This book is an absolute must read for its thorough coverage of the non-issue that has captured a greatly disproportionate amount of the worlds time and money. A few excerpts: 

By Chris Horner

Greenpeace is Stealing My Trash

It was spring. Young men’s hearts turned to fancy. And Greenpeace started stealing my trash. I noticed that my garbage was getting collected much more efficiently than normal - and late the night before it was scheduled to go. I also noticed that soon, the media revealed a secret cabal I orchestrated from my basement…I had arrived. If they would spend so much energy to, well, trash me, I must be important, right? But I soon learned from others that this is standard operating procedure for the global warming industry. They have tried to ruin careers, blacklisted scientists, knowingly spread lies about dissenters, called for the imprisonment of skeptics, and used government pressure to cut off rivals’ funding. Isn’t it relevant to the debate about global warming that the alarmist side engages in this systematic campaign?

Environmental Catastrophes Sell Papers

All of our national newspapers are deeply vested players in the global warming industry. The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today all regularly weigh in with editorials, in-house columnists, “news” items and human interest stories declaring certain catastrophes, and irresponsibility of those whose politics they do not like. When the series of scandals exposing the flimsy nature of the alarmist’s case emerged in 2007, the national papers proved completely unwilling to directly report on the facts. Substantiated claims that are inconsistent with the prevailing media template of warming-bad-U.S.-worse are typically revealed only well after the fact, for purposes of giving the alarmists a platform to diminish its significance.

A Healthy Environment Won’t Earn Anyone Funding

Rarely, if ever, has the scientific establishment seen a gravy train the likes of global warming. The money flowing into studying the issue is jaw-dropping: federal taxpayer expenditures on climate-related research for the entire panoply of related inquiry is now pushing up against $6 billion per year, more than taxpayers send to the National Cancer Institute and even more than our government spends on AIDS. Now ask yourself this: would this money keep flowing from governments and international institutions if scientists concluded tomorrow that Man’s influence on climate is likely within natural variability or “background noise”? Or that anthropogenic effects on climate change are real but not catastrophic or substantially different than we have faced and will always continue to face? As long as Man-made greenhouse gases really matter, the people who study greenhouse gases and technologies that would benefit from the government action will be flooded with taxpayer money. Understanding this dynamic is key to understanding why science has been corrupted. And it has been corrupted by the global warming scare.

See the book here.

Christopher C. Horner is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. He is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an acknowledged expert on global warming legislation and regulation, and has testified before Senate committees and given numerous addresses in the European Parliament.

Britt Weygandt, Western Business Roundtable

A bipartisan coalition of business leaders is calling on Governors, state legislators and Members of Congress publicly express their opposition before tomorrow’s election to proposals to “bankrupt” the U.S. coal industry and threaten to put out of work several hundred thousand Americans who work in coal-related industries. The call was issued by the Western Business Roundtable following news reports that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama intends to make it so costly to build advanced clean coal power plants with carbon capture and sequestration that it will “bankrupt” any company that tries to do so.

“We are calling upon Democrats, Republicans and Independents from coast to coast to publicly express their support for advanced clean coal power generation and to distance themselves from those who say that we should bankrupt the coal industry,” said Britt Weygandt, Executive Director of the Western Business Roundtable. “A lot of Americans are going to be listening in the next 24 hours to see which elected leaders stand up for clean coal and which don’t.”

Obama’s comments regarding coal were made during an interview with the San Francisco Examiner earlier this year, and is available in streaming audio form here. In the interview, Obama says the following:

“Let me sort of describe my overall policy. What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there. I was the first to call for a 100 percent auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.  The only thing I’ve said with respect to coal, I haven’t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a (sic) ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

Weygandt said: “Regardless of the outcome of tomorrow’s election, elected officials at all levels need to stand up for a robust clean coal coal option for America,” Weygandt said. “They should stand up for affordable and reliable electricity, for a stable and reliable grid, and for the hundreds of thousands of American workers in this industry.” Full release here.

By P.J. Gladnick

Barack Obama actually flat out told the San Francisco Chronicle (SF Gate) that he was willing to see the coal industry go bankrupt in a January 17, 2008 interview. The result? Nothing. This audio interview has been hidden from the public until now. Here is the transcript of Obama’s statement about bankrupting the coal industry:

Let me sort of describe my overall policy. What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there. I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.

The only thing I’ve said with respect to coal, I haven’t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a (sic) ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.

Amazing that this statement by Obama about bankrupting the coal industry has been kept under wraps until this time. See the video of the interview here. See transcript here.