The Reality of the Green World--3 Wolves and a Sheep voting on what to have for lunch

Sometimes, it takes a wake-up call. The world’s environmentalists would have you believe that THEY are the caretakers of our earth and no one and nothing else matters. The fact is, as you’ll read in this compelling article, we are ALL the caretakers, and as the world and its inhabitants evolve, it is our challenge to evolve responsibly. We must. In addition, the Green Movement attempts to prevent humans from being human, and to progress and grow at a rate the earth continues to handle if we are all responsible human beings. But, there must be a middle ground somewhere. In it, may we all do the right thing in this universe that we do not own, but are surely a part of.

By Tom DeWeese

After fighting the radical environmental movement for more than 20 years, I have come to one basic conclusion: the people who understand and care for the environment the least are environmentalists. My experience has shown that the leaders of this once-popular and still powerful force simply use the environment as an excuse to impose a radical, socialist agenda. Meanwhile, the faithful rank and file of the movement believe anything if it is attached to the label “green,” rarely questioning if the statement is true or not.

For example, it is an accepted fact in environmental circles that man is not part of the ecology, only its destroyer. Say the Greens, man’s every action results in damage to the environment and to the plants and animals which are forced to co-exist with him.

Based on that premise, the entire economy of the United States has been transformed to reduce man’s earthbound “footprint,” as human civilization recedes back to that of cave dwellers freezing in the dark. The result is not only a new dark ages for the community of man, but also for the environment.

The anti-human policy says forests must be left alone, never cared for by man. This leaves dead trees to lie on the floor of the forest to rot. Say the environmentalists, this is the natural way. For centuries man has taken care of the forests, clearing out dead wood, improving their ecologic health. No more. The National Forest Service demands that the dead trees stay on the floor, rotting away – in a “natural” habitat.

The fact is, such policy is actually more destructive to the environment. That’s because leaving the dead trees to rot builds up tinder on the floor of the forest. When a forest fire breaks out the fires burn so hot it is nearly impossible to put them out. We’ve all read about how much hotter the fires seem to be today. This is the reason. Moreover, in some cases the floor of the forest is so full of dead and rotting wood that the kindling reaches as high as ten feet, making it nearly impossible for animals to move through it. But that, say the Greens, is the natural, and therefore the right way.

One more thing: the rotting trees bring disease and termites to the other trees, causing more trees to die. In addition, the termites produce about one fourth of the methane that the Greens so fear as a cause of global warming. So, the correct course is clear – clean out the dead trees and make a termite homeless – for the environment. But the Greens refuse to budge to logic.

Environmentalists loath the concept of private property. Only man, they say, can come up with the concept of buying and selling land that is not his. Only man can conceive of fencing in the wilderness. The rest of the natural world lives in harmony, they say, taking only what they need. The idea of ownership of private property is inconceivable to the natural world, say the environmentalists.

Here’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask an environmentalist. Have you ever stuck your hand in a bee hive? If so, do you have any doubt that the bees have a concept of private property, ready to defend it to the death? Other animals move about the land, marking their territory as a warning to others to stay away. Why? Because it’s HIS land. Is there any difference between marking your territory with urine and building fences (other than the obvious sanitary issue)? Bears have territory. Lions have territory. And anyone truly in tune with the environment understands that fact. Only self-appointed environmental experts fail to grasp the massive natural property rights claims that exist throughout the animal world. Apparently, if they can’t see a physical fence as man tends to build, then it doesn’t exist, according to the myopic view of the Greens.

The worst environmental lies come in the policies of endangered species and reintroduction of dangerous predators. For several hundred years our ancestors worked diligently to remove predators from the land so they could live in peace, without fear for their children and live stock. Over the past 20 years, environmentalists have forced government policy to bring back the wolves and Grizzly bears that the ranchers and farmers fought so hard to get rid of. We need to replace the natural environment that man has destroyed, say the Greens. Nature demands it, they claim. Disaster will befall us if we don’t, goes the mantra.

When the people protested, saying the wolves and Grizzles would destroy their lives and lively hood, the Greens said it wasn’t so. Man could live in harmony with these predators, they claimed. In one classic community meeting, when residents expressed their fear of Grizzlies living next door and the possible results that could have on the safety for their children, they were comforted by the local Fish and Wildlife agent who said, just put bells on your children. If there is a “bad” bear out there, the bells will scare them away. Such comforting words caused one wise resident to respond, “seems to me the only way to tell a good bear from a bad bear is if it has bells in its poop.” Such is the lunacy of “going Green.” It has nothing to do with true conservation of the environment.

But the government, following the Green demands, brought in the wolves and the bears. Residents were assured that wolves never attacked humans, instead they stay away from man; that wolves are good for Elk populations; that they only kill what they eat; that man and the wolves will live in a harmonious utopia, right out of a Disney movie.

Say’s the Green’s Public Relations tune: “Our success ensures a future where our children, from coast to coast, Alaska to Mexico, know their wild neighbors — ancient redwoods to long leaf pines, backyard songbirds to elusive wolves — and thrive in the life-giving company they provide.”

But that’s not quite the reality for the folks who actually live in this nightmare. Take a close look at the photos on these pages. This is the reality of growing wolf packs. Pets destroyed. Elk herd being decimated. Since, 2000, wolves have caused 45% of known deaths of radio-collared female elk on the northern range of Montana. Since wolf reintroduction, Elk populations have decreased significantly, from 16,791 in 1995 to 8,335 in 2004. Wolf kills of Elk are double the rate predicted in the Endangered Species Act (ESA). And wolves are not efficient killers, as the Greens claim. Wolves will eat their prey alive, or worse, eat a portion of the animal and leave it to suffer.

Wolves have been sold to the American public as noble animals, wrongly destroyed by humans. In fact, they are treacherous and not to be trusted. They reproduce at a rapid rate, often ten or more pups per litter. They are destroying farms and endangering both domestic and wild life in their path.
In Montana and Idaho, residents are now living in fear of reintroduced, protected, thriving wolf packs. Hunters have reported being surrounded by packs of wolves, cleverly hunted like a scene out of Jurassic Park.

One resident in Idaho reported a pack of wolves sitting in her yard as she walked down her driveway. As she tried to call a neighbor for help, they surrounded her, closing in, almost upon her before help finally arrived. In May, 2007, two Catron County, New Mexico, school children were followed home from the bus stop by three wolves. In December, 2007, at the Glenwood elementary school in New Mexico, a wolf was seen on the playground after multiple reports of the animal being seen in the town. In January, 2008, a wolf kill was found within 70 yards of a school bus stop in Idaho. Yet the wolves are the ones our own government chooses to protect.

It’s another government-funded scheme to make living in your community dangerous, forcing many to leave. Each of these programs is designed to make it just a little harder to live on the land – a little more expensive – a little more hopeless. Of course, the ultimate goal is to remove man from the land, and “rewild” it back to the days before man stepped foot on the soil. Such is the Green dream of utopia.

Finally, there is the great lie hiding in the Green folklore. It’s the near worship of the Native American Indian as the great example of how all humans should live in the environment.
We are told that they lived off the land, taking only what they needed, leaving the range open, respecting every breathing thing, practicing stewardship of it. Of course, it’s not the Native Americans who are perpetrating this lie. They are just another pawn in the Green propaganda machine.

Again, the Green myths ignore reality. I have stood on a great cliff in Helena, Montana where one can clearly see the scars on the opposite wall. These scars were caused by the horns of the buffalo as local tribes ran the entire herd over the cliff in a common hunting practice called a buffalo jump. They killed them all and yet took only what they wanted, leaving much to go to waste. Good stewardship indeed.

Then there is my favorite story of the public meeting in which the government agents were informing the people of the new decision to protect the Spotted Owl. The decision meant that the timber industry was going to be severely damaged, perhaps destroying the town’s ability to survive financially. But this was to be important environmental policy to protect the ecology – just as the Native Americans would do, so went the mantra.

As the people protested, suddenly, one of the community’s Native American residents stood to speak. The government agents, sure they were about to hear some Indian wisdom about natural stewardship of the land, quickly gave him the floor. As all eyes turned to him he announced to the gathering, “in my religion the Spotted Owl is a symbol of evil and I will kill any one that I see.” Oops.
But the Indian myths of perfection march on in the Green movement. Their favorite example of the perfect Indian is that of Chief Seattle. A real Indian chief who lived on the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. Take a look in nearly any National Park Service gift shop, or Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, and you will find the great speech given by Chief Seattle in 1854, in which he tells in stirring words how the Indian reveres the land and the white man has no connection to nature.

Says Chief Seattle, “How can you buy and sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people….This shining water that moves the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors… The rivers are our brothers they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes and feed our children. …The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath… What is man without the beasts? …This we know – the Earth does not belong to man – man belongs to the Earth… we do not understand when the buffalo are slaughtered, the wild horses tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the Eagle? Gone. The end of living is the beginning of survival.”

And there you have it. One incredible Indian saying in one speech everything the Green movement advocates. How fortunate for that movement that they have such a role- model to lead us all to the path of Green righteousness. There’s just one problem. Chief Seattle never said a word of this. All of it was written by a movie screenwriter named Ted Perry in 1971, about one hundred years after the chief died.

The Green movement is based on wrong policy, perpetrated by deceit and promoted by myth. Its true purpose is the destruction of modern human society. If you don’t want to end up living in a cave, shivering by the camp fire, or being lunch for a wolf, then stop feeling guilty about your existence and stand up for your own species for a change.

Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence. Go to americanpolicy.org for more information.

New Study Affirms Natural Climate Change

It has been much ado about nothing for so long and now the chickens are coming home to roost. All that we've heard, and read, about man-made global warming is turning out to be a farce. (When was the last time we heard anything from Al Gore about the issue?) It appears that study after study is now proving that what the earth is experiencing is just cyclical warming that's been happening for centuries, if not millenia. This is just one more example of how politics has been inserted into science.

BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

It’s nice when people validate your work. Fred Singer and I—co-authors of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years—are currently basking in the glow of a new paper that affirms the earth’s long, moderate, natural climate cycle. The study is by Dr. U.R. Rao, former chair of India’s Space Research Organization. He says solar variations and cosmic rays account for 40 percent of the world’s recent global warming.

Dr. Rao says the data between 1960 and 2005 show lots fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth, due to a periodic expansion of the sun’s magnetic field. The bigger solar magnetic field blocked many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise have hit earth. Fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth meant fewer water droplets shattering in our atmosphere, and thus fewer of the low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into space. So the earth warmed.

Fred and I tried to tell the world in 2007 that the moderate 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle was the cause of the warming since 1850, based on historic and paleoclimatic evidence. The cosmic ray linkage was put forth in 2008 by Henrik Svensmark of Denmark. The UN’s panel on climate change dismissed that whole approach, claiming the variations in the sun’s irradiance were far too small to account for the rapid warming from 1976–98.

The flaw in the UN reasoning is clear, however. The alarmists claim the global warming since 1976 has been too rapid to be caused by natural forces, and therefore must be man-made. However, the earth’s Industrial Revolution went global after 1945—releasing the first big flush of CO2 emissions. That burst of greenhouse gases should have sharply boosted the earth’s temperatures. Instead, the earth’s temperature declined from 1940–75.

Commenting on Rao’s paper, V. Ramanathan of the U.S.-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography says, “The observed rapid warming trends during the last 40 years cannot be accounted for by trends in [cosmic rays].” But didn’t earth’s warming from 1915–1940, too early to blame on CO2, move just about as fast for just about as long as the “unnatural” warming from 1976–98?

Did human greenhouse emissions account for the other 60 percent of our Modern Warming? Well, a modern city is fully capable of warming its own temperatures by 7 degrees C or more through expanded brick and blacktop and lost greenery. A huge number of rural weather stations have been dropped from the rolls in recent years, putting our thermometers still more heavily in debt to Urban Heat Islands.

A study by Dr. Eugenia Kalnay of the University of Maryland says 40 percent of our net temperature increase since 1940 was actually caused by expanding urban heat islands and land use changes. Since the official net warming over that period is only about 0.2 degree C, that doesn’t leave much for Al Gore to deplore.

Nor do these studies offer much support for the EPA’s recent finding that global warming presents “public endangerment.” One of EPA’s own senior scientists produced a contrary evaluation, but he’s been retired and his paper has been ignored up by the government and the mass media.

India may be the most scientifically advanced country that refuses to agree the current global warming is man-made. Dr. Rao’s paper has just been accepted by India’s most prestigious science journal, Current Science.

Sources:

1 )The Hindustan Times January 21, 2011.
2) E. Kalney and M. Cai. “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423 (29 May 2003): 528-31.

.DENNIS T. AVERY, an environmental economist, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Global warming skeptic flattens Big Green's arrogant Oberstar

They say “pride goeth before the fall” and that’s exactly what has happened to many pretentious Democrats this past election season. They now know what it’s like to be without job. And, those who continue to push global warming (which has been proven to be based on false data) find themselves in that many-million strong unemployment line. They felt above the everyday, average American who not only feels global warming is becoming a joke, but that the support of it costs millions of jobs. In this article below, you’ll see one fine example of one congressional hopeful who did all the right things by supporting his district’s energy-based constituency.

By Ron Arnold, Executive VP of Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise; reprinted from the Washington Examiner

Political novice Chip Cravaack came out of nowhere and beat one of the most powerful Democrats in the congressional Big Green machine: Minnesota’s longest-serving, 18-term Rep. Jim Oberstar, chairman of an important committee and an influential global warming believer.

Cravaack, 50, won the state’s vast 8th Congressional District — the first Republican to serve there since 1947—by a slim 4,400 votes. It was the year of the Tea Party, Cravaack saw a chink in Oberstar’s armor, and the newcomer’s every-vote-counts campaign worked the district’s 17 counties hard, trumping Oberstar’s 100 percent rating by the League of Conservation Voters.

A Naval Academy graduate (with a master’s degree in education), decorated naval and retired airline pilot, Cravaack sincerely thought he could beat Oberstar, but nobody else did except his wife, Traci. She said she would take care of things at home—they have two sons—so he hit the road. He lives in Lindstrom, in the district’s Republican-leaning south, not far from Minneapolis, but the Democrat vote was concentrated nearly 200 miles north in the Iron Range. Many union miners and steelworkers there felt they couldn’t trust Oberstar because his defiant 2009 vote for the cap-and-trade bill was a vote to kill the mining industry.

That vote hurt Oberstar more than his vote for Obamacare, something Cravaack didn’t see at first — he decided to run because Oberstar snubbed a meeting about health care with local voters. But in September, when Cravaack went to the Minorca Mining facility in a fight for endorsement, he lost to Oberstar by a shockingly close 28-25, and a TV poll showed the incumbent ahead by only one point, 47-46.

Cravaack courted the Iron Range, promoting new mines like the multi-mineral PolyMet mine and others to supplement the huge iron industry. Don Parmeter — a native of northern Minnesota, 35-year veteran of environmental politics, and co-chairman of the National Water & Conservation Alliance—said the entire district was worried about a different Oberstar monstrosity: the Clean Water Restoration Act. Oberstar wrote and introduced it as chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Unbelievably, it removed the word “navigable” from “waters of the United States” and substituted a list of more than 15 kinds of wet places (including “sandflats”) and all watersheds, ending with the horrifying clause “are subject to the legislative power of Congress.” Parmeter said, “Federal control over all watersheds means every square inch of America. It wasn’t even about water; it was a total land grab. And the media began to report it. It never passed.”

Then, during a rowdy, emotional, packed-auditorium debate in Duluth two weeks before Election Day, Oberstar made a fatal error. Cravaack had just said, “We must get rid of regulations. I trust you with your money. He trusts the government with your money,” pointing at Oberstar.

Then Oberstar warned that global warming was destroying everything and we must pass cap-and- trade regulations, to loud jeers and booing. Oberstar looked out at his audience and arrogantly said, “Global warming is real. You must be members of the Flat Earth Society.” “Insulting the constituency is what killed his vote,” said Parmeter. The Duluth News-Tribune quickly endorsed Cravaack.

When I interviewed Cravaak, I asked what his first priority was. He said, “I’m going to do everything I can to get those new mines permitted, operating, and creating jobs. This is a tremendous opportunity for economic recovery.”

Perhaps as a Christmas present to residents in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, the Republican leadership appointed Cravaack to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Washington Examiner contributor Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

Terrorists get free pass into the U.S. thanks to Bingaman

How many times have we heard about our porous southern border with Mexico; a problem that continues unabated for the most part? Now it’s more serious than ever as more than just illegal Mexicans try to get into the U.S. As you’ll read in this shocking article, people from the countries notorious for breeding terrorism are also part of that illegal immigrant surge across our southern border. So, who’s behind legislation that not only allows it, but promotes it?

New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman. Not likely a patriot who understands the threats we face.

By: Ron Arnold
Washington Examiner OpEd Contributor

Sen. Jeff Bingaman is being called our worst border security threat. Angry Dona Ana County residents have branded the New Mexico Democrat's Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks Wilderness Act as "Bingaman's Bandit Boulevard" for proposing a 50-mile-long safe haven for Mexican drug runners -- and worse.

John Hummer, former chairman of the Greater Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce, reminded his community of the no-motorized-vehicle clause in wilderness laws. The Border Patrol can't patrol.
Wilderness laws allow our own park and forest rangers to keep the cops out. That's supposed to protect nature, but ends up protecting drug cartels, illegal immigrants -- and terrorists.

Steve Wilmeth, fifth-generation New Mexico rancher, told me that Bingaman's north-south strip and two mountain clusters don't worry him for the inevitable Mexican intruders, but for the OTMs -- Other Than Mexicans.

A U.S. Border Patrol document obtained by The Examiner shows the nationality and number of OTMs arrested last year. A few samples: Afghanistan (12); Indonesia (95); Iran (42); Iraq (42); Jordan (52); Saudi Arabia (6); Somalia (70); Yemen (22).

Members of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers say they weren't smuggling drugs. Retired Border Patrol Officer Zack Taylor said Bingaman's wilderness boundary is just a stroll from violent Juarez and El Paso.

Terrorists want terror, said Taylor -- unexpected targets with severed body parts and dead babies. A dozen relays of three sunburned hikers carrying big backpacks could trek unmolested up Bingaman's Boulevard, stockpiling materials to obliterate the balloon festival, the state Capitol, the Acoma Pueblo -- anything we treasure.

Frank DuBois, a Reagan-era deputy assistant secretary of the interior, told me that interdicting criminals in wilderness is losing priority. Bingaman's bill makes his wilderness a "component of the National Landscape Conservation System." That's ominous.

In a previous Examiner report, I exposed Wendy Van Asselt's Wilderness Society campaign with Bureau of Land Management officials that led her to the House Natural Resources Committee, where she helped create that hands-off conservation system. (She resigned last month).

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has elevated the Office of the National Landscape Conservation System to the level of a directorate within BLM, with preservation its priority.

Given that newly exalted status, questions arise. First, who led the campaign for Bingaman's bill?
That's easy: the Albuquerque-based New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, a purist group out to "re-wild" and restore the Americas to pre-Columbus conditions.

NMWA has been more effective than its $1 million revenue suggests. Its IRS Form 990 shows why: The "affiliations" disclosure shows NMWA "works together on ongoing basis" with three rich Big Green groups: the Wilderness Society (which led the campaign to create the conservation system), the Pew-supported Campaign for America's Wilderness, and, most importantly, the Sierra Club, which can spend limitless sums lobbying legislators.

But the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance dances on the strings of its foundation funders. The top donors are the Wyss Foundation, which also bankrolled Wendy Van Asselt's conservation system campaign for the Wilderness Society, and the Wilburforce Foundation, which specifically donated to "the Organ Mountains Wilderness Campaign."

Top donor Wilburforce ($750,000), based in Seattle, is the money of Gordon Letwin, one of the 12 original employees of Microsoft -- which was born in Albuquerque and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1978.

Letwin quit Microsoft in 1993 to "kick back" with his $20 million fortune. His wife Rosanna now runs Wilburforce with the income from 300,000 shares of Microsoft stock as a money spigot for green groups.
The first of this month, Wilburforce hired Van Asselt as a program officer, giving her a credential on all three sides of an Iron Triangle -- activist, government, donor -- and illustrating the revolving doors of Big Green.

Washington Examiner contributor Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2010/11/sen-bingaman-making-big-mistake-his-dangerous-wilderness-bill#ixzz16xuQHLgN

Has the EPA Become a Menace?

Regardless of the evidence, The Environmental Protection Agency continues with its scorched-earth policies; all without any vote from Congress, much less the approval of the American people. How will it affect you? In your wallet with higher electricity costs along with hikes in every area of energy. Somewhere, sometime, it must stop as the EPA’s rules and regulations plow through the lives of Americans with wild, and unencumbered, abandon.

BY MICHAEL R. FOX, PHD

One country cannot single-handedly curb global greenhouse gas emissions, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refuses to accept that idea.

The EPA is forging ahead with plans to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted from America’s largest power plants and industrial facilities. Never mind that no persuasive scientific case exists for the claim that man-made emissions are causing global warming, given that 99% of the atmospheric carbon dioxide is from natural sources – and whether carbon dioxide is even harmful remains open to question. Leave aside the fact that the recent email scandal involving some of the self-same scientists who are calling for curbs on greenhouse gases has cast much of their work in doubt.

The regulations, which will take effect in January, won’t do a thing to reduce global emissions but they will increase the cost of electricity in the United States, undermine the competitiveness of American industries, and wind up sending more jobs overseas.

The regulations are sweeping and shortsighted. They are being promulgated under the Clean Air Act, which the EPA has twisted to suit the administration’s policy of increasing the use of renewable energy sources.

The naiveté of trying to tackle a global issue like curbing greenhouse-gas emissions without international cooperation is staggering. The United States has little to gain and unfortunately much to lose.

President Obama has hammered home the need to put Americans back to work, to grow our industrial sector and create jobs of the sort that our middle class depends on. But despite his rhetoric, the EPA’s agenda will have precisely the opposite result.

Under the EPA’s new regulations, states that will suffer the most economically are those that rely heavily on the use of fossil fuels to provide electricity – the very ones that make up the core of the nation’s manufacturing and industrial sector. As older power plants are either shut down or retrofitted to comply with greenhouse-gas regulations, the price of electricity will inevitably rise and the cost will be passed directly onto businesses, workers and consumers. Simply put, the EPA’s policy amounts to a nationwide energy tax.

Financial analysts estimate that by the end of this decade it could cost as much as $150 billion in capital investment to comply with new regulations. And the key thing to bear in mind is that Congress had no say in establishing this policy. It was foisted on the American public by the EPA, with the support of President Obama.

Unless Congress takes action to block the EPA from issuing the regulations, U.S. energy companies and major industries will have to curtail greenhouse emissions at great cost, while developing nations blithely add new fossil-fuel power plants in record numbers.

China has already surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. And India, with its massive population and rapidly growing economy, is not too far behind. We are reminded time and again that we live and work in an increasingly flat world. When energy prices rise for American companies, the cost of doing business goes up and it becomes more difficult for our companies to compete in international markets.

So the irony is that the supposed gain in emission reductions that would be achieved under the EPA’s plan will be quickly negated by ever-increasing emissions from China and other so-called developing nations – the very same economic adversaries that are competing directly with U.S. companies.

What the EPA has come up with is not really a strategy to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions so much as a scheme to replace fossil fuels with greater use of renewable energy sources. As such, it is a poorly-conceived plan that will have little or no impact on reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions, while encumbering our own industries with higher costs, undermining their competitiveness and throwing thousands of additional people out of work at a time when our country is struggling to emerge from the deepest recession since the 1930s.

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is a retired nuclear scientist and university chemistry professor. He is the science and energy writer/reporter for the HawaiiReport.com. A resident of Kaneohe, Hawaii, he has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. His interests and activities in the communications of science, energy, and the environment has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows.

The Bus Has a Blow-Out

Most of us have been held hostage by the environmentalist’s “green movement.” It has changed our lives in unimaginable ways, costing us hard-earned family dollars, increased the cost of energy immeasurably, and for many of us old enough to remember, there actually WAS a time when life, and the cost of energy, was reasonable. Now, after the environmentalists have permeated every aspect of our lives, we know things in the United States will never be the same. Shockingly, the Greenies are changing their tune. They now realize their ideology was not only ridiculous, but has been very damaging on a global scale. Here’s some quiet information that’s circulating under the radar and it may lift your spirits. It appears the wheels are coming off the intrusive green bus.

BY DENNIS T. AVERY

If the Big Green Bus hasn’t actually stalled, it’s at least got a couple of newly-flattened tires. And the suddenly-Republican U.S. Congress’s opposition to energy taxes is only part of it.

It started, of course, after the 1998 El Nino when global land temperatures refused to trend back upward. It became far more serious when world thermometers actually turned downward in 2007–08. The disparity between the computer model forecasts and real-world temperatures has now become massive.

Then there was climate-gate, which gave us a peek into the unscientific maneuverings of the “real climate scientists” in the IPCC establishment. The revelations seem to have broken the spell the Greens had cast over First World journalists.

The latest problem is Green defections. Britain’s Channel 4 last week aired a documentary titled, “What the Greens Got Wrong.” In it, such former Green stalwarts as Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace co-founder and Stuart Brand, former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, issued a mea culpa about nuclear power. They lamented that Green opposition to nuclear had led to “extra gigatons” of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Greens hotly deny they shut down nuclear power single-handedly, but they certainly constituted a powerful blocking force. Their positions dominated the nuclear headlines for decades.

British activist Mark Lynas, who used to uproot genetically-modified test plantings, now says that biotech could help feed the hungry. In fact, one of the segments of the Channel 4 program that has made Greens angriest was footage of starving Zambian kids during a drought—while the Greens were convincing the country’s president to padlock U.S. food aid corn in warehouses as “dangerous.”

For Greens, it was an ugly reminder of the millions of needless malaria deaths over the years since 1972, after Silent Spring and the Environmental Defense Fund got DDT banned in America. In African countries that can do without U.S. aid, DDT is sprayed inside the homes—both to kill mosquitoes and as the most powerful mosquito repellent. In fact, the Greens nearly got the manufacture of DDT banned worldwide under the Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty. Only the resistance of India, which uses the pesticide broadly and thus has a low malaria death rate, kept DDT available at all.

Lynas now says, “Being an environmentalist was part of my identity and most of my friends were environmentalists. We were involved in the whole movement together. It took me years to actually begin to question those core, cherished beliefs.”

“We have got to find a more pragmatic and realistic way of engaging with people,” said Brand. “I would like to see an environmental movement that says it turns out our fears about genetically engineered food crops were exaggerated, and we’re glad about that.”

“Environmentalists did harm by being ignorant and ideological and unwilling to change their mind based on actual evidence,” says Moore. But of course being Green has always meant singing another chorus of “Never Gonna Say I’m Sorry.”

The “turncoats” are all being vilified now by the unrepentant eco-faithful. But . . .

In America, last week the EPA’s Policy Director resigned. Lisa Heinzerling had been famous among activists for her role in persuading the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 to permit EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. Within EPA, her position had been: “The law is on our side. Let’s go get them.” Now she’s resigned well before her leave-of-absence from Georgetown Law School expired.

Could EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson be worried about the Republican House Appropriations Committee—and her agency’s budget? If so, which lady is the Green defector?

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

No More Double Standard

Suddenly, and most alarmingly, some federal and state government agencies have the kind of power that should, at the very least, belong to Congress and State Legislatures. One would hope that our representatives would do the bidding of the American people. Unfortunately, under the Obama administration, we find agencies like the EPA are making policy; implementing rules and regulations, without having to answer to anyone.

By Paul Driessen

False, misleading or fraudulent claims have long brought the wrath of juries, judges and government agencies down on perpetrators. So have substandard manufacturing practices.

* GlaxoSmith Klein has agreed to plead guilty and pay a $750-million fine for manufacturing deficiencies at a former pharmaceuticals plant. Even though there was no indication of patient harm, said the US attorney, the fine was needed “to pressure companies to follow the rules.”

* Johnson & Johnson was recently slapped with a $258-million jury verdict for allegedly misleading claims about the safety and superiority of an antipsychotic drug. J&J’s actions “defrauded the Louisiana Medicaid system,” prosecutors argued. (The company intends to appeal.)

* The Feds have also prosecuted baseball players for lying to congressional investigators about using performance-enhancing steroids. Said a prosecutor: “Even when you’re just providing information to the Legislative Branch, you need to be truthful.”

Who could oppose following the rules, making quality products and being honest? But shouldn’t these values apply where far more is at stake than a few companies, pills, baseball records or bad role models? Shouldn’t we demand that these rules apply to people and actions that have unprecedented impact on lives, livelihoods, liberties and communities throughout the country?

Can we afford to continue having double standards that let government officials violate basic standards of honesty and accountability that they apply “vigorously” to citizens and companies?

Why should legislators, regulators and investigators be exempt from rules they devise and impose on everyone else? Shouldn’t we teach our kids that government officials mustn’t lie to us, either?

Few examples are as immediate, costly and far-reaching as the new ozone, dust, mercury and carbon dioxide rules that EPA regulators are trying to impose, under the guise of protecting air quality, planetary climate and human health.

Few corporate executives or citizens are as exempt from basic legal standards as the energy and climate czars, czarinas, bureaucrats, and government-funded scientists and activists who seek to inflict their anti-hydrocarbon agenda on us, regardless of the science – or the impacts on jobs, prosperity, families and civil rights progress.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury, ozone and soot rules alone would eliminate up to 76,000 megawatts of generating capacity by 2015, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation calculates. That’s 7% of total US electric generating capacity – enough to power 38,000,000 homes under normal conditions. It’s 1.2 times the all-time peak electricity demand record for the entire state of Texas.

Credit Suisse estimates that compliance with these new standards will cost the power generation industry (ie, electricity consumers) $150 billion by 2020, to retrofit coal plants or replace them with natural gas-fired units. NERA Economic Consulting calculates that meeting EPA’s proposed new 60 ppb ozone standard alone would impose an annual cost of $1-trillion per year and cumulative losses of 7.3 million jobs; create hundreds of new air quality non-attainment areas; require millions more car inspections and repairs; and block numerous highway, residential and commercial construction projects.

The costs are monstrous – the benefits negligible, illusory or fabricated. The ozone rules would send power plant emissions almost to natural background levels in many areas. That’s just for starters.

EPA claims coal-fired power plants release “40% of all domestic human-caused mercury emissions.” But only a quarter of this is deposited in the contiguous United States. The National Center for Atmospheric Research says total mercury emissions from U.S. power plants are roughly equivalent to what comes from trees burned in forest fires. (Natural mercury in soils is taken up by trees through their roots.)

Some 30% of mercury that lands in the US comes from other countries. And according to data collected by the Science and Public Policy Institute, when emissions from volcanoes, oceanic geothermal vents and other natural sources are also factored in, US power plants may account for as little as 0.5% of total annual US mercury emissions and 0.002% of global emissions.

Worse, these huge energy, employment and economic impacts do not include the far more massive costs and intrusions associated with EPA’s scheme to slash carbon dioxide emissions, supposedly to safeguard “human health and welfare” from “dangerous” plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide and the manmade global warming that CO2 allegedly causes.

The Brookings Institute, Congressional Budget Office, Charles River Associates, Heritage Foundation and other analysts have documented the economic impacts. Delaware Senate candidate Chris Coons may “earn” millions if cap-tax-and-trade passes or the EPA rules are implemented. The rest of America will pay big-time. America’s #1 priority is fixing the economy and jobs. EPA’s seems to be killing them.

As to the “science” behind what the White House now calls “global climate disruption,” the ClimateGate emails underscored how deceptive, manipulated and even fraudulent the supposed evidence actually was. The IPCC’s headline-grabbing climate “disasters” turned out to be based on environmentalist press releases, casual email comments, anecdotal stories, student theses, studies that had absolutely nothing to do with climate change, and almost anything except honest peer-reviewed science.

On October 6, highly respected physicist Harold Lewis resigned from the American Physical Society. He had believed the climate chaos claims – but kept studying the science, pro and con, for years. He still saw a small human element in climate-forcing mechanisms, but no longer believed the alarmist hysteria. Finally, he’d had it, and said so bluntly in his resignation letter to APS

President Curtis Gallan:

“[T]he global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. I don’t believe any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion.”

As for EPA, instead of conducting its own analysis of competing climate change claims, the agency simply adopted the bogus IPCC conclusions. Even in the face of the unfolding ClimateGate and IPCC scandals, Administrator Lisa Jackson proudly and pointedly refused to alter her position or plans. While the Glaxo whistleblower stands to get $96 million for turning in his company, EPA research analyst Alan Carlin got sent to bureaucratic Siberia for issuing an independent analysis that disagreed with his agency.

Now we face another monumental federal power grab, this time of the hydrocarbon energy that powers 85% of the American economy. The looming seizure of our money, jobs and liberties is based on shoddily manufactured “evidence,” fraudulent data and science, good-old-boy peer reviews, and false or misleading reports and testimony that would earn any citizen or company exec major fines and jail time.

When Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, their first order of business should be investigating the “manmade climate disaster” industry. They should subpoena federal employees and grant recipients, question them under oath regarding their funding and activities, and hold robust, public, expert debates on the science, economics, costs and supposed benefits of cap-tax-and-trade, carbon dioxide “endangerment,” ozone, and other punitive government policies that are strangling our nation’s energy and economic future.

They need to ensure that basic rules of honesty, transparency and accountability are finally applied as forcefully to regulators and taxpayer-funded scientists and activists, as to the rest of us.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.