Global Warming, Energy
Environment, Science

According to White House energy adviser Heather Zichal, the Obama administration still sees a future for coal. She also said that the administration wasn’t “singing ‘Kumbaya’” with the natural gas industry and was committed to seeing coal burned “in a more environmentally friendly way.”[ia] But what does that mean and how do we reach that point?

FLINT, MI. —It’s tempting to call the shameful taxpayer subsidy for electric cars — vehicles that are unaffordable for all but a small, elite number of wealthy Americans — this nation’s costly little secret.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel-winning economist with expertise on international trade, yet he has a disturbing habit of pontificating with confidence on matters where he is either deliberately misleading or is simply ignorant of the basic facts. I have previously documented this habit when Krugman commented on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, and more recently when he carelessly repeated “facts” about mercury emissions that were obviously nonsense to anyone with common sense.

Thomas Mulcair’s so-called “solution” to the “problem” of the oil sands artificially inflating our dollar and gutting Canada’s manufacturing sector is to take billions of dollars more out of the pockets of ordinary Canadians.

The UN climate campaign is running out of money. Launched with high hopes, the global “Green Climate Fund” (GCF), set up by the United Nations to finance climate change projects in the developing world, is gridlocked due to an international power play. Meanwhile, the UNFCCC Climate Change Secretariat does not know how to raise five million Euros needed for its next climate conference.—Bernhard Potter, Die Tageszeitung,  24 May 2012

As a result of Germany’s green energy transition, electricity prices are exploding. Consumers and businesses are paying the price while Germany faces gradual de-industrialisation. Economists estimate that the cost of the green energy transition will total 170 billion Euros by 2020. This is more than double of what Germany would have to write off if Greece were to withdraw from the monetary union. “The de-industrialization has already begun,” the EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has warned.—Handelsblatt, 23 May 2012

Over the past several years I have ripped former Vice President Al Gore for his far, far left rambles and rants on what he once called ‘Global Warming’ but now refers to as ‘Climate Change’.  Of course, when global warming was smacked down by authentic climatologists, unlike the “pretend” types such as Gore and his misled followers, the debunked terminology was discreetly changed to something that we know is a fact; who can argue the new title ‘Climate Change’? Is it now no more than just a factual, inarguable subject?

The new flat earth society is not a fringe group of a few people living in the middle of nowhere. It is to be found at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), not to be confused with the Goddard Space Flight Center, personified by its leader for many years, Dr. James E. Hansen.

Chemical & Engineering News

The emergence of weeds resistant to the most widely used herbicide is fostering a new arms race in the war against these menaces, which cost society billions of dollars annually in control measures and lost agricultural production. That’s the topic of a story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly magazine of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society.

Journal of the American Chemical Society

The world’s first “electrified snail” has joined the menagerie of cockroaches, rats, rabbits and other animals previously implanted with biofuel cells that generate electricity — perhaps for future spy cameras, eavesdropping microphones and other electronics — from natural sugar in their bodies. Scientists are describing how their new biofuel cell worked for months in a free-living snail in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.