Democrat Senators: Cap And Trade Should Be Delayed Until Next Year

I wholeheartedly agree. Let's postpone debate on Cap-And-Tax until the 2010 election year. It will be one of the next big fights after we've defeated Obamacare.

From Daniel Whitten and Simon Lomax of Bloomberg:

The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say. “The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. “I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem.”

Lincoln isn't the only one. Anyone who has read the Cap-And-Tax bill knows that it will cause energy prices to "skyrocket" which is exactly what Obama said he wanted to see happen.

More:

Ben Nelson of Nebraska and North Dakota Senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan joined Lincoln in suggesting that the climate measure be put off. “We should separate the energy bill from the climate bill,” Conrad told reporters this month. ‘It needs to be done as soon as we can get it done,” he said, referring to the energy legislation. Climate legislation would require 60 votes in the Senate. Most Republicans have said they oppose the cap-and-trade measure, and at least 15 of the Senate’s 60-member Democratic majority have said the House-passed version would hurt the economy and needs to be revamped to win their support.

You have to wonder if all the pressure we are putting on Congress over socialized medicine is starting to force some sanity on these people.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Climate Change Measure Should Be Set Aside, U.S. Senators Say
Daniel Whitten and Simon Lomax
Bloomberg.com
August 14, 2009

The Ehthanol Hoax: Still Going Strong

I posted last year about how ethanol was one big hoax. You can read that blog entry here:

Big Corn And Ethanol Hoax
84rules
March 13, 2008

And you can get information about the side effects here:

Ethanol: The Side Effects
84rules
April 29, 2008

Well, ethanol is still a big hoax and the Obama adminstration thinks that you and I are still dumb enough to fall for it. From the Wall Street Journal:

The biofuels industry already receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol produced, or about $3 billion a year. Meanwhile, import tariffs of 54 cents a gallon and an ad valorem tariff of four to seven cents a gallon keep out sugar-based ethanol from Brazil and the Caribbean. The federal 10% blending requirement insures a market for ethanol whether consumers want it or not -- a market Congress has mandated will double to 20.5 billion gallons in 2015.

What has happened here is that the Big Corn/Ethanol lobby has successfully conned Congress into giving them a monopoly over the ethanol industry and forced Americans to buy only from this monopoly. (Where are the trust-busters now?)

And then there are the side effects:

The Congressional Budget Office reported last month that Americans pay another surcharge for ethanol in higher food prices. CBO estimates that from April 2007 to April 2008 "the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices." Ethanol raises food prices because millions of acres of farmland and three billion bushels of corn were diverted to ethanol from food production. Americans spend about $1.1 trillion a year on food, so in 2007 the ethanol subsidy cost families between $5.5 billion and $8.8 billion in higher grocery bills.

So, not only are you paying higher gas prices, but you are paying higher food prices as well.

But, many of you out there will say, "We're helping the environment, though!" Not so. Ethanol is having negligible effects, and in many instances, negative effects.

A second study -- by the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Transportation and Air Quality -- explains that the reduction in CO2 emissions from burning ethanol are minimal and maybe negative. Making ethanol requires new land from clearing forest and grasslands that would otherwise sequester carbon emissions. "As with petroleum based fuels," the report concludes: "GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions are associated with the conversion and combustion of bio-fuels and every year they are produced GHG emissions could be released through time if new acres are needed to produce corn or other crops for biofuels." The EPA study also explores a series of alternative scenarios over 30 to 100 years. In some cases ethanol leads to a net reduction in carbon relative to using gasoline. But many other long-term scenarios observe a net increase in CO2 relative to burning fossil fuels. Ethanol produced in a "basic natural gas fired dry mill" will over a 30-year horizon produce "a 5% increase in GHG emissions compared to petroleum gasoline." When ethanol is produced with coal burning mills, the process "significantly worsens the lifecycle GHG impact of ethanol" creating 34% more greenhouse gases than gasoline does over 30 years.

And the parting shot:

As public policy, ethanol is like the joke about the baseball prospect who is a poor hitter but a bad fielder. It doesn't reduce CO2 but it does cost more. Imagine how many subsidies the Beltway would throw at ethanol if the fuel actually had any benefits.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Ethanol's Grocery Bill
Review & Outlook
Wall Street Journal
June 2, 2009

NASA Acknowledges 'Deep Solar Minimum'

It is true that most Americans no longer believe in Anthroprogenic (Man-made) Global Warming. Why? Mostly because of the harsh winter that we just endured and the unusually cool spring we are looking at right now. If greenhouse gas emissions are supposed to make temperatures go up, then why are temperatures going down? That is what people are asking.

But these observations may be showing us just the beginning of things to come. Most legitimate scientists (i.e. those scientists who are not on someone's political payroll) are coming to the conclusion that climate change, whether it be warming or cooling, is driven by our sun. NASA has recently lent it's support to that position by acknowledging the possibility of a "deep solar minimum."

What that means is that our sun has slipped into a period of decreased activity and decreased solar energy output.

From Science@NASA:

The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%). It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

And to show what that means graphically:



Sunspot counts are clearly at a minimum and that means decreased solar energy output as evidenced by the solar irradiance measurement:



NASA scientists admit that they do not know what will happen next. But it is clear that the sunspot cycle and the solar irradience cycle are more closely tied to global temperature change than any greenhouse gas emissions are. We know this because thanks to the efforts of China and India, greenhouse gas emissions have increased over the years, but global temperature has gone down, not up.

Other effects:

A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20% drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth. A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.

Also, if those sunspots don't return and solar energy output does not increase, we will be in for some very cold times ahead.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Deep Solar Minimum
Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
April 1, 2009

U.N. 'Climate Change' Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions To Form New World Economy

The United Nations, that lovely bastion of anti-Americanism, wants to control the world's economies by invoking the hoax of human-induced climate change.

The very first paragraph of the Fox News story covering this says it all and should send chills up your spine:

A United Nations document on "climate change" that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body.

The document is 16 pages long and it involves sending millions of American jobs offshore to other nations, all in the name of environmentalism.

And here is what is even worse:

The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an "effective framework" for dealing with global warming.

Didn't Barack Obama chastise American companies for out-sourcing jobs overseas and threaten to punitively tax anyone who did out-source their jobs? Yes, he did.

And now, Obama wants to send more American jobs overseas by signing on to this ridiculously anti-American U.N. treaty. I say anti-American because the United States will be the one nation that is hit the hardest in terms of economic losses. I also beleieve that the people at the U.N. who wrote this treaty are aiming precisely for such results.

The news article goes on:

The note adds only that industrial relocation "would involve negative consequences for the implementing country, which loses employment and investment." But at the same time it "would involve indeterminate consequences for the countries that would host the relocated industries."

This is what Obama supports? U.S. companies cannot out-source employement as a revenue saving measure, but he will allow the U.N. to force American jobs to "relocate" to other nations?

Can Obama possibly be a bigger hypocrite on this issue?

Here is more evidence of the anti-American slant that this treaty holds:

A "climate change levy on aviation" for example, is described as having undetermined "negative impacts on exporters of goods that rely on air transport, such as cut flowers and premium perishable produce," as well as "tourism services." But no mention is made in the note of the impact on the aerospace industry, an industry that had revenues in 2008 of $208 billion in the U.S. alone, or the losses the levy would impose on airlines for ordinary passenger transportation. (Global commercial airline revenues in 2008 were about $530 billion, and were already forecast to drop to an estimated $467 billion this year.)

The language of this document was no accident. It is clearly aimed directly at the economic throat of the United States and Barack Obama has already signed on as a supporter. Maybe Obama didn't read this proposal, just like he didn't read the Dodd Amendment of the stimulus package.

Anthroprogenic Global Warming is a hoax. But it is a hoax that the United Nations believes in and apparently Barack Obama does as well.

This new treaty would destroy the already fragile U.S. economy, destroy millions of American jobs and surrender our national sovereignity to the United Nations. I wonder if Obama is already aware of this.

You can access the complete story on-line here:

U.N. 'Climate Change' Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions To Form New World Economy
George Russell
Fox News
March 27, 2009

Both The Remote Sensing Systems Of Santa Rosa And University Of Alabama (Huntsville) Dataset Show Temperature Going Down

See the two above graphs? They both show that the earth has been in a cyclical cooling trend for the past several years. Although no one can accurately predict what the trends will be for the years to come, both of the data representations show that all of the hype about the world coming to an end because of man-made "greenhouse" gases is nothing more than ... well ... a bunch of hype.

Greenhouse gas theory holds that as greenhouse gas emissions increase, global temperatures go up. Since 2000, greenhouse gas emissions have indeed gone up thanks to China and India, but as the data shows, temperatures have gone down. The theory has failed its own major test.

Also note the UAH graph has detail explanations with regards to certain outlier events (the eruption of Mount Pinatubo and the cycling of El Nino) in addition to a fourth-order polynomial fit to show what the trends are. No global warming alarmist would ever mention such natural causes nor such contrary evidence in any of their arguments.

Dr. James Hansen: Unethically Manipulating The Data (Global Warming Junk Science)

It seems that Dr. James Hansen can't keep his name out of the headlines, especially when he is caught engaging in the junk science that AGW alarmists cling to despite evidence to the contrary.

Now, Dr. Hansen is trying to re-write geophysical history by re-writing the temperature data from the time period of 1910 to 2008.

Dr. Gregory Young, neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England, wrote an entry into the American Thinker explaining the scientific fraud that Dr. Hansen tried to get away with. From his article:

In yet another egregious display of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) arrogance, he changed the temperature data from 1910-2008 to reflect what is clearly a cooling trend to reflect a warming trend.

Note the following graph:



The blue lines are the raw data and the red lines are Dr. Hansen's compensation. Apparently, Dr. Hansen is not okay with letting the data just be the data. He has to insert his own bias into it to make it look more politically correct.

More:

Indeed this past year (2008) is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released this month by the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Great Britain. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07.

This flies completely in the face of global warming theory which clearly states that as so-called greenhouse gases increase, the temperature must increase as well. But, greenhouse gas emissions have increased and the temperatures have decreased. Global warming theory has failed a major test here.

Dr. Young also re-prints an excerpt from Dr. David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma who has published numerous peer-reviewed research articles:

"Environmental extremists and global warming alarmists are in denial and running for cover.... To the extent global warming was ever valid, it is now officially over. It is time to file this theory in the dustbin of history, next to Aristotelean physics, Neptunism, the geocentric universe, phlogiston, and a plethora of other incorrect scientific theories, all of which had vocal and dogmatic supporters who cited incontrovertible evidence. Weather and climate change are natural processes beyond human control. To argue otherwise is to deny the factual evidence."

It is high time we start paying attention to real scientists like Dr. Gregory Young and Dr. David Deming and send pseudo-researchers like Dr. James Hansen packing.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Global Warm-Mongering: More Silk From A Pig's Ear
Dr. Gregory Young
The American Thinker
January 6, 2009