Free Republic

BEWARE of geeks bearing formulas. That's the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The "quants" who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero. Turns out they got a few things wrong. Their formulas were based on only a few years of actual data. Or they failed to take into account the possibility that housing prices would fall. Or that the market for mortgage-backed securities might suddenly stop functioning. The lesson seems clear. Don't allow a whole system to become hostage to...

UPDATED: President Obama's climate plan could cost industry close to $2 trillion, nearly three times the White House's initial estimate of the so-called "cap-and-trade" legislation, according to Senate staffers who were briefed by the White House. A top economic aide to Mr. Obama told a group of Senate staffers last month that the president's climate-change plan would surely raise more than the $646 billion over eight years the White House had estimated publicly, according to multiple a number of staffers who attended the briefing Feb. 26. "We all looked at each other like, 'Wow, that's a big number,'" said a...

The atmosphere is cooling, the ice is expanding, the seas are not rising -- even though carbon emissions are increasing. The evidence is now crystal clear to anyone with an unwashed brain that man-made global warming theory is sheer unadulterated bunkum. So how do the warmers react to the ever more embarrassing evidence that they have hitched their reputations to the biggest anti-scientific scam in history? By ratcheting up the hysteria to fever pitch and shrieking that their predictions about the impending irreversible environmental apocalypse have grievously underestimated the catastrophe which is going to be far, far worse. At the...

Already we are seeing the Socialist, Marxist cogs in the change wheel manipulating away our freedoms and money. Congress and this President have wasted no time from the executive orders to the manipulative speeches and attachments on the ‘stimulus’ bill that insult and betray the American people. Don’t you love the endless speeches and statements by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Obama regarding the URGENT need to pass the stimulus bill or our country will go down in heaping flames? Naturally, we all understand the EXTREME emergency choices added to the bill such as $650 million for digital TV coupons;...

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=wth_p4p0rfY&feature=PlayList&p=AF27CAAC2A8AD49A&index=12 Wow, this is the first time I heard of this documentary

that he is a political radical, it’s not surprising that he has tried to present a moderate image to the public. The PR campaign has been working to a large extent. But problems are beginning to emerge. Carol Browner might be one of them. Obama chose Browner, a former EPA administrator, to be his energy czar (really, czarina). Browner is all for draconian carbon emission controls aimed at halting global warming. Critics of carbon control say such plans are really about expanding government control over the economy and have little to do with things climatological. In order words, such plans...

The Heritage Foundation issued a harsh rebuttal to Barack Obama’s latest climate change comments, blasting the president-elect for recycling problematic climate change rhetoric from the campaign trail. The Washington think tank also criticized Obama’s plans to address global warming, calling the proposals “fear mongering” based on tainted data. The Heritage Foundation’s statement came in response to comments made at the Global Climate Summit, a meeting arranged by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles earlier this week. More than 600 global climate-change experts convened at the summit to try to break gridlock on environmental issues ahead of next month’s United...

If you haven’t made up your mind who to vote for in tomorrow’s presidential election, I’m not sure that what I am about to tell you will help — but it just might. Both candidates told the web site sciencedebate2008 that they accept the scientific agreement that greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are changing the Earth’s climate. And both candidates have said they want to cap emissions produced by the burning of those fossil fuels.But only Barack Obama has said he would regulate CO2 as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.President George W. Bush has declined to curb...

Breathless in Arizona Regulating carbon dioxide emissions could leave Arizonans out of breath By Byron Schlomach, Ph.D. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) appears to want to regulate our very breath. But not with mandates for regular doses of Listerine in the morning. The problem is carbon dioxide, the gas we expel with every breath. It has become public enemy number one. ADEQ's director, Steve Owen, wants to impose rules on Arizona's economy similar to those California has proposed for the regulation of the so-called greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. Ironically enough, it is the federal government and the Environmental...

Global Warming : A Religion of Non-Sense         Myth:  Humans are the primary cause for Global Warming.Myth:  If we conserve energy and decrease our carbon emissions, we will reverse or stop Global Warming.        Myth:  We (human beings) have the power to alter the global temperature of the earth.Myth:  Having children is hazardous to the environment and selfish.        Myth:  Carbon Credits will offset human pollution.Fact:  The earth has been changing temperature, long before we started driving SUVs.Fact:  China is not going to slow their economic growth or stop building a new coal plant every other day, because of a bunch of environmentalist whacko’s and...

Though Austin Chronicle writer Robert Bryce is likely not a household name, his column published in Thursday's Energy Tribune is a must-read for all anthropogenic global warming skeptics. In "Al Gore's Zero Emissions Makes Zero Sense," Bryce not only skewered the Global Warmingist in Chief's schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth," but he also deliciously mocked all the sycophant devotees of the former vice president that have failed to recognize the obvious as they tour the country professing imminent planetary doom at the hands of a naturally occurring gas that happens to be a necessity to all forms of life. With that...

When it comes to their role in causing global warming, Californians can feel slightly less guilty than most Americans. The average Californian generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions - the main heat-trapping gas blamed for warming the planet - than residents in all other states but Idaho, Vermont and Rhode Island, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. California ranks second in total carbon emissions, trailing only Texas. But the country's most populous state is one of the lowest carbon emitters on a per-person basis. Each person in California is responsible for about 24,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per...

As deadlines loom in California's landmark law to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, the Senate hopes to write into the state budget a rule that forces Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Market Advisory Committee to eschew closed-door meetings and allow the public to view its deliberations. The committee is charged with proposing the heart of the carbon-emissions law--the system of rewards and penalties that will actually make the statute work. The confidential nature of the committee is well known in the Capitol but has been largely ignored outside the state, where the focus has been as much on Schwarzenegger, an actor-turned-politician with a huge...

Prominent political fundraisers who backed Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign are reserving support for the current slate of 2008 Democrats in hopes the former vice president will swoop in for another White House bid. H.E. "Sonny" Cauthen Jr. told The Washington Times he has been flattered to get calls from candidates asking for his help this time around, but said he is hesitating on picking one while he waits to see what Mr. Gore decides. "If he wants to run, I would be very supportive of that," said Mr. Cauthen, a founding partner of the Washington lobbying firm Cauthen Forbes...

Supermarkets, hotels, councils and universities could be given a "cap" on the amount of carbon dioxide they are allowed to emit within five years under Government plans announced yesterday to set legally binding carbon reduction targets. Any business or public body wanting to use more power than its allocation would have to buy low-carbon technology or purchase carbon credits on the open market under the powers contained in a draft Climate Change Bill. The new legislation, binding the UK to an ambitious 60 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050, was published as ministers stepped up their attack on...

BRUSSELS -- The European Union unveiled an ambitious blueprint for combating global warming and boosting energy efficiency, but key elements of the plan face strong opposition from business interests and could require major battles to get them implemented. The European Commission yesterday published a long-awaited proposal for the bloc's first common energy strategy, a version of which will be discussed at a summit of the EU's 27 national leaders in March. "Europe must lead the world into a new -- or maybe one should say post-industrial -- revolution: the development of a low-carbon economy," said commission President José Manuel Barroso....

In one of the strongest signs yet that U.S. industry anticipates government curbs on global-warming emissions, Exxon Mobil Corp., long a leading opponent of such rules, is starting to talk about how it would like them to be structured. Exxon, the world's largest publicly traded oil company by market value, long has been a lightning rod in the global-warming debate. Its top executives have openly questioned the scientific validity of claims that fossil-fuel emissions are warming the planet, and it has funded outside groups that have challenged such claims in language sometimes stronger than the company itself has used. Those...