We can’t drill our way out of the problem,” goes the Democratic mantra on oil. So what would Democrats do? Some in the party have the worst possible answer: “Nationalize the oil industry.” In the kind of “oops!” moments politicians have when they say something they wish they hadn’t, two House Democrats have recently suggested nationalizing the U.S. oil industry. The first was the far-left Maxine Waters of South Central Los Angeles. During a May 22 grilling of oil CEOs, she responded: “Well, I can see that this congresswoman is going to favor nationalizing the oil companies, and making sure the prices go down.”

Then, this week, responding to President Bush’s call for more drilling, the just-as-liberal Maurice Hinchey of New York’s Borscht Belt chipped in with: “We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets into the market.” This is what it’s about: “control.” And it’s extremely dangerous for our democracy because once government controls the economy, it controls you, too. Then the Constitution, which guarantees your rights as a citizen of our republic, becomes a dead letter.

What’s especially shocking is these two extremists no longer seem out of step with what used to be a centrist Party. Don’t take our word for it. A Rasmussen Poll released Tuesday showed that 37% of Democrats think nationalizing the oil companies is a good idea. Only 32% disagreed with that. Which makes us wonder: Do they even know that socialism - state ownership of the means of production - has been completely discredited by history?

For 74 years, we struggled against this evil system, and it ultimately collapsed of its own internal contradictions. Yet, apparently, many Democrats are keen to replicate its worst features here. What’s ironic about this nationalization mania is that government, specifically bad decisions made during decades of control by Democrats, is to blame for our current energy woes. Whether it’s their failure to build nuclear power plants or oil refineries, their refusal to drill for our plentiful oil, their reliance on market-destroying price controls or their absurd belief that windfall profit taxes will somehow bring us more energy, Democrat-led Congresses have failed us over and over again. They’ve demonized oil companies for the very thing they themselves are responsible for - namely, destroying the link between higher prices and increased output of energy that would naturally occur in a functioning free-market economy. Read more here.

A year and a half ago, James Spann questioned the money and the so-called scientific consensus pushing the idea that mankind is causing global warming. Today, he says it’s losing steam. Two imminent surveys of meteorologists may further complicate the climate debate.  Spann, a broadcast meteorologist for ABC 33/40, an affiliate in Birmingham, Ala., downplayed the future of the global warming movement in a June 13 appearance. He was interviewed by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council for its Washington Watch Weekly broadcast. Spann told Perkins: “[Y]ou know, there was some great power in that movement back in January of 2007,” Spann said. “It’s pretty rapidly running out of gas and it just seems like every day more and more people are coming out with the fact that that’s pretty much a hoax. And these are Ph.D climatologists that are pretty much saying what I said all along.” In January 2007, Spann received national attention when he wrote a post on his blog challenging a post by The Weather Channel climate expert Dr. Heidi Cullen. Cullen had argued that meteorologists should have the American Meteorological Society (AMS) credentials taken away if they doubt the validity of manmade climate change.

Spann explained it wasn’t his belief that carbon dioxide was a pollutant, but he told Perkins to understand the motivation of those who say it is - they should follow the grant money.  “Of course, the root of this whole thing is money,” Spann said. “And, there is a vast amount of wealth being generated by this whole issue. And I always recommend to folks - if anyone speaks on the subject, get a disclosure and find out their financial interests in it.” The same claims are often made by climate change alarmists - global warming skeptics are in it for the money from big energy corporations. Spann told Perkins he has never accepted any money for speaking out about global warming alarmism, but he had reservations about money’s effects on government policy pertaining to climate change.  “When I speak on this topic, I’ve never accepted one dime,” Spann said. “It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other - if warming that we’ve seen in recent years is natural or not.

But, there’s a vast amount of grant money going to very, very powerful people and I think that maybe that flows into some of the lobbying efforts and it goes and winds up in Washington. He pointed to former Vice President Al Gore as an example of how money behind climate change and global warming alarmism can perpetuate a theory that shouldn’t warrant as much merit otherwise. “I’m not a politician, don’t understand it - I honestly don’t know,” Spann said. “But, I will tell you that there’s a lot of people who have gotten very, very wealthy - filthy rich off this subject. I think former Vice President [Al Gore] collects a minimum of $200,000 per speech on this and all of this money - it can corrupt anybody, and I just think it’s all about money.”

Manmade global warming is a myth, and the cult surrounding it will fade into obscurity, says JOE FONE , but the costs and taxes imposed to combat this imagined menace will remain. (p>In 1998, a peculiar thing happened. Global warming, such as it was, came to an end. Since then, global temperatures have trended downwards, while carbon-dioxide emissions have risen. The disconnect between carbon-dioxide emissions and global temperature trends proved what many scientists had been saying for some time, that the two are unrelated. But this should have been intuitively obvious in any case because industrial carbon dioxide represents only a tiny percentage of the atmosphere, so it is hardly likely to be a powerful climatic driving force.

So what is going on? What is so special about carbon dioxide and 0.6deg warming over 150 years that has the political world in such a flap? Why is carbon dioxide considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be a polluting scourge inimical to life on Earth when the opposite is true? Despite mounting evidence that manmade climate change is a myth and the science behind it is tenuous at best, the issue is so politically entrenched that the United Nations Human Rights Council has made climate change a human-rights issue. This astounding development reflects the attitude of Maurice Strong, adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who said: “We may get to the point where the only way to save the world will be for industrial civilisation to collapse.” Not to be outdone, the United States Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, Timothy Wirth, declared: “We have got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” Even worse, Richard Benedick, who headed policy divisions of the US State Department, said: “A global-warming treaty must be implemented, even if there is no scientific evidence to back the (enhanced) greenhouse effect”.  “A lie told often enough becomes truth,” as Vladimir Lenin said.

Yet thousands of scientists are scathing of the IPCC’s forecasts and are concerned that science is being manipulated to prove there is a catastrophe facing mankind, when no such threat exists. They warn of the dangers in relying upon computer models, which have proved hopelessly inaccurate, while being used as a basis for massive economic change.  Many scientists are concerned that the IPCC is using the implausible threat of catastrophic climate change to frighten governments into introducing drastic economic penalties for carbon emissions solely to undermine Western democracies, scientific progress and industrialisation. Read more here.

Climate change is never going to rise to the status of a top-tier political issue” is how one top climate-policy expert recently described the political lay of the land to me. Just take a look at the results of a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.  The top issue for voters (27 percent) was job creation and economic growth. Right behind was the war in Iraq (24 percent). Then came energy and gas prices (18 percent). Far down the list were the environment and global warming, at a minuscule 4 percent. So despite all the media attention on global warming as an existential threat to humanity, it still scores a bit below illegal immigration in the hierarchy of voter concerns. And there lies an opportunity for John McCain to turn the issues of energy and the environment to his advantage in his race against Barack Obama. Here are a few pieces of advice for Team McCain that I have gathered after talking to some political folks in recent days.

1) Stop talking about global warming. Or at least don’t talk about it nearly as much as “energy independence.” The latter has an incredible resonance with voters for national security and economic reasons.
2) Ban the color green. Not only is it a less-than-flattering hue for McCain; but it implies a kinship with an anti-oil, anticoal, antidrilling, antieconomic-growth agenda
3) Propose drilling in ANWR while standing in ANWR. Yes, McCain has come out against drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But with oil seemingly on its way to $150 a barrel or higher, at least if you believe many top energy analysts, surely McCain would be forgiven for a flip-flop.
4) Accuse Obama of wanting to launch a pre-emptive war on the American economy. McCain could attack Obama’s plan on two main fronts: its overreliance on alternative energy vs. fossil fuels and nukes, and Obama’s seeming willingness to go ahead with capping carbon emissions even if India and China-America’s two main economic rivals of the future-take a pass.
5)Stop blaming Big Oil. Why should McCain echo Obama in criticizing the oil companies-a blame game that a Republican can’t win-when he could easily blast the Democrats for a generation of policies that have limited oil drilling and the exploitation of nuclear energy?
Read more here.

Gas has finally hit $4 a gallon. Most Americans are upset about the cost, but to some journalists, environmental activists and politicians, high gas prices are good news. Even though the media have complained about “sky-high” gas prices, reporting the pain caused at the pump, they have declared energy conservation the “clear winner” from rising prices and have even called for higher prices to boost the “green” movement, as The New York Times did as early as 2005.

Not very long ago, CNNMoney.com Managing Editor Allen Wastler called for “a tax to make it $4 a gallon right now.” At the time - April 30, 2007 - gas averaged $2.95 a gallon, meaning Wastler called for more than $1 in extra gasoline taxes “because when you saw us flirting with $3, all the sudden we got a burst in hybrid production, we got a burst in ethanol production.” And environmental activists overtly praise pain at the pump and lobby for more federal taxes on fuel.

The media have had it both ways, bashing Big Oil for allegedly making prices high while praising the same high prices for the effect they may have on warming-related emissions. “It’s time to pay a price to curb global warming,” the Christian Science Monitor declared in a May 12 editorial. “Rather than prevent $4-a-gallon gas now, legislators should welcome it.” In his 2000 book “Earth in the Balance,” former Vice President Al Gore advocated increasing energy taxes on consumers to decrease the incentive to pollute. Seven years earlier, in 1993, Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to increase the federal gas tax to 18.4 cents, where it stands today. Elected officials in Congress are still working to harness the power of federal taxes to fund the “green” agenda and have been working to raise the price of gas even as it rises due to market forces.

In October 2005, when gas was around $2.85 a gallon, The New York Times called expensive gas “the best solution” to terrorist, environmental and economic threats. “The best solution is to increase the federal gasoline tax, in order to keep the price of gas near its post-Katrina high of $3-plus a gallon,” the newspaper’s editors wrote in an editorial.

NBC’s Anne Thompson noted on the March 12 “Nightly News” that higher energy prices would be good for alternative forms of energy like solar and wind power, which can cost two to four times as much as coal and oil. In May 2006, Earth Policy Institute president Lester Brown proposed a gasoline tax hike of 30 cents per gallon every year for the next 10 years. He said higher prices would spur investment in alternative energy and public transportation and decrease dependence on foreign oil. In March 2008, as gas prices rose closer and closer to $4, Brown maintained that an increased tax was a good idea, telling Fox News that “a tax on gas is a way to reduce dependence on import oil, reduce traffic congestion and reduce carbon emissions.” Read full report here.

The first qualification on my resume now is “Environmentalist”. Actually, it is a title everyone can put after their name. We are all environmentalists to greater or lesser degrees. It is an outrage that certain people and groups have usurped this title and implied that only they care about the environment. While this series of articles has shown the role the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in manipulating climate science it has succeeded within the dominance of environmentalism over the western view of the world.

The message the IPCC pushed suited the environmentalists so it was able to hide its activities amid the usurped moral high ground. They could isolate those who dared to question the science as anti-environment or paid by the oil companies who were the cause of the major problem of climate change. While this was happening politicians were being convinced of the need for action, in most cases by the bureaucrats who were members of the IPCC representing their country. Politicians didn’t understand the science and were easily bullied--besides they all wanted to be green.

What is wrong with the CO2 argument? Well most people have no understanding of climate science overall or the facts about CO2. The IPCC have also effectively made it the sole cause of climate change. AGW advocates and governments talk about reducing greenhouse gases, but they mean CO2. Few know it is less than 4% of all the greenhouse gases and the human portion is just a fraction of the 4%. Indeed, the amount we produce is within the error factor of the estimates of three natural sources. The table shows the range of estimates of natural CO2 and human production in 2005 (Gt C/year is Gigatons of Carbon per year). Accuracy has not improved since. Notice the human contribution is within the error range of three (1, 2, & 4) of the natural sources. The total error range is almost 5 times the amount of total human production. If we play the carbon tax game we can reduce that by 50 percent to 3.75 Gt C/year net because we remove half of what we produce through agriculture and reforestation.

In other words, if everyone left the planet but one scientist remained to measure the difference in atmospheric CO2 she would not be able to measure any difference. Many problems exist with the AGW theory, but there is one that destroys it completely. The most fundamental assumption of the theory is that an increase in CO2 will cause an increase in temperature. In fact, every record for any time period and any duration shows that exactly the opposite happens - temperature increases before CO2. This assumption is still programmed into the computer models so they continue to show that a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase. They dare not change this because it will take the focus away from CO2. Read more and see links to Dr. Ball’s series here.

In order to promote a new climate change special airing this fall, Thursday’s “Good Morning America” hyped terrifying future predictions of “more floods, more droughts, more wildfires” and, bizarrely, invited viewers to somehow morph into prophets and “report back” about what life is like in the year 2100. Featuring a slate of global warming alarmists, reporter Bob Woodruff previewed “Earth 2100” and touted the show as “a countdown through the next century” that “shows what scientists say might very well happen if we do not change our current path.” An online version of this story hyperventilated, “Are we living in the last century of our civilization?”

However, the oddest concept of this upcoming special includes a interactive online game that Woodruff claimed “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world.” Certainly Dan Rather and the ethical machinations of other journalists have lowered the bar of journalism in recent years, but how does one “report” on life in the year 2100? Is ABC providing a time machine? Doesn’t “report,” in this instance, just mean “making stuff up?”

The scientist/talking heads featured in the piece weren’t much more calm then the civilians. Featuring a cavalcade of alarmists that included James Hansen, Al Gore’s science advisor and Heidi Cullens, the climate change expert for the Weather Channel, to name a few, the GMA segment preceded to terrify viewers with a apocalyptic future of death and destruction. (It should also be pointed out that ABC failed to identify any of these people and their names/associations were only discerned after matching up quotes from an article on GMA’s website.)

Professor John Holdren of Harvard University darkly announced that the future would bring “more floods, more droughts, more wildfires.” The segment featured movie-style footage of flames, rioting and general destruction. Added to this were unidentified “reporters” who scarily proclaimed such things as “Flames cover hundreds of square miles.” Of course, these predictions were provided with no context and generally just seemed designed to induce panic. Read more here.

Icecap Note: ABC has now joined the list of networks I will not watch. Maybe if enough of us stop watching and ratings for this special are abysmal and GMA drop they will stop this nonsense.

Science does not proceed on the basis of consensus. The history of science is full of cases where a minority (or even single individuals) turn out to be right and the majority turns out to be wrong.  The German scientist, Wegener, provides a Twentieth Century example, through the response of the scientific community to his notion of continental drift. For some sixty years the theory was derided by the majority of the geophysical community and papers supporting it were declined for publication by leading journals. Minorities, particularly, have a problem where there are strong ideological pressures towards conformity. In these cases, some fortitude is required to maintain what is seen to be a deviant or heretical view. Apart from the obvious example of Galileo the situation of biological scientists in the Soviet Union, subjected to the dominant (and erroneous) dogma of Lysenko about the inheritability of acquired characteristics, might be cited.

In the contemporary world of public financing of intellectual activity, there are also more subtle pressures towards conformity. One of the many baleful consequences of directed or ‘performance’-based research funding is the extent to which it privileges the prejudices and paradigms of those holding power in the system at any time. The result is to favour for research support and publication those who follow the party-line. This characteristic, and the dominating connection between this activity and promotion, ensures the production of vast quantities of mediocre and repetitive material in our universities and like establishments and discourages the long-term and more speculative activity that used to be their academic glory. It is to the continuing shame of all the New Zealand universities that this is so. In this connection it is noteworthy that in the UK the panels making these systemic judgements about academic worth have now been instructed to destroy all the notes on which the judgements were made.

All this has important implications for our contemporary concerns about climate change and about what our response ought to be to claims that a major crisis is looming and, as a consequence, certain social, political and economic steps should be taken. As is well-known, there is serious and persistent scepticism in regard to both the magnitude and the direction of climate change and the degree to which it may be said to be anthropogenic. This might be a largely ‘academic’ question were it not for the fact that measures of taxation and regulation are proposed that have the potential to cause significant harm to the economic well-being of New Zealand. Unlike the Wegener case, the consequence of suppressing the deviant view may not be simply that we remain in ignorance. It may be that we embark on policies that are likely to be very damaging to us and only marginally advantageous (if at all) to the wider global community. Read more here.