Category: Green Hell

Question of the day: Exactly how much daylight is there between the population control rantings of Discovery Channel Channel gunman James Lee and the writings of Obama science advisor John Holdren?

by Steve Milloy
July 14, 2010, The Daily Caller

Penn State University just exonerated Professor Michael Mann for wrongdoing related to Climategate. While that good news for Mann is no surprise, it came at a dear cost to Penn State – its integrity.

Soon after Climategate broke last November, Penn State convened an internal committee to investigate Mann, the primary author of the now-infamous and discredited “hockey stick” global warming graph.

Hopes for a bona fide investigation were dashed when the preliminary results were released in February. To the joy of climate alarmists, Penn State announced via press release that Mann was cleared of three of the four allegations against him (regarding falsification/suppression of data, deletion of e-mails/data and misuse of confidential information). But if one looks past the release and reads the committee’s report, it becomes obvious the fix was in.

The preliminary review included the Climategate e-mails themselves, an interview with Mann, and documents submitted by Mann. While one committee member did informally endeavor to get external views on Mann, they only came from Texas A&M’s Gerald North and Stanford University’s Donald Kennedy.

North had earlier dismissed Climategate in a Washington Post interview only a few days after the scandal broke. He also assisted with a futile 2006 effort to rehabilitate Mann’s debunked hockey stick. As editor of Science magazine, Kennedy was an outspoken advocate of climate alarmism.

The committee went to great lengths to defuse the money line from the Climategate e-mails – i.e., “Mike’s Nature trick… to hide the decline.” While explaining how “trick” could merely refer to a “clever device,” the committee failed to even mention “hide the decline,” a phrase referring to Mann’s still-unexplained deletion of temperature data contradicting the climate alarmism hypothesis.

Based on Mann’s denial, the preliminary report concluded that there was no evidence to indicate that Mann intended to delete e-mails – even though that conclusion is contradicted by the plain language and circumstances of the relevant e-mail exchange. No inquiry beyond Mann’s denial was made.

Finally, the preliminary report dismissed the accusation that Mann conspired to silence skeptics by stating, “one finds enormous confusion has been caused by interpretations of the e-mails and their content” – but shouldn’t the committee have attempted to eliminate that confusion?

It’s unclear why the committee didn’t immediately exonerate Mann of the fourth allegation — seriously deviating from accepted practices within the academic community — except that by leaving it open, the committee apparently hoped to rebuild “public trust in science in general and climate science specifically.”

Four months later, the committee’s investigation charade has concluded. Most shocking, however, is that Penn State remains openly unabashed by the investigation’s shoddiness.

As before, a media release clearing Mann of “any wrongdoing” is making alarmists giddy. But once again, the investigation’s disturbing reality is revealed in the report.

The committee again excluded from consideration any document or point of view that might incriminate Mann’s conduct.

Other than the Climategate e-mails, the committee only examined:

(1) undescribed “documents collected by the [committee];” (2) “documents provided by Dr. Mann…”; (3) the committee’s preliminary report; (4) a May British House of Commons whitewash of Climategate; (5) a recent letter published in Science magazine deploring climate skepticism from 255 climate alarmists; (6) a document about the National Science Foundation peer review process; (7) the Department of Energy Guide to Financial Assistance; (8) information on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s peer review process; (9) information regarding the percentage of NSF proposals funded; and (10) Mann’s curriculum vitae.

The committee apparently made no effort to obtain, much less consider, the volumes of available news reports, analyses (including from Congress) and commentary about Mann, the hockey stick and/or Climategate.

More than see no evil, the committee maintained its policy of hear no evil. Of the five additional interviews conducted, four were of Mann’s fellow alarmists. The lone climate skeptic interviewed was MIT professor Richard Lindzen. But the report makes clear that the committee conducted Lindzen’s interview in the finest traditions of a kangaroo court.

Here’s how the report describes the interview:

… When told that the first three allegations against Dr. Mann were dismissed at the inquiry stage… Dr. Lindzen’s response was: ‘It’s thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues that he explicitly stated in the e-mails. I’m wondering what’s going on?’ The Investigatory Committee members did not respond to Dr. Lindzen’s statement. Instead, Dr. Lindzen’s attention was directed to the fourth allegation, and it was explained to him that this is the allegation which the Investigatory Committee is charged to address…

Amazed that the committee would treat a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and an IPCC lead author with such disrespect and disregard, I contacted Dr. Lindzen. He told me, “They also basically ignored what I said. I suppose they interviewed me in order to say that they had interviewed someone who was skeptical of warming alarm.”

The committee asked Mann about e-mails that mention Dr. Stephen McIntyre, one of the scientists credited with debunking Mann’s hockey stick. While Mann told the committee that there was “no merit whatsoever to Mr. [sic] McIntyre’s claims here…,” the committee didn’t interview McIntyre.

The committee also pointed to several awards given to Mann for his research including Scientific American’s naming Mann as one of the “50 leading visionaries in science and technology” and its selection of a web site co-founded by Mann as one of the top 25 “science and technology” web sites in 2005. The committee then wrote, “had Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the respected practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions…”

The Committee also credited Mann with the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. “This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside accepted practices in his field,” the committee observed. MIT’s Lindzen was also a co-Nobelist, but apparently the award didn’t help his credibility.

Global warming and Mann have been worth millions of grant dollars and lots of publicity for Penn State. But one would think the institution’s integrity is worth more.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).

We’re in a Lame-Duck Political Climate
By Steve Milloy
July 8, 2010, RollCall.com

Who would have guessed that 18 months into the Obama administration and a nearly filibuster-proof, Democratic-controlled Congress that cap-and-trade would still be just a green dream? Not many. But then not many people would probably think there’s enough time or political will to make cap-and-trade happen in the time remaining for this session of Congress. That’s wrong, too.

Since its high-water mark of House passage of the Waxman-Markey bill late in June 2009, it’s been all downhill for cap-and-trade. The health care debate delayed a Senate bill, and the tea party movement made cap-and-trade one of its top targets. By the time the Kerry-Boxer bill was introduced last October, the Republican Members of Chairman Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee felt secure enough to boycott the committee vote on the bill, rendering the unanimous Democratic committee vote meaningless.

The continuing inquisition of the health care bill helped bring about the election of Republican Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts and the evaporation of the Democrats’ 60-vote, filibuster-proof margin. When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) dared work with Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) on a cap-and-trade bill, the political blowback for Graham was so strong that he looked for the first excuse out, which came in the form of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s supposed prioritization of the immigration bill over cap-and-trade. The Kerry-Lieberman bill has now been relegated to perhaps being offered as a mere amendment to a Senate energy bill, the main focus of which may be the BP oil spill.

Competing with the Kerry-Lieberman bill are the so-called cap-and-dividend bill by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) and the bill by Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) that attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through any means but cap-and-trade. Recent discussions about a cap-and-trade bill include limiting it to electric utilities rather than being economywide.

Even President Barack Obama seems lost when it comes to cap-and-trade. Although he emphasized the need to transform to a “clean energy” economy during his recent Oval Office speech on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, he was painfully short on details of how to get there, garnering him criticism from prominent carbon cap proponents. Cap-and-trade is so out of favor that its supporters are trying to rebrand it as anything else — including clean energy, “green energy” and “a price on carbon.”

Regardless of branding, expecting the Senate to take a tough vote on cap-and-trade and expecting House Democrats to double down on their Waxman-Markey vote before the November midterms is wishful thinking by any political calculus.

The foregoing aside, cap-and-trade is more of a threat now than ever, thanks to the November-December lame-duck session of Congress.

First, it’s useful to keep in mind the two main lessons from the health care debate — public opinion is not determinative in whether a bill passes Congress, and the Democratic leadership in Congress is willing to bend its rules any which way to pass leadership priorities.

Next, this Congress could be the last chance for cap-and-trade, whatever it’s called in the end. At the very least, Republicans are likely to make significant gains in the House and Senate. Cap-and-trade supporters would have to start all over in the next session of Congress, and the Waxman-Markey bill that squeaked by last June will not likely do so again.

That means cap-and-trade advocates are desperate and could resort to desperate procedural moves in a Congress where lame ducks have nothing to lose and, possibly, everything to gain by voting for their future employers, whether they be the Obama administration, cushy nongovernmental organizations jobs, lobbying firms or industry beneficiaries of cap-and-trade.

But won’t cap-and-trade need 60 Senate votes to pass while Reid can only produce 59 at most? Yes and no.

While Senate Republicans have held together on climate so far — consider their unanimous vote against Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases — Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Collins and several others are on record as supporting some action on climate. While some Senate Democrats have opposed cap-and-trade so far, including Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.), there’s a lot of money sloshing around cap-and-trade that could easily become the next Cornhusker Kickback or Louisiana Purchase.

But who says Reid needs 60 votes in the first place? Sixty votes weren’t needed for health care. Who is to say that Reid can’t decide that cap-and-trade somehow fits under Senate budget reconciliation rules or some other procedural twist of Senate rules where only a bare majority wins. Senate rules, after all, are not enforceable in a court of law. Such a rule change would be the ultimate nuclear option, but desperate cap-and-traders may do desperate things.

So what can be done to stop a kamikaze cap-and-trade attack in the lame-duck Congress?

Republican Senate and House candidates need to make the lame-duck possibility a campaign issue. They should pressure incumbent Democratic Senate candidates to pledge they will not take action on cap-and-trade in a lame-duck session. House Democratic candidates should be pressured to express a similar sentiment in hopes that Senate Democrats who are up for election in 2012 will get the message that a lame-duck vote for cap-and-trade will be held against them next time.

There may be a reason that President Obama was silent on how he planned to press for cap-and-trade during his Oval Office address — he didn’t want to let the lame duck out of the bag.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.”

By Steve Milloy
July 3, 2010, Washington Times

Ronald Reagan’s 10 most dangerous words were, “Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The Gulf oil spill is only the latest validation of that sentiment when it comes to environmental protection.

Just last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government computer models built to plan for Gulf oil spills and relied on by drillers, including BP, erroneously assumed that much of the oil would evaporate rapidly or be dispersed by waves and weather. While evaporation, physical breakup and degradation will be how most of the oil disperses eventually, these overly optimistic models perhaps explain why the feds were unprepared to implement the Clinton-era policy of having adequate oil-containment booms and skimmers easily available to protect the coast.

But faulty modeling was only the first government screw-up. The Jones Act has prevented foreign companies from bringing in skimmers to help clean up the oil and the Coast Guard has kept 80 percent of the U.S. skimmer fleet out of the Gulf in the unlikely event of a simultaneous spill elsewhere.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) blocked skimmer systems offered by the Dutch because water discharged back into the Gulf after processing wouldn’t be sufficiently oil-free. It doesn’t matter that the water put back into the ocean would have been much cleaner than what was taken out of the ocean. EPA regulations nonsensically only allow pure water to be discharged back into the ocean, even in the process of cleaning up an oil spill.

Early on, the EPA tried to block BP from using the only effective oil dispersant available because of purported toxicity concerns, ignoring the reality that nothing survives in an oil slick in the first place. The Hoover Institution’s Henry Miller recently observed that EPA’s long-standing anti-biotechnology leanings have delayed the development and commercialization of genetically modified microorganisms that could feed on spilled oil.

Then there’s the Army Corps of Engineers’ delay of the construction of oil-blocking sand berms pending completion of an entirely bureaucratic environmental impact statement.

If there’s any time in history when the feds have well earned the epithet “gooberment,” that time is now. That said, federal ineptitude is nothing new when it comes to environmental protection.

The EPA’s dogged determination to force unrealistic cleanup levels on toxic waste sites under the infamous Superfund program delayed the removal of pollution for 15 years. The agency’s junk-science-based stubbornness ensured that far more money was spent on litigation and lobbyists than cleanup. But the EPA has wasted more than just time and money with Superfund – it has ruined lives and polluted the environment.

In 1982, the EPA infamously purchased and evacuated the town of Times Beach, Miss., amid the era’s unwarranted hysteria over dioxin. More than 2,000 people were involuntarily displaced from their homes, and the community was permanently bulldozed at a total cost of about $150 million.

The EPA is overseeing the “cleanup” of PCBs in Hudson River sediments – contaminants that had been safely entombed there for more than 30 years. As predicted by many, the cleanup stirred up PCBs last summer, causing water contamination at unsafe levels.

As a result of the EPA’s campaign to scare the public about the safety of chlorinated drinking water, Peruvian officials once discontinued the use of chlorine, exacerbating a deadly 1991 cholera epidemic. Closer to home, the same scare campaign led to increased levels of lead in Washington, D.C., drinking water when local officials substituted a more corrosive ammonia-based disinfectant for chlorine. Then there’s EPA’s infamous 1972 ban of the pesticide DDT, a decision that has had effects of genocidal proportions on sub-Saharan Africa.

Perhaps the next Congress will consider reforming an agency from which the environment and human health may actually need protection.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery, 2009).

By Steve Milloy
Washington Times, May 27, 2010

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a perplexing beast. While the agency remains hellbent on regulating colorless, odorless and likely harmless greenhouse gas emissions, it has been utterly incapable of living up to its name with respect to the Gulf oil spill.

Not only was the EPA caught entirely unprepared for the oil spill, but also last week it actually tried to interfere with BP’s efforts to use a chemical called Corexit to speed up dispersal of the oil. When the EPA told BP that it should use a less toxic chemical, BP rightly ignored the order because it’s the oil, not the dispersant (stupid) that is the real threat to the environment, and there is no better option than the detergentlike Corexit.

Though laboratory toxicity tests show that Corexit will kill 50 percent of the fish exposed to a concentration of 15 parts per million over a period of four days, what the EPA seems to have overlooked is that there are no fish still living in an oil slick in the first place. By the time the oil has dispersed, so too will have the Corexit, down to nontoxic levels. But in the EPA mindset, all chemicals are bad and to be avoided – even ones that help and are, practically speaking, harmless.

But that is not the extent of the EPA’s failure.

Millions of feet of boom are desperately needed to corral the expanding slick and protect coastlines. Only a small fraction of that boom has arrived in the Gulf region, and not even all of that has been deployed. Let’s not forget the initial failure to have fire boom available nearby, which could have corralled the oil so that it could be burned – a 1990s-era requirement developed by the Clinton administration but not implemented by the EPA.

None of this is to excuse BP, the rig owners, and the other federal agencies whose performances have been far from inspiring, but at least none of them is called the Environmental Protection Agency.

As real pollution spews forth uncontrollably in the Gulf, the clueless EPA is meanwhile busy scheming to skirt the law and regulate the non-pollution that emanates from the nation’s power plants and manufacturing facilities.

Although the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2007 that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, that law would require that EPA regulate all sources of greenhouse gases that emit more than 250 tons per year. As the average American emits about 20 tons per year, it’s easy to see how the law would require the EPA to regulate virtually every small business and apartment building.

So, to avoid the obvious political problem of having to microregulate virtually all of society, the EPA devised a scheme (called the “tailoring rule”) to limit regulation to facilities that emit 100,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year. This may sound like a reasonable approach, except that the EPA lacks the legal authority to change the Clean Air Act, which sets the threshold for regulation at 250 tons.

Barring successful legal challenge, the EPA is planning to regulate large greenhouse-gas emitters starting in 2011.

The only remaining roadblock to the agency plan is a resolution introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski and 40 other Republican and Democratic senators to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Debate and vote on the resolution has been scheduled for June 10.

Despite its 41 co-sponsors, the Murkowski resolution is no cinch to get the 51 votes it needs to pass the Senate. Democratic moderates like Virginia’s Jim Webb and Mark Warner, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter and Bob Casey, North Dakota’s Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and Republicans like Maine’s Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe have not yet publicly embraced the bill.

This is despite the fact that the EPA is showing precisely how unprepared and inept it is at dealing with a genuine environmental crisis. In contrast, the agency and its lawyers have been quite creative and adept at devising a scheme to create and regulate a non-crisis.

Passing the Murkowski resolution should be Congress’ first step in a longer process of re-evaluating what the EPA is all about.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).

By Steve Milloy
The Washington Times, May 27, 2010

The EPA has a history of impeding environmental protection, most notably with toxic-waste-site cleanup and nuclear waste storage.

In the wake of the 1978 Love Canal controversy, a lame-duck Congress and president enacted the Superfund law in December 1980 to provide for the cleanup of so-called toxic-waste sites. But the Superfund law was poorly designed. By the early 1990s, few sites had been cleaned up. Moreover, while it would take only about two years to actually clean up a site, it would take 10 years to progress to the point of implementation. An average cleanup cost $25 million. The Department of Energy was looking down the barrel of $300 billion worth of cleanups. More money was spent litigating cleanups than actually cleaning up.

Although there were many problematical aspects of the Superfund law, the EPA’s control over cleanups was the greatest obstacle to the program’s goals. “How clean is clean?” was the famous rhetorical question of the time. In the early years of Superfund, the EPA doggedly maintained that sites had to be cleaned up virtually to something near Garden of Eden status – an obviously silly goal for a dump or an industrial facility. It wasn’t good enough just to seal off the facilities and prevent public exposure to substances at the site. Such standards added unnecessary millions to the cost of every cleanup. Because private parties had to pay, they fought the EPA every step of the way.

Sites began getting cleaned up faster and more cheaply during the Clinton administration after cleanup standards became more reasonable in a practical effort to get the program moving. No longer was the groundwater at sites being pumped and treated until it was good enough to be bottled. No longer was soil treated to the point where a hypothetical child could eat spoonfuls of soil from the site’s most contaminated or “hot” spot.

Another example of EPA impeding environmental protection is the now-abandoned project to store spent nuclear fuel at the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada. Although the Yucca Mountain site was in a remote part of the Nevada desert and the spent fuel would have been stored in sealed casks one mile underground, the EPA set standards that virtually guaranteed the facility would never open.

The EPA decided that the Department of Energy (DOE) would have to be able to guarantee that there would be no significant exposures to the public from radiation for a period of 1 million years – about 200 times longer than recorded history. The DOE was being forced by the EPA to figure out how it might communicate with and warn future civilizations that might not understand English-language warnings about the spent nuclear fuel stored beneath the mountain.

DOE, of course, could never hope to meet the EPA’s standards. Despite 25 years of engineering and $30 billion in costs, Yucca Mountain was a dead man walking when the Obama administration defunded it early in 2009. Because of the lack of a long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, nuclear power plants are forced to continue storing spent fuel in on-site storage pools – facilities that are running out of space.

By Steve Milloy
The Daily Caller, May 21, 2010

Sometime before June 7, the so-called Murkowski resolution to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases will be voted on in the Senate. Democrats up for re-election this fall may want to think twice about a knee-jerk “no” vote.

Finalized last December but not yet implemented, EPA regulation of greenhouse gases would be even worse economically than cap-and-trade, which is already bad enough. (How bad is cap-and-trade? So bad that massive Democrat congressional majorities can’t pass it.)

EPA greenhouse gas regulation would empower the agency to control energy use (and, hence, the economy) without any of the potential ameliorative effects from the trade part of cap-and-trade or the dividend part of Cantwell-Collins’ cap-and-dividend. EPA regulation would just be cap-and-pain.

Some quick-learning Democratic senators, like Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, Arkansas’ Blanche Lincoln, and Nebraska’s Ben Nelson have already figured out the politics of EPA cap-and-pain. They joined Sen. Lisa Murkowski when the resolution was introduced in January.

But senators like Colorado’s Michael Bennett, Nevada’s Harry Reid, and North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan are still dithering hoping that Murkowski will either not bring her resolution to the floor for a vote or that it will be overtaken by a separate effort by West Virginia’s Jay Rockfeller that would delay EPA regulation for two years.

But Sen. Murkowski seems undeterred in what could be the only Senate vote this year on climate.

Given the ornery mood of the electorate — ask Utah’s Bob Bennett or Indiana’s Evan Bayh — it should be a no-brainer for Senate Democrats to vote for Murkowski. After all, it’s really a free vote for them since even if a similar bill passed the House, President Obama would surely veto it and the EPA would not be curbed. At least they could claim they tried to do the right thing.

Yet Senate Democrats seem willing to go on record as supporting EPA control and destruction of the economy. How they expect this will help them other than with their extreme leftie supporters (who are not numerous enough to get them elected to anything) is anyone’s guess.

The original idea behind EPA regulation was to force businesses to capitulate and swallow cap-and-trade. But that hasn’t happened. The Climategate scandal has given new life to lawsuits challenging EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. Businesses — even some that are for cap-and-trade — oppose cap-and-pain and are ready to fight.

The vote on the Murkowski resolution will be close. Should it fall a vote or two short, you can bet on that vote being a major issue this fall in Senate races. Should the EPA actually try to regulate greenhouse gases starting in 2011, you can bet that the 2012 election will take an even greater toll on the Democrat Party.
There is no political upside to permitting EPA to implement cap-and-pain. Clear thinking Senate Democrats will figure that out sooner rather than too-later.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them (Regnery 2009).

Speaking before the Business Roundtable yesterday, President Obama denied that he was a socialist, stating:

“Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, I am an ardent believer in the free market… We have arrived at a juncture in our politics where reasonable efforts to update our regulations, or make basic investments in our future, are too often greeted with cries of ‘government takeover’ or even ‘socialism’…” [Emphasis added]

Now check out this excerpt from James Mann’s The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (Viking 2009):

In a 1960 letter to Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, who had published an article by [screenwriter and Communist Party member Dalton Trumbo] and defended his right to freedom of speech, Reagan recalled how his views [on communism] had been formed during [the late-1940s]. “I once thought exactly as you think… It took seven months of meeting communists and communist-influenced people across a table in almost daily sessions while pickets rioted in front of studio gates, homes were bombed and a great industry almost ground to a halt.” What bothered Reagan above all, he wrote, was the discovery that Communist Party members operated in secret and did not tell the truth. “I, like you, will defend the right of any American to openly practice and preach any political philospophy from monarchy to anarchy,” he told Hefner. “But this is not the case with regard to the communist. He is bound by party discipline to deny that he is a communist so that he can by subversion and stealth impose on an unwilling people the rule of the International Communist Party which is in fact the government of Soviet Russia.” Anticommunism for Reagan, then, was not primarily foreign policy or geopolitics; it was personal and moralistic in nature, driven by his experiences with people he considered sophisticated and devious, who did not abide by the small-town Midwestern values he had absorbed in his youth.

While Obama says he’s for the free market and that his policies are not socialist, all his actions, policies and proposal are in actuality anti-free market and socialist — e.g., the auto takeover, cap-and-trade, and nationalized health care to name just a few. Moreover, Obama surrounds himself with admitted socialists and communists, like Carol Browner, Van Jones to name just two.

So what would Reagan say about Obama?

So much for the Copenhagen Accord. The Obama administration apparently is backing off its promise made in Copenhagen to provide up to $100 billion in aid to developing countries.

According to a repot in today’s Climatewire:

America’s contribution to $100 billion in annual global climate change funding by 2020 may not be over and above existing foreign aid, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated yesterday.

The promised money — which Clinton announced at the U.N. climate summit in Denmark last month and pledged the United States would take a lead role in mobilizing — was a key element in the final global warming accord that world leaders approved.

Yet while the Copenhagen Accord, as it is known, calls for “scaled up, new and additional” money to help poor nations cope with climate change-provoked disasters, Clinton sidestepped the commitment when asked directly if the U.S. portion would be additional.

“We don’t know yet, because we don’t know what the Congress is going to do,” Clinton told a crowd at the Center for Global Development.

President Obama called the Copenhagen Accord a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough.” While Obama’s breaking of a promise certainly is not “unprecedented” — whatever happened to healthcare discussions being broadcast on C-SPAN — it should be meaningful to Americans. Don’t believe President Obama.