"Earth Hour's" Global Propaganda Campaign

By Alan Caruba

On Saturday, 8:30 PM local time, everyone will be invited to turn off all their electrical devices and presumably sit in the dark. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Earth Hour is intended to “encourage American cities to prepare for the costly impacts of climate-related extreme weather and reduce their carbon footprint.”

Earth Hour is an example of the enormous funding available to the Greens and of their continued assault on the world’s population to encourage and maintain its message that the Earth is imperiled by mankind’s activities, i.e., the use of energy. Earth Hour is a huge piece of international propaganda. Millions of dollars and man-hours have been expended to get the lights turned off from the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building, the Leaning Tower of Pisa to Australia’s Opera House.

You may have noticed there is no longer any reference to “global warming.” That’s because a growing percentage of Americans have concluded that global warming is a hoax. The same charlatans behind Earth Hour and the forthcoming Earth Day on April 22nd have mostly abandoned any reference to global warming and are now lying to you about “climate change” and, soon enough, will shift their message to “sustainability.”

On December 21, 2012, you will find the same people who have drunk deeply of the global warming Kool-Aid sitting on mountaintops waiting for the end of the world as predicted by a Mayan calendar. You will not find any Mayans there because that civilization is long gone.

More recently, Pastor Harold Camping predicted the end of the world in 1994 and then revised his prediction to May 21, 2011. People have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time. They have all been wrong.

Earth Hour fits into this pattern, but its insidious purpose to maintain the same levels of anxiety and fear that has driven the environmental movement since it began in earnest back in the 1970s when it was predicting an ice age would arrive. A decade later they switched gears and began predicting global warming, projecting the end over periods of time from a decade to fifty years or so.

Global warming—a dramatic rise in the Earth’s temperatures—did not occur for two reasons; (1) it was a hoax based on computer models created by charlatans and, (2) largely due to a natural cooling cycle that set in around 1998 as the Sun’s sunspot activity began its own natural cycle in which fewer such magnetic storms occurred. Scientists have long known that a reduction of sunspots has always been accompanied by cooling on Earth.

The Green’s claim that a build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) would plunge the Earth into a period of warming is the greatest lie of the modern era. The Earth has had periods in which the level of CO2 was much higher. Vital to all life on Earth, CO2 is to all vegetation what oxygen is to all animal life.

The notion that “man made” CO2 portends disaster is false and is directed at forcing the reduction of the use of all “fossil fuels” for industrial and all other uses. It is the greatest scam ever perpetrated because the Greens use it to sell “carbon credits”, worthless pieces of paper that could be sold or traded in the same way as the “indulgences” that were sold as a way to buy a ticket into heaven.

I recommend that you read a short book that explains how and why the environmental movement is a huge scam and a hideous attack on mankind. “Roosters of the Apocalypse” by Rael Jean Isaac ($8.95) is published by The Heartland Institute and can be purchased from its website. In less time than it takes to watch “Dancing with the Stars”, you will learn everything you need to know about the global warming scam and all the ways you and everyone else are being robbed by the schemes tied to it, to “climate change”, and to “sustainability.”

Ms. Isaac tells the story of how, in today’s South Africa, the Xhosa tribe destroyed its economy in 1856. Based on a prophecy of a 15-year-old orphan girl, they killed an estimated half-million of their own cattle, ceased planting crops, and destroyed their grain stores. “By the end of 1857 between thirty and fifty thousand of them had starved to death—a third to a half of their population.”

Turning off all electricity during Earth Hour is no different from what the Xhosa tribe did and refusing to allow the drilling for oil and natural gas, or mining coal, all of which the United States has in sufficient abundance to make us energy independent and exporters of these energy reserves, is an act of national suicide; one that this international symbolism portends for any nation that abandons the energy that sustains economic growth and the welfare of millions.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Human activity, mostly in the past five thousand years that we call civilization, has not had a thing to do with its existence, but some humans are foolish creatures, easily spooked by prophecies that do not come true or claims that they are responsible for its existence and future. Some of them will turn off their electricity on Saturday.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Greener Than Thou

By Alan Caruba

The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles is destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.

Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.

Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.

A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).

Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.

To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth's creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.

For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.

Environmentalism is essentially irrational.

It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.

Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less—less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress—when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”

The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.

What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.

The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.

Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.

Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.

Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”

That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.

Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather—which they cannot control—and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.

Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.

Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.

The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.

© Alan Caruba, 2012.

Ice Age "News" is Wrong--It's Coming Sooner Than Later

By Alan Caruba

When you consider the millions of words published as “news” about global warming, a massive hoax based on the theory that an increase in the Earth’s levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), a minor atmospheric gas (0.0380%), it boggles the mind that reporters for a respected newswire, Reuters, would still be writing utter rubbish about it.

Just as the “news” about global warming was demolished in 2009 and again in 2011 with the leaked emails of the conspirators behind the fictions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main agency behind the hoax, on January 9, Nina Chesney of Reuters London Bureau, reported about a paper in the journal, Nature Geoscience, that the “Next Ice Age not likely before 1,500 years: study.”

The paper claimed that “Concentrations of the main gases blamed for global warming reached record levels in 2010 and will linger in the atmosphere for decades even if the world stopped pumping out emissions today, according to the U.N.’s weather agency.”

The U.N. does not have a “weather agency.” It has a propaganda agency devoted in its own words to “climate.” The two are not the same. Weather is what is occurring right now and climate is the measurement of trends over centuries.

The authors of the paper based their ice age predictions on “variations in the earth’s orbit and rock samples” and was “conducted by academics at Cambridge University, University College London, the University of Florida, and Norway’s University of Bergen.

These people have to justify their salaries and, just like all the other academics who jumped on board the global warming wagon, they are likely among the last holdouts making claims about CO2. Their conclusions are absurd. This isn’t science. It’s the dying gasp of those trying desperately to keep the global warming hoax alive.

The science—the known facts—aren’t that difficult to understand. Climatologists have established that, over the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence, ice ages have had interglacial periods that averaged about 11,500 years. Then the Earth lapses into a period of extreme cold. The Earth is 11,500 years since the end of the last major ice age.

We are due the onset of the next ice age any day now and when it begins, it will come on so fast that all the manmade CO2 will have no effect whatever. Moreover, CO2 shows up in the atmosphere in a greater quantity AFTER a major climatic event, not before.

There have been periods when there was much more CO2 in the atmosphere; the age of the dinosaurs comes to mind. Indeed, when the last big ice age struck, mammoths were literally frozen in place, waiting to be discovered and dug up centuries later, so intact scientists were able to determine what their last meal was!

I count myself fortunate to have Robert W. Felix, perhaps the world’s leading authority on ice ages, as my friend. I recommend you visit www.iceagenow.info and benefit from the facts. You can also read “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, his book on the topic of ice ages.

In a post on his website regarding the latest nonsense about a distant ice age, Felix cites the fact that Argentina’s Perito Moreno is growing and it is in the southern hemisphere. In addition, glaciers are growing in India, in the Rockies, in California and Washington State. Do you believe that CO2 will stop this growth or have the slightest affect on it?

The assertion that “an increase in ice-sheet volume would not be possible” is a lie. Just like all the other lies published about global warming by the IPCC and all the others that sought to profit from the hoax.

Do not believe these claims. The Earth has been in a perfectly natural cooling trend since 1998. We are at the end of the most recent interglacial period and could tip into a new ice age tomorrow.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Eco-Absurdity

Hurricanes seen from outer space

By Alan Caruba

There are no lengths and no depths to which Greens—environmentalists—will not go to advance the greatest hoax of the modern era. It used to be called “global warming”, but when that was exposed as based on falsified computer models put out by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the term “climate change” was adopted to mask it.

Billions of dollars have been wasted on claims of a massive increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere and entire careers, organizations, and government agencies have been financed to advance the hoax.

So much depends on this cash flow that the fraud’s machinery continues to function. Yet another IPCC conference on climate change began on November 30 in Durban, South Africa for the purpose of extending the absurd Kyoto Protocols that some nations signed onto with the promise of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions.” The original protocols exempted China and India. The U.S. refused to participate and many industrial nations have indicated they have no intention of doing so this time around.

As just one example of this BIG LIE, on November 30 I received a news release from the Missouri State University stating that one of its professors was “delivering a message in Washington, D.C. today urging the nation’s leaders to address the moral issue surrounding climate change.”

Oh, so now global warming is a moral issue, too?

As I have frequently noted, climate is something measured in centuries, while weather is forecast in days and, even then, can prove to be incorrect. The definition of the weather is “chaos” as it is subject to change in just hours as various “fronts” shift course. Even the most powerful events like hurricanes are difficult to predict and the U.S. mainland has not been hit by one in years. By the time Hurricane Irene arrived on the East Coast this year, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm.

This and the revelations of “Climategate”, the thousands of emails exchanged by the IPCC meteorologists of the University of East Anglia’s climate center, has hardly made a dent on the frantic efforts to keep the global warming lie alive.

“Michael Nelson, MSU associate professor of environmental ethics and philosophy, is part of the Climate Ethics Campaign, a team of representatives from government agencies, business and environmental organizations delivering a national climate ethics statement to President Obama and Congress.”

Here’s where it really gets absurd. Having blamed global warming for everything, this gang of hucksters assert that “’Missing from the international debate is the deeply disturbing moral and ethical implications of climate change.’ Nelson said ‘Climate change is a real, dangerous and rapidly worsening problem that cannot be driven solely by short-term economics or national self-interest.’”

The level of fear-mongering reaches new heights with the Climate Ethics Campaign claim that “Climate change-related impacts are already harming and killing people here and abroad. Unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, the resulting natural disasters, floods, diseases, illnesses, water and food shortages, and environmental degradation, along with associated rising violence and social breakdown, will injure or kill millions more every year.”

So, there you have it. Either we spend billions on “climate change” or people will die and societies will suffer turmoil. Can you name a single day when the weather somewhere has not killed someone? Do societies experience turmoil because of the weather or because they oppress their population? And can anyone do anything about the weather? No.

I fully expect these charlatans to announce that Santa may not show up on Christmas Eve if we don’t do something about climate change..

The weather, deemed too warm or too cold, continues to be touted as the result of too much CO2 in the atmosphere even though it is a mere 0.038% of the atmosphere and meteorological science has established its impact is virtually non-existent. There is no correlation between its increase and the climate except that it shows up well after any change.

Prof. Nelson, apparently concerned that his job is on the line, said, “We want to urge every citizen to push for policies that reduce emissions and prepare for climate change.”

Some of those policies threaten to further undermine the nation’s economy in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion that CO2 is a “pollutant” and is falsely trying to use the Clean Air Act to shut down every coal-fired plant for the generation of electricity—even though they provide fifty percent of all electricity generated.

These aren’t just bad policies based on utterly false and debased science, but they represent the real threat to the lives of all Americans and to the economy in general.

There is no real “ethical” component to climate change. There is only the need to clean up after a hurricane, blizzard or flood in order to help people get their lives in order again. That is already addressed in part by government agencies like FEMA.

The time has long since passed when the U.S. and other nations should pay any attention, let alone waste any more time and money on the “sustainable” schemes being pushed by the United Nations and the many organizations dependent on this massive fraud..

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Climategate, Part Duh!

By Alan Caruba

At what point will it finally occur to the pea-brained legion of journalists, academics, alleged scientists, United Nations propagandists, and others still blathering about “global warming” and “climate change” that there is no global warming and that the climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years on planet Earth?

It would appear that no amount of the evidence of fraud is sufficient to convince them they have either participated or been taken in by the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Perhaps, though, the latest release of thousands of emails between the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change perpetrators may push them toward a rational conclusion and release the rest of humanity from the penalties and costs imposed by the global warming hoax.

It’s not that the IPCC is not relentless in this ugly business. A report released on November 18 by these reprehensible liars predicted “more extreme weather events.”

Well, duh! There isn’t a day that goes by without an extreme weather event occurring somewhere on the Earth. One might consider the weather at the northern and southern poles extreme. Or the heat of the Earth’s deserts? Then throw in the usual blizzards, floods, and droughts—and you have a non-stop variety of “extreme weather events” to which to point.

To put it another way, the whole hoax was working just fine until the Earth began to cool around 1998. So naturally the IPCC had to (1) change the terminology from global warming to climate change, (2) deny that its “scientists” were lying, and (3) continue the pathetic prediction scheme by pointing to “weather events.”

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, “The scientific link between climate change and extreme weather, however, isn’t uniformly clear, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988 to assist policy makers with climate change.”

That’s right, this whole farce has been going on since 1988. At what point will the “enablers” of global warming accept defeat? Not soon if one considers that the IPCC is laying on another climate conference to be held in Durban, South Africa from November 28 to December 9. It will be the 17th opportunity for these deceivers to gather to wine and dine while taxpayers from the many nations they represent pick up the tab.

Here’s the kicker. “Christina Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “the report also underscored the need for governments to take action to reduce emissions.”

What emissions? Carbon dioxide? A trace gas in the atmosphere (0.038%) that has no effect whatever on climate or weather?

Does anyone grasp how costly all the lies about “emissions” have been and continue to be? The Christmas tree to be erected at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. comes complete with the purchase of so-called “carbon offsets” to pay for its transport 4,200 miles across the country from California. Eighty million tons of “carbon credits” were purchased.

Bear in mind, that tree and all others depend on carbon dioxide in the same way humans and other creatures depend on oxygen! CO2 is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. Without it, we all die.

But what is one Christmas tree compared to an entire nation, Australia, whose government just imposed a carbon-emissions tax on everything? The tax will drive existing heavy industry and other generators of CO2 from the nation that can afford to leave and make those who cannot less competitive with global manufacturers and other businesses. Some business will just shut their doors.

This kind of deception is global. The International Energy Agency announced in early November that “dangerous climate change will be essentially irreversible within little over five years.” The news report concluded saying “The IEA uses conclusions from research collated by the United Nations. Most climate scientists agree with the U.N. conclusions, although recent polls show a growing proportion of the public in many countries is skeptical of climate change.”

No, most climate scientists do not agree with the U.N. data because they know how flawed and frequently fraudulent it is. This kind of casual journalistic reference is a lie, along with all the rest of the global warming and/or climate change data from “official” sources like the IPCC and IEA, et al.

In early November the U.S. Department of Energy published “estimates” of global carbon dioxide emissions for the year 2010. Writing in Forbes, James Taylor of The Heartland Institute, took note that the Department concluded that “emissions rose by 6% from 2009 to 2010. This constitutes the largest rise yet recorded.” And then he added that “global temperatures have not risen during the past decade.”

There is no correlation. Never was.

Whether it is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the U.S. Departments of Energy, Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency, all depend on people being too ignorant or indifferent to grasp the truth that everything done in the name of global warming, climate change, or carbon dioxide emissions is a costly, evil deception.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The EPA Gets Caught in a Big Fat Lie

By Alan Caruba

The notion that the Environmental Protection Agency uses “science” to justify their regulations is false, just like most of the claims they issue on various aspects of the nation’s environment. Their favorite scam is to estimate the number of deaths they will prevent with some new draconian regulation.

The EPA is the American equivalent of the Gestapo, a ruthless enforcement agency with a very Green agenda that is opposed to the use of many beneficial chemicals, every form of energy, and the right of people to be left alone.

At the top of its list of priorities is the destruction of the nation’s economy with special attention to all forms of energy production. Manufacturing anything comes next, followed by afflicting the nation’s vast agricultural sector. The EPA insists that dust is a pollutant. You can’t farm without generating DUST.

To understand the threat the EPA poses it is necessary to understand that proposed Clean Air regulations are based on the claim that “global warming” is real, is happening, and is caused primarily by carbon dioxide (CO2). The claim is utterly without any scientific merit..

There is NO global warming. At least not the kind Al Gore lies about.

The North and South Poles are not melting; they gain and lose ice in a perfectly natural cycle that has been going on for billions of years. The polar bears are not disappearing. Drilling for oil in ANWR will have zero effect on the caribou. Et cetera!

With our vast reserves of coal and natural gas, the U.S. does not lack for the ability to generate electricity or to refine oil for transportation.

If you want to stay warm this winter, you better hope that utilities keep producing the electricity for your home or apartment’s heating system. Fifty percent of that electricity is produced by cheap, abundant coal and the EPA is hell bent to shut down as many coal mines as possible, leading in turn to the shutdown of utilities that burn coal. Natural gas accounts for just over twenty-four percent of electricity generation and it need hardly be said that the EPA is wary of fracking, the technology to access it.

Blowing the Whistle on the EPA

The big news—the kind even the mainstream media was unable to ignore—was that the EPA’s own inspector general has released a report accusing the agency of cutting corners regarding the “science” cited to justify its effort to declare CO2 a “pollutant.”

Simply stated, without CO2 all life on Earth dies.

It is a gas that plants use for their growth. From a blade of grass to a giant redwood, all depend on CO2, as do all the crops grown coast to coast. Enormous quantities of corn and wheat are grown that contribute to the U.S. economy, feeding both livestock and humans in wondrous ways. Take away vegetation and the animals die. Take away the animals that grace our dinner plates and we die.

Absurdly, the EPA says it is a “pollutant”, a dangerous hazard to our health.

No, the most dangerous hazard to our health is the EPA.

The EPA insists on ignoring all the other natural sources of CO2 as well as the fact that it constitutes less than one percent, 0.038 percent of the atmosphere. The oceans of the world gather it, store it, and release it. The EPA, though, says that when man is involved, it is pure evil.

Mind you, every human exhales about six pounds of CO2 every day. The fact is that the air Americans inhale daily is clean is due to the agency’s early efforts to mitigate some abuses. Those were the days before the EPA abandoned a rational, fact-based approach to its stated objectives. One of its legacies is the idiotic required inclusion of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline. Made from corn, it actually produces more CO2 to produce and use.

The EPA effort to regulate CO2 came along with the invention of the global warming hoax that claimed CO2 was “trapping” the Earth’s heat. That is why CO2 and others are deceptively called “greenhouse” gases (GHGs). Manufacturing everything from a donut to megawatts of electricity emits GHGs.

Finally, even the EPA’s inspector general blew the whistle on the utterly deceitful way the EPA arrives at its justification for a vast matrix of regulations that has been stifling the economy for years. The IG has charged that the EPA did not meet its own guidelines for peer review to ensure the integrity of the science stated.

Anyone who has been following the rise and fall of the global warming hoax knows that “peer review” has become a highly corrupted practice. Real peer review is critical to the integrity of any scientific study. When major science journals abandoned the peer review process to publish gibberish about global warming, they put all other new scientific studies at risk.

As Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted, the EPA’s regulation of CO2 emissions would require “230,000 full-time employees to produce 1.4 billion work hours to address the actual increase in permitting functions” that would result if the EPA is allowed to get away with this scandalous hoax. It would cost an estimated $21 billion per year. By contrast, the EPA’s budget request for fiscal year 2012 is $8.973 billion.

The EPA claims that the Clean Air Act gives it the power to regulate CO2, but it does not. It was never intended to, but the Supreme Court in one of its more idiotic rulings opened the door for the EPA claim. In his dissent from Massachusetts v EPA, Justice Antonin Scalia quipped that, as defined by the Court, “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an ‘air pollutant’”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) pointed out that “The EPA’s determination has led to a mountain of Clean Air Act regulations that could cost over a million jobs.” It is noteworthy that Sen. Barrasso said, “EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has regularly assured Congress and the American public that its finding is based on sound scientific practices.” It isn’t. Jackson “should testify immediately,” said Sen. Barrasso, “the American people deserve the truth.”

The EPA has been short on the truth about all of its claims for four decades and needs to be shut down in order to let a truly science-based agency replace it with strict congressional oversight and limitations.

The time is long overdue to pull the plug on the Environmental Protection Agency.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The EPA Nation-Killing Machine

By Alan Caruba

The problem with the Environmental Protection Agency is that it has “protected” the nation into a place where corporations flee to other nations, exporting jobs no longer available here. When not doing that, it is destroying the ability of whole industries—particularly energy—and of our agricultural dynamo to function.

In late July, the Sacramento Bee reported that “There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California—and the Sacramento region—because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.” While America struggles to survive its regulatory juggernaut, “Mexico’s unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.”

What’s wrong with that equation? Everything!

Putting aside the debate over debt and wasteful spending, at the heart of the economic stagnation that has been occurring is the Environmental Protection Agency. It is an agency of pure malice and a place that arrogantly cites bogus health statistics while issuing rules and regulations that are strangling the economy.

James Hammerton of Freedom Works recently noted that “The EPA is in the process of completing and finalizing 30 major regulations and 170 major policy rules that would impose hundreds of billions of dollars of compliance costs on the economy.” Only Congress can stop this.

Long after the global warming hoax was exposed, the EPA continues to insist that carbon dioxide, a gas vital to all life on Earth, has to be regulated. Even after the administration’s failed effort to get Cap-and-Trade legislation passed, the EPA relentlessly pursues this policy.

In brief, the claim is that carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is causing global warming. Therefore it must be reduced. Who produces CO2? Everyone! Humans exhale about six pounds of it a day. Every kind of energy use for manufacturing, for transportation, for the production of electricity, all this and more generates CO2 emissions. All this and more represent the core elements of our economy.

Why would you want to “trade” CO2? Well, by selling and trading “carbon credits”, millions of dollars can be made by the exchanges set up for that purpose. Utilities and manufacturing facilities would all have to buy the credits in order to stay in business. The whole global warming hoax was devoted to this scheme and, of course, those advocating it were all going to get obscenely wealthy while the cost of everything increased for the rest of us.

The problem for the EPA is that the Chicago exchange set up to trade carbon credits has long since closed its doors after revelations in November 2009 that a handful of climate modeling scientists had rigged the models to show a warming trend when, in fact, the planet had entered a cooling cycle in 1998!

Sensing that its ability to destroy the economy is slipping away, the EPA has been readying regulations allegedly based on the nation’s air quality. The problem they face is that the air over the U.S. is as clean as it has ever been. With the exception of places like Los Angeles, air quality has never been better. The EPA is literally trying to regulate dust that drifts in from Africa or airborne soot that arrives from Pacific volcanoes.

Regarding its proposed Ozone rules, John Engler, the president of the Business Roundtable, noted that “There’s nothing reasonable or balanced about the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to tighten national air-quality standards for ozone emissions at this time. For one thing, it’s premature, coming a full two years before the EPA is scheduled to complete its own scientific study of ozone emissions in 2013.” Not surprisingly, 2013 is likely to be the year that the U.S. has a new president and a Congress made up primarily of politicians devoted to debt reduction and the elimination of waste.

There is not enough time, nor space to describe how crazed the EPA is, but let me share just one example. The EPA recently told New York City that it will have to build a $1.6 billion-plus cover of a reservoir to prevent contamination of cryptosporidium, a water-born pathogen that causes diarrhea, from getting into its water system.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, “There’s one problem. The pathogen hasn’t been found in the reservoir despite years of tests and is barely present in the city.” Never mind, the EPA is claiming that the cover would “prevent between 112,000 and 365,000 cases annually”!

It gets worse, “New York City has already spent nearly $15 billion since 2002 for federally-mandated water projects, with the feds chipping in less than 1% of the costs. Next year it will finish building a $1.6 billion ultraviolet facility—the largest in the world—to disinfect water even more than it already does.”

That is just a snapshot of the billions in costs the EPA is right now trying to impose on a nation that is already $14 trillion in debt.

Here’s a suggestion. Close down the EPA entirely. Let the States determine what should be done regarding their air, water, and other environmental standards. The nation could save itself trillions by just ridding itself of the crazies running the EPA.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

What Greens Really Believe

By Alan Caruba

Earth Day was established in 1970 and millions of Americans and others around the world have been steadily brainwashed to embrace the impression that environmentalism is about protecting the Earth, but when Greens talk among themselves, it is a very different story and a frightening one at that.

The massive propaganda program that supports the Green agenda is impressive in its scope. Its locus is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was revealed in 2009 to be a complete hoax based on the manipulation of computer models to predict a warming due to excess carbon dioxide. There never was any threat from CO2. It is a gas that is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. It represents a very minor, even miniscule, part of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Nothing, however, deters the Green agenda and, since the first Earth Day, it has penetrated the nation’s schools and, of course, its politics, deliberately deterring and thwarting access to the nation’s vast reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas; the greatest such reserves in the world! It is a drag on business development. It is the ultimate nanny state seeking to alter people's lifestyles through coercion, legislation, and persuasion.

What most people are unaware of is the fascistic hatred of mankind that underlies the philosophic basis of environmentalism.

Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept, was quoted by William Tuck in “Progress and Privilege”, 1982, as saying “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals, but absolutely limited by the state.” Lamont Cole, an ecologist, has said, “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem."

Stewart Brand, writing in the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote, “We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!”

I doubt most people are wishing for a disaster and, when they occur such as the earthquakes in Haiti and in Japan, the first instinct of decent people worldwide is to mobilize to help those affected. This is a very human reaction, but it is not a Green one.

Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, characterized capitalism, saying “Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.”

It is no coincidence that Earth Day is also the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, the founder of the former Soviet Union and devotee of Karl Marx, the creator of Communism. The Communist revolution worldwide led to the murder of an estimated one hundred million throughout the last century.

At the heart of environmentalism, aside from its wish for far fewer humans, is a hatred of capitalism. The failures of communism and socialism everywhere attest to the way state control of all aspects of life is ignored by Greens.

David Foreman, founder of Earth First!, said, “We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, hold dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wildness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settle land.”

Thus, agriculture, the key to civilization, is decried as harming the Earth and all manner of business and industrial enterprises, dependent on the provision of energy, is regarded as evil.

Major environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club to name just two, oppose the use of coal, oil, and natural gas to provide energy.

So much of what environmentalism preaches and claims in its propaganda is utterly false, but telling lies is part and parcel of the Green message.

Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. Senator (D-CO) said, “What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Virtually everything being advocated by the Obama administration represents this willingness to take action and tell lies about the nation’s need for energy, with the exception of the worst ways of producing it, wind, solar, and biofuels. Even before gasoline prices climbed to new highs, negatively affecting all aspects of life in America, Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, was advocating higher prices.

The few quotes cited here do not begin to illuminate the horrors that environmentalism would visit on mankind or the nihilistic view it holds, but they represent a far greater body of Green writings and statements over the years that indicate the extent of the threat it poses to humanity.

A deluge of environmental propaganda will precede Earth Day, April 22, 2011. It should be seen as a warning to all who believe in the Creator and all who wish to advance a world at peace, one in which humanity benefits from trade, prosperity, and modern technology worldwide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Global Warming, R.I.P.

By Alan Caruba

Have you noticed that you rarely hear “global warming” mentioned on radio or television and the term rarely occurs any more in the print media?

One reason is that it has been replaced with “climate change” and the other reason is that the only people talking about climate change seem to be leaders of governments like the United States or Australia.

To borrow a line from Shakespeare, I come to bury global warming, not to praise it.

An early and unrelenting skeptic from the days it first debuted in the late 1980s, I rather instinctively knew that the only warming occurring was the same natural warming that always follows a cooling cycle; in this case the warming that began in 1850 after the Little Ice Age that began around 1300.

It never made sense to me that “industry” should be blamed for pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when the amount of CO2 was a minuscule 0.038 percent with far greater amounts of hydrogen and oxygen that protect the Earth from becoming the galactic equivalent of a toasted marshmallow.

Then, too, like oxygen, all life on Planet Earth is dependent on CO2, a gas that the Environmental Protection Agency is actually calling a “pollutant.” That is so absurd that I was confident people would laugh the whole “theory” out the door when it was first proposed. But that was over two decades ago.

The end didn’t begin until November 2009 and the release of thousands of “Climategate” emails between the meteorologists supplying the bogus data that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used to generate the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Not since the discovery of the “Piltdown Man” had so many scientists allowed themselves to be taken in by a complete fabrication; one based entirely on falsified computer model data. Worse still, many climbed on board the global warming bandwagon to reap some of the billions in grant money involved.

The fact that “global warming” was generated by the United Nations should have been the red flag that something was not just wrong about it, but that it hid an agenda aimed at Western industrialized nations.

I think global warming gained credibility as much from the support of the leaders of Western nations as from the great difficulty skeptical scientists encountered in gaining any traction against it. To this day President Obama still prattles on about the need for solar and wind power to replace fossil fuels in order to avoid “climate change” from their use.

The current Prime Minister of Australia is busy trying to impose a carbon tax on that nation. The British have dug themselves a deep hole by embracing windmills instead of coal mines. Billions have been wasted by Spain and Germany on alternative energy sources.

The anti-energy agenda will have devastating affects on life in the West. Electricity consumers in the United Kingdom were recently told by the CEO of the country’s grid operation that, by 2020, they will have to get used to having no electricity for periods during the day and night. This will put the U.K. on par with North Korea. And the U.S. is not far behind if it does not quickly reverse current energy policies.

In the U.S., the leading voice for “global warming” became the former Vice President Al Gore who, following his defeat for the presidency ,set about becoming a multimillionaire with all manner of “global warming” projects and enterprises. He would eventually win an Oscar for his documentary and a Nobel Peace Prize that was shared by the IPCC. Today, however, Al Gore is a joke.

The legacy of “global warming” has been the decades-long attack on U.S. energy sources until today our vast resources of coal and oil remain in the ground instead of being available as the price of oil increases due to troubles in the Middle East and the cost of electricity increases due to laws mandating that utilities must buy from wind and solar electricity producers who would be out of business by next week without those government mandates.

The public acceptance of the “global warming” hoax has waned even as the mainstream media has tried to hide the truth. The rise of the Internet has seen to that and other more pressing, real challenges are shoveling dirt onto its grave. 9/11 refocused public attention on a real threat. The 2008 financial crisis still holds the nation in its grip.

And a President whose first two years have generated massive resistance now only occasionally references “climate change.”

The global warming corpse is not quite dead, but dead enough for now. The question is what new fraud will the United Nations and environmental organizations perpetrate? The “acidification” of the world’s oceans? “Species extinction” or “Invasive species”? Be assured, the UN mafia is at work on something.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Deconstructing the Global Warming Fraud

By Alan Caruba

I have been reviewing books for fifty years and have long since lost count of how many books were written to propagate the global warming fraud, nor how many have been written to deconstruct it. That’s how the war of ideas is fought these days, along with documentaries, blogs and websites, conferences, and all the other ways lies are defeated by the truth.

From the earliest days the global warming “theory” was proposed I knew that it was a complete hoax. It never made any sense to me that an element of the earth’s atmosphere, carbon dioxide that measured an infinitesimal 0.0389%, could have an effect on the planet’s climate. Just one of the so-called “greenhouse gases”, water vapor—clouds—is 51 times greater than CO2.

Moreover, not one single computer model can factor in the effect clouds have on the planet’s weather because not one single meteorologist, living or dead, has a clue why they do what they do. They appear and disappear in the very definition of chaos. So it struck me as odd that all the computer models of the advocates of global warming always came to the same conclusion; it’s coming and the earth's temperature will rise dramatically IF…

IF is the key word that global warming advocates, now called “warmists”, kept saying. If you don’t stop using coal and oil for energy, we’re doomed. If you don’t reduce your personal “carbon footprint”, we’re doomed. If we don’t immediately start using ethanol, wind and solar power, we’re doomed.

Beyond IF came an endless avalanche of claims that global warming was altering or affecting every single natural phenomenon in the world. The claim was that glaciers were melting. Polar bear populations were disappearing. Hurricanes were increasing. The seas were rising. Eventually, just about everything happening anywhere was blamed on global warming.

Follywood and the mass media signed onto this absurdity, ignoring the science involved and the most obvious fact that an entirely natural cooling cycle began in 1998 and continues to this day. The worst of it, however, was a combination of the way the government and the nation’s educational system became parties to this massive fraud. And still are!

The EPA claim that it has the authority to regulate CO2 is a pure lie and it is based on the global warming lie.

Ultimately, however, not one "warmest" ever once pointed to the single greatest factor in the earth’s climate, the sun.

All this brings me to a new book, “Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory”, by eight co-authors, contributors whose expertise ranges across climatology, meteorology, physics, and mathematics, along with an expert in the legal aspects of the hoax. All have been derided as “deniers” and “skeptics.”

I know several of them as Internet friends, I count Hans Schreuder, Joseph A. Olsen, and John O’Sullivan among the many people who have helped me, over the years, to understand the complexities of climate science.

This book is not light reading. Indeed, if you don’t come equipped with an understanding of physics, for example, some chapters will remain beyond your grasp. And mine! Happily, most is easily comprehended. In sum, it is a damning condemnation of the great hoax of the modern era, perhaps the greatest hoax since the bogus economic theory of communism.

Real science is not arrived at by “consensus.” Real scientists actually seek to disprove the findings of other scientists until they cannot be disproved, affirming them finally as accurate.

Real science can be corrupted in the same way as other aspects of society can be. For me, the real crime of global warming is the way governmental agencies, beginning with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, deliberately falsified data, mostly based on computer models, to underwrite the global warming fraud. That is also what NOAA, NASA, and the EPA, have done, to name just three.

Now add in billions of dollars lavished on “climate research” conducted on university campuses from coast to coast. There were exceptions. Some university-based scientists disputed the bogus research and some were threatened with the loss of their jobs. The other crime involves the corruption of formerly respected science journals and general science-related media such as National Geographic.

I have used the words “hoax” and “fraud” interchangeably, but the latter refers to the way global warming was never about the climate and all about a handful of people becoming quite wealthy by setting up exchanges to buy and sell bogus “carbon credits” mandated by governments in order to emit CO2 in the normal process of manufacturing production and other applications.

Others have cashed in building solar and wind farms, or became producers of ethanol. None of these ventures would survive without government mandates requiring their use.

The Cap-and-Trade Act is one such fraud and is currently in the U.S. Senate’s political dead zone, hopefully to never be enacted. It is the global warming equivalent of Obamacare; the death of thousands of jobs and the economy.

I recommend you read “Slaying the Sky Dragon” as the definitive answer to more than twenty years of global warming lies.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Al Gore's Incredibly Shrinking Credibility

By Alan Caruba

In 1992 who said: “But the theory of global warming will not be disproved, and the skeptics are vastly outnumbered by former skeptics who now accept the overwhelming weight of accumulated evidence.”

Writing about automobiles, who said, “We now know that their cumulative impact on the global environment is posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront…it ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.”

No, it is not President Barack Obama who rescued General Motors from bankruptcy in order to require that it begin building obscenely expensive electric cars that will get you anywhere you want to go so long it’s not farther away than forty miles.

It is, of course, Al Gore and you can read more of his insane ravings in “Earth in the Balance”, published initially just prior to serving as the 45th Vice President of the United States during Bill Clinton’s two terms from 1993 to 2001. In 2000 he was the Democratic Party candidate for President, losing to George W. Bush after an election so close the Supreme Court had to make the final call.

After his defeat, Al Gore apparently decided that, if he could not be President, he could at least become obscenely wealthy by co-founding and becoming chairman of Generation Investment Management, focusing on “sustainable investing.” He co-founded and became chairman of Current TV, a cable and satellite television network “for young people based on viewer-created content and citizen journalism.” Current just hired Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC.

He found time to write “An Inconvenient Truth” about global warming and to star in an Oscar-winning documentary. The book was published in 2006 and The New York Times proclaimed that “Al Gore revisits global warming, with passionate warnings and pictures.” This was followed by a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize shared with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In late 2009 the wheels began to come off of Al Gore's and the IPCC hoax when thousands of emails between the key perpetrators of its rigged computer climate models were posted to the Internet. Everyone could learn about the conspiracy of lies that were the foundation of global warming.

Plans to impose a massive energy tax known as Cap-and-Trade began to falter. A 2009 United Nations Conference of Parties in Copenhagen resembled a rout as delegates struggled to leave town as a blizzard descended. A 2010 conference in Cancun was mocked as an excuse for UN toadies to dance until dawn and dine like royalty.

In June 2010, Gore and Tipper, his high school sweetheart and wife of 40 years, announced their separation. That same month, Gore paid $8,875,000 for an ocean view villa in Montecito, California. His Nashville mansion burned enough electricity to keep the lights on in several small Tennessee towns.

Today, Al Gore and global warming are synonymous with hypocrisy and deceit on a global scale.

With the advent of record-setting low temperatures and blizzards bringing U.S. cities to a standstill, Gore has been telling anyone who would listen that the cold and snow was the result of—you guessed it—global warming.

On January 31st, noted meteorologist, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, blogged that “No serious climate researcher—including the ones I disagree with believes global warming can cause colder weather unless they have become delusional as a result of some sort of mental illness.”

On February 3rd, Investor’s Business Daily editorialized about “Gore’s Unending Blizzard of Lies.” The same day in Forbes Magazine, Larry Bell, the author of “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax”, said of Gore that “no one has done more to melt down complacent minds with stoked-up claims of fossil-fueled climate peril.”

Behind the global warming hoax was the scheme to put a price on a tiny element (0.0389%) of the Earth’s atmosphere, Carbon Dioxide, that could then be bartered like a commodity as “carbon credits.”

It never had anything to do with climate.

It was Gore, speaking before a 2007 U.S. Joint House Energy and Science Committee, who said, “As soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave of investment in it.” It was P.T. Barnum who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

It was always about the money. If it took a global hoax, a fraud perpetrated by the United Nations’ IPCC and given the complete support of the mainstream media, so be it.

My question is this: If the government could bring Bernie Madoff to justice for perpetrating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, why has Al Gore been given a pass for being the face and voice of the global warming fraud and, by extension, the exchanges established to buy and sell worthless carbon credits? Isn't lying under oath to Congress a crime?

My other question is this: Why is any legitimate news organization still quoting him as if there is a scintilla of truth to his pronouncements about global warming?

Finally, at what point does Gore so completely disgrace himself that no one on planet Earth will believe anything he says?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Nutty Professors and Nutty New Taxes

By Alan Caruba

Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. All of which might explain why the nation is broke and why “intellectuals” like Blinder are responsible for some of the most stupid ideas ever imposed on citizens who lack their credentials.

In the January 31st edition of The Wall Street Journal, Blinder had a commentary titled, “The Carbon Tax Miracle Cure.” It is a masterpiece of ignorance.

Blinder claimed that “Everyone knows that CO2 emissions are the major cause of global climate change, that climate change poses a clear and present danger to our planet, and that the U.S. contributes a huge share of global emissions.”

One can only conclude that Blinder is among the last of Al Gore’s acolytes who has not heard that the only “climate change” occurring is the same that has been going on for 4.5 billion years on planet Earth.

Blinder’s miracle tax is “a carbon tax—really, a carbon dioxide tax—but one that starts at zero and ramps up gradually over time.” Will someone please tell Binder that the scheme to sell “carbon credits” for the right to emit carbon dioxide (CO2) has gone bust? Even the Chicago Exchange created to foster this “global warming” fraud has closed its doors.

The idiocy of Blinder’s “miracle tax” is that, if you can tax CO2, what is to prevent government from taxing oxygen too? Or nitrogen? Hell, just tax the entirety of the Earth’s atmosphere because, obviously, we are just using too much of it.

Blinder’s justification is that “the U.S. contributes a huge share of global emissions.” So, naturally, Americans should be taxed for exhaling six pounds of CO2 every day, along with every other activity from manufacturing to transportation, as well as heating and cooling our homes and all other structures. Every living creature and most all human activity emits CO2 along with the earth’s numerous active volcanoes.

It probably never occurred to Blinder that all other nations also “contribute” global emissions.

For the record the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of 76.55% nitrogen, 20.54% oxygen, and 0.91% argon. Of the remaining 2% of the atmosphere, water vapor constitutes 1.95%, while carbon dioxide is 0.0389%. Let me repeat that, 0.0389%.

Despite what the liars at the Environmental Protection Agency are loudly shouting these days, carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant.” In earlier eras there was far more CO2 in the atmosphere than now, providing the dinosaurs vast amounts of vegetation on which to dine and something to eat for those dinosaurs with a taste for other dinosaurs.

The only “global warming” in recent times has been the one degree of warming that began to occur at the merciful end of the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. The Earth has, since 1998, entered a new cycle of completely natural cooling due to a solar cycle called the Maunder Minimum when the Sun’s radiation is reduced.

Acknowledging that “this is a terrible time to hit (the nation) with some big new tax”, Blinder nonetheless advocates a carbon tax that “should be set at zero for 2011 and 2012. After that, it would ramp up gradually.”

“The tax might start at something like $8 per ton of CO2 in 2013 (that’s roughly eight cents per gallon of gasoline), reach $25 a ton by 2015 (still just 26 cents per gallon), $40 a ton by 2020, and keep on rising. I’d like to see it top out at more than $300 a ton in, say 2040.”

This would lead, says Blinder, to “lucrative opportunities from carbon-saving devices and technologies.” He envisions “80% of our electricity being generated by clean energy sources in 2035.”

By clean energy Blinder means wind and solar energy which, together, barely produce one percent of the electricity America uses daily. It is unreliable and would not exist were it not for government subsidies and mandates requiring its use.

Meanwhile, the vast bulk of our electricity comes from coal, just over 50%, and a combination of natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectricity (dams). Even if we blanketed several States with solar mirrors and wind turbines, we could never match the cost effectiveness and efficiency of fossil fuels.

Blinder notes that “No one likes to pay higher taxes” and dismisses value-added taxes (a favorite form of extortion in Europe), but in his view “A CO2 tax trumps them all”, concluding that a carbon tax would reduce oil imports.”

Apparently, it has not occurred to Blinder that extracting some of America’s vast oil reserves, billions of barrels worth, might also reduce oil imports, but what is one to expect from a professor of economics who thinks taxing a minor component of the atmosphere would solve our present economic problems?

Only morons want to turn America’s corn into “biofuels.” Only charlatans want to “reduce” greenhouse gas emissions. And only those locked in academic ivory towers keep insisting that man-made “climate change” is “a clear and present danger.”

You end recessions by reducing taxes, not inventing new ones. You end recessions by encouraging access to the nation’s reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil because that generates real jobs, not “green” ones. And you end recessions by not listening to the likes of Alan S. Blinder.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Climate Mafia Gather in Cancun

By Alan Caruba

On November 14, 1957, leaders of the American and other Mafia organizations gathered at the home of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara in Apalachin, New York; approximately one hundred Mafiosi from around the United States, Canada, and Italy attended.

Up to then, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had refused to acknowledge that the Mafia even existed, but a succession of prime time television appearances before Congressional committees by members of the Mafia made it abundantly clear that crime in America was, indeed, organized and led by some very colorful and ruthless descendents of the Sicilian Mafia.

It is time for the U.S. government to acknowledge that a climate mafia has existed since the gathering in Kyoto, Japan, to establish the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The December 11, 1997 treaty was, upon ratification, to go into force on February 16, 2005. Its expressed purpose was to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the purpose of avoiding “global warming”, but its real purpose was to create an entirely bogus system of emissions trading to be known as “the carbon market.”

On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate, responsible for the ratification of international treaties, unanimously passed (95-0) a resolution rejecting the Kyoto Treaty on the grounds that it “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.”

As this is written, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is striving to secure authorization to regulate GHG emissions despite massive evidence that they pose no threat to the environment and despite the fact that this authority would, as in 1997, cripple and likely destroy an already ailing economy.

There was no “global warming” then or now. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was deemed the chief cause of “global warming” when, in fact, it plays little or no role in climate change.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a criminal enterprise set up as a mechanism to facilitate the sale of bogus “carbon credits” and to transfer billions from industrialized, developed nations to those that have failed to keep pace. This latter scheme is little more than extortion.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC for their efforts to further this fraud. This demonstrates just how vast the effort to impose it had become. In the U.S., “Cap-and-Trade” legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, sponsored by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) was passed in the House and sent to the Senate. Political pundits say it is unlikely to come up for a vote.

In November 2009, the leak of thousands of emails between the scientists leading two university-based climate research centers responsible for the data published by the IPCC demonstrated they had deliberately rigged the data to assert a “global warming” that did not exist then or now. It was quickly dubbed “Climategate.”

The Climategate revelations doomed last year’s conference in Copenhagen that was intended to further the “global warming” fraud. It was attended by President Obama who said, “Today we’ve made (a) meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.”

There is no threat of climate change beyond those natural climate events such as hurricanes and blizzards over which humankind has no control.

Abandoning the term “global warming” and substituting “climate change” does not change the fact that there has been NO dramatic increase in the Earth’s overall temperature and ignores the fact that, since 1998, the Earth has entered a predictable and natural cooling cycle.

The President was lying then and continues to lie today about “climate change.”

Billions worldwide have been wasted on the needless reduction of GHGs. Billions here in the U.S. have been diverted to two of the most unpredictable and least effective means of energy production, wind and solar power.

Billions have been wasted on the U.S. mandate that ethanol be mixed with the gasoline Americans purchase, despite the fact that ethanol releases more CO2 into the environment than gasoline without it. Due to expire on December 31st, it would save an estimated six billion dollars. Even Al Gore has disowned ethanol.

The IPCC meeting in Cancun begins on November 29 and will generate a lot of hot air for two weeks.

The Earth doesn’t need less carbon dioxide; vital to all crops, forests and vegetation. It needs more. The world doesn’t need less energy production. It needs more; vital to the economies of developed and developing nations.

The future of six billion people on planet Earth depends on the failure of the Cancun conference.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Is the EPA Trying to Murder the USA?

By Alan Caruba

Day after day the news arrives regarding some new announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that is often so bizarre that it seems a parody of regulation, science, and common sense.

Most people don’t have time to pay attention to the cast of characters setting the agency’s agenda but these days that includes the president’s top environment advisor, Carol Browner, a former EPA director under Bill Clinton, and Lisa Jackson, the current administrator, an acolyte of Browner and, if possible, more obsessed with destroying the nation than her former boss.

Browner is a dedicated Socialist, but Jackson is a bounce-off-the-walls enviro-wacko for whom real science is a great nuisance while pseudo-science is a blunt instrument with which to impose a regime that will destroy the economy and take down the whole nation.

At the heart of the EPA’s latest initiatives is the thoroughly debunked theory of “global warming”; that carbon dioxide (CO2) is “causing” it, and that human beings are producing too much CO2 by using various forms of energy such as coal, oil, and natural gas. All three assertions are utterly and completely false.

As you read this, the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of 76.55% nitrogen, 20.54% oxygen, 0.91% argon, and 0.0389% carbon dioxide. Of the so-called “greenhouse gases”, the largest is water vapor—clouds.

When the EPA recently announced it had lifted the cap on how much ethanol had to be mixed with gasoline to increase the consumption mandates in the 2007 energy bill from 10% to 15%, it set off a firestorm of resistance. At the last count, more than 90 companies and trade associations have filed legal challenges.

The ethanol mandate was and is bogus. When mixed with gasoline, ethanol actually produces more CO2. It reduces the mileage per gallon and, in the process, damages automobile engines because it is corrosive. Made primarily from corn, it drives up the cost of countless food products. Its use is solely dependent on government mandates and subsidies. It is moonshine.

While companies and jobs depart the United States, the government flushes billions down the green toilet subsidizing ethanol, wind and solar energy.

The EPA has been asserting the right to regulate CO2, claiming that the 1970 Clean Air Act permits this. It does not.

When the State of Texas protested, The Wall Street Journal noted that Ms. Jackson was “threatening to punish Texas and other green dissenters with a de facto moratorium on any major energy or construction projects.” The Obama EPA is not run by touchy-feely tree huggers. “Put bluntly,” said the Journal, “this coercion is illegal.”

In an October 10 editorial, the Journal warned, “the EPA decision to strip permitting authority from the states is tantamount to a ban on major construction or building expansion—not merely Texan refineries, but any kind of carbon-heavy utility, industrial production, manufacturing plant or even large office buildings.”

The authority it claims would enable the EPA to shut down every kind of industrial activity or construction project nationwide.

We have witnessed the damage the Obama administration’s moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wrought. Despite two court rulings that it was illegal, the administration ignored them and, only when it concluded that the moratorium might cost Democrats votes in the midterm elections, was it lifted.

This is the most anti-energy administration in the nation’s history and it poses a grave threat to the economy.

CNSnews.com reported on a June 3 EPA statement, noting that “Tough new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency restricting greenhouse gas emissions will ‘slow construction nationwide for years’—but will only reduce global temperatures 0.0015 (15 ten-thousandths) of a degree Celsius in the next century.”

Mother Nature is already reducing worldwide temperatures as the result of a natural cooling cycle that began around 1998. We are more than a decade into a cycle that some meteorologists fear could become a new Little Ice Age.

A GOP minority report on the EPA’s greenhouse gas emission reduction proposals estimated than more than 800,000 jobs would be put at risk with no evidence of any environmental benefit.

In January, the EPA proposed lowering the ozone national ambient air quality standards from 75 parts per billion (ppb) to between 60 and 70 ppb. A study by the Manufacturer’s Alliance/MAPI declared that the EPA’s proposed revision of the “primary” (health based) standard would have “devastating economic impacts.”

The study estimated the new ozone standard would impose compliance costs of $1.013 trillion between 2020 and 2030 with a resulting reduction of GDP of $687 billion by 2020. They estimate 7.3 million jobs would be lost by 2020.

Ozone and carbon dioxide levels, and even levels of airborne dust are the Trojan horse the EPA is using to wreak havoc on an already fragile economy and rising levels of unemployment.

If the EPA is permitted to have its way, in ten years the economy will have been effectively destroyed. This all-encompassing federal agency gives daily evidence of trying to murder the United States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Journalistic Misfeasance

By Alan Caruba

The Gallup Organization has just released the results of a poll that, for the fourth straight year, reveals that the “majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.”

Those that do express trust in the media (43%) tie a record low. “Nearly half of Americans (48%) say the media are too liberal…Overall, perceptions of bias have remained quite steady over this tumultuous period of change for the media, marked by the growth of cable and Internet news sources.”

A perfect example of the reason for this mistrust is an October 3rd article in The Washington Post by staff writer, Juliet Eilperin. “Threat of global warming sparks U.S. interest in geoengineering.”

There is no threat of global warming. The Earth has been a cooling cycle for a decade.

Unless Washington Post editors and this reporter have been living in complete isolation for a while, it would have been impossible to ignore the fact that we are coming up on a one-year anniversary of the leak of thousands of emails between the handful of scientists responsible for the global warming hoax. These were the men who provided misleading and false data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The leaked emails led to the complete collapse of last year’s Copenhagen international climate conference.

Why, then, is the reporter referencing global warming as if it had any basis in fact? Perhaps because, on October 6th, in Washington, D.C., the Woodrow Wilson Center will be the site of a presentation by James Roger Fleming, a professor of science, technology and society at Colby College and author of “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.”

If, as the Washington Post article suggests, there is an interest in geoengineering, Fleming writes that “Geoengineering is in fact untested and dangerous. We don’t understand it, we can’t test it on smaller than planetary scales, and we don’t have the political capital, wisdom, or will to govern it.”

The key words here are “political capital” as clearly, without it, geoengineering cannot garner the billions equivalent to those squandered on the many scientists who received taxpayer funding for utterly bogus research to demonstrate that everything and anything was caused by global warming.

Ms. Eilperin covers herself nicely by noting that “For years it was considered downright wacky in official Washington to discuss geoengineering; altering the climate by reflecting sunlight back into the sky, sucking carbon dioxide from the air or a host of gee-whiz schemes.”

The reason for this is that it is wacky. That, however, did not deter Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, from suggesting that global warming could be deterred by painting roofs and highways white!

The primary method put forth to stop a non-existent global warming is to limit "greenhouse gas emissions", especially carbon dioxide (CO2). Ms. Eilperin cited the fact that the British government will spend $4.5 million over the next three years on geoengineering research, but neglected to mention that the Royal Society just backed off its support for global warming, sending a small shock wave through the international scientific community.

The bad news for Americans is that a Cap-and-Trade bill to control CO2 emissions awaits a Senate vote and, failing that, the EPA intends to exert control.

This article and all the thousands that preceded it, claiming a global warming threat, is nothing more than journalistic misfeasance. It is deceptive. It picks and chooses the information it imparts but neglects to mention that the Earth is cooling, not warming.

Little wonder that the public holds U.S. media in such low esteem. The so-called mainstream media has earned it.

Happily, people seeking to make sense of the news and issues of the day turn to Internet news and opinion sites they do trust.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

No Science, Fake Science, and the Destruction of the Nation

By Alan Caruba

Any scientist who has not sold his soul to the environmental movement will tell you that the reason that greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), do not cause any warming is due to the fact that they have to conform to the laws of thermodynamics. The first law states that “energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only change form.”

Energy produced by coal, natural gas, oil, or nuclear is energy that has changed from one form of matter to another. The attack on these sources of energy is a direct attack on the economic success of America and it is one that is at a dangerous peak of activity generated by the Obama administration, primarily through the Environmental Protection Agency.

There is simply no such thing as “dirty energy.” The push for so-called clean or renewable energy is a fiction to advance the use of the two worst, most unpredictable and unreliable forms of energy, solar and wind. They exist solely because of government subsidies and mandates. They produce little over three percent of the energy used nationwide every day.

The September 12 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek addressed this in an article, “Lisa Jackson’s High-Wire Act on Carbon Controls.” What the article did not say was that, if the EPA gains the authority to control carbon dioxide, it will literally control all business and industrial activity in the nation as well as the lives of all Americans.

What the article did not say is that there is no scientific justification for controlling CO2 because it plays no role in the so-called “climate change”, the new language being used to avoid saying “global warming.” It should be evident to a kindergartner that humans not only do not affect the climate, but have no control over it.

The environmental movement that has devoted decades and millions to perpetrate the greatest science fraud in the history of mankind has backed away from “global warming” for the obvious reason that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the past decade, the result of a reduction in solar activity, a dormant period that has a long history of preceding periods of cooling.

One of President Obama’s goals has been to secure legislation, known as “Cap-and-Trade” that would authorize a scheme by which “carbon credits” would be bought and sold by utilities and industry for the right to produce and use energy. It is part of the global warming fraud and its sole purpose is political power while enriching a few insiders betting on the expansion of alternative energy sources.

As the Business Week article noted, the EPA has been attempting to exert authority over CO2, but has been doing so "cautiously" to avoid evoking a public outcry against it. Thus, Lisa Jackson has offered a “tailored” approach “that exempts mom-and-pop dry cleaners and pizza parlors and initially regulates only power plants and oil refineries.”

The effect on oil refineries would drive up the cost of gasoline and every other oil derivatives.

Under the Clean Air Act, however, the EPA does not have this authority as CO2 is exempt from such action. Moreover, as noted, there is zero need to control CO2 as a threat to the environment because, without it, all life on Earth would not exist. It is CO2 that is the plant life equivalent of oxygen that maintains all animal life. The two are symbiotic and have been for billions of years.

Americans and people worldwide have been deluged with fake science based entirely on computer models whose results have been deliberately skewed to produce results that affirm CO2 as a primarily factor affecting the Earth’s climate. It is not.

As Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser has noted in his book, “Convenient Myths”, and in articles on the subject, “The atmosphere contains currently a bit less than 0.04% CO2. The rest is mainly oxygen (20%) and nitrogen (79%).” This represents an increase since the Industrial Age when the amount was an infinitesimal 0.03%.

If all the CO2 produced by power plants and the use of coal, oil, and natural gas was reduced to levels the EPA and environmental groups deem “safe” it would have zero affect on the atmosphere.

As Dr. Klaus noted, “Nearly all life on earth depends on the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere. Without any CO2, the Earth would be a barren place like the moon, or our neighboring planets, Venus and Mars.”

The EPA is lying to Americans using fake science. On July 29, 2010 it refused to “reconsider its greenhouse gas endangerment finding.” It avoided citing any of the scientists in its employ, instead it quoted the chief scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization that is entirely devoted to the global warming fraud. That so-called scientist, Dr. Steven Hamburg, said “The science behind EPA’s finding is strong. Now America needs to forge clean energy solutions that reduce the vast pollution discharged into our air.”

That is a lie. Indeed, more CO2 in the atmosphere would be extremely beneficial, aiding larger crop yields to feed Americans and others worldwide. It would improve the health and vitality of the planet’s forests. Ads on television touting “carbon sequestration” are part of the lie.

To sum up, Cap-and-Trade and any control of CO2 is in its simplest terms, a vehicle to destroy the nation’s economy.

You won’t read that in the BusinessWeek article, but it is a truth that cannot be denied and it is a battle for the future of the nation that must be won against this administration, against the EPA, and against the environmental organizations that have devoted themselves to this purpose.

© Alan Caruba, 2010