In a piece on the proposed oil sands pipeline project from Canada to Texas, the center-left Talking Points Memo picks up on an important point but doesn’t quite drive it home: “Canadians can do what they want with their oil in Canada, and there’s little American protesters can do to stop them,” notes the post.
Correct. The green position is that President Obama must either kill up to 20,000 jobs to show symbolic opposition to a Canadian oil drilling plan or risk the wrath and condemnation of the mighty green movement. President Obama can’t kill the oil sands development by blocking the pipeline; he can only ensure that the US derives no benefit from the oil next door.
That, presumably, is why the White House announced today that the pipeline will go ahead, greens and New York Times editorial board notwithstanding. There was no other rational choice he could make.
No significant political force in the United States is as incompetently organized and led as the greens. Republicans should rejoice; green extremism, hysteria and incompetence seriously undercuts Democratic coherence and credibility. That is the point that TPM and its allies need to be making; until the rest of the left knocks some sense into green heads, the environmentalists will continue to serve as one of the Republican Party’s most helpful auxiliaries.
Alongside actress Daryl Hannah, religious leaders, and dozens of eco-activists arrested Monday outside the White House protesting a planned oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico stood an unlikely partner—NASA’s top climate scientist and government official James Hansen.
Hansen, a controversial and highly vocal proponent of the argument that man’s actions have dramatically affected the planet’s climate, is the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—a position for which he earns a $180,000 taxpayer-paid salary.
He has been arrested at least three times now in public protests over climate change and global warming.
Before his latest arrest Monday outside of the White House, Hansen used a microphone to implore President Obama to act “for the sake of your children and grandchildren,” the SF Gate reported.
As a government employee, Hansen is essentially taking pot shots at his own employer.
Yet Ed Campion, a spokesman for parent organization Goddard Space Flight Center—a Greenbelt, Md. facility that manages the space agency’s unmanned scientific aircraft— told FoxNews.com that Hansen was on personal leave for a day for the protests.
“The agency doesn’t comment on personnel matters other than to say that Hansen was on his own personal time and wasn’t acting in official capacity as a NASA employee,” Campion told FoxNews.com.
It was unclear whether Hansen chose to be arrested on a vacation day or a personal day.
David Roberts, an writer with environmental blog Grist, questioned whether it was smart of Hansen to protest in this fashion.
“I know I’m not supposed to say this, but James Hansen managed his transition from scientist to activist *terribly*. All influence lost,” the green blogger tweeted out prior to the arrest.
Hansen’s arrest came on day 10 of a two-week sit-in to protest a Canadian company’s proposal to construct a $7 billion, 1,702-mile pipeline to pump heavy crude oil from mines in Canada to refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Prior to the protest, Hansen told environmental blog SolveClimate News of his plans to join the protest and risk arrest, because the threat the pipeline poses to the climate is too great to ignore.
“If [Obama] chooses the dirty needle, it’s game over because it will confirm that Obama was just greenwashing, like the other well-oiled, coal-fired politicians with no real intention of solving the addiction.”
can find a buyer,” Hansen said.
In June, a In a lawsuit filed in Washington
Canada is going to sell its dope, if it , D.C., claimed Hansen receiving more than $1.2 million from the very environmental organizations whose agenda he advocated—failing to comply with ethics rules and financial disclosures regulations.
Hansen has been arrested at least twice before in protests over climate issues, in 2009 and 2010.
IBD Editorial
Junk Science: The governor of a state under assault by the EPA takes on the patron saint of climate change over whether “warmers” or “deniers” benefit financially from the debate. Meanwhile, the nation loses.
Is Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry a racist? According to the increasingly bombastic Al “expletive deleted” Gore, who was interviewed by Climate Reality Project collaborator Alex Bogusky on Ustream last Friday, Perry’s global warming skepticism qualifies him as one.
Gore related how his “generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on civil rights demonstrators” and that it was when racists could not answer the question of why blacks were inferior “with integrity” that “the change really started.”
We shall overcome climate skeptics as well, he believes. “We have to win the conversation on climate,” Gore said, just as the conversation on race was won.
After Gore equated climate change skepticism with racism, Bogusky prompted Gore: “Gov. Perry suggests that scientists have gotten together to foil the American public, or the global public.” In fact, what Perry told an audience in New Hampshire was that our climate has been “changing ever since the earth was formed” due to largely natural forces and that “there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”
Perry was Gore’s Texas campaign manager in 1988, a fact that many purists say should disqualify him for the GOP nomination. Back then, Perry was a Democrat and Gore was a relatively conservative Democrat who had not yet invented the Internet or beheld an Earth hanging in the balance.
Perry has seen the error of his ways. Gore has not.
“This is an organized effort to attack the reputation of the scientific community as a whole, to attack their integrity, and to slander them with a lie that they are making up the science in order to make money,” Gore said in the online interview. Of course, Gore hasn’t shied away from accusing skeptics of being financed by coal and oil companies.
Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast We and others have documented the manipulated and edited data used by Britain’s Climate Research Unit to “hide the decline” in global temperature, and fraudulent assessments by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with conclusions based on single-source anecdotes from obscure journals. They all have been well-funded.
No one has made more money from climate change hype than Gore. According to the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, just one of the “green” companies in which Gore has invested has received over half a billion dollars in subsidies from the Energy Department.
Financial disclosure documents released before the 2000 election put the Gore family’s net worth at $1 million to $2 million. A mere decade later, estimates are that he is worth $100 million. He’s been touted in the press as one day becoming the first “carbon billionaire.”
According to the Science & Public Policy Institute, the U.S. government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid and tax breaks.
Compare that with, say, Exxon-Mobil Corp., which is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics.
According to the World Bank, the value of carbon trading doubled from $63 billion in 2007 to $126 billion in 2008. Big money has been and can be made by conning governments into formulating policies based on fraudulently hyped climate hysteria.
Monday’s endorsement of Perry by Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., should come as no surprise. Inhofe recognizes that what Perry calls “anti-carbon programs” are scams based on fraudulent science and that Perry is right.
While many like Gore have profited handsomely, these policies cost the nation dearly in terms of jobs and economic growth.