Looks like Dion's shifty green carbon tax isn't going to be an easy sell, even in liberal Hogtown. This guy is the best thing that Stephen Harper's conservatives have going for them.
via CITY-TV
Some plain talk on how the UN and the media perpetrate the myth of man-made global warming by Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers, from Saturday's National Post:
On a tour earlier this week for his new book on global warming, The Deniers, Lawrence Solomon made a presentation at the Petroleum Club in Calgary. His remarks, adapted, appear below.Related: more than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition rejecting claims of human-caused global warming.
I’m surprised to see so many of you here today. I thought you might be at trial, for your global warming crimes.
James Hansen — he’s one of the leaders in the climate change movement in the U.S. — wants you in court. “CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing,” he stated yesterday. “...they should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”
(...)
But on the global warming issues, based on the evidence to date, you have nothing to feel guilty about. Albertans have nothing to feel guilty about either. No crime has been committed. No known harm has occurred.
You’ve been had.
The fears of cataclysm over global warming are unfounded. There is no consensus on climate change, despite what Al Gore and the UN’s Panel on Climate Change would have you believe.
Let me tell you why most people think that global warming is a serious problem. It comes down to one number: 2500. That’s the number of scientists associated with the UN’s Panel on Climate Change that the press reports has endorsed the UN Panel’s conclusions.
(...)
2500 is an impressive number of scientists. To find out who, exactly, they were, I contacted the Secretariat of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and asked for their names. The Secretariat replied that the names were not public, so I couldn’t have them. And I learned that the 2500 scientists were reviewers, not endorsers.
Those scientists hadn’t endorsed anything. They had merely reviewed one or more of the literally hundreds of background studies, some important and some not, that were part of this immense United Nations bureaucratic process. They did not review the final report or endorse it.
Their reviews weren’t even all favorable. I know that from many sources, including from among some of the scientists that I profiled — several of the deniers in my book are among those 2500. And those deniers, and others, generally consider the UN’s work a travesty.
There is no endorsement by 2500 top UN scientists. The press has been taken. And so the public has been taken.
The extent to which the public has been taken may surprise you. Not only is there no consensus, the scientists who are skeptics — the deniers — have extraordinary credentials, people at the very top echelons of the scientific establishment. They are the Who’s Who of Science.
From the always eloquent Rex Murphy, here is Science by intimidation from Saturday's Globe and Mail (a piece that is so well written that it must be read in it's entirety):
Truth may enter the world by many doors, but she is never escorted by force. I thought that was a lesson learned long ago, and learned by none more tellingly than scientists. Real scientists, actually, have learned it. A new amalgam has emerged however, the scientist-activist, and for that specimen it's a lesson passed by.Did Hansen just play what the Urban Dictionary calls The Hitler Card? - a common last ditch effort in a heated political debate to steer the argument back in one's favor by declaring your opponent's position to be that of Adolf Hitler.
In the dawn of the Enlightenment, it was scientists who were hauled before tribunals and inquisitions. Galileo is the arch example, the pioneer empiricist who rejected the ancient Earth-centric model of the (then known) universe, and for his pains earned the attention and wrath of the distinctly unscientific Inquisition.
I am drawn to these thoughts, and to the long-decayed example of the Inquisition, by a most curious outburst this week by James Hansen, the principal voice of NASA on the subject of global warming, a man who played – as it were – John the Baptist to Al Gore's messianic teachings on the subject. Dr. Hansen is largely credited with “sounding the alarm” on man-made global warming, and he has been a persistent, high-profile and very aggressive proponent of the cause for over two decades now. Dr. Hansen doesn't take kindly to those who dispute his apocalyptic scenarios. I choose the term, apocalyptic, deliberately. According to Dr. Hansen, mankind may have reached the tipping point with global warming. Should that be the case, wide-scale calamity and catastrophe are inevitable. And should we not have reached the point of absolute crisis, should there be a minuscule interval for the human species to act and avert the very worst, according to Dr. Hansen, what yet remains to be faced is still horrible enough indeed.
Not all the world shares Dr. Hansen's vision of imminent ecological Armageddon. Serious minds, seriously disinterested in the subject, throw up caveats all the time. They question the models of climatological speculation; they question the peculiar mix of man-made and other likely sources of climate dynamics; they question some of the data gathering and some of its interpretation; and they question the very maturity of the highly complex, and experimentally deficient science of global warming itself.
They seriously question, too, the massive policy prescriptions that are being insisted upon as necessary in response to the scientific determinations of man-made global warming. There is lots of room for different, honest opinion on questions so large and complex, questions at the terribly complicated intersection of science, politics and economics.
But, to Dr. Hansen's agitated mind, those who raise such questions, who inject skepticism into the global warming debate, are “deniers.” The word here is becoming commonplace, but it remains a singular slur. A clutch of the global warming believers like to cast all who would argue with them into the polemical pit, the pit being that dissent from orthodox opinion on global warming as the equivalent of Holocaust denial. It is a shameless and vicious tactic, and hardly accords with the nobility that is suppose to drive the conscience of those out to save the planet. Dr. Hansen is overfond of the specious and chilling analogy: He has written of the “crashing glaciers serv(ing) as a Krystal Nacht” and, although he later repented of the metaphor, compared coal trains to “death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.” This week, Dr. Hansen went a step even more noxiously forward.
He called for a tribunal, or as I prefer to call it, an Inquisition, to put on trial for crimes against nature and humanity, the CEOs of the big oil companies who, according to Dr. Hansen's frantic view of things, feed the public “misinformation” about the climate crisis. Again the implicit model is to Nuremberg, as the man attempts to put concern for a future – let us call it a probability – on a moral and factual par with the unquestioned, historical, shattering enormity of the Nazi Holocaust.
Is this a scientist speaking? If so, it is more than curious that in the 21st century it is the scientist calling for the secular equivalent of an Inquisition. More to the point, are these the words of a man really certain of his truth, or one who – with the anxiety of the fanatic – is trying to shield it from all rigour of skepticism and inquiry? In either case, I do not question at all the assertion that it is the voice of a man who is neither a friend to reason or science. This is the voice of the scientist-activist consumed with his own virtue and fearful of all dispute.
Science has no need of tribunals or trials, no need of Nuremberg justice, or analogies with the Holocaust. James Hansen's words this week were an offence, an offence against inquiry, against science, against moral seriousness. They were a piece of insolence against the idea of debate itself.
You've seen the recent headlines full of alarm, North Pole could be ice-free this summer, scientists say (CNN) and Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole, Polar scientists reveal dramatic new evidence of climate change (the Independant).
The ice retreated to a record level in September when the Northwest Passage -- the sea route through the Arctic Ocean -- opened up briefly for the first time in recorded history.Tom Nelson adds a little perspective:
Except that the Northwest Passage was successfully navigated in years like 1906, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1944, 1957, 1969, 1977, 1984, 1988, and 2000.I guess when you are the main stream media, you don't want a little thing like facts to interfere with your alarmist story.
Much more detail is available here.
Victoria Hardy writes in the American Chronicle:
Seems we bought the global warming myth hook, line and sinker, but of course it was sold to us impressively, with glitzy Hollywood stars on Oprah, Gore winning an Academy Award and "An Inconvenient Truth" being shown as truth in our schools. What we seemingly fail to understand, though, is that the climate on the earth changes, it always has and it always will, it is not something we can control. Continents have shifted, societies and animals have gone extinct, storms and floods have ravaged and mountains have been born, the earth changes and those changes are beyond our control. And attempting to control this myth of global warming is causing far more harm than good.
Some facts you're not likely to hear about from the mainstream media. By Joe D’Aleo.
The Antarctic set a new record (since records began in 1979) for sea ice extent at the end of last winter. It stayed well above the normal through the summer with icemelt 40% below the normal. As a new height of irony and hype, the media made a big deal about a fracture of a small part of the Wilkins ice sheet in late February (160 square miles of the 6 million square mile Antarctic ice sheet (0.0027% of the total).This chart, also from Cryosphere, shows the Global Sea Ice Area from 1979 to present. It begs the question, where's the melt?Media headlines blared: Bye-bye, Antarctica? and Massive ice shelf collapsing off Antarctica.
But as you can see from this Cryosphere chart below, the extent never dropped to less than 1 million square km ABOVE NORMAL during or after the brief event. Currently Antarctic ice extent is running nearly 1 million square kilometers higher than last year at this time. Peak comes at the end of the southern winter (September).
"There is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are (bleep) -- difference, difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. It's been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little more than 200 years.George Carlin via Rush
"Two hundred years versus four and a half billion, and we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a threat, that somehow we're going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us, been through all kinds of things worse than us, been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. We are! We're going away."
Shocking an Alarmist is quite a feat in itself, but the Brits have done it! I guess they must have watched the Great Global Warming Swindle*.
The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.The Brits are not falling into lock step with the AGW propaganda.
The results have shocked campaigners...
Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults and found that six out of 10 agreed that 'many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change', and that four out of 10 'sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say'. In both cases, another 20 per cent were not convinced either way.There's still hope.
First it was David "kooky" Suzuki calling for the jailing of politicians who ignore the gospel of climate change. Now we have a notorious NASA scientist calling for trials for oil company executives:
James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.All these enviro whack-jobs need is a good old kangaroo court and they'll be in business.
The party's over. Rep. Ted Poe of Texas on compact flourescent light (CFL) bulbs.
Update: Rush: there's really nothing I can do for you
...and help us solve the energy crisis? An amazing discovery by scientists for all those who are concerned about emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere...
Under the gleam of blinding lamps, engulfed by banks of angrily frothing flasks, Makoto Watanabe is plotting a slimy, lurid-green revolution. He has spent his life in search of a species of algae that efficiently “sweats” crude oil, and has finally found it.I couldn't agree more. Food for fuel is a very, very bad idea.
Now, exploiting the previously unrecognised power of pondlife, Professor Watanabe dreams of transforming Japan from a voracious energy importer into an oil-exporting nation to rival any member of Opec.
The professor has given himself a decade to effect this seemingly implausible conversion: Japan’s export-led economics have always been shaped by their near 100 per cent dependence on foreign energy. In the present world economic climate, those economics are looking especially fragile.
“I believe I can change Japan within five years,” the Professor told The Times from his laboratory in Tsukuba University. “A couple of years after that, we start changing the world.”The algae, he believes, will spearhead enormous changes to the way that energy is produced and to the explosive geopolitics that have developed around the global thirst for fossil fuels. They could also overturn the current debate on corn and sugar-based biofuels. It is madness, he says, for humanity to pursue sources of energy that compete with its own stomachs when there is a far purer source that does not sitting in a test tube in his laboratory.
We'll be sure to keep an eye on this story.Professor Watanabe’s vision arises from the extraordinary properties of the Botryococcus braunii algae: give the microscopic green strands enough light – and plenty of carbon dioxide – and they excrete oil. The tiny globules of oil that form on the surface of the algae can be easily harvested and then refined using the same “cracking” technologies with which the oil industry now converts crude into everything from jet fuel to plastics.
The Japanese Government has supplied him with hefty grants to work on ways of industrialising the algae cultures. The professor admits that there is much work to be done to bring the financial and environmental costs of creating algae oilfields down to reasonable levels: to meet Japan’s current oil needs would require an algae-filled paddyfield the size of Yorkshire.
But – in laboratory conditions at least – the powers of Botryococcus braunii are astonishing. A field of corn, when converted into biofuel ethanol, may produce about 0.2 tonnes of oil equivalent per hectare. Rapeseed may generate around 1.2 tonnes. Micro algae can theoretically produce between 50 and 140 tonnes using the same plot of land.
via the Orange County Register
The nation avoided global warming-related devastation last week. The Senate killed a grandiose scheme to clamp down on emissions of CO2, a benign, necessary, natural atmospheric gas. However, something similar, if not worse, will be back next year.The Climate Security Act, a.k.a. Lieberman-Warner: not dead enough.
The devastation wouldn't have been the 1- or 2-degree temperature increases that may have occurred over the next century, which may not even be related to CO2. The real devastation would have been gasoline prices increasing $1.40 per gallon by 2050, millions of jobs lost or shipped overseas, an effective $3,700-a-year tax on families, a 33-percent increase in home energy costs by 2020, and, says the Heritage Foundation, the equivalent economic cost of 35 Hurricane Katrinas every year for two decades.
Those would be certain results of the failed Climate Security Act's vastly expanded government controls to extract trillions of dollars from productive companies and redistribute the money to politically favored interests, say the bill's opponents.
What's uncertain is whether the trouble and expense would have bought anything. Even if CO2 emissions are returned to the level of horse-and-buggy days, an increase of 0.013 degree Celsius might be avoided over the next century, says climatologist Patrick Michaels. That's if CO2 increases temperature, which many scientists doubt. So, why go down this path?
“Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat's dream,” MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen said. “If you control carbon, you control life.”
Carbon Zombies are attacking our economy, writes Lorrie Goldstein.
Somewhere on the road to Kyoto, Canada turned into the land of the carbon zombies.Meanwhile, at the Drax power station in the UK, carbon zombies are attacking coal trains.
Like the walking undead, blood-sucking politicians of all stripes are howling at each other over discredited ways to reduce carbon emissions that other countries, having tried to implement, are running away from in terror.
But even if the greens lose the political battle over drilling offshore and in places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they nevertheless are way ahead of the game as they implement a back-up plan to make sure that not a drop of that oil ever eases our gasoline crunch.Obama: I was for high gas prices before I was against them.
The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, successfully pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to block ConocoPhillips’ expansion of its Roxana, Ill., gasoline refinery, which processes heavy crude oil from Canada, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Just as class struggle forms the nucleus of Marxism, so does it sit at the very core of the Left's climate alarmism. At a glance, the regressive nature of fiscal Carbon control schemes, be they taxation or cap-and-trade, would appear to be antithetical to liberal thinking. But beneath the veneer of both the domestic and international green agenda lies a devious wealth-redistribution plan compared to which all predecessors pale.Valdis Dombrovskis on the EU’s Kyoto shell game:
The failure of the EU-15 to meet its Kyoto target does not come as a big surprise. However, what is surprising is that the EU-15 have managed to market their failure as a success.And as the Europeans move closer and closer to Kyotocide, Ireland moves once again to save western civilization.
by John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel:
You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.Be sure to read the whole thing.
The future of our civilization lies in the balance.
...of Canada's battle of "hate speech" vs. free speech and our Kangaroo courts, a.k.a. Human Rights Commissions. Well, at least Adam Liptak notices in the International Herald Tribune.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia: A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article's tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States did not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.h/t: Drudge.
Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.
Under Canadian law, there is a serious argument that the article contained hate speech and that its publisher, Maclean's magazine, the nation's leading newsweekly, should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their "dignity, feelings and self respect."
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions in Vancouver last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean's violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up animosity toward Muslims.
As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.
"It's hate speech!" yelled one man.
"It's free speech!" yelled another.
In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minority groups and religions - even false, provocative or hateful things - without legal consequence.
The Maclean's article, "The Future Belongs to Islam," was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called "America Alone." The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.
"In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one's legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment," Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called "The Exceptional First Amendment."
"But in the United States," Schauer continued, "all such speech remains constitutionally protected."
A longer-than-normal period of solar sunspot inactivity has been noted by scientists at an international solar conference at Montana State University, "Solar Variability, Earth's Climate and the Space Environment."
The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, [Dana] Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today's sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren't sure why.So what do scientists have to say about this "longer-than-normal" period with a lack of sunspot activity?
"It's a dead face," [Saku] Tsuneta said of the sun's appearance.
In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period, from approximately 1650 to 1700, occurred during the middle of a little ice age on Earth that lasted from as early as the mid-15th century to as late as the mid-19th century.Now that's a matter for concern.
Today's must read article is from CO2 Skeptics:
Stephen Wilde has been a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1968. The first five articles from Mr Wilde were received with a great deal of interest throughout the Co2 Sceptic community.Read The Death Blow to AGW by Stephen Wilde. Here's a little tease...
In Stephen Wilde’s sixth and exclusive article for CO2Sceptics.Com he considers that the IPCC have failed to carry out any risk analysis for the potential for global cooling instead of global warming and that a repeat of the Little Ice Age a mere 400 years ago would cause mass starvation worldwide.
The influence of the sun has been discounted in the climate models as a contributor to the warming observed between 1975 and 1998. Those who support the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), now known as anthropogenic climate change so that recent cooling can be included in their scenario, always deny that the sun has anything to do with recent global temperature movements.Be sure to RTWT.
The reason given is that Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) varied so little over that period that it cannot explain the warming that was observed. I don’t yet accept that TSI tells the whole story because it is ill defined and speculative as regards it’s representation of all the different ways the sun could affect the Earth via the entire available range of physical processes.
Despite the limitations of TSI as an indicator of solar influence I think there are conclusions we can draw from the records we do have. Oddly, I have not seen them discussed properly anywhere else, especially not by AGW enthusiasts.
Peter Foster, Financial Post Published: Friday, June 06, 2008
Let's say that a bunch of tribal chiefs, having realized that they are in danger of being exposed as useless parasites, consult with their witch doctors and announce that the Gods are angry. These vengeful Gods are demanding that every tribesman (except chiefs and witch doctors)must have either an arm or a leg amputated.Be sure to read the whole thing.
Being eager to be seen as good chiefs, they agree to consult with the tribesmen. Not about the anger of the Gods, of course. That's settled. Instead, debate is to be allowed on the relative merits and defects of being one-armed vs. one-legged. Should individuals be allowed to choose which limb to lose? How much of a limb should be sufficient for divine appeasement? Below the knee? Above the elbow? Some bright spin/witch doctor might even suggest that this mass amputation would represent a marvellous opportunity to stimulate economic growth via the development of a prosthetic limb industry. Once the benefits of this new industry were taken into account, the Gods' anger might prove a net benefit, a golden opportunity.
But then suppose some emperor's-new-clothes kind of individual comes along and says, "Hang on, what proof do we have the Gods are angry? And where are these Gods anyway?" You might be sure that if they couldn't rip his heart out straight away, the powers that be would engage in much agitated jumping and hooting. "Infidel," they would scream. There would be dark whispers that this person must be in league with, or in the pay of, the Devil, X'on. How dare he doubt the shamans, among whom there is consensus.
Just substitute "catastrophic climate change" for "angry gods," carbon taxes vs. cap-and-trade for amputating arms vs. amputating legs, and "Denier" for "Infidel," and you pretty much have the substance of the present climate change policy debate.
Lt.-Gen. Walter Natynczyk. Excellent choice!
Natynczyk's selection was predicted by most military watchers, who say he will be as much a booster of the Canadian Forces as his predecessor, but not as outspoken. He is known mostly as a tough guy, a soldier's soldier.Update: more on Gen. Natynczyk.
"The further away you are from the sound of the guns," he told a recent Senate defence committee, "the less you understand."Natynczyk has certainly spent time close to the guns. He has been to Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Eritrea with Canadian peacekeepers, but it is his high-profile command role in Iraq that has most controversially defined him.
Natynczyk was on a three-year exchange with the U.S. Army at Fort Hood, Tex., when III Corps was deployed to Iraq in 2004. Paul Martin's Liberal government granted him permission to go along even though Canada had opted to stay out of the invasion. In a reorganization of invading forces that spring, Natynczyk was named deputy-commanding general of the Multi-National Corps. (Iraq).
The US $6 Trillion tax and spend bill known as Lieberman-Warner is dead. For now.
U.S. lawmakers Friday blocked a sweeping climate change bill in the Senate after a bitter debate over its cost and impact on fuel prices.President Bush was prepared to veto this legislation, so it really was a non-starter. But did the Democrats actually wake up to the fact that mammoth tax increases on fuels was just not such a bright idea right now? Iain Murray writes at the Corner that the effort to pass this bill was, well lackluster:
The bill received only 48 of the 60 votes needed to bring it for a final debate in the Senate.
I don't think I've ever seen as pathetic an attempt at legislative management as the majority's bumbling attempts to promote the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill this week (and I lived through the Major government in Britain). From Sen. Boxer's stumbling delivery, through the farce of the full reading of the 491-page "minor textual" amendments to today's failure by the majority even to reach 50 votes for cloture when it was a free vote, this has been high comedy all around (or low tragedy if you are an alarmist).Hmmm... politicians talking the talk, but not walking the walk. As if we needed to be reminded, Fox News has this: Politicians have a knack for saying one thing and doing another.
Whatever possessed them to believe that a time when Americans are suffering from high food and energy prices would be appropriate to discuss a bill whose only point is that is raises those prices further to discourage energy use?
Take their seemingly never-ending preaching over CO2. The world is in peril without major action, we’re told. According to Al Gore, we’ve never faced a greater threat, which ought to come as news to any veteran of World War II.But don't fret, this legislation is not dead enough yet. In one form or another it will be back. And chances are it won't be faced with a veto from the future occupant of the White House.
What is Washington’s response?
"America’s Climate Security Act," which the Senate recently debated. Sponsored by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and John Warner, R-Va., it would mandate economy-busting caps on emissions and push subsidies for failed technologies. Add in some energy rationing, and you have Washington’s global-warming policy.
The opposition parties have successfully ganged up in an attempt to force Canada into committing Kyotocide.
OTTAWA — The House of Commons has given its final approval to a controversial climate-change bill that would require the government to drastically cut greenhouse gases.Meeting these targets, even if they were remotely obtainable - and they are not - would have the following results:
NDP Leader Jack Layton's private-member's bill passed third reading with the support of the Liberals and Bloc Quebecois.
Once it clears the Senate and receives royal assent, the bill would require the government to gradually cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.
It would also require Ottawa to set interim reduction targets for every five years between 2015 and 2050 - but if previous legislative attempts are any indication, the minority Conservatives will ignore the bill.
The bill's reduction targets are closely in line with cuts required by the Kyoto Protocol, of which Canada is a signatory.
But the Conservative government has dismissed the Kyoto reduction targets as unattainable and has instead committed to cutting emissions 20 per cent below 2006 levels by 2020.When the truth about greenhouse gases and global warming becomes more widely known (and it will), even this more measured response will seem like a tremendous over-reaction to a non-existent problem.
The best global warming videos on the internet, Part 1, courtesy of Duane Lester at All American Blogger. Be sure to check out Duane's excellent blog.
h/t: ecomyths (another excellent blog)
Two points of interest:
1) Liberals and environmentalists in Canada have nothing but harsh criticism for Stephen Harper's Conservative government's plans to reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions because they say his plan doesn't go far enough.
1) Small-l liberals (mostly Democrats) and environmentalists in the U.S. are pushing for climate change legislation, the Lieberman-Warner bill a.k.a. America's Climate Security Act which has been costed at about $6 Trillion as the solution to saving the planet.
Got that? liberal plan in the US is good, Conservative plan in Canada bad.
Now take note of this excerpt from an article today by Lorrie Goldstein called Cap and trade? The devil's in the details
In fact, the U.S. bill's goal of cutting carbon emissions by 18% below 2005 levels by 2020, mirrors that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government to lower Canada's emissions by 20% below 2006 levels by 2020.How can two plans that are practically identical, as far as emissions reductions targets are concerned, be viewed so differently?
Spiegel Online senses a major shift in climate policy by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, once the hero of environmentalists.
The job of saving the earth, once a matter for the chancellor herself, has been delegated once again to state secretaries, backbenchers and minor officials. It has lost its oomph and momentum, and the entire affair has clearly been made to conform to the chancellor's priorities. Germany's contribution to climate protection is gradually entering the realm of the vague and the unclear.Seems the German voters are paying more attention to skyrocketing energy prices than they are to "climate change" and saving the planet. And Spiegel laments that the one opponent that she (the "climate Chancellor") "can't bear confronting is the German voter".
The German Economics Ministry has always been skeptical of concrete climate policy. But now it seems officials there could best be described as radically skeptical.What is the world coming to? Climate skeptics in government? Democracy? Outrageous!
U.S. Senator James Inhofe in the Wall Street Journal:
With average gas prices across the country approaching $4 a gallon, it may be hard to believe, but the U.S. Senate is considering legislation this week that will further drive up the cost at the pump.President Bush says he will veto the US $6 trillion spending bill if it reaches his desk in its present form.
The Senate is debating a global warming bill that will create the largest expansion of the federal government since FDR's New Deal, complete with a brand new, unelected bureaucracy. The Lieberman-Warner bill (America's Climate Security Act) represents the largest tax increase in U.S. history and the biggest pork bill ever contemplated with trillions of dollars in giveaways. Well-heeled lobbyists are already plotting how to divide up the federal largesse. The handouts offered by the sponsors of this bill come straight from the pockets of families and workers in the form of lost jobs, higher gas, power and heating bills, and more expensive consumer goods.
Today's must read article from Peter Ferrara at National Review Online:
Global warming has nothing to do with climate or science. What it is all about is the great, historic class struggle between working people and the ruling classes.Ferrara covers all the bases in his article. Be sure to RTWT.
Global warming is a great excuse for a massive expansion of government power. That, not science, is why the overlords, from the New York Times to the United Nations to Al Gore, so heartily embrace it.
The U.N. thinks global warming is a perfect reason for the U.N. to be transformed into a world government. So how long do you think it took for the world-class bureaucrats at Turtle Bay to conclude that global warming was real and caused by humans?
In today's Toronto Sun, Lorrie Goldstein writes:
Kyoto is a socialist, money-sucking scheme. Why don't the Conservatives just say it?Well, Prime Minister Stephen Harper once did say that, when he called Kyoto a socialist scheme designed to suck money out of wealth producing nations. He was right. But as Goldstein says, Harper is now paying lip service to Kyoto as part of his strategy to win the next election.
...voters know when politicians are bulls...ting them.Is there no politician left anywhere in Canada who is willing to stand up to the alarmist nonsense and do the right thing before we commit Kyotocide?
"Consensus is the business of politics. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period." Michael Crichton.
"Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations." Stephen Harper.
Watch the Great Global Warming Swindle
I am a Canadian,
free to speak without fear,
free to worship in my own way,
free to stand for what I think right,
free to oppose what I believe wrong,
or free to choose those
who shall govern my country.
This heritage of freedom
I pledge to uphold
for myself and all mankind.
Canadian Bill of Rights
