in increased amounts 800 or more years after any major climate change.

Moreover, there have been periods in the Earth’s past when there was a lot more CO2 and, not surprisingly, forests, jungles, and all manner of vegetation were even more abundant than now. Dinosaurs grew to huge sizes thanks to the rich diet available or by dining off of the herbivores. And then they went extinct. No one suggests they died from an excess of CO2 in the environment.

The essential problem with Lovelock’s theories about carbon dioxide and global warming is that they lack any scientific merit. The other problem is that environmentalists and politicians worldwide have latched onto them as a means to exert total control over the lives of everyone on Earth.

If Lovelock were just an obscure scientist raving about the end of the world in some English pub, we could happily ignore him, but he is one of the founders of the movement that has been taken up by the United Nations and implemented in various ways by nations that have wasted billions on so-called “clean energy” such as wind and solar energy, biofuels like ethanol, and the set-aside of vast areas of America to ensure that millions of tons of coal cannot be mined, nor billions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of natural gas tapped for our use.

Always, at the heart of Lovelock’s and environmentalist programs is the view that humans are to blame for the Earth’s extraordinary, chaotic, and uncontrollable climate systems.

Lovelock despairs that “No voluntary human act can reduce our numbers fast enough even to slow climate change. Merely by existing, people and their dependent animals are responsible for more than ten times the greenhouse gas emissions of all the airline travel in the world.”

Lovelock thinks it was “brave” for ten thousand people to make the long journey to Bali, the site of the last United Nations climate control conference, but says that “As we hold our meetings and talk of stewardship, Gaia still moves step by step toward the hot state…” No, Jim, Gaia—Earth—is cooling, not heating. That invalidates all the rest of the gibberish in his latest book and the lies President Obama and others keep telling about global warming.

When it comes to the Earth, Lovelock says that it has “not evolved solely for our benefit, and any changes we make to it are at our own risk. That way of thinking makes clear that we have no special human rights; we are merely one of the partner species in the great enterprise of Gaia. We are creatures of Darwinian evolution, a transient species with a limited lifespan, as were all our numerous distant ancestors.”

Unlike other “transient species”, however, the human one has organized itself into complex societies that permit it to use energy sources to build vast cities, developed transportation that move millions around the globe every day, have communications systems that allow people to address all manner of needs and problems, created agricultural systems that feed six billion people every day, discovered how to eliminate or cure diseases that threaten our lives, and also found time to create music, drama, and literature that enhances our lives.

All this has occurred in the very brief period of about ten thousand years from the days the first humans stood upright, banded together in families, tribes, and nations, and about five thousand years ago began to devote most of our time to looting, pillaging and killing one another with greater efficiency.

Lovelock is now closing in on his own mortality and the odds are that he will join the many other prophets of doom who despise their own species while worshipping an Earth that constantly reminds us all with earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods, droughts, ice ages, and other natural calamities that we are not in charge of anything.

Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. He also posts a weekly commentary on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com

When the Inmates are in Charge

By Alan Caruba, Warning Signs

If you ever wondered what it would be like if seriously deranged people were close to the seat of power in America, you can stop wondering.

In January, the Competitive Enterprise Institute issued a three-page memorandum. William Yeatman, the author of the memorandum, had serious concerns about the nomination of Dr. John P. Holdren to be the White House Science Adviser.

This position heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy which, in official lingo, “serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the Federal Government.”

“John Holdren’s 40-year record of outlandish scientific assertions, consistently wrong predictions, and dangerous public policy choices make him unfit to serve as White House Science Adviser,” warned Yeatman.

Just how crazy is Holdren? On April 8, according to the Associated Press, Holdren said that “global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.” Holdren suggested that one option includes “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.”

The last time anything of this nature was discussed, it was called “a nuclear winter” in which the debris from a nuclear war would fill the atmosphere and keep the Sun’s warming and nourishing rays from getting through.

According to Holdren, “It’s got to be looked at. We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.” Holdren believes that the Earth is in the grip of global warming, but the difference between belief and science is that the latter demands proof. Take, for example, the data our weather satellites have been sending back since 1998 all of which points to a cooling Earth.

Twice during the interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in a fog.” The truth, however, is that Holdren is a genuine cuckoo who probably checks under the bed every night to make sure the bogyman isn’t there.

Yeatman described him more charitably as a “chronic alarmist”, citing just a few of his paranoid fantasies. In 1971, Holdren predicted that “some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.” We are now safely into a new century and the only catastrophe is the Obama administration.

The really neat thing about making catastrophic predictions is that they always take place way into a future. In 1986, Holdren was predicting that global warming would cause the deaths of one billion people by 2020. This is eight years beyond 2012 when devotees of the ancient Mayan calendar predict the end of the world will occur. Neither are likely to occur.

In 1998 Holdren warned that we just can’t go on using energy fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal that represent nearly one hundred percent of everything we and everyone else uses now and will into the future. These days we hear President Obama blathering away about “clean energy”, but there is reality and there is the increasingly weird world of the White House.

In a recent article, Robert Bryce, one of the nation’s leading authorities on energy, pointed out that “Oil now provides nearly 40 percent of America’s total primary energy use. It also provides nearly all of the energy needed for the transportation sector. Coal and natural gas together provide about 50 percent of America’s primary needs.”

That leaves “clean energy”, solar and wind power, “but together,” Bryce notes, “these sources currently provide about 0.16 percent of Americans total needs.” It should also be pointed out that solar, wind, and ethanol production would not exist were it not for huge government subsidies and mandates for their use.

Both President Obama and Holdren think “clean energy” should receive billions of dollars while the White House does everything in its power to destroy the nation’s oil and coal industries.

The Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, recently said that windmills off the East Coast “could generate one million megawatts of power, roughly the equivalent of 3,000 medium coal-fired power plants, or nearly five times the number of coal plants now in the United States.”

The reality, however, is that there aren’t 3,000 coal fired plants operating. There isn’t even half that number. The Institute for Energy Research estimates that, to achieve Salazar’s insane goal, there would have to be 309,587 giant 3.15 megawatt wind turbines spread over 1,800 miles of coastline or about 172 turbines per mile of coastline. And, of course, the wind would have to blow 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Are these people crazy? You bet! Are the inmates in charge of the asylum? Yes, indeed.

They aren’t the only ones. The American Meteorological Society and several other otherwise respected science groups have completely lost their wits. The AMS wants to explore “geoengineering’s potential to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

Geoengineering? Remember that Star Trek movie that featured the “Genesis” machine that could convert a dead planet into one with grass and trees, rivers and oceans? When the AMS starts talking about geoengineering, it is strictly into cloud cuckoo land.

Absolutely nothing humans can or should do to mess with the unimaginably huge forces that determine the Earth’s atmosphere should even be contemplated. It is insane! It’s beyond science fiction. It is global genocide. Holdren has been urging “population control measures” since the 1960s.

In 1969, Holdren wrote that it was necessary “to convince society and its leaders that there is no alternative but the cessation of our irresponsible, all-demanding, and all-consuming population growth.” This is another way of saying that there are too many people sharing the planet with Holdren and he has been thinking about that “problem” for a very long time.

So have others in the Obama White House and, in terms of energy use, their “solution” is to make energy so expensive that people will stop driving, starting using mass transit, or just telecommute without going anywhere ever again. Forget about air conditioning and other aspects of modern life.

They intend to achieve this by scaring everyone with global warming talk and by claiming carbon dioxide is a “pollutant”. Then they intend to have the Environmental Protection Agency regulate it. Then they will tax it in the form of cap-and-trade “carbon credits” that must be purchased by all forms of industry and business in America. The costs will be passed along to consumers.

Billions would flow to a government that already is spending trillions in a mad scheme to fix the financial crisis.

What ever happened to just doing nothing? Sometimes when there is no problem, doing nothing is the most brilliant answer. There is no global warming. And, left alone, the financial crisis would correct itself in time. Everything the government is currently doing was tried in the 1930s and it just prolonged the Depression and made it worse!

In the meantime, loonies like Dr. John Holdren will be whispering into Obama’s ear about “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.”

The War on CO2 Isn't About Science

By Bob Ellis, Dakota Voice

Alan Caruba’s latest column provides some simple bullet-point truths about the religion of global warming which demonstrate that adherents to this religion are believing in something as silly as ancient astrology:

Here are a few things you need to keep in mind about carbon dioxide:

– CO2 is not a “pollutant.” It is a trace gas necessary for all life of Earth because it is essential to the growth of all vegetation.

– Without CO2 all vegetation—grasses, forests, jungles, crops such as wheat, corn and rice—dies. Then herbivores die. Then you die.

– The CO2 produced by human industry or activity is a miniscule fraction of a percentage of greenhouse gases. It constitutes a mere 0.038% of the atmosphere.

– The oceans emit 96.5% of all greenhouse gases, holding and releasing CO2 as it has down through the millennia of Earth’s existence.

– In past millennia, CO2 levels were often much higher than the present.

– CO2 levels rise hundreds of years after temperature rise on planet Earth.

– The Sun is the primary source of warmth on Earth. Rising CO2 is an effect of global warming, not a cause.

– Both global warming and cooling are natural phenomenon over which humans have no control.

– The Earth is not currently warming. It has been cooling for a decade and likely to continue for at least another twenty years or longer. If a new Ice Age is triggered, it will last at least 10,000 years.

– Polar ice is now at record levels and still growing.

Obviously this reality doesn’t match up with the flames of hysteria being fanned by Al Gore and the UN. The science is simply not on their side.

So why this massive campaign of unscientific lies? Well, it’s not hard to figure out, when you understand the great motivation of power-hungry big-government socialists.

And Caruba spells it out:

The EPA proposal is not about science. It is about power and it is about money. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “The administration has proposed a cap-and-trade system that could raise $646 billion by 2019 through government auctions of emission allowances.”

Folks, don’t fall for more socialist lies aimed to remove more of the money you earned from your pocket to make even bigger government which aims to rob you of more of your God-given liberties.

More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that the fantasy of anthropogenic global warming is a load of hot air.

Isn’t it time you took a look at how thin the “facts” are behind Al Gore’s religion, and join the rest of us in rejecting this anti-American nonsense? It’s time we relegated this crazy notion of man-made climate disaster to the place it truly belongs: a Saturday-afternoon C-grade Sci Fi Channel movie–something you might watch if you were snowed in and stuck in the house, but wouldn’t bother with if you had anything better to do.

The Greens Hate Energy, America, and You!

By Alan Caruba, Warning Signs & The National Anxiety Center

I doubt that most Americans have a clue what the leading Green organizations like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club have as their agenda for 2009. They have already made it known to their members, so I will share it with you.

There are literally dozens of these groups in the United States and each has their own particular focus of attention, but the largest among them play well together in the giant sandbox of Green utopian fantasies. That’s why both FOE and Sierra Club announced they are looking forward to “a clean slate” from the Obama administration.

“There’s nothing like a fresh start. On his first day in office, President Obama could make four decisions that would start 2009 with a ‘clean slate’ of energy policies,” said Friends of the Earth at the same time, the Sierra Club announced its own “Clean Slate Energy Agenda” that—surprise—was the same.

The focus of both is on energy use and accessibility. Both want a lot LESS energy use. Along with all other environmental organizations both use the bogy man of “global warming” to demand huge reductions in “emissions.”

The Sierra Club informed its members that it wants to “reduce global warming emissions quickly by making it possible for over a dozen states to implement their clean car requirements.” This is the objective of one of President Obama’s earliest executive orders. Driving up the cost of owning and operating a car directly strikes at the ability of Americans to be mobile and independent. Justifying it as necessary to reduce global warming is just a big fat lie. There is NO global warming.

Friends of the Earth are totally opposed to any economy stimulus that might include improving the nation’s infrastructure of highways. They warned the plan “is in danger of being hijacked by the road-building lobby, which wants billions of dollars for unnecessary new roads that would increase global warming pollution.”

Over the years I have come to marvel at the ability of environmental organizations to conjure up statistics faster than a magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat. “”Transportation is responsible for 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and 70 percent of our oil consumption” warned Friends of the Earth. What does it matter that carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) have no impact whatever on the Earth’s climate? And just what is wrong with oil consumption if it contributes to the success and growth of the nation’s economy?

“Just 10 miles of a new four-lane highway lead to emissions that are equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 46,700 new Hummers,” said Friends of the Earth. To which I reply, who cares? With oil prices plunging, those Hummers, particularly in parts of the nation hit by bad weather, look like a good idea. Bottom line: if you can afford a Hummer, where is it written you should not be allowed to own one?

Friends of the Earth, however, want to “shift the debate” in the environmental community to get the nation to avoid “car-centric highways and toward sustainable alternatives such as transit, biking, walking, and smart growth development, that will help fight global warming.”

What are these Green groups going to do when the vast population of the United States and elsewhere around the world concludes that there is no global warming? That day is not far off insofar as the Earth is now fully a decade into a cooling cycle that promises longer, harsher winters and a shift to generally cooler temperatures that will affect all northern hemisphere nations in particular and to an extent those in the southern hemisphere as well.

This explains why the United Nations environmental program has shifted into high gear to get the bogus Kyoto Protocols ratified. Not surprisingly, the U.S. has never signed on to it and even European nations that did are balking at emission reduction mandates. Meanwhile, neither China, nor India, nor many under-developed nations are subject to any of the restrictions. It’s a plan to undermine the economies of developed nations because greens hate humanity in general and successful economies in particular.

We’re not even halfway through the “clean slate” proposals. They include Sierra Club’s call to “require new and existing coal power plants to limit their global warming emissions” and to “end destructive mountaintop removal mining…” Finally, they want to “restore America’s international leadership in the fight to end global warming by publicly committing the U.S. to cut its CO2 emissions at least 35 percent by 2020.”

The Greens are so demented that the American Bird Conservancy released a statement in mid-December hailing the appointments of the new Obama administration. Its idea of stimulating the economy was to “invest $29 million dollars over the next four years in the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act” because “bird watching is now big business.” The Conservancy wants the U.S. to “invest “$540 million in America’s 543 national wildlife refuges” to create more “green jobs.” What a big help that will be to Americans who live primarily in America’s cities and suburbs.

The bird-lovers are a bit conflicted over another recommendation to “invest $30.5 million in the five year extension of the renewable energy production tax credit and making renewable energy tax incentives fully refundable. Wind energy is one of the alternative sources of energy” they recommend, but “if left unregulated, has the potential to kill large numbers of birds and bats and harm fragile habitats.” Well, which is it? Dead birds or more “alternative” energy? Both are extremely bad ideas.

The Greens for all their enthusiasm to spend tax dollars on their favorite notions remain opposed to any real energy generation by coal-fired or nuclear plants to meet current and future needs for electricity. They are utterly opposed to people driving around in cars for any reason and, one must assume, trucks that deliver the goods we require to live.

The longer one listens to what the Greens want, the more one becomes convinced that the members of these organizations must be utterly brain dead and that their objective is to render America a third-world nation by opposing the building of new power plants, along with the exploration and extraction of our natural resources of coal, natural gas, and oil.

Does this sound like a good plan to you?

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at Warning Signs. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center.

Skeptics, Deniers, and World Class Scientists

By Alan Caruba

After spending time at the largest gathering of world class climatologists, meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and economists, among other very brainy folks, I came away with the feeling that the battle remains joined by this hearty group, otherwise derided as skeptics and deniers of global warming.

The occasion was the second annual International Conference on Climate Change sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free market think tank. The place was New York City and the gathering involved seminars on all aspects of the bogus science put forth by the global warming alarmists. The conclusion should come as no surprise. There simply is no valid science that supports the claim that the Earth has warmed dramatically, is warming dramatically, or is likely to warm dramatically.

I find it almost amusing—if it weren’t so important—that the alarmists never make any mention of the fact, verified by weather satellites, that the Earth has been in a decade-long cooling trend and some who have examined it think it will continue for twenty or thirty more years. The increased severity of winter weather events around the world is testament to that. It is not getting warmer. It is getting colder.

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and serving also in a rotating term as president of the European Union, received a standing ovation at the beginning and end of his presentation. “Their true plans and ambitions (are) to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back,” said Klaus of the globally united environmental organizations and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It’s worth pointing out that the IPCC is not about “science”; it is about “government” as the name implies and, despite claims of scientific authority, its computer climate models and the claims based on them are held in universal disdain by the relative handful of men who understand climate or weather.

As Klaus noted, the alarmists are “not able to explain why the global temperature increased from 1918, decreased from 1940 to 1976, increased from 1976 to 1998, and decreased from 1998 to the present, irrespective of the fact that the people have been adding increasing amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”

“It is evident that the environmentalists don’t want to change the climate. They want to change our behavior…to control and manipulate us,” said Klaus. That’s what all totalitarian regimes want to do.

Sadly, anyone watching the behavior of leading scientific organizations knows that they have thrown their prestige behind the alarmists, giving awards and honors to the likes of Al Gore and NASA’s James Hansen when it is obvious to all that both are engaged in the worst kind of hucksterism and charlatanism. Many of these organization’s members are less than thrilled by this further evidence of the politicization of science.

Great dangers do exist for Americans and others around the world for whom the Big Lie of carbon dioxide emissions is being used by the White House and in Congress to justify legislation that would impose “cap and trade” regulations and by an Environmental Protection Agency that is poised to regulate CO2 as a “pollutant” under auspices of the Clean Air Act. It is a massive fraud.

It will prove enormously costly to every kind of business and industry in America. It has the potential of undermining the economy to a point where we shall never be able to recover from the present financial crisis.

All this was on the minds of those attending the conference. It should be on your mind too and it is why you have to ask your elected representatives and senators, “Why do you want to raise my energy prices?” That’s the ultimate punishment every American will bear because regulation of CO2 is about energy use of every description.

Why do you want to raise my energy prices? If they tell you it’s because of global warming, tell them you will not vote for them and in 2010, vote them out of office!

Compared to the thousands of environmentalists running about issuing notices of doom, a gathering of 800 men and women from around the world may not seem like much, but they have something beyond value on their side; the truth!

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at Warning Signs. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center.

Green “Civil Disobedience” coming to D.C.

By Alan Caruba, Warning Signs
On Monday, March 2nd, environmentalists will gather in Washington, D.C. for what they self-describe as the “biggest climate civil disobedience in U.S. history.” The purpose of the Capitol Climate Action Coalition is to bring at least 2,500 people to Washington, D.C. for the purpose of protesting the Capitol Power Plant that uses coal to generate electricity for the Capitol Building. The lighting, heating, cooling, and all other uses of electricity depend on this plant. The protest asserts that using coal for this purpose will contribute to “global warming.” Only there isn’t any global warming and coal is used to generate just over 50% of all the electricity the nation requires every day. Need it be said that both Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has endorsed the protest? The plant is owned by Congress. The Coalition says the plant is a symbol of “coal’s stranglehold on the environment and public health.” This is so absurd that only the brainwashed herds of people who still believe global warming is real would believe it. What the rest of us will be seeing is just one more piece of propaganda by the environmental movement to demonize coal and to advance the greatest hoax of modern times, “global warming.” Since 1998, the weather satellites have recorded a steady cooling trend on Earth. The Center for Public Integrity has analyzed the data and concluded that, “The number of lobbyists seeking to influence federal policy on climate change has grown more than 300 percent in five years, with a slew of new interests from Main Street to Wall Street adding to the challenge of addressing global warming.” These lobbyists represent a range of concerned parties from those who want to put the brakes on the global warming lies and the regulations that will flow from them to those who want to shape “cap-and-trade” legislation to do the least amount of harm to their interests. The largest number are those trying to end the use of coal as a source of energy in America. Dr. James Hansen, the man who in 1988 got the global warming ball rolling by testifying before a congressional committee that global warming was the greatest threat facing the Earth, actually participated in a video urging people to come protest. However, Dr. Hansen has been a government employee for decades, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The Institute has become known for fudging the actual facts about climate trends, having to retract its statements. Dr. Hansen recently wrote to the heads of England, Germany and other nations demanding that they shut down all their coal-fired plants. There is something profoundly unethical, if not completely nutty, about Dr. Hansen’s activities and he should be fired. It is doubtful he will be because President Obama is on record as being opposed to coal-fired plants and doesn’t want any more of them built to meet the demand for more electricity as the population of the nation continues to grow. Obama has surrounded himself with dedicated socialists like Carol Browner as his environmental policy adviser, along with a complete loony, John P. Holdren, as his science advisor. Holdren favors surrendering U.S. sovereignty to “a comprehensive Planetary Regime.” The Coalition organizing the protest represent many of the largest environmental groups in the nation. There is even a television commercial being aired to suggest that coal-fired plants are a threat to everyone’s health. This is such blatant nonsense that it defies the mind. Do these people and the Obama administration want to plunge the nation into darkness? Well, why not? If your objective is to destroy the greatest economy and the world’s beacon for freedom and democracy, this makes sense. Meanwhile, the March 2nd protest will serve as yet another platform for all the lies the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been telling for years. This globalist entity has used false and flawed computer models that have no relationship to the Earth’s actual climate system to advance the global warming hoax. While the nation’s economy continues to crater, the environmentalists are busy trying to divert everyone’s attention by raising their cries about global warming. You can be sure this will be big news so far as the mainstream media is concerned. It will get wide coverage. The second annual International Conference on Climate Change to be held in New York next week, March 8-10 is not likely to get media attention other than to ridicule a gathering of more than 500 of the world’s leading climatologists and meteorologists, the president of the Czech Republic, a former U.S. astronaut, and others who will offer scientific papers and presentations that demonstrate that global warming is a hoax. The D.C. protest will include actress Daryl Hannah and Grammy winner Kathy Mattea as part of the group that will speak out against the most abundant source of energy America possesses. This protest is part of an effort to systematically destroy America by denying it the electricity in needs to exist. Meanwhile, Congress refuses to allow any exploration and drilling for America’s oil and is putting off limits millions of acres of land that potentially is home to vast amounts of coal and oil that will continue to be denied to Americans. You don’t have to be paranoid or a conspiracy freak to believe that the enemy is inside the gates. Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at Warning Signs. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center .