Free Republic

From the Washington Free Beacon by Zach Noble, how a half page of the Kyoto protocol turned into a free ride for corruption. Carbon Corruption Iran, North Korea, Sudan rack up millions by trading U.N. carbon credits The U.N. is funneling millions of dollars worth of tradable carbon credits to corrupt nations worldwide, including Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Uzbekistan in an attempt to encourage clean energy projects in the developing world.The U.N. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is defined in Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol. Western European countries fund energy projects in the developing world in order to obtain...

Skeptics are winning: “The carbon market is dead” The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus...

  Al Gore Al Gore deserves an Oscar for hypocrisy to go along with the two Academy Awards his movie won last night, contends a think tank from his home state Tennessee. The former vice president's mansion in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, says the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, citing data from the Nashville Electric Service. Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth, a 95-minute film warning of a coming cataclysm due to man-made "global warming," won the award for best documentary feature and best...

UPDATE on November 19, 2011: The outside income estimate doubled. From Glenn Reynolds: “JAMES HANSEN FINANCIAL SCANDAL? Hey, there’s nothing wrong with professors making outside income. But when it’s for global warming activism, it does call your scientific neutrality into question. In Hansen’s defense, no serious person has believed that he possessed scientific neutrality for years. But anybody who owns an $8000 engraved Montres Rolex watch is clearly part of the 1%, no?” THE ORIGINAL POST Government bureaucrat James Hansen pulled down up to $750,000 last year in speeches and prize money. The American Tradition Institute reported: “As it waits...

[snip] ....What's going on? "The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton. He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democrat gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign. From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades,...

"When you make comments that fly in the face of 98 out of 100 climate scientists, to call into question the science of evolution, all I am saying is that in order for the Republican Party to win, we can't run from science," Huntsman said. "By making comments that basically don't reflect the reality of the situation, we turn people off." Politico's John Harris, a debate moderator, pressed Texas Gov. Rick Perry to name the scientists that he refers to on the campaign trail as credibly refuting the international consensus that humans are contributing to global warming.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is set to reveal the details of a carbon tax designed to help fight climate change and billed as one of the nation's biggest economic reforms for decades. Labor leader Gillard plans to tax Australia's top 500 polluters for their carbon dioxide emissions as a means of reducing pollution, changing energy use and building investment in clean sources of energy. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard "No longer will the nation's biggest polluters be able to pollute our atmosphere for free," Gillard told a Labor Party conference on Saturday. "From July 1 next year, the freedom...

During a press conference on February 12, 2010, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched a High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing (AGF). The panelists, described below, will work together to mobilize the financial resources for climate change that were pledged at the Copenhagen Summit. The group’s objectives include developing practical proposals to significantly scale-up both short-term and long-term financing for mitigation and adaptation strategies in developing countries, in particular by jump-starting the mobilization of new and innovative resources to reach $100 billion annually by 2020,High-Level Panel ProfilesChristine Lagarde...Christine Lagarde Christine Lagarde made history as the first female chairman of the...

 Guest post by EcotretasCO2 tumbling downEU Carbon Credits via Bloomberg -BLUENEXT - BNS EUA 08-12 (phase 2) (PNXCSPT2:IND) - click graph for report Once upon a time, carbon trading was supposed to be the salvation for Earth’s climate problems. But as time went on, people started realizing that something was wrong. As usual, financial markets anticipated the move. Late last year, US carbon trading crashed. Two weeks later, it closed. In Europe, the price of CO2 emissions even flourished earlier this year. The European Union pushed for stronger policies towards renewables. And Fukushima pressed German’s chancellor Angela Merkel to abandon...

California's largest utility promises its customers green salvation through its ClimateSmart program. For every bit of energy a Pacific Gas & Electric ratepayer uses - from turning on a vacuum cleaner to powering up a computer or heating up an oven - a little part of a tree or forest is saved to erase the carbon sins of the customer. The voluntary program costs participants about $60 a year. But the company isn't telling its customers one crucial fact: Those forests were purchased years ago by a Virginia conservation group that used nearly $50 million in loans and grants from...

(CNSNews.com) – The Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it has awarded $17.4 million for pilot projects that will begin exploring how to establish a market for greenhouse gas (GHG) credits, a key component of a cap and trade system, to help reduce carbon and other emissions that apparently contribute to global warming.Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the projects were the “foundational work” for establishing an American carbon market.“This is really sort of foundational work that’s being done,” Vilsack told reporters on a conference call on Wednesday.The $17.4 million in funding is part of the Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) program,...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) announced Thursday that he would pull out of a regional climate pact by the end of the year, delivering a political setback to the fledging effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming. In a news conference, Christie said the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a 2005 accord in which 10 states agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants 10 percent by 2018, would not be able to meet its goals. The program requires plants in the region that burn fossil fuels to buy pollution allowances for the carbon they...

The public is increasingly skeptical of global warming and far more worried about the economy than the environmentWhat the heck went wrong?" That, apparently, is the question roiling the environmental community as it realizes that the fight against climate change has fizzled. As Brad Plumer writes in the New Republic, everything was looking great in 2008 for a sweeping effort to make good on candidate Barack Obama's pledge to start turning back the rising oceans. The Democrats held Congress. Both John McCain and Mr. Obama had promised to push for capping carbon emissions. Corporations had gotten on board. Al Gore...

At times it seems hard to accept that humanity has really advanced. Though it would appear that we have generally forsaken superstition and confronted the shadows that linger just beyond the light cast from our communal fires, today’s news from Chicheley, England would suggest that we have only masked our fears of the unknown with superficial intellectualism. Charles J Hanley, a special correspondent with the Associated Press, reports that dozens of scientists gathered at Chicheley to discuss a Plan B that may serve as an alternative to carbon emission reduction plans which the world seems unwilling to adopt. The concept...

You might want to file this under “another way to subsidize a tyrant who would just as soon see you dead.” North Korea wants to “earn” real money by “selling” UN-backed carbon offsets from its hydro-power plants. Don’t ya love it? It’s sort of the double whammy (not quite triple) of bad ideas...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 2011-46 Washington, D.C., Feb. 18, 2011 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a group of seven individuals who perpetrated a fraudulent pump-and-dump scheme in the stock of a sham company that purported to provide products and services to fight global warming. The SEC alleges that the group included stock promoters, traders, and a lawyer who wrote a fraudulent opinion letter. The scheme resulted in more than $7 million in illicit profits from sales of stock in CO2 Tech Ltd. at artificially inflated prices. Despite touting impressive business relationships and anti-global warming technology innovations, CO2 Tech...

In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, the incoming House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) teamed up with Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, to write that the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases "represents an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs -- unless Congress steps in." Upton and Phillips complain that EPA -- despite the regulatory power given to it in 2007 under a Supreme Court interpretation of the Clean Air Act -- should await the outcome of further litigation about the...

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a timetable on Thursday for issuing rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and oil refineries, signaling a resolve to press ahead on such regulation even as it faces stiffening opposition in Congress. The agency said it would propose performance standards for new and refurbished power plants next July, with final rules to be issued in May 2012. Proposed emissions standards for new oil refineries will be published next December, it said, with the final rules due in November 2012; rules for existing plants would come later. But the E.P.A. was vague on how...

The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that it will seize authority from Texas to regulate major emitters of greenhouse gases because Gov. Rick Perry and state regulators refused to implement the rules. The move caps a long dispute between Texas and the EPA, which have clashed over the Obama administration's push to regulate industrial sources of carbon dioxide emissions. State officials complain the rules will unfairly punish Texas and its energy-hungry industries when they take effect Jan. 2. While the EPA makes the rules, states implement most of the requirements of the Clean Air Act. The most likely practical effect...

GREEN MAKE BELIEVE: Van Jones Admits Left is “PRETENDING” Need for Regulations And Cap & Trade in Green Movement http://www.theblaze.com/stories/green-make-believe-van-jones-admits-left-is-pretending-need-for-regulations-and-cap-trade-in-green-movement/