'76 Blog

The first Earth Day in 1970 came to pass with a plethora of statements from the usual alarmist suspects (e.g., Paul Ehrlich, Dennis Hayes, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, et al) that, in hindsight, should make any sane person laugh out loud. The fact making these a lot less funny is that similarly outrageous statements are being made today by the likes of Al Gore & Co. A sampling of the 1970 stuff appears at the end of this commentary. The fatal fault underlying much said by these disciples of Thomas Malthus is their apparent ignorance of history. Thus, they are oblivious to the wisdom in a metaphor coined, I think, by Sir Isaac Newton, circa 1675, while writing to another giant of science of his day, Robert Hooke: "If I have seen further (than you and Descartes) it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." The Malthusian conceit leading to such as 1972's The Limits to Growth is that human progress cannot continue beyond the present so behavior must now be strictly controlled to avoid the disasters conjured up in the Malthusians' vivid imaginations. One might put it, "We midgets cannot contribute to growth of the giant on whose shoulders we stand (all accumulated human knowledge), so we must retreat." A contemporary example I like to cite is the story of natural gas supply today vis-à-vis 1978, when Congress enacted, and Pres. Carter signed, the National Energy Act. That act comprised the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act and four other acts. The fuel use act commanded a rapid switch to coal, considered necessary mostly on account of imminent depletion of natural gas availability to zero (as well as the need—surprise, surprise—to reduce oil imports!). We now have a glut of natural gas on account of drilling and fracturing techniques undreamt of by the 1978 crowd. This Malthsian scarcity stuff is manna for the socialist one-world government types. "Sustainability" is their code word of choice. A fairly extensive discussion of that appears here on my website. Colorado's flagship public university at Boulder, like hundreds of other institutions of purportedly higher learnng all over the country, is all in to "sustainability." But don't ask for a working definition. I have, and the Chancellor's office either cannot, or is afraid to, provide it. 1970 Earth Day Predictions “We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” • Kenneth Watt, ecologist “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” • George Wald, Harvard Biologist “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” • Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” • Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” • Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” • Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” • Life Magazine, January 1970 “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” • Kenneth Watt, Ecologist “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” • Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” • Kenneth Watt, Ecologist “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” • Sen. Gaylord Nelson “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” • Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

(Centennial Fellow) You can, on the one hand, listen to Bill McKibben, who says the raging Midwest and Southern tornadoes are still another sign of global warming doom. Or you can listen to Harold Camping, who recently announced the world would go kaput not too long after Christians were sent heavenward on May 21 by none other than God himself. Take your luckless pick of either imaginative overreach. Although Camping's day of ascension came and went without most of us noticing physical uplift, there's not much boosting the McKibben thesis, either.  A leading voice of warming alarmism -- "warmism" some call it -- McKibben sounded off in a Washington Post opinion piece on the subject, contemptuously contending that warming is obviously linked to recent wildfire-causing, harvest-denying droughts, record rains, consequent flooding and the terrible tornadoes.  He identifies some who say we can adapt to warming as worried principally about the profits of fossil fuel producers. Unfortunately for the ad hominem polemicist, an economist named Donald Boudreaux at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. bothered to check with the Weather Service. Despite a doubling of the population, weather-related U.S. fatalities have been declining over the past 70 years, he found. Boudreaux, who reported the information in his Cafe Hayek Web site, along with a Camping comparison, gets debunking assistance from an article in Britain's Guardian. It quotes a meteorologist saying listings of tornadoes have been up over the years only because we have improved means of detecting and reporting them.  As for fatalities caused solely by tornadoes, John Hayward notes in a Human Events piece that there has been a half-century's decline in absolute numbers and a more dramatic drop as a percentage of population.  While this has, of course, been a particularly bad year for tornado fatalities, the worst in decades, Americans faced a number of awful years in cooler periods. Hayward notes the particularly atrocious accident of having a tornado pass through Joplin, Mo., instead of some undeveloped stretch of land. He reports analyses about having more large population centers for tornadoes to wander over than before and more old people who are less successful than the young in escaping the horror.  Tornado causes? Chief among them, cold air meets hot air, and no one has been able to show that warming fosters the get-together. Maybe none of this is as conclusive a refutation of the McKibben assertion as an uneventful Rapture day was of the Camping message. But Dennis Prager of talk show fame observes in a column that secular leftists have made far more apocalyptic errors than religions, such as a 2005 U.N. prediction that we would have 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010. There were no Christians soaring in air May 21, but neither were there millions fleeing climate-cursed environments in 2010. So how do you deal with all the missed climate forecasts, among them the computer simulations that make throwing darts blindfolded seem more scientific? You heed Camping. After his prophecy went poof, the 89-year-old minister went on his California radio show, said there was a "spiritual" judgment May 21 and revealed the world would definitely conclude its business Oct. 21.  Likewise, the computer simulators are ever revising content to comply with past reality and telling us that if not all transpired exactly as they originally said, stay tuned. It will next time. The moral of this tale is not that we should rule out the possibility of  danger posed by global warming that may have been partly instigated by humankind, but that our ignorance is far greater than facile talk of a "scientific consensus" would have you believe. Wrong responses could be more disastrous than warming, with no effect on thermometers.  Many get it, I think, that a hard landing could await us if we leap before a lot more calm, careful, apolitical looking, and alarmists should understand that ranting about doomsday afflictions will bring few to this secular faith. Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is now a columnist living in Colorado and a Centennial Institute Fellow.

(CCU Faculty) Jeffrey Sachs is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals with his special chair at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and his years of leading the U.N. Millennium Project.  So I was a bit surprised to see him accusing me of being on the payroll of Exxon and among those who deny the link between smoking and cancer.    He did not name me specifically but he broad-brushed everyone like me in a recent column.  “We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process.”  He acknowledges a few small problems—like Climate-gate and the thousands of leaked emails showing the fraudulence of climate-change scientists, and an IPCC report full of errors—but brushes them aside to congratulate the “great scientific minds” who have learned to “read” earth’s history.  And we had better heed their warnings or we are all going to die.    Well, Professor Sachs, you need to graduate from middle-school kinds of ad hominem attacks.  As one of your critics I can assure you I am not on the payroll of Exxon.  (But would love to be.  Message to Exxon—please send large amounts of money to my address in care of CCU.)  And I tell my children there is a link between smoking and cancer.  But you and your ilk have big scientific problems with your greenhouse-catastrophe rhetoric and I will sum them up in four questions that have always been at the heart of the global-warming debate and that you have trouble answering.  The questions are in ascending order of importance.    Question #1:  Is the earth really warming?  Probably not.  Even the apocalyptic warmers agree there hasn’t been any in the last dozen years and one of them even called this a “travesty.”  But even if it is warming a bigger issue is….Question #2:  Are humans causing the warming?  Even more probably not.  In a recent column http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/-236562--.html  Michael Landsbaum pointed out that “all greenhouse gases worldwide make up 2 percent of the atmosphere. Only 3.6 percent of that 2 percent is carbon dioxide. Only 3.4 percent of that 3.6 percent is man-made. If California shut down every man-made CO2-emitting source the result would be atmospherically unnoticeable.”   The earth is a big place.  People are really small.  As I point out to my classes the entire human population of the planet could stand inside Boulder County, Colorado, and the rest of the world would be empty.  Our footprint is negligible.  But, let’s say humans are a big factor.  This brings us to….    Question #3:  Is warming a bad thing?  Emphatically it is not.  As a historian I can tell you that warm is good and cold is bad.  The crash of the High Middle Ages was brought on in part by the end of the Medieval Warm Period.  Cold weather is hard on crops—ask Colorado’s peach growers.  I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming.  Global Warming is not a threat, it is an answer to prayer.  But even if warming is bad we come to the most important question of all….    Question #4:  What will be done about it?  And the answer clearly is….nothing.  We got a good look at all this in Copenhagen.  This summit to end all summits ended in confusion and ended in a very cold winter.  The Chinese—the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases plan to do jack and squat about global warming.  And for good reason.  In his brilliant essay, Bound to Burn,   Peter Huber asks a simple question.  If the world’s poor had 40 trillion dollars worth of gold buried on their property would the rich nations be able to talk them out of digging it up?  When pigs fly.  And that’s what they have.  It’s all they have.  The Chinese add a U.S.’s worth of coal generating capacity every three years.  And they will continue to do it.  So, Professor Sachs, it’s not cancer-deniers like me you need to be talking to.  Head over to Beijing to do your missionary work.   In the meantime I’m going to sit here and wait for the end.  And wait for those checks from Exxon to start rolling in.

('76 Contributor) If you're someone who cherishes humanity and thus opposes human exploitation, as I do, you will welcome the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a new joint effort by conservative Christians standing against global warming alarmism.  Please read the group's formal declaration and then consider signing the declaration.    There are varying opinions on global warming and the responses being put forth by our governments (state and national).  But the possible negative consequences of putting the control of energy resources in the hands of a few are beyond imagination.  As I have followed this issue for years, I have noted a huge disconnect between the rhetoric and the lifestyle of some of the top promoters of human-caused global warming.  This alone has generated a skepticism and recent revelations of tainted data confirm my skepticism.   What is the real motivation for a few to control the energy supply?  What will such control and the accompanying restrictions mean to lower income and impoverished people in American and around the globe?  Will it increase human hunger and deaths?  Is the global warming agenda connected to world population control?  If have not yet take some time to delve into this issue to ascertain what is really driving it, I encourage you to click the links below.  If you find the case compelling enough to sign on, please consider passing this along to others you believe would be interested. Following is the notice I received from Calvin Beisner, Cornwall Alliance spokesman: Dear Friend: I'm sure you're absolutely swamped with other concerns, so please forgive this demand on your time, but if you could spare just a few minutes to read An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming and, if you're in agreement, complete the endorsement form online, it would be a great help to us. Thus far we're nearing 500 endorsers, but we'd like to add more leaders to the list before making a public announcement. (By the way, we make provision for non-evangelicals to endorse without implying that they're evangelicals.) The Declaration is based on the findings of A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor, co-authored by, among others, Dr. Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama, Dr. Cornelis van Kooten of the University of Victoria, BC, and Dr. Craig Mitchell of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. In case you're interested, here are names of a few of the prominent people who have endorsed so far: Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Dr. Barrett Duke of the same, Dr. Daniel Heimbach of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family, Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Dr. Charles Van Eaton of Bryan College, Janet Parshall of Janet Parshall's America, Dr. Joseph Pipa, president of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Dr. Peter Jones of Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, CA, Dr. Douglas Groothuis of Denver Seminary [and a Centennial Institute Fellow], Mark Coppenger of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, and Dr. Robert L. Reymond, emeritus professor of Systematic Theology at Knox Theological Seminary and Covenant Theological Seminary. The collapse of climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen last week was welcome, and it was my delight to be there and watch it happen on the heals of "climategate" and the general collapse of the scientific case for dangerous manmade global warming over the last several years. Now we need to work together to prevent the United States from adopting similar policy on its own. Your endorsement of the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming will help achieve that. Note: John Andrews, Director of the Centennial Institute and '76 Blog editor, signed the declaration immediately upon receiving notice from former Vermont State Sen. Mark Shepard and Colorado State Sen. Kevin Lundberg.  Others with the Centennial Institute and Colorado Christian University are being encouraged to sign as well.

(Centennial Fellow) Why have diplomats from the underdeveloped nations of the world been clamoring in Copenhagen for something to be done about global warming?  Why did the burned-out Marxists of the world protest in the streets of Copenhagen for an even greater redistribution of wealth worldwide?  Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe, in his speech at the conference, blamed that nation's poverty not on his own Marxist tyranny and economic mismanagement, but on “the planet-unfriendly model of development pursued by…the so-called highly-industrialised developed world, all to our collective detriment.”  He was followed by Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, who praised “socialism [as] the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell….let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” This is not about Global Warming.  It is about fleecing productive nations, draining them of the capital which could lift the world economy out of its pit.  It’s about redistributing that capital to unproductive nations, where it will disappear down a rat hole.  This is a reincarnation of the Marxism-Leninism that killed over a hundred million people in the last century. In the nineteenth century Europeans poured millions into their colonies throughout the underdeveloped world in hopes of a return on their investment.  After the devastation of two world wars, those European powers could no longer afford to prop up these failing regions, so they let them go to fend for themselves.  Franz Fanon, radical Marxist and guru of post-colonial studies, called for the “Wretched of the Earth” to violently rise up against their colonial masters, whom he claimed had exploited them and ruined their lands.  Actually Europeans brought modern technology and economic development which began to lift the underdeveloped world out of their primitive desperation.  They built railroads, hospitals and schools, and worked to make their land productive and prosperous. But when independence came they became even more “wretched”, sinking back into poverty and desperation.  When the British left Ghana, its GNP was equal to that of South Korea, the largest producer of cocoa in the world and with the finest harbor in Sub-Saharan Africa.   A few decades later it was one of the poorest countries in the world, with a GDP 3% of South Korea’s. In the twentieth century two superpowers, the US and the USSR, poured billions into their client states throughout the underdeveloped world in hopes of either encouraging or discouraging the growth of world-wide communism.  As the Cold War ended, foreign aid dried up and unproductive nations of the world sunk once again into poverty and desperation, with only paltry sums from cash-strapped NGOs to support them. All foreign aid has produced has been economic dependence, perpetuation of poverty, and bitterness toward the very people who help them.  Now the underdeveloped world clamors again for funds to prop up their corrupt regimes, funds that hardly filter down below the government officials whose incomes are hundreds of times greater than their general population.  They now demand that productive nations pay trillions to perpetuate inefficiency, poverty and dependence, and all in the name of saving the earth from a danger that fewer and fewer people even believe is a danger, and if so, whether we can do anything about it anyway.  More likely it is another way for politicians (from both the underdeveloped and developed worlds) to scam the productive of the earth. William Watson is a history professor at Colorado Christian University.  Amont the courses he will be teaching next semester are: Colonialism, the Cold War, and Africa.

(CCU Faculty) When the Spanish first arrived in Mexico, they discovered that Aztec high priests sacrificed 10,000 still-beating hearts to the god Quetzalcoatl every December 22nd in order to cause the days to stop growing shorter.  This religious belief was confirmed, as the days began to grow longer again.  Al Gore is the high priest of our new religion, global warming.  He insists that if we sacrifice our standard of living, our economy, and millions of American jobs, that we can save the planet and stop global temperatures from increasing.  Unfortunately for him but fortunately for us, global temperatures began to drop before he was able to perform his sacrifice. Throughout the 1990s I believed in global warming and taught it as fact in university geography courses, mostly due to the liberal media and education which I received at the University of California.  It wasn’t until I read Senator Inhofe’s 2005 speech before the Senate, that my faith in Global Warming began to be seriously challenged.  Inhofe called Global Warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”  I then began to reconsider my position on the issue.  I learned of the Medieval Warming Period, that Vikings farmed in Greenland and the earth continued to warm until the 14th century.  This Medieval Warming Period was ignored by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a way reminiscent of Joseph Stalin erasing Bolsheviks who fell out of favor by simply erasing them from photographs.  Instead the IPCC invented the “hockey stick” graph claiming that the earth’s temperature was basically unchanged until the 19th century when it began to drastically increase.  The data (which we now know was falsified by environmental “scientists”) shows that after the Medieval Warming Period, the earth began to cool until the Little Ice Age of the 16th to 18th centuries.  Then it began to warm again through the 19th and 20th centuries.  Al Gore insists this was caused by human activity, but I began to wonder what degree humans could complete with heat produced by solar radiation.  I became convinced that any contribution by humans would be infinitesimal compared to the energy produced by our sun. In 2007 I heard the Danish climatologist/economist Bjorn Lomborg speak to the Denver World Affairs Council on the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol.  He reminded us of the importance of doing a cost/benefit analysis, warning that “we are in danger of implementing a cure that is more costly than the original affliction: economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut carbon dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures."   Shortly thereafter, I read Christopher Horner’s “Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming”, and while on a fellowship to Oxford that same year saw the UK documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”  Most convincing was their graph showing the correlation between solar radiation and average global temperatures, confirming my hunch that the sun was overwhelmingly the major contributor. Over the past several years ice caps and glaciers have begun to grow again.  Even my heating bills show that 2009 was colder than 2008, which was colder than 2007.  Yesterday it snowed in Houston, setting a record.  Those who are convinced that humans really make a difference to global temperature now should encourage us to burn coal and oil to save the planet from a coming Ice Age.  However, it is more likely due to the regular fluctuations of solar radiation, which we should learn to live with, rather than allowing dishonest scientists and politicians to sacrifice our global economy, or for that matter 10,000 still-beating hearts.

  It is now clear that a gaggle of prominent "scientists" have betrayed both science and the public on a grand scale for the purposes of getting government grants, pushing a left-wing political agenda, and being invited to all the right parties.      It seems unlikely that these e-mails were "hacked".    More likely they were leaked by an insider.  The leak was well timed to prevent an international agreement that would have required America and other nations to destroy their economies and ultimately to kill millions of people based on fraudulent misinformation.   In particular, the pending "Cap and Trade" legislation is now extremely unlikely to pass Congress.  Thank God.    Jack   http://www.climatedepot.com/a/3943/Read-All-About-it-Climate-Depot-Exclusive--Continuously-Updated-ClimateGate-News-Round-Up   http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_warmist_conspiracy_tthe_emails_that_really_damn_professor_jones#63704

('76 Contributor) As any visitor to Cuba will tell you, slogans like "Hasta la victoria siempre" (towards victory, always) or "Socialismo or muerte" (socialism or death) are dotted here and there all over the Caribbean island for fear that the long-suffering local population might lose sight of the ill-fated goals of the communist revolution that took place there under the leadership of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in 1959.   The way things are going in France right now, pockets of little Cubas are very likely to sprout up all over the country as the summit on climate change in Copenhagen next month looms larger and larger. I personally know of one such Cuban-like ideological treadmill: the High School in Lyon, France’s second-largest city, where I am completing my third year as a teacher of Anglo-American Studies.  About two months ago, straight from the French Department of Education came a diktat to the effect that all public schools in the country had to organize teaching activities aimed at promoting so-called environmentally-friendly sustainable development, i.e. socialism. I have been asked to participate. Needless to say that I have sustainably declined. One of the ideas some of my colleagues have come up with though is to translate the speeches President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown are expected to make in Denmark next month, and to flash up bits of the speeches on large TV screens dotted here and there all over the school for fear that the students might lose sight of the ill-fated goals of the green revolution that is currently taking place in France under the leadership of President Nicolas Sarkozy. With so much hot air coming out of the screens, I guess temperatures will rise exponentially all over the school and melt what little critical thinking is left in the French education system.  As the episode illustrates, descriptions of President Sarkozy as a conservative are misleading. On global warming, as in many other policy areas, Sarkozy is just about as conservative as Newt Gingrich sitting on a couch with Speaker Pelosi touting misguided bipartisan efforts to save the planet. The green revolution currently going on in France is being every bit as destructive of individual freedom and responsibility as the ominous events of 1789 there, or, for that matter, those in Cuba more than 150 years later. In other words, welcome to the new land of scorching propaganda, brainwashing, intellectual goose-stepping and, I almost forgot, youth duly decked out in Guevara accessories and apparel as the latest fashion dictates.   Are you sure you want to be next, America? The author is a French citizen with a PhD in political science who formerly lived in Colorado.

"Is Global Warming a Crisis," the Centennial Institute debate proposition for Scott Denning of CSU and James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, yielded an illuminating rather than heated exchange with Taylor saying no and Denning in backhanded agreement.  Facing off before an audience of 500 at Colorado Christian University on Oct. 20, the two argued their cases with data, analogies, humor, and the inevitable slide presentations.  Click to view the Denning slides and the Taylor slides. Denning defused suspense at the outset by sidestepping the "crisis" description popularized by Al Gore and other politicians.  But he insisted the human-generated increase of CO2 in earth's atmosphere will increase surface temperatures by 2100 at about the equivalent of one 4-watt light bulb per square meter worldwide, making it imperative to reduce CO2 emissions. His solution: "the magic of the free market," transitioning us smoothly to a new energy economy -- provided policymakers cooperate by "putting a price on carbon."    But that latter condition seemed to me a fatal disqualification to the whole scenario, since it implicitly endorses cap-and-trade, a decidedly unfree approach.   Taylor's rebuttal built on the key points that (1) context is crucial (recent warming trends being minor in perspective with historically much-warmer and high-CO2 epochs in earth's history), (2) solar influence is more explanatory for past climate cycles than CO2, (3) computer modeling of the sort used for Denning's light-bulb prediction is discredited by recent research from William Gray and Richard Lindzen, and (4) the prohibitive economic sacrifices of pricing-out carbon are unjustified in light of the foregoing, especially with China and India determined to continue their own burgeoning emissions.   The bottom line for this (admittedly non-neutral) observer: Carbon-dioxide worriers didn't come close to demonstrating urgency to warrant such drastic measures as the Waxman-Markey energy tax now before the US Senate and the Copenhagen Treaty due for international action before year-end.   "First do no harm," the policy verdict recommended by Chris Horner at Centennial's climate debate last April, was convincingly seconded by James Taylor at the October debate -- and this is the only wise guide for America's unilateral and multilateral actions on climate issues at present. Here's more about the Oct. 20 debate from CCU partner journalist Jean Torkelson, with photos by Ryan Masterson.

Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein has been following the "climate change" bill that was cobbled together in Congress in recent weeks. This is the bill, written by left-wing Democrats Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, that would attempt to lower American carbon emissions by 83 percent in 40 years. I.e., it would raise energy prices, drive our remaining manufacturers offshore, destroy our future military capability and drive a stake through the heart of the American economy.  Pearlstein makes the following observations about the bill: (1) It is "badly flawed" and a "monstrosity" that includes many concessions to special interests (2) New government agencies would "dole out rebates and tax subsidies and pick winning and losing technologies" (3) Newly created regulators would "set prices and allocate resources" (4) "Its elaborate allocation of pollution allowances and offsets reads like a parody of industrial policy" (5) "The opportunities for waste, fraud and regulatory screwup look enormous" (6) Nevertheless, it "may be the best bill that the political system can produce" (7) It is "preferable to doing nothing" Isn't that just the way an honest liberal so often reacts, after looking at the hard facts? One would like to get inside their brains to study why they so often misfirelike this. Now the climate will change or not, as it always has, due to gargantuan forces beyond our control. On its face, this stupid bill is like King Canute trying to stop the tide from coming in. However, "climate change" is just a deceptive pretext for this bill that enables leftists to do to the American economy and the American people what they have always wanted to do: Control us. Cut us down to size. Break us. Disarm us. Transform us from proud citizens to meek subjects. Make us like Europeans. Force us to submit first to collectivist economics and then to the authority of world government. This is the actual goal; preventing climate change has nothing to do with it. This bill is written by our domestic enemies, and must be stopped.