By P. Gosselin
Hans von Storch’s blog brings our attention to an excellent German report by the normally green ZDF television.
The report takes a critical view of Europe’s energy policy and reaches the conclusion that it’s a failure. My last post Billions Of Euros For Nothing Called A Success Story illustrates this beautifully.
The ZDF interviews a leading finance researcher, and here’s what the ZDF report says:
“After 20 years of conference, after conference after conference, a sort of traveling climate circus on a worldwide tour, Copenhagen became the highpoint of absurdity in December of last year - a political and media overkill with the aim of nothing less than to rescue the planet. The conference failed yet again. It all gets down to money.”
Professor Dr. Kai Konrad is a distinguished finance researcher at the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Munich and a close advisor to the Federal Ministry of Finance. He and a team of researchers drew up an expert assessment of Germany’s climate policy.
The assessment was so damning that the Ministry quickly removed it from its website.
The assessment took a hard look at the 1st Commandment of climate policy: reduce CO2 emissions, and how a relatively small group of countries decided - unilaterally - to reduce CO2 emissions. The researchers writing the assessment deemed this a grave error. Professor Konrad says:
“When a small group of countries sit down and say they want to do something good for the climate, and reduce their emissions, it has practically no effect on the total amount of emissions worldwide. It means the rest of the world picks up the slack and just emits more.
In effect it means that the countries who cut emissions incur all the costs but no benefits. And the countries that don’t cut emissions, profit. So it’s highly worth it for these so-called “free-riders” who don’t sign on. What has the Kyoto protocol produced?
Since 1990 worldwide CO2 emissions have increased 36% and the few countries that have reduced their emissions have had immense costs, estimated to be $150 billion.”
When it comes to CO2 emissions, the European Union is a global power. Especially Germany has been a leader in cutting emissions - already 20% less than 1990. Professor Konrad says:
“The fact that Europe is a leader in cutting emissions will only lead to other countries slacking off, and thus the costs are merely shifted from the countries that don’t play along to Europe. So whatever progress Europe makes in cutting emissions just gets lost to countries like USA and China.”
And so the circus goes on. The other countries are happy about the cuts, and the EU carries all the costs. Europe’s Climate Commissar estimates the costs will be: 500 billion Euros ($620 billion) in the next 10 years.
Germany is the leader in this craziness, and is expected to cut emissions by 40% by 2020. This is to be accomplished by Germany’s EEG Gesetz, or Energy Feed-in Act, which forces power companies to purchase renewable energy at exorbitant prices from anyone who produces them and to deliver them to consumers, who then must pay through the nose. Professor Konrad says (in summary):
“From a theoretical point of view, the EEG brings no benefit. It brings nothing because the system of buying CO2 emissions certificates doesn’t work.”
All the certificates do is ensure that the CO2 gets produced elsewhere. Professor Konrad:
“The Feed-in Act is to be criticised in my view because it is no longer transparent as to what an enormous redistribution it creates and the huge subsidies that flow out of the pockets of consumers and into the hands of those who profit from it.”
By the end of the year German consumers will have paid 62 billion Euros ($75 billion) without seeing any CO2 reduction. In Professor Konrad’s and his colleagues’ view:
“The policy of avoiding the production of CO2 is a failure, nationally and globally.”
As a result, Professor Konrad’s recommendation is to use a different strategy (one that even the earliest and most primitive of man used): A D A P T A T I O N
The researchers say this policy would be much more successful, and certainly much cheaper than the current CO2 elimination policy.
Now, I wonder if our clever politicians will muster the intelligence that even our early Neanderthal ancestors had millions of years ago, and adopt this strategy?
Don’t hold your breath.
See post here.
By Jeffrey Ball, Wall Street Journal
The Obama administration signaled newfound concerns Wednesday about whether steps officials are taking to protect the Gulf coastline from the massive oil spill might end up causing environmental damage of their own.
Worries focused on the protective sand piles being built along Louisiana’s coast and an underwater plume of oil believed to have been caused in part by the use of chemical dispersants to break up surface slicks of crude.
In the latest twist in a controversy that has dragged on for weeks, the administration effectively ordered Louisiana officials Tuesday evening to temporarily stop building a line of sand berms east of the Mississippi River that the state officials see as crucial to protecting their fragile coastal marshes from incoming oil. Federal officials described the construction halt as necessary to prevent long-term environmental damage. Louisiana officials warned it could allow more oil to hit their shores right away.
Tom Strickland, the U.S. Interior Department’s assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, said Louisiana officials had been building the berms in a way that violated conditions set out by the Obama administration when it approved the berm plan in late May. He said the state was dredging sand to build the berms from an offshore area that is too fragile, potentially intensifying erosion of the Chandeleur Islands, a chain of barrier islands the berms are designed in part to protect.
BP Relied on Faulty U.S. Data Mishap Sets Back Efforts to Contain Leaking Well “You don’t want to destroy the village to save the village,” Mr. Strickland said in a call with reporters. “It’s a question of whether we’re going to impair that island chain in a way that it may not ever be able to be restored.”
But Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican who has been critical of the Obama administration’s handling of the oil spill, decried the federal government’s move to curtail construction of the berms.
“We don’t have time for red tape and bureaucracy,” he said in his own news conference Wednesday. “We’re literally in a war to save our coast.” He added that he was “calling on the federal government to get out of the way.”
Louisiana officials requested federal authorization to build the berms in early May, but they didn’t get the blessing until weeks later, after amending the plan to address environmental concerns from several federal agencies. Among the tweaks was changing an area where they would dredge sand near the Chandeleur Islands, an environmentally sensitive area for birds and other wildlife.
Mr. Strickland said that state officials were taking sand from a sensitive area the federal government gave them temporary permission to tap—but that the federal government decided it wouldn’t extend the dispensation beyond Tuesday evening. Mr. Jindal countered that the federal government had essentially changed the conditions of the permit after awarding it to the state.
Both sides said talks on resolving the dispute were ongoing.
A federal report released Wednesday about the underwater oil plume dealt with questions about another tactic officials are using to fight the spill. The report confirmed the presence of a plume of oil droplets sitting deep in the Gulf. But it said that, based on the data it analyzed, the oil plume didn’t appear to have markedly reduced oxygen levels in a way that was harming marine life.
That oil “appears to be chemically dispersed,” the report said, suggesting the droplets are in part the result of chemicals, known as dispersants, that have been sprayed on the oil to break it up and prevent it from washing ashore.
A main concern with oil sitting underwater is that it could reduce the levels of underwater oxygen, as natural bacteria in the water use oxygen as they eat up the oil.
The report said the plume didn’t appear to have reduced the levels of underwater oxygen to dangerous levels. But it cautioned that the most recent water samples on which its conclusions were based were collected May 25, and that the situation may have worsened since then, as more oil has spilled and more dispersants have been applied.
The report noted that its data came only from one research ship, which studied only a portion of the area around the leaking wellhead. Further research on the underwater oil continues. See post here.
Bishop Hill in Climate
As part of his ongoing investigations into the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, David Holland has used FoI to get hold of a pile of emails from Professor Brian Hoskins, then of the University of Reading and now at Imperial College. Readers will remember that Professor Hoskins amusingly rubber-stamped the list of papers chosen by UEA for the Oxburgh report.
I thought I’d highlight one particular email, which stands on its own as being something of an indictment both of the Royal Society and the IPCC. It’s an email from an IPCC bigwig, Susan Solomon, who was in charge of the admin for the Working Group 1 report for the Fourth Assessment Report. Solomon sent it to Rachel Garthwaite of the Science Policy Unit of the Royal Society. Regular readers may remember Ms Garthwaite as the person who stopped answering my questions about who it was who wrote the Royal Society’s position papers on climate.
The email dates from 2006, nearly 9 months before the release of the Fourth Assessment Report. Garthwaite is trying to organise speakers to attend a Royal Society lecture to coincide with the report’s publication. The email appears to be from Garthwaite with Solomon’s inline responses:
RG: Thank you for calling last week and my apologies for having taken so long to get back to you. I am out of the office all of this week but wanted to reassure you that the Royal Society is still very keen to hold an event to showcase the WG1 report and we have taken your comments regarding the potential content of the meeting very seriously.
SS: thanks - I think it was very helpful.
RG: In terms of ensuring there are no climate sceptics present at the meeting, obviously this will be difficult to ensure if the meeting is open to members of the public.
SS: I didn’t say anything along these lines. I fully expect some to be present in the audience.
RG: However we have no intention of inviting any known sceptics to the meeting, and certainly would not have invited representation on any discussion panel should we decide to have one.
SS:Yes, that is the point - they should not be invited to take the podium as speakers or panelists because that is simply not an appropriate representation of the state of understanding and uncertainty. The public has been confused enough by one side says this, the other that. This issue has gone far beyond that and this meeting should reflect that.
It’s astonishing to see these two organisations, which are supposed to be neutrals in the climate debate, getting down and dirty, taking sides and doing their darndest to make sure their side wins. No sceptics allowed. In fact, Rachel Garthwaite goes on to try to persuade Solomon that the Royal Society event should be about policy matters rather than scientific ones.
RG: In terms of ensuring that the content of the meeting does not breach IPCC rules we will of course include both yourself and Tim Palmer in the organisation of the meeting to ensure the content reflects these rules while still meeting the needs of the Royal Society (ie that there is some element of policy discussion)…
SS: As you know, WG1 is the physical science report. I am concerned to understand what it is you are proposing. Please clarify what it is you are envisioning regarding ‘some element of policy discussion’.
It’s funny to see the Royal Society trying to argue that one of their events should be about policy rather than science. Does anyone seriously doubt that the Royal Society has become simply another arm of the government, a body to give a scientific gloss to whatever it is the government wants to do?
Deutsche Welle
Naomi Oreskes, Bob Ward and Alexander Kirby discuss climate skeptics at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum.
“The statements from scientists are so greatly disconnected from the media in the USA because the journalists unknowingly and inaccurately repeat what was said,” explained American scientist Naomi Oreskes to the question regarding the possible reasons for the influence of climate skeptics. She took part in a panel discussion at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum, along with Bob Ward from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the former BBC journalist Alexander Kirby. This year’s conference, entitled “The Heat is On - Climate Change and the Media”, is taking place from June 21-23 in Bonn.
Oreskes said that the media treated the topic like a pure scientific debate, although it was grounded ideologically. “Global warming is no longer a debate - it’s a proven fact,” said Oreskes. She went on to say that the so-called climate skeptics are nothing but “contrarians” and can’t be taken seriously because their critique isn’t scientifically based. According to Oreskes, these are the same people who didn’t want to believe that the consumption of tobacco had negative effects.
Bob Ward claims the media in the UK are ignorant in their interviews. The scientist (sic) said it is astounding how many of the journalists don’t know “the difference between fact and fiction”.
But he also conceded that there have been grave mistakes made by researchers. “The IPCC is too slow in correcting the faults,” said Ward, and called for scientists to handle their findings and knowledge responsibly.
Alexander Kirby says that he himself is a “climate skeptic”, because he is a journalist and “serious journalism is always skeptical”. Kirby noted that there are serious theorists among the skeptics - and those are the people who need to be involved in the debate. “But the majority has never written a scientific article,” said Kirby.
However, journalists shouldn’t try to satisfy everyone. There are some topics where the media can’t be neutral. “Apartheid is an immoral system and there is nothing to be said in its favor,” said Kirby. “It’s not our job to inject a spurious, mythical balance into an unbalanced reality.”
Editor’s note: After years of uncritical coverage by the mainstream media, in part organised by Bob Ward and his friends, Ward is now turning on them when they are off message. What Ward, Kirby, Oreskes et al. don’t understand is that - on climate change issues - the mainstream media have lost both their monopoly and the trust of most people. Who cares what this or that news outlet says about global warming? Interested observers are well aware of habitual media bias and know exactly where (on the web) to look for more informed, more balanced and more reliable comment and analysis. The game is up and no amount of screaming and kicking will put this genie back in the bottle.
By Nick Collins, The Telegraph
The research indicates that scientists who blame human activity for global warming have published more relevant and influential papers than those who question man’s impact.
The analysis of climate scientists claims the “vast majority” of climate change researchers agree on the issue, and that those who oppose the consensus are “not actually climate researchers or not very productive researchers”. But the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has been dismissed as misleading by critics.
Opponents said that the paper divided scientists into artificial groups and did not consider a balanced spectrum of scientists. They also pointed out that climate sceptics often struggled to get their papers accepted by journals, as they must first be reviewed and approved by climate change “believers”.
Judith Curry, a climate expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology - who was not part of the analysis - called the study “completely unconvincing” while John Christy of University of Alabama claimed he and other climate sceptics included in the survey were simply “being blacklisted” by colleagues.
The study examined 1,372 scientists who had taken part in reviews of climate science or had put their name to statements regarding the key findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Scientists were grouped as “convinced” or “unconvinced”, and researchers examined how many times they had published papers on the climate.
The results showed that “unconvinced” scientists accounted for just three of the 100 most prolific authors on the subject, while papers by “convinced” scientists were more frequently cited in other research.
Opponents criticised the authors of the report for polarising all scientists into two distinct groups, rather than taking into account different shades of support for theories on climate change.
Roger Pielke Jr, of the University of Colorado, told sciencemag.org that some scientists were put into a group despite holding a more moderate viewpoint.
In one case a scientist who argued against immediate reductions to greenhouse gas emissions - a political rather than a scientific position - was categorised as “unconvinced”, he said.
Critics also said the paper focuses solely on scientists who have made their position on climate change public - failing to consider those “unconvinced” scientists who choose not to speak out - and that the peer review process meant the consensus view was unfairly favoured.
See post here.
Lawrence Solomon: Google Scholar at the Academy
See here in this Lawrence Solomon post the faulty methodology used in the study here.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has utilized a non-expert to write an analysis entitled “Expert credibility in climate change.” This analysis judges the climate science credentials of scientists who have taken a position in the climate change debate, and disqualifies those who are not expert enough in climate science for its choosing.
The non-expert writer of this analysis of credibility, James W. Prall at Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, is not only not an expert in the field of climate change, he is also not an expert in electrical and computer engineering, at least not in the sense that some might assume from his University of Toronto affiliation. Mr. Prall is an administrator who looks after computers at the university, not a scientist or even a lowly researcher in the field. If it strikes you as odd that an editor at the National Academy of Sciences would accept someone with a life-long service and programming career in the computer field to judge the academic credentials of scientists, it gets odder.
Prall’s methodology in determining who is credible as a scientist involves the use of Google Scholar which, he explained last fall to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “studies just the scientific literature. They look at peer-reviewed journals” Prall uses Google Scholar to determine how often people publish and how often they are cited. Based on the number of hits that Google Scholar produces - not on any analysis of the actual content of climate studies - Prall determines scientific merit. It’s an easy and straightforward process, he explained, that anyone can perform.
Does Google Scholar really limit itself to scholars? No. Search “Al Gore” on Google Scholar and you will find some 33,200 Scholar hits, almost 10 times as many as obtained by searching “James Hansen,” a true scientist and easily the best known of those endorsed by Prall as a bona fide believer. Neither does Google Scholar limit itself to “just the scientific literature.” Google Scholar finds articles in newspapers and magazines around the world: 113,000 in the New York Times, 22,000 in Economist, 21,000 in Le Monde, 16,000 in The Guardian.
Icecap Note: Prall got his 15 minutes of fame but like fellow phoney elitist Naomi Oreskes, he would have been better off sticking to an area he has expertise. The willingness of Schneider to offer his name for use in the paper and the PNAS to publish this work shows you how nervous and desparate the alarmists have become that their Madoff like scheme already exposed may be dismantled. See full roundup at Climate Depot here.
By Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr., Niger Innis and Reverend Samuel Rodriquez
Business and capitalism are dirty words in many White House and progressive circles, except in two ways.
Business is good when it can be co-opted and manipulated by government to advance “progressive” energy, social or economic agendas. And capitalism is a virtue in the sense of capitalizing on every crisis to promote those agendas - through the guiding principle enshrined by leftists like Saul Alinsky and Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
Thus the tragic Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been incompetently handled by a White House, EPA and Corps of Engineers unable even to make timely decisions about constructing sand berms to keep oil out of fragile estuaries. But the crisis is being exploited brilliantly to justify policy initiatives like cap-tax-and-trade, EPA’s “endangerment” decree, more bans on drilling, and mandatory fuel switching to higher priced options, most notably wind and solar power.
The economic facts of life simply don’t support this agenda.
Senator John Kerry asserts that China and India are spending billions to take our “clean energy” discoveries and technologies, make the wind turbines and solar panels in Asia, and sell them back to us. He is right about what’s happening, but completely wrong about why. The fault, dear Senator, is not in our stars (or in Asia), but in ourselves.
China and India pay their workers less than we do, especially in union shops so beloved by progressives. They use coal to generate cheap electricity to power their factories, while the White House, EPA and Congress strive to tax and regulate American coal-fired power plants into oblivion. China mines its abundant rare earth minerals (essential for wind turbine magnets and Prius batteries), whereas we have made hundreds of millions of acres of superb mineral prospects off limits.
China and India are creating tens of thousands of jobs, financed by American taxpayers and consumers, while we tax and over-regulate productive industries to pay for subsidies, tax breaks and payrolls for wind and solar companies that then must buy turbines and panels from China and India, because we cannot afford to make them here in the United States.
That’s why 240 gigantic wind turbines being installed in Texas created 2,800 jobs - but 2,400 of them were in China. The measly 400 we got were temp jobs: truckers to haul components from the West Coast to West Texas, plus installers, landscapers, lawyers and bureaucrats. This is indeed a great Green Jobs Program - for the Chinese!
Is this the economic transformation that Senator Kerry wants to bring about? So now we are going to be dependent on the Middle East for oil - and on China and India for “alternative,” “renewable” energy?
Equally puzzling, the wind energy industry is exempted from Migratory Bird and Endangered Species laws. Oil companies pay millions in fines, if a few hundred birds die in uncovered treatment ponds or are caught in the Gulf oil spill. And they should. But wind turbine operators get a free pass, even when their “Cuisinarts of the air” slice and dice thousands of eagles, hawks, falcons, geese, ducks and bats annually.
Installing hundreds of thousands of turbines, and millions of acres of solar panels - to replace oil, gas and coal facilities - would be an unprecedented disaster for habitats, wildlife and the environment.
Equally absurd, the 83% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions required by the House-passed climate bill and its Kerry-Lieberman Senate counterpart would send America’s CO2 emissions back to levels last seen in 1870, when population, energy use and technology changes are taken into account. The price impacts on energy use, jobs, working families, living standards, schools and hospitals would be disastrous.
Meanwhile, emissions from China, India and other emerging economic powerhouses would rapidly offset our nation’s painful reductions, and global atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise. America is not an island.
This is not sustainable development. It is the unsustainable devolution of our country. It is economically and environmentally ruinous. It is the Greecification of America.
The shift to the new Green Jobs Economy may sound good in the abstract. But a closer look at the current transformative plan reveals substantial complications.
It will not generate wealth and is not the product of wealth creation. It is a manifest wealth transfer, from productive and innovative segments of business and society to regulators, activists, companies and energy systems that could not survive without constant subsidies, tax breaks and environmental “get out of jail free” cards.
The Green Jobs Economy would have expensive, intermittent wind and solar replace reliable, affordable hydrocarbon-based electricity. On a large scale, that would severely impact working class families and small businesses. It would impose a punitive, regressive tax on our nation’s most economically vulnerable citizens. It would slow, if not obliterate, our nation’s chance for economic recovery and growth.
President Obama says he’s trying to figure out “whose ass to kick” over the Gulf oil spill and cleanup. He might want to start with his own regulators, advisors and congressional allies, who are leading him and our country over an energy and economic cliff.
Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr. is founder and chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition; Niger Innis is national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality; Reverend Samuel Rodriquez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. They are the co-chairs of the Affordable Power Alliance.
By Matthew Roth
Jon Stewart fired one of his more brilliant salvos last night, synthesizing 40 years of political posturing around energy independence and America’s addiction to foreign oil in just under eight minutes of pointed satire. Using President Obama’s Oval Office speech on Tuesday, where he urged a new energy future, Stewart skewered his rhetoric by playing clips from the past seven presidents, dating to Nixon, as they also pledged to get us off oil.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| An Energy-Independent Future | ||||
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As he so often does, Stewart offers purer critique of the issue with a few short video clips and montages than the whole of the punditocracy blabbering on
in other media.
“For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil are numbered,” said President Obama. “Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.”
“I believe I can fly...” Stewart breaks in, very off key, before continuing, “On non-petroleum based technology...or giant magnets or hamsters running simultaneously.. some other type of energy source we haven’t...”
Of course, Obama’s call to arms is virtually identical to one given by George W. Bush in 2006, and Clinton in 2000, Pappy Bush in 1988 and on down the line to 1974, when Nixon exclaimed, “We will break the back of the energy crisis. We will lay the foundation for our future capacity to meet America’s energy needs from America’s own resources.”
All the presidents also lay out technology fixes, alternative fuels (love Carter’s “gasahol"), and aggressive timelines that become somewhat less aggressive with each successive president.
And of all the ironies, as Stewart pointed out in his bit, despite Nixon’s reviled past and suspect ethics, he was one of the few presidents to give us meaningful environmental protections by establishing the EPA and signing the Clean Water Act. With the others at the helm, we’ve done nothing to abate our consumption of oil, nor meaningfully reduce our over-reliance on driving.
American presidents have talked the energy independence talk for four decades now, but we continue to drive the drive without changing our ways. I don’t know if we will ever elect to move away from fossil fuels affirmatively, or if we will be forced to innovate when the miracle of oil energy dries up or destroys the ecosystems we love and need, but I find it hard to be optimistic.
Anyone else as affected by this clip as me?
By Paul Joseph Watson, Prsion Planet
Government would have “absolute power” to seize control of the world wide web under Lieberman legislation
The federal government would have “absolute power” to shut down the Internet under the terms of a new US Senate bill being pushed by Joe Lieberman, legislation which would hand President Obama a figurative “kill switch” to seize control of the world wide web in response to a Homeland Security directive.
Lieberman has been pushing for government regulation of the Internet for years under the guise of cybersecurity, but this new bill goes even further in handing emergency powers over to the feds which could be used to silence free speech under the pretext of a national emergency.
“The legislation says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines or software firms that the US Government selects “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined,” reports ZDNet’s Declan McCullagh.
The 197-page bill (PDF) is entitled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, or PCNAA.
Technology lobbying group TechAmerica warned that the legislation created “the potential for absolute power,” while the Center for Democracy and Technology worried that the bill’s emergency powers “include authority to shut down or limit internet traffic on private systems.” The bill has the vehement support of Senator Jay Rockefeller, who last year asked during a congressional hearing, “Would it had been better if we’d have never invented the Internet?” while fearmongering about cyber-terrorists preparing attacks.
The largest Internet-based corporations are seemingly happy with the bill, primarily because it contains language that will give them immunity from civil lawsuits and also reimburse them for any costs incurred if the Internet is shut down for a period of time. “If there’s an “incident related to a cyber vulnerability” after the President has declared an emergency and the affected company has followed federal standards, plaintiffs’ lawyers cannot collect damages for economic harm. And if the harm is caused by an emergency order from the Feds, not only does the possibility of damages virtually disappear, but the US Treasury will even pick up the private company’s tab,” writes McCullagh.
Tom Gann, McAfee’s vice president for government relations, described the bill as a “very important piece of legislation”. As we have repeatedly warned for years, the federal government is desperate to seize control of the Internet because the establishment is petrified at the fact that alternative and independent media outlets are now eclipsing corporate media outlets in terms of audience share, trust, and influence.
We witnessed another example of this on Monday when establishment Congressman Bob Etheridge was publicly shamed after he was shown on video assaulting two college students who asked him a question. Two kids with a flip cam and a You Tube account could very well have changed the course of a state election, another startling reminder of the power of the Internet and independent media, and why the establishment is desperate to take that power away.
The government has been searching for any avenue possible through which to regulate free speech on the Internet and strangle alternative media outlets, with the FTC recently proposing a “Drudge Tax” that would force independent media organizations to pay fees that would be used to fund mainstream newspapers. Similar legislation aimed at imposing Chinese-style censorship of the Internet and giving the state the power to shut down networks has already been passed globally, including in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.
We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted “internet 2” system. Handing government the power to control the Internet would only be the first step towards this system, whereby individual ID’s and government permission would be required simply to operate a website.
The Lieberman bill needs to be met with fierce opposition at every level and from across the political spectrum. Regulation of the Internet would not only represent a massive assault on free speech, it would also create new roadblocks for e-commerce and as a consequence further devastate the economy. See post here.