Jobs, who is also slated to become the German utility's chief operating officer April 1, said RWE will not implement plans to build a 2.2 bln eur power plant elsewhere in Germany, after public protests at a site earmarked in Ensdorf led it to abandon the project.

In a long, and interesting speech, he characterized what the U.S. and other industrialized nations need to do to combat global warming this way: "We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren."

At a time that the nation is worried about a recession is that really the characterization his wife would want him making? "Slow down our economy"?

I don't really think there's much debate that, at least initially, a full commitment to reduce greenhouse gases would slow down the economy….So was this a moment of candor?

He went on to say that his the U.S. -- and those countries that have committed to reducing greenhouse gases -- could ultimately increase jobs and raise wages with a good energy plan..

There is a distressing commonality when discussing climate science lately: many people skip past the data and arguments offered by a skeptic and ask the question, “Are you a climatologist?” The implication, sometimes flatly stated, is that, if you are not, then you have no business offering a negative opinion on the state of “the” science.

It is distressing because I repeatedly have to point out that it is a logical fallacy that because a person is not a climatologist their skeptical argument is therefore false. If you like labels, this fallacious retort is called the Appeal to Authority. Each argument must be assessed on its merits and cannot be dismissed because the person offered it does not meet a certain credentialing standard. Climate theory arguments from non-experts cannot be banned or forbidden tout court.

Being open to arguments from non-specialists in other fields has meant that honest scientists have had to deal with the ravings of cranks and bizarre, pointless, and irrelevant theories. But tough luck. Every physicist gets a steady stream of letters and emails from people claiming to have finally solved zero point energy, every mathematician has to read missives that have uncovered the secret proof for squaring the circle. The progress of physics and math have not been appreciably slowed by this nonsense. And every now and then, rarely, comes a paper from a nobody in a patent office or a hand-written theorem from some unknown Indian kid whose hobby is playing with numbers, and entirely new avenues of thought are opened.

LSU President John Lombardi (pictured) has blocked plans by the outgoing chancellor of the Baton Rouge campus to join the college "Presidents Climate Commitment" — an agreement to take various steps to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

Chancellor Sean O'Keefe, whose last day is Friday, had planned Wednesday to commit the campus to efforts to become a more eco-friendly campus before stepping down. He said he was disappointed Lombardi chose to block the efforts of the LSU Environmental Conservation Organization that put a lot of hard work into the effort.

Lombardi said he wanted to take a look at how the commitment affects the flagship campus and if it could involve LSU's other academic campuses.

"The document commits the institution to take actions that, while desirable, have significant costs associated with them," Lombardi said in an e-mail response. "Until we can assess these costs and include them within the budget, it would not be appropriate to sign such a pledge.

[Empasis added]  Simon Linnett, Executive Vice-Chairman of Rothschild, has called for a new international body, the World Environment Agency, to regulate carbon trading.

In a recently published paper, Trading Emissions, for the Social Market Foundation, Mr Linnett argues that the International problem of climate change demands an international solution.

Unless governments cede some of their sovereignty to a new world body, he says, a global carbon trading scheme cannot be enforced and regulated.

"An urgent global response." This was how Nicolas Stern described the problem of carbon dioxide emissions, in his recent review of the economics of climate change. The sense of an impending crisis infuses all our debates on this issue.

Read the rest...

The head of Britain's business lobby said yesterday that there was no chance of Britain or Europe meeting the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by the deadline set by Brussels last week.

Richard Lambert, director-general of the Confederation of British industry, added that there was also no chance of Britain meeting the target for renewable energy by 2020 ordered by the European Commission.

The commission last week announced draft legislation outlining how the 27 EU countries are to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 20% and ensure 20% of European energy is generated from renewable sources by 2020.

Under the proposals, Britain is to increase its renewable energy quotient from under 2% to 15% by 2020. "It can be done but it will cost a hell of a lot of money," said Lambert. "I think it is not realistic." The scheme would not be cost-effective and businesses would not invest sufficiently in renewable energy technologies, Lambert predicted. The main hope for combating of climate change lay in allowing the market to set a realistic carbon price enabling big polluters to trade their carbon permits and providing incentives for investment in low-carbon or carbon-neutral energy generation.

After years of debate over who will foot the bill to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, world leaders are now taking up a new matter: Who will profit.

Diplomats from some of the world's biggest economies will gather in Hawaii today for a new round of talks aimed at hashing out an international agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which sets caps on greenhouse-gas emissions but expires in 2012. The meeting isn't expected to produce any major breakthrough.

But it comes as the U.S. and other industrialized countries are pushing developing nations to scrap tariffs and other trade barriers they now impose on clean-energy technology -- a push backed by Western companies such as General Electric Co., which see sales of those goods in the developing world as a hot business.

The company, which could pay out tens of millions of pounds for claims from businesses and householders over floods, hurricanes and droughts caused by global warming, is taking Blair on to advise it on the implications of climate change.

The aim, a spokesman said, was to establish "the best way they can adapt their policies for businesses to take account of climate change".

Zurich refused to say how much it was paying Blair and whether the payment would be offshore, but did not deny that he was likely to receive a six-figure sum as a senior adviser. The company has 58,000 staff and operates in 170 countries.

IN October last year, it was Al Gore who came under a cloud, on the eve of his Nobel Prize, for exaggerating his claims about the dangers of impending climate change. A British High Court judge took his film, An Inconvenient Truth, to task over nine significant errors. The film was labelled alarmist and one-sided.

Now we have another high-flying climate change warrior, no less than Sir Nicholas Stern, under similar attack for his 2006 review on global warming's exaggerated claims by another high-ranking critic, Australia's Productivity Commission. The nub of the commission's problem: Stern's claim that global warming will cost anywhere between 5 and 20 per cent of GDP is ``as much an exercise in advocacy as it is an economic analysis of climate change''. In other words, what the media refers to as a beat-up. Which, incidentally, is what earlier critics, enviro-economists Richard Tol and Robert Mendelsohn, said as well. And what other critics called biased and alarmist.

Indonesia is a land in turmoil, home to massive volcanoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. On Monday, January 14, it experienced a brand new type of disturbance, the world's first food riot caused by another nation pandering to the global warming mob. Indonesians took to the streets, demanding that their government to do something about the price of soybeans, a dietary staple.

All over the world, food prices are on the rise. For most of the late 1990s and up until 2005, the price of beans on the Chicago Board of Trade had remained stable at about $5 a bushel. Since then, they have shot up over 150 percent, to around $13. Corn has doubled, to $5. Wheat prices have tripled.

It all started with the 2005 Energy Policy Act, passed by a Republican congress and signed by a Republican president, mandating that an increasing amount of ethanol be admixed with gasoline. The bill was sold as a road to "energy independence" and as lowering the amount of carbon dioxide we emit, reducing dreaded global warming.

When Congress went after the TV industry years ago because of all the sex and violence exposed to kids, most parents nodded in agreement that something had to be done (after all, politicians do not take up causes unless there is some back-end bacon come voting time). Hence, we now have the TV-PG, TV-14, etc..., labels to help us make decisions on what to watch. It doesn't mean there is any less sex or violence on TV (adults are people, too!), it just means that guardians can get an idea of what not to expose their children to and set the appropriate block on their cable boxes.

So what do you do when your child visits the local multiplex and sees a documentary that, unknown to his parents, uses very dangerous and misleading facts to brainwash his young mind? It now appears the flick, An Inconvenient Truth, now recognized by the Courts as being alarmist and having numerous errors, is having a trickle-down effect on easily influenced teenagers.