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CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – A new round of UN climate talks got underway on Monday to appeals for action and compromise after the squabbles that drove last year's global summit in Copenhagen close to disaster. "A richer tapestry of efforts is needed," UN climate chief Christiana Figueres warned, as she spelt out the tasks facing the 12-day conference in the Mexican resort city of Cancun. "A tapestry of holes will not work -- and the holes can only be filled in through compromise." President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, whose country is hosting the conference, also appealed for common purpose. "Climate...

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis is paying the price for independent thinking. Inglis, a Travelers Rest Republican, might have been the only Republican lawmaker in the country booed lustily by his own constituents at town hall meetings last month.Inglis was shouted down when he asked listeners why they're afraid of President Barack Obama - and then suggested they stop watching conservative TV commentator Glenn Beck."He's trading on fear," Inglis advised one group, setting off loud catcalls. Despite a broadly conservative voting record, Inglis has angered many GOP activists with his contrarian stands on a handful of high-profile issues. In...

Just because nobody knows the future is no excuse to do nothing in the face of worrisome possibilities, says Dan Gardner, the author of a solidly researched new book that makes it clear just how shaky – if not dead wrong – expert predictions usually are. Good policy, Gardner writes in Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway, stands up as worthwhile even if the forecast that prompted it turns out to be wrong. He cites as an example “a stiff carbon tax with the revenues returned to the economy in the form of...

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Environmental groups on Tuesday sought to cancel the December sale of oil and gas leases beneath more than 234 square miles of public lands in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota. In a formal protest letter sent to the Bureau of Land Management, the three groups said the agency had not done enough to curb greenhouse gas emissions from oil field activities. Any leases sold in the Dec. 9 sale will not be issued until the protest is resolved. The three environmental groups — Montana Environmental Information Center, Earthworks and WildEarth Guardians — sued the BLM...

Boulder has long been on the national and international stage -- sometimes as the butt of hippie jokes -- but increasingly the spotlight is for the strides the city has made in land-use policies and reducing carbon emissions. "We really are seen as one of the most innovative and leading cities in the area of sustainable communities," said Councilman Matt Appelbaum, who recently returned from a trip to Stockholm, Sweden, where Boulder was among 10 U.S. cities invited to talk about green policies at the local level. Koehn, who has represented the city abroad several times, said he personally purchases...

Skeptics of cap-and-trade have found their cinematic answer to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in Bjorn Lomborg’s new documentary, Cool It. Lomborg, 45, has an innocent-sounding résumé: He is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a Danish think tank that researches cost-effective ways for governments to spend aid money. However, the film begins with clips of scientists denouncing him as a traitor, a parasite, and an idiot. In one shot, Stephen Schneider, the late Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University, tells the camera crew that they’re “not helping the world” by publicizing Lomborg’s efforts....

Environmental Protection Agency officials Wednesday provided power companies and states with new guidance on EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gases. A D.C. lobbyist for two major power companies told Bloomberg News that “the energy and manufacturing sectors will essentially be in a construction moratorium” as a consequence. Here we are, with 15 million Americans unemployed and millions more underemployed, and the EPA is moving blindly ahead with new regulations that will increase dramatically the energy costs of U.S. industries, reducing their competitiveness and profitability, and making it less likely they will hire. EPA’s action amounts to rewriting the Clean Air...

November’s Scientific American features a profile of Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist Judith Curry, who has committed the mortal sin of reaching out to other scientists who hypothesize that global warming isn’t the disaster it’s been cracked up to be. I have personal experience with this, as she invited me to give a research seminar in Tech’s prestigious School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in 2008. My lecture summarizing the reasons for doubting the apocalyptic synthesis of climate change was well-received by an overflow crowd. Written by Michael Lemonick, who hails from the shrill blog Climate Central, the article isn’t devoid...

This is a collection of news story excerpts this past week. AGW proponents and environmentalists is general are taking hit after hit in the media this week. – AnthonyFrom the GWPF via email: The Crisis of Climate Catastrophism The threat to tropical rainforests from climate change may have been exaggerated by environmentalists, according to a new study. Researchers have shown that the world’s tropical forests thrived in the far distant past when temperatures were 3 to 5C warmer than today. They believe that a wetter, warmer future may actually boost plants and animals living the tropics. – David Derbyshire, Daily...

The New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board (EIB) adopted by a vote of four to three the most comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution reduction regulations in the nation. The rules, proposed by the New Mexico Environment Department, will reduce global warming pollutants through a regional cap on GHG emissions. “Addressing climate change immediately is the right thing to do—I am pleased that the EIB adopted the program I have worked so hard to develop,” Governor Bill Richardson said. “I call on the federal government to build on New Mexico’s program and the WCI to implement a national cap-and-trade system.” “I applaud...

It's high time we recognize that carbon dioxide has been treated unfairly. Not only have the good deeds of that wonderful molecule so essential to rain forests, begonias and plants that feed God's creatures been ignored, it has even come to be demonized as an endangering pollutant and climate-ravaging menace. What real evidence has been offered up to support these defamatory charges? Absolutely none. Take the EPA's CO-2 endangerment finding, for example. Shrouded under the ever- expanding blanket of the Clean Air Act, it is being applied to validate an unprecedented regulatory takeover of carbon-emitting energy and construction industry permitting....

Climate Fraud: As the case for global warming and cap-and-trade has collapsed, so too has the market that was to exploit this manufactured crisis for fun and profit. The climate-change bubble has burst. Lost in the hubbub leading up to the Republican and Tea Party tsunami on Nov. 2 was the collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). But its implications for the future of the American economy and the business climate are staggering: It is an acknowledgment that both the case for climate trade and cap-and-tax legislation has also collapsed. On Oct. 21 the exchange announced it was ending...

The CCX was the topic of thousands of MSM articles over the years, but not a single article reported their recent demise. Hmmm. Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year.Although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub...

This is a response to "Why Can't We Innovate Our Way To A Carbon-Free Energy Future?", a "Perspective" by Bjorn Lomborg that ran in this space a week ago. Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It," is right about the need to focus on critical health and economic priorities. But he is wrong about human carbon dioxide emissions causing what is now being called "global climate disruption." By demonizing the gas of life, in league with Al Gore and Bill Gates, Lomborg commits several serious scientific errors. As independent scientists, with broad training in mathematics, physics, chemistry,...

Texas has refused to meet new federal greenhouse gas emission rules that go into effect in January, the latest anti-Washington move in an ongoing battle that could halt new construction at the nation's largest refineries and other industry in Texas. The refusal to join 49 other states in agreeing to the new rules is the latest salvo from Texas in its fight with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which Gov. Rick Perry has used on the campaign trail as an example of meddling by the federal government.

I wrote a few weeks ago that The only lower price than today’s closing price on a ton of carbon is ZERO. That’s true now more than ever. See the chart below from yesterday’s close of the Chicago Climate Exchange: [snip] And it’s still crashing. Last week the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced that they were scrapping the existing carbon trading program, and focusing on a new one that deals with directly sold carbon offsets rather than open trading.

The EU is outsourcing its carbon emissions in order to claim that it has reduced its carbon emissions. So in essence EU states that it has progressed in meeting Kyoto protocol targets, yet those claims are offset by emissions from EU goods produced abroad where they have outsourced EU jobs to foreign countries where carbon emissions have increase by 40% (see storyand here) Now if the goal was to reduce carbon emissions, but the EU only transferred carbon emissions from their countries to other countries no matter where the carbon emanates from aren’t we still affected by carbon emission whether...

Harold Lewis, an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has resigned from the American Physical Society as a result of the “global warming scam” which he says is the “greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud” he has seen in his time as a physicist. Lewis wrote within his letter of resignation: How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons...

Dear Reader: Good news! This coming Sunday is 10/10/10, which has been officially designated as global Carbon Action Day. Which, as I understand it, involves scaring up some action by way of our old miracle friend carbon - a/k/a "Gaia's gift to the periodic tables." Continued

Murder on the Carbon Express: Interpol Takes On Emissions Fraud As carbon trading booms, fraudsters—and cops—are getting into the game. While US climate legislation languishes, the rest of the world is already taking the next step—educating police on how to keep criminals out of the global carbon markets. In Lyon, France last month, undercover agents specializing in wildlife smuggling rubbed elbows with financial sleuths at a conference sponsored by INTERPOL intended to highlight the increasing complexity of environmental crimes and the tightening of environmental regulations in developing and developed countries. "Governments should start preparing for an onslaught of environmental court...