“Climate change is a threat multiplier” is the new trendy rationale for Kyoto-style energy rationing. One hears little these days about Al Gore’s nightmare vision of death and destruction from ever more powerful and frequent hurricanes, catastrophic sea-level rise, or a warming-induced climate shift into a new ice age. This story line is too implausible for most grownups to swallow or patronize, no matter how desperate they are to look green.

The new, more ‘nuanced’ rationale for energy rationing is that global warming will…

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Today’s ClimateWire (subscription required) carries an analysis by reporter Lauren Morello that begins:

Say goodbye to “greenhouse gases.” Say hello to “carbon pollution” and ”heat-trapping gases.”  

Morello observes a shift in the vocabulary U.S. government officials are using to talk about global warming — a change much in evidence in President Obama’s climate speech yesterday at the U.N.

Obama officials increasingly avoid the non-pejorative (although somewhat metaphorical) term “greenhouse gas” to describe carbon dioxide and instead refer to “carbon pollution” and “heat-trapping gases.”

Morello quotes NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco’s…

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India and China talk the Al Gore talk of climate Armageddon and the necessity for urgent action — yet their emissions keep going up and they refuse to adopt emission caps or carbon taxes. The world’s two most populous countries with the biggest “emerging” economies act on the premise that global warming policies are more dangerous than global warming itself. It’s time for their words to match their deeds, as I explain today on MasterResource.Org.

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Today’s excerpt from CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, offers a free-market perspective on Al Gore’s proclamation, at the end of An Inconvenient Truth, that global warming is “a moral issue.”

Considered in the abstract, apart from its context in movie, this is a completely unremarkable statement. Just about all public policy issues can be described as moral issues, because they directly or implicitly ask us to decide whether a proposed course of action is fair or…

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The news that the Federal Government has forced UBS to give up the details of 4000 of its customers’ transactions has other financial institutions finding new ways to protect their clients.  This has been greeted with dismay by one community.  The following letter to the New York Times was intercepted and we provide it here in the interests of transparency.

Dear Sir,

As an international bank robber, may I say how much I deplore the underhanded way in which financial institutions are…

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Today’s excerpt from CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, is on the global warming movement’s anti-coal campaign and the dangers it poses to U.S. consumers and the economy. To watch today’s clip, click here. To watch the entire film, click here.

The text of today’s excerpt follows. I provide additional commentary and links to supporting information in the footnotes.

Narrator: First and foremost, they want to ban construction of new coal-fired power plants.…

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Today’s post in my series of commentaries on excerpts from CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, challenges the Gorethodox dogma that the science debate on global warming is “over.”

There are three basic issues in the climate change science debate:

Detection - Has the world warmed, and if so, by how much?
Attribution - How much of the observed warming (especially since the mid-1970s) is due to increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations?…

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Is global warming making hurricanes more destructive? Did global warming contribute to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina? Would Kyoto-style energy rationing help avert future weather-related catastrophes?

Well, just ask Al Gore! In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claims there’s a “strong new emerging consensus” that global warming is increasing the duration and intensity of hurricanes (AIT, p. 81), he depicts New Orleans as a global warming victim (pp. 94-95), and the threat of increasingly powerful storms is a major part of the alleged “climate crisis” that Gore…

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As announced last Friday, each day this week and next I’ll post an excerpt of CEI’s film Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself. The film is our antidote to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth . If you want to watch Policy Peril in its entirety, click here.

Today’s segment is on heat waves. Gore and others claim that global warming will make heat waves more frequent and severe, leading to a massive increase in heat-related mortality. Click here to watch…

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Showing that he believes Al Gore’s typical misunderstanding that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of the characters for threat and opportunity (it isn’t), Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Program, has said that the global financial crisis provides an opportunity for a global green new deal:

The UNEP report said investments of one percent of global gross domestic product, or about $750 billion, could bankroll a “Global Green New Deal” inspired by the “New Deal” of…

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Since Dot Eco TLD announced that they were seeking establishment as a top level domain (TLD) at ICANN’s (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Mexico event last week with the cooperation of Al Gore, many have been asking why we need a new TLD.  Furthermore, why we needed a new TLD solely focused on environmental websites.

There are a lot of legitimate arguments out there against this proposal, consisting of this solely being about money, or asking why a TLD should…

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Your hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist bring you Episode 32 of the LibertyWeek podcast with special guest Sam Kazman and surprise guest co-host Jeremy Lott. We start by looking into the possible future of the Federal Communications Commission with nominee Julius Genachowski about to ascend to the chairmanship, and then take another stroll through the New Great Depression with high-level financial talks between unpopular British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and über-popular President Barack Obama. Oregonian brewers fight a proposed fifteen…

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In today’s Guardian, Juliana Glover reports that carbon permit prices in Europe’s Emission Trading System (ETS) have crashed from €31 last summer to €8 today. This price is too low to create any incentive for covered entities to invest in ‘green’ technology.

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It must be nice to be so certain of one’s moral purity and political correctness to believe that anything, including, well, lying, is fine and appropriate to advance the cause.

Consider physicist Richard A. Muller’s recent interview with Grist:

What’s your take on NASA climate scientist James Hansen?
Hansen I’ve known for many years. He’s a very good climate scientist, but he’s decided to do the politics. I feel that he’s doing some cherry-picking of his own [when it comes to the science].…

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Juxtapose this from the Washington Post–

Gore envisions a nationwide “Smart Grid”–a massive underground network of electrical power lines that would be powered by massive solar panel installations in the Southwest, and huge wind turbine installations in the Pacific Northwest. The Smart grid would dole out power and regulate itself using 21 Century computer technology, Gore said. Gore said such a system would cost $600 billion to build, but that it would pay for itself quickly.

With this from E and E–

California’s…

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Paul Krugman once accused me of Gore Derangement Syndrome. In response, I suggested that he and others suffered from Gore Blindness Syndrome. Here’s another example of that at work, where a reporter manages to write an adulatory piece about our former Vice President despite said paragon having completely rebuffed him when he asked him a question. As he indicates, Gore has made a habit recently of refusing to allow any interviews. Given that he’s the undoubted leader of a worldwide political…

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