Dear Colleague --

You may have seen news coverage in recent weeks about a new coalition of African-American, civil rights, Christian, agriculture, veteran, state legislative and consumer group leaders called the “Alliance to Stop the War on the Poor.” Congressional Quarterly, the highly influential inside-the-Beltway publication, wrote a piece on the Alliance this past week.

U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch has picked up on the Alliance’s messaging strongly, as have other national and state politicians.  The group’s national “rollout” in Washington, D.C. recently was a bonafide protest rally attended by nearly 100 citizens who chanted “Stop the War on the Poor.”

I bring this to your attention because this group plans to wage a series of high-profile public education initiatives in the coming months to promote greater consumer access to affordable energy—something I know you and your organization support.

The Alliance is pushing for greater supply of all domestic energy resources—coal, oil & gas, oil shale, nuclear, renewables and conservation / efficiency.  In particular, they have rallied around two pieces of federal legislation in the Congress, which you can see here.

They also say they want increased funding for low-income energy assistance programs and greater deployment of energy savings technologies in new low-income housing. And, they intend to present a major consumer-led pushback against some of the climate change “solutions” being pushed by extremist environmental activists. This new movement isn’t linked to any industry group and is run by its three national co-chairs—all Democrats who lead their own non-partisan, non-profit groups:  Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality; Bishop Harry Jackson of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, the Wyoming State Senator Bill Vasey of Americans for American Energy.  You can read more about them here. The Alliance plans to be very active during the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Denver.

To learn more about this new movement, and sign up to receive occasional email updates from them, you can go here.

Best,

Jim Sims
Policy Communication, Inc.

Politics has its puzzling moments. John McCain and most of the GOP experienced one late last week. That was when five of their own set about dismantling the best issue Republicans have in the upcoming election. It’s taken time, but Sen. McCain and his party have finally found—in energy—an issue that’s working for them. Riding voter discontent over high gas prices, the GOP has made antidrilling Democrats this summer’s headlines.  Their enthusiasm has given conservative candidates a boost in tough races. And Mr. McCain has pressured Barack Obama into an energy debate, where the Democrat has struggled to explain shifting and confused policy proposals.

Still, it was probably too much to assume every Republican would work out that their side was winning this issue. And so, last Friday, in stumbled Sens. Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Saxby Chambliss, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson—alongside five Senate Democrats. This “Gang of 10” announced a “sweeping” and “bipartisan” energy plan to break Washington’s energy “stalemate.” What they did was throw every vulnerable Democrat, and Mr. Obama, a life preserver.

That’s because the plan is a Democratic giveaway. New production on offshore federal lands is left to state legislatures, and then in only four coastal states. The regulatory hurdles are huge. And the bill bars drilling within 50 miles of the coast—putting off limits some of the most productive areas. Alaska’s oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is still a no-go.

The highlight is instead $84 billion in tax credits, subsidies and federal handouts for alternative fuels and renewables. The Gang of 10 intends to pay for all this in part by raising taxes on . . . oil companies! The Sierra Club couldn’t have penned it better. And so the Republican Five has potentially given antidrilling Democrats the political cover they need to neutralize energy through November.

Sen. Obama was thrilled. He quickly praised the Gang’s bipartisan spirit, and warmed up to a possible compromise. Of course, he means removing even the token drilling provisions now in the bill. But he’s only too happy for the focus to remain on the Gang’s efforts, and in particular on the five Republicans providing his party its fig leaf.

Equally gleeful was Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrat. She had been sweating the energy debate, especially after her vote against more oil-shale production—a position her Republican opponent, John Kennedy, had used against her to great effect. Yet there she was, chummily standing with the Gang of 10 and boasting that she is working with “five Republicans” to “lower prices at the pump by increasing offshore drilling here at home.” Not one of the five Republicans in the Gang is facing a tough election this year. That’s the sort of security that leads to bad decisions. And theirs is the sort of thinking that could leave Republicans in a permanent minority. See more here.

By SPPI

The scare: In an official press release of the Royal Society, Britain’s oldest taxpayer-funded body, Martin Rees, its president, is quoted as saying: “The science of climate change is complex; however the weight of scientific evidence shows that ‘global warming’ caused by human actions is happening now.”

The truth: The weight of scientific evidence shows that “global warming” began 300 years ago, at the end of an unusually prolonged period of comparative solar inactivity known as the Maunder Minimum, and has continued since then at a near-uniform 1 F per century. Throughout most of that long period of warming, we were not numerous enough or industrially active enough to have made any impact on mean global surface temperatures whatsoever (Akasofu, 2007).  The last year which set a record for mean global surface temperature was 1998, when an exceptional but not unprecedented El Nino Southern Oscillation caused a sharp spike in global temperatures as stored heat was released from the world’s oceans to the atmosphere. Note that the instrumental temperature record began only in 1880; and, given the long-run rising trend in global
temperatures, higher temperatures at the end of the period of record are scarcely surprising.

See larger graph here

Since 1998 no new annual temperature record has been set. Since late 2001, linear-regression trends for all four of the major global-temperature datasets have been downward (Figure 1). The drop in temperature between January 2007 and January 2008 was the greatest since instrumental records began in 1880. Whatever else is happening in the climate, “global warming” is not “happening now” and has not been happening for a decade. No new annual global-temperature record is expected until 2015 (Keenlyside et al., 2008). Not one of the computer models predicted this long period of global cooling. In the month of June 2008, exactly 20 years after James Hansen’s forecast to Congress that global temperatures would rise sharply, global temperatures were actually cooler than they had been when he made the forecast in June 1988. SPPI’s Scarewatch service provides swift, authoritative, factual, balanced, science-based responses to media scare stories about “global warming”. Our bulletins reach news media worldwide. For the truth about a climate scare, visit Scarewatch. If your news media don’t give both sides, write to them and tell them.

Global temperatures have been higher than today’s throughout most of the past 550 million years. They were 10 degrees F higher than the present in each of the last four interglacial periods; and up to 5 degrees F warmer in the Bronze Age, Roman, and Mediaeval warm periods. In fact, for two-thirds of the past 10,000 years, global temperatures were above today’s. End of scare. Download here.