As demonstrated by President Obama’s budget, the administration has launched an onslaught of unprecedented policies to restrict access to natural resources and increase taxes on America’s homegrown natural gas and oil industry.

The attack has drawn the ire of Democrats and Republicans from energy-producing states. One Senate Democrat recently said, “I’m going to ask the president how he thinks that increasing substantially taxes on the oil and gas industry helps us to achieve our goal of domestic energy independence of a more robust domestic drilling program. It’s one of the areas where I take the strongest issue with the administration. But independent oil and gas producers, which are the backbone of the domestic industry, cannot bear the elimination of these tax credits.”

I could not agree more.

Of the nearly 6 million Americans who are directly and indirectly employed as a result of natural gas and oil exploration, production and refining, all should be alarmed with the adverse consequences of President Obama’s tax increases. His $31 billion increase in oil and gas taxes would significantly curtail the operating budgets of all exploration and production companies, big and small. Tens of thousands of land owners from Montana to New York and Alabama to New Mexico are the beneficiaries of monthly checks coming from the mineral royalties produced on their properties. Nearly every single one of these royalty owners would face tax increases under Obama’s plan.

States annually receive billions of dollars in excise and severance taxes to support the critical funding of roads, schools and law enforcement. These revenues would significantly drop due to the forced cutbacks in exploration and production caused by these federal tax increases. Furthermore, every marginal well operator in the country should be acutely aware that these proposals will force the premature plugging of potentially tens of thousands of low-production marginal wells.

Despite the rhetoric, America’s oil companies are already paying taxes at the highest rates. Figures from the Energy Information Agency indicate that America’s major oil producers already pay on average more than a 40 percent income tax rate. After President Jimmy Carter imposed a similar windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry back in 1980, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service later determined that its results were hugely counterproductive: “The WPT reduced domestic oil production between 3 and 6 percent, and increased oil imports from between 8 and 16 percent. This made the U.S. more dependent upon imported oil.”

For American jobs, for the international competitiveness of American companies and for the consumers at the pump, Congress must reject Obama’s energy tax increases. These counterintuitive policies will undoubtedly make our nation more dependent on foreign oil, not less. See story here.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? After six months of economic hardship and one unusually chilly winter, it seems that Americans are beginning to conclude that perhaps global warming wasn’t such a big deal after all. Blowing $30,000 on a solar roof doesn’t seem such a great move these days. And for the price of a Toyota Prius you can now buy a three-bedroomed house in Detroit with enough left for a pick-up truck (this isn’t a joke - the median house price in Motor City is $7,500).

The ranks of America’s “climate sceptics” have been growing quietly for some months now. And at the weekend a watershed was reached: the usually left-wing New York Times put the British-born physicist Freeman Dyson on the front of its Sunday magazine. The article inside revealed that Professor Dyson - 85 years old and based in Princeton - not only possesses one of the finest noodles on Planet Earth, but also happens to think that most of what Al Gore and his band of Unmerry Men preach amounts to little more than yuppie self-loathing.

“All the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated,” is how Professor Dyson puts it. He adds that while it’s true that human-caused carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising, the Earth is still going through a relatively cool period in its history, and that most of the evolution of life took place in a warmer era. Professor Dyson is also fond of pointing out that carbon dioxide helps plants to grow - so having too much of the stuff hanging around might not be such a bad thing.

Out in the blogotwittersphere, the Greens can hardly believe that the same media that once helped Mr Gore to win both an Oscar and a Nobel prize are now promoting such heresy. To make matters more infuriating, Professor Dyson isn’t even a conservative: he’s a left-wing, Obama-voting, peace-marching, boho-academic genius who argues that coal-produced electricity has liberated millions in China from poverty, and that “greens are people who’ve never had to worry about grocery bills”.

I suspect that, as we all get used to our relative poverty over coming months and as it becomes politically impossible for President Obama to bankrupt power stations and impose carbon tariffs on imports, such scepticism will become ever more mainstream. Only last week a suggestion by California to outlaw black cars because they absorb too much heat and therefore require too much air conditioning was met with almost universal ridicule. All of which is both satisfying and unsettling - satisfying to see debate triumph over heavy-handedness, but unsettling because even if what Mr Gore was peddling was a lie, it was a convenient one, in that it seemed to be finally weaning the US off Saudi oil. Read more here.

For at least a decade, intimately connected with energy use, have been claims on climate change.

Professor Richard Lindzen, arguably the world’s most renowned climate scientist, describes our understanding of the science of climate as “primitive”.  Yet many in the media persist in treating alarmist ‘climate experts’ as ‘all-knowing’.  But then the same media have a long history of taking up ‘end is nigh’ scaremongering. It’s good for ratings.  We have had a litany of warnings that ‘billions could die’ when AIDS, Avian flu, SARS, Ebola, mad cow disease, the millennium bug - the list is endless - hit the headlines. When they didn’t of course, media alarmists shrugged, claimed they ‘simply report the facts’ and moved on to warn about the next looming disaster. 

Since man set foot on the earth however, nothing has quite gripped the angst-ridden imagination like the weather gods visiting their fury at human behaviour and life, so much connected with the use of fossil fuel energy.  Media editors know this. Where once we banished such ‘end is nigh’ eccentrics to the limits of society, today, they are feted for spinning prediction as science and conducting publicly-funded research to “save the planet.” Their messages are aided by apocalyptic video game scenarios passing for media news reports. 

Nowhere has this been thrown into more graphic relief than in two international climate conferences held in March this year. The ‘expert’ conclusions of each could not have been more starkly divergent.  But it is in the aims, nature and public pronouncements of each conference that we discern where the real science of climate understanding lays, and thus who are the real ‘climate deniers’.  All of which has profound implications for the future of energy, energy policy and energy investment. 

Much more could be said, but reading the New York presentations (linked here) one can only be impressed by the standard of empirical scientific study and debate and, in Copenhagen, the distinct lack of it.  The juxtaposition of these two conferences is thus iconic of the entire climate debate - or rather the mass media’s collusive and shameful closing down of it.  Unfortunately, many political leaders have simply bought the media-dominating alarmist line.

Vaclav Klaus, keynote speaker at the New York conference and current president of the European Union, lamented that, “the minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers.” Yet it’s those same leaders who are about to consider diverting vast economic and energy resources at the looming G20 and at December’s ‘Kyoto II’.  Frightening, when you consider they will do so based on an agenda propagated by a highly anti-intellectual, exclusively prophetic, anti-science ‘faith’ movement - the real climate deniers.

The increasing atmospheric CO2 has overwhelmed the environmentalists. It’s made them fizzy. And they can’t claim that any new, associated heat has made them delusional, because it ain’t happenin’.

The uncooperative climate and plummeting economy have attempted to deliver a one-two bitchslap smackdown of a wakeup to the global warming alarmists, but they still snooze. They instead cling to the nuns of their religion, hoping to inflate yet another economic balloon: that of a punishing carbon cap-and-trade system, which would heavily tax coal and oil as energy sources in a phony, “market-based” rationing system. The boom-and-bust bad examples of 1990s exuberance, Enron speculation, and the twin bastards of the federal government have not been a lesson learned by these environoiacs. They want AIG on their faces too.

How wedded are they to their anti-fossil fuels scheme? They can’t help themselves; they return to Carter-era policies like the Proverbs 26 pooch. It is convulsive and compulsive.

Real consequences mean nothing to them. Instead the warmers’ intemperate climate doomcasters and economics imaginarians collaborate to condemn the energy status quo, in favor of prospective sunshiny days that energize solar panels but don’t heat the planet. It’s a future that abounds with “green" jobs and a “new energy economy,” where smatterings of vista spoiling (for non-elitists, that is) wind turbines light the nation. And you know how much waterfront and ridgeline the non-elitists own.

The alarmists have pushed their agenda with amazing arrogance. With the election of their head-swiveling screen reader, they believe the end of their double decade journey to a decarbonated utopia is near, and they have trash-talked all the way.

But despite this hare’s once huge lead, we are now at the point where the tortoise has passed the napper. Why? Because the rhetorical inanity of claims to eco-economical benefit by the Green Genies (outrageous, he screams and he bawls) has been overtaken by the economy’s current state, and by the newfound understanding that phony markets based on worthless paper collapse and erase assets.

Those who understand all sides of an economic equation (job destruction as well as job creation; costs as well as benefits) have examined the likely trauma that would be inflicted by cap-and-trade. It all started last year with the scrutiny of the Greens’ grail: the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. The expert economists at the American Council for Capital Formation (at the behest of the National Association of Manufacturers) foretold the scars and found brutality (PDF). Read more here.

My friend, the internationally famed climatologist, Dr. S. Fred Singer, calls them “the CO2 wars.” It is the last ditch attempt by the Greens, under the aegis of the Obama administration, to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant and thus open the door to its regulation. Singer says such regulation “would be the equivalent of an atomic bomb directed at the U.S. economy - all without any scientific justification.”

I am increasingly of the opinion that the main goal of the Obama administration through CO2 regulation, exploding deficits, punishing taxation, and any other means at their disposal is the destruction of the economy and the complete control of impoverished Americans. This is an administration that exists to impose an Orwellian socialist utopia after the smokescreen clears. When it comes to CO2, Obama, his so-called science advisors, and the Environmental Protection Agency are all lying. It is governmental gangsterism.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, “The Environmental Protection Agency has sent the White House a proposed finding that carbon dioxide is a danger to public health, a step that could trigger a clampdown on emissions of so-called greenhouse gases across a wide swath of the economy.” Here are a few things you need to keep in mind about carbon dioxide:

CO2 is not a “pollutant.” It is a trace gas necessary for all life of Earth because it is essential to the growth of all vegetation. Without CO2 all vegetation - grasses, forests, jungles, crops such as wheat, corn and rice - dies. Then herbivores die. Then you die.

The CO2 produced by human industry or activity is a miniscule fraction of a percentage of greenhouse gases. It constitutes a mere 0.038% of the atmosphere. The oceans emit 96.5% of all greenhouse gases, holding and releasing CO2 as it has down through the millennia of Earth’s existence. In past millennia, CO2 levels were often much higher than the present. CO2 levels rise hundreds of years after temperature rise on planet Earth. The Sun is the primary source of warmth on Earth. Rising CO2 is an effect of global warming, not a cause.  Both global warming and cooling are natural phenomenon over which humans have no control.

The Earth is not currently warming. It has been cooling for a decade and likely to continue for at least another twenty years or longer. If a new Ice Age is triggered, it will last at least 10,000 years. Polar ice is now at record levels and still growing. If you had a choice, would you prefer a warmer or colder Earth? And consider this, if only the United States was to significantly cut its CO2 emissions, how much effect, if any, would that have in a world where most other nations, including China and India, have no intention of doing so? Both are exempt from the UN Kyoto Protocol. The answer is zero!

The EPA proposal is not about science. It is about power and it is about money. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “The administration has proposed a cap-and-trade system that could raise $646 billion by 2019 through government auctions of emission allowances.” The federal government, though the aegis of the EPA, would have control over the destinies of an estimated 13,000 facilities if this regulatory obscenity were to become law. “Coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and domestic industries, such as energy-intensive paper, cement, fertilizer, steel and glass manufacturers, worry that increased dost burdens imposed by climate-change laws will put them at a severe competitive disadvantage to their international peers that aren’t bound by similar environmental rules.” Such industries would flee the United States as the most toxic place on Earth in which to do business.

This would be the fulfillment of the Obama administration’s goal and explains in part why this new assault on science, industry, and common sense has been put forth by the EPA. One of the best sites for information about carbon dioxide is here.
I recommend you visit and browse through its extensive data with tip of the hat as well to this section.

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center.

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Morner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker.

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Morner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Morner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Morner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on “going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world”.

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Morner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”. Read full post here.

Follow the bolded words below to see what passes for intelligent discourse on Climate Progress, Joe Romm’s allegedly “indispensable blog” (Icecap note: as the equally dispensible) Tom Friedman inexplicably put it several weeks back):

“Shame on the New York Times Magazine for publishing an extended, largely favorable profile of Freeman Dyson, a true climate crackpot”

“Shame on them for printing his scientifically unjustifiable slanders of the country’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen”

“And shame on the NYT’s top climate science reporter, Andy Revkin for promoting this piece on his blog with not a single criticism of Dyson’s numerous anti-scientific statements and smears.  I call on Revkin to retract his absurdly indefensible assertion that, ‘On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right...(see full quote at end)’”

Romm betrays himself with the editing of Revkin’s sentence; more about that in a minute. But first, Romm aims his wrath at the New York Times for publishing a profile of Freeman Dyson in Sundays New York Times Magazine, and, of course, at one of his favorite whipping boys, Andy Revkin, for writing about the profile dispassionately in his DotEarth blog. 

In Joe Romm’s logic, anyone who disagrees with him is guilty of “smears” and “slander,” as opposed to simply offering an opinion, which, well, may be right or wrong. It’s not good enough for Romm to argue passionately against a point of view. For anyone with the chutzpah to advance an argument he disagrees with, Romm seems compelled to use taunts and epithets. He also frequently ties this tactic with the demand that a writer or publication “retract” what they’ve published. One gets the sense that honest debate is not Romm’s goal, but quite the opposite: the shutting down of free expression. And in my opinion, this makes him the entirely dispensable censor.

Romm reveals just how dispensable his blog really is with his editing of Revkin’s sentence - editing that was clearly intended to twist Andy’s original meaning to leave his readers with a false impression. Here is the full sentence, minus Romm’s excisions: “On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right or wrong, and pretty much admits that.”

Freeman Dyson profiled in the New York Times Magazine

Yes, Romm did direct his readers to Revkin’s blog to see the “full quote at end.” But how many will actually take the extra steps to do that? Not many. If Romm really was interested in truth he would have have included the six extra words in that sentence.

I suspect that something other than a pursuit of the truth and healthy debate is at work here. What might that be? Let’s string together the strong words from his post, one after the other: shame; slanders; shame; shame; smears; absurdly indefensible; loopy; famous crackpot camp; outlandish; crackpot; rant and rave; loopiness; slander-fest; uncivil, unjustified ravings; crackpots. (Did I catch them all?)

And then this: “Shame on the NYT, shame on the reporter, Nicholas Dawidoff, for publishing this crackpot’s crap for millions to read and possibly think is credible”. I believe psychologists have a word for Romm’s unseemly behavior: “projection.” (Or possibly “transference”?). See post here. See the original New York Time story that infuriated Romm here.

MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone - out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists - William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson - a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory - not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists - and has lived a more original life. Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do.

Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” - the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
Read much more here.