Investors Business Daily Editorial

Recovery: While states like Nevada wallow in recession, tiny North Dakota becomes the first state rated as expanding by a leading service. Could it be the state’s burgeoning energy industry?

The recession - induced by Democrats and activists meddling in the housing market through the Community Reinvestment Act and then whistling past the bad-loan graveyard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - officially ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

For much of the country, mired in a jobless recovery with job losses so great and prospects so bleak that it will take decades just to get back to where we were, this statistical factoid meant little as hope and change continued to deteriorate into chaos and incompetence.

The most recent data from the Adversity Index, produced by Moody’s Analytics and MSNBC.com, showed that those states - Nevada, Michigan, Vermont, Rhode Island, Georgia, New Mexico, Mississippi and Illinois - were still in a recession as recently as July of this year.

One state, North Dakota, is in a boom of sorts, so much so that it was rated by the Adversity Index as the first state to have moved out of the recession and actual expansion mode.

The key may be North Dakota’s development of the energy resources under its soil and in its rocks, something the Obama administration is loath to do nationally. Instead we get drilling moratoriums and polar bear habitat protection that serve to make America the only industrialized nation not developing its domestic energy resources.

North Dakota is simply gushing. It has a billion-dollar budget surplus and oil revenues ready to shoot up 70% over the next two years.

Contrast this with the Gulf states, where job losses could reach tens of thousands as the oil industry atrophies and rigs leave for foreign waters.

North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation: 3.6% for July. That’s in large part because the state has doubled its oil production in just four years, surging to 80 million barrels in 2009. In the past year, the number of oil-drilling rigs has tripled and now stands at about 130. New technology has made profitable the previously unprofitable oil reserves there.

That technology - hydraulic fracturing, or fracking - is being used to tap the oil resources of the Bakken Shale formation. Production so far is small on a global scale, but it’s been enough to vault North Dakota past Oklahoma and Louisiana to become the nation’s fourth-largest oil producer after Texas, Alaska and California. It has also lifted North Dakota out of its recession.

The Bakken Shale may contain as much as 4.3 billion barrels of currently recoverable oil, according to conservative estimates from the U.S. Geologic Survey. We also have additional shale oil stored in the Barnett formation in Texas and the Marcellus formation in Pennsylvania and New York.

In fact, the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of shale oil. Yet some in Congress are working to ban hydraulic fracturing and place this oil resource off-limits as well.

A study done by SAC Corp. at the request of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the Gas Technology Institute and others shows that the U.S. economy will suffer $2.3 trillion in lost-opportunity costs over the next two decades if this insane energy policy continues - dollars that would go a long way toward reining in runaway deficits and creating economic growth.

Just as the nonevent at Three Mile Island was hyped to kill nuclear power, so has the Gulf spill been used to kill domestic oil exploration. North Dakota has shown us the way out of our economic doldrums. And that way is to drill, baby, drill. See post here. H/T SEPP newsletter.

By Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

William Connolley, arguably the world’s most influential global warming advocate after Al Gore, has lost his bully pulpit. Connolley did not wield his influence by the quality of his research or the force of his argument but through his administrative position at Wikipedia, the most popular reference source on the planet.

Through his position, Connolley for years kept dissenting views on global warming out of Wikipedia, allowing only those that promoted the view that global warming represented a threat to mankind. As a result, Wikipedia became a leading source of global warming propaganda, with Connolley its chief propagandist.

His career as a global warming propagandist has now been stopped, following a unanimous verdict that came down today through an arbitration proceeding conducted by Wikipedia. In the decision, a slap-down for the once-powerful Connolley by his peers, he has been barred from participating in any article, discussion or forum dealing with global warming. In addition, because he rewrote biographies of scientists and others he disagreed with, to either belittle their accomplishments or make them appear to be frauds, Wikipedia barred him - again unanimously - from editing biographies of those in the climate change field.

I have written several columns for the National Post on Connolley’s role as a propagandist. Two of them appear here and here.

Jamdes Deingpole reported in December 2009 (here) that Lawrence in an erarlier post wrote:

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known - Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it - more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred - over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

Miranda Devine

It’s hard to believe that it’s not satire but the 10:10 campaign’s advertisement showing a teacher blowing up children was a serious attempt to drum up support for climate alarmism. 

The video, which attracted condemnation around the world this week, shows a teacher encouraging her young charges to follow the 10:10 campaign’s plan to reduce carbon emissions. When she asks for a show of hands from those who want to join the campaign, all but two of the children thrust their hands in the air.

“That’s absolutely fine, your own choice,” the teacher says, smiling. Then she presses a red button and the two little holdouts explode, their blood and gore spraying all over their classmates.

The same scenario is repeated in a workplace and on a soccer ground where those reluctant to join the campaign are messily vaporised.

This nasty ad wasn’t the work of Chaser-style fringe comedians. This was a serious product of the environmental establishment, an organisation sponsored by Sony - until the company pulled out this week - and in partnership with the Guardian newspaper.

Politicians, schools, and celebrities all over the world have joined 10:10. Even our very own Hugh Jackman has been photographed wearing a 10:10 promotional necklace.

The video was scripted by Richard Curtis of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame, and was the brainchild of the UK’s version of Michael Moore, Frannie Armstrong, director of The Age of Stupid.

It was the considered message from the very heart of the green movement - stand in the way of our plans and we will eliminate you. It’s green Darwinism, known in earlier times as The Final Solution.

Frannie and friends removed the video from the 10:10 website when complaints started, but it was too late. She has let the cat out of the bag.

Now we have the evidence that during the long silence after the twin blows last year of the Copenhagen climate summit and Climategate, green zealots had been busy plotting revenge.

They flipped the switch in their brains that takes them down the blood-spattered path of totalitarian death so well-worn in the 20th century. Now we know - climate change alarmism is a death cult.

We heard the message in its starkest form last month from the US Discovery Channel’s suicide bomber James Lee, whose eco-manifesto demanded no more “filthy human children”, before he was shot dead by police.

And we heard it in the subtle endorsement by Father Frank Brennan when he defended a vote for the Greens during the last election. “On some policy issues, I daresay the Greens have a more Christian message than the major parties,” Brennan wrote in rebuttal of Cardinal George Pell’s rather better description of the Greens as “sweet camouflaged poison”.

But, whatever way you dress it up, the climate alarmist message ultimately can be boiled down to death.

No surprise that the first big issue in the kinder, gentler new parliament for Brennan’s pet Greens was euthanasia. It’s where their heads are at. Killing people.

And if you’re not dead then they’ll make you suffer.

Already this winter we have had stories of people forced to huddle over hot water bottles and even sleep with cats to keep warm because they can’t afford to keep paying soaring electricity bills. The pain inflicted is deliberate. You are intended to suffer. In this land blessed with abundant reserves of cheap coal-fired energy, your suffering is what environmentalists and policy makers call reducing demand. You are being forced to turn off the heater, pull out your electric plugs and bathe in lukewarm water in order to - ahem - stop climate change.

Electricity consumers are being hit twice - first with doubled prices to pay for inefficient green power such as wind and solar and then to catch up on infrastructure investment neglected by sloppy state governments.

Then there is Julia Gillard’s looming unpromised carbon tax. If it is priced at between $20 and $50 a tonne, as the Energy Supply Association of Australia told the Business Spectator’s Robert Gottliebsen, then power bills will double again.

In other words, over the next four to five years your electricity bill will quadruple.

Suck it up, because your pain is the aim of the new green paradigm. Yet the greater aim is not to change the planet’s temperature because no one knows how to do that.

For one thing, evidence used by alarmists to justify killing people and by the Government to justify a carbon tax is looking increasingly flimsy. As the brilliant Perth-based mathematician David Evans, who wrote the Government’s carbon accounting program when he worked at the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) told a climate seminar last week, the temperature record is based in part on suspect readings.

At a seminar by the American climate sceptic think tank the Heartland Institute in Sydney on Friday, Evans displayed images of temperature measuring stations around the world, including in Melbourne and Sydney, which stand next to heat-generating air-conditioners, freeways and asphalt runways. Thermometers that might once have stood in paddocks are registering higher temperatures due to what’s been built next to them, whether that’s a brick building, wastewater reservoir, carpark or incinerator.

These humble bits of technology in prosaic locations across the planet determine surface temperature trends, yet their readings have been influenced by the so-called urban heat island effect. Since the whistle was blown by American sceptic Anthony Watts, some have been eliminated. But, as Evans pointed out, their results remain in the temperature record. That is the record which has so alarmed climate zealots they think nothing of advocating the murder of people who don’t agree with them.

Eco-fanatics are no different to totalitarian ideologues through the ages. Evils such as Nazism don’t arrive with devil’s horns; they come in disguise - “sweet camouflaged poison”.

So we should thank Frannie and her 10:10 comrades for their vile ad. They naively removed the camouflage too soon.

Read post and comments here.