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

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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

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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

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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

More about → Deconstructing the Global Warming Fraud

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

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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

More about → Nutty Professors and Nutty New Taxes

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

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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

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