As the Times-Picayune’s David Hammer writes this morning, yesterday’s accident aboard Mariner Energy’s Vermilion 380 platform in the Gulf, which resulted in a fire it took several hours to put out, is being put forth as further evidence the offshore oil industry is out of control and needs to be curtailed if not ended.

And as Hammer notes, it takes some rather severe contortions to create equivalency between the Vermilion 380 accident and BP’s Deepwater Horizon nightmare. Contortions, it must be said, which only someone with a left-wing agenda would wish to practice.

Hammer’s piece notes that on the same day the Vermilion 380 fire started, Democrat congressmen and leftist environmental groups blasted out press releases assaulting the oil industry…

Still, that didn’t stop environmental groups and members of Congress from saying Thursday’s fire made their case for extending the drilling ban. Almost immediately, U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., and the Sierra Club released statements calling for the moratorium to continue based on what Grijalva said was Thursday’s “starkest possible reminder that oil rigs in this country are not safe.”

But Grijalva, who last month demanded that oil companies waste money by removing abandoned rigs from the Gulf (an idea which is as much a shot at recreational fishermen as it is at the oil patch), went further than just the snippet Hammer used.

The money part of Grijalva’s release reads as follows:

The newly announced spill, Grijalva said, “is the starkest possible reminder that oil rigs in this country are not safe, have not been safe for years, and are not currently being inspected for safety. This is not a situation we could afford to ignore before the Deepwater catastrophe, let alone today. It seems that everyone is content to let another oil rig explode every few months rather than taking concrete steps to clean up the industry.”

Vermilion 380, owned by Mariner Energy based in Houston, had a 13-person crew. All have been accounted for, and one is reportedly injured. According to the company’s Web site, “About 85% of the company’s production comes from offshore, with a growing share of that coming from deepwater developments[.]”

Improving the industry’s safety record “can’t get bogged down in political quibbling, because it’s not a political issue,” Grijalva said. “People are dying, getting injured, losing their livelihoods and filling the Gulf with spilled oil while we continue to do nothing.”

Of course, Grijalva ended up with huevo on his face later in the afternoon when no one could find spilled oil in the vicinity of the Mariner platform – an indication that for all his bluster and rushing to conclusions he had little idea what the hell he was talking about.

Let’s remember what actually happened yesterday.

Vermilion 380 is a production platform, not a drilling rig. Ignoramuses like Grijalva might not recognize the difference, but for people of average intelligence it’s really not that complicated. Drilling rigs look for oil by means of making holes in the ground or seabed. When they find oil, production platforms then show up and gather what comes up and process it for transport to refineries. Those are two very different missions, and they involve different levels of risk.

Vermilion 380 was also anchored in shallow water. As such, it has an apples-and-oranges relationship to the moratorium Grijalva touts – which is supposed to govern deepwater floating exploration rigs. 

The accident yesterday involved construction work on the Vermilion 380 platform – namely, welding, or sandblasting to knock off some rust. Assumedly a spark from that activity must have come in contact with a pocket of hydrocarbons, like natural gas in all likelihood. It’s been 15-20 years since something like this happened, but it’s not outside the realm of normal risk aboard an oil platform.

This is nothing like Deepwater Horizon, which was a poorly-designed well on a problematic, yet highly prolific, prospect in which a cascade of marginal decisions culminated in disaster.

The moratorium didn’t affect Vermilion 380, and it wouldn’t affect it. Vermilion 380 was an accident. No one died, and no environmental damage was done. As the “starkest possible reminder” that the oil industry is unsafe and the moratorium should continue, it’s not very persuasive – unless, of course, you’re already persuaded that destroying Gulf Coast jobs is a smart thing to do.

Our friends at the EPA are spending our tax dollars to promote the erroneous notion of climate change to our children.  They even have a website dedicated to the cause.  Here, kids can play checkers with Ozone the dog and learn all the “facts” they need to know about global warming.

Outrageous!

The EPA Climate Change website for kids is filled with heavily challenged claims, presented, of course, as scientific fact, about anthropogenic global warming and its threat to the planet and human kind.  Imagine the impact on an impressionable young child when reading that the earth is heating up.  Young children don’t have the perspective to understand that a 1ºF rise in temperature over a 100 year period isn’t an immediate threat to life as we know it.  They surely aren’t likely to be sufficiently informed to wonder if that’s an ongoing trend, a cycle, or simply an unproven claim.

There are tool kits for teachers to help spread the propaganda.  There are games, links to other useful and related information, and even a calculator to determine how much an individual child, a classroom, or a school can reduce its carbon footprint by converting incandescent lightbulbs to fluorescent. 

The most outrageous aspect of the site is that it presents all this heavily challenged scientific research as fact.  Informed readers know that the claims of global warming supporters are heavily disputed these days.  Alarmists won’t even engage in an honest debate with skeptics.  Yet here they are, at a taxpayer funded government agency website, presenting it to children as fact.

There is an ongoing and healthy debate regarding the teaching of scientific creationism along side the theory of evolution.  That theory meets with less skepticism today than does the validity of global warming science.  Global warming, if taught at all, should be presented to older children as a contentious area of scientific debate, not as proven fact.

And it surely shouldn’t be taught to young children by Ozone the dog!

We repeatedly hear that the nation, the world, must convert its powerplants to renewable wind energy technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

From the American Wind Energy Association – 

Wind turbines are extremely effective at reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the leading greenhouse gas. 

From the Global Wind Energy Council -

Wind energy has a considerable impact on avoiding greenhouse gases and combating climate change. The global capacity of 94 GW of wind capacity will save about 122 million tons of CO2 every year, which is equivalent to around 20 large coal fired power stations. 

From the British Wind Energy Association – 

Wind power is a clean, renewable source of energy which produces no greenhouse gas emissions or waste products. 

From today’s Wall Street Journal - 

Not true.

While it is true that a 750KW wind turbine driven generator produces no carbon emissions, wind turbines are not reliable as continuous sources of motive force for generators.  We have gotten spoiled to the reliable and continuous availability of electric power, and the wind has a bad habit of ceasing to blow.  As such, wind farms must be backed up with coal or natural gas fired plants.

But, you might argue, if the coal or gas plants are running at reduced capacity, or being cycled off and on, there will be a net reduction in the emissions from their burnt fuel.  It’s a reasonable argument, but not a valid one.  For just as your car runs more efficiently, and gets better gas mileage, on an open highway than in a rush hour traffic jam, a conventional power plant runs more efficiently, and pollutes less, when operated at a generally constant load near its best efficiency point.

A study released in April and performed by Bentek Energy, an energy analysis firm based in Colorado, concluded that in spite of large investments in windmills to generate electricity in Colorado, the net effect on carbon emissions has been “minimal.  Their study found that, because of cycling coal fired plants in support of wind energy, Colorado saw at least 94,000 more pounds of CO₂ emitted in 2009.

So, in addition to the falsehoods being “emitted” by the left regarding the wonderful economic benefits of wind energy, now we know that they are misrepresenting the environmental benefits as well.

And let’s not even talk about the impact on wildlife.

This country needs to invest in nuclear facilities and natural gas powered facilities, and avoid wind and solar energy until it can provide safe, reliable, continuous power without government subsidies.  That day will come when the sun never sets and the wind never ceases to blow.

Remember James Cameron, Hollywood director of Titanic and Avatar and oil well plugging consultant to the Obama administration?  He’s also a proponent of global warming, and he was to debate three skeptics this weekend at a renewable energy conference in Aspen, undoubtedly a friendly venue for his views.

It was to be, in his words, a “shootout at high noon.”

Apparently he was firing blanks.  He didn’t show.

Last March, Cameron offered to debate filmmaker Ann McElhinney (Not Evil Just Wrong), Marc Morano of the blog Climate Depot, and new media mogul Andrew Breitbart to an open and public debate on global warming, saying

“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.”

To even the score at the podium, Cameron was to be joined by two scientists.  The debate was to be held at the Aspen American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit this past weekend, and was originally billed as an open and public forum.  Fox News was invited, along with The Washington Post, Newsmax, and any other organization that wanted to cover the event.  Film, photography and audio recording were all encouraged, and it was to be streamed live on the internet.

As the debate approached, though, Cameron began changing the rules.  As McElhinney reported after the last minute cancellation,

They wanted to change their team. We agreed.

They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to “a roundtable”. We agreed.

Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.

Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed

Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he “wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out,” decided to ban the media from the shoot out.

He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.

No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.

We all agreed to that.

So Cameron cancelled at the last minute, so much so that Morano was actually airborne and en route when the event was cancelled.

Then on the day, and at the location where the debate was to occur, Cameron publicly referred to climate change skeptics as “swine.”

Why the sudden cancellation?  Cameron has said it was because he wanted higher profile challengers, though that hardly seems believable in light of the fact that he had several months to compel others to join the fray.  As his opponents readily agreed to all his other changes, surely they would have agreed to some substitutions on their panel.  No, we believe that all the changes to the terms of the debate were an attempt to have the team of skeptics withdraw from the debate in disgust.  When Cameron couldn’t force them out and realized he would actually have to debate informed people, and would have to dispute them with facts and logic rather than the simple rhetoric he shares with like-minded allies, he found himself painted into a corner he didn’t like and was forced to not show up.  For as we noted last May,

Climate change advocates, best personified by Al Gore, are not scientists, and they don’t have the knowledge or desire to participate in open debate.  The “science” on which their argument was based has been discredited, but their audience has conveniently not been informed.  Advocates such as Mr. Gore preach ideology, not science.

Gore, who had the microphone turned off when a journalist asked pointed questions about inaccuracies in An Inconvenient Truth, has stubbornly declined invitations to debate well known scientist and skeptic Christopher Monckton, and Cameron, it seems, is no different.  As one who directs scripted drama, he simply tried to create a script that caused his opponents to drop out so he could save face.

Cameron realized he would be shooting blanks at well armed opponents, and hid behind the bar rather than meeting them in the street at high noon.

Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for Barack Obama, calls Louisiana home, having grown up in Pontchartrain Park, pictured here, in the Gentilly area of New Orleans.  Yet her policy positions, her ideology, and her actions have been anything but supportive of her home state.

Born in Philadelphia, Jackson was adopted within a few weeks of her birth, and was raised in Pontchartrain Park, a neighborhood that was developed after WWII for middle class blacks at a time when New Orleans was heavily segregated.  Her mother still resided their when hurricane Katrina caused as much as twenty feet of water to submerge the neighborhood, making it virtually uninhabitable.  The area is recovering today under the leadership of another product of the neighborhood, actor Wendell Pierce, trombone player in the HBO series Treme.  Other familiar names, and childhood friends or acquaintances of Jackson, include mayors Dutch and Marc Morial, district attorney Eddie Jordan, and jazz musician Terrence Blanchard.

Jackson graduated as valedictorian of Saint Mary’s Dominican High School, then graduated summa cum laude from Tulane University with a degree in chemical engineering, followed by a masters in chemical engineering from Princeton.

Pontchartrain Park must have offered an inspiring and motivating environment to host such a commendable group of success stories.  And while others have stayed or returned to help strengthen Louisiana and rebuild New Orleans, Jackson has supported policies that are harmful to the state.  Cite the role her agency played in the inept federal response to the Gulf oil spill, her mandating that CO₂ and other greenhouse gases fall under her jurisdiction under the Clean Air Act despite tainted scientific findings to support her position (not to mention the absence of legislation so empowering her), and especially her general disdain for the fossil fuels which contribute significantly to the region’s economy.

Jackson began her career with the EPA in 1986 and spent 16 years there before joining the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, first as an assistant commissioner, then as Commissioner, and had only recently accepted the position of Chief of Staff for then Governor Jon Corzine when Obama tapped her to run the EPA.  So there’s not a lot of diversity in her experiences, having looked at environmental issues from within government her entire career.

Nor is there a wealth of achievement, for other than having written the New Jersey global warming law, most of her career has been fraught with mediocrity and claims of being perhaps less than fully competent.  But as that Huffington Post article notes, in familiar left wing soliloquy,

Many prominent New Jersey environmental advocates say that Jackson inherited most of the department’s problems from previous commissioners, and from staff cuts made by former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, who went on to become EPA administrator herself under President Bush.

And who can forget the EPA’s confusing lack of leadership over use of the dispersant Corexit in one of BP’s attempts to lessen the impact of the Gulf oil spill?  Corexit was on the EPA’s approved list of dispersants, and was the only one available in sufficient quantities to have any hope of being effective.  Despite their having approved it previously, the EPA crawfished so they could study the long term toxic effects one would presume they had already studied at length.  As Tony Hayward commented,

“We have used dispersants from the beginning that are on the EPA-approved list,” Hayward said. “Everything that we do with dispersants is with the explicit approval of the EPA, both in terms of dispersant type and the quantity, volume applied over any 24-hour period. And that continues.”

But it was not good enough for the Louisiana raised head of the EPA that her agency had given prior approval to the use of Corexit.  In the height of a crisis that threatened her home state, she wanted to study it some more.

Finally, there is her position on the use of fossil fuels, that resource that figuratively fuels the Louisiana economy and literally fuels the nation.  Her ideology says that fossil fuels have to go, and sooner rather than later, because she firmly believes that the CO₂ emitted during their use is harmful to the environment.  When asked her position on the discrediting nature of the “climategate” scandal, Jackson told the Senate Environment and Public Works committee that

“I do not agree that the IPCC has been totally discredited in any way,” Jackson said, adding that it is important to understand that the IPCC is a body that follows open and impartial practices. 

Yet later, during Senate hearings over her proposed budget, she again crawfished, saying

In my opening statement, I didn’t quote one international scientist or IPCC report. … We are quoting the American scientific community here.

But perhaps most telling are her remarks to a Tampa reporter when asked her thoughts on the Clinton era EPA forcing Tampa Electric to convert from coal to natural gas to reduce its emissions.

Burning natural gas for baseload power is like burning your antique furniture in the fireplace.

Louisiana has produced many of questionable character and judgment who have brought embarrassment, shame and harm to the state.  Edwin Edwards, the Long family, and David Duke immediately come to mind.

Should the name of Lisa Jackson be included on that list?

Yeah, it turns out that study the White House put out there wasn’t exactly peer-reviewed. Human Events has the story…

Met with much skepticism nationwide, the White House touted a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report out the first week of August stating nearly three-quarters of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico by BP had been cleaned up or dispersed.

One NOAA scientist told Congressional investigators yesterday that the White House released the report — not NOAA — and the report was not peer reviewed as the administration claimed.

According to a release by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, a NOAA scientist, Dr. Bill Lehr, yesterday told a group of Congressional staff investigators on a conference call that a NOAA report claiming that nearly three-quarters of the oil from the Gulf oil spill has already been addressed was released by White House officials and not scientists at NOAA. The NOAA scientist told congressional investigators that the data backing up the assertions made in the report is still unavailable and that peer review of the report is still not complete. Officials at an August 4 White House press briefing had said that the report had been thoroughly peer reviewed.

“This is yet another in a long line of examples where the White House’s pre-occupation with the public relations of the oil spill has superseded the realities on the ground. It is deeply troubling that White House officials apparently preempted the completion and review of a scientific study on the oil spill by NOAA scientists in order to tout conclusions that many experts believe may be deeply flawed,” Issa said.

It’s not a particular surprise that we would get propaganda from the federal government. After all, that study was used to generate a media narrative that the spill wasn’t so bad after all (which remains true to an extent, but only because of the irresponsible prior media narrative that it would eventually soil every beach on the Atlantic and coat the Gulf a foot thick with oil) and thus the Obama administration’s response to it wasn’t so bad. Even the Times-Picayune bought into that one earlier this week with an inexplicable piece touting Obama’s spill response.

Except while there are lots of areas within the state where fisheries are not ruined by the spill – and Louisiana shrimp are perfectly fine to eat if they make it to market, there’s still a whole lot of oil out there. And while we’re all grateful that the threat from BP’s oil is gradually receding now that the well has been capped for a month, the effort to push the spill off the front page by use of the same kinds of BS studies and propaganda that have accompanied much of the rest of the administration’s agenda and self-description is becoming a threat in and of itself.

Already the economic effects of the moratorium are beginning to hit like a hurricane in South Louisiana, with no relief in sight, and already the handoff to Kenneth Feinberg’s office of BP’s claims process has caused a bottleneck for those affected by the spill. But the narrative that things weren’t so bad, that Obama did fine, that the Gulf is unaffected is the one which has prevailed at long last.

Would that were true. It’s what we all wish were truth. But it lacks basis in reality. And it undermines the credibility of those who require it to function.

“Cap and Trade” continues to haunt the oil and gas industry, the petrochemical industry, and the electrical generating industry, to name but a few who have deferred capital investment in this country partly because that threat won’t go away.  Pelosi and Waxman got it through the House of Representatives, and John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and, until recently, Lindsey Graham, with the help of Harry Reid, have tried to get it through the Senate.  Some anticipate they will try again during a lame duck session of Congress following the November mid-term elections.

What are some of the seldom reported truths behind the carbon trading concept – truths that Hayride readers will find both captivating and infuriating?  Follow along as we attempt to unravel a tightly woven fabric of selfish greed, deception, and debatably, corruption.

First, what, exactly, is Cap and Trade?  Cap and Trade is a legislative mandate in which a government places a cap, a ceiling, on the amount of a greenhouse gas, most notably CO₂, which an industry or a business can emit.  That limit is established by issuing them carbon credits.  If a business emits more than its allocated amount, it either pays a fine or it can purchase unused credits from another business.  These credits become a marketable commodity.

Where did the concept originate?  The trail seems to begin with Enron and Al Gore.  Enron was an energy trading company which owned large blocks of natural gas, run by the now infamous Ken Lay.  In order to make its natural gas investments more valuable, Enron needed to increase its appeal to power companies who preferred coal at the time due to its ready availability and its low cost per BTU.  Mr. Lay met Al Gore at a convention in Hawaii.  Gore was working on a sulfur dioxide credit trading scheme which dovetailed nicely with Lay’s objective of demonizing coal, as coal firing was associated with sulfur dioxide emissions, which in turn was associated with acid rain.

The scheme worked, and the two began examining ways to trade in other pollutants.  They found a study that had been performed at East Anglia University pertaining to a little known concept of global warming which the study associated with carbon emissions. 

Gore began promoting the concept of global warming and its relationship to carbon emissions, and made his movie An Inconvenient Truth to further promote it.  That movie made the concept a household phrase, and a new cult religion was born.

Another thread in this fabric is a man named Maurice Strong.  Mr. Strong was the founding director of the United Nations Environment Program in the mid-70’s, and organized the first UN environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.  It was that summit that paved the way for the 1997 Kyoto Treaty to control greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.

During the 1990’s Mr. Strong was heavily involved and invested in a company called Molten Metal Technologies, Inc, an environmental company that boasted a process for the destruction of hazardous wastes in a vessel containing molten metals.  The wastes would purportedly be reduced to their harmless elemental components in that bath.  MMTI had a sales office in Baton Rouge, among other places, and frequented the chemical manufacturing corridor in an attempt to sell its wares.  It appeared to be a highly promising technology, as described in this article in IndustryWeek, a popular business journal of the day.

This promising technology caught the attention of the US Department of Energy, which provided it with grants totaling $33million, these grants being the only source of revenue the company enjoyed other than investor capital.  On Earth Day in 1995, Gore visited MMTI, publicly proclaiming the wonders of this technology, and its publicly traded stock value soared.  In early 1996, Mr. Strong and other corporate officers, many of whom were also friends and associates of Gore, began selling their stock in the company.  In October of that year the company issued a press release that the Department of Energy would no longer fund the initiative, and the stock value plummeted.  But Mr. Strong had greatly added to his wealth, and he and Mr. Gore had bonded.

Strong went on to be involved in a controversial Oil-for-Food program and to dealings with Tongsun Park, a Korean rice broker known for brandishing envelopes full of money in and around the halls of Congress.  One of the recipients of his generosity was Elaine Edwards, wife of then Louisiana Congressman Edwin Edwards. 

But we digress.  What do we have thus far? 

We have an established concept of trading in pollution credits.  We have a movement in place to preach the gospel of global warming and to free us of the sin of greenhouse gas emissions.  We have the grandfather of the United Nations environmental movement and a precursor to the Kyoto Treaty.  We have a public relationship between the leaders of the two related movements.  What we don’t have is an institution through which to broker the “carbon credits” commodity.

Enter the Joyce Foundation, a foundation so wealthy that it helps fund George Soros’ endeavors.  The Joyce Foundation is based in Chicago, where its mission is

“to protect the natural environment of the Great Lakes, to reduce poverty and violence in the region, and to ensure that its people have access to good schools, decent jobs, and a diverse and thriving culture. We are especially interested in improving public policies, because public systems such as education and welfare directly affect the lives of so many people, and because public policies help shape private sector decisions about jobs, the environment, and the health of our communities. To ensure that public policies truly reflect public rather than private interests, we support efforts to reform the system of financing election campaigns.”

Their interest in “public systems such as education” included funding the work of John Ayers, brother of Bill.  During the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the Board membership of the Joyce Foundation included a little known law professor named Barrack Obama, and his friend Valerie Jarrett, who remains on the Board.  In 2000, the Foundation gave Barrack Obama two grants totaling about $1.1million to help establish the Chicago Carbon Exchange, which bills itself as

“North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

The Chicago Climate Exchange was established as a private organization whose Board members include Maurice Strong.  Richard Sandor, who publicly stated that the climate exchange market would be a $10trillion industry, was established as its president.

The profit potential offered by the Exchange was so appealing that one of the early investors was a group called Generation Investment Management, LLP, for which Al Gore serves as Chairman and Founding Partner, accompanied by several Goldman Sachs alumni.

Other Goldman Sachs alumni serve as advisers to now President Obama.

Goldman Sachs, which made vast profits selling home mortgage derivatives and helped cause the collapse of the housing bubble, also invested heavily in the Exchange.  Greenhouse gas credit derivatives entered the mix.

So now we have the movement, the leadership, and a brokerage house.  We still need the technology to execute the transactions of the business.

That technology was invented in 1999 by Carlton W. Bartels.  He applied for a patent on his invention, but tragically, he was killed on September 11, 2001 in World Trade Center Tower One.  His widow later sold the technology, still unpatented, to Franklin Raines, who was CEO of Fannie Mae!  The patent was granted, to Raines, on November 7, 2006, which ironically (?) was the day after the Democratic Party took control of the House and Senate.

And where might the former CEO of Fannie Mae now work?  Why, at the Chicago Climate Exchange, of course.

There remains but one component to hem the edges of our tightly woven fabric – the imposition of Cap and Trade in the United States.  As we noted at the outset, it isn’t for a lack of trying.  And among the proponents who have lobbied heavily for the passage of such legislation is the world’s now favorite oil company, “Beyond” Petroleum, which is heavily engaged in pollution credit trading in Europe and envisions doing the same in the US.

Absence of that hem is causing the fabric to unravel.  The Chicago Carbon Exchange was recently sold to the Intercontinental Exchange, a futures and derivatives platform with offices in London and Atlanta, which also purchased the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange and the European Climate Exchange.  Sandor and his associates managed to turn the Joyce Foundation’s $1.1million grant into $600million, but they didn’t get to reap the full reward of the $10trillion industry they imagined.

No doubt many consider the foregoing tale to be another “hair-brained conspiracy theory.”  We don’t share that perception, nor do we believe that it was motivated out of corruption – though it was certainly perpetuated by a consortium of corrupt individuals.  Rather, we believe this was a very large scheme perpetrated by like-minded individuals, sometimes working alone and sometimes in concert, to further their personal agenda, be it ideology, greed, and/or political influence.  It’s working in Europe, and it would undoubtedly work in the US had the science of climate change not come under question before Cap and Trade could pass the Senate.  It will still work, making Al Gore and his “passionately concerned about the environment” cronies extremely wealthy, if a lame duck Senate with nothing left to lose chooses to pass it.  Mr. Gore still has friends who will likely be among those lame ducks, and he has friends in the White House who believe in global warming driven by escalating CO₂ emissions.  He has friends in the White House who believe that green jobs and renewable energy are the panacea needed to bring this country out of recession, despite what happened in Germany, Spain and Japan.

The true irony in all this is that Cap and Trade, despite all the brow beating and impassioned rhetoric, will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  It will simply make enormous amounts of money for those who were in on the creation of the marketable commodity, and it will either force those industries which emit higher levels of those gases than some bureaucrat in Washington deems acceptable to transfer its wealth to more bureaucratically acceptable industries, or more likely to transfer its operations to more industry friendly locales. 

As we have said since this publication was born, Cap and Trade will be devastating to the economy of this region and this nation.

During the height of the Gulf oil spill, there was a debate in the Senate over a “resolution of disapproval,” aimed at taking away the EPA’s self-empowered authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.  We reported it here.  It failed.

On Friday the U. S. Chamber of Commerce filed suit against the EPA in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, once again challenging this gross misinterpretation of the Clean Air Act. 

By denying the resolution, the Senate effectively empowered the EPA to act as a legislative body.  As we said then,

So, what this means is that today, Congress has delivered still another blow to the Louisiana economy, they have granted federal agencies the authority to enact policy, they have condoned federal agencies adjusting the wording of legislation, they have increased our costs of obtaining fuels, they have increased our dependence on foreign oil, and they have increased the flow of our currency to countries that despise us – all in the name of reducing carbon emissions which, on a global scale, they didn’t achieve.

Independent of the “resolution of disapproval,” the Chamber of Commerce had presented the EPA with petitions from the Chamber, states of Virginia and Texas, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, coal giant Peabody Energy Corp. and others that sought to nix the finding.  Among other claims, the petitions cited environmental science that has come into question.  In rejecting them, the EPA suggested that the petitions

based as they are on selectively edited, out-of-context data and a manufactured controversy — provide no evidence to undermine our determination. Excess greenhouse gases are a threat to our health and welfare,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said at the time.

Once again, blind ideology triumphs over reason, and the EPA Administrator, appointed by the Obama administration, perceives herself, with the implied endorsement of the Senate, to be empowered to create and interpret legislation rather than simply enforcing policy.

We did not elect Lisa Jackson to write legislation.  Now the courts can decide if that matters.

With the likelihood of our being confronted with a lame duck Congress in November, a Congress with nothing left to lose and a liberal agenda that includes climate change, Cap and Trade, and energy policy still unfulfilled, we felt it was appropriate to update readers on recent developments in the field of climate change science.  We will make every effort not to bring up “climategate,” as this new information makes that unnecessary.

Let’s begin with the findings of a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, where we learn that a team of scientists have reconstructed the earth’s climate belts as they existed in the late Ordovician Period, which was between 445 million and 460 million years ago.  Without going into details we don’t understand and you’d probably not read, these scientists studied the global distribution of certain common fossils, and found patterns of glaciation, where glaciers gave way to more temperate waters, were very similar to the patterns found today.  In other words, the global temperature patterns 460 million years ago were about like those we know now.

And oh, lest we forget, they also found that atmospheric carbon levels during that period were only four to five times what they are today.

“This ‘modern-looking’ pattern suggests that those ancient carbon dioxide levels could not have been as high as previously thought, but were more modest, at about five times current levels.”

These scientists included Mark Williams (tel. 0116 252 3642 , email mri@le.ac.uk) and Jan Zalasiewicz (0116 2523928, jaz1@le.ac.uk) of the Geology Department of the University of Leicester, and was led by Dr. Thijs Vandenbroucke (contact information not provided), formerly of Leicester and now at the University of Lille 1 (France).  Give them a call if you need more details.

Then there’s Roy Spencer, whose work The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled The World’s Top Climate Scientists presents solid evidence in an easily read format (perhaps a Hayride book review is in order) that indicates more than 75% of the warming scientists have observed since the beginning of the 20^th century is a result of natural processes.  He goes into great detail regarding one of these processes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and how it operates in the “real world.” 

The PDO is a heat transfer process between the oceans and the atmosphere similar to El Niño and La Niña except it takes longer.  Cloud cover diminishes during its positive phase, thus more sunlight reaches the earth and its thermal component is stored in the oceans as heat.  During its negative phase, the cycle reverses.  This reportedly occurs in 32 year cycles, and carbon levels fluctuate along with these cycles.  Spencer concludes that our global climate is largely insensitive to man-made CO₂, and that proponents of anthropogenic global warming have made a fundamental error of confusing cause and effect.

High levels of carbon in the atmosphere don’t cause global warming.  Global warming causes increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere.

Lastly, and on a much lighter note, there’s the case of the climate change scientists who verbally rebelled.  This section is largely derived from a post at Climate Depot, and it will be littered with quotes we’ll not credit again.

That scientist is Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, formerly a professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, who recently released a video in which he declares that the entire anthropogenic global warming movement is a

“corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else,”

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.

Rancourt goes on, discussing how he is unable to hold a reasonable discussion on the subject of global warming with friends and colleagues, they shun him, as the community of climate scientists is self-censoring.

“When I tell environmental activists that global warming is not something to be concerned about, they attack me — they shun me, they do not allow me to have my materials published in their magazines,”

On Al Gore

“Gore strikes me as someone working for someone — as someone who will financially benefit from this. He does not give me impression of someone who genuinely cares about environmental or social justice.”

On Cap and Trade

“Someone is going to make a lot of money from these schemes. I have great distrust for it. It is not motivated by true concern for social justice and the environment. It can only be about powerful financiers. I see it as an horrendous scam,”

On his former colleagues

“They are all virtually all service intellectuals. They will not truly critique, in a way that could threaten the power interests that keep them in their jobs. The tenure track is just a process to make docile and obedient intellectuals that will then train other intellectuals.”

“You have this army of university scientists and they have to pretend like they are doing important research without ever criticizing the powerful interests in a real way. So what do they look for, they look for elusive sanitized things like acid rain, global warming,” he added. This entire process “helps to neutralize any kind of dissent.”

“When you do find something bad, you quickly learn and are told you better toe the line on this — your career depends on it.”

On the business of scientific research

“Environmental scientists naively and knowingly work hand in hand with finance-corporate shysters, mainstream media, politicians, and state and international bureaucrats to mask real problems and to create profit opportunities for select power elites.

 “Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass.”

Dr. Rancourt can be reached at claude.cde@gmail.com.

Dr. Rancourt is not the only prominent figure to have recently revolted against the climate change movement, but he is certainly among the more entertaining.

But there you have it – two new theories and an outspoken but respected scientist, all of which further discredit the need to be concerned about man-made, carbon induced global warming.  Keep that in mind should Congress begin anew to debate any form of Cap and Trade legislation, written in part by Enron and British Petroleum, during a lame duck session.

(Hat Tip – American Thinker)

A few days ago we reported on a move in New York State to ban hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale gas in that state. 

We’ve learned more.

It seems that the organization behind the legislation, a group known as the Working Families Party of New York, was aided and abetted by MoveOn.Org, a left wing group quite heavily funded by President Obama’s supporter, George Soros.  As the New York Observer reported recently –

The 4.2 million member strong online community MoveOn.org is sending out an email urging its supporters to sign a Working Families Party petition that would place a one-year moratorium on hydrofracking.

It is rare for MoveOn to engage in local issues, and it is believed to be the first time that the group has collaborated with the New York City-based WFP.

The WFP delivered 22,000 signatures to the Senate last night. If the Senate passes the moratorium, the Assembly is expected to follow suit.

In the spring, Congress asked the Environmental Protection Agency to study the risks of hydrofracking, and the WFP and their allies are urging an end to all natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale until that study is complete

As you know if you read our previous post, the WFP was successful, as the Senate did pass the moratorium.  The State Assembly reportedly will consider similar legislation in September.

Why would a national organization such as MoveOn.Org be interested in a local issue such as hydraulic fracturing of shale for natural gas recovery in New York.  As we noted, MoveOn.Org is heavily funded by George Soros.  Soros is heavily invested in InterOil Corporation of Australia, and Petrobras in Brazil, which has vast natural gas holdings, as well as investments in numerous “green” energy initiatives.  Natural gas from shale, being vastly available domestically when hydraulic fracturing is used, is clean, economical, and a viable alternative to coal and oil in a number of applications we’ve discussed here previously, as well as a logical bridge to nuclear power generation facilities that should be constructed.  As such, it is a major obstacle to the profitability of his investments.  A foothold in New York could lead to regulation of fracturing by the EPA rather than the individual states (a move also under way as the Observer noted) and ultimately to this safe technology being banned all together.

Soros is joined in his quest by Marion and Herbert Sandler, who profited from the savings and loan disaster years ago and who now fund their own leftist propaganda organization, Pro Publica, which has not only exercised a great deal of its attention on the fracturing of shale for gas recovery. 

Furthermore, Soros and the Sandler’s have joined forces to found the Center for American Progress, for which the primary agenda is the promotion of Cap and Trade and renewable “green” energy programs.

All totaled, it is rather apparent that Soros and the Sandler’s are using their organizations to promote their personal agenda, which includes the elimination of the shale gas industry.

A moratorium on hydraulic fracturing will benefit George Soros perhaps as much as a moratorium on deep water oil exploration, and will be similarly devastating to Louisiana and other states where natural gas is trapped in shale formations.

That which is good for George Soros is not good for this state or this nation.