Would you like to have electricity coming out of the outlet in your wall?

Most people would, but the NYC Mayor and the Sierra Club have decided that all coal-fired power plants are TERRIBLE. Unfortunately for the U.S. (and us), the plants provide as much as 98 percent of the electricity in most states in this country. See what CARE favorite Paul Driessen has to say.

What's really killing carbon capture and storage?

Bloomberg magazine bemoans dying interest in CCS, while the boss hastens its demise

Paul Driessen

Carbon capture and storage could ensure abundant electricity from coal, while cutting the CO2 emissions responsible for climate change. Yet, barely two years after a sense of determination and common cause inspired the Obama Energy Department to launch CCS projects, industry is pulling the plug.

What could have gone wrong? Environmentalists had heralded the projects. What's killing carbon capture? Bloomberg Businessweek wondered.

The economy is weak, its reporters suggested. US climate policy is uncertain. There is a national retreat from the goal of reversing climate change, largely because of energy industry lobbying against cap-and-trade legislation. The administration spent its political capital on Obamacare. Republicans took over the House. Utility regulators refuse to underwrite growing CCS costs with massive rate increases. A CCS storage site in Saskatchewan began bubbling up carbon dioxide.

All these factors played a role. But they ignore some inconvenient elephants.

While his magazine staff scratched their heads, owner Michael Bloomberg was working to scuttle carbon capture and coal-fired power plants. His foundation gave Sierra Club $50 million to finance disinformation campaigns aimed at shutting down one-third of the nation's coal-fired power plants by 2020.

That's the same coal that generates 48-98% of the reliable, affordable electricity in 26 states. It enables U.S. companies to compete internationally, keeps millions employed, produces billions in tax revenue, powers air conditioners that keep people comfortable and alive when outside temperatures hit 90-115, and allows even poor families to enjoy the best living standards in world history.

That's the same billionaire Michael Bloomberg who, as mayor of New York City, wanted to install giant wind turbines on the city's bridges and skyscrapers. This, he insisted, would get NYC off the blackout-prone Northeast power grid and reduce the threat of heat waves like the ones back in 1976, 1954, 1936 and 1924, before climate change and heat waves stopped being natural and became manmade.

By financing Sierra Club's anti-energy crusade, Hizzoner is making it infinitely harder for any company to justify investing another dime in CCS demonstration projects. The Department of Energy and Businessweek reporters may still support carbon capture. But Bloomberg, Sierra Club, NRDC and Lisa Jackson's Environmental Protection Agency want it and coal-based electricity priced out of existence.

Frustrated that Congress refused to enact cap-tax-and-trade, President Obama unleashed EPA to promulgate thousands of pages of rules governing carbon dioxide, toxic pollutants that have already been reduced dramatically, cross-state transport of emissions, and other power plant operations. All tout health claims based on virtual reality computer models, cherry-picked research and illusory benefits. But the adverse health and economic impacts of the new regulations are significant, real and ignored.

Management Information Services Inc. calculates that the air toxics and cross-state rules alone will cost utilities upwards of $130 billion, to retrofit existing plants or demolish them and build replacements plus some $30 billion a year for operations and maintenance. National Economic Research Associates says power companies will have to pay $184 billion through 2030, including $72 billion in immediate capital costs, to comply with the two regulations. The rules will send electricity prices skyrocketing 12-60% and cost six Midwestern manufacturing states a combined 3.5 million jobs and $42-82 billion in annual state GDP, says MISI.

Few companies can justify those costs for older power plants. No wonder they've lost interest in CCS experiments. Utilities will simply close dozens of generating units, representing tens of thousands of megawatts. Illinois alone will lose nearly 3,500 MW of reliable, affordable baseload electricity by 2014. The cross-state rule alone will prematurely shut down nearly 25% of America's coal-based electricity generating capacity, says Texas Environmental Quality Commissioner Bryan Shaw. The United States could lose as much as 60,000 MW by 2017, enough to power 60,000,000 homes and small businesses.

And all this is before considering the cost of removing plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust streams, under EPA endangerment rules. Once EPA implements those plans, utilities will have to spend billions more to design, build, install and operate CCS equipment, pipeline and storage facilities.

These parasitic systems produce no electricity. In the process of pulling CO2 out of the exhaust stream and sending it to underground reservoirs, they consume one-third or more of a power plant's electricity output at $60-85 per ton of CO2 captured adding yet another 30-80% to family and business electricity rates. We will need far more power plants to generate the same net electricity.

If Americans need still more reasons for retreating on climate change prevention, consider this. There has been no measurable increase in average global temperatures since 1995. The Climategate emails proved that unscrupulous scientists were colluding with each other, vying to publish the most alarmist findings, and pressuring scientific journals not to publish articles by climate realists. IPCC headline-grabbing climate disasters turned out to be rank speculation, computer-model hogwash or fraud.

Moreover, China, India and other countries are constantly building coal-fired power plants. Thus, even slashing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to zero will merely destroy American jobs, companies and living standards making our current unemployment, debt and family misery indexes seem like paradise.

Businessweek barely touched on this. Nor did it ask Mr. Bloomberg, Sierra Club, Lisa Jackson or President Obama just how they intend to replace all this lost electricity. Their sound-bite answer is always renewable energy. But we need to know specifically how they would address realities like these.

* Replacing just one 600-MW coal-fired power plant with wind turbines would require a 50,000-acre wind farm, like the one at Fowler Ridge, Indiana, assuming it operates 24 hours a day, every day, which, of course, no wind farm ever will. And these guys are talking about replacing a lot of power plants.

* Providing green electricity to meet New York Citys need's would require blanketing the State of Connecticut with wind turbines, says Rochester U environmental science professor Jesse Ausubel.

* Replacing the third of U.S. coal-fired generation that Bloomberg wants shut down would require over 50,000 monstrous offshore turbines, one every half-mile, in a five-mile-wide obstacle course along the entire Atlantic coastline, according to calculations by Power magazine editor-in-chief Robert Peltier.

All these wind turbines would need to be backed up 90-100% by (mostly) gas-fired generators that can surge almost instantaneously from spinning reserve to full power, whenever the turbines stop working which they often do on the hottest days, when electricity demand is at its peak. That means we will need vast natural gas resources.

Fortunately, America has them, especially now that we know how to use horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to unlock our abundant conventional and shale gas deposits. Unfortunately, Bloomberg & Friends oppose onshore and offshore drilling and fracking. And few renewable energy aficionados will ever support land-hungry, scenery-scarring, raw material-intensive, bat and raptor-killing wind turbine installations on the scale needed to replace the power plants that are being closed down.

Talk about cognitive dissonance.

We are governed too much by ideologues who detest and obstruct every energy system that works and support large-scale systems that don't work, until someone actually proposes to install one. The problem is pervasive, growing and seemingly intractable. But the bottom line is simple.

If obstructionists have their way, America faces a grim future: of energy shortfalls and rate hikes, unemployment, poverty, heatstroke, misery and death at the hands of ruling elites.

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.

Do you think the EPA and the American Lung Association really care about a wheezing baby?

Or is it all about money, power and control, with the corroboration of Obama's sneaky end run around Congress? Read on to get the facts.

By: Ron Arnold | 08/04/11 8:05 PM (psst! hey, all you tipsters who helped with this - THANKS!)

Is the American Lung Association EPA's chief lobbyist?

If you've watched TV this past week, you've probably seen "the Red Carriage television advertisement" being run over and over and over.

The sound track consists of a pitiful asthmatic infant wheezing and coughing alarmingly enough to jolt any parent into emergency mode. But what you see is only a side view of the red baby buggy in one place after another, never who or what's in it.

The quick images jump from the red baby buggy beside the Washington Monument, to the red baby buggy outside a congressional building, to the red baby buggy in the halls of Congress, and finally the red baby buggy on the Capitol steps, the invisible baby coughing and wheezing and crying all the way.

Last scene: As the American flag waves before the shining Capitol dome, a mommy's voice instructs us, "Congress can't ignore the facts. More pollution means more childhood asthma attacks. Log on to LungUSA.org and tell Washington: Don't weaken the Clean Air Act."

The press release accompanying the ad said the American Lung Association produced it to "thwart congressional attacks on the Clean Air Act." ALA's website says, "We are fighting to ensure EPA has the legal authority and necessary funding to continue to protect public health."

You have to concede that this ad is a masterpiece of lobbying. It made me want to grab that poor baby and rush to the nearest medical help. Too bad it's nothing but cunning propaganda.

This "Crusade against Congress" has nothing to do with childhood asthma. It has everything to do with the Environmental Protection Agency's defiant end-run around Congress to expand the Clean Air Act with unauthorized CO2 regulations that the Senate rejected in 2008 by killing the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill.

That defeat prompted President Obama to tell the nation that if he couldn't impose his climate change agenda legislatively, he'd do it administratively, with regulations and directives.

In response, many in Congress are fed up with the EPA's rogue agency behavior, and have proposed defunding its unauthorized regulations. One congressman has even proposed abolishing the EPA altogether.

So the Red Carriage ad is not about protecting public health. It's about protecting EPA's power. And it's about the American Lung Association acting like EPA's chief lobbyist.

That doesn't look good because the EPA paid the American Lung Association's Washington headquarters $7.7 million, according to the EPA's website. here (http://yosemite.epa.gov/oarm/igms_egf.nsf/Reports/Non-Profit+Grants?OpenView).

The EPA website also shows the agency paid $20.4 million taxpayer dollars to 61 American Lung Association affiliates. That looks like collusion and conflict of interest to me.

Not that ALA needs the money. The group's Internal Revenue Service Form 990 shows that 2010 revenue was $47.7 million, and only $796,150 of that came from government grants. (Where's that $7.7 million?) ALA's president and chief executive officer, Charles D. Connor, received compensation in excess of $370,000.

These well-off people manipulate our emotions to bolster crumbling confidence in an agency running on ideology rather than fact. It's ironic that the Red Carriage ad's mommy voice tells us that "Congress can't ignore the facts. More pollution means more childhood asthma attacks."

Scientists disagree. Two Australian immunologists, Kendle M. Maslowski and Charles R. Mackay, wrote early this year in the journal Nature Immunology:

"The hygiene hypothesis is now the prevailing explanation for the increase in asthma and atopic disorders in Western countries. It suggests that excess cleanliness in the environment has led to a decrease in the number of infectious stimuli needed for proper development of the immune system."

Listen up, mommy: EPA can't ignore the facts. Excess cleanliness in the environment means more childhood asthma attacks.

Examiner Columnist 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/columnists/2011/08/american-lung-association-epas-chief-lobbyist#ixzz1U6pfzD8T

Are you ready for Possible Global Cooling?

The next big theory in the global warming debate is about to be published. A new report indicates that the sun and its cosmic rays are responsible for the cyclical cooling and warming of Earth.

Read on for the details of the report, which will be "just the facts."

July 19, 2011

The Next Climate Debate Bombshell

bY dENNIS t. aVERY

CHURVILLE, VA—Get ready for the next big bombshell in the man-made warming debate. The world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory—CERN in Geneva—will soon announce that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in earth’s atmosphere. More cosmic rays mean a cooler planet. Thus, the solar source of the earth’s long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle will finally be explained.

Cosmic rays and solar winds are interesting phenomena—but they are vastly more relevant when an undocumented theory is threatening to quadruple society’s energy costs. The IPCC wants $10 gasoline, and “soaring” electric bills to reduce earth’s temperatures by an amount too tiny to measure with most thermometers.

In 2007, when Fred Singer and I published Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, we weren’t terribly concerned with cosmic rays. We knew the natural, moderate warming/cooling cycle was real, from the evidence in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. The cycle was the big factor that belied the man-made warming hysteria of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

When Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger discovered the 1,500 year cycle in the Greenland ice cores in 1984, they knew immediately that it was solar-powered. They’d seen exactly the same cycle in the carbon 14 molecules in trees, and in the beryllium 10 molecules in ice cores. Both sets of molecules are formed when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. The cycle had produced a whole series of dramatic, abrupt Medieval-Warming-to-Little-Ice-Age climate changes.

The IPCC, for its part, announced that the sun could not be the forcing factor in any major climate change because the solar irradiation was too small. IPCC did not, however, add up the other solar variations that could amplify the solar irradiation. Nor had the IPCC programmed its famed computer models with the knowledge of the Medieval Warming (950–1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC–600 AD), or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.

The IPCC apparently wanted to dismiss the sun as a climate factor—to leave room for a CO₂ factor that has only a 22 percent correlation with our past thermometer record. Correlation is not causation—but the lack of CO₂ correlation is deadly to the IPCC theory.

Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute added the next chapter in the climate cycle story, just before our book was published. His cloud chamber experiment showed natural cosmic rays quickly created vast numbers of tiny “cloud seeds” when our mix of atmospheric gases was bombarded with ultra-violet light. Since clouds often cover 30 percent of the earth’s surface, a moderate change in cloud cover clearly could explain the warming/cooling cycle.

Svensmark noted the gigantic “solar wind” that expands when the sun is active—and thus blocks many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise hit the earth’s atmosphere. When the sun weakens, the solar wind shrinks. Recently, the U.S. Solar Observatory reported a very long period of “quiet sun” and predicted 30 years of cooling.

Last year, Denmark’s University of Aarhus did another experiment with a particle accelerator that fully confirmed the Svensmark hypothesis: cosmic rays help to make more clouds and thus could cool the earth.

The CERN experiment is supposed to be the big test of the Svensmark theory. It’s a tipoff, then, that CERN’s boss, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, has just told the German magazine Die Welt that he has forbidden his researchers to “interpret” the forthcoming test results. In other words, the CERN report will be a stark “just the facts” listing of the findings. Those findings must support Svensmark, or Heuer would never have issued such a stifling order on a major experiment.

Stay tuned.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist. 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 2442, email to cgfi@hughes.net or blog on www.cgfi.org

Shouldn't we be allowed to choose which light bulbs to buy?

Do we need the elitists to tell us which bulb we must buy in the name of whatever environmental agenda they are pushing?

Or should we let market choices and lighting needs determine what bulb to purchase?

Read Bonner Cohen's take on the difference between what Thomas Edison envisioned for his invention and what the U.S. president said on the 2008 campaign trail.

Save the light bulb!

Will it be "lights out" for the Legacy of Thomas Edison?

July 10, 2011

by Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

We're about to lose our light bulbs.

Among the many foolish things the political class in Washington has foisted on an unsuspecting public in recent years was the mandated phase-out of one of the most successful inventions in human history, the incandescent light bulb.

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by President Bush, set in motion a scheme to phase out the incandescent light bulb, replacing it with what the public was told were “more efficient” and “climate friendly” alternatives. Those who questioned the wisdom of the move were assured that emerging technologies, specifically the Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL), would more than fill our lighting needs.

It hasn’t worked out that way. CFLs are more expensive than traditional light bulbs, less reliable as an instant and consistent source of light, and they contain potentially dangerous mercury. Dropping an incandescent light bulb on the floor is a matter of sweeping up broken glass. Break a CFL and you risk contaminating your home and clothes with mercury. Furthermore, the Washington Post recently reported that GE is closing its last remaining incandescent light bulb factory, located in Winchester, Virginia. CFLs can be produced cheaper in China than they can in the U.S., and that’s where the new green jobs are expected to go.

Some members of Congress are finally waking up to the folly their colleagues committed three years ago. Representatives Joe Barton (R-Texas), Michael Burgess (R-Texas), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) introduced a bill – the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (BULB) -- in early September that would repeal the section of the 2007 energy bill that mandates the use of more energy-efficient bulbs. “I’m not opposed to the energy saving bulbs at all,” Barton told the Daily Caller (Sept. 17). “But I say let the consumers make the choice, instead of mandating.”

Our misadventure with light bulbs touted to be more energy efficient is another example of what is known as “technology forcing.” Washington mandates the use of a technology under the assumption that when the mandate goes into effect, the technology will be ready. But if the technology isn’t ready for prime time – and CFLs are not – then consumers suffer. The exercise is all the more absurd when the phase out of a proven product by an unproven one is done in the name of fighting global warming, climate change, climate disruption, or whatever label is used to justify government interference in our lives.

Thomas Edison (1847-1931) is popularly credited with “inventing” the incandescent light bulb. Actually, Edison improved on work others had been performing for three-quarters of a century. But his light bulb, with its carbon filament, made the product commercially viable and so transformed people’s lives forever. Out went the gas light or candle of old, and in came the incandescent light bulb, powered by colorless, smokeless, weightless energy. Edison immediately grasped the importance of his innovation. Shortly before he filed for a patent for his incandescent light bulb in 1879, he said: “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will buy candles.”

Compare this with the words of presidential candidate Barack Obama in January 2008. He told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview: “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

The 19^th century inventor wanted to make electricity accessible to ordinary people. The 21^st century environmental elitist wants to impede that access.

The difference between the two men is well worth pondering.

America has plentiful supplies of coal, yet the Obama administration, through the EPA, insists on putting more regulations on the industry.

Why won't this administration realize that simplifying and getting rid of onerous regulations would bring back to this country all those jobs that many companies are now shipping overseas?

Read CARE favorite Diana Furchtgott-Roth's take on the issue to see how this country can create jobs without any "stimulus" package.

How to Create Jobs Without Spending a Dime
By Diana Furchtgott-Roth

RealClearMarkets.com
July 7, 2011.

WASHINGTON—Most Americans know the biggest problem in America today: too few jobs.

Yet, by executive action alone, President Obama could create more jobs without spending another dime, generating billions of additional dollars in income tax revenues for Treasury coffers.

Economists forecast that the Labor Department will issue disappointing job creation numbers on Friday, partly because it's getting harder to create jobs due to our regulatory environment.

Regulations are controlled by presidential appointees at agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Labor Department, which are part of the executive branch, and at "independent" agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board, which has quasi-judicial functions.

Tougher regulations lead employers to locate elsewhere. Friendlier regulations draw them back home.

Mr. Obama acknowledged this when, on January 18, 2011, he issued Executive Order 13563, entitled Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review.

Each agency is supposed to make a plan to "periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives."

While Mr. Obama knows that burdensome regulations crimp job creation, his agencies continue to interfere with private sector job creation. Here are just a few examples.

The acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, Lafe Solomon, wants to stop the Boeing Company, which has a backlog of over 800 Dreamliner aircraft on order, from using its new aircraft manufacturing plant in South Carolina to build Dreamliners.

Mr. Solomon has charged that Boeing's decision to build a new plant at North Charleston, South Carolina, to expand production of its Dreamliner 787, was made in retaliation for strikes at its Everett, Washington plant in 2005 and 2008, even though Boeing has added workers in Washington State since the strikes.

Mr. Solomon's charge was brought in response to a complaint from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents Boeing employees in Washington State.

The NLRB's action is sending a job-chilling signal to foreign and domestic companies which might want to locate plants in America. If Boeing had built its new plant in China, the NLRB would lack any authority over it.

Or, take regulations affecting coal, which accounts for 45 percent of American electricity production. The Environmental Protection Agency is developing regulations to restrict coal ash emitted into the atmosphere. It wants to impose tighter standards for nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and other particulates, and new standards for water and carbon. The Agency asserts that these more restrictive limits are necessary to protect public health.

However, EPA states on its Web site that U.S. air quality has been steadily improving since 1980. "Since 1980, nationwide air quality, measured at more than a thousand locations across the country, has improved significantly for all six principal pollutants. These common pollutants are ground-level ozone, particle pollution, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead."

To deprive Americans of jobs at this time for the sake of yet cleaner air seems callous indeed. Can't further air improvements wait until the unemployment rate has declined?

And the links between improved air quality and health are unclear. At the same time as air quality has been improving, the incidence of asthma, a disease commonly associated with polluted air, has been increasing. Between 1980 and 2001, as measured air quality was improving, the prevalence of asthma tripled, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Meanwhile, by coincidence or design, the Labor Department has been ratcheting up safety standards for coal miners. EPA regulations will discourage coal from being burned in power plants, but it can be mined and exported. Coal exports are significant, 76 million tons in 2010, 23 percent higher than in 2009.

Proposed Labor Department regulations, if made final, would discourage coal from being produced at all. Over 30 new regulations for coal are on the Labor Department's regulatory agenda.

These regulations discourage coal production, causing unemployment of miners and others in mining communities. Moreover, by making the use of coal more expensive, the government discourages energy-intensive industries, such as manufacturing, from locating in the United States, in effect, encouraging them to flee abroad.

Another proposed Labor Department regulation is affirmative action for women on construction sites. Discrimination is already illegal in the construction industry. In practice, this rule would require construction companies to employ less-qualified women.

With the construction industry still sick from the recession, and women's unemployment rates almost a full percentage point lower than men's, this is not the time to force construction companies to employ women.

Then, consider drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP oil spill occurred 15 months ago, and deepwater drilling has yet to resume in the Gulf, although some shallow-water activity has started. The Department of the Interior could approve permits tomorrow and bring back some of the jobs and oil rigs lost to the Gulf states.

With high unemployment in the headlines, it's time to look at some low-cost solutions to spur job growth. How about some simple regulatory reform?

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Don't Read if You Agree with Global Warming!

Don't read if you agree with 'global warming'

Finally, skeptics on global warming are making inroads, but the warmist camp is fully entrenched into global, national, state and local entities, so they are not ready to give up yet.

Take a look at the following article about things happening to the global warming agenda and realize that we can't let up on our efforts to bring common sense to the issue.

The UN’s climate of desperation

Scandals, deceit, stable temperatures and real problems minimize global concern about climate

David Rothbard & Craig Rucker

As the UN wrapped up its recent climate conference in Bonn, Germany, talks organizer Christiana Figueres proclaimed that climate change is the “the most important negotiation the world has ever faced.” Faced with real problems – financial meltdowns, unemployment, war and genuine human suffering – the world no longer agrees.

It’s a good thing human productivity doesn’t threaten the global thermostat the way the UN would have us believe. If it were, we’d be cooked. Countries rich and poor are backing away from commitments they made years ago during rosier economic times, before the public became aware of Climategate, renewable energy costs and genuine debate.

The Kyoto Protocol, the only binding international agreement signed since the global warming scare began, expires after 2012. Canada, Russia and Japan have publicly declared they will not renew; China and the United States never signed it; and the US has made it plain it is not about to. And poor countries are becoming less enamored about signing on, as they realize hard economic times mean there will be little climate “mitigation” and “restitution” money coming their way from (formerly) rich countries.

Even die-hard warmists increasingly recognize that bureaucratic solutions hatched at these conferences are rife with waste, fraud and abuse. They may enrich a few, at the expense of everyone else, especially the poor. But they are powerless to control Earth’s climate.

In March, German investigators reported that 850 million Euros disappeared, when shady companies swarmed into carbon trading, emissions and energy businesses. Criminal enterprises raked in tens of millions, fended off regulators with delaying tactics, and then announced bankruptcy or vanished. An Italian sting operation resulted in arrests of wind farm developers who billed the country for subsidies, but never produced a kilowatt of electricity.

London’s liberal Guardian newspaper was aghast to learn that the World Bank’s Biocarbon Fund had arranged to pay European “entrepreneurs” $1 million to establish a system under which 60,000 Kenyans would restrict themselves to farming under rigidly controlled, inefficient, “sustainable” techniques. For that they will receive $1.4 million over 20 years.

That’s right, the beneficent World Bank will enrich more Europeans, so that 60,000 Kenyans can receive $23.83 apiece annually for 20 years of drudgery, poverty and misery: a princely $1.19 a year!

Even the European Union finally understands how little energy deprivation and bureaucratic dictates affect the climate. “It is not enough for the EU to simply sign up for another commitment period,” EU climate representative Jurgen Lefevere admitted. “We only represent 11% of global emissions.”

Burning fossil fuels contributes only a fraction of total annual atmospheric carbon dioxide buildup, and the EU contributes just 11% of that. The EU’s commitment to slashing CO2 emissions by 20% invites corruption, has no control over Chinese or Indian emissions, and has no effect on the climate.

The biggest divide evident in Bonn was between the USA and large emerging economies. Even Obama administration officials who are thoroughly committed to manmade global warming catastrophe claims finally recognize the fraud problem. In Bonn the US insisted that all countries subject their emission reduction claims to verification.

However, China will accept only an agreement that lacks verification – and thereby guarantees the right to cheat. Meanwhile, the Chinese are happy to be “the world’s leader” in manufacturing wind turbines – 95% which they gladly sell to guilt-ridden western countries, while they build a new coal-fired power plant every week.

China and other nations support the notion that prosperous countries owe the world restitution for the “sin” of engaging in the Industrial Revolution and becoming prosperous. We can only hope some nation’s representative will have the courage to remind China and its fellow climate travelers that the West never forced them to spend fifty years mired in Communism, bureaucracy and stagnation.

While it is encouraging that the global warming camp no longer has things entirely its own way, celebration would be premature. For all the gnashing of teeth and complaining about corporate influence we hear from global warming bureaucrats and campaigners, the truth is that today the warmists are the establishment.

Billions are being redistributed to researchers, developing nations, carbon speculators, alternative energy investors and other carbon profiteers – who would like to turn billions into trillions. Pity the poor carbon traders whose markets expire with Kyoto. Not all have their villa in the sun yet.

But rest assured, they will do whatever is necessary to get their villas. Big Warming will not surrender its hold on Western taxpayers without a fight.

The warmist camp plans to retake the initiative at the December UN conference in Durban, South Africa. It intends to turn back the clock to the time when the media would attribute any weather or nature event to global warming, without question or critical examination. Al Gore’s recent Rolling Stone diatribe essentially calls on the media to censure climate disaster skeptics and adopt a one-sided manmade warming narrative.

The New York Times may go along, but the huge and growing alternative media will not. This week’s Washington, DC Heartland Institute international conference of climate alarm skeptics dramatically reinforced the lack of evidence for manmade Armageddon, and the disastrous consequences for poor and industrialized nations alike of staying the current UN course.

Many believe the last-minute appearance by dozens of world leaders crippled the Copenhagen climate conference. But with the big names absent from Cancun and now Bonn, the UN wants them back.

Ms. Figueres capped the Bonn conference with a call for “high-level political attention.” If she succeeds, just imagine the mischief a gathering of Heads of State, foreign ministers, bureaucrats, researchers, green campaigners and carbon profiteers can do at an African beach resort.

Then imagine how nearly impossible it will be to repair the harm they inflict. Action must be taken now to avert such a result.

______________

David Rothbard is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, DC-based policy group that works on issues of environment and development. Craig Rucker is CFACT’s executive director.

And What is it About Facts that the EPA doesn't understand?

Why should everyone in America suffer for what one misguided federal agency wants to do to American citizens, especially those in minority groups, that it supposedly is "helping?" Will a bankrupt economy caused by EPA regulations help anyone?

Clearing the air

Trying to correct all the disinformation about “mercury and air toxics” is a full-time job

Paul Driessen

Ever since public, congressional and union anger and anxiety persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency to delay action on its economy-strangling carbon dioxide rules, EPA has been on a take-no-prisoners crusade to impose other job-killing rules for electricity-generating plants.

As President Obama said when America rejected cap-tax-and-trade, “there’s more than one way to skin the cat.” If Congress won't cooperate, his EPA will lead the charge. Energy prices will “skyrocket.” Companies that want to build coal-fired power plants will “go bankrupt.” His administration will “fundamentally transform” our nation’s energy, economic, industrial and social structure.

EPA’s proposed “mercury and air toxics” rules for power plants are built on the false premise that we are still breathing the smog, soot and poisons that shrouded London, England, and Gary, Indiana, sixty years ago. In reality, US air quality improved steadily after the 1970 Clean Air Act was enacted.

Moreover, since 1990, even as US coal use more than doubled, coal-fired power plant emissions declined even further: 58% for mercury, 67% for nitrogen oxides, 70% for particulates, 85% for sulfur dioxide – and just as significantly for most of the other 80 pollutants that EPA intends to cover with its 946-pages of draconian proposed regulations.

It’s time to clear the political air – and scrub out some of the toxic disinformation that EPA and its allies have been emitting for months, under a multi-million-dollar “public education” campaign that EPA has orchestrated and funded, to frighten people into supporting its new rules. PR firms, religious and civil rights groups, environmental activists and college students are eagerly propagating the myths.

EPA’s “most wanted” outlaw is mercury. But for Americans this villain is as real as Freddy or Norman Bates. To turn power plant mercury emissions into a mass killer, EPA cherry-picked studies and data, and ignored any that didn’t fit its “slasher” film script. As my colleague Dr. Willie Soon and I pointed out in our Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily articles, US power plants account for just 0.5% of mercury emitted into North American’s air; the other 99.5% comes from natural and foreign sources.

Critics assailed our analysis, but the studies support us, not EPA – as is abundantly clear in Dr. Soon’s 85-page report, available at www.AffordablePowerAlliance.org. The report and studies it cites fully support our conclusion that America’s fish are safe to eat (in part because they contain selenium and are thus low in biologically available methylmercury, mercury’s more toxic cousin), and blood mercury levels for American women and children are already below FDA’s and other agencies’ safe levels.

Not only are EPA’s mercury claims fraudulent. They are scaring people away from eating fish, which are rich in essential fatty acids. In other words, EPA is actively harming people’s nutrition and health.

One of the more bizarre criticisms of our analysis contends that mercury released in forest fires “originates from coal-burning power plants,” which supposedly shower the toxin onto trees, which release it back into the atmosphere during arboreal conflagrations. In fact, mercury is as abundant in the earth’s crust as silver and selenium. It is absorbed by trees through their roots – and their leaves, which absorb those 0.5% (power plant) and 99.5% (other) atmospheric mercury components through their stomata.

Another bizarre criticism is that mercury isn’t the issue. The real problem is ultra-fine (2.5 micron) soot particles. So now the “power plant mercury is poisoning babies and children” campaign was just a sideshow! Talk about changing the subject. Now, suddenly, the alleged health benefits and lives saved would come from controlling soot particles. That claim is as bogus as the anti-mercury scare stories.

Even EPA and NOAA data demonstrate that America’s air already meets EPA’s national standard, which is equivalent to disseminating an ounce of soot (about one and a quarter super-pulverized charcoal briquettes) across a volume of air one-half mile long, one-half mile wide and one story high. That’s less than you’re likely to get from sitting in front of a campfire, fireplace or wood-burning stove, inhaling airborne particulates, hydrocarbon gases and heavy metals. (Search the internet for Danish, EPA and Forest Service studies and advisories on these popular “organic” heating and cooking methods.)

Simply put, EPA’s proposed rules will impose huge costs – for few health or environmental benefits, beyond what we are already realizing through steadily declining emissions under existing regulations.

Besides bringing mythical health benefits, EPA claims its lower national emission standards will simply put all states and utility companies “on the same level playing field.” This pious rhetoric may be fine for states that get little electricity from coal. However, for states (especially manufacturing states) that burn coal to generate 48-98% of their electricity, the new rules will be job, economy and revenue killers.

Energy analyst Roger Bezdek estimates that utilities will have to spend over $130 billion to retrofit older plants, under the measly three-year (2014) deadline that EPA is giving them, under a sweetheart court deal the agency brokered with radical environmental groups. On top of that, utilities will have to spend another $30 billion a year for operations, maintenance and extra fuel for the energy-intensive scrubbers and other equipment they will be forced to install.

Many companies simply cannot justify those huge costs for older power plants. Thus Dominion Power, American Electric Power and other utilities have announced that they will simply close dozens of generating units, representing tens of thousands of megawatts – enough to electrify tens of millions of homes and businesses. Illinois alone will lose nearly 3,500 MW of reliable, affordable, baseload electricity – with little but promises of intermittent pixie-dust wind turbine electricity to replace it.

Electricity costs are set to skyrocket, just as the President promised. Consumers can expect to pay at least 20% more in many states by 2014 or shortly thereafter. According to the Chicago Tribune, hard-pressed Illinois families and businesses will shell out 40-60% more! How’s that for an incentive to ramp up production and hire more workers? How’s that “hope and change” working out for families that had planned to fix the car, save for college and retirement, take a vacation, get that long-postponed surgery?

For a mid-sized hospital or factory that currently pays $500,000 annually for electricity (including peak-demand charges), those rate hikes could add $300,000 a year to its electricity bill. That’s equivalent to ten full-time entry-level employees … that now won't get hired, or will get laid off.

And it’s not just private businesses that will get hammered. As the Chi Trib notes, if the Chicago public school system wants to keep the lights on and computers running for two semesters, by 2014 it will get hit for an extra $2.7 million it doesn’t have, to pay for skyrocketing electricity costs.

Carry those costs through much of the US economy – especially the 26 states that get 48-98% of their electricity from coal-fired power plants – and we are talking about truly “fundamental transformations.” Millions will be laid off, millions more won't be hired, millions of jobs will be shipped overseas – and millions will endure brownouts, blackouts and increasing social unrest.

EPA generally refuses to consider the economic effects of its regulations, except to insist that even its most oppressive rules will generate benefits “far in excess” of any expected costs. Perhaps it will at least consider the obvious, unavoidable and monumental adverse physical and mental health impacts of its rate hikes and layoffs – on nutrition, healthcare, depression, family violence and civil rights progress.

The Environmental Protection Agency has always had a horse-blinder attitude about environmental policy. Under Administrator Lisa Jackson, it has become a truly rogue agency.

It’s time for Congress, state legislatures, attorneys-general, courts and We the People to bring some balance and common sense into the picture. Otherwise 9.1% unemployment – with Black and Hispanic unemployment even higher – will soon look like boom times.
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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.