Late Sunday night, my wife and I drove from Sacramento, Calif., to Los Angeles. We figured that it would be wise to leave Sacramento in the early evening to avoid traffic. At 7 p.m., we climbed into the car and headed for Interstate 5, the major highway connecting Northern California and Southern California.

For the first five hours of the drive, things went as planned. The highway was relatively clear, and we sailed along happily at 80 mph.

Then we saw it. A sign. A large orange sign reading: Freeway Closed Ahead, 11 p.m.-4 a.m.

It was too late to get off the freeway; it was too late to turn around. There were no turnoffs, no exits, no restrooms. We were stuck an hour from Los Angeles, bumper-to-bumper, moving less than 1 mph. Literally. During the next three hours, we moved a grand total of 1.6 miles. Families were pulling onto the shoulders of the highway to catch some winks. One creative fellow actually attempted to drive off the freeway by cutting through some wire separating the freeway from an adjacent road. The cops immediately arrested him.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, Congressman Nick Rahall, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress who oppose producing more American oil are in a bind.

They know voters are hurting from high gas prices and overwhelmingly want the government to allow more American oil production. But they can’t side with the American people and risk upsetting their left-wing base. So they needed a way to make us think they support more drilling – while effectively preventing us from ever drilling a single new well.

They think they’ve found a solution: a proposed “use it or lose it” law on federal leases for energy exploration. Bingaman, Rahall and fellow drilling opponents accuse the oil industry of “sitting on” 68 million acres of “non-producing” leased land. They want to force energy companies to “use” this leased land within ten years – or lose all exploration and drilling rights.

Premier Gordon Campbell's ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions were in a sense drawn out of thin air.

Rather than any serious analysis of what it would take to get there, the goal of a 33 per cent reduction from 2007 levels by 2020 was based on his determination of what we need to achieve if we want to play an effective role in limiting the potentially harmful effects of climate change.

We got our first look at the changes required with the carbon tax and other measures introduced earlier this year.

Now the B.C. Climate Action Team has issued its recommendations to the provincial government that give a much clearer view of the magnitude of change that will be needed, along with interim targets that will have to be met by 2012 and 2016 to stay on track for the 33-per-cent reduction by 2020 reduction.

What is immediately clear is that the carbon tax now causing all the fuss at the gas pump is just the beginning. The panel recommends changes that will have much greater impact over time in the form of higher costs for any goods or services using energy and/or more provincial regulation of housing, transportation, community design and industry.

Ms. Nancy Pelosi and Mr. Harry Reid, Democratic Party, Washington, D.C.,

Dear Party Leaders,

As a proud member of the Republican Attack Machine and a charter member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I want to personally thank you for giving the Republican Party new life in the 2008 presidential campaign and congressional races.

You accomplished this by refusing to drill for new oil when a majority of the American people are in favor of it, and that majority is growing. Demonstrating the same brilliant leadership that has catapulted Congress to a 12 percent approval rating, you have not even allowed the issue to come to a vote. This makes one wonder whether your party is really democratic. Instead, you decided to go on a 35-day vacation without taking action to produce more energy and without passing 11 of the 12 appropriation bills.

I can’t thank you enough for handing the GOP a great issue on a silver platter. Before this happened, Republicans were dead in the water and John McCain’s presidential campaign was going nowhere. Aside from somebody stealing Obama’s teleprompter, I can’t think of anything that could have been more detrimental to the Democratic Party or more beneficial to the Republicans.

Dr David Stockwell, a leading expert on ecological niche modeling, checked the CSIRO’s figures and assumptions behind its warning of more drought thanks to global warming, and found in fact:

… that the results show no significant increase in drought due to greenhouse warming in almost all regions of Australia

Stockwell’s conclusions were hampered by the CSIRO’s refusal to hand over the data it had used to make its terrifying predictions. Eventually the CSIRO caved in, and Stockwell has since crunched its numbers and found the CSIRO’s models are in fact worthless, not even being able to “predict” past climate: 

This Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi again promised to use all her power to prevent the House from voting on any measure that would allow new oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf. A majority of Americans support new oil exploration in these regions. Pelosi has tried to prevent the House from even debating whether or not to increase domestic energy production, but this past Friday a small group of conservatives took over the House floor after Democrats voted to go on a five-week paid vacation.

After the vote to adjourn, 48 conservatives simply refused to leave, continuing to speak from the well of the House floor. The lights were turned off, the microphones were shut off, and the C-SPAN cameras were ordered to go dark, but the remaining members stayed to do the people’s business. Reporters were asked to leave the speaker’s lobby but the remaining conservatives escorted the press one by one to a press gallery directly above it. When Capitol Police closed the tourist galleries, the House members invited the visitors down to the chamber floor. A boy in the visitors gallery asked, “When do you think you’re going to get this vote?” Republican Policy Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) declared, “This is the People’s House. This is not Pelosi’s Politburo.”