Saturday, June 04, 2011

Fascist Germany lives on

Hitler was a Greenie, after all. From the quotes below it would seem that greenshirts are just as dangerous to liberty as were the brownshirts of the '30s. Will we be hearing "Heil Klima" soon?

During the Cold War between the Free World and the Communist USSR, many in the Free World argued it was better to be red than dead after nuclear Armageddon. Today, fearing the planet’s annihilation from another source – global warming — scientists in elite government circles in Germany are saying we’re better off green than free.

The scientists – in the form of Germany’s Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change – form German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s advisory committee. The chairman of this council is one of the country’s top climate authorities, Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The council’s report, published last month under the title “World in Transition – Social Contract for a Great Transformation,” argues that “The transformation to a climate friendly economy… is morally as necessary as the abolition of slavery and the outlawing of child labour.”

The great transformation will require that “The world citizenry agree to … surrender spontaneous and persistent desires” – i.e., citizens will need to accept that their lifestyles are unsustainable and collectively accept the need for government to make decisions on their behalf, without the public having a veto over government decisions that could “impede the transition to a sustainable society.”

SOURCE





Director Admits He Withheld Key Evidence From Final Cut of Oscar-Nominated Documentary

Josh Fox, the director of Gasland, an Oscar-nominated documentary, has admitted he withheld evidence that showed gas can occur in water naturally and is not a result of fracking, the natural gas drilling technique that enables recovery of natural gas from previously-untappable rock formations. The video below captures Fox’s disclosure:

In the documentary, Fox claims that fracking has polluted water so badly that it has become flammable, according to a news release issued by Phelim McAleer, a journalist and documentary filmmaker whose efforts have been chronicled on this blog in several posts during the past three years. He specializes in asking difficult questions of the mainstream environmental movement.

In the remainder of his news release, the co-producer of the 2008 feature-length documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, outlines the problems he found in the Big Oil-bashing documentary:

In some of the most dramatic scenes in the documentary Fox shows a number of families lighting their water.

They claim that the gas has only been present in the water since gas companies started fracking a few years ago. Fracking involves retrieving gas rocks using high powered water.

However, under close questioning during a Q&A at a screening at Northwestern University Fox first denied but then admitted that scientists had found gas in water before fracking had occurred in Colorado.

Journalist and filmmaker Phelim McAleer asked him about a report from 1976 by the Colorado Division of Water which said there was a “troublesome amount of methane” in the aquifer close to two families, the Markhams and the McClures, who are featured in the documentary as having problems with their water.

Mr Fox initially denied the existence of the 1976 report, but eventually admitted that there have been reports of “flammable water” in the US since at least 1936.

He said such scientific reports were not relevant to his documentary because he believed the families and accepted their accounts of their situation.

“The point is this.. The citizens [in Colorado] reported they could not light their water on fire before the drilling. And after the drilling they could light their water on fire. (…) I don’t care about reports from 1976, there are reports from 1936 that people said they could light their water on fire in New York City, but that’s no bearing on this situation at all. “

Speaking after the Q&A the journalist Phelim McAleer said the exchange with Fox showed he would withhold facts that did not suit his story.

“This is another example of journalists and filmmakers showing half the story and smothering science that does not suit their narrative. Josh Fox owes it to frightened families to reveal all the facts. He should let them know that some water across the US has gas in it and always has had gas in it. It has nothing to do with fracking,” he added.

“He knew about these reports but chose not to include them – that is not journalism.”

SOURCE




Obama Reversed The Decline In Sea Ice!

Is Obama the only Green prophet who (sort of) got it right? He said that his presidency would mark the moment when "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal"

Prior to the election of Barack Obama, Arctic ice was in a free fall. Leading experts had forecast that the ice would be gone by 2008, 2011, 2013, and even 1960.



After Obama was elected, the sea ice made a sharp reversal – which embarrassed the experts. They failed to consider the Obama healing factor. It is now believed that after Obama’s 12th term as commissar, Canada will be completely covered with ice.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





House Energy and Commerce Committee Approves Legislation to Create Jobs and Increase American Energy Supplies

The House Energy and Commerce Committee today approved bipartisan legislation to increase the production of American-made energy by eliminating unnecessary federal red tape that stalls exploration and stands in the way of job creation. The bill is part of the GOP’s American Energy Initiative, which aims to increase American energy production, create jobs, and create a more secure energy future.

The Jobs and Energy Permitting Act (H.R. 2021), introduced by Reps. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Gene Green (D-TX), would eliminate red tape and expedite EPA's permitting process to allow for increased oil and gas exploration in the Outer Continental Shelf. The bill passed with bipartisan support by a vote of 34 to 14.

The administration’s bureaucratic permitting process under the Clean Air Act has held up oil exploration in the Outer Continental Shelf for years, keeping valuable energy supplies locked away. The Jobs and Energy Permitting Act clarifies the law to correct the permitting process and remove uncertainties creating these delays.

“The Gardner-Green bill will end the perpetual circuit of permits, reviews, and appeals created by EPA’s current system for offshore exploration. Production off the coast of Alaska could make enormous strides to decrease our foreign oil imports, refill the declining Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and create tens of thousands of jobs,” said Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI). “This common-sense legislation is an important part of House Republicans’ efforts under the American Energy Initiative and I look forward to a vote on the House floor soon.”

SOURCE





Obama Commerce Nominee is a Warmist nut

Obama wants John Bryson to lead an agency that is responsible for promoting and fostering business and industry. Why Obama would choose to put an anti-business anti-jobs and anti-economic growth nut in charge of our economic recovery - who was a co-founder of the wildly anti-everything Natural Resources Defense Council - is quite insane!

John Bryson, President Barack Obama's nominee to be secretary of commerce, said it was “incredibly important” that the United States pass cap and trade legislation and that America needed to be a global leader in combating man-made global warming.

“I regard it as incredibly important that the United States comes forth in this year with federal climate change legislation as a foundation for moving ahead,” Bryson told the U.N. International Energy Conference in late August 2009. “I think we in the U.S. have an obligation to assist in significant ways in providing leadership in this community of nations that you represent and addressing energy and climate change.”

Bryson, in stating “in this year,” was speaking about the U.N. Climate Change Conference scheduled for December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Formerly the CEO of Edison International, Bryson has long been an advocate of some sort of federal plan for regulating greenhouse gasses. While still at Edison, he called for a national cap and trade system.

Under cap and trade, in general, the amount of carbon an industry could emit into the air would be capped. For companies that expect to exceed that cap, they could buy (“trade”) carbon credits to supposedly offset their emissions; the money spent for the credit would be redirected to supposedly greener, less polluting companies.

“A deliberate and coordinated effort is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the entire energy sector,” Bryson said in a July 2004 Edison press release.

“Long term, a reasonable and balanced ‘cap-and-trade’ system for reducing carbon dioxide emissions could be adopted once new carbon- dioxide removal technology has been developed and becomes commercially available.”

Bryson, a co-founder of the liberal environmentalist group Natural Resources Defense Council, was most recently a member of the United Nations’ Advisory Group on Energy and Climate Change, a panel of scientific and industry experts tasked with providing advice on combating global warming.

Bryson’s nomination to head Commerce must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

SOURCE





Greenie nonsense leads to bad government

But if it leads to distrust of Greenie policies, that may be a price worth paying. Robert Carling comments from Australia:

The rule of law stands as a bulwark against the arbitrary exercise of power by government. As such it is fundamental to fairness, the freedom of the governed, and the success of the liberal market economy – but it is frequently under attack, sometimes from unexpected quarters. Two recent examples spring to mind.

Retrospective legislation is antithetical to the rule of law. It is like changing the rules of the game after it has been played. But governments sometimes resort to it, citing extraordinary circumstances as the justification.

The freshly minted O’Farrell government in NSW is planning to tear up contracts entered into by its predecessor, which had promised to pay participants in the solar energy scheme a very generous 60 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity generated (the ‘feed-in tariff’). It plans retrospective legislation to invalidate the old contracts, cut the price paid, and deny participants in the scheme any legal recourse against the government.

The solar scheme was an atrocious act of public policy, adopted by the previous government in the expectation that the nasty fiscal consequences would be someone else’s problem.

But can an action of one government be so bad that it justifies retrospective legislation by a successor government? Opinions will differ on this, but the avoidance of retrospectivity is such an important principle that the justification should be very strong indeed, and in my opinion stronger than in this case.

The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated 3 June. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At times I like to remind myself what is real and what is fake in this great culture war.

http://oi54.tinypic.com/hrf1ad.jpg