By Chris Horner, Planet Gore

This piece in Politico yesterday, daring to acknowledge scientific debate about “global warming,” was not about to go untouched by the opprobrium of the Green noise machine, which is dedicated to teaching anyone who dares speak up that it might not be beneficial to their careers.

On cue, aspiring Obama administration climate thug Joe Romm of the Soros-funded Climate Progress - who blamed the Minneapolis bridge collapse on global warming, among other absurdities - and David “Nuremburg-syle trials for those b@$tards” Roberts of Grist did what they’re paid to do: change the subject by attacking the person with names and slurs.

Upon seeing the story yesterday, I wrote the reporter, Erika Lovely (whom I do not know and to whom I have never spoken) to note as much - commenting that, if she knew this going in, she was brave (surely braver than most journos) and if not, well, she should just take what’s about to come her way as instructive. What does it tell you that some people rush to lash out with (typically personal) nastiness at the public expression of ideas of which they do not approve?

After all, while we’re used to the Left’s mindset - that every one of their ideas needs to be a law and tolerance only extends so far as it suits their ideology or biases - as I have demonstrated, there is a remarkable Gang Green that seizes upon all heretical thought or speech and seeks to teach its purveyor a painful lesson.

This is indeed a movement premised on fear - fear of debate, democracy, and science. Their biggest problem is that numbers don’t lie and the public are still allowed to look out the window. So, children: throw your sticks and stones, and take your taxpayer-funded billions to play with computer models to create the scariest future scenarios you can engineer - and the scenarios are engineered - and it still won’t change the fact that the sky is where it always was and there remains no observational evidence to suggest it’s falling.  Life’s tough. See post and more here.

Also today in the American Thinker piece, When Warming Idealogues Attack, Marc Sheppard noted “It’s still uncertain whether Heidi Cullen, who once wrote that the American Meteorological Society should pull the certification of any weatherperson daring to question AGW, will be a casualty of last week’s Weather Channel employee purge.  But yesterday’s rabid multi-front name-calling attack on an energy and environment reporter who dared question greenhouse gas canons quashed any doubt that the choir of green-snobbery has many voices. Two pieces by Erika Lovley were published at The Politico Tuesday, one serious, the other—mostly for laughs.  But the Big Green Scare Machine was amused by neither.

Scientists urge caution on global warming opened by getting right down to business:"Climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill are quietly watching a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation."The article attempted to present a rational examination of the impact recent cooling—an alarmist conundrum—may have on emissions trading schemes Democrats promise to pass through Congress next year. 

But what should have been seen as a moment of MSM balance was instead seen by the usual suspects as a philosophical punching bag.  Indeed, it didn’t take long for Think Progress—the George Soros-backed liberal propaganda machine—to label it as “toxic stupidity about global warming,” containing what they call “zombie lies” about sun-cycles and dissenting scientists.  Or for Joe Romm at Climate Progress to accuse Lovely of “pimp[ing] global cooling for Hill deniers,” demean her work as “laughable,” and demand she be either fired or pulled “from the environmental/energy beat.”

You’ve got to wonder—If these guys are so convinced of their position’s immutability, then why does the slightest challenge to it unleash such frenzied behavior?

By Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times

Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel. From Italy to China, the threat to jobs, profits and government tax revenues posed by the financial crisis has cast doubt on commitments to cap emissions or phase out polluting factories. Automakers, especially Detroit’s Big Three, face collapsing sales, threatening their plans to invest heavily in more fuel-efficient cars. And with gas prices now around $2 a gallon in the United States, struggling consumers may be less inclined than they once were to trade in their gas-guzzling models in any case.

President-elect Barack Obama and the European Union have vowed to stick to commitments to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and invest in new green technologies, arguing that government action could stimulate the economy and create new jobs in producing sustainable energy. But as the United Nations prepares to gather the world’s environment ministers in Poznan, Poland, next week to try to agree on a new treaty to reduce emissions, both the political will and the economic underpinnings for a much more assertive strategy appear shakier than they did even a few weeks ago.

“Yes things have changed,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a phone interview. He is organizing the meeting in Poland. “European industry is saying we can’t deal with financial crisis and reduce emissions at the same time,” he said. “Heads of government have other things on their minds.” The economic decline also could complicate the political calculus of limiting emissions in developing countries, especially China.

There are signs of considerable backpedaling in at least near-term commitments to invest in green technology and alternative energy. Italy’s environment minister, Stefania Prestigiacomo, said last month that “profound changes” were needed in the European Union climate package because of the global economic crisis. Coal-based economies like Poland’s have expressed similar worries. Theolia, one of France’s largest alternative energy companies, has canceled plans for a subsidiary devoted to emerging markets, and pulled back on its goals of how much energy it could produce by 2009.

In the United States, T. Boone Pickens, the Oklahoma oil tycoon who leased hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas for a giant wind farm, has now delayed the project. He told reporters at a recent news conference that fossil fuel prices would have to rise again before it was economically viable. Barbara Helfferich, the European Commission spokeswoman on the environment, said, “Investing in reducing emission is more difficult to do in times of economic downturn than when you have money to spend.” See story here.

By Kimberly Kindy and Dan Keating, The Washington Post

Problems Plague U.S. Flex-Fuel Fleet. Most Government-Bought Vehicles Still Use Standard Gas. The federal government has invested billions of dollars over the past 16 years, building a fleet of 112,000 alternative-fuel vehicles to serve as a model for a national movement away from fossil fuels. But the costly effort to put more workers into vehicles powered by ethanol and other fuel alternatives has been fraught with problems, many of them caused by buying vehicles before fuel stations were in place to support them, a Washington Post analysis of federal records shows.

“I call it the ‘Field of Dreams’ plan. If you buy them, they will come,” said Wayne Corey, vehicle operations manager with the U.S. Postal Service. “It hasn’t happened.” Under a mandate from Congress, federal agencies have gradually increased their fleets of alternative-fuel vehicles, a majority of them “flex-fuel,” capable of running on either gasoline or ethanol-based E85 fuel. But many of the vehicles were sent to locations hundreds of miles from any alternative fueling sites, the analysis shows. As a result, more than 92 percent of the fuel used in the government’s alternative-fuel fleet continues to be standard gasoline. A 2005 law—meant to align the vehicles with alternative-fuel stations—now requires agencies to seek waivers when a vehicle is more than five miles or 15 minutes from an ethanol pump.

The latest generations of alternative vehicles have compounded the problem. Often, the vehicles come only with larger engines than the ones they replaced in the fleet. Consequently, the federal program—known as EPAct—has sometimes increased gasoline consumption and emission rates, the opposite of what was intended. The EPAct program offers a cautionary tale as President-elect Barack Obama promises to kill dependence on foreign oil and revive the economy by retooling for the green revolution, experts say.

“This is an example of a law that has had a perversely different effect than what was originally intended,’’ said Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an nonprofit environmental organization based in Washington. The Postal Service illustrates the problem. It estimates that its 37,000 newer alternative-fuel delivery vans, which can run on high-grade ethanol, consumed 1.5 million additional gallons of gasoline last fiscal year because of the larger engines. The vehicles that would allow the agency to meet federal mandates were available in six- and eight-cylinder models—not the four-cylinder variety it traditionally purchased. Alternative fuel was used less than 1 percent of the time in 2007-2008. Read more here.

By the way, since Kyoto was ratified:
Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%
Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%
Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%
Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%