When I was told I'd be on the Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends" debating Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (pictured) about the contentious issue of oil consumption and Barack Obama's refusal to consider offshore drilling or nuclear energy, I really looked forward to the exchange. After all, how many times does one have a chance to have a frank and open exchange with one of the true high priests of the shrill global warming crowd?

Meeting him in the Fox News Channel's green room before the appearance, I began to have some concerns. I'm the kind of guy who likes to have a little friendly banter, even with someone I disagree with. Mr. Kennedy pretty clearly does not, at least not with me. I asked him how his uncle Ted was doing, joked about us being invited to be on the "early morning" shift that day (our appearance aired at 6:15am), and did everything I could to try and establish that, contrary to the way many liberals believe, a conservative like me doesn't have any horns or fangs.

Is the elusive ET the next frontier to promote man-made Global Warming/Climate Change?

The search for life on other planets is a never-ending dream for untold millions of earthlings.

“Scientists believe NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander exposed bits of ice while recently digging a trench in the soil of the Martian arctic, the mission’s investigator said Thursday.” (FoxNews.com, June 20, 2008).  “Phoenix Mars is studying whether the arctic region of the Red Planet could be habitable.

The ridicule of detractors notwithstanding, there are many who believe that it is sheer arrogance to assume that Earth is the only entity in the galaxy populated by intelligent life.

The true deniers of climate change are not the thousands of scientists and economists, the climate realists, who are critical of the ‘global warming’ grand narrative, but the ‘global warming’ zealots who believe that we can either ‘stop’ or ‘stabilize’ climate change, two of the most ridiculous and hubristic concepts ever to afflict human arrogance. It is especially concerning, however, when you read such nonsense in supposedly serious newspapers like the Financial Times [see: Philip Stephens, ‘Saving the planet will be difficult, but do not despair’, Financial Times, June 19]. We learn from this august outlet that:

“The climate can be stabilised ...” [my emphasis]

An international conference was recently held in Zakopane, Poland hosted by the Department of Quaternary Paleogeography and Paleoecology at the University of Silesia and the Institute of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Wroclaw. The meeting also served as the Annual Conference of the Association for Tree-Ring Research. Over 100 scientists gave presentations at the meeting, most were from Europe, although one presenter was from Penn State University and two others from the University of Missouri made the trip to present their research in Poland. The Association for Tree-Ring Research is a credible organization with no agenda that we know of regarding the global warming issue.

One presentation there was entitled “Climate variation (cycles and trends) and climate predicting from tree-rings”, and normally, we would be reluctant to feature conference presentations at World Climate Report. However, the work is an update of what the lead author recently published in The Holocene, the work is currently under review at an undisclosed scientific journal, and the authors have a history of publications in outstanding journals.

Rarely has so much hectoring produced so little.

After all the magazine covers, celebrity sermonizing and U.N.-certified-expert hand-wringing, the fight against global warming got a real-world test in the U.S. Senate a few weeks ago in the debate over a proposal to limit carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system. After a small dose of the argument, supporters of the proposal couldn't wait to drop it. It was leading opponent Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, who declared he'd be happy to talk about cap-and-trade for a month.

As an indirect tax on carbon, cap-and-trade would increase energy prices when people are already straining under $4-a-gallon gas. Even a political naif -- which McConnell assuredly is not -- would realize the benefit of hanging the proposal around its supporters' necks. Lately, we've seen the tech and housing bubbles burst, and now -- at least as an urgent political issue -- the global-warming bubble is getting pricked.

As oil skyrockets under a Democratic Congress that promised to lower the price of oil in 2006, what is the chosen method of the imbeciles?

Pass a law and threaten to sue. Got that? We are going to sue OPEC.

They passed a law, too. It prohibits anybody from doing anything that might limit the supply of oil in an effort to keep prices high.

I assume there is a "present company excepted" clause in there somewhere. By law we cannot get to our own natural resources and those who passed these laws look to force other countries, by lawsuit, to produce more of theirs so we can buy it from them. Hammer, meet nail.

Back in 1956 there was a science fiction movie entitled ”Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.  A re-make of the movie was released in 1978.  Both films were done fairly well and were a hit at the box office.

For those of you unfamiliar with the film, “seeds” from outer space descended on America and started growing into fairly large, man-sized pods.  Through some mechanism the pod would select a victim and when the victim was asleep, the pod would start giving birth to an exact replica of the sleeping victim and before he could awake, the replica took his place and the original body disintegrated.  In the end, the newly constituted bodies acted as a collective, collecting pods from the fields where they were being cultivated and distributing them widely throughout the land, thereby propagating the invasion.  If a person recognized the plan and what was going on, there was no escape.  They were immediately pointed out, captured, put to sleep and their body replaced by the contents of a pod.  At the end Kevin McCarthy, the lead actor in the original version, saw what was taking place and realized that there was no defense.  The Earth was doomed.

Last Thursday, oil prices increased $5.50 per barrel in one day. Last Friday marked the biggest single-day surge in oil price history, rocketing $11 more to $138 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In just two days, oil costs increased 13%.

Average Americans literally are driving to the poorhouse on financial fumes. With gas at $4 per gallon, roughly two cars in every household, and the average annual gas usage at 700 gallons, you do the math. Americans are being forced to use their hard-earned money that once put food in their stomachs to put petroleum in their tanks and to drive the exact same distances they drove a decade ago for four to five times the price.

The late Natalie Grant Wraga once wrote, "Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values."

And who was this person?

Natalie Grant Wraga (who died in 2002 at age 101) was an internationally-recognized expert on the art of disinformation. In her Washington Post obituary, Herbert Romerstein — veteran intelligence expert in the legislative and executive branches of government — described Grant/Wraga as "one of our leading authorities" on Soviet deceit.

The northern hemisphere emerged from the last ice age 14,700 years ago with about a 12 degree Celsius (22 Fahrenheit) spike in just 50 years before plunging back into icy conditions, then suddenly warming again 3,000 years later, the researchers said.

Rapid changes in atmospheric circulation -- such as where storms occurred or where the jet stream was -- coincided with each temperature shift, pointing to a potential trigger for severe climate change, the researchers said.

People concerned about global warming tend to cheer surging oil prices, figuring that will spur less-polluting alternatives. Perhaps those people should think again.

In Europe, natural gas prices track crude oil. Recent crude price spikes have driven natural gas prices higher, too. That has made natural gas even less-competitive against traditional fuels like coal.

So, say carbon-market analysts Point Carbon, the oil price spike is leading some European power companies to switch from burning pricey gas to relatively cheaper coal, then covering their pollution by buying carbon credits in Europe’s carbon trading scheme.

Looking at images of nearly all Iowa underwater got me thinking about the difference in politics between fixing the here-and-now and fantasizing about the future.

One began to suspect our public officials might be drifting toward the clouds when many started referring to Earth as "the planet." Democrats especially of a certain environmental stripe talk only about "the planet."

Of late, one might ask: Which planet are they living on? The Earth is about the here-and-now. The Planet is about the out-there.

This week John McCain sounded like an Earth guy and Barack Obama like a Planet man.