Next week, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold three hearings on S. 1733, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” also known as Kerry-Boxer after its co-sponsors Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Kerry-Boxer is the Senate companion bill to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), also known as Waxman-Markey after its co-sponsors Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA).

Part A of Title VII of Kerry-Boxer sets forth the emission reduction targets…

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Your host Richard Morrison and guest co-hosts William Yeatman and Ryan Young conspire to bring you Episode 64 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the big vote on health care legislation, squeezing more energy from the ground and the warming that wasn’t there. We continue with the British expense scandal, and the Obama administration’s love for new rules and regulations.

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In today’s New York Times, John Broder strains to belittle Alan Carlin, the “whistle blower” whose skeptical comments on EPA’s proposed endangerment finding the Agency tried to suppress. Most of the piece is larded with innuendo and spin.

Below is the text of Broder’s article and my running commentary in bold italics.

Behind the Furor Over a Climate Change Skeptic
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — Alan Carlin, a 72-year-old analyst and economist, had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon…

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Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host Jeremy Lott of the Capital Research Center and special guest Sean Higgins of Investor’s Business Daily for Episode 58 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We begin with a revolt against congressional incumbency, wicked and foolish climate policy and a political sea change in the land of the rising sun. We continue with a technology news interview with Ryan Radia and finish with some fiscally sound Olympic News.

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A factoid is rapidly making the rounds in climate skeptic circles. By a factoid, I mean “A piece of unverified or inaccurate information that is presented to the press as factual . . . and that is then accepted as true because of frequent repetition.”

On the BBC program HARDtalk, reporter Stephen Sackur, in a combative interview with Gerd Leipold, retiring Executive Director of Greenpeace, accused Greenpeace of peddling exaggeration and alarmism about global warming. I think that’s true, but Sackur, however unwittingly, built his case on false evidence. And now the unfounded claim that Leipold confessed…

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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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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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In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warns that global warming could raise sea levels by 20 feet, and he implies that this could happen quite suddenly–in our lifetimes or those of our children.

Specifically, on pp. 204-206 of the book version of AIT, Gore warns that if half the Greenland Ice Sheet and half the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted or broke up and slipped into the sea, some 100 million people living in Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Bangladesh would  “be displaced,”…

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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 you may have heard, there has been no net warming of the planet since 2001, and no subsequent year was a warm as 1998 (admittedly a year with a major El Nino). A recent study by Keenlyside et al. (2008) concludes that “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade” due to natural oscillations in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

As Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute explained at a recent congressional hearing, the suite of 21 climate models used…

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Jerry Taylor of Cato has an excellent summary of what the scientific literature tells us about the social cost of carbon emissions, drawing on the comprehensive but sometimes opaque work of Richard Tol. His conclusion:

So what does Tol 2008 tell us about the social cost of carbon emissions (assuming that the underlying science from the IPCC is correct)? Given our skepticism about the underlying logic of discount rates of 1% or less, any number between $3 per ton and $24 per…

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