By Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times in UK Telegraph

Friedman has converted to the Green faith and to environmental trumpery, but in a more nuanced and optimistic way than most of his fellow travellers. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, he aims to reclaim ‘greenness’ from the liberal, tree-hugging, sissy and unpatriotic ghetto into which it has been forced by critics, adopting instead a realistic and economically literate position.

Encouragingly, he avoids the misanthropy that characterises much environmentalist rhetoric, in which, to quote Reginald Heber’s famous hymn, From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, ‘only man is vile!’ Friedman states: ‘This is not about the whales any more. It’s about us. And what we do about the challenges of energy and climate…’

He further rejects environmentalist utopias in which economic growth has no place, correctly observing that ‘without economic growth as part of the mix, you cannot even begin to have a conversation with China, India, or Brazil’.

Lastly, he rightly identifies energy as the core issue. Accordingly, we are left seeking the holy grail of successfully de-coupling economic growth from increasing environmental pressures.

Friedman argues that we are entering what he terms the ‘Energy-Climate Era’; today’s date should be, in true Jacobin fashion, 1 ECE. He believes that we are no longer post-anything, such as post-colonial, post-war or post-Cold War, because we are now ‘pre-something totally new’, his ECE. In this, Friedman has somewhat naively rediscovered one of the ‘hybrids’- those ‘modern’ systems mixing politics, science, technology and nature, of which ‘global warming’ is a prime example.

The five elements of Friedman’s particular ‘hybrid’ are energy and natural resources supply and demand; the ‘petrodictatorship’; climate change; energy poverty and biodiversity loss. For him, ‘the convergence of global warming, global flattening (ie the technological revolution and the levelling of the global economic playing field), and global crowding’ is driving these problems ‘well past their tipping points into new realms we’ve never seen before, as a planet or as a species’. Read more here.

By Vaclav Klaus

I think I have to start with expressing my deep and ever-deeper conviction that the recently created panic as regards dramatic, in the past allegedly unknown global climate changes and their supposedly catastrophic consequences for the future of human civilization must not remain without a resolute answer of the - until now - more or less silent majority of rationally thinking people, especially classical liberals, libertarians and other freedom loving men and women. Not everyone is silent but the current dominance of climate alarmism practically in the whole world can’t be disputed.

Many of us know (or at least should know) that this panic doesn’t have a solid ground, that it has not been set off by rational arguments, that it demonstrates an apparent disregard of the past experience of mankind, and that its substance is not science. It is based, on the contrary, on the abuse of science by a non-liberal, extremely authoritarian, freedom and prosperity despising (and destroying) ideology which I, together with many others, call environmentalism.

We have to touch also upon the so called precautionary principle, one of the main arguments of the environmentalists. The people are and should be cautious. It is quite natural. Every rational human being minimizes risk – but not at all costs. The world is full of trade-offs and any policy analyst knows that he or she has to evaluate the costs and benefits of any policy before judging whether or not the policy should be pursued. The precautionary principle, this dogma of environmentalists, leads to an unjustifiable maximization of risk aversion. Attitudes of that kind can finally succeed in blocking and prohibiting everything. Prof. Sternhell ("The Abused Science of Climate Change”, Quadrant, June 2008) says correctly that the precautionary principle “requires a quantitative judgment as otherwise we never cross roads, sit in a bus or even get out of bed?. And this “quantitative judgment” is a cost-benefit analysis.

I did not speak here about climatology or IPCC assessment reports. Without using strong words and lengthy arguments, it is enough to say here now that I do agree with Prof. Sternhell that “climate-anthropogenic carbon dioxide nexus justifies watching and research, but it does not justify the currently proposed expensive, probably unnecessary, disruptive and probably futile measures.”

I conclude with my request (made at the International Conference on Climate Change, organized in March 2008 in New York City by the Heartland Institute) that “we have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society,” because as I said many times: the current dispute is not about climatology, it is about freedom. And I would add “about prosperity and living conditions of billions of people.” To avoid a disaster, “we should trust in the rationality of man and in the outcome of spontaneous evolution of human society, not in the virtues of political activism.” See full talk here.

By Carl Hulse, New York Times

For decades, opposition to new offshore oil drilling has been a core principle of Congressional Democrats, ranking in the party pantheon somewhere just below protecting Social Security and increasing the minimum wage. But a concerted Republican assault over domestic oil production and the threat of political backlash from financially pressed motorists have Democrats poised to embrace a fundamental shift in energy policy.

Even more surprising, the turnabout is led by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who has a history of fighting oil drilling going back to the early days of her career in California. Under a measure being assembled for a vote in the House next week, oil rigs could go up 50 miles from the shores of states that welcome drilling and 100 miles off any section of the United States coast - a stark reversal on an issue that has been a Democratic environmental touchstone since the 1980s.

“It shows what $4 a gallon gas will do,” said Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow on energy and climate issues at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, an advocacy group. Republicans and oil industry representatives are skeptical that Democrats are serious about allowing offshore exploration. They say that the outlines of the emerging bill do not go far enough to satisfy them and that the legislation appears intended to do more political than policy good. And they say a decision not to share any new oil royalties with the states eliminates a prime incentive for states to say yes to drilling. Read more here.

See also in this piece in the Nashua Telegraph, how the Climate is Right for an Arctic Oil Rush. It’s a scramble for the spoils of global warming as the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice is opening access to previously unreachable deposits of oil and gas, setting off a race by northern nations - including the United States, Canada and Russia - to claim them.

The pursuit of those resources was underscored last month when the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy sailed north from Barrow, Alaska, to map the sea floor of the Chukchi Cap, an area at the northern edge of the Beaufort Sea. The maps could eventually bolster U.S. claims to the area as part of its extended outer continental shelf.

The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed this summer what the oil industry had long suspected when the agency released an estimate that the area north of the Arctic Circle may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or roughly 13 percent of the world’s total undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas.

And finally in this story Gas, Gas Everywhere by Christopher Palmeri in Business Week, In the oil patch, they are calling it the “shale sweepstakes"-a fevered rush to purchase drilling rights to natural gas that lies deep in deposits of shale rock. Output from these fields has been on a rocket ride for the past four years. It is the reason why natural gas production overall in the U.S. is expected to jump 9% in 2008, after nearly a decade of no growth.

This is good news for consumers who’ll be turning up their gas furnaces this winter. Natural gas prices have fallen 50%-much steeper than oil-in the past two months, to a recent $7 per 1,000 cubic feet. All the new shale development could keep a lid on natural gas prices for years to come. The oil companies, says Ed Siefert, president of market researcher RigData, “are all spending money like drunken sailors.” (h/t Benny Peiser CCNET)