Solar energy fiasco.

As failed solar panel manufacturer Solyndra rides through the investigative ringer in Congress, revelations of another politically-connected company that received what appears to be a less-than-virtuous $1.2 billion loan guarantee are surfacing. The company, SunPower, received its $1.2 billion loan guarantee in September, immediately before the program’s deadline. SunPower isn’t as financially sound as the public was led to believe when it secured a loan guarantee twice the size of Solyndra’s $535 million loan. Just this week — less than a month after taxpayers landed on the hook for SunPower’s $1.2 billion loan guarantee —
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The Green money pit

Last week, the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) released a report on the amount of money that has been spent in the fight over Transcanada Corp.’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline, which would run 1,700 miles from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, is opposed by environmentalists.

Unfortunately, CRP’s report portrays the fight as a battle between “Big Oil” and poor little environmental activist groups. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The report quotes Eddie Scher, the senior communications strategist for the Sierra Club. Scher complains that environmental groups can’t compete with the “literally unlimited resources” of energy companies.

“There’s no question we’re up against big numbers of campaign dollars,” he said. “We’re up against the cream of the crop when it comes to K Street lobbyists. But we believe even well-financed insanity is trumped by democracy.”

But the Sierra Club - like other major environmental groups - is by no means poor. At the end of 2009, it had more than $170 million in assets between its activist wing and its education foundation. The Nature Conservancy ended last year with $5.65 billion in assets, after taking in $210.5 million in revenue. The World Wildlife Fund had $377.5 million in assets as of June 2010, after scraping together $177.7 million for the fiscal year. And the National Audubon Society had $305.9 million stashed away at the end of last year. The Environmental Defense Fund, Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and almost every other national “green” group you’ve ever heard of are similarly “impoverished.”

And then there are the foundations - dozens if not hundreds of them - that finance environmental activism. Among their benefactors: the Energy Foundation ($68.6 million in assets), the Joyce Foundation ($773.6 million), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund ($729 million), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ($6.8 billion), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation ($5.7 billion), and Heinz Endowments ($1.2 billion).

Scher’s Sierra Club might not spend as much money on lobbying as energy companies do, but that’s by choice. The part of the Sierra Club that is organized under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code - in other words, the part of the organization that isn’t limited by lobbying restrictions - had nearly $49 million in assets at its disposal at the end of 2009. According to its 2009 tax return, the group spent about $4.9 million on “lobbying and political expenditures.” Only $480,000 of that money was spent at the federal level. The other $4.4 million was spent lobbying at the state level or on political activities like advertisements.

But that’s because the Sierra Club has made a strategic decision to focus more on litigation than on lobbying. The group files, on average, one lawsuit per week.

Other groups with as much financial might, such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, make similar tactical decisions about litigation, lobbying, and other activities. In fact, litigation involves more bullying than lobbying does. There are few things worse in life than dealing with lawsuits.

It’s time for the people at these well-heeled environmental groups to stop whining about how they “can’t compete” with energy companies.

new Orleans levees

We keep hearing "It is Was George Bush and the republicans" who blocked the levee construction in New Orleans. Think Again.
"My feeling was that saving human lives was more important than saving a percentage of shrimp and crab in Lake Pontchartrain," Towers told the Times. "I told my staff at the time that this judge had condemned the city. Some people said I was being a little dramatic."


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First Nation Funding

Here

The voice of science: let's agree to disagree

Real science depends for its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect knowledge.”

Carbon credit Uganda style

But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.

The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations.  HERE

Gore effect on Climate Parody Day

So there is nothing unusual about the weather and the behavior of the atmosphere on September 14th, 2011, in comparison with any similar late Summer date in the recent centuries. Still, there exist people on this world who have the stomach to talk for 24 hours – and address their speech to 7 billion people (even though only dozens will listen) – and say that the Earth is nearly dying in their struggle to earn the first billion of dollars coming purely out of malicious libels attacking carbon, the key element of all of life.

FA launches ‘Let’s Kick Climate Change Denial Out of Football’ campaign

‘There is absolutely no place for this type of bigotry in the modern game,’ said Barry Jones, the FA’s new climate change guru and leading light in the zero-tolerance community. ‘We’ve come a long way since the days when it was considered acceptable for players and fans to joke about holes in the ozone layer and melting ice caps, but now we need to stamp it out for good.’

Global Cooling?

Listen to Joe Bastardi on the right of the screen.

scientists would not lie

Yea Sure Big Al and what is next? You did not became the first environmental Billionaire?

NOAA's Climate Office.

this is a must read. The current upper echelons of NOAA are remorseless eco-zealots. They are not public servants in that they feel no need to answer to the American people. They have their truth, and it shall be the truth for all, or else. Congress must stick to their guns and not allow this callous cabal to reorganize before the 2012 election.

Trying to put the Climategate genie back in the bottle..by Judith Curry

Anna Haynes (sourcewatch) latest antics:

For example, one of Mashey and Mann’s supporters has made it her business to contact by telephone and e-mail NAS trustees, members, employees, and others with leading questions about my views on climate change and sustainability. Her questions have insinuated that two former employees of NAS who died in 1995 were murdered, perhaps at the behest of Richard Mellon Scaife! (As it happened both died of heart attacks; and both had suffered previous heart attacks.) This woman has similarly attacked other people and organizations that express views on climate change that she disagrees with. Her targets have sometimes spoken up, but as far as I can tell she is accepted by AGW proponents as a welcome contributor to the effort.

Wood closes with the following text:

The techniques vary. The results, however, are similar: What cannot be established by transparent science can be imposed by coercion and intimidation.

The hardball approach of his defenders is in large part a reflex of this loss of prestige and authority. The proponents of AGW, however, have chosen a very foolish tactic. Bullying skeptics and sneering at those who raise questions is no way to regain public trust.

The sharp practices of the warmists also damage the tenor of academic, scientific, and public debate. Frivolous lawsuits, intimidation, mobbing are not the flying buttresses of modern science. They are the rot that undermines the intellectual authority of science. Can you trust anything said by someone who engages in such tactics?

Now it is the SUN?

Last week it was China's Coal

UN climate talks will collapse without EU leadership, thinktank warns

"Copenhagen and Cancún summits." Here
Both were failures .
here

what if it was Exxon-Mobil?

Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre discovered earlier this week that the IPCC’s recent report on alternative energy — which asserted that it was possible to convert the world to 80% green energy by 2050 if politicians would simply tax conventional sources and spend billions on alternative sources — was lifted largely from Greenpeace reports.

The lead author of the IPCC report turns out to be Sven Teske, a Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner, who the IPCC does not identify as such in either the report or its media releases. Mr. Teske is also the author of much of the Greenpeace material on which the IPCC report is based, in effect making him a peer reviewer of the validity of his own material.NP
here

A gem

NAS Climate Panel Fails The Laugh Test

May 18, 2011

By James Taylor, Forbes

Three environmental activists and a duck walk into a bar and start talking global warming with a dozen people who have no formal education in climate science. Sound like the beginning of a bad joke? Actually, it’s not. It’s what the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) would have us believe is an expert, objective, scientifically authoritative panel qualified to produce its latest report, America’s Climate Choices.

America’s Climate Choices asserts that humans are the primary cause of recent climate change that poses significant risks to human welfare and the environment. The report asserts we need to act now to fend off future harms.

Environmental activist groups and their media allies have had a field day claiming America�s Climate Choices is an unquestionably objective and expert report providing irrefutable proof that humans are causing a global warming crisis.

USA Today, for example, claimed the report was authored by “the nation�s pre-eminent scientific advisory group” and said the report “leave[s] the deniers in the same position as the ‘birthers’” who challenge President Obama’s reported birthplace.

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post referred to the report as “the scientific consensus of America’s premier scientific advisory group” and says “climate-change deniers, in other words, are willfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three.”

These are very strong assertions. Let’s see if the facts back them up.

Only 23 people served on the panel. This is hardly sufficient to form a �scientific consensus.�

Of the 23 panelists, only five have a Ph.D. in a field closely related to climate science. That’s less than 22%.

Five of the 23 panelists are or were staffers for environmental activist organizations. That means there are as many professional environmental activists on the panel as there are persons with climate-related science degrees.

Prior to publishing the report, 19 of the 23 made statements claiming global warming is a human induced problem and/or we need to take action to reduce carbon dioxide restrictions. That means 83% of the panel was clearly and obviously biased before being selected.

Two of the panelists are or were politicians.

One of the panelists was appointed by the Clinton administration as general counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency.

To claim that a report from such a small panel, comprised primarily of non-climate scientists and environmental activists, is objective and scientifically authoritative is a joke. The fact that 19 of the 23 panelists were clearly biased before even writing the report makes the report an even bigger joke. The only thing missing from such an “expert” and “objective” panel is the presence of Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.”

When environmental activists lament the fact that public opinion has turned so forcefully against global warming alarmism, they need only look in the mirror to find the answer. You can’t trot out staffers from Environmental Defense Fund, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and other environmental activist groups and claim this is authoritative, objective science. And if you are going to issue a global warming report and claim it is from impeccably qualified scientific sources, at least a quarter of the report’s authors should be climate scientists.

Environmental activists and their media allies repeatedly point out that America’s Climate Choices is a National Academy of Sciences publication. Rather than provide credibility for the panel of activists and non-climate scientists, the involvement of NAS merely illustrates how far away from quality, objective science NAS has travelled when the topic is a political one as well as scientific one. The fact that NAS chose to publish the report in no way changes the fact that the report was written by a very small panel of environmental activists and non-climate scientists. All the Washington Post and USA Today editorials in the world cannot change the fact that the NAS panel is about as close to representing an objective, authoritative scientific consensus on climate science as Donald Trump is to representing an objective, authoritative scientific consensus on the accuracy of President Obama’s birth claims.

Indeed, when three environmental activists and a duck walk into a bar to discuss global warming with non-climate scientists, the duck is most objective, qualified source in the room. Too bad the duck was the only entity left off the NAS panel.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

Marc Morano has compiled some links here.http://www.climatedepot.com/a/11086/Climate-Depots-Round-up-on-National-Research-Councils-media-hyped-political-science-scare-report

Repulsive: National Research Council Chaired by Corrupted Warmist Ralph Cicerone: Turned Org. into political advocacy group: $6 million NAS study used to lobby for climate bill rcicerone@nas.edu

Flashback: MIT’s Lindzen Slams: ‘Ralph Cicerone of NAS/NRC is saying that regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If gov’t wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide’

The Global Warming Doctrine is Not a Science

They also know how to do it. They want to organize the CO2 emissions reduction by means of directives (or commands) issued by the institutions of “global governance”. They forget to tell us that this is not possible without undermining democracy, independence of individual countries, human freedom, economic prosperity and a chance to eliminate poverty in the world. They pretend that the CO2 emissions reduction will bring benefits which will exceed its costs.

Dr Igor Polyakov (University of Alaska) for the period 1860-2005.

These latest findings appear to contradict the general perception that sea level rise is escalating at present.
This data set shows clearly that the Arctic was at its warmest in 1935 and 1936 and the present temperature in the Arctic is about the same as it was in the mid-1930s. Further, the Arctic witnessed significant icecap and glacier melting during the 1920s and 1930s as evidenced by the following commentary “The Arctic sea is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared (US Weather Bureau CIRCA 1922)”.Study finds no acceleration in sea level rise, but instead a small average deceleration of -0.0014 and -0.0123 mm/yr2. These latest findings appear to contradict the general perception that sea level rise is escalating at present.(Houston & Dean (Journal of Coastal Research 2011)

Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years

The professor says students need to know because they must deal with the buildup of CO2 causing climate change. This discloses his ignorance about the science of the carbon cycle and the role of CO2 in climate. It’s not surprising, and caused by three major factors:

1. a function of the emotional, irrational, religious approach to environmentalism;
2. the takeover of climate science for a political agenda; and
3. funding directed to prove the political, rather than the scientific, agenda.