PRNewswire-USNewswire

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission denied a bid by Lehman Brothers to block shareholders from voting on a global warming-related shareholder proposal from the Free Enterprise Action Fund (Ticker: FEAOX). “Lehman Brothers says it wants to make money from global warming, but basic information on which the firm relies and presents to shareholders is clearly erroneous,” said Steve Milloy, portfolio manager of Action Fund Management (AFM), the FEAOX’s investment adviser. “When a $34 billion company is touting misinformation as a basis for its actions, it makes you wonder about the soundness of its business plan,”
Milloy added. Lehman Brothers’ management uses the so-called “hockey stick” chart, for example, to support the notion that “the Earth’s mean temperature has risen sharply in recent decades.” But the hockey stick graph was scientifically discredited long before Lehman issued its February 2007 report.

“We think that Lehman is in way over its head when it comes to global warming and that management is recklessly risking shareholder value,” said Milloy. “Shareholders will be looking for an explanation from CEO Richard Fuld at the annual shareholder meeting,” Milloy concluded. By investing in the FEAOX (http://www.FEAOX.com), individuals can participate in the global warming debate while having an opportunity to earn a financial return through ownership of a large-cap mutual fund. With a minimum investment of $2,500, individuals can join FEAOX’s effort to make CEOs justify their positions on global warming. FEAOX is available exclusively through Foreside Distribution Services L.P., (applications may be obtained at http://www.FEAOX.com/how.html), and through E*Trade Financial, Scottrade, TD Ameritrade and HSBC.

Read full release here.

By Cathy Cash, Electric Utility Week

With a bipartisan measure awaiting a Senate vote and a House committee vowing to advance its own version, climate change legislation is expected to be a star attraction in this session of the 110th Congress. But dim economic forecasts in addition to stubborn White House opposition have industry insiders looking to future Congresses to get a federal mandate for capping greenhouse gas emissions. “We all have ideas, but depending on how economy goes, the level of interest in tackling something like climate ? These activities raise the cost of energy,” said one Midwest utility lobbyist. “In an economy not doing well, there may be little appetite to take on [climate change] in any serious way. The state of the economy will dictate what the energy and environment agenda looks like in 2008.”

Another industry source predicted that the Senate would fail to muster 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster on climate legislation and that the House would attempt to write a bill by late April but may or may not get it to the floor for a vote. Lawmakers might just look back on their 2007 accomplishments toward greenhouse gas reductions, tighter corporate average fuel efficiency standards, biofuel requirements and energy efficiency programs and leave it at that.

“With the economy softening and with the transportation sector having already been addressed last year, along with appliance efficiency standards, I don’t think there is much pent-up Congressional demand to sharply increase energy prices through an economy-wide cap-and-trade bill, which is what would be necessary in order to significantly reduce CO2 emissions in these sectors further,” the industry source said.

Virginia Democrat Rick Boucher, a key member of the House of Representatives charged with drafting comprehensive climate change legislation, vowed last week to move legislation through Congress and to the president’s desk this year. And gloomy economic forecasts would not slow the pace of getting the GHG cap-and-trade bill through Congress, he said.

Industry analysts say the potential costs of a GHG cap on various industries will be wide-ranging and lawmakers are only beginning to consider the financial impacts. “The economics are going to be a huge part of it,” said Richard Cortright, managing director at Standard & Poor’s Ratings, which like Platts is a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies. Forecasts for a possible recession this year could deter lawmakers from passing any legislation argued to increase energy costs. “The timing may be really bad,” said Cortright, noting that at the moment, it “seems that the stars are lined up in a way to really prevent passage of any meaningful legislation when it comes to energy.”

By Lubos Motl, The Reference Frame on SPPI

The Heartland Institute organizes a climate conference in March that is, unlike the conferences that you usually hear about in the media, open to climate skeptics and experts regardless of their political opinions or overall sentiments about the relationship between Nature and human civilization. The organizers have sent invitations to many kinds of climate experts, including some of the well-known champions of the climate alarm. These invitations have provoked a hysterical reaction from RealClimate.org. The profoundly concerned scientists describe all the scientists who will attend - before they actually know who they are - as being corrupt by the “evil” oil industry, not being scientists at all, as people being paid concrete amounts of money to fabricate papers and talks, and so on. Their talks are described as “tobacco science”.  The RealClimate “group” explains that the participants are not scientists at all - before they actually know who is attending - and they encourage the participants to skip the talks and enjoy a nice hotel in New York instead. They wouldn’t hear any science at all, so it is important that the participants can’t hear the talks…

Their smear job is so blatant, hostile, and inconsistent with any kind of a reasonable, balanced, open-minded, or scientific analysis of a question that I can’t really believe that there exist people who are intelligent enough to learn how to read but antediluvian enough to be influenced by this incredibly transparent propaganda.

The real problem here is a political one - there exist powerful forces that don’t want other people to learn what is actually known about the climate, not even some of the basic results and numbers. There exist organizations and their ad hoc unions that prefer constant lies to be promoted by the media and myths to thrive among ordinary people.

They have certain reasons to make people believe that the temperature of the second millennium looked like a hockey stick - even five years after the papers were shown to be bunk and their main author an apparent dilettante in statistics. They want everyone to believe that carbon dioxide was driving temperature during the ice ages and interglacials - many years after it became absolutely clear that the causal relation behind the correlation goes in the opposite direction.

They want everyone to believe that small changes of the temperature can exterminate polar bears and other species even though the actual scientific evidence shows that it can’t; that the Solar activity doesn’t have any impact on the terrestrial climate even though there is extensive evidence that it does; that small warming creates catastrophic hurricanes even though all links of this type have been shown erroneous. They want everyone to believe that there is a scientific consensus and this consensus can settle the debate and justify arbitrarily oversimplified conclusions - even though there is clearly no consensus and even if there existed one, it wouldn’t mean anything and it would certainly not justify any oversimplification. Read more here.