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President Obama will tout investments in “renewable” energy Wednesday at the local Copper Mountain Solar 1 plant, although the plant has only five full-time employees. The plant, owned by San Diego-based energy company Sempra, was built in late 2010 at a cost of $141 million. Funding included $42 million in federal-government tax credits and $12 million in tax-rebate commitments from the state of Nevada. Construction of the plant involved over 300 part-time jobs, but currently only five full-time employees operate the plant, a Sempra spokeswoman confirmed. That comes out to $10.8 million in tax-dollar subsidies per employee.

Van Jones rallies Hawaii crowd in support of green projects, against Wall Street Published March 21, 2012 | FoxNews.com Van Jones is returning to the spotlight as a green jobs cheerleader, hosting a rally Tuesday night organized to promote a "green" bank to finance alternative energy programs. According to the Hawaii Reporter, Jones gave the keynote address at Tuesday's rally, put together by groups who want the state to create a "State Partnership Bank." Among the legislative proposals is one to have the bank be led by the governor, union leaders and board members appointed by the Democrat-dominated legislature --...

Now on Fox. SCOTUS has ruled in favor of the couple that bought a house lot and was then fined $ 175,000/day by the loathsome EPA for "disturbing a wetland" that does not exist. Will be fascinating to see if any of the Rancid Media even report this.

'Global warming' gets a rebranding By: Erica Martinson and Jonathan Allen March 21, 2012 12:09 AM EDT Shhhh! Don’t talk about global warming! There’s been a change in climate for Washington’s greenhouse gang, and they’ve come to this conclusion: To win, they have to talk about other topics, like gas prices and kids choking on pollutants. More than two years since Democrats’ cap-and-trade plan died in Congress, the strategic shift represents a reluctant acknowledgment from environmentalists that they’ve lost ground by tackling global warming head-on. Their best bet now lies in a bit of a bait and switch: Help elect...

Many Insiders contended that the White House, in weighing the political implications of issuing these rules, will “wait for a less turbulent political environment to move forward”—after the November election passes. “OMB is going to hold on to the [regulations] until after the election. No matter what the [regulations] say, they are going to send shock waves through the important Rust Belt states. To release [them] earlier would be a certain self-imposed wound,” one Insider said. Some Insiders maintained that Obama already handed a victory to his environmental base when he rejected a permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline...

As spring officially begins today, America’s poet laureate of the changing seasons is getting renewed interest for his contributions not only to literature, but modern-day science. Britain’s The Guardian newspaper recently reported that the journals of Henry David Thoreau have been recruited to glean crucial insights about global warming. Thoreau, a studious amateur naturalist, recorded the date of first spring-time blooms for a wide variety of plants in his native New England. But comparing Thoreau’s observations with more recent data, Boston University researchers have concluded that today’s flowers are blooming about 10 days earlier – powerful evidence that the Earth’s...

Guest post by Alec Rawls“President no longer worried about CO2!” That’s what the headlines should have read last week after Obama presented an elaborate argument that alternative energy is the only viable response to high energy prices without ever once mentioning CO2, global warming or climate change. Instead, he presented the need to lessen our reliance on oil purely as an economic imperative.Back when he thought that global warming was a winning concern Obama used to acknowledge that his anti-CO2 policies were going to cause high energy prices (forcing them to “necessarily skyrocket“). Now he is trying to use the...

Your tax dollars at work. Lyle Scruggs, an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, says the Great Recession is responsible for the spike in Americans' skepticism about man-made global warming. Based on his taxpayer-funded review of more than two decades of polling data, Mr. Scruggs says he has correlated people's belief in climate change with their economic well-being: the less secure they feel, the less likely they are to believe. At first blush, that seems logical. When the U.S. economy was robust, Americans were more willing to indulge the fantasies of Internet Al Gore and his...

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), which mandated a steep rise in domestic ethanol production, is causing unforeseen negative consequences for food prices while failing to live up to the desired gasoline results and other expectations, concludes a Texas A&M University research team headed by an economics professor who studies energy issues.James Griffin James M. Griffin, director of the Mosbacher Institute for Trade, Economics & Public Policy, which is part of Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, and Mauricio Cifuentes Soto, a graduate student assisting him, say in their report that the goal of...

    White House staff knew enough about Solyndra’s troubles in January 2011 to dismiss talk of inviting the company’s executives into President Barack Obama’s special State of the Union box, internal emails released Friday show.     The idea of seating Solyndra officials with Michelle Obama in the Capitol during the president’s nationally televised speech came up around the same time that DOE was preparing a controversial change to the company’s $535 million federal loan guarantee, which wound up increasing the risk to taxpayers.  But Daniella Gibbs Léger, director of White House message events, batted down the idea of a State...

a b s t r a c t Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend is found between the length of a cycle and the average temperature in the same cycle, but a significant negative trend is found between the length of a cycle and the temperature in the next cycle. This provides a tool to predict anaverage temperature decrease of at least 1:0 1C from solar cycle 23...

Research based on over 100 independent expert studies points to a cooling Earth climate at least until 2030. Author, Dr. Theodor Landscheidt of the Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity points to failures by climatologists to account for solar variation in their projections.

Living along New Jersey’s 127 miles of coastline has always posed something of a risk. Terms like coastal flooding, erosion and nor’easter have long been a part of the vocabulary of residents on the Shore. But new research predicts rising sea levels due to global warming will more than triple the likelihood of devastating coastal flooding by the year 2030, putting more than 230,000 beach and bay-side residents in the flood zone. Put simply, the once in a lifetime coastal storm may soon come around once in a generation. "Sea level rise is not some distant problem that we can...

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled March 2nd against Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and his renewed attempts to obtain access to the emails and documents used in the research of a former University professor. Michael Mann — who was on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and is a significant contributor to the theory of anthropomorphic, or man-made, global warming — received tax-payer funded grants from the years 1999 to 2005. Cuccinelli’s move to check Mann’s research engendered a good deal of backlash, both from the University and members of the...

It’s only now becoming clear how many people have become rich thanks to the global-warming scare. Politicians from both parties have been so afraid of being labeled a “denier” that they’ll vote for any piece of legislation bearing the trendy green label. The numbers are adding up fast. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) counted a whopping 641 programs in place at 130 federal agencies in 2010 to prop up windmill technology and underwrite solar panel manufacturers. The report released Tuesday didn’t include a reliable estimate of the total cost to taxpayers. The auditors found the array of loans, tax credits,...

President Obama blasted his Republican critics Thursday for their resistance to investing in alternative energy sources, comparing their stance to the beliefs of those who thought that Columbus would sail off the edge of the world. In another in a series of speeches defending his energy policies, Obama touted his push for green energy growth — including wind and solar power, electric cars and biofuels — as a way to help wean the nation from a dependence on foreign oil. And he mocked his rivals for failing to embrace his ideas. “If some of these folks were around when Columbus...

The groups currently drafting new science standards for American classrooms have decided to include a section addressing the issue of climate change. The Congressionally chartered National Academies, including the National Research Council, plan to include a document drafted last year that says that human activities have at least a partial impact on climate.Although there’s a strong consensus in scientific literature on anthropogenic climate change, in America the issue is a source of significant controversy and debate. Just how strident the debate over climate change had become came as a surprise to one California middle school teacher: When Treena Joi, a...

Global warming/obesity crises unite! — New theory: CO2 making us fat By Caroline May - The Daily Caller 1:06 PM 03/14/2012 ADVERTISEMENT A Danish researcher claims he has discovered yet another reason to combat the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere: it is making us fat. According to the researcher, orexins, neuropeptide hormones in the brain that regulate energy, are negatively affected by CO2 — making us more tired and hungry, Science Nordic reports. Lars-Georg Hersoug of the Research Centre for Prevention and Health at Glostrup University Hospital tracked obesity over a 22-year span. He found that both thin and...

WASHINGTON — Global warming-fueled sea level rise over the next century could flood 3.7 million people in 544 U.S. cities temporarily, according to a new method of looking at risking of rising seas published in two scientific papers. The cities that have the most people living within three feet (one meter) of high tide — the projected sea level rise by the year 2100 made by many scientists and computer models — are in Florida, Louisiana, and New York. New York City, often not thought of as a city prone to flooding, has 141,000 people at risk, which is second...

“Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing,” Strauss told The New York Times. “We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas.”