By Robert Moon, Macon County Conservative Examiner

Chapter 4 of my book, titled, “An Inconvenient Hoax,” systematically exposes and confronts all the most current science fiction being shoved down our throats by the Luddite absolutists and pseudo-intellectual scam artists of the left. It is devastating.

Unsurprisingly, there is a flurry of new data pouring in even further confirming how utterly baseless this invented Green Scare really is, now even from Obama’s own people. Much like the Swine Flu and about a gazillion other contrived alarmist fantasies from decades past (breast implants, Alar, the Millenium bug, DDT, etc.), public faith in the environmentalist religion is consequently fading, and fast. As Investor’s Business Daily put it:

Nearly half (48%) believe the cause is naturally occurring planetary trends. Just a year ago, only 34% said warming was a natural phenomenon, while 47% said human activity was placing the planet at risk of disastrous climate change. That’s a huge shift.

Interestingly, a growing number of Americans (58%) say we need to build more nuclear power plants, with 63% saying that finding additional sources of energy is more important than reducing the amount of energy Americans currently consume. They recognize that a growing economy requires more energy, not less, and that nukes are a pollution-free way of getting it.

Even countries utterly saturated with the left’s absurd scare-mongering on this, like Australia, are producing loud voices of reason in an ocean of bogus, hysterical environmental propaganda.

As Andrew Bolt, of The Herald Sun put it (on 4/29/09):

Global warming alarmists must be feeling a chill as new facts overwhelm their fiction. It’s snowing in April. Ice is spreading in Antarctica. The Great Barrier Reef is as healthy as ever. And that’s just the news of the past week. Bolt then issued a challenge…

Here’s a test: Name just three clear signs the planet is warming...Just three. Chances are your “proofs” are in fact on my list of 10 Top Myths about global warming. And if your “proofs” indeed turn out to be false, don’t get angry with me.  Just ask yourself: Why do you still believe that man is heating the planet to hell? What evidence do you have? So let’s see if facts matter more to you than faith, and observations more than predictions.

The List…

MYTH 1: THE WORLD IS WARMING

Wrong. It is true the world did warm between 1975 and 1998, but even Professor David Karoly, one of our leading alarmists, admitted this week “temperatures have dropped...both in surface temperatures and in atmospheric temperatures measured from satellites.” In fact, the fall in temperatures from just 2002 has already wiped out half the warming our planet experienced last century. (Check data from Britain’s Hadley Centre, NASA’s Aqua satellite and the US National Climatic Data Centre.)

Some experts, such as Professor David Karoly, claim this proves nothing and the world will soon start warming again. Others, such as Professor Ian Plimer of Adelaide University, point out that so many years of cooling already contradict the theory that man’s rapidly increasing gases must drive up temperatures ever faster.

But that’s all theory. The question I’ve asked is: What signs can you actually see of the man-made warming that the alarmists predicted? Read more here.

By Senator James Inhofe

It’s safe to say that at 3:09 am on June 26th, most of America was asleep.  While they slept, Democratic leaders in the House were creating a nightmare: in the early morning hours, Speaker Pelosi and her deputies were pushing the largest tax increase in American history. In the dead of night, with no one watching, they engaged in full-scale arm twisting, backroom dealing, and outright pork-barreling to garner support for a massive bill, which few even read or understood. 

When America awoke, they found Democrats talking about “green jobs” and the “new clean energy economy.” They spoke of free-markets and innovation and energy independence.  All of it sounded so appealing, yet none of it was true. That’s because Waxman-Markey is full of regulations, mandates, bureaucracy, and big government programs.  Waxman-Markey is, to quote John Dingell (D. MI),"a tax, and a great big one,” on small businesses, families, and consumers.

I don’t blame the Democrats for selling cap-and-trade as something it’s not.  This is a political imperative for them, because the American people now know what cap-and-trade is, and they don’t like it.  According to independent political analysis Charlie Cook, “Many Democrats getting back to Washington from the Independence Day recess reported getting an earful from their constituents over the ‘energy tax hike’” Further, Cook noted, “The perception is that this is a huge tax increase at a time when people can ill afford one. Hence, Democrats, whether they supported the bill or not, are getting battered, increasing their blood pressure.”

It’s safe to say that the House members who voted ‘yes’ for this bill are regretting their vote. So why are politicians who voted for cap-and-trade getting such an earful?  For one, many Americans are struggling financially, and many Americans are out of work.  So when they hear about Nancy Pelosi’s plan to raise their electricity, food, and gasoline bills, they rightly get upset.  As of now, the American people don’t want to pay anything to address climate change for 3 reasons: the science is flawed, we are in a cooling period and it would constitute the largest tax increase in history. But don’t take my word for it: poll after poll confirms this.  Consider a the most recent national poll on behalf of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, in which 58 percent of Americans said they won’t pay any more than they currently pay in their electricity bills to address climate change. 

Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that Democrats are calling Waxman-Markey, among other things, a “jobs bill.” In doing this, the Democrats betray a certain amount of desperation in their attempt to pass cap-and-trade.  They see a rising tide of opposition when they go back to their districts - and they also see that the math in the Senate doesn’t add up.  But supporters of this bill won’t give up, and, unfortunately for them, neither will we. 

I think the time is right, then, to peel back the green veil and expose this 1,400-page monument to big government.  There’s a lot in there, and at times the bill gets very complicated.  But over the next several weeks, I plan to focus on some of the bill’s most damaging provisions, as well as those that reinforce the criticisms I’ve been making. On that note, let’s begin with the claim that Waxman-Markey will be an engine of job creation.  First, there’s no evidence that this will create an overall net gain of new jobs.  Putting stress on “net gain” is important here.  Backers routinely claim the bill will create “green” jobs in the renewable energy.  That’s true - there will be greater demand for solar panels and windmills.  But that’s only one side of the equation. 

The fact is that Waxman-Markey will destroy millions of manufacturing jobs, meaning that America will experience a net job loss.  Consider a recent analysis of Waxman-Markey by CRA International, commissioned by the National Black Chamber of Commerce.  The analysis found that, “the number of these new ‘green jobs’ will be lower than the number of the other jobs that [Waxman-Markey] would destroy elsewhere in the economy.”

In total, Waxman-Markey would cause a net reduction of 2.3 million to 2.7 million jobs.  In other words, on the one hand, we’ll create some green jobs, but on the other, we’ll destroy many more jobs.  Take Spain as an example. According to a study from King Juan University in Madrid, every job in renewable energies created in Spain in the year 2000 has cost 571,138 Euros and has been the cause of the loss of 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy.  Now the Democrats want to transfer that same logic to the United States. They want to use expanded government, bureaucracy and taxes to create jobs, while if the private sector could just go to work, 2.2 jobs could be created for every 1 job that is created by the government.  In this economy, those numbers add up.

I think most Americans would find it curious that a bill that supposedly creates jobs contains provisions to help people who would lose their jobs because of the legislation. What does this mean?  The authors of Waxman-Markey, through this provision, implicitly acknowledge that Waxman-Markey will destroy jobs.  The “adjustment” mentioned is just a euphemism for the pink slip workers get when Waxman-Markey goes into effect.  And then, through a laborious process, they can petition the federal government for taxpayer handouts.

But that’s not all: workers may be eligible in certain circumstances for a one-time job search allowance up to $1,500, and for relocation assistance up to $1,500. What’s going on here?  Again, the authors of Waxman-Markey created an elaborate bureaucratic, taxpayer-funded social services program for people who lose their jobs because of Waxman-Markey.  But isn’t Waxman-Markey a jobs bill?  Why would any of these big government programs be necessary if the bill is supposed to create jobs?  The answer is simple: buried at the end of nearly 1,400 pages of taxes and mandates, we see the stark reality of this bill: it sends pink slips to workers and then promises the unemployed that they will get assistance from the government. 

You simply can’t create a rational, workable, commonsensical national energy policy by putting people out of work.  It’s the Democrats who will not allow us to produce our own oil and gas. We could be completely free from our dependency on the middle east for oil and gas. The alternative Republican plan goes in a different direction.  We support opening access to domestic energy resources, removing barriers to innovative clean energy technologies, and allowing all forms of energy to power this great machine called America.  And we firmly reject an energy policy based on taxes, mandates, and bureaucracy. 
Read full speech here.

By Paul Driessen

Boone Pickens, Nacel Energy, Vestas Iberia and others have been issuing statements and running ads, extolling the virtues of wind as an affordable, sustainable energy resource. Renewable energy reality is slowly taking hold, however. Spain did increase its installed wind power capacity to 10% of its total electricity, although actual energy output is 10-30% of this, or 1-3% of total electricity, because the wind is intermittent and unreliable. However, Spain spent $3.7 billion on the program in 2007 alone, King Juan Carlos University economics professor Gabriel Calzada determined. It created 50,000 jobs, mostly installing wind turbines, at $73,000 in annual subsidies per job - and 10,000 of these jobs have already been terminated. The subsidies have been slashed, due to Spain’s growing economic problems, putting the remaining 40,000 jobs at risk. Meanwhile, the cost of subsidized wind energy and carbon dioxide emission permits sent electricity prices soaring for other businesses - causing 2.2 jobs to be lost for every “green” job created, says Calzada. Spain’s unemployment rate is now 17% and rising. That’s hardly the “success” story so often cited by Congress and the Obama Administration.

Across the Channel, Britain’s biggest wind-energy projects are in trouble. Just as the UK government announced its goal of creating 400,000 eco-jobs by 2015, major green energy employer Vestas UK is ending production. All 7,000 turbines that Downing Street just committed to installing over the next decade will be manufactured - not in Britain, but in Germany, Denmark and China. For businesses, existing global warming policies have added 21% to industrial electricity bills since 2001, and this will rise to 55% by 2020, the UK government admits. Its latest renewable energy strategy will add another 15% - meaning the total impact on British industry will likely be a prohibitive 70% cost increase over two decades. This is the result of the government’s plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions 34% below 1990 levels by 2020, and increase the share of renewables, especially wind, from 6% to 31% of Britain’s electricity. These cost hikes could make British manufacturers uncompetitive, and send thousands more jobs overseas, the Energy Intensive Users Group reports. English steel mills could become “unable to compete globally, even at current domestic energy prices,” says British journalist Dominic Lawson; “but deliberately to make them uncompetitive is industrial vandalism - and even madness a futile gesture ...and immoral.”

On this side of the pond, President Obama and anti-hydrocarbon members of Congress are promoting “green” energy and jobs, via new mandates, standards, tax breaks and subsidies. However, the United States would need 180,000 1.5-megawatt wind turbines by 2020, just to generate the 600 billion kilowatthours of electricity that compliance with the narrowly passed Waxman-Markey global warming bill would necessitate, retired energy and nuclear engineering professor James Rust calculates.

This would require millions of acres of scenic, habitat and agricultural lands, and 126 million tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass and “rare earth” minerals for the turbines, at 700 tons per turbine; prodigious quantities of concrete, steel, copper and land for new transmission lines; and still more land, fuel and raw materials for backup gas-fired generators. America’s new national forests will apparently be made of concrete and steel. Those miners and drillers would likely be reclassified as “green” workers, based on the intended purpose of their output. However, the raw materials will probably not be produced in the States, because so many lands, prospects and deposits are off limits - and NIMBY litigation will further hamper resource extraction.

Air quality laws and skyrocketing energy costs (due to carbon taxes and expensive renewable energy mandates) will make wind turbine (and solar panel) manufacturing in the USA equally improbable. Thus, manufacturing could well be in China or India, and most “green” jobs could be for installers, as Spain and Britain discovered. Posturing has already collided with reality in Texas, the nation’s wind energy capital. Austin’s GreenChoice program cannot find buyers for electricity generated entirely from wind and solar power. Its latest sales scheme has been a massive flop: after seven months, 99% of its recent electricity offering remains unsold.

Austin officials admit that “times have changed,” and the recession and falling energy prices may make it impossible for the city to meet its lofty goals. The company’s renewable electricity now costs almost three times more than standard electricity, and even eco-conscious consumers care more about the color of their money than the hue of their purported ideology. Even worse for global warming alarmists and renewable energy advocates and rent seekers, global
warming patterns have reversed during the past decade. Satellite data reveal that the planet is cooling, despite steadily rising carbon dioxide levels, and summertime low temperature records are being broken all over the United States.

“You’d better hope global warming is caused by manmade CO2 if you’re investing in [renewable] sectors,” says Daniel Rice, the past decade’s best-performing US equity fund manager (BlackRock Energy and Resources Fund). But evidence for manmade catastrophic global warming is dissipating faster
than carbon dioxide from an open soda bottle on a hot summer day. The crucial fact remains: wind and solar are simply not economical without major government subsidies or monstrous carbon taxes. Moreover, cap-and-tax legislation currently being promoted in the House and Senate is “not enough to do anything” about supposed global warming disasters notes Rice.

“All it does is provide Obama a pass to Copenhagen,” where the UN will host a climate change conference in December, Rice says. And those subsidies and taxes would drive energy prices still higher, killing jobs and skyrocketing the cost of everything we eat, drive, heat, cool, grow, make and do. Congress and the Administration are dragging their feet on nuclear power, closing off access to more resource-rich lands, and imposing layers of new regulations on oil, gas and coal energy - denying Americans these vast stores of energy and hundreds of billions in revenue that developing them would generate. Meanwhile, slick wind turbine ad campaigns promote expensive, heavily subsidized, unreliable technologies that only climate activists and company lobbyists would describe as sustainable, affordable, eco-friendly or socially responsible. The ads and lobbyists seek more mandates, tax breaks and subsidies. Wind promoters want to quiet opponents long enough to get energy and climate legislation enacted - before Americans realize how it would drive the price of energy still higher, kill jobs, curtail living standards and liberties, and raise the cost of everything we eat, drive, heat, cool, grow, make and do. Read PDF here.