Wall Street Journal Review and Outlook
Global warming is becoming a new unified field theory for environmentalists, a crisis so urgent and profound that it even justifies leaping the democratic process. Consider the political campaign to prod the Bush Administration to list the polar bear as an endangered species—even though many proponents admit it isn’t endangered at all. This game began with a 2005 lawsuit against the Interior Department from pressure groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council. Their demand was that the polar bear be designated as “threatened”—that is, at risk for extinction in the foreseeable future—under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The problem is that polar bear populations have been rising over the last four decades, and may now be at an historic high.
The logical—and dangerous—leap here is that the greens are attempting to rewrite the Endangered Species Act without actual legislation. If the “iconic” polar bear is classified as threatened, and the harm is formally attributed to warming caused by humans, then their gambit could lead to all sorts of regulatory mischief. Another political goal is to use an “endangered” bear listing to tie up in the courts a modest sale of oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea 25 to 200 miles off the coast of Alaska, scheduled for February 6. Read more here.
By Carole “CJ” Williams, Newswithviews.com
Last March, global warming fanatic Al Gore used a picture of two polar bears purportedly stranded on melting ice off the coast of Alaska as a visual aide to support his claim that man-made global warming is doing great harm to Mother Earth. Al Gore, who was awarded a 2007 Nobel Prize for drawing the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming, as well as a coveted Hollywood Oscar in ‘07 for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, stands to make millions of dollars selling carbon offsets through his London based corporation, Generation Investment Management. According to information from the American Land Rights Assoc., under the ESA any activity regulated by the Federal Government (i.e. air or water quality) would be subject to further regulation because of claims that “greenhouse gas” emissions have a potentially adverse effect on polar bear habitat.
Virtually everything people do involves fossil fuels and greenhouse gases, and since 85% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, almost every heating, cooling, transportation (including shipping) and electricity decision will be affected. Utility and manufacturing companies will be required to slash CO2 emissions, forcing an increase in prices to cover escalated new costs. But it won’t stop there. All other sources of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases will also be regulated and restricted by environmental alarmists; bakeries, breweries, chicken and dairy farms, cattle ranches, dry cleaners, auto manufacturers, cement and other industrial facilities, and on and on, ad nauseum. As their costs go up, so will consumers’ costs to heat and cool homes, drive cars, and clothe and feed their family. And, as costs go up, companies may further reduce their workforces or outsource jobs to other countries so as to stay in business.
Blue collar, poor, and fixed income families will be hit the hardest, but everyone’s jobs and cost of living will be affected. However, the likes of Al Gore and other elitists will still be flying around in private jets and cashing in on their investments in a newly created multi-billion dollar alternative energy industry and carbon offset scheme designed to supposedly mitigate the man-made global warming scam. Read more of this hard-hitting piece here.
When Alexander Cockburn, author of the forthcoming book A Short History of Fear, dared to question the climate change consensus, he was punished by a tsunami of self-righteous fury. It is time for a free and open ‘battle of ideas’, he says.
By Alexander Cockburn, Spiked On-Line
While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy. In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors - to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the medieval warming period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now.
Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as being man-made, and many have made it into the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle. This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice. Read more here.