Climate change sceptics 'as bad as Fritzl'

AN English bishop has compared climate change doubters to the Austrian child abuser Josef Fritzl (pictured).

The Church of English Bishop of Stafford, the Right Reverend Gordon Mursell, said it was hard to imagine a more disgusting crime than Fritzl's, who sealed his daughter in a cellar for 24 years, The Daily Mail reported.

"You could argue that, by our refusal to face the truth about climate change, we are as guilty as he is," Dr Mursell said.

"We are in effect locking our children and grandchildren into a world with no future and throwing away the key."

I see that we are once again having to hear how NASA's James Hansen (pictured) was dissuaded from talking to the press on a few of the 1,400 media interviews he was involved in over the years. 

Well, I had the same pressure as a NASA employee during the Clinton-Gore years, because NASA management and the Clinton/Gore administration knew that I was skeptical that mankind's CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming. I was even told not to give my views during congressional testimony, and so I purposely dodged a question, under oath, when it arose.

There's roughly twice as many polar bears in the world today as there was 30 years ago. But on May 14, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, invoking the U.S. Endangered Species Act, proclaimed polar bears a “threatened species.”

In 1972, the creatures had already lost value in the U.S. when the Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited their hunting in Alaska. (And no, it's not the hunting ban that caused their increased numbers; they proliferated equally in Canada which continued the polar bear season.)

After 1972, U.S. hunters started hunting polar bears in Canada. But Kempthorne's recent proclamation means that U.S. hunters will be barred by law from bringing their trophy bear skins into the U.S. So again polar bears have lost value. Lately hunters (primarily from the U.S.) have been paying $30,000 for the chance of whacking a polar bear during a grueling hunt in the Canadian arctic on dog-sleds and in sub-zero weather.

As the Senate opens debate on its mammoth carbon regulation program this week, the phrase of the hour is "cap and trade." This sounds innocuous enough. But anyone who looks at the legislative details will quickly see that a better description is cap and spend. This is easily the largest income redistribution scheme since the income tax.

Sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner, the bill would put a cap on carbon emissions that gets lowered every year. But to ease the pain and allow for economic adjustment, the bill would dole out "allowances" under the cap that would stand for the right to emit greenhouse gases. Senator Barbara Boxer has introduced a package of manager's amendments that mandates total carbon reductions of 66% by 2050, while earmarking the allowances.

When cap and trade has been used in the past, such as to reduce acid rain, the allowances were usually distributed for free. A major difference this time is that the allowances will be auctioned off to covered businesses, which means imposing an upfront tax before the trade half of cap and trade even begins. It also means a gigantic revenue windfall for Congress.

We'll have to discard the old adage "Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it." It is inoperative in this era of global warming, because the whole point of controlling greenhouse gas emissions is to do something about the weather. This promises to be hard and perhaps futile, but there are good and bad ways of attempting it. One of the bad ways is cap-and-trade. Unfortunately, it's the darling of environmental groups and their political allies.

The chief political virtue of cap-and-trade -- a complex scheme to reduce greenhouse gases -- is its complexity. This allows its environmental supporters to shape public perceptions in essentially deceptive ways. Cap-and-trade would act as a tax, but it's not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it's promoted as a "free market" mechanism. Finally, it would trigger a tidal wave of influence-peddling, as lobbyists scrambled to exploit the system for different industries and localities. This would undermine whatever abstract advantages the system has.

Stephen Harper should call the environmental accord what it is -- a train wreck

Could Prime Minister Stephen Harper (pictured) or Environment Minister John Baird please explain what they mean when they say Canada continues to be a participant in the Kyoto accord?

How can we be a participant when the PM has said we cannot do what Kyoto requires of us -- lower our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by an average of 6% below 1990 levels between now and 2012?

We're 29.1% above our Kyoto target. Achieving that target is the point of Kyoto.

So what, exactly, are we participating in?