If some environmentalists have their way, simple math suggests life as we know it will end

(H/T to John)  In 1916 a blanket ban on beer seemed like far-fetched idea. But prohibitionists cracked the door open by promising to keep whiskey available by prescription [See picture, right]. Within three years, the country was dry.

Nearly a century later, environmentalists are thinking the same way about carbon. Converting fossil fuels into controlled substances today could lead to outright carbon prohibition tomorrow.

In a magazine interview last year, Al Gore upped his call for a 90 percent cut in fossil fuel use, demanding Congress “eliminate the payroll tax and replace it dollar for dollar with a CO2 tax.” A research paper published this year in Geophysical Research Letters went further. “Avoiding future human-induced climate warming,” the authors said, “may require policies that seek not only to decrease CO2 emissions, but to eliminate them entirely.” As the New York Times business section headlined it in March, “For Carbon Emissions, a Goal of Less Than Zero.”

I've seen lots of things on Penn & Teller's Bull----!, television's only investigative-journalism program run by comic magicians: Hidden-camera pranks where yuppie fools blather on about designer water that actually came from a garden hose. New Age health nuts allowing mollusks to crawl around on their faces to soak up the health benefits of slug slime. Naked people floating around in a zero-gravity chamber for a show on NASA. I don't actually know what that one was supposed to prove, but Penn & Teller share my first rule of journalism, that naked is always good.

But one thing I haven't seen is grim; the show is just too much fun for that. So when Thursday's episode on environmentalism [Being Green] opened with a morose-looking Penn Jillette waving a magazine as he recited one ecotastrophe after another -- drought in Africa, flooding in Pakistan and Japan, snowless winters in New England and Northern Europe -- I snapped to attention. ''It says right here in Time magazine -- the weather's gone nuts and we humans are to blame!'' Teller wailed. ``We have bleeped up the environment and now we're going to pay for it!''

Yeah, that global warming is pretty bad. You know, Al Gore says -- oops, never mind. Turns out Penn's not reading from the infamous Time cover story of 2006 on global warming, the one headlined BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. No, this Time is from 1974, and the headline is, ANOTHER ICE AGE? And all those violent paroxysms of nature are the pernicious work of global cooling.

Congress: Americans expect and need a Speaker of the House who offers common-sense leadership to direct bipartisan legislative action. Nancy Pelosi is not up to that task, and our nation is the loser.

It's bad enough that Rep. Pelosi refuses to embrace reality, evaluate facts and oversee meaningful debate. But the hissy fits she throws against President Bush and the Republican minority are worse yet. This is a sad situation.

Pelosi's reaction to Bush's lifting of the ban on offshore drilling is a perfect example. She called the action a giveaway of "more public resources to the very same oil companies that are sitting on 68 million acres of federal lands they've already leased."

The key phrase is "public" resources — not Democratic resources or Pelosi's resources — and polls clearly show Americans are behind coastal drilling. The speaker knows that.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in a July 17 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, on a bill to allow offshore drilling for oil:

BLITZER: John Boehner, who's the Republican leader in the House, he says you have to let this come up for a vote. He says that you're walking your blue dogs, who are the moderate and conservative Democrats, and other vulnerable Democrats off a cliff by not allowing this to come up for a vote, the offshore oil drilling legislation.

PELOSI: Is that right? Well, you know, just because John Boehner, who is my friend and whom I respect, says it, doesn't make it so. . . .

BLITZER: Are you afraid if this comes up for a vote in the House you will lose, given the support for offshore oil drilling among these so-called blue dogs, or moderate Democrats, who will join with Republicans?

Having read an article by Dr. Tim Ball recently, I began to wonder when the real tipping point in global warming will come.  With Al Gore and James Hansen warning of dire consequences if we don’t convert to a carbonless society soon, one can only wonder if there’s truly a target date of destruction or if the goalposts will continue to move as predicted disasters come and go.

Gore was quick to call climate change skeptics moon landing hoaxers and flat Earthers, but might we not consider Gore and his global warming activists similar to those who continued to predict the second coming of Christ, only to fail time-and-time again?  While it took a while for believers in the false prophets to finally realize they’d been lied to, I often wonder how long it will take for proponents of global warming to realize that they too have been subjected to lies all in an effort to bring socialistic ideals to countries around the world.

Climatology is a science. Climatism is an ideology. Climatologists are scientists. Climatists are social or political organizers who abuse climatology in the service of ideologues. Climatology was and still is an investigation of nature. Climatism is the exploitation of the fear of nature to gain power, wealth and social esteem.

 Once, learned discussions about the climate, if not tomorrow's weather, were confined to climatologists. Today, public discussion about the climate in the Western media is dominated, maybe monopolized by climatists. The typical American, Canadian, European, Japanese, or Australian is exposed to climatism daily but hardly ever to climatology. Climatism is a Western ideology that has, generally, failed to expand its ambit of influence beyond rich people in rich countries.

congestion charge, aka climate tax

Feeling guilty? Then don't! According to one of my constituents, a lady of no mean intellect, 'climate change' is the new, 21st Century tyranny. Marx, Stalin and Tommy Sheridan are replaced by the gurus of the G8 stage and a vast new industry of high-salaried, taxpayer-funded, environmental jobsworths.

The good lady could very well have a point, suggesting that CO2-driven 'global warming' is a huge political conspiracy invented by post-socialism lefties to beat up business, industry and those of us with oil-guzzling Agas and 4x4s.

Even in the rarefied and usually overheated atmosphere of the Moray Council, I hear dark mutterings about 'climate change commitments' and 'carbon footprints'. Someone even good-humouredly asked if I cycled to Elgin for meetings. What? The Beast of Alves on a bike?

No, this is not satire - and the idiocy of such a panel discussing “media bias” is, quite typically, lost on Age reporter Matthew Ricketson:

Gather together four luminaries of the media to discuss whether the media is biased and what do you get?

Well, in this case, Matthew, (and excuse me while I laugh) you get a perfect illustration of the predominant bias of that very media:

Mary Kostakidis, the former presenter of the World News on SBS, chaired the event, which heard from:

Peter Mares, the presenter of The National Interest on ABC Radio National and author of the well received book about the asylum seeker issue, ‘Borderline’;

Michael Gawenda, former editor-in-chief of The Age and now heading the Centre for the Advanced Study of Journalism at Melbourne University, which is due to open its doors next year;

Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University and chair of the editorial board of The Monthly magazine;

David Marr, senior writer at The Sydney Morning Herald, co-author of another well received book about asylum seekers and the 2001 federal election, ‘Dark Victory’, and a former presenter of ABC television’s Media Watch program.

In the July 18, 2008 edition of The Australian, yet another major Global Warming scientist has come forward to shed some light on the hysteria.

David Evans, admittedly a former alarmist, now says that after years of searching for evidence that carbon emissions caused this warming period, they have yet to find any. He also sheds some light on the intellectual momentum behind the hysteria and the economic consequences we can expect should we allow governments to pursue their ideas for "fixes".

One need only to look back to the seventies to find the same kind of hysteria surrounding the theory of a coming ice age. In fact, several books were written on the subject at the time, some suggesting that most of North America would be covered by ice by the year 2000.

Gore's spokeswoman, Kalee Kreider, told The Associated Press on Wednesday no date or location has been nailed down, but that Gore "has confirmed that he is going to give a fundraiser for Sen. Obama."

Gore announced his decision to support Obama in a fundraising e-mail last month. He wrote at the time: "From now through Election Day, I intend to do whatever I can to make sure he is elected president of the United States."

In 2000, Gore won the popular vote but lost the disputed election to George W. Bush, who captured Florida and its electoral votes after a divided Supreme Court ended the re-count of ballots.

Since then, Gore has made combating global warming his signature issue and has been recognized worldwide for his effort — from an Academy Award to the Nobel Prize.  Source

Former Vice President Al Gore recently took his climate-change show on the road for the benefit of liberal bloggers, Sunday morning TV aficionados and other innocent bystanders. This week he laid out his demand for a miraculous transformation in U.S. energy use over a mere 10 years. As for drilling for more oil? "Absurd," the Nobel Laureate scoffed. "When you're in a hole, stop digging."

The same might be said for Mr. Gore. For while his message hasn't changed, the political realities of the energy debate have. Suddenly, Mr. Gore's inconvenient speechifying only tightens the vice Democrats find themselves in over drilling.

Voters' pocketbooks are now involved, making them more skeptical about climate change -- and about the utility of any policies aimed at influencing climate change. The environmental movement is facing a critical moment. Democrats who support the greenies in their most ambitious goals, and scariest pseudo-scientific rhetoric, suddenly seem woefully out of touch with American voters.

Senator Barbara Boxer implied that the money raised by the now defunct Lieberman-Warner global warming cap-and-trade bill would have gone back to American consumers and Boxer further claimed that 54 Senators were prepared to move the global warming bill forward in June 2008.   

FACT: Proponents of the Lieberman-Warner bill alleged that Americans would get $800 billion in tax relief over the next 40 years.  The trouble is, the bill would have taken $6.7 trillion in order to fund the $800 billion.  That’s one dollar back for every $8 put in.  Only in Washington DC would that be considered a good return on investment.

Boxer’s claim that supporters of Lieberman-Warner had the support of 54 U.S. Senators for the Climate Tax Bill does not add up. Directly contradicting Boxer’s assertion is a letter signed on June 6 by ten Democratic Senators explicitly stating they “cannot support final passage” of the Climate Tax Bill. The letter indicates that Boxer would apparently only have had at most 45 votes today to support final passage of the bill. (Democrat Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who was absent for today’s vote, had previously voted against bringing the bill to the floor on June 2.)  Source