Category Archives: climate change

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is known for its relentless pursuit of initiatives to combat pollution and emissions it deems harmful, including carbon dioxide. However, one of its efforts designed to counter climate change has the agency attracting incoming fire, with critics charging that CARB is more concerned about the prospect of global warming than protecting the public from felons.

At issue is a CARB measure known as the “Cool Cars” rule that requires the application of certain additives to window glass. The theory behind the mandate is that reflective windshields will prevent cars from overheating, and thus reduce reliance on air conditioning, which affects how much fuel is burnt by a car. Proponents of climate change theory attribute changes in temperature to human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, whereas skeptics charge that such theory amounts to a load of hot air.

What is certain in the debate over this mandate is that CARB’s action has a lot of people hot under the collar: While the glaze ostensibly prevents excess solar heat from entering cars, critics say it also seriously degrades the signal sent by a whole host of electronic devices, including GPS navigation systems, cellular phones and—perhaps most critically— ankle monitoring bracelets worn by felons, which utilize GPS technology.

On that point, which regulators and legislators have to-date not acknowledged, law enforcement groups and victim rights advocates have been expressing “grave concerns” about the new regulation. In a recent letter obtained by Capitol Confidential, the California Police Chiefs Association, the California Narcotics Officers Association and the California Peace Officers’ Association cautioned that the new regulation “threatens to undermine an already imperfect monitoring tool.”

Warning that prison overcrowding and budget shortfalls necessitate the release of additional felons, none of whom could be properly monitored under the regulation, the glaze would “virtually vitiate the effectiveness of GPS monitoring.” “At a time when the public safety of California communities is being challenged as never before,” the letter reads, “the crippling of important GPS monitoring and the utility of cellular phones to seek emergency assistance is not helpful.”

In line with the disconcerting reminder from law enforcement that “horrific crimes” take place when the GPS signal of ankle monitoring devices are dropped, Crime Victims United of California also wrote state regulators last month that the group had “serious concerns” with the new initiative. “Given the difficulty in adequately monitoring the prison, jail and parolee population as it is this regulation should be halted immediately as it will result in even greater problems for the state in monitoring its GPS population,” the group’s president wrote. “[T]his approach to global warming is unacceptable and has crime victims in an uproar.”

Typically, criticisms of California’s approach to combating the perceived threat of climate change have tended to center on the impact of state initiatives on jobs. Just this week, California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office indicated that the state’s climate change policy would likely lead to “modest” job losses in the short term.

This new uproar could, observers say, result in CARB easing its “Cool Cars” regulation.

This week (March 3, 2010) was the deadline Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) set for Mark Crisson, President and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), to explain why APPA is urging Senators to support Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Congressional Review Act resolution to veto the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The Senate may vote on the Murkowski resolution as soon as next week.

Now, aside from the merits of the issue, which I’ll get into in a moment, Waxman and Markey’s behavior is out of line. Waxman and Markey (W/M) are Members of the House of Representatives. What business is it of theirs if the APPA lobbies Senators about a bill pending in the Senate? Senators can conduct their own inquiries without any assistance from W/M. And why didn’t W/M copy Sen. Murkowski or at least Senate Energy Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) on their Feb. 25 letter to Mr. Crisson? Failure to “cc” any of the principals in the Senate flouts one of the most basic rules of legislative courtesy.

Besides being busybodies, Waxman and Markey are bullies.

In their letter to Crisson, Waxman and Markey demand that he “clarify exactly APPA’s position on EPA’s scientific finding,” and either “provide the scientific basis” for disputing it, or explain why APPA is urging Senators to disapprove the finding if it has no scientific “bases” for disputing it.

There is in fact a strong scientific basis for disputing EPA’s endangerment finding. Peabody Energy presents the evidence in exquisite detail in their petition for a reconsideration of the endangerment finding. The basis that eludes Waxman and Markey may be summarized in one word: Climategate.

EPA’s endangerment finding relies heavily on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Scientists at the heart of the Climategate scandal include several lead authors and contributors to the IPCC reports. They massaged data to produce pre-determined conclusions, ignored data that did not fit into a “nice tidy story line,” conspired to bias the peer-reviewed literature by preventing “skeptics” from publishing, and violated freedom of information laws to prevent critics from checking their data and methods.

These behaviors produced a secretive, agenda-driven process that flouts EPA’s own standards of “transparency and openness,” making the IPCC reports unsuitable as a basis for EPA policy decisions.

However, although the scientific shortcomings of EPA’s endangerment finding are serious, Mr. Crisson need not engage in this debate, because the Murkowski resolution does not take a stand on EPA’s “science” one way or the other.

W/M would like nothing better than to spin the Murkowski resolution as a benighted attempt to determine scientific truth by voting. Ironically, W/M do much the same by continually invoking the alleged “consensus of scientists,” as if a head count could settle scientific controversies. But that’s a topic for another day.

My free (and unsolicited) advice to Mr. Crisson – and anyone else debating opponents of the Murkowski resolution – is to clarify what the resolution is and isn’t. It is not a referendum on EPA’s “science.” Rather, it is a referendum on whether bureaucrats with a vested interest in expanding their power, aided and abetted by trial lawyers and eco-pressure groups with no political accountability to the American people, should make climate and energy policy for the nation. It is a referendum on the constitutional propriety of EPA dealing itself into a position to implement regulatory policies Congress never approved when it enacted and amended the Clean Air Act.

A bit of background is in order here. If allowed to stand, the endangerment finding will compel EPA to establish greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for new motor vehicles. That, in turn, will automatically make carbon dioxide (CO2) “subject to regulation” under the Clean Air Act’s pre-construction and operating permit programs. As even EPA acknowledges, stretching those programs to include CO2 would lead to “absurd results” manifestly contrary to congressional intent.

For example, EPA would have to apply pre-construction permitting requirements to tens of thousands of previously non-regulated small business, and operating permit requirements to millions. The permitting programs would crash under the own weight, freezing construction activity and thrusting countless businesses into legal limbo during the worst recession in 50 years.

The endangerment finding is also precedent for economy-wide regulation of greenhouse gases under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) program. Logically, EPA would have to set the NAAQS for CO2 below current atmospheric levels. Even a global depression lasting several decades would not be enough to bring America (and the world) into attainment with such a standard, yet the Clean Air Act obligates states to attain “primary” (health-based) NAAQS within five or at most 10 years.

To have its cake and eat it (regulate CO2 without hammering small business and igniting a political backlash), EPA proposes in its Tailoring Rule to exempt small sources of CO2 from the permitting programs. This breach of the separation of powers may or may not survive judicial scrutiny. But even if it does, EPA’s proposed small business protections would terminate in six years. Moreover, the Tailoring Rule in no way reduces the threat of NAAQS regulation. The Murkowski resolution, on the other hand, would nip all this mischief in the bud.

How? The Murkowski resolution would veto the endangerment finding’s “legal force and effect.” And that is all it would do. It takes absolutely no position on the scientific validity of EPA’s reasoning or conclusions, as anyone can see who actually takes the trouble to read the text, which is only one sentence long.

And, just in case you’re wondering, Sen. Murkowski is not a global warming skeptic, nor is she opposed in principle to greenhouse gas regulation. She simply believes that climate policy is too important to be made by anyone except the people’s elected representatives.

It is thus a complete misunderstanding to claim, as Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and others do, that the Murkowski amendment is equivalent to Congress voting to overturn the Surgeon General’s report in 1964 finding that cigarette smoking causes cancer. The Surgeon General’s report was simply that – an assessment of the scientific literature. It had zero legal force or effect. In fact, the Surgeon General proposed no remedies at all. It was Congress, not the Surgeon General or any executive agency that, in 1965, required cigarette packages to carry a health warning, and that later prohibited cigarette advertising on television and radio.

If the endangerment finding were simply an assessment of the scientific literature, the Senate would have no business voting on it. But it is much more than that. It is the setup for EPA to take control of vast portions of the economy. It is the trigger for a cascade of regulations potentially more costly than any climate bill or treaty Congress has considered and either rejected or declined to enact or ratify.

W/M need to chill. Whether anyone – the APPA, other trade associations, or Members of Congress – agrees or disagrees with EPA’s “science” is irrelevant. Do W/M support politically accountable policymaking or bureaucratic end runs around the democratic process? Do they think EPA should be allowed to amend the Clean Air Act and violate the separation of powers to avoid the political fallout from regulatory excesses (“absurd results”) that the agency’s “science” would unleash on the American economy?

Finally, do W/M favor establishing NAAQS for CO2?  If not, just how do they propose to avoid this “absurd result” if the endangerment finding is allowed to stand?

Too bad W/M get to ask all the questions and don’t have to answer any. Their questions are designed to bully and intimidate – and distract public attention from serious threats to our economy and our democracy, threats the Murkowski resolution would remove.

Al Gore emerged from his undisclosed location and took to the op-ed page of the New York Times:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skepticsmay not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Read the whole piece of performance art here. No doubt Al Gore believes that the really important thing here is that the ‘global consensus’ remains unchanged. For him and other climate-profiteers, science has been flipped; it is the conclusion, not the premises, which is set in stone. If some facts fall apart, they’ll just find some new ones to prop up their proposals.

Al Gore emerged from his undisclosed location and took to the op-ed page of the New York Times:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skepticsmay not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Read the whole piece of performance art here. No doubt Al Gore believes that the really important thing here is that the ‘global consensus’ remains unchanged. For him and other climate-profiteers, science has been flipped; it is the conclusion, not the premises, which is set in stone. If some facts fall apart, they’ll just find some new ones to prop up their proposals.

During his campaign for Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli committed himself to acting with an aggressive conservative agenda. He promised voters that he would the office to aggressively fight governmental overregulation and interference wherever he could find it.

In other words, he pledged to use the office of Attorney General for good, rather than evil. After just over one month in office, he’s off to one hell of a start.

Last week, AG Cuccinelli boldly petitioned the EPA to convene a proceeding to reexamine their “Endangerment Finding” which claims that human activity has increased atmospheric greenhouse gases to a point that people’s lives are at risk. As such, they claim, the federal government must impose new caps on emissions and other climate protection policies in the energy sector.

Cuccinelli believes, rightly, that regulations based on the findings of the EPA in this sketchy case would be both legally questionable and detrimental to Virginia’s economy. (Much of the research that the EPA has based these findings upon has come from the questionable climate-gate materials). Accordingly, the AG also has petitioned a federal appeals court to review the EPA’s findings.

Keep an eye on this guy. He means business. And by picking these kinds of necessary fights, he’s certainly going to need backup.

The U.S. Chamber strongly supports efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, but we believe there’s a right way and a wrong way to achieve that goal.

The wrong way is through the EPA’s endangerment finding, which triggers Clean Air Act regulation. Because of the huge potential impact on jobs and local economies, this is an issue that requires careful analysis of all available data and options. Unfortunately, the agency failed to do that and instead overreached. The result is a flawed administrative finding that will lead to other poorly conceived regulations further downstream.

Today the Chamber is filing a formal petition indicating it will challenge EPA’s decision to trigger Clean Air Act regulation, based on lapses in EPA’s process in making that decision. The Chamber’s legal challenge will focus specifically on the inadequacies of the process that EPA followed in triggering Clean Air Act regulation, and not on scientific issues related to climate change or endangerment.

We continue to call for Congress to address climate change policy through the legislative process, rather than having EPA misapply environmental statutes like the Clean Air Act or Endangered Species Act that were not created to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Emphasis mine.

In addition to ignoring its own internal rules and working outside the legislative branch, the EPA is acting on a 2007 Supreme Court Ruling, which, based on new developments in the Climategate scandal, should be revisited. The ruling states the EPA was found to have the authority to regulate emissions that contribute to global warming and climate change. In addition, the Court stated:

Based on respected scientific opinion that a well-documented rise in global temperatures and attendant climatological and environmental changes have resulted from a significant increase in the atmospheric concentration of “greenhouse gases,” a group of private organizations petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to begin regulating the emissions of four such gases, including carbon dioxide, under §202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act, which requires that the EPA “shall by regulation prescribe…

The EPA, in concert with with Obama administration, is attempting to force through a modified version of cap-and-trade through regulation, a signal that Obama realizes cap and trade is dead in the Senate–especially after this death blow to the global warming/climate change movement:

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

It will be interesting to watch the Obama administration attempt to circumvent and spin lead scientist Professor Jones’ statements. Will the EPA revise its final report based on this new information?

Global warming, climate change, and cap and trade will be that much harder for the Left to sell. Americans weren’t buying them in the first place. Cap and trade was recognized for what is was and is–the legislation that provided the trigger for the transfer of wealth to poor nations–wealth redistribution on a global scale.

What, now, is the fate of the “Copenhagen Accord” non-binding agreement where:

The Copenhagen Accord is a 12 paragraph document that sets a 2 degree Celsius limit on future warming. Its provisions address emissions cuts, verification and deforestation. It would also commit 100 billion dollars from wealthy countries and global institutions over the next 10 years to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

Based on all of the new information on climate change and the manipulation of the “science” for some 15 years, it will be revealing if the United States adheres to this agreement. If Obama continues with this nonsense of climate change and insists on transferring United States’ wealth to third world countries, my assertions have been correct all along–that the core intentions of the Obama agenda are to place severe hardship on the American people by destroying the nation’s wealth. After all, Obama is intentionally proposing, supporting, and forcing policies through–by any means–that bankrupt the United States and weaken our economy, discourage businesses from investing and hiring workers, deepening unemployment and stifling innovation, and squeezing the American people into desperation for federal aid (there is a record number of food stamp recipients now, for example) and health care benefits.

It seems the end goal of the Obama Administration is to make people dependent upon the federal government. How’s that for some hope and change.

The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the last few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as originally claimed. This is on top of the recent mess regarding data, where the three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 assessment report still not been released. Other information indicates that data have been systematically biased to produce a rise in measured temperatures when actual temperatures were falling or flat.

Take some of the false claims in the 2007 IPCC report.

– The IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. The forecast was based on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999, and the Indian glaciologist who was interviewed, Syed Hasnain, says that he was misquoted, indeed he had provide no date. Professor Hasnain discovered the mistake in 2008 when he read the IPCC’s published report, but he said: “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report. . . . My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Even more disturbingly, Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.’s climate chief, first denied that he knew about the error before the Copenhagen global warming conference. He only admitted that he knew about it before the conference when a writer for the journal Science, Pallava Bagla, pointed to email correspondence that he had with Pachauri last fall.

– The IPCC warned that because of global warming the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s.” They cited one study to support their claim, but when the research was published in 2008, after the IPCC report was released, the study noted: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

– The IPCC warned that up to 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming, but the sole source for that claim was a non-refereed report authored by two people who the Sunday Times of London referred to as “two green activists,” one of them with the World Wildlife Fund.

– The IPCC even got wrong the percentage of the Netherlands that is below sea level. The report claims that the percent is 55 percent, when the right number is 26 percent.

On February 3rd, Mr. Pachauri however defended the UN’s IPCC report by saying that the critics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder. I hope that they apply [asbestos] to their faces every day.” While Pachauri admits that the IPCC was inaccurate about the Himalayan glaciers melting, he claimed that the attacks were motivated by “business interests” who “spread a lot of disinformation.”

Finally, it should be noted that Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which enforces that country’s freedom of information act regulations, has come to some conclusions regarding Climategate. The ICO found that the University of East Anglia breached violated British law by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming. The UK Daily Mail reports that “the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago.” Out of 105 freedom of information requests, Professor Phil Jones, who headed the university’s Climate Research Unit, only complied with 10 requests.

For too long global warming proponents have claimed that their claims can’t be questioned. Science should be more transparent than this. But relying on misreported news stories and white papers put out by non-scientists from advocacy cases isn’t science.  Why these climate temperature data has been hidden and why researchers won’t answer questions on adjustments that they have made has become quite troubling. In this age of computers and website, there is no excuse for hiding data.

UP TO $10,000 WILL BE GIVEN AWAY—

Get Your Global Warming Sign in the News and Win Some Cold Hard Cash!

After Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate and the cold hard facts on the ground it’s become obvious that manmade global warming is a scam.

Big government politicians and scientists were hoping they could convince people that their junk science was real. Then they could further control the energy industry through taxation and regulation. Unfortunately, for them the scam is falling apart right in front of their eyes.

So what better time for a contest?

If you would like to have some fun and make a little cash while you’re snowed in then this is just the contest you’ve been waiting for. Here are the rules:

1.) Create a sign.

2.) You must then get your sign in a position so that it can be seen on TV.

For each local TV spot you will receive $100.00.

If a sign is placed on a national TV network the prize will jump to $300.00.

If two or three signs are on one TV spot then the prize would be divided by the participants.

The most original sign would receive and additional $500.00.

The funniest sign will receive an additional $500.00.

Get the details at Gateway Pundit Blog.

The contest runs until Sunday February 14, 2010.

And that’s the point, I guess. Watch this ad for a “clean diesel” car by Audi, and good luck getting this slightly modified version of the Cheap Trick classic “Dream Police” out of your head. I couldn’t get it out with a lobotomy. It’s been playing off and on in my brain since it first aired during the Super Bowl.

But beyond the diddy, I also can’t get the vision of a fascist “green” future out of my head — even if it’s portrayed with a heavy dollop of of “Reno: 911“-style cop-show parody. Good comedy has to have a grain of truth in it to work, and this spot has plenty. It’s not just a peek at a ridiculous future, but a look at our “be green or else” present. An overreaction? Tell that to the chief of America’s Green Police, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who Tweeted:

“Ok .. That ‘green police’ Audi commercial hits home..”

And hits home hard. San Francisco, which proudly considers itself the greenest city in America, has mandated composting for all residents and businesses. Failure to comply results in an escalating scale of fines. No word on whether Newsom was proud or embarrassed to see his Green Police state in San Francisco reflected in an ad.

There’s no doubt the ad is funny, but one is left to wonder what Audi’s purpose was? I’m still a bit flummoxed. Did Audi intend to produce a screed against the Green Police as a way to appeal to those who are fed up with years of constant eco-scolding? One would think not, since the “punch line” is that if you own a clean-diesel Audi, you get to drive right through a green checkpoint. But the other 40 seconds of the one-minute spot dovetail nicely with the growing fatigue and skepticism the public feels about the “green” initiatives of government — especially in the wake of the ClimateGate scandals.

Or did Audi believe the public is in lock-step with the green agenda, and figured people would get a laugh out of a satire of paranoid, know-nothing skeptics, and actually want a car that keeps you on the “good side” of environmental policy. If so, it strikes me as a horrible miscalculation to assume the country is full of people who think like Al Gore and Barbara Boxer. The German carmaker, too, seems to be a bit confused about its own ad.

The Green Police are a humorous group of individuals that have joined forces in an effort to collectively help guide consumers to make the right decision when it comes to the environment. They’re not here to judge, merely to guide these decisions.

Ha ha ha! Just “guide” us, eh? By slamming a dude’s head into the checkout line for choosing plastic? Not here to judge? Tell that to the folks scrambling away from their too-hot hot tub. (I know. It’s only a commercial, and a funny one to boot. Still, to pretend there’s no judgment being made on people’s freedom to make decisions about how they may go about their ordinary lives is ridiculous.)

There’s been a good bit of commentary about this ad in the blogosphere. Ben Boychuk at Infinite Monkeys thought the ad was “cleverly written and produced (the anteater was a cute touch)… and utterly horrifying.”

Two bits in particular really bothered me: The part where the Green Police put some hapless homeowner in the back of a squad car as a news reporter explains the perp was caught using incandescent lights; and the Cops-like scene where the bewildered couple is rousted for setting their hot tub’s thermostat too high.

Ben notes how Audi explains there are “numerous real Green Police units globally that are furthering green practices and environmental issues.”

For example, Israel’s main arm of the Ministry of Environmental Protection in the area of enforcement and deterrence is called; you guess it, the Green Police. New York has officers within the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation that are fondly called the “Green Police”. The Green Police is also the popular name for Vietnam’s Environmental Police Department and the UK has a group who dresses in green as part of the Environment Agency’s squad to monitor excessive CO2 emissions.

Wait. What? A Western carmaker is holding up Communist Vietnam as a good example to follow? And we’re supposed to admire the fact that “free” countries like Israel and Great Britain send bureaucrats around to monitor the emissions of its citizens? I don’t care if they wear cute green outfits, that’s a bit creepy and fascist to me. Such agencies don’t merely “further green practices and environmental issues.” They enforce government-desired life practices through a knock on the door. Big difference.

But, I suppose the joke’s on me. Steve Hayward at No Left Turns sees this as a victory for those of us who’ve had enough of the enviro-scolds:

What’s more over than Mark Sanford’s marriage or John Edwards’ reputation? The environmental movement, that’s what. … Is [the ad] mocking environmentalism?  Um. . . yeah. Your moral authority is pretty thin when a major advertiser finds it safe to take this approach. Think anyone would ever try something like this about the civil rights movement? Or the feminist movement?

Point taken. And it should be a source of comfort that those who believe in bossing us around in the name of “saving the planet” (which doesn’t need saved) are a little worried about the mixed messages in this ad. But I live in a state, California, which recently:

• proposed fining and jailing people for the crime of driving with under-inflated tires;

• considered a bill banning cars with black paint from being sold (because black cars trap more heat in the summer and require more use of the air conditioner to make the driver comfortable);

• banned wood-burning fireplaces in new home construction (and restricts it in “grandfathered-in” homes from time to time by bureaucratic fiat); and

• outlawed 25 percent of flat-screen TVs on the market because a panel of bureaucrats say they use too much power;

I could list more examples, including a bit from the Audi ad that is actually true: Incandescent light bulbs will be contraband in the United States starting in 2012. Sure looks like the Green Police are real to me. Happily, Audi has now armed those who would oppose the reordering of society through environmental mandates with a nice bit of video to splice into footage of Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Henry Waxman, Barack Obama and others ordering us how to live our lives.

Get crackin’, YouTube fiends! A golden propaganda moment awaits.

Yesterday, President Obama announced his plan to create a new federal agency tasked with climate change. Later that day, the National Weather Service announced that DC was due to receive another 10-20 inches of snow today. (On top of the 2 1/2 feet of snow over the weekend.) Now THAT is some climate change.

From ABC News:

The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.

Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA’s National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.

“Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat,” Locke said Monday at a news conference.

Lubchenco added, “Climate change is real, it’s happening now.” She said climate information is vital to the wind power industry, coastal community planning, fishermen and fishery managers, farmers and public health officials.

NOAA recently reported that the decade of 2000-2009 was the warmest on record worldwide; the previous warmest decade was the 1990s. Most atmospheric scientists believe that warming is largely due to human actions, adding gases to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

Read the whole article here.

The 13th Annual Energy & Environment Conference, held in Phoenix Feb. 1-3, isn’t the sort of place where global warming “deniers” are exactly welcome. In fact, by my observations, the skeptical caucus at the event consisted entirely of: James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute; Keith Lockitch, a fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights; and me. All the other attendees spent their time discussing how the U.S. government — or, even better, a “global government” — needs to compel us all to live “greener” lives through schemes like cap-and-trade. Environmentalists are a bossy and power-hungry lot.

Lockitch gave a presentation arguing free-market economies are better positioned than socialist societies to deal with any severe weather events caused by climate change — and was called a “denier” and compared to a shill for “Big Tobacco” for his trouble. Taylor got off a little easier, receiving only scoffs and curious-to-annoyed glances for asking inconvenient questions.

But that’s not to say we were the only people to question the assumptions of the attendees who believe the “science is settled” on global warming. Perhaps the greatest challenge came from one of their own — renowned climate scientist William Sprigg — who urged his colleagues to stop treating the ClimateGate scandal as irrelevant noise promoted by “deniers.” In an amazingly telling moment, green energy consultant Andy Van Horn, who introduced Sprigg, admitted he’d never heard of ClimateGate until Sprigg suggested it a few weeks ago as a topic worthy of discussion. (Who are the real “deniers” again?)

Sprigg, adjunct research professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, believes the planet is on a potentially dangerous warming path and atmospheric carbon dioxide is to blame. He also led the technical review of the first global warming report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990. Clealry, Sprigg is no “outlier” or “rebel,” but one of the most respected and “mainstream” scientists in the field of climatology. So it came to a bit of shock to the audience when Sprigg expressed concerns about how contrarian scientists are treated with contempt by many of his colleagues.

It’s not right, he said, that the game is rigged to keep skeptics out of peer-reviewed journals. It violates the scientific method to refuse to release raw data so others can test your theories. And it’s a big mistake to keep defending the likes of infamous “Hide the Decline” emailers Phil Jones and Michael Mann. The very credibility of the entire discipline of climate science is at stake, Sprigg said, and it’s time to stop ignoring this fact. As one might imagine, this all did not go over very well in the audience — who were undoubtedly expecting to hear a lecture ratifying their view that ClimateGate was no big deal when they saw Sprigg’s topic on the agenda.

I recorded Sprigg’s remarks on video for Heartland, and (from what I could tell) mine was the only camera in the room. The footage below features Taylor — who is also managing editor of Environment & Climate News — asking Sprigg what he thinks the future holds for the wholly corrupted IPCC. Sprigg nodded as Taylor referred to “mounting scandals” at the IPCC and then responded:

“There will be some reform. I think there are going to be big changes in the peer review process for the IPCC. There will be — there are — calls for the head of [IPCC Chairman Raj] Pachauri. Some of my colleagues have written letters saying that he needs to be taken off the job.”

In his 24-minute lecture, Sprigg also:

• warned of a growing perception that “the IPCC is biased, conflicted, [and] pushing political agendas.”;

• called for a new climate research agency supported not entirely by the government, but in conjunction with the private sector;

• and declared: “We need to stick to our scientific principles,” and “improve our peer preview process, and expand the stakeholders’ role to keep us all honest.”

It was a remarkable presentation, one that The Heartland Institute has summarized with commentary in the video below. One gets the feeling Sprigg has put himself on the path to pariah status among the true-believers of global warming, But this honest scientist deserves praise from all sides of the debate for demanding politics, group-think and a desire to control our lives through government mandates not replace scientific rigor.

In looking at four “possible allegations” of research misconduct against meteorology professor Michael Mann, a Penn State University panel has determined that further investigation is warranted for one of them.

The allegations — or “possible allegations” as they put it — stem from Mann’s alleged involvement in the “ClimateGate” e-mails scandal that surfaced in early December and seemed to show evidence of fraud and conspiracy among the research scientists and others whose work formed much of the basis of calls for extreme climate change regulation.

At the center of the scandal was Mann, the inventor of the famous “hockey stick” graph which claimed to show that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures had shot up to their highest level in recorded history. It was made famous in Al Gore’s Academy Award®-winning documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

While this is good news, I suspect panel members are secretly hoping someone else will shoulder responsibility for determining Mann’s guilt or innocence before they’re forced to reach any conclusion(s).

Below is the text of the release about the inquiry issued by members of the panel a short while ago:

University Park, Pa. — An internal inquiry by Penn State into the research and scholarly activities of a well-known climate scientist will move into the investigatory stage, which is the next step in the University’s process for reviewing research conduct.

A University committee has concluded its inquiry into allegations of research impropriety that were leveled in November against Professor Michael Mann, after information contained in a collection of stolen e-mails was revealed. More than a thousand e-mails are reported to have been “hacked” from computer servers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, one of the main repositories of information about climate change.

During the inquiry, all relevant e-mails pertaining to Mann or his work were reviewed, as well as related journal articles, reports and additional information. The committee followed a well-established University policy during the inquiry (http://guru.psu.edu/policies/ra10.html ).

In looking at four possible allegations of research misconduct, the committee determined that further investigation is warranted for one of those allegations. The recommended investigation will focus on determining if Mann “engaged in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” A full report (http://www.research.psu.edu/orp) concerning the allegations and the findings of the inquiry committee has been submitted.

In the investigatory phase, as in the inquiry phase, the committee will not address the science of global climate change, a matter more appropriately left to the profession. The committee is charged with looking at the ethical behavior of the scientist and determining whether he violated professional standards in the course of his work.

The investigatory committee will consist of five tenured full professor faculty members who will assess the evidence in the case and make a determination on Mann’s conduct.

Worth noting is the time frame set forth by university policy:

If an investigation is undertaken pursuant to this policy, the investigation should normally be concluded, and a decision made by the Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, within 120 days from the initiation of the investigation.

Stay tuned!

So, do you think Punxsutawney Phil reads IPCC Global Warming reports? Actually, Phil is probably verifiably more reliable.

So the Washington Post reports that bin Laden is still furious about the U.S. causing global warming.

Al Jazeera, which originally broke the communiqué story, did so with a headline drawn from the Tiger Beat school of style: “Obama deplores climate change”.  AJ writes, “In an audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera, bin Laden criticised George Bush, the former US president, for rejecting the Kyoto pact and condemned global corporations.”

Oh, dear. We’re still on that kick again, one I think even the Post has dropped.

In 2002 Obama similarly parroted the Western media rant fashionable at the time that we “refuse[d] to sign the Kyoto agreement “, four years after Clinton signed it. Even the New York Times issued a correction, in November 2006.

Indeed the Post notes that “Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic.” OK. So he’s losing it. At least he didn’t invoke Haiti.

But then the Post loses me, with “The speech, which included almost no religious rhetoric, could be an attempt by the terror leader to give his message an appeal beyond Islamic militants.” I can think of at least two things wrong with this analysis, and will just address the second one, that bin Laden apparently hasn’t seen the latest polls indicating there may be better wagon to which one ought hitch his star.

So, in sum, bin Laden has found common ground with Obama’s State of the Union speech, in part, accepting what Obama claimed is “the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change” — a material slip-up betraying ignorance, incidentally; the artful advocate sticks with “consensus, which is about prophesying, not “evidence” which is about observations and which is easily checked.

Bin Laden is just not so sold on the “green jobs” rhetoric. As the Post writes, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring the wheels of the American economy’ to a halt.”

Hey, even busted clocks get the odd point right. The big problem I return to is that bin Laden and the fundamentalists among the green movement share more than just global warming fervor and rhetoric. They seem to share an objective.

This story in E&EM News PM (subscription required), “Murkowski floats plan to force Senate vote on cap and trade next week”, is spectacular.

Here are the money lines, all noting Sen. Murkowski’s clever plan to simply call the Left on their rhetoric and posing about the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill S. 1733, a bill that was marked up in the Environment and Public Works Committee in a somber yet urgent November affair, reporting it to the Senate floor and, oh yes, the Copenhagen conference:

“‘Boxer-Kerry is a non-starter, and the amendment — if that’s what it said — it would expose that,’ said Murkowski spokesman Robert Dillon. ‘We obviously don’t want to pass the bill; we’re confident that it would fail.’ Holding a vote on the Kerry-Boxer bill would ’show the sense of the Senate, where it is,’ Dillon said….

‘What she’s trying to do is force Democrats to vote against a bill that is clearly one that is not ripe to be brought to the Senate floor,’ said Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, noting that the bill was intended to be combined with an energy bill aimed at lowering energy costs and spurring investments in technology.

‘This is Lisa Murkowski giving the finger to those who believe we need to reduce global warming pollution because this is not a serious proposal,’ Weiss said.”

Well, that’s not quite what it is, but it does reveal that someone was giving the rest of us the finger all along. And I am more than a little amused to note how the “us” includes not a few fellow travelers in Copenhagen.

Team Soros’s Dan Weiss calls the marked-up, EPW-approved Kerry-Boxer bill, rushed through to impress the Europeans with the Dems’ seriousness of purpose and courageous stance on the precipice of bicameral enactment, ”not a serious proposal.”

Gosh that’s great stuff. And quite a turnaround for our eager green beaver who, when peddling the pose, touted the bill as “another signal to the international community that the U.S. is serious about achievement of real reductions in its global warming pollution.” But, hey, being a green means never having to say you’re sorry. Just ask all of those Third World children who’ve paid the price for the agenda.

Still, no kidding. Nice you finally admit that when it looks like this bill — “marked up” in, and voted out of committee to the floor for quick packaging overseas — looks like it might be something your pals can have held against them in a meaningful way. Something about the prospect of a hanging and how it aids one’s thinking, etc. Or, maybe, it’s just that it’s rather easier to strike a silly pose for some Euro-love (still an epic fail, incidentally) than it is to confront your voters.

What poseurs! he is effectively admitting about a bill reported to the floor as well as publicly and we now know dishonestly hailed, if adding his own touch of absurdity: nothing added by other committees would unring the bell of cap-and-trade — the objective of which our president has admitted is to cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket” and “bankrupt” coal and dependent industries. So they’re reduced to some strange line of saying it’s painful but, you see, we were planning on adding some windmill and pixie dust “green jobs” nonsense to it and suddenly take away the pain (or, well , at least distract from what we’re really doing).

Second, recall and prepare to catalogue the promiscuous use of the line, in promotion of “must act now!” legislative pain, that “hey now…we don’t want EPA to do this!”. It does provide them a nice hard place against which to be pressed: possibly they might be forced to say “but I don’t want Congress to either!” (or they do want that but just not via the bill marked up in and voted out of committee and sold to the Europeans et al. as being really great shakes and almost there…)?

Great stuff. Really. And yet another wonderful exhibit about how seriously to take these people.

It is only a matter of time before Environmentalists and some scientists blame the Haiti earthquake and its massive death toll on Global Warming. They have already laid the groundwork with this Sept 2009 article in the UK Guardian newspaper. According to Professor Bill McGuire of University College London an upcoming scientific conference would show how “global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.” Despite these claims the earthquake in Haiti was not caused by Global Warming.

And the death and destruction was not because Haitians had made a pact with the devil.

The reason so many people died in Haiti is because its people live in poorly built houses and have not benefited from development which brings with it cities and houses which can withstand earthquakes.

But guess who are the most active opponents of cities and modern concrete housing?

The environmental movement, sees cities and growing urbanization as “unsustainable” and something that must be stopped. Mark Fenn, the head of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Madagascar, believes development, in the form of jobs and prosperity, will be a negative for some of the world’s most impoverished people. These environmentalists view development as an evil – destroying indigenous cultures. As the millionaire Hollywood actor Ed Begley Jr. says they may be poor, but they seem happy and development might threaten this happiness.

For Begley rampant child mortality and horrible deaths in inadequate houses during earthquakes are small prices for others to pay as long we can visit them on eco-holidays.

Environmentalists call this sustainable development but the only thing sustained is poverty. In the face of this massive earthquake it has meant visiting death and destruction on some of the poorest people on the planet. Shame on environmentalists, and shame on Ed Begley Jr.

Climate-gate could further complicate the re-election prospects of congressional representatives from industrialized states who are already playing defense over the economic costs of climate change legislation.

Thousands of  emails leaked to the Internet from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom appear to substantiate a growing body of research that questions the idea of man-made global warming. Climate-gate has the potential to emerge as an unexpected gift to Republican candidates in this year’s midterm elections. But there’s the rub.

With the exception of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), and a handful of other elected officials, Republicans have been reticent to engage and debate the dubious claims of human induced global warming, laments Steve Milloy, editor and founder of JunkScience.com.

“Too many of them don’t understand the issue and the extremism that stands behind green activism,” he observes. “They are afraid of being labeled as anti-environment and are just not well-equipped or well informed enough to confront policies that could result in an unprecedented expansion of government power.”

At the very least, 2010 Republican challengers could invoke the email scandal to demonstrate how research has been falsified and distorted to advance a political agenda at odds with the economic well-being of many Americans. This in turn could open the way to a larger discussion of global warming science and the role of the United Nations.

Waxman-Markey (H.R. 2494), which passed the House last year by a 219-212 vote in June, calls for reducing total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. The legislation would impose a “cap and trade” regime that limits the amount of carbon dioxide that could be released into the atmosphere. Companies exceeding their prescribed limit would have to buy “carbon allowances” in a government-contrived system.

At least six Democratic senators are now urging the White House to back away from pushing “cap and trade” in the midst of an election year. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) are among those who have expressed reservations.

Virginia’s Bob McDonnell very deftly turned Waxman-Markey back against his Democratic opponent in last year’s race for governor. His landslide election victory should encourage other Republican candidates looking to capitalize on economic concerns.

“Cap and trade is opposed by most employers in Virginia because they see what it’s going to do to the cost of goods and services,” McDonnell explained in an interview. “It is strongly opposed by the coal industry, for instance, which is vitally important to Southwest Virginia. Cap and trade is just bad policy and the more citizens understand that it’s going to increase their electricity rates over time the more they are going to oppose it.”

Nationwide data measuring the impact of Waxman-Markey in a new study commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) yielded the following results:

• Cumulative loss in gross domestic product (GDP) up to $3.1 trillion (2012-2030)
• Employment losses up to 2.4 million jobs in 2030
• Residential electricity price increases up to 50 percent by 2030
• Gasoline price increases (per gallon) up 26 percent by 2030.

The NAM/ACCF study includes data on all 50 states.

In Virginia, for example, the NAM/ACCF study estimates that at least 41,400 jobs could be lost by 2030 as a result of lower industrial output that would follow from higher energy prices. Virginia residents would also see their disposable income reduced by $103 to $235 per year by 2020 and $608 to $1,096 by 2030 as a consequence of Waxman-Markey.

There’s no question that industrial states stand to lose the most and this should become a point of contention in 2010, just as it was in the Virginia governor’s race. But free market advocates who are looking to unseat cap and trade proponents now have the added benefit of climate-gate.

Even as cap and trade stalls in the U.S. Senate, the Obama Administration now appears poised to use the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) endangerment finding on Co2 to make an end run around democratic channels.

This maneuvering suggests that the economic arguments standing alone will not be sufficient over the long-term and must be co-joined with scientific data that can be included in litigation challenging the endangerment finding. But Republican candidates should get started now in exposing anti-scientific research that underpins alarmist positions on global warming.

In their messaging to voters they can draw from the expertise of numerous, well-credentialed skeptics who have found expression for their own research, despite the best efforts of the scientific establishment.

Over 31,000 scientists, including over 9,000 Ph.Ds, have signed off on a petition circulated through the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine that states human activity is not responsible for causing catastrophic disruption of the earth’s climate system. Moreover, over 700 scientists have now endorsed a U.S. Senate minority report that questions man-made global warming.

Charles Dunn, dean of the Regent University School of Government based in Virginia Beach, Va., sees opportunities for Republican candidates running in parts of the south and the mid-west especially. As it turns out, these are some of the same states that would be disproportionately affected by cap and trade.

Liberal media organs and Democratic operatives sought to make an issue out of McDonnell’s connection with Regent University during the campaign. In the end, Dunn suspects this coverage may have actually benefitted the Republican candidate in that it further heightened his esteem among social conservatives. Consequently, McDonnell was better positioned to make an issue out of energy policy because his base was already solidified, he surmises.

Throughout the campaign, McDonnell emphasized his support for expanded nuclear power and for offshore drilling. That’s what the public likes to hear and Republican candidates in other states can build on this approach by asking their Democratic counterparts to account for the junk science that constrains American ingenuity.

So, China went big into windmill and solar panel production, causing the media and other liberals to breathlessly swoon over this further evidence of the wisdom of us mandating the things even though all it proves is that China is not dumb.

Rich countries say all weather is now their fault and vow to spend billions on uneconomic, inefficient and intermittent energy sources regardless of their merits or performance as penance and to show their seriousness of purpose in feeling really, really bad about the whole thing they alone talked themselves into. China volunteers to make the machines for us because, without absurd “green” policies of the sort causing energy prices to rise so high that seniors burn books to stay warm — in fact, China rejects the Kyoto agenda precisely because it has sworn off of that sort of poverty and knows what would keep them there — they can do it more cheaply.

And then they go to Copenhagen and hold us up for billions in new, “climate aid”, with more than a whiff of reparations about it because, after all, our government aided and abetted that line of argument.

So please don’t be surprised by China’s reaction when confronted, like the rest of our hemisphere, by yet another severe winter of the sort RFK Jr. and others swore were a thing of the past thanks to Man-made global warming. That reaction is to claim that the severe winter is instead further evidence of the same phenomenon that, erm, supposedly made such things extinct. Because to not say so might threaten the billions in “climate aid” and windmill sales.

It just might work. Because, you know, we’re like that now, willing to believe everything that happens is further evidence of a theory that nothing can disprove or even cause a rethink (”faith”, anyone?). And we have useful idiots willing to also say anything to aid in the cause.

This is how countries can make themselves look so incredibly simple to the world while laboring to appear so sophisticated.

The United States government has shelled out huge sums of money to universities, think tanks, and businesses to study global warming climate change.  The government is poised to dole out even more money for climate-change “solutions” like the cap-and-trade scheme.  With the revelations about the lengths to which the leading group of global warming doomsayers went to “hide the decline” in temperatures in their seminal studies – studies that themselves spawned an avalanche of government spending – the world is seeing that the entire enterprise may be based on a fraud.

In a normal scandal where the government appears to have been ripped off, someone in the legislative or executive branch can usually be counted on to investigate the alleged fraud, if for no other reason than advancing their own political career.  In the case of this scandal, however, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have calculated that their political interests are best served by ignoring ClimateGate.  This is sure to continue as new scandals emerge.

That leaves only the judicial branch as a place where climate change fraud can be unmasked in a government forum.

Individuals with inside knowledge about scientists, businesses, or any organization who knowingly used false statements to get (or keep) government money to perpetuate the “climate change” machine should consider a lawsuit under the federal False Claims Act.

The False Claims Act permits whistleblowers to sue in the name of the government as a “qui tam” plaintiff.  Qui tam whistleblowers have used the FCA for decades to police (some would say hound) government contractors accused of obtaining government money by means of false statements.  What’s the non-altruistic incentive for exposing fraud on the government?  Successful whistleblowers can keep a share of the money that a federal judge or jury says should be paid back to the government, sometimes up to 30% of the recovery.  Indeed, whistleblowers have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in these suits over the last 20 years.

There is no reason this legal tool can’t be used against unscrupulous professors, scientists, and “green jobs” hucksters who knowingly submit false statements to get government grants that fund their research, fuel their green-tech start-ups, and underwrite their proselytizing about supposed man-made climate change.

Importantly, false statements necessary to justify a False Claims Act suit don’t have to involve the same type of data-manipulation exposed in the current ClimateGate scandal.  A climate-fraud FCA case could be made out of any type of false statement made in order to get or keep government money.  Government grants and contracts typically involve a significant amount of ongoing certification of compliance with bureaucratic restrictions – think of a government contractor’s progress reports or a hospital’s never-ending stream of paperwork assuring that all is in order – and false statements in this paperwork may open the door to a lawsuit.

What about retaliation against those who blow the whistle on their organization or their boss?  The law provides extremely strong protections for those who bring a lawsuit.  In fact, the FCA contains separate provisions permitting whistleblowers to recover for such retaliation.

Finally, a few important caveats for anyone considering a qui tam suit:

First, secrecy is important, at least at the beginning.  You may lose the opportunity to litigate on behalf of the government if you or someone else publicizes your inside information.  The FCA imposes strict guidelines on whistleblowers’ ability to maintain suits based on information that has been publicly disclosed.

Second, states and state universities (like Prof. Michael Mann’s employer Penn State) cannot be sued under the FCA for reasons having to do with federalism, but individuals working at state universities can be named as defendants if they caused false claims to be submitted.

Third, before filing suit, whistleblowers must share the information supporting their suit with the Justice Department.  Although the government has the option of taking over the litigation to recover the money, it is unlikely, to say the least, that the current Justice Department would assist a whistleblower whose FCA case threatened to undermine the administration’s climate-change policies.  If (or when) the government declines to intervene, the whistleblower plaintiff and their lawyers can vigorously prosecute the lawsuit, with all the powerful tools of pre-trial discovery.

A climate fraud False Claims Act suit would be no small undertaking.  The rewards, however, could be quite substantial, and not just in monetary terms.  Who would like to see a videotaped deposition of a climate-change fraudster defending his or her actions under oath?  I sure would.