Tom Friedman or aFraidman?

As part of a recent green campaign against Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell — click here for the Earth First! smear — the green BuildIntelBlog put up a virtual debate between Milloy and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, author of the book Hot, Flat and Crowded.

Milloy actually had this sort of idea first and, in a May 11 e-mail, suggested to Friedman a real live debate of the themes of their books. Alas, Friedman has not responded.

Perhaps Friedman’s enthusiastic agreement to the challenge was lost somewhere in electronic oblivion or, perhaps, like Al Gore and other alarmists, he’s simply aFraidman.

So which is it, Mr. Friedman?

Hmmm... could I really defend 'Hot, Flat & Crowded'?
Hmmm... could I really defend 'Hot, Flat & Crowded'?

Obama climate czar deja vu: Browner no stranger to law-breaking?

Obama climate czar Carol Browner, accused by House Republicans last week of deliberately violating the Presidential Records Act, seems to be no stranger to abusing, possibly illegally, her government power.

In 1995 when House Republicans were pushing their “Contract With America” legislative proposals, Rep. David McIntosh (R-IN) accused then-EPA Administrator Browner of…

… breaking the law by sending out fact sheets and news releases on the bill, which is part of the Republicans’ Contract With America…

… according to the New York Times.

Federal agencies are barred by the Hatch Act from lobbying Congress on their own behalf.

The Times article laughed off the accusations since

… the law is rarely enforced…

… which is what you’d expect when the law-breakers and law-enforcers are part of the same administration.

Spotted Owl of Solar Power?

This one-inch fish is shaping up to be the excuse for blocking water-cooled solar projects on public lands in Western deserts:

Pupfish

Remember the allegedly endangered spotted owl that nearly brought timber harvesting in California to a halt in the 1980s? Not only was the spotted owl never “endangered,” but now with logging greatly reduced, it (and all else) faces an even more devastating threat — uncontrollable forest fires. Go green, yeah!

So now we have a situation where there’s a “planetary emergency” (just ask Al Gore) and where solar power could be part of the solution to the alleged problem. But because of the one-inch pupfish that lives in desert pools (a vital part of the global ecosystem?), the solution to the emergency can’t be implemented. Go green, yeah!

Click here for today’s Wall Street Journal story on the all-important pupfish.

Climate change you can believe in…

Ahead of the release of the US Global Change Research Program‘s new study, Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center told the New York Times,

“[Climate change is] not just happening in the Arctic regions, but it’s beginning to show up in our backyards.”

Indeed it is. Tomorrow’s forecast for my backyard in Potomac, MD is a high of 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The average high for June is 85 degrees.

Hey, maybe the Kyoto Protocol is working after all?

NOAA's Thomas Karl forecasts climate change you can believe in...
NOAA's Thomas Karl forecasts climate change you can believe in...
... and today's weahther map bears him out... OK, so the change is in a different direction... details... details...
... and today's weahther map bears him out... OK, so the change is in a different direction... details... details...

Climate thuggery: Markey tries fed agency to intimidate cap-and-trade opponent

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) tried to use the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to intimidate a utility executive who testified against the Waxman-Markey climate bill.

Immediately after MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company Chairman David Sokol testified against cap-and-trade on June 9, Rep. Markey sent a letter to FERC chairman Jon Wellinghoff asking for an investigation of MidAmerican.

Although Rep. Markey quickly sent up a follow-up letter asking FERC not to focus on solely MidAmerican but on all investor-owned utilities, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee rebuked Markey on June 12:

… Our witnesses… have every right to expect that in
exchange for their honesty with us, they will not be subjected to sanction, retribution and vengeance simply because the facts and opinions they offer do not square with those of the Committee’s members. Exercising the power of the Majority requires a special responsibility to protect witnesses.

… As the hearing was still under way, however, Mr. Sokol and his company became the focus of apparent intimidation when Chairman Markey by letter dated the day of the hearing, asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to answer specific questions about investment and transmission-related activities of MidAmerican Energy and its parent, investor Warren Buffett…

… An after-the-fact rationalization, however, does not change the appearance that Chairman Markey’s June 9 letter to FERC was intended to badger and harass a witness whose offense was merely daring to disagree with Mr. Markey on a matter of professional experience and knowledge.

Mr. Sokol, who voluntarily testified at Congress’s request on Tuesday, could assume from his trip to Washington that if you are a good citizen and you agree to testify truthfully before the Congress, you better make sure that your views do not conflict with those of the ruling Majority. Otherwise, you will risk having the Majority abuse its powers by sending a government regulator to harass you and your company.

We have grave concerns about Chairman Markey’s actions and their implications for the future. Not only might they damage the reputation of this Committee as being a place where truth is welcomed and honest debate is cherished; it could well make all witnesses think twice before accepting an invitation to appear before us to tell us something other than exactly what the Majority wants to hear. Honest, fair public policy can only be made if a full range of opinions are presented to Congress, not just what the Majority wants to hear.

Sadly, this is not the first time the nation has seen this sort of troubling behavior from its officials. As you know, within the memories of many of us, agents of the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies were systematically dispatched to cow dissidents and smother protest against government policy. Just this week the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee instructed Democrat health care lobbyists not to meet with Republicans. If a pattern of intimidation and bullying is being created by the Majority party, it is a sad thing. As members of the Minority party, we will do everything possible to stop this emerging pattern.

We implore you to take whatever actions are necessary to make certain that this sorry episode is vacated and never replicated. Rather than trying to explain his way around his specific questions that FERC has not answered yet, Chairman Markey should explicitly rescind his request to have FERC pry into the activities of Mr. Sokol, Mr. Buffett, and MidAmerican. No company in America or its employees should be harassed. We are confident that you agree with us on the basic protection all witnesses before our committee have a right to expect…

Will the real Luca Brazzi please raise his hand?

Markey

Luca


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Obama climate czar accused of law-breaking

House Republicans Darrell Issa and James Sensenbrenner are calling for an investigation of whether Obama climate czar Carol Browner’s secrecy in developing Obama’s CAFE standards and EPA’s CO2 endangerment finding was a “deliberate and willful violation” of the Presidential Records Act.

According to the letter,

… Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), revealed to the New York Times that the White House held a series of secret meetings with select special interests as they were crafting the new CAFE standards. Nichols was a key player in these negotiations because of California’s determined efforts to regulate fuel economy standards at the state level. Nichols admitted there was a deliberate “vow of silence”
surrounding the negotiations between the White House and California on vehicle fuel economy [standards]. According to Nichols’ interview, “[Carol] Browner [Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change] quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials.” Great care was taken to “put nothing in writing, ever.” This coordinated effort, led by Carol Browner, to leave no paper trail of the deliberations within the White House appears to be a deliberate and willful violation of the Presidential Records Act. This Act requires the President to take, “all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records.” Clearly, Browner’s actions were intended to leave little to no documentation of the deliberations that lead to the development of stringent new CAFE standards.

So much for President Obama’s Jan. 21 committment to unprecedented openness in government.

Click here for the Issa/Sensenbrenner letter.

This case is not like Dick Cheney’s 2005 win-for-White-House-secrecy stemming from the 2001 lawsuit by green groups over Cheney’s refusal to release documents from the National Energy Policy Development Group under the Freedom of Information Act. In that case, a federal appeals court ruled that the NEPDG was not an agency subject to FOIA. But no one accused the NEPDG of conspiring to evade whatever record retention law might have been applicable.

Yes, this is the same Carol Browner who JunkScience.com exposed earlier this year as an official with Socialist International.

Click here for a copy of the Socialist International web page before Browner’s photo and name were scrubbed.

An appropriate historical footnote to this situation comes from a 1960 letter to Playboy from Ronald Reagan about his awakening to communism, as retold by James Mann in The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan (Viking Press, 2009):

What bothereed 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 philosophy 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 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. Anti-communism 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…

“General Secretary” is probably more apt than “czar” for Browner.

Oh, Carol...
Oh, Carol...

Greens: Replace dams with wind, gas

The New York Times reports to day that the Sierra Club wants to raze dams in the Northwest and replace them with

… wind turbines in more places, to help balance power generation by ensuring that some are always in an area where the wind is blowing, or relying more on the Northwest’s natural gas plants in combination with energy-saving measures.

This is, of course, another half-baked, hare-brained idea designed more to cause energy chaos and shortages than to provide “clean energy” and help the “endangered salmon.”

The erratic nature of wind power cannot be remedied by more windmills in more places because… well… wind power is erratic. Just because the wind isn’t blowing here doesn’t mean it’s blowing there. Then there are the problems of all those expensive transmission lines that would need to be installed for the extra windmills, the eyesore nature of windmills, their large footprint, the migratory bird-Cuisinart controversy, additional taxpayer subsidies and more.

And what’s this, the Sierra Club wants to replace low greenhouse gas emitting hydropower with fossil fuels? Are they serious? What about the planetary emergency? Is saving salmon more important than saving the world from the dreaded global warming? Didn’t Kofi Oil-for-Food Annan just say that global warming kills 300,000 people every year? And WWAGS?

Energy-saving measures? Now we get to the nut-cutting, as Lyndon Johnson used to say. “Energy-saving” is green-speak for rationing — and isn’t that what the greens really want?

San Francisco: The recycling police state

San Franciscans will soon be fined unless they dispose of trash and recycle precisely according to the scheme below:

SFTRASH

San Francisco’s idea has some merit — but we recommend the following improvements to the scheme:

SFTRASH1

Click here for the San Francisco Chronicle report.

Green lawsuit in California seen as warm-up for future climate litigation

Carbon Control News reports that two “environmental justice” groups (Communities for a Better Environment and California Communities Against Toxics) sued the state of California on June 10 alleging the state’s climate change program violates its 2006 global warming law. [Click here for the summary].

Carbon Control News rightly pointed out that the lawsuit

… could foreshadow similar legal challenges facing a federal GHG cap-and-trade program, because the California groups, who question the effectiveness of emissions trading, are also opposed to the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation.

The lesson here — especially for USCAP’s business members — is that while businesses may feel like they can deal with seemingly “mainstream” green groups (like USCAP’s Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council) in crafting a survivable climate bill, in the end the more extreme green groups will come along and try to scuttle the deal in favor of more extreme regulation.