Evil mutant rises from the dead ...

… to threaten industry and prosperity. First, it was Waxman-Markey; then it was Boxer-Kerry; now it's Kerry-Lieberman; but it's all cap 'n' trade.



Left to right, Kerry, Obama, Lieberman. Al Gore is out of the frame.

If it passes, it will be the American economy that's the zombie. But the Chicago Carbon Exchange will be doing fine.

Van der Leun on Obama

Just a few.

The bow to Abdullah. The bow to Akihito.

A new General Theory of Obama, with emphasis on Afghanistan and chaos. W.B. Yeats and Steely Dan are mentioned. Follow-up to the General Theory, with zombies.

The Mao jacket and the crotch salute.

Palin in WaPo: "The 'Cap And Tax' Dead End"

Sarah Palin lays out familiar objections to cap-and-trade.

There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn't lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive! Those who understand the issue know we can meet our energy needs and environmental challenges without destroying America's economy.

Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.

In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase.

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

A little of that good Sarah snark there. And to conclude:

We have an important choice to make. Do we want to control our energy supply and its environmental impact? Or, do we want to outsource it to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia? Make no mistake: President Obama's plan will result in the latter.

For so many reasons, we can't afford to kill responsible domestic energy production or clobber every American consumer with higher prices.

Can America produce more of its own energy through strategic investments that protect the environment, revive our economy and secure our nation?

Yes, we can. Just not with Barack Obama's energy cap-and-tax plan.

Nice. In this written piece, she is able to throttle the speed of her thinking, simplify her sentence structures, and supply her own punctuation, so that the usual media tricks of inaccurate transcription can't be applied. The WaPo comments are, for the most part, about what one would expect, mostly accusations that she did not write it herself. Here's a NY Times op-ed from last year, for comparison. No, I did not read all 3000+ comments, but 10 pages or so seems like a fair sample.

It's awfully good to see these sensible arguments presented in a major publication, from someone whose ability to command attention is so great.

Let's take a closer look at that book …

… that Obama's science advisor John Holdren wrote with Paul Ehrlich. Zombie has the story: John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet. Good grief.

This stuff about the Planetary Regime fits nicely with Al Gore's recent call for "global governance," and what that regime would do sounds a lot like the prescriptions of Herman Daly in Steady-State Economics, cited here earlier in Obama's chief energy regulator tells us to prepare to freeze in the dark.

Anyone for a New World Order?

Thanks to Blake for the Zombietime link.

Update: David Harsanyi should have linked to Zombie.

Another update: Follow-up post at Zomblog, as Holdren and and the White House attempt to deny that what was written was what was meant, or something like that.

Skeptical scientists are speaking up

Starting from a thread at Althouse about the current G8 summit …

It seems that William Happer, Princeton physicist, who used to work for the government but was fired by Al Gore back in 1993, has joined with fifty-three other physicists, including a Nobel Prize winner (in physics, not peace), to write a letter to the Council of the American Physical Society asking for a reconsideration of the Council's November 2007 Statement on Climate Change.

Brian Karpuk writes about this at Newsburglar. The WSJ article he mentions is this one: The Climate Change Climate Change: The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere. 575 comments at last count, some of them substantial.

Happer's testimony before the Senate in February is here, and some other places as well.

Some of those physicists more recently wrote an open letter to Congress.

An interview with Happer:

Evil mutant targets homeowners in addition to industry

Deep within the Waxman-Markey bill are some provisions relating to energy efficiency of private dwellings, which … well, let Jimmie Bise explain it. Part 1. Part 2.

Krugman out of his mind and over the line

Another link to Neo-neocon. Good bunch of comments over there, too.

"Traitors to the planet?" Good grief. Put down that Kool-Aid, Dr. Krugman. You're way outside your academic field here. Let no one say after this that warming is a scientific issue any more. The politicians have got their teeth into it now.

I'd be more inclined to call people voting for Waxman-Markey traitors, in the old fashioned sense of working for the destruction of their country, if I were going to sling that word around, which, of course, I'm not.

I wouldn't use apophasis on those guys. No I wouldn't.

---------------------
More from Tom Maguire.

Update: Lomborg on Krugman, et Al.: Al Gore and friends create climate of McCarthyism. Via Planet Gore.

Pournelle: "Authority to accomplish the impossible implies absolute power."

An aphorism is born. I hope Dr. Pournelle won't mind if I quote this whole passage.

That is a world-level statement

Mr. Pournelle,

"Authority to accomplish the impossible implies absolute power" is an eye-opening statement. It is very good. You might want to spread it around. Much like that "power corrupts" statement.

Nathan Okun

Thank you. On reflection, perhaps the principle deserves some kind of title analogous to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but I haven't thought of a suitable name yet. It does hold up to inspection. The statement was that just as in logic a false statement implies the universe class, in human affairs authority to accomplish the impossible implies absolute power, and that does seem true enough.

And now the House has passed perhaps the worst bill in its history, 1,000 pages that no one had read giving enormous regulatory power in pursuit of the impossible. The actual effect of US adoption of cap and trade on climate is essentially nil. China and India will continue to burn coal and oil as they industrialize. CO2 levels will continue to rise. Global temperatures will continue to rise. US self destruction may affect the global temperature in the year 2100, but I know of no theory that can show the effect will be greater than 1 degree C (that is, global temperature would be 1 degree C less without US contribution to CO2) and that is a very extreme limit; few of the theories show our contribution to be large enough to have that much effect. The most likely outcome is an enormous hamper to US economic recovery and no effect whatever on global temperature.

The President speaks of this as a jobs bill. The cost of each job created by this is enormous. Economic growth and energy cost have a high negative correlation and always have, and this is an energy tax; it will raise the price of energy, whatever else it does. Nearly all "green" energy produces energy at a cost great than the equivalent of $150/bbl oil.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Indeed. Dr. P. understates the number of pages in the bill, but that number was changing so fast, it's a trivial error.

Elsewhere, tangentially to a note about the unwillingness of alarmist modelers to share their source code, Dr. Pournelle notes a distressing possibility:

[T]he charges of "Climate Change Deniers" continue to circulate, while the number of falsifiable hypotheses from the consensus group does not increase. The very nature of science may be at stake: consensus as more important than falsifiability.

Though of course science has always suffered from the problem of consensus. Cases in point, Semmelweis, Wegener.

Evil mutant succeeds in first battle!

Forces of Truth, Justice, and The American Way have not prevailed.

Waxman-Markey passed in the House, 219 to 212.

Watts Up With That has the vote, and a video from the ridiculously brief debate.

More at Ace of Spades.

Michelle Malkin liveblogged the debate, Part 1, Part 1.1 (looking forward), Part 1.2 (sidelight on the relative importance of Michael Jackson's death), Part 2, Part 2.1 (sidelight on Barney Frank, and the bill's implications for financial regulation), and Part 3, the vote.

It's not a bill, it's a concept! I mean, it really is not a bill. Details will be filled in later. So they didn't know what they passed because they had not read it, and because it was not there to read. Both at once! There is some serious dereliction of duty going on here.

Evil mutant continues to grow!

Mutation rate update! The Waxman-Markey bill gained another 300 pages overnight! This alone should be reason to postpone the vote.

The debate is live on C-Span. At this moment, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) is griping about how little the bill contains on the subject of flex-fuel cars. How does he know what's in it? Did he read all 1500 pages since this morning?

Club for Growth lists 15 Reasons to Oppose Climate Bill.

Even Greenpeace opposes Waxman-Markey.

Earlier post: Waxman-Markey, evil mutant — can it be stopped?

Waxman-Markey, evil mutant — can it be stopped?

It was evil all along, but now it's mutating at an incredible rate!

The bill is scheduled for a vote on Friday, that's in two days, and suddenly it has gained 250 pages! Sunlight Foundation: "Despite having a bill, H.R. 2454, that has been reported out of the Energy & Commerce Committee and discharged by eight other committees, there is now, suddenly, a new bill that is almost 300-pages longer — but it’s still being considered as H.R. 2454."

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

And at The Corner, Jim Manzi has posted a letter: Dear Member of Congress: Why You Should Vote Against Waxman-Markey. It's a concise 5-point summary, with links. RTWT.

Monckton not permitted to appear with Gore

The debate that never was. What a pity. It would have been a wonderful thing to hear, and a good thing for the world. But embarass a Democrat? Can't be allowed to happen, though the heavens fall.

At Climate Depot:

UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.

“The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”

And at Watts Up With That, more story, and a lot of comments.

Monckton's comments on Gore's testimony.

Monckton did testify, a little, at another time. His written testimony (PDF) is brief and breezy. This letter (PDF) to Markey and Barton, expanding on the written testimony, is neither. For laughs, here's a look at that day at the hearing from an alarmist point of view.

That high profile hearing was on the subject of the Markey Waxman climate bill, or ACES (American Clean Energy and Security) Act. A four-part series on it at the WSJ's Environmental Capital blog begins here. Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-TX), ranking Republican member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, says in the Washington Times:

Nobody understands exactly what the legislation means in dollars and cents - more on this later - but to experience how it would feel to lower your personal carbon footprint to the size this bill proposes, set the flux capacitor to 1875. That's the last time Americans' carbon emissions matched the goals set by the Waxman-Markey legislation.

What, the old DeLorean is up on cinder blocks in the front yard again? In that case you can test drive Waxman-Markey by sailing down to Haiti, because current CO2 emissions are where Waxman-Markey wants America's to be in 2050. Radical environmentalists think such a CO2 level will be heaven on Earth, but the place that has actually achieved it is a nation swimming in bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A and E, typhoid fever, dengue fever and malaria, with 47 percent illiteracy and a life expectancy of 49 years. So excuse me if I remain unconvinced.

Iain Murray asks, "Just What Is Waxman-Markey For?" And Kenneth Green points to analysis by Chip Knappenberger showing that even if the whole industrialized world, not just the US, were to go along with Waxman-Markey, "it would, at most, avoid only a bit more than one-half of a °C of projected global warming (out of 4.5°C—or only about 10%). And this is under worst-case emissions assumptions; middle-of-the-road scenarios and less sensitive climate models produce even less overall impact." To sum up: very expensive, entirely useless.

The Democrats are moving fast on their agenda, in the hope of getting it all enacted before the general public catches on.

Earth Day, things to do for

• Get birthday card for Lenin
• Call member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard on Earth Day and ask them to oppose the Markey Waxman climate bill, or American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES). (No point, but might as well.)
  
• Submit comment to EPA on the Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act, which would allow the EPA to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. (A smidgen of hope for this one, but only a smidgen. It's a huge power grab, and will be irresistible.)
• Go to park after rally, pick up litter.
  

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Iain Murray has a bunch of Earth Day links over at The Corner: link to Myron Ebell's testimony on ACES; comment on CrunchyCon sneering; link to John Tierney contra the Ehrlichites, Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet; link to comedian Lewis Black's take on TV companies marketing Earth Day to kids. (Near the end of the Lewis Black video there is a Sesame Street clip with a rock band of kids singing "Turn it off!" about water and lights and TV; of course they are using electric instruments and microphones, and are on a TV show themselves. Environmentalists don't appreciate irony.)

The TierneyLab blog followup to the Tierney piece above has a rich turnout of Malthusians and Ehrlichites in the comments. They all seem to be well-fed computer users. If their reasoning were correct, the whole world should have starved to death by now. Is comment #100 the prize-winner?

The U. S. is not finally turning green because it’s richer, but because leadership finally believes that the future matters.

Cuba is among the greenest countries on earth, according to a study by the Global Footprint Network. It is not wealthy in the monetary terms that Mr. Tierney measures, although it does have high levels of human development indicators such as health, science, education, arts, and culture. It also has a low ecological footprint (or level of ecological damage), according to the study.

It also has leadership focused on measures other than private profit.

There's your example to follow, kids! If we can only get the right leadership, we can be just like Cuba! Political prisons and all. Comment #135 for the runner-up:

How about measuring some more pertinent variables, like the amount of un-built land, old-growth forest, grassland… even the number of tropical beaches that don’t have hotels and hordes of drunken tourists. ["…" is in the original]

If somehow all those other people, you know, the annoying ones who just don't care about Gaia, would just disappear, wouldn't everything be wonderful! We could have those tropical beaches all to ourselves. And we don't sleep in hotels, no, we sleep right on the beach, and bury our poop in the sand.

I'll close up this Earth Day post by noting that President Obama chose to honor conservation and all that by taking Air Force One to go to Newton, Iowa, for a few hours, to make a campaign stop deliver a speech. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, who also has this: CNN's Marciano to Obama: 'Let's Park the Jumbo Jet' for Earth Day, and links on the amount of fuel consumed.)

Here earlier: Planning a newer New Deal and a new Depression to go with it, and Energy, among others.

Global Warming Links

A few interesting links about global warming, starting with Christopher Monckton's first article on the Stern Report, in the Telegraph, Climate chaos? Don't believe it.

Monckton's second article: Wrong problem, wrong solution.

Unsigned Telegraph editorial with comments: Green blinkers.

Gore's response: At stake is nothing less than the survival of human civilisation.

Monckton's response to Gore: Gore Gored.

Monckton on the Summary of the IPCC report: IPCC Fourth Assessment Report 2007 Analysis and Summary.

Melanie Phillips on doctoring evidence in IPCC report: Dirty work at the green crossroads.

another, from Timothy Ball, the first Canadian to receive a Ph.D. in climatology: Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts? via The Reference Frame, at which Luboš Motl has quite a bit more.

Update, March 12: Timothy Ball has been receiving death threats.

Update, Oct 23: Gore and Monckton are having another go-round.

Update, April 11, 2008: Monckton's movie is now available.

Update, January 27, 2009: Monckton writes again.

Update, April 23, 2009: There was nearly a joint appearance of Gore and Monckton before the House Energy and Commerce committee, debating the Markey-Waxman ACES Bill, but alas, it was not to be. The Democrats would not let the out-of-town challenger in the ring with their champ. So he retains the title, but we all know what happened.

Update, Oct. 22, 2009: Monckton spoke at Bethel College in St. Paul, MN, on the upcoming Copenhagen conference. "Is Obama poised to cede US sovereignty?"

Update, Nov. 21, 2009: Monckton spoke with Michael Coren on Canadian television in October.

Update, Dec 3, 2009: Monckton on Climategate: "The Whistle Blows for Truth."