Agenda 21

Another Disgusting “Education” Liberal Trying to Lead our Children Astray!

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Teacher watchdog chair faces misconduct charges

Former college of teachers discipline chair charged with professional misconduct.

 
 
By:  Investigations, Published on Fri Jul 11 2014

The Ontario College of Teacher’s former discipline chair is facing charges of professional misconduct for authoring a soft porn book containing “sexually explicit content” involving Grade 9 students and negative descriptions of teachers.

Jacques Tremblay’s role at the college and his co-authorship of The Sexteens and the Fake Goddess were exposed in a 2011 Toronto Star investigation.Tremblay resigned his role as discipline chair almost immediately and the college began a probe.

No date has been set for his hearing. Tremblay did not respond to a request for comment.

His book is a lurid tale of striptease, breast fondling, bum grabbing, orgasms, drugs and blackmail that features a deputy headmaster who sweeps a sex assault under the carpet and tells male students at a pep rally that if he were younger he would have sex with all the girls in the audience. Another teacher gives a boy advice on French kissing and as the plot unfolds we learn that the deputy headmaster (Harry Dick) and a third teacher once had a threesome with a female student.

In the notice of hearing in the Tremblay case, college investigators accuse him of “dishonourable” conduct and allege the book includes “sexualized descriptions of students.”

Tremblay “permitted the marketing of the novel to teenagers . . . despite the fact that he knew or ought to have known that material in the novel was inconsistent with the standards, values or goals of the teaching profession and/or the education system,” according to allegations filed by the teacher regulator.

Until his resignation, Tremblay had presided over cases that dealt with teachers alleged to have violated the trust of students and the public through sexual assault, verbal and physically abusive attacks, or incompetent behaviour.

The Star uncovered Tremblay’s book and his role on the committee as part of an investigation into the way discipline was carried out at the college. The Star found the college was increasingly shielding bad teachers by keeping their names secret. The secrecty policy changed following the Star investigation.

Tremblay, who has for years been a teacher in Eastern Ontario, was chair of the discipline committee from 2006 to 2011. The Sexteens was published in 2008.

In 2011, Tremblay told the Star that his work as an author was separate from his “public interest” work at the College. He said The Sexteens book “is meant to empower teenagers, to encourage them to be strong and resist or avoid peer pressure,” and that the book has “been endorsed by parents and educators.”

The book was co-written with two others, one of them Tremblay’s wife. It is still available on Amazon.ca, where a review notes: “This is a great book, but one of the authors was fired. He was the person in charge of disciplinary action against teachers in Toronto Canada. Writing about teenagers having sex with teachers was too much for the public to accept from someone that works in a job related to education.”

The original Mothers Against Wind Turbines TM, appealing for help for children…

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Please acknowledge receipt of this message.

 

To:

 

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper

Prime Minister of Canada

pm@pm.gc.ca

 

The Honourable Peter Gordon MacKay

Minister of Justice and Attorney General

mcu@justice.gc.ca

 

July 12, 2014

 

Dear Prime Minister Harper and Hon. MacKay, Attorney General and Minister of Justice,

 

Re: Convention on the Rights of the Child and Industrial Wind Energy 

 

Ms Correia and I have taken the opportunity to communicate some of the risk factors of exposing fetuses, babies, children, youth and those with special needs to noise and other emissions associated with industrial wind energy facilities. We provided a snapshot of evidence indicating some members of this vulnerable population group with pre-existing medical conditions could also be at risk. In some cases, vulnerable children are expected to be exposed at home, at school or both.

 

This letter is public and may be shared.

 

During our correspondence, we cited the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

 

We now note that a recent Supreme Court of Canada Judgment considered the Convention on the Rights of the Child. [Judgment and Reasons, The Hon. Justice MacTavish, Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, The Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, Daniel Garcia Rodriques, Hanif Ayubi and Justice for Children and Youth v. Attorney General of Canada and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration]   

 

Ms Correia has urged that the Government of Canada take immediate measures to ensure health protection from wind energy facilities for her son and Canadian children.

 

We have requested a meeting with Minister Peter McKay and look forward to the opportunity to share our concerns and provide some of the evidence relating to this complex topic.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

Carmen Krogh, BScPharm

Ontario

Cell 613 312 9663

 

Attachments

  1. Judgment and Reasons, The Hon. Justice MacTavish, Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, The Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, Daniel Garcia Rodriques, Hanif Ayubi and Justice for Children and Youth v. Attorney General of Canada and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration 
  2. Convention on the Rights of the Child July 12 2014.FINAL.pdf

 

[1]

 

2 Attachments

 

 

Preview attachment SCC-T-356-13 Cdn Doctors v AGC Judgment and Reasons.pdf

SCC-T-356-13 Cdn Doctors v AGC Judgment and Reasons.pdf

Preview attachment Convention on the Rights of the Child July 12 2014 FINAL.pdf

Convention on the Rights of the Child July 12 2014 FINAL.pdf

 

Faux-Green Scam Used to Push Agenda 21…Fight back! Educate yourself!

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Big Green’s lethal agenda

Sustainability and climate claims limit energy access and living standards for the world’s poor

  • snowgore

July 11, 2014 by Paul Driessein

The outstanding presentations at this Ninth International Conference on Climate Change clearly demonstrate that activist climate science is increasingly devoid of evidence … increasingly removed from the scientific method – and yet is increasingly being used to devise, justify and impose policies, laws, and regulations that govern our lives.

Indeed, rules formulated on the basis of “dangerous manmade climate change” allegationscontrol the hydrocarbons that power America and the world, improve and safeguard our lives, lift billions out of abject poverty, and allow us to achieve technologies and dreams never before thought possible.

Put simply, those who control carbon control our lives … our livelihoods, liberties, living standards, and even life spans. It is therefore essential that climate science reflects the utmost in integrity, transparency, and accountability.

Sadly, the opposite is true. As we have seen, far too much of the supposed science used to justify IPCC, US, EU, and other actions is distorted, exaggerated, even fabricated. If it were used to market private sector investments, products or services, the perpetrators would be prosecuted for fraud.

The latest White House claims are no better. The assertion that shutting down affordable, reliable coal-based electricity will somehow reduce asthma and protect children’s health is as baseless as any other arguments advanced in support of claims that we face an imminent manmade climate change catastrophe.

A primary reason for the fervor and longevity of these claims is that global warming is a social movement – or more accurately one manifestation of a social movement. It is a major part of a near religious Deep Ecology movement that is anti-energy, anti-people, and opposed to modern economies, technologies, and civilizations. In its determination to impose its worldview on the rest of humanity, it is dogmatic, imperialistic, and authoritarian.

It is also a Big Green and Big Government movement – with tens of billions of dollars at its disposal: over $13 billion per year just in the United States for Big Green organizations.

Global warming, climate change, climate disruption, and extreme weather mantras are almost interchangeable with sustainable development. When ClimateGate, fizzled confabs in Copenhagen and Durban, and a then-15-year pause in Earth’s warming made the world weary of climate change disaster demagoguery – Rio+20 Summit organizers simply repackaged climate crisis claims under the sustainability mantra. Fossil fuels, they intoned, must be replaced because we are running out of them, and their use is unsustainable.

Like climate change, sustainability is infinitely elastic and malleable, making it a perfect weapon for anti-development activists. Whatever they support is sustainable. Whatever they oppose is unsustainable.

For other times and audiences, climate and sustainability are replaced – in whole or in part – with over- population, resource depletion, the precautionary principle, mass species extinction … or chemical contamination. That’s why the White House is now talking about carbon pollution and asthma.

Think of the T-1000 android in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This vastly improved villain had the ability to morph into any shape it desired, giving it previously unimaginable powers and near indestructibility – all with the goal of controlling the future of humanity.

And so we have Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome and its concept of Limits to Growth. “When DDT was introduced for civilian use,” King wrote, within 2 years Guyana had almost eliminated malaria. “But at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”

ehrlichThe Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich likewise blamed DDT for the “drastic lowering of death rates” in underdeveloped countries. He suggested that, because those countries were not practicing a “birth rate solution” – they needed to have a “death rate solution” imposed on them. Ban DDT.

Global warming, sustainability, and attacks on fossil fuels and biotechnology must therefore be understood as other components of their “death rate solution” and their intense desire to control all human endeavors.

In his 1973 Human Ecology book with Paul Ehrlich, President Obama’s chief science advisor John Holdren put it this way:

“A massive campaign must be launched to … de-develop the United States [and bring] our economic system … into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation…. Once the United States has clearly started on the path of cleaning up its own mess, it can then turn its attention to the problems of the de-development of the other [developed countries] and the ecologically feasible development of the [underdeveloped countries].”

“Limits to growth,” “the global resource situation,” and “ecologically feasible development” of course are synonyms for “resource depletion,” “peak oil,” “sustainable development,” and “dangerous manmade global warming” – with radical Deep Ecologists in and out of government making all the decisions.

Never mind that fracking has obliterated their “peak oil and gas” mantra. Never mind that human ingenuity and innovation – JulianSimonJulian Simon’s ultimate resource – has and will always discover new ways to find and extract the energy and other materials needed to make new technologies that will continue improving lives, living standards and planetary health.

For eco-imperialists, whatever they support is sustainable. Whatever they oppose isunsustainable. Whatever they support complies with the “precautionary principle.” Whatever they disdain violates the principle. Or as Competitive Enterprise Institute founder Fred Smith once put it, “For radical environmentalists, ‘sustainable development’ means don’t use it today, and the precautionary principle means don’t produce it tomorrow.”

The precautionary principle always focuses on the alleged risks of using technologies – butnever on the risks of not using them. It spotlights risks that a technology – such as coal-fired power plants – might cause, but ignores the risks that the technology would reduce or prevent.

That is a major part of the reason why over 700 million people and 300 million Indians (three times the population of the U.S. and Canada combined) still have no access to electricity, or only sporadic access. Worldwide, almost 2.5 billion people – nearly a third of our Earth’s population – still lack electricity or have access only to little solar panels or unreliable networks.

That means they must burn wood and dung for heating and cooking, which results in widespread lung diseases that kill 2 to 4 million people every year. It means they also lack refrigeration, safe water, and decent hospitals, resulting in virulent intestinal diseases that kill another 2 million people a year.

But when anyone points out these cold-as-grave realities, the Terminator 2 ideological android morphs yet again – shifting the topic to “global cataclysms” of manmade global warming and unsustainable development. The Deep Ecologists’ callous indifference to these intolerable and immoral death tolls is stunning.

To the extent that they do want to improve these people’s lives, they advocate wind turbines in villages and solar panels on huts – but never abundant, affordable, reliable electricity from large-scale coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, or nuclear facilities. Their opposition to a gas-fired plant in Ghana, coal-fired plant in South Africa, and hydroelectric projects in China, India, and Uganda underscores their inhumane worldview.

So Big Green activists shift the topic again: to mass global species extinctions. But these claims are based on completely irrelevant examples of predators introduced into islandpopulations. Moreover, the true threats to wild plant and animal species are the very technologies that Deep Ecology/Climate Chaos ideologues love the most: biofuels and wind turbines.

Both of these “eco-friendly alternatives” blanket vast acreage that would otherwise be wildlife habitats – and wind turbines slaughter millions of birds and bats annually, nearly wiping out some species across broad areas near industrial wind turbine facilities.

The key point to remember is this. Climate change, sustainability, and these other mantras give Mr. Holdren and his ideological soul-mates the justification and power to determine the fate of nations … to decide how much development each should be allowed to have … to compel rich countries to de-develop and reduce their living standards … and to force poor countries to accept whatever the Deep Ecologists decide is the proper, sustainable, climate-stabilization level of development, population, poverty, disease, malnutrition, and premature death.

malariachildrenOn and on it goes, with “climate justice” yet another weapon that these wealthy, powerful, arrogant, intolerant, immoral, mostly white elites are using in their crusade to control the rest of humanity – regardless of the human and animal death tolls. As Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”

Their double standards … secret science … morphing mantras … and vicious attacks on anyone who dares to disagree with them – are all designed to seize power over the energy that powers modern civilization … and to control every aspect of our lives, livelihoods, living standards, fundamental liberties, health, welfare, dreams, and aspirations.

These mantras are truly weapons of mass destruction in a movement war on modern civilization. It is a war that pits wealthy elites against poor, minority, elderly, and working classes – and rich nations against poor nations. And in those poor nations, it is a war on women and children, for they are the most vulnerable, and they die in the greatest numbers from malaria, lung infections, malnutrition, and severe diarrhea.

Equally revealing and frightening is the fact that this Big Green/Big Government movement refuses to budge an inch in its opposition to fossil fuels, fracking, and reliable electricity – even when confronted by the turmoil and destruction we are witnessing in Ukraine, the Middle East, Libya, Nigeria, and other parts of the world … many of them energy-rich, and with the prospect of Al Qaeda controlling countless billions of dollars in oil wealth.

The eco-imperialist movement’s focus on distant, conjectural, fabricated risks a century from now remains unchanged. It is truly the great moral and ethical battle of our time.

That is what we’re up against.

We have struck a blow here at this conference for honest, evidence-based science … for transparency and accountability, and open, robust debate … for the freedom and courage to stand up to the forces of tyranny, darkness, and death. But our work is not yet finished.

Like the Thirty Years War and other religious and ideological confrontations of the ages, this battle will go on, and the global death toll will rise.

However, I am heartened by the knowledge that we here gathered today will fight on – for honest science, affordable energy, accountable government, and better lives for billions of people … and against the dark forces of climate fanaticism. I also know we are being joined by more and more countries, as they increasingly understand the true nature of this ideological conflict.

In the immortal words of Sir Winston Churchill: “We shall fight in the fields, in the streets and in the hills. We shall never surrender. We shall fight on until victory, however long and hard the road may be. For without victory, there is no survival.”

————-

Paul Driessen presented this paper at the Heartland Institute’s Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 9, 2014, for the panel, “Global Warming as a Social Movement.”

– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2014/07/11/big-greens-lethal-agenda/#sthash.gkd76cJw.dpuf

The Global Warming Nonsense, is Wearing Thin. It’s just not true!~

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Bast: If There’s No Global Warming, There’s No Climate Change Problem

July 9, 2014 – 1:37 PM
By Barbara Hollingsworth
 
Joe Bast

Joe Bast, president & CEO of the Heartland Institute, (Heartland Institute(CNSNews.com) –  With satellitedata showing no global warming for 17 years and 10 months, and even the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledging a “pause” in rising temperatures, it’s time to stop talking about a climate change problem, says Joe Bast, president and CEO of the Heartland Foundation.

 

“Global warming is still at the heart of climate change. All the climate changes are attributable to the increase in temperature in the climate, so even if they might want to talk about sea level rise and heat being stored in the lower ocean and all these indirect climate effects, the engine for that, the cause of all that is global warming,” Bast told CNSNews.com.

“And if there is no global warming, or if it’s paused, or if it’s less than what they thought, or if the human impact is less than they thought, then that whole paradigm collapses. Whether you call it climate change or global warming, if there’s no warming going on, it’s not a problem.”

“I would say two years ago, we could have concluded that,” Bast added. “NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said 15 years was the cut-off date in an influential [2008] report…. But even the alarmists said that if there was no warming for 15 years, that that would invalidate the models that they were using. So it’s rare that the other side puts a date on something like that, but they did it this time, and I think we ought to hold them to it.”

Noting that the behavior of prominent climate change scientists is “characteristic of a movement that’s about to crash,” Bast pointed out that the “alarmists” invited to debate the “skeptics” at Heartland’s 9th Annual Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas this week declined to defend their contention that the Earth is facing catastrophic warming and that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are to blame.

“We invited scores of scientists who are on the alarmist side of this debate to attend and present their ideas,” Bast told CNSNews.com. “In the past, we’ve had one or two willing to do that, and they’ve always been treated with great politeness and allowed to debate. But none of them this time agreed to take us up on our offer.”

“Why do you think that is?” CNSNews.com asked Bast.

“I think they’re afraid to debate. They’re just afraid,” he replied. “They know in front of an audience of their peers that they will lose.”

On June 25, President Obama mocked those who challenge the theory that man-made global warming is causing catastrophic climate change, tellingthe League of Conservation Voters that it is a fact despite 17-plus years of evidence to the contrary.

“You can ignore the facts; you can’t deny the facts,” the president said.

 

President Obama

President Obama addresses the League of Conservation Voters at a June 25, 2014 dinner in Washington. (AP photo)

 

But Bast criticized the Obama administration for doing just that by promulgating energy policies based on flawed computer models’ predictions of global warming, which actual temperature data have since proven to be wrong.

“I don’t think this administration’s policies are based on science at all, which is why they just ignore every report and every scientist who says they’re wrong on this,” Bast told CNSNews.com.

He also criticized Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) for claiming that “97 percent of scientists agree that [carbon dioxide] is leading to dangerous climate change that is affecting our families” at a June 18 hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee.

“The scientific community is deeply divided on some of the underlying science issues, like whether or not models can forecast future climate, and what the trade-offs, the feedbacks are in the environment, so there’s just tremendous uncertainty,” Bast said.

“This is one of the big unsolved scientific issues of our day, and for politicians to be saying 97 percent of all scientists agree on this is absurd.”

“Frankly, the science doesn’t matter to President Obama or to any of those Democratic senators. They’ve decided that they want to wage a war on fossil fuels, they’ve decided that they want to subsidize and promote a new energy industry, renewables, and global warming is just a handy excuse, or smoke and mirrors, that they can use to sell this agenda,” Bast told CNSNews.com.

Asked whether most Americans are aware that the Earth has not warmed for close to 18 years, he replied:

“I think the people who are paying attention have figured this out. The American people see prominent left-wing politicians talking about this issue and the more they talk about it, the more the public understands that this is a political issue, not a science debate.”

Now that actual temperature data has confirmed the skeptics’ view that carbon dioxide is not causing catastrophic global warming, Bast says it’s time to move on, especially since billions of dollars have already been spent trying to stop a non-existent threat.

“I think the other side is just going to double down on ad hominen attacks and outrageous lies, like the 97 percent consensus and claims about the weather. They’re going to try to keep the focus away from what the real issue now should be,” he said.

“Going forward, the issue is: what do we do legislatively?  How should public policy be changed, now that we know global warming is not a crisis, now that we know the costs of trying to reduce emissions are enormous and would cause lots of negative consequences?”

“I would love to have that debate,” Bast continued. “We tried to start that debate a good 10, 15 years ago and people were so concerned about the science that they didn’t want to discuss how much it would cost to try to stop this thing. Now that the science has been thrown out, we need to be having a debate about what we should be doing.

“And that debate, I think, logically leads to we should start getting rid of all the subsidies to wind and solar and ethanol, we should start looking at ways of adapting to climate change regardless of whether it’s natural or man-made, and probably encourage innovation, both in the energy sector and manufacturing, because that’s where we have win-win solutions.”

 

Al Gore: Public ‘Lulled’ Into Accepting 'Using the Atmosphere as an Open Sewer'

Former Democratic Vice President Al Gore. (AP)

 

Meanwhile, he pointed out, more and more scientists are quietly backing away from their prior claims that the Earth has a “fever,” as former vice-president Al Gore once put it.

“I think the IPCC in its last report kind of hit a dead end, and some very prominent folks are saying that. The editors of Nature editorialized that this should be the last report from the IPCC,” Bast said, characterizing the reports as “massive compilations of obsolete research” trying to prove “a broken paradigm.”

“Now the folks at Nature are still committed alarmists, although I think they’re walking that back, admitting that it’s more complicated, or that it might take longer, or that reducing emissions might not be the way to try to respond to the possible problems,” he said.

Even groups that have been “sitting on the sidelines, not willing to challenge the science,” are now speaking out publicly, he added, noting that the Heartland Institute has done so since its founding in Chicago in 1984.

“We took a lot of bullets, a lot of arrows for doing that,” Bast said. “But it’s great. I love the company.”

Some Scientists Losing Respect and Trust?…No Surprise!

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Scientific publishing: The inside track

Members of the US National Academy of Sciences have long enjoyed a privileged path to publication in the body’s prominent house journal. Meet the scientists who use it most heavily.

18 June 2014

Maxwell MacKenzie/National Academy of Sciences

The building for the National Academy of Sciences was completed in 1924 as a “home of science in America”. The academy’s house journal was established a decade earlier, in part, as a home for members’ papers.

In April, the US National Academy of Sciences elected 105 new members to its ranks. Academy membership is one the most prestigious honours for a scientist, and it comes with a tangible perk: members can submit up to four papers per year to the body’s high-profile journal, the venerableProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), through the ‘contributed’ publication track. This unusual process allows authors to choose who will review their paper and how to respond to those reviewers’ comments.

 

 

For many academy members, this privileged path is central to the appeal of PNAS. But to some scientists, it gives the journal the appearance of an old boys’ club. “Sound anachronistic? It is,” wrote biochemist Steve Caplan of the University of Nebraska, Omaha, in a 2011 blogpost that suggested the contributed track could be used as a “dumping ground” for some papers. Editors at the journal have strived to dispel that perception.

With PNAS currently celebrating its centenary, the news team at Naturedecided to examine the contributed track, both to assess its scientific impact and to see which members use it most heavily and why. After analysing a decade’s worth of PNAS papers, we found that only a small number of scientists have used the track at close to the maximum allowable rate. The group includes some of the biggest names in science, and six are past or current members of the journal’s editorial board. These scientists say that the main motivator for using the contributed track is an intense frustration with the peer-review process at other high-profile journals, which they argue has become excessive and laborious.

Our analysis also suggests that the efforts by PNAS to prevent abuse of the contributed track and to boost the quality of papers published by this route are bearing fruit. Although contributed PNASpapers attract fewer citations than those handled through the journal’s standard review process, the gap has narrowed in recent years. “We have worked really hard at this,” says Alan Fersht, a biophysicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, one of PNAS‘s associate editors and a heavy user of the contributed track.

The inside track:Methods for data analysis and full data

A privilege to publish

An inside track to publication for academy members rests deep in PNAS‘s DNA. The journal was established in 1914 with the explicit goal of publishing members’ “more important contributions to research” in addition to “work that appears to a member to be of particular importance”. That remit led to the creation of two publishing tracks: contributed and ‘communicated’ papers (manuscripts sent by non-members to colleagues in the academy, who would shepherd them through review). These two tracks were the only ways to get a paper into PNAS until 1995, when biochemist Nicholas Cozzarelli of the University of California, Berkeley, took over as editor-in-chief and introduced ‘direct submissions’, which are handled more like papers at other journals. Direct submissions must pass an initial screen by a member of the editorial board, after which they are assigned to an independent editor — either an academy member or a guest editor — who organizes peer review.

Expand

Starting in 1972, the journal placed limits on the number of contributed papers that an academy member could submit, and the current annual cap of four was imposed in 1996. Then in 2010, PNASabolished the communicated track, which was already declining in popularity1. Today, more than three-quarters of the papers published in the journal are direct submissions. These papers are much less likely to be accepted than those contributed by academy members. Only 18% of direct submissions were published in 2013, whereas more than 98% of contributed papers were published, according to figures on the journal’s website. (The one caveat is that PNAS has no data on how many papers intended for the contributed track receive negative reviews and never get submitted.)

Despite the impressive acceptance rate for contributed papers, the data collected show that many eligible scientists choose not to submit papers through this track. Of the more than 3,100 academy members who could have used the contributed track between 2004 and 2013, fewer than 1,400 scientists did so. (This might in part reflect where researchers from different fields prefer to publish their work; the academy draws its members from all disciplines, including researchers from fields such as astronomy and mathematics, who rarely send their papers to PNAS.) Most members who used the contributed track did so sparingly: the majority published on average fewer than one contributed paper per year. Only a small group consistently used the track at close to the allowable maximum: from 2004 to 2013, 13 scientists each contributed more than 30 of their own papers. This roster includes some of the best-known people in contemporary science (see ‘Who are the power users?’).

Some of these researchers, such as Solomon Snyder, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, rarely or never publish in PNAS except through the contributed track. But others, including immunologist Tak Mak at the University of Toronto in Canada and cancer researcher Carlo Croce at Ohio State University in Columbus, also regularly send in direct submissions.

Having control over the review process brings advantages. Those who work across disciplinary boundaries say that being able to choose your own reviewers is the best way to ensure that referees actually understand the material. “Chemists have no idea about glycobiology,” says Chi-Huey Wong of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who studies the chemistry and biology of sugars.

But for others, including Croce, who consistently hits his annual allocation of four contributed papers per year, the track’s appeal boils down to one word: speed. Several of the contributed track’s most regular users say that they have had papers held in limbo for up to two years at Nature, Science orCell while the manuscripts went through multiple reviews and revisions. “In two years, you can be scooped over and over and over,” says Croce.

Science and Nature each provided figures for median time passed between submission and publication for recent papers, which suggest lag times greater than for contributed articles at PNAS.Cell declined to provide figures. However, comparing across journals is difficult because each has different policies on when a revised manuscript is considered a ‘new’ submission.

Still, many of the contributed track’s power users believe that increased competition for space in high-profile journals has allowed editors and reviewers to become more demanding. “Being able to publish four high-profile papers with much less grief than the usual high-prestige journal — that’s worth something,” says Snyder. Some of the power users, including Snyder and Mak, add that the contributed track benefits postdoctoral researchers or students in their laboratories who are searching for jobs and need high-profile publications more quickly than the review time at Nature orScience would allow.

Complaints about nitpicking reviews at Nature and Science go hand-in-hand with the charge that the editors at these journals are in thrall to trendy areas of research. “Very often what seems to be fashionable is not very good science,” says Croce.

Special access

Related stories

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The problem for most scientists looking to advance their career, however, is that they do not have the option of turning to PNAS‘s contributed track. No wonder, then, that successive editors-in-chief have been dogged by the view that PNAS is a club for academy members. “We want to remove this perception,” says current editor-in-chief Inder Verma, a gene-therapy researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla.

The steady growth of direct submissions bears witness to efforts by Verma and his predecessors to make the journal attractive to scientists who are not academy members (see ‘A changing journal’). “When I was editor, I was very concerned about the abuse of members’ privilege,” says Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley, a former PNAS editor-in-chief, under whose watch communicated papers were abolished (see Nature http://doi.org/d22bqx; 2009). Academy members were consulted on that decision, and it was a popular one — probably because it freed members from having to deal with submission requests from colleagues.

But it would be far more difficult to convince members to give up their own publishing privileges. Even the contributed track’s critics accept that it is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. “I’d just do away with it,” says applied physicist David Weitz of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “But it’s something that many members of the academy have viewed as their prerogative.” Weitz, who sits on the PNAS editorial board, publishes some of his best work in the journal, but has a policy of never using the contributed track. “I don’t want to have a special ‘in’,” he says.

The contributed track’s most enthusiastic users argue that their papers get thoroughly reviewed. “The referees I choose are people I hardly know but who can give the best review of the papers — so I don’t get egg on my face,” says Fersht. “It’s not a free ride,” agrees Mak, who adds that his haul of contributed PNAS papers should be viewed against his high productivity overall. His laboratory published more than 300 original research papers over the same decade. Many of the other power users head similarly productive labs.

“Editors have been dogged by the view that PNAS is a club for academy members”

PNAS has also tried to limit conflicts of interest by barring members from picking recent collaborators to referee their papers. Current rules prohibit members from choosing any scientist they have worked with in the past four years. The journal’s editorial board can also step in to block contributed papers if it feels that members are abusing their privileges, a process that Schekman says took a considerable amount of time and effort during his tenure. Telling big-name scientists — some with egos to match — that their work isn’t up to snuff can be difficult. “We would challenge these papers, and people would take umbrage and personally attack me,” says Schekman. “It was discouraging to have to deal with that, but I was unbowed.” Verma continues the fight, taking a wry view. “Every member of the academy is a legend in their own mind,” he jokes.

As well as providing oversight for the contributed track, the nearly 200-strong PNAS editorial board includes some of the track’s most enthusiastic users. Our analysis shows that almost half of those who contributed more than 30 papers over the past decade are current or former members of the board — including Fersht, Mak and Snyder. These scientists work hard for PNAS: none more so than Snyder, who has organized the review of hundreds of direct-submission papers over the past decade.

Verma is adamant that there is no preferential treatment for those who sit on the journal’s editorial board. Still, he acknowledges that the perk of the contributed track helps to explain how the journal can operate without professional editors. Fersht agrees: “Members are willing to act as editors, and part of it is because they know they are able to publish their own papers.” Verma says that more than 1,200 members of the academy responded to the call to edit one or more papers in 2013, and he argues that collective editing by leading scientists is the journal’s main strength.

But all of that does not quell criticism of the contributed track, and there is evidence that contributed papers have less impact than those reviewed in the usual way. In 2009, psychologist David Rand and evolutionary biologist Thomas Pfeiffer, then both at Harvard University, looked at citations to papers published in PNAS between June 2004 and April 2005. Controlling for factors such as scientific discipline and time elapsed since publication, the pair found that contributed papers were cited less often than direct submissions and communicated papers2. (By the time Rand and Pfeiffer published their analysis, PNAS had already decided to abolish the communicated track.)

Although citations are not the only way to judge the impact of papers, they are the most readily available and widely researched measure. We repeated and extended Rand and Pfeiffer’s analysis, considering papers published from 2004 to 2011. Overall, the conclusion was the same: the difference between citation rates for directly submitted and contributed papers was not large — controlling for other factors such as discipline, contributed papers garnered about 4.5% fewer citations — but it was statistically significant. Nature‘s analysis also suggests that the gap in citation rates between directly submitted and contributed papers has been narrowing, and this does not seem to be because more-recent papers have yet to acquire enough citations for the difference to show.

Viewed in this light, the journal seems to be making progress with its efforts to eliminate the abuse of publishing privileges by academy members. And Verma vows to keep up the pressure. He is now encouraging academy members to list the reviewers for contributed papers, taking the lead by doing so for his own most recent contribution3. Such transparency, he hopes, will hold everyone to rigorous standards.

Verma also wants to eliminate what some scientists see as a vestige of the old communicated track — an option to request a ‘prearranged editor’ from the academy. One in five direct submissions published in 2013 used a prearranged editor, and the acceptance rate for these papers is higher than for other direct submissions. “More and more the playing field will be levelled,” says Verma.

As PNAS marches into its second century, debate about its idiosyncratic publishing mechanisms is sure to continue. But for those who benefit from the journal’s distinctive approach, PNAS‘s quirks are inherent to its appeal. “The last thing we need, I think, is less diversity,” argues Nobel-prizewinning neuroscientist Thomas Südhof of Stanford University in California. “Turning PNAS into a standard journal, in my view, would make it unnecessary.

No Reason to Fear Fracking! Better for us than wind turbines and solar panels!

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Seven Facts for Fracking Deniers

By Jeffrey Folks
 

At a recent town hall meeting in Edmond, Oklahoma, local citizens gathered to discuss the possible connection between fracking and increased seismic activity in their area.  According to one published report, members of the audience left “disappointed” that no consensus had been reached linking fracking and seismic activity.  According to the samereport, many in the audience appeared to be “hostile to the oil and gas industry.”  Even in this most oil-friendly of states, it seems, there is a rush to judgment linking fracking to every conceivable sort of damage.

Although fracking has been around for fifty years, only recently have technological advances made its widespread use economically feasible.  Now fracking is reviving the entire American economy by providing efficient fuel for new industries and slashing energy costs for consumers.  By 2015, the U.S. willbegin exporting natural gas, most of it produced by fracking.

No wonder the left is furious.  Anything that promises to restore American greatness drives leftists crazy.  Their dream of global socialism, with America brought down to the bottom of the heap, is at risk, and they have responded by targeting America’s oil and gas industry.

Having tried unsuccessfully to link fracking to groundwater contamination, opponents have turned their attention to the potential link between fracking and earthquake activity.  The problem is, even scientists who normally align with the left now admit that hydraulic fracturing itself does not and cannot cause earthquakes.  The only unresolved question is whether wastewater injection, a byproduct of current fracking procedures, may contribute to increased seismic activity.

 

Clearly, the left is engaged in an all-out effort to smear the oil and gas industry by spreading misinformation and fostering confusion – such as ignoring the difference between fracking itself and wastewater injection.  The intent of this effort is to cripple the U.S. economy by depriving it of an efficient and reliable source of energy.  The ultimate goal, as always, is to strip America of its sovereignty and subject it to the will of a communist world order.  The energy industry stands in the way of this agenda, as does every other industry operating within the free market.

Fracking is now essential to America’s energy security and economic well-being, and thus essential to the liberty of its citizens.  Like all forms of capitalist activity, it must be defended against those who plot to destroy freedom, and the best way to defend it is to separate fact from fiction.

Fact #1: Fracking, in and of itself, does not cause earthquake activity (or, for that matter, groundwater pollution or other harmful effects).

Fact #2: In some locations where fracking has taken place, there has been acoincidental increase in the number of earthquakes.  In other areas where widespread fracking has taken place, no quakes or tremors have been registered.  As authorities stated at the Edmond meeting, there exists no conclusive evidence that fracking causes earthquakes.  It should also be stressed that none of the quakes purportedly linked to fracking have seriously injured human beings or caused major property damage.

Fact #3: Even in those limited areas where earthquake activity has increased, it is impossible to know to what extent seismic activity has increased, since speculation about the connection with fracking has led to the deployment of a larger number of monitoring devices.  According to one prominent geologist, a similar increase in seismic activity may have taken place in Oklahoma in the early 1950s, though an absence of recording devices at that time makes an exact comparison impossible.  The record shows that Oklahoma has a long history of earthquake activity.  While more quakes and tremors are now being recorded, it is certain that a larger number would have been detected in the past if an equal number of monitoring devices had been deployed.

Fact #4: It is alleged that injection wells, used to dispose of fracking liquids deep underground, may be triggering seismic activity.  Most seismologists admit, however, that it is impossible at this time to prove that wastewater injection is the cause of increased earthquake activity.  As scientists study the connection between wastewater disposal and seismic activity, it may be necessary to establish better standards or develop new methods of wastewater disposal.  Energy companies are committed to following best practices in this regard.

These facts contradict the left’s attempts to demonize fracking.  As with the anti-nuclear witch hunt of the 1980s following an accident at Three Mile Island, there is the danger that states and municipalities – or the federal government through the EPA or other agencies – will impose regulations or moratoriums that shut down an important segment of our nation’s energy supply.  Had the anti-nuclear lunacy not swept the country following Three Mile Island in 1979, America would have been a lot better off.  Lost oil and gas production due to a moratorium on fracking (such as Germany has just imposed) would result in even greater harm.

Given the serious implications for U.S. energy independence and economic growth, any discussion of fracking and seismic activity needs to consider three additional facts.

Fact #5: Fracking has led to an increase in domestic oil and gas production and a major reduction in dependence on foreign oil.  Since 2005, U.S. oil production has increased from approximately 5 million to 8 million barrels per day.  Combined with increased fuel efficiency and a slight decline in miles driven, increased domestic oil production has cut dependence on foreign oil in half.  According to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. will become the world’s largest oil producer by 2015.

Fact #6: The oil and gas industry has contributed the lion’s share of job growth since 2008.  According to the American Energy Institute, as of January 2013, jobs in the oil and gas sector had increased by 26.2%, while overall employment in the five-year period had declined by 2.3%.  And unlike most jobs created in the Obama’s years, oil and gas jobs are high-paying.  In 2013, annual earnings for workers in North Dakota’s oil fields averaged $112,000.  Nationally, petroleum engineers averaged between $110,000 and $150,000 annually, with senior engineers and managers earning far more.

Fact #7: Fracking has lowered the cost of natural gas and helped to restrain price increases for oil as well.  According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency,natural gas prices peaked at $13.42 per mBtu in October 2005.  After fracking became common in the U.S., prices declined to a low of $1.99 per mBtu in April 2012, and they remain low today.  Lower energy prices have reduced costs for homes, schools, businesses, and industries.  At the same time, fracking has generated tens of billions of dollars of new revenue for states and municipalities.

Given these facts, the obvious conclusion is that government should move slowly and deliberately before imposing unnecessary restrictions on fracking, especially in the absence of evidence linking the practice to earthquakes or other ill effects.

Instead of shouting down fracking at town hall meetings, the public needs to be marching in support of this advanced technology.  Otherwise, some other nation – perhaps China or Russia – will eventually surpass us in this vital technology and reap all the rewards that fracking now provides.       

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books on American politics and culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

 
 

The Terrifying Truth About the Faux-Green Agenda! READ THIS!

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We should all want to be wise and careful stewards of the beautiful planet we call home. But most of us realize that humans in general are not being good stewards. We are wasteful with our natural resources and have reduced biodiversity. Therefore, when we read about groups and organisations calling for a ‘green revolution’ and a new relationship between humanity and nature it is easy to agree with their ideas. 

However, certain aspects of the modern green movement that is permeating every segment of our society are not about protecting the environment. You don’t have to dig very deep to discover the true beliefs of the influential leaders who are using genuine concerns about the environment to promote an agenda of fear and control. Please carefully consider the implications of the opinions that they so openly and freely express:

(references and sources for the quotes below can be found here)

“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up 
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, 
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome, 
premier environmental think-tank,
consultants to the United Nations

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public’s imagination…
So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements
and make little mention of any doubts…
Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.“
– Prof. Stephen Schneider, 
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of 
economic and environmental policy.“
– Timothy Wirth, 
President of the UN Foundation 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
– Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations 
on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
– Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The models are convenient fictions 
that provide something very useful.”
– Dr David Frame, 
climate modeler, Oxford University

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts 
on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.”
– Al Gore,
Climate Change activist

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“It doesn’t matter what is true,
it only matters what people believe is true.”
– Paul Watson,
co-founder of Greenpeace

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The only way to get our society to truly change is to
frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
– emeritus professor Daniel Botkin

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and
spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest
opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level.”
– Al Gore,
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We are on the verge of a global transformation.
All we need is the right major crisis…”
– David Rockefeller,
Club of Rome executive member

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the
world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a
major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system
into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods,
droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have
ever experienced – a catastrophe of our own making.” 
– Al Gore,
An Inconvenient Truth

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We are getting close to catastrophic tipping points,
despite the fact that most people barely notice the warming yet.”
– Dr James Hansen,
NASA researcher

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“By the end of this century climate change will reduce the human
population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.”
– Sir James Lovelock,
Revenge of Gaia

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Climate Change will result in a catastrophic global sea level
rise of seven meters. That’s bye-bye most of Bangladesh,
Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis.”
– Greenpeace International

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“This planet is on course for a catastrophe.
The existence of Life itself is at stake.”
– Dr Tim Flannery,
Principal Research Scientist 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. 
It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.” 
– Harry Reid,
U.S. Senate majority leader

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Climate Change is the greatest threat that
human civilization has ever faced.”
– Angela Merkel,
German Chancellor

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it’s here,
and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new 
global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.“
– Barack Obama,
US President

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We simply must do everything we can in our power to
slow down global warming before it is too late.”
– Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Governor of California

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Climate change should be seen as the
greatest challenge to ever face mankind.”
– Prince Charles

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Climate change makes us all global citizens,
we are truly all in this together.”
– Gordon Brown,
British Prime Minister

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We have reached the critical moment of decision on climate change.
Failure to act to now would be deeply and unforgivably irresponsible.
We urgently require a global environmental revolution.”
– Tony Blair,
former British PM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We are close to a time when all of humankind 
will envision a global agenda that encompasses 
a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the 
causes of poverty and suffering and 
environmental destruction all over the earth.“
– Al Gore,
Earth in the Balance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“In Nature organic growth proceeds according 
to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a ‘master plan’ is 
missing from the process of growth and development of
the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for 
sustainable growth and world development based on global 
allocation of all resources and a new global economic system.
Ten or twenty years form today it will probably be too late.”
– Club of Rome,
Mankind at the Turning Point

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We need a new paradigm of development in 
which the environment will be a priority. 
World civilization as we know it will soon end. 
We have very little time and we must act. 
If we can address the environmental problem, 
it will have to be done within a new system, a 
new paradigm. We have to change our mindset, 
the way humankind views the world.“
– Mikhail Gorbachev,
founder of Green Cross International

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable,
indeed a sacred principle of international relations.
It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to
the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.“
– UN Commission on Global Governance report

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and
it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely.
Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well 
suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature 
of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected 
representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.” 
– Club of Rome,
The First Global Revolution

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The emerging ‘environmentalization’ of our civilization
and the need for vigorous action in the interest of the entire global
community will inevitably have multiple political consequences.
Perhaps the most important of them will be a gradual change
in the status of the United Nations. Inevitably, it must
assume some aspects of a world government.“
– Mikhail Gorbachev,
State of the World Forum

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I envisage the prinicles of the Earth Charter to
be a new form of the ten commandments.
They lay the foundation for a sustainable
global earth community.“
– Mikhail Gorbachev,
co-author of The Earth Charter

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“In my view, after fifty years of service in the United Nations system,
I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper
Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present 
political and economic systems are no longer appropriate
and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet.
We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways.”
– Dr Robert Muller, 
UN Assistant Secretary General,

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty 
to the international community and beginning to create a 
new system of international environmental governance 
as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises.”
– Lester Brown,
WorldWatch Institute 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Regionalism must precede globalism.
We foresee a seamless system of governance from
local communities, individual states, regional unions
and up through to the United Nations itself.”
– UN Commission on Global Governance 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that 
fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order 
and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.
Perhaps only a new and enlightened humanism
can permit mankind to negotiate this transition.“
– Club of Rome,
Mankind at the Turning Point

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The alternative to the existing world order can only
emerge as a result of a new human dimension of progress. 
We envision a revolution of the mind, a new way of thinking.“
– Mikhail Gorbachev,
State of the World Forum

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We require a central organizing principle – one agreed to voluntarily.
Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvement in laws and regulations,
rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change – these are all forms of
appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that
sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation
of society will not be necessary.”
– Al Gore,
Earth in the Balance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Adopting a central organizing principle…
means embarking on an all-out effort to use every 
policy and program, every law and institution…
to halt the destruction of the environment.“
– Al Gore,
Earth in the Balance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound
reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world
has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both
governments and individuals and an unprecedented
redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift
will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences
of every human action be integrated into individual and
collective decision-making at every level.” 
– UN Agenda 21

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The current course of development is thus clearly unsustainable.
Current problems cannot be solved by piecemeal measures.
More of the same is not enough. Radical change from the
current trajectory is not an option, but an absolute necessity.
Fundamental economic, social and cultural changes that
address the root causes of poverty and environmental
degradation are required and they are required now.“
– from the Earth Charter website

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, 
which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.” 
– David Brower,
founder of Friends of the Earth

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of
saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have
an ecologically sound society under socialism. 
I don’t think it is possible under capitalism” 
– Judi Bari,
principal organiser of Earth First! 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the 
industrialized civilizations collapse? 
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong,
founder of the UN Environment Programme

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the
United States. De-development means bringing our
economic system into line with the realities of
ecology and the world resource situation.“
– Paul Ehrlich, 
Professor of Population Studies

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another
United States. We can’t let other countries have the same 
number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. 
We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
– Michael Oppenheimer,
Environmental Defense Fund

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty,
reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
– Professor Maurice King

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place 
for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and 
plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, 
free shackled rivers and return to wilderness 
millions of acres of presently settled land.”
– David Foreman, 
co-founder of Earth First! 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on 
human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to
discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy,
because of what we might do with it.”
– Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the
worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
– Jeremy Rifkin,
Greenhouse Crisis Foundation

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the 
equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath
the surface of the earth is a willful expansion
of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.”
– Al Gore,
Earth in the Balance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many,
doing too well economically and burning too much oil.“
– Sir James Lovelock,
BBC Interview

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to
about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure
and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species,
returning throughout the world.” 
–Dave Foreman,
co-founder of Earth First! 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the
affluent middle class – involving high meat intake,
use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning,
and suburban housing – are not sustainable.“
– Maurice Strong,
Rio Earth Summit 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, 
selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
– Michael Fox,
vice-president of The Humane Society 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Human beings, as a species, 
have no more value than slugs.” 
– John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a
pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
– Sir James Lovelock,
Healing Gaia

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The Earth has cancer
and the cancer is Man.”
– Club of Rome,
Mankind at the Turning Point

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; 
the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.
We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to 
the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many 
apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich,
The Population Bomb 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I don’t claim to have any special interest in natural history, 
but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in 
the number of game animals and the need to adjust 
the cull to the size of the surplus population.” 
– Prince Philip,
preface of Down to Earth

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society
at the present North American material standard of living 
would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard
of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.”
– United Nations,
Global Biodiversity Assessment

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“A total population of 250-300 million people, 
a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
– Ted Turner,
founder of CNN and major UN donor

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence
more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
– Club of Rome,
Goals for Mankind

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“One America burdens the earth much more than 
twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say. 
In order to stabilize world population,we must eliminate 
350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say,
but it’s just as bad not to say it.”
– Jacques Cousteau,
UNESCO Courier

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth
as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
– Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,
patron of the World Wildlife Fund

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong.
It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
– John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The extinction of the human species may not
only be inevitable but a good thing.”
– Christopher Manes, Earth First!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival 
for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. 
Phasing out the human race will solve every 
problem on Earth – social and environmental.”
– Ingrid Newkirk,
former President of PETA

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against
society, unless the parents hold a government license.
All potential parents should be required to use
contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing
antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
– David Brower, 
first Executive Director of the Sierra Club

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The fate of mankind, as well as of religion, depends upon
the emergence of a new faith in the future. 
Armed with such a faith, we might find 
it possible to resanctify the earth.“
– Al Gore,
Earth in the Balance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The greatest hope for the Earth lies in religionists and 
scientists uniting to awaken the world to its near fatal predicament
and then leading mankind out of the bewildering maze of 
international crises into the future Utopia of humanist hope.“
– Club of Rome,
Goals for Mankind

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“What an incredible planet in the universe this will be
when we will be one human family living in justice,
peace, love and harmony with our divine Earth, 
with each other and with the heavens.”
– Robert Muller, 
UN Assistant Secretary General

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on
her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human
species has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution….
Our salvation depends upon our ability
to create a religion of nature.”
– Rene Dubos, 
board member, Planetary Citizens

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Each element, plant, insect, fish and animal
represents a certain aspect of Gaia’s – and our – being.
In a way, we are Gaia’s intelligence and awareness
– currently lost in self-destructive madness.
We must acknowledge, respect and love her for being
the Mother she is to us or we deny our very selves. 
Nurture the Mother as she nurtures us.”
– Prof. Michael J. Cohen, 
Ecopsychologist

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“It is the responsibility of each human being today to 
choose between the force of darkness and the force of light.
We must therefore transform our attitudes, and adopt a renewed
respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.“
– Maurice Strong,
first Secretary General of UNEP

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The spirit of our planet is stirring! 
The Consciousness of Goddess Earth 
is now rising against all odds, 
in spite of millennia of suppression, 
repression and oppression inflicted on Her 
by a hubristic and misguided humanity. 

The Earth is a living entity, a biological organism 
with psychic and spiritual dimensions. 
With the expansion of the patriarchal religions 
that focused on a male God majestically 
stationed in Heaven ruling over the Earth and the 
Universe, the memory of our planet’s innate Divinity 
was repressed and banished into the 
collective unconscious of humanity.“
– Envision Earth

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Still more important is the implication that the evolution of
homo sapiens, with his technological inventiveness and his
increasingly subtle communications network, has vastly increased
Gaia’s range of perception. She is now through us awake and aware
of herself. She has seen the reflection of her fair face through the
eyes of astronauts and the television cameras of orbiting spacecraft.

Our sensations of wonder and pleasure, our capacity
for conscious thought and speculation, our restless curiosity and
drive are hers to share. This new interrelationship of Gaia with man
is by no means fully established; we are not yet a truly collective
species, corralled and tamed as an integral part of the biosphere,
as we are as individual creatures. It may be that the destiny of
mankind is to become tamed, so that the fierce, destructive, and
greedy forces of tribalism and nationalism are fused into a
compulsive urge to belong to the commonwealth of all
creatures which constitutes Gaia.“
– Sir James Lovelock, 
Gaia: A New Look At Life

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Little by little a planetary prayer book is
thus being composed by an increasingly united
humanity seeking its oneness. Once again,
but this time on a universal scale, humankind is
seeking no less than its reunion with ‘divine,’
its transcendence into higher forms of life. Hindus
call our earth Brahma, or God, for they rightly
see no difference between our earth and the divine.
This ancient simple truth is slowly dawning again upon
humanity, as we are about to enter our cosmic age
and become what we were always meant to be:
the planet of god.”
– Robert Muller, 
UN Assistant Secretary General

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“What if Mary is another name for Gaia? Then her capacity for
virgin birth is no miracle . . . it is a role of Gaia since life began . . .
She is of this Universe and, conceivably, a part of God. On Earth,
she is the source of life everlasting and is alive now;
she gave birth to humankind and we are part of her.”
– Sir James Lovelock, 
Ages of Gaia

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred;
trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.“
– Mikhail Gorbachev, 
Green Cross International

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The spiritual sense of our place in nature…
can be traced to the origins of human civilization….
The last vestige of organized goddess worship
was eliminated by Christianity.“
– Al Gore,
Earth in the Balance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed,
we must destroy the Judeo-Christian Religious tradition.”
– Peter Singer, founder of Animal Rights 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I pledge allegiance to the Earth and all its sacred parts.
Its water, land and living things and all its human hearts.”
– Global Education Associates,
The Earth Pledge 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“By fostering a deep sense of connection to others and to the earth
in all its dimensions, holistic education encourages a sense of
responsibility to self to others and to the planet.“
– Global Alliance for Transforming Education

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The earth is not dead matter. She is alive.
Now begin to speak to the earth as you walk.
You can speak out loud, or just talk to her in your mind.
Send your love into her with your exhalation. Feel your
heart touching upon the heart of the planet. Say to her
whatever words come to you: Mother Earth, I love you.
Mother Earth, I bless you. May you be healed. May all
your creatures be happy. Peace to you, Mother Earth.
On behalf of the human race, I ask forgiveness
for having injured you. Forgive us, Mother Earth“
– US Student Textbook, 
“Prayer to the Earth”

Why Throw Away More Money, that Taxpayers Don’t Have? Useless!

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The PTC extension: More taxpayer dollars for green energy?

Reauthorizing the PTC would put launch a new fleet of wind-powered boondoggles

capewind

July 8, 2014 by ,

This tug-of-war is seen, perhaps most obviously, in the so-called renewable energy field. After Solyndra, and the more than fifty other stimulus-funded Green energy projects that have failed or are circling the drain, the public has grown weary, and wary, of any more spending on Green energy. The money isn’t there to spend, and the motive behind the 2009 rush to push billions of taxpayer dollars out through the Department of Energy has been tainted by corruption and illegal activity.

The Green-energy emphasis was sold as a job creator for unemployed Americans, as a cure for global warming, and as a way to slow a perceived energy shortage. It sounded so positive in the many speeches President Obama gave as a sales pitch to the American public.

Today, Americans know better.

abengoaThey knew about Solyndra—which took over five hundred million dollars and then folded. Thanks in large part to my exposé, many now know about Abengoa and the Solana solar project—which took billions of taxpayer dollars and is now functioning and producing electricity but does so by breaking immigration and labor laws, giving foreigners hiring preference, and stiffing American suppliers.

Watching multiple predictions fail and proponents get rich, Americans instinctively know that the whole global warming agenda doesn’t add up—as evidenced by this week’s International Conference on Climate Change where more than 600 “skeptics” from around the world gathered to discuss real science and policy.

With headlines heralding: “North Dakota has joined the ranks of the few places in the world that produce more than a million barrels of oil per day,” people know there isn’t an energy shortage. And America’s new energy abundance is on top of our rich reserves of coal and uranium that can provide for our electrical needs for centuries to come.

Yet, the White House keeps pushing the Green-energy narrative and, on July 3, 2014, “The Energy Department Just Announced $4 Billion For Projects That Fight Global Warming,” as the headline reads at ThinkProgress.org.

Wind Energy and the Production Tax Credit

Simmering just below the headlines is the push-pull over the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for Wind energy that expired at the end of 2013.

A recent study from the Institute for Energy Research (IER), which examined the state-by-state burden of the PTC, called it “an amazing subsidy” because it can “effectively give a utility a bigger subsidy than the actual market price. It would be as if Uncle Sam allowed car dealers to knock off $60,000 from their tax bill for every $50,000 car they sold. Indeed, the PTC is so generous that it can result in negative wholesale electricity prices.” The “Sharing the Burden of the Wind PTC” report shows which states benefit most from the federal subsidy and which lose.  Texas was the biggest winner, having received $394 million in PTC credits.

Texans might be elated at their good fortune; however, the IER study points out that individual consumers “still lose from the existence of the wind subsidies.” It states: “It’s not as if the IRS takes the population of Texas and divides $394 million among them, evenly. Rather, the wind subsidies are concentrated in the hands of a small group of wind producers.” As a result, wind serves as a tax shelter for large corporations.

On June 26, wind energy proponents—including pages of signatories who benefit financially from the tax credit—sent a letter to the top Congressional leaders urging them to “support the immediate passage of the Expiring Provisions Improvement Reform and Efficiency (EXPIRE) Act.”

On the other side, citizens, like Mary Kay Barton of New York, are sending their elected federal representatives letters asking schumerthem not to support a PTC extension as proposed in EXPIRE. She sent a letter to SenatorCharles Schumer (D-NY) and he sent one back to her.

Schumer opens: “Thank you for writing to express your opposition to tax credits, and subsidies for alternative energy. I share your opposition to unsuccessful and unnecessary subsides.”

He then goes into a long paragraph about his effort to put an “end to subsidies for huge oil companies”and brags about being a “cosponsor of S.940, the Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act, which would roll back huge subsidies and tax credit for large oil companies.”

Green energy supporters, such as Schumer, like to mix the terms “subsidies” and “tax credits” with “tax deductions”—when they are completely different. A subsidy, or loan guarantee, and tax credit involves taxpayer dollars being doled out—or taxes not collected—to incentivize a favored activity. This is not how America’s oil-and-gas producers are treated. They do, however, receive tax deductions—like any other business—that allow them to write of losses and the cost of doing business against income.

Additionally, as the New York Times, in a story about corporate tax rates, reported last year: “Large oil companies typically pay high rates.”  It shows that the average tax rate among companies is roughly 29%, while “large oil companies” are paying 37% and utility companies that “benefited from the 2009 stimulus bill, which included tax breaks,” have an “overall” rate of 12%.

In response to Barton’s letter about ending the PTC for industrial wind, Schumer continues: “I believe that it is necessary to balance our country’s increasing energy needs with the need to protect the environment. We must also focus on renewable energy and energy conservation in order to meet our growing energy demands. According to one study, if the U.S. increases its efficiency by 2.2% per year, it could reduce foreign oil imports by more than 50%. Such actions would not only reduce our dependence on foreign oil but would also safeguard the environment.”

Barton told me: “You’ll note that Senator Schumer still seems to think that subsidies for wind energy (electricity) will somehow ‘reduce foreign imports,’ and then references increasing ‘efficiency’ in response to a letter about inefficient, unreliable wind?” She’s picked up on one of my favorite soapboxes: we could cover every available acre with wind turbines and solar panels and it would do nothing to “reduce our dependence on foreign oil” or increase America’s energy independence. Wind and solar produce electricity and, through our coal, natural gas, and uranium supplies, we are already electricity independent. We import oil to fuel our transportation fleet.

As the fight over the PTC points out, wind energy cannot survive without the tax credits.

High Cost, Low Benefit

Wind energy is also more expensive than almost all other electricity sources—only solar is higher. A new study from the Brookings Institute on the “best path to a low-carbon future,” assumes that CO2 emissions are causing climate change and therefore must be reduced. It analyzes the costs and benefits of the most common solutions. The study found: “Adding up the net energy cost and the net capacity cost of the five low-carbon alternatives, far and away the most expensive is solar. It costs almost 19 cents more per KWH than power from the coal or gas plants that it displaces.”

baseload coal and peak load gas“Wind power,” the study reports, “is the second most expensive. It costs nearly 6 cents more per KWH.” The study puts these additional costs in context: “The average cost of electricity to U.S. consumers in 2012 was 9.84 cents per KWH, including the cost of transmission and distribution of electricity. This means a new wind plant could at least cost 50% more per KWH to produce electricity, and a new solar plant at least 200% more per KWH, than using coal and gas technologies.” The study concludes: “Renewable incentives that are biased in favor of wind and solar and biased against large-scale hydro, nuclear, and gas combined cycle are a very expensive and inefficient way to reduce CO2 emissions.”

Wind energy proponents cling to the idea that we must reduce fossil fuel use and believe, therefore, that the extra cost is worth it. However, because of the intermittency issues with wind and the reliability demand from the consumer, it requires fully dispatchable back-up power generation. Natural gas is the best form of backup because it can be easily adjusted to produce more or less electricity—however, the constant adjustment required to supplement wind or solar energy results in less efficient use and more CO2 emissions.

I like to explain the preference for natural-gas backups this way. Suppose you are going to cook a hamburger. You can cook it over charcoal or natural gas/propane. To use charcoal, you mound up the charcoal in the grill, soak it in lighter fluid, and toss in a match. You then wait 30 minutes for the coals to get nice and hot. Once hot, you put on your burger and cook it for 5 to 8 minutes. You remove your burger and leave the coals to die down—which could take several hours. On natural gas/propane, you simply turn it on and light the grill. After giving it 5 minutes to heat up, you toss on your burger. When your burger is cooked, you turn off the grill, and it is cool in minutes.

Natural gas is the preferred backup for wind (and solar) energy because, as in the burger example, its production can more easily be increased and decreased to follow the needed output—even though it operates most efficiently at a consistent level. Coal-fueled electricity generation cannot be simply turned up and down.

By way of answering the question: “Why are the costs of wind and solar so much higher, and the benefits not much different from other low-carbon alternatives?” the Brookings study states: “The benefits of reduced emissions from wind and solar are limited because they operate at peak capacity only a fraction of the time.”

It’s Not Just About the Money

If cost issues weren’t enough to make you a wind energy opponent, think of the health issues.

In late June, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) took President Obama up on his “so sue me” challenge and filed a lawsuit over his administration’s modification of the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act that now allows wind energy producers a 30- year permit to kill the majestic birds. According to ABC spokesman Bob Johns, “the Obama Administration has gone too far with incentives for the wind industry.” The Washington Times quotes Johns: “Since the 1980s, wind turbines have killed an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 eagles, but the industry has paid only one fine.”

Wind turbines hurt more than birds. On June 16, a Michigan judge agreed with residents who live near the 56-tdeadeagkleurbine Lake Winds facility and who complained of health problems that began just after the turbines began operating. A lawsuit filed on April 1, 2013 argued that noise, vibrations, and flickering lights emanating from Lake Winds were adversely affecting their health.

Cape Wind

Despite these, and other harmful impacts—which include a loss of property values when wind turbines are installed in a neighborhood—and opposition from environmental groups and local fisherman, the Department of Energy has just approved a stimulus-funded $150 million loan guarantee for the controversial Cape Wind project planned to be built in the Nantucket Sound. Cape Wind, scheduled to begin construction in 2015, will be the first utility-scale wind facility in U.S. waters.

Addressing the loan guarantee announcement, the Boston Globe states: “Now, with a large portion of financing in place, regulatory approvals in hand, and most legal challenges resolved, the project has finally reached a threshold where it is likely to get done.” Validating my earlier point of higher cost, the Globe says the two largest utilities in Massachusetts “agreed to purchase a total of 77.5% of the power generated by Cape Wind at a starting price of 18.7 cents per kilowatt hour—well above typical wholesale prices.”   [Remember,  the average 2012 price for elctricity was 9.84 cents per KWH.]

Like other wind energy projects, Cape Wind is dependent on the PTC extension. It is time for everyone who opposes government intervention in markets to contact his or her representatives—as Mary Kay Barton did—and voice opposition to the PTC extension. Call and say: “Stop supporting wind energy. It is an inefficient system that leads to perverse outcomes. The massive expansion of wind energy that we’ve seen in the past six years would not survive on a level playing field.”

– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2014/07/08/the-ptc-extension-more-taxpayer-dollars-for-green-energy/#sthash.J9wfTx9O.dpuf

Facts That the Climate Alarmists, Would Rather You Didn’t Know!

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Government Data Show U.S. in Decade-Long Cooling

 

Responding to widespread criticism that its temperature station readings were corrupted by poor siting issues and suspect adjustments, NOAA established a network of 114 pristinely sited temperature stations spread out fairly uniformly throughout the United States. Because the network, known as the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), is so uniformly and pristinely situated, the temperature data require no adjustments to provide an accurate nationwide temperature record. USCRN began compiling temperature data in January 2005. Now, nearly a decade later, NOAA has finally made the USCRN temperature readings available.

According to the USCRN temperature readings, U.S. temperatures are not rising at all – at least not since the network became operational 10 years ago. Instead, the United States has cooled by approximately 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is more than half of the claimed global warming of the twentieth century.

Of course, 10 years is hardly enough to establish a long-term trend. Nevertheless, the 10-year cooling period does present some interesting facts.

Source: National Climatic Data Center, NOAA

First, global warming is not so dramatic and uniform as alarmists claim. For example, prominent alarmist James Hansen claimed in 2010, “Global warming on decadal time scales is continuing without letup … effectively illustrat[ing] the monotonic and substantial warming that is occurring on decadal time scales.” The word “monotonic” means, according to Merriam-Webster Online, “having the property either of never increasing or of never decreasing as the values of the independent variable or the subscripts of the terms increase.” Well, either temperatures are decreasing by 0.4 degrees Celsius every decade or they are not monotonic.

Second, for those who may point out U.S. temperatures do not equate to global temperatures, the USCRN data are entirely consistent with – and indeed lend additional evidentiary support for – the global warming stagnation of the past 17-plus years. While objective temperature data show there has been no global warming since sometime last century, the USCRN data confirm this ongoing stagnation in the United States, also.

Third, the USCRN data debunk claims that rising U.S. temperatures caused wildfires, droughts, or other extreme weather events during the past year. The objective data show droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events have become less frequent and severe in recent decades as our planet modestly warms. But even ignoring such objective data, it is difficult to claim global warming is causing recent U.S. droughts and wildfires when U.S. temperatures are a full 0.4 degrees Celsius colder than they were in 2005.

Even more importantly than the facts above, the USCRN provides the promise of reliable nationwide temperature data for years to come. No longer will global warming alarmists be able to hide behind thinly veiled excuses to doctor the U.S. temperature record. Now, thanks to the USCRN, the data are what the data are.

Expect global warming alarmists, now and for the foreseeable future, to howl in desperation claiming the USCRN temperature data are irrelevant.

Of course, to global warming alarmists, all real-world data are irrelevant.

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