By Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr. and Niger Innis
President Obama recently called Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, to thank him for hiring MVP-candidate Michael Vick, and underscore the President’s support for giving rehabilitated ex-convicts a second chance.
We strongly support both sentiments, and think it is wonderful that a God-gifted athlete like Vick can again market his formidable talents. Our church has an active, successful rehabilitation programs for men and women who “did their time” and want to become productive members of society.
However, the main purpose of the call to Lurie had nothing to do with rehabilitation. It was to push the President’s Green Agenda. Mr. Obama urged Lurie to make Lincoln Financial Field “greener,” by installing wind turbines and solar panels; he also discussed the construction of a biodiesel plant nearby.
Mr. Obama has frequently said the economy will be his “singular focus” over the next two years. “We need to work every day, to get our economy moving again. For most Americans and for me, that means jobs.” He wanted Mr. Lurie to support that agenda.
However, when Mr. Obama says, “create jobs” and “grow the economy,” he means taxpayer-supported “green” jobs and a “renewable” energy economy. This may be politically correct and appeal to some voters, but his plan will cause major trauma to our economic recovery. While Obama’s agenda means subsidizing wind, solar and biofuel power, it also means handcuffing hydrocarbon production and use. The inevitable result will be increased energy prices and obstacles to investment in traditional sectors of our economy.
Mr. Obama’s climate and energy czars, EPA administrator and Interior secretary are imposing policies this very week that will make this untenable result a reality. They will make more energy resources off limits, reduce royalty and tax revenues - and implement by executive fiat the draconian carbon dioxide and pollution controls that Congress and the American people rejected in 2010. The people rejected the plan because the controls would further curtail economic growth, and endanger environmental quality and human health and welfare.
For both ex-cons and citizens who have never been inside a jail cell, those policies will mean higher prices, higher taxes, fewer opportunities, hobbled civil rights progress, and a still moribund economy. They may create more jobs for government bureaucrats, but will cost millions of jobs in other sectors. These policies will be especially devastating for ex-cons seeking entry-level work.
Low-cost electricity and transportation fuels are key to improving productivity and giving American companies a competitive edge internationally, while paying the world’s best wages and benefits. Policies that make energy less reliable and affordable impair productivity and profitability, freeze hiring, and destroy or outsource jobs. They adversely affect factories, truckers, airlines, homes, offices, schools, hospitals, ambulances, taxi and delivery services - virtually 100 percent of our lives.
These “job creation” and “economy building” policies may make sense in the rarified atmosphere of Planet White House. They make no sense in the “real” world the rest of us must continue to live in.
Michael Vick may be blessed with God given talent enhanced through his hard work. Most ex-cons, however, are not as fortunate. These rehabilitated individuals need a booming American economy that provides for a variety of job opportunities - not a crippled American economy handicapped by fatally flawed energy policies.
Reliable, affordable energy is the foundation for jobs, health, environmental and civil rights progress, and every other component of human welfare. These misnamed “green energy” policies severely undermine every one of these goals.
Congress, the states, truly responsible companies and the courts need to stop, defund or overturn this White House, EPA and Interior power grab. The Affordable Power Alliance will do everything it can to ensure that this happens. PDF
Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr. and Niger Innis are co-chairs of the Affordable Power Alliance, a humanitarian coalition of civil rights, minority, small business, senior citizen and faith-based organizations that champion access to affordable energy. In their next APA article, Alliance experts will give more specifics as to why many of the green policies have inherent problems that will affect every American’s pocketbook.
By Christopher Booker
First it was a national joke. Then its professional failings became a national disaster. Now, the dishonesty of its attempts to fight off a barrage of criticism has become a real national scandal. I am talking yet again of that sad organisation the UK Met Office, as it now defends its bizarre record with claims as embarrassingly absurd as any which can ever have been made by highly-paid government officials.
The Russian icebreaker Krasin is sailing to the relief of fishermen trapped in the Sea of Okhotsk
Let us begin with last week’s astonishing claim that, far from failing to predict the coldest November and December since records began, the Met Office had secretly warned the Cabinet Office in October that Britain was facing an early and extremely cold winter. In what looked like a concerted effort at damage limitation, this was revealed by the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Roger Harrabin, a leading evangelist for man-made climate change. But the Met Office website - as reported by the blog Autonomous Mind - still contains a chart it published in October, predicting that UK temperatures between December and February would be up to 2C warmer than average.
So if the Met Office told the Government in October the opposite of what it told the public, it seems to be admitting that its information was false and misleading. But we have no evidence of what it did tell the Government other than its own latest account. And on the model of the famous Cretan Paradox, how can we now trust that statement?
Then we have the recent claim by the Met Office’s chief scientist, Professor Julia Slingo OBE, in an interview with Nature, that if her organisation’s forecasts have shortcomings, they could be remedied by giving it another 20 million pounds a year for better computers. As she put it, “We keep saying we need four times the computing power.”
Yet it is only two years since the Met Office was boasting of the 33 million pounds supercomputer, the most powerful in Britain, that it had installed in Exeter. This, as Prof Slingo confirmed to the parliamentary inquiry into Climategate, is what provides the Met Office both with its weather forecasting and its projections of what the world’s climate will be like in 100 years (relied on, in turn, by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Prof Slingo fails to recognise that the fatal flaw of her computer models is that they assume that the main forcing factor determining climate is the rise in CO2 levels. So giving her yet more money would only compound the errors her computers come up with.
In another interview, just before Christmas, when the whole country was grinding to a halt in ice and snow, Prof Slingo claimed that this was merely a local event, “very much confined to the UK and Western Europe”. Do these Met Office experts ever look beyond those computer models which tell them that 2010 was the second hottest year in history? Only a few days after she made this remark, the east coast of the USA suffered one of the worst snowstorms ever recorded. There have been similar freezing disasters in south China, Japan, central Russia and right round the northern hemisphere. See more here.
The only evidence the Met Office and its warmist allies can adduce to support their belief in the warmth of 2010 is that in certain parts of the world, such as Greenland, Baffin Island and the southern half of Hudson Bay, it was warmer than average. Yet even there temperatures are currently plummeting: Hudson Bay and Baffin Island are rapidly freezing, at well below zero.
The desperate attempt to establish 2010 as an outstandingly warm year also relies on increasingly questionable official data records, such as that run by Dr James Hansen, partly based on large areas of the world which have no weather stations (more than 60 per cent of these have been lost since 1990). The gaps are filled in by the guesswork of computer models, designed by people who have an interest in showing that the Earth is continuing to warm.
It is this kind of increasingly suspect modelling that the Met Office depends on for its forecasts and the IPCC for its projections of climate a century ahead. And from them our politicians get their obsession with global warming, on which they base their schemes to spend hundreds of billions of pounds on a suicidal energy policy, centred on building tens of thousands of grotesquely expensive and useless windmills.
A vivid little reflection of how our whole official system has gone off the rails was the award in the New Year’s Honours List of a CBE, one rank lower than a knighthood, to Robert Napier, the climate activist and former head of the global warming pressure group WWF-UK, who is now the Met Office’s chairman. The more the once-respected Met Office gets lost in the greenie bubble into which it has been hijacked, the worse it becomes at doing the job for which we pay it nearly 200 million pounds a year, and the more our Government showers it with cash and honours.
Meanwhile, in the real world, another weather-related disaster is unfolding in the Sea of Okhotsk, off the coast of Russia north of Japan, where the BBC last week reported that a group of Russian “fishing trawlers” had got stuck in “30 centimetres” (a foot) of ice. It didn’t sound anything too serious. But, as my colleague Richard North has been reporting on his EU Referendum blog, the BBC underestimated the scale of what is happening by several orders of magnitude.
Although several smaller ships have now escaped, the two largest are still trapped in up to six feet (two metres) of ice - including one of the world’s biggest factory ships, the 32,000-ton Sodruzhestvo. They still have more than 400 men on board. Three Russian ice-breakers, including two huge 14,000-tonners, are engaged in what looks like a forlorn bid to free them. A 14,000-ton ice-breaker can scarcely clear the way for a ship well over twice its size. And as the weather worsens, with gales, blizzards and visibility often reduced to zero, the chances of helicoptering the men to safety seem sadly remote.
The mystery is why the Russians should, in the middle of winter, have allowed such a fleet of ships into a stretch of sea known as “the factory of ice”. This is because all the rivers which empty into it from the Russian coast lower its salinity, making it prone to rapid freezing. But the Sea of Okhotsk has long been held out by the world’s warmists as an example, like the Arctic, of waters which, thanks to global warming, will soon be ice-free.
As we know from Prof Slingo, however, all this cold weather we are having at the moment is a local event, “very much confined to the UK and Western Europe”. Perhaps the Russian fishing fleet took the word of the Met Office, assuming that ice was a thing of the past. As the ice-breakers struggle to reach the hundreds of trapped men, and still-thickening ice threatens to start crushing the hulls of their ships, it seems that, short of a miracle like that which saved the Chilean miners, a major tragedy could be unfolding.
Meanwhile, the sad little nonentities in charge of our Met Office prattle on, extending their begging bowls - and our politicians who have put them there remain smugly and inanely oblivious to anything happening out there in the real world.
Read reprint on SPPI here.
And Andrew Orlowski in the register writes Met confirms secret Gov forecast of Brass Monkey winter. He recalls “In October 2008, the Met predicted “a milder than average” winter, only for Britain to experience its coldest in 10 years. The following year, the Met predicted that “the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue” - only for Britain to experience the coldest winter in 30 years. This winter has proved the coldest since records begin. Transport Minister Phil Hammond told Parliament he’ll ask the Met if three cold winters in a row indicates a “steep change” in British climate. The Met Office responded it needed more money for bigger computers, likely to produce bad forecasts but with much more local detail to the errors. They are like a contractor who botches a home improvement project but tells you if you give him a lot more money he will do better the next effort.
H/T GWPF
The UN’s IPCC Assessor David Shearman wants you to pay an eco tax of $18,000 for every child you have. This is to compensate the planet for you being a human. Don’t forget the eco elitists in power think you are a disease, a scourge on the planet, a virus that needs to be eliminated so the logical consequence is they want you to pay even more for being a human - that is to them of course. They have taken it upon themselves to represent the earth - no one voted them there - they elevated themselves to that position and now they feel they have the right to tell the rest of us how to live. They are taking their Malthusian steps like the Fabians - one step at a time. Putting us in a pot of cold water like lobsters and slowly heating it till it is boiling.
The UN and Barack Obama’s science czar John Holdren has always been an advocate of population control. Some of the measures he supports is compulsory abortion of American women, forcibly sterilising the country by additives to the water supply (eg fluoride). This is the same Holdren who thinks that children up to the age of two are not really human beings and so can be eliminated without any qualms. Again we have an anti-human eco elitist in power deciding whether you will have descendants or not, if so how many and of those that live how diseased they will be and what their life span will be.
Holden’s co-author Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) was Bush’s science czar. Funny how both sides of politics have anti people advisers. Ehrlich predicted the end of the world (these eco elitists love trying to scare humanity to death) but was incredibly wrong (as they usually are). He proposed carbon offsets to stop the poor from breeding - obviously the rich like him are ok to multiply. And yet there is much more in has hatred of humanity that this eco elitist proposes it is quite appalling.
In recent days Ted Turner Chairman of the United Nations Foundation Board (also founder of CNN) has advocated a one child policy for the western world in order to save the planet. He has donated over $1 billion to the UN to further his ‘special interests’. He has also rescued the UN previously giving them huge sums of money. I wonder what the dinner party is like for these UN eco elitists? “Hey Paul I agree we must wipe 100 million out in the next 10 years”. “Yeah Ted the human pests are just doing too much damage to our world - we want to enjoy it without them getting in the way”. “How do you propose we do it John”? “‘Oh don’t worry boys the UN already has it under control - another cigar and port?”
Already we are seeing women who will get voluntarily sterilised because they’ve been brainwashed to believe that babies are not eco friendly. We are also seeing fluoride - a sterilisation agent in our water supply, GM soy - another sterilisation agent in our food supply that completely sterilises rats in 4 generations. Is it any wonder our fertility levels are plummeting. The CIA gives an interesting look into fertility rates The where the west is at the bottom of the table. GM soy like most GM products are also linked to birth defects and cancer - so even if you have kids then the diseases we are starting to see plague us will hit them even harder.
And then there’s the UN’s depopulation agenda. World population down to 500 million. The UN is monitoring the situation and the UN can see that it’s policies through puppet governments are working. It now has World Population Day for the masses - or elimination of them. Then there’s agenda 21 and it’s social engineering - placing you in prison cities. There is also codex alimentaris - making it illegal for you to use natural remedies for your health.
So as the world freezes while the UN squanders our money on global warning it is worth remembering the biggest killer in the history of the earth and humanity is the cold. Ice ages have almost wiped us out completely. But as dead bodies are being dug out of the ice the UN and it’s eco elitists will still be telling us through the lamestream media even the cold is proof that the world is warming and they will still be demanding even more money from our puppet governments in the form of trillion dollar eco debts and they will still be there putting up the cost of keeping warm. The UN will handle all the financial transactions from the guilt funds and eco taxes, making trillions in the process and living the life of excess whilst they keep us poor. Whilst UN is enriching itself they will be (as they are now) driving you into poverty. Cant afford to pay your electricity bills? Can’t afford to keep warm in a cooling world. Just think this is only the beginning and it could get a lot worse, as long as we let them and their puppets stay in power. Post here.