Climate Change: The president's plan to reduce carbon emissions legitimizes the environmentalist agenda of destroying the earth in order to save it. At least one scientist says we need more CO2 emissions, not less.

It must have seemed a good idea at the time, this attempt to blunt the global warming agenda and head off a regulatory train wreck. But President Bush's announcement Wednesday of a plan to halt growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, while not embracing all the enviro groups want, legitimizes their argument that global warming is caused by humans and an imminent threat to mankind.

As Christopher Horner, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming," says: "All this accomplished was to legitimize the agenda, wrench the political center of the issue far to the left, and leave some very good men and women out there hanging."

It also comes at a time when an increasing number of scientists are giving warming theories a cold shoulder.

Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short-time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

But it's not nice to blame Mother Nature when you have the Industrial Revolution and the internal combustion engine as convenient scapegoats. This comes after a debate driven primarily by ideology and not by sound science. It's a way of achieving economic, political and social control that communism, another tyranny sublimating freedom to the greater good, could only dream of.

The Environmental Protection Agency already is under orders from the Supreme Court to determine if CO2, the basis for all plant and therefore animal life on Earth, is endangering the public health and welfare. If so, the EPA must regulate it and our economy.

Global warm-mongers are using the polar bear, poster pet for climate change, to force action through the Endangered Species Act. They're also trying to hijack laws such as the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. The Bush global warming plan, whatever its intent, will not slow them down. It merely will provide a sanctioned tree on which they can hang their ornaments.

"U.S. taxpayers are already spending $40 billion a year to address climate change," notes Brian Kennedy, spokesman for the Institute for Energy Research. "And to date we're achieving better results than the Europeans are under a bureaucratic regulatory framework."

Horner agrees, pointing out that the U.S. "is the world leader in reducing the rate of growth of CO2 emissions while also growing its economy — faster on both counts, as with population as well, than its principal antagonist, Europe. "

Global warming extremists have wreaked more havoc on this planet through their policies to save it. The rush to biofuels such as ethanol has raised the price of food around the globe to the point of causing food riots. Agricultural runoff from increased cultivation is degrading rivers and coastal areas. Meanwhile, trendy "carbon offsets" turn needed Third World farmland into tree farms.

Solar scientist David Archibald recently told a Hong Kong conference on climate change that because of declining solar activity, we should be thinking of ways to increase CO2 emissions. Seems we might be heading into global cooling.

Drilling The Future

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, April 14, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Energy: America's energy crunch is sadly self-inflicted. While others around the world engage in a mad dash to find more oil reserves, the U.S. seems to think $111-a-barrel oil won't be affected by more supply.

Aline from the recent film "There Will Be Blood" reminds us of the spirit this country's original oil entrepreneurs once had. "There's a whole ocean of oil beneath our feet," bellows antihero Daniel Plainview. "No one can get at it except for me."

Such sentiment these days is in short supply. But not overseas. Take Brazil's Petroleo Brasileiro. On Monday, it announced that its Carioca offshore oil field may hold up to 33 billion barrels — more than the estimated official reserves in all the U.S.

This follows Brazil's discovery last December of a huge new oil source, the Tupi field, also thought to hold billions of barrels. Haroldo Lima, head of Brazil's National Oil Agency, estimates that Carioca might be as much as five times the size of Tupi.

Why the spate of discoveries off Brazil? Simple: With oil topping $100 a barrel, it's now more economical to prospect for hard-to-get supplies, whether deep in the ocean or in remote regions of dry land. When prices soared, Brazil got busy.

This is happening around the world. As we reported in December, China last year made 10 major new energy discoveries in a bid to secure its energy future. India recently invited foreign companies to help it find more energy on its territory.

Europe continues to fully exploit its oil reserves in the North Sea, without worrying about hurdles such as the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases or concerns about damage to the ocean ecosystem. Yet "peak oil" advocates in the U.S. argue that we're already at the end of our large-scale recoverable reserves.

Conventional wisdom is that the U.S. has just 30 billion barrels of oil left, enough for just 10 years of pumping at current rates. Sounds pretty bleak, but that figure is ludicrously low. Just last week, a new report concluded that the Bakken oil basin, stretching from North Dakota and Montana into Canada, contains an estimated 4 billion-plus barrels of oil.

Colorado and Utah are estimated to contain as much as 1.2 trillion barrels of oil trapped in shale below ground. They're not counted as "recoverable" reserves because until recently they weren't economical. Today they are.

The 2006 discovery in the Gulf of Mexico by Chevron, Devon Energy and Norway's Statoil of an oil field containing as much as 15 billion barrels of crude is still another example.

Offshore U.S. sources hold as much as 10 billion barrels of untapped oil, while the 2,000 acres of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge have as much as 16 billion — enough to replace 30 years of Middle East imports.

Many estimate that just under 1 trillion barrels of oil remain to be pumped. But a U.S. Geological Survey four years ago put the amount worldwide at 3 trillion.

We need oil. It's the lifeblood of our economy. And fortunately we have lots of it. But because of Congress' unwillingness to go after it, we're leaving billions of barrels untapped, driving up prices and causing untold economic hardship. This madness must end.

Global warming rage lets global hunger grow

We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

	A demonstrator eats grass in front of a U.N. peacekeeping soldier during a protest against the high cost of living in Port-au-Prince

"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said.

The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted.

We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.

The EU has targeted a 5.75pc biofuel share by 2010, though that may change. Europe's farm ministers are to debate a measure this week ensuring "absolute priority" for food output.

PBS And The 'Remarkable' Ted Turner

Ted Turner was not only interviewed, but celebrated on PBS — on April Fool's Day. The prank was apparently on PBS. It was as if Turner had a subversive mission, to prove that PBS isn't just for smart people.

True to form, Turner walked off a cliff of rhetorical excess on "The Charlie Rose Show," charging that global warming was going to grow so severe that in a few decades, most of humanity would be extinct.

"We'll be eight degrees hotter in 10 — not 10, but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died, and the rest of us will be cannibals."

Charlie Rose should have been embarrassed, but wasn't. When Turner said during the show, "It's been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid," he should have administered a Breathalyzer test.

Instead, at show's end, he delivered an homage to Turner's humanitarianism. Rose was still seated, but the tone sounded like he was bowing deeply to his guest's expansive intellect. "You're a remarkable man," he declared.

The global warming disaster-movie pushers always try to intimidate their opponents by insisting the finest scientific minds are all on their side. But Ted Turner is not one of the finest scientific minds in America. All you have to do is express the politically correct opinion and PBS will treat you as one of the world's great sages.

PBS is a natural habitat for this kind of wild-eyed lunacy. The taxpayer-funded network has a well-worn reputation for providing gloomy — and wholly inaccurate — predictions from environmental extremists.

In 1990, the PBS documentary series "Race to Save the Planet" featured another one of those lesser scientific minds, actress Meryl Streep: "By the year 2000 — that's less than 10 years away — the earth's climate will be warmer than it's been in over 100,000 years. If we don't do something, there'll be enormous calamities in a very short time."

Doesn't everyone remember the massive human die-off of 2000?

Al Gore went to Harvard with Erich Segal, the author of "Love Story," so he knows that being in love with the planet Earth means never having to say you're sorry when your doomsday pitches are massively, dreadfully wrong. But shouldn't PBS and other media outlets be held accountable when doomsday predictions they've facilitated from 15 or 20 years ago fail to materialize?

Liberalism is so impressed with its own brilliance that results apparently don't matter. There is the "enlightened" opinion, and there is the benighted opinion.

When Charlie Rose interviewed Gore in 2006, he wondered about how President Bush could be so deluded about the impending warming disaster: "But do you know anybody who has temporarily tried to have a conversation with the president about this, in a way which you would consider an enlightened conversation?" Gore said Bush is an "incurious person," which is a patronizing way of saying he's not stupid, he just doesn't care as much about the planet as we do.

But can't it be said that Ted Turner is an incurious person? What has Ted Turner ever done to display his curiosity about free-market environmentalism?

Eleven years ago, when he was still in charge of CNN, he wouldn't let opponents speak. It was bad enough that CNN (and TBS) had a habit of airing extremely one-sided eco-panic — even with child indoctrination in cartoon form like "Captain Planet."

Turner even had commercials opposing the Kyoto global warming treaty pulled from his airwaves. They were apparently inaccurate for predicting that U.S. approval of Kyoto would dramatically increase gas and electricity prices for the American people.

This was one gloomy scenario that Turner would not endorse. Despite its status as a prediction about the future — just like Turner's — it was denounced as a lie in the present tense.

The media, including PBS, are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads. They can suspect that conservatives have an axe to grind. Fine. They ought to suspect the same from liberals.

The media could make gains against their damaged credibility by simply revisiting environmental crystal-ball claims from 1968, 1978 and 1988, and answering the question: Were the doomsayers and their predictions of disaster right?

Instead, the media appear to all the world as trapped inside a hermetically sealed bubble of its own incuriosity.

The Business and Media Institute studied global warming stories on ABC, CBS and NBC in the second half of 2007, and found only 20% of stories even mentioned the mere concept that some disagree with doomsday global warming scenarios.

 

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