I lived in Florida for some five years between attending the University of Miami and returning after service in the Army for a job I left on news of JFK’s assassination. Some five years ago my older brother, a resident of Boynton Beach, urged me to relocate.

As the exit doors of the Palm Beach Airport slid open, I was hit with a soggy blast of hot air that instantly told me I would not be taking up residence there again.

I returned to New Jersey which shares with Florida, California and ten other States the dubious honor of being on the brink of financial collapse and default. Like others, New Jersey requires that some part of electricity production must came from “renewable” sources such as solar or wind.

Other States have a similar mandate. Utilities have embraced it because the costs are heavily subsidized with taxpayer dollars. It is an enormous waste of money made worse by the unreliable aspects of both plus the need to always have a backup supplier, usually in the form of a coal-fired plant.

To make matters worse, Congress is contemplating a national Renewable Electricity Standard that would require more use of solar and wind energy. The argument for this is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid “global warming.” However, there is no global warming. For the past decade, there’s been a global cooling and it is anticipated to last for several more decades.

Finally, it must be said that there is NO connection whatever between greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and any warming that did naturally occur. Ever.

Thus, a national mandate would just multiply the waste of billions of taxpayer dollars required to subsidize these massively inefficient and unreliable forms of electricity production.

In October there was a flurry of news stories about the largest solar panel plant in the United States, located on 180 acres of land, 80 miles southeast of Tampa. Naturally, President Obama paid a visit to the Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center because he is a big booster of renewable energy. He keeps telling everyone that it will generate hundreds, if not thousands, of new “green” jobs.

What the President didn’t say during his visit was that the solar panels and other items were manufactured in nations other than the United States. The solar cells came from the Philippines. The steel mountings were made in Canada. The electric boxes were manufactured in Germany.

The project did generate some 400 temporary jobs, but how many full time jobs will the new Florida installation generate? The total comes to two full-time employees and six part-time groundskeepers who will work one week a month during the rainy season.

And here’s where it just gets totally obscene. The Desoto facilities and two other Florida Power and Light solar facilities will generate enough electricity to power just 3,000 homes of the 4,000,000-plus accounts served by Florida’s largest utility.

Less than 4% of Florida’s energy needs will be met by this $150 million facility. Meanwhile, proposed coal-fired and nuclear plants are fought to a standstill by environmentalists.

And, finally, consider this piece of news. General Electric just announced that it plans to close down its only solar-panel manufacturing facility because if found the price for panels had fallen below production costs! The 82 employees at the Newark, Delaware facility will join the other millions of Americans who are out of work.

America, like Great Britain, is closing in on an era of blackouts because the federal government is doing everything in its power to thwart the building of proven sources of electricity production, coal-fired and nuclear plants. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, sitting atop enough to provide power for the next three hundred or more years. No new nuclear plants have been built in three decades.

It’s only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that shoveling snow has been reclassified a “green” job. Jimmy Carter’s famed “misery index” is about to shoot off the charts.

I received an email from the Sierra Club urging me to sign a petition to declare the polar bear an endangered species.

The Department of the Interior is considering this and it would cover much of the Arctic, including the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean. The Sierra Club is worried because Shell Oil wants to drill for oil in the Beaufort Sea, a part of the “critical habitat for the bear.”

So, for anyone who doesn’t think that thwarting all attempts to drill for oil in the Arctic isn’t the real reason to “save” the thriving polar bear population, the answer is that it has nothing to do with polar bears and everything to do with the primary goal of all environmental organization, denying energy sources to Americans and everyone else.

Indeed, the Sierra Club said declaring the polar bear endangered was “necessary to stop harmful activities such as oil drilling.” So I guess it doesn’t get any more plain than that.

The Sierra Club went on to blatantly lie about the status of polar bears, claiming that “survival rates for polar bear cubs are plunging.” It is common knowledge that male polar bears are known to kill cubs, but the survival rates have much more to do with the mother bear’s ability to catch ringed seals.

Ironically, polar bears’ favorite delicacy is the pups of ringed seals. Mother Nature doesn’t much care who wins the survival marathon and the Sierra Club is not calling for an endangered species declaration for ringed seals.

The Sierra Club is lying. The Natural Resources Defense Council is lying. The World Wildlife Fund is lying. They could not care less about polar bears. Their objective is shutting off access to anywhere that has oil or natural gas reserves.

In a July 2006 a report, “Polar Bear Politics: Underestimating the survival capacity of one popular bear” by Jennifer Marohasy, the Director of the Food and Environmental Unit at the Australian based Institute of Public Affairs was published. The estimate of the population is “about 25,000 polar bears existing in 19 relatively discrete populations across Norway, Denmark, Russia, Alaska, Greenland, and Canada.”

“Forty years ago, there were only about 5,000 bears, the worldwide population depressed by hunting.” In the 1970s, nations agreed to restrict hunting, resulting in the growth of the population.

The BIG LIE is that the Arctic is melting because of “global warming.” The Arctic has, in fact, “warmed” over the past two decades and there has been a reduction in sea ice, but there has been no “global warming”, only a natural cycle of warming that followed a Little Ice Age that ended around 1850 after three hundred years.

In fact, in October 2007, NASA announced the results of an in-depth study of Arctic sea ice and concluded what melting had occurred was due “a change in wind patterns” that had “compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream, and then sped its flow out of the Arctic.” Wind patterns, not “global warming.”

The Earth is now into a new cooling cycle that began in 1998 and which meteorologists predict will last for several decades. What they won’t tell you is that they have their fingers crossed that it does not, in fact, signal a new Ice Age. The period between ice ages is about 11,500 years and the Earth is at the end of the interglacial period that has allowed for the rise of human civilization in the past five thousand years or so.

So, the fate of the polar bear is such that they are more likely to survive a new Ice Age than billions of humans in the northern hemisphere.

As should be obvious to everyone, the reduction of Arctic sea ice or the population of ringed seals has had no correlation whatever with the growth of the polar bear population. Indeed, if there hadn’t been a period of glaciation about 250,000 years ago and a bunch of formerly brown bears had not become isolated and had not adapted successfully, there would be no polar bears.

Further putting the lie to the Sierra Club and other environmental organization’s predictions is the fact that polar bears live in remote and inhospitable parts of the Arctic. In addition, they are not stationary, roaming over an area as large as two hundred square kilometers in search of tasty seals. Most of the time, humans can’t even visit or fly over the vast bulk of the Arctic to make any kind of count.

The Sierra Club has no idea how many polar bears actually exist in the Arctic and any claim that they are “endangered” is pure balderdash. I could use another word to describe such claims, but my Mother told me not to.

So, to sum up, the Sierra Club is LYING about polar bears and you would be well advised to take anything else they have to say with a grain of Arctic Sea salt.

I have long harbored strong doubts about the knowledge that most Americans possess regarding the sources of energy they largely take for granted. We flip a switch and the lights go on. We pull up to the gas pump and drive away. We use machines that are totally dependent on having enough electricity to power entire cities as well as rural communities.

Since all successful economies depend on abundant, affordable energy, why is the Congress preparing to pass a cap-and-trade bill, renamed to suggest “clean energy” and “national security” has anything to do with a huge tax on the use of energy by all Americans?

There are some fundamental facts about energy in America you need to know. The Congressional Research Service recently released a report on U.S. energy reserves. To begin:

The U.S. has 1,321 billion barrels of oil (or barrels of oil equivalent for other sources of energy) when combining its recoverable natural gas, oil and coal reserves. This is oil known to exist and oil estimates in fields as yet untapped. Between Alaska and the continental offshore potential, we could literally be self-sufficient.

Keep in mind, however, oil represents less than 40% of our energy use, nor do we import most of that from the Middle East. Two-thirds of our oil consumption comes from North America with Canada and Mexico being major providers. By expanding domestic production, we could reduce dependency on the Middle East even further.

That said, since the days of Jimmy Carter, the White House and Congress has gone out of its way to make it difficult, if not impossible, to tap domestic reserves. When a windfall profits tax was imposed on November 9, 1978, it sent a message to U.S. oil companies they were not welcome here.

While ExxonMobil is the favorite target of environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth or the Sierra Club, the fact is that it is no longer in the seven top oil producers in the United States. The “big” domestic oil companies are now Aera Energy, Anadarko, and Occidental. ExxonMobil looks for oil in overseas locations.

Astonishingly, other oil producing nations whose reserves are ranked behind the U.S. are Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, and Canada. The only oil “shortage” in the U.S. is one created by Congress and the energy policies of a succession of past presidents. An estimated 87% of our oil reserves remain untouched.

When it comes to coal, the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal with 28% of all the world’s coal reserves. Russian comes in second with 19%. Coal represents more than 50% of all the electricity produced in America and the Obama administration has declared war on it.

The cap-and-trade bill before Congress puts all of its emphasis on the two worst, most expensive, and job-killing forms of energy, wind and solar. Combined they represent a pathetic 1% of electricity. They are unreliable sources, dependent on whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Moreover, though never mentioned, they require backup sources of traditional energy production. You cannot have wind or solar energy without also having a coal-fired, hydroelectric, or nuclear plant to ensure a steady source.

As reported in Newsweek, “Each year as much as $100 billion is spent by governments and consumers around the world on green subsidies to encourage wind, solar, and other renewable energy markets.”

The result, in the U.S. is a virtually army, “1,150 lobbying groups that spent more than $20 million to lobby the U.S. Congress as it was writing the Clean Energy bill (which would create a $60 billion annual market for emissions permits by 2012.)”

The Newsweek article said, “It’s a genetic defect that not only guarantees great waste, but opens the door to manipulation and often demonstrably contravenes the objectives that climate policy is supposed to achieve.”

We do not have a climate policy in the United States. We have a huge scheme to enrich a small group of people who will control the exchanges for utterly bogus “carbon credits”, nothing more than the right to emit carbon dioxide as the natural result of burning fuel for energy. It is not, however, such industrial and other uses that represents the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. The Earth itself is responsible for 95% of the CO2 in the atmosphere and that CO2 represents 3.618%.

By comparison, nuclear energy does not produce CO2 emissions and yet there hasn’t been a new nuclear reactor built in the United States for some thirty years.

The same is true for the building of a single new oil refinery in America. Since it takes about a decade from start to finish on these huge engineering projects and a billion dollar investment, it would be 2020 before one was in full production if begun next year. The real question is, if you were an oil company CEO, would you invest that kind of money when the U.S. won’t let you explore or extract oil on or offshore?

What no one is telling you is that CO2 does not “cause” global warming and there is no global warming. The Earth is actually in a natural cycle of cooling that began in 1998 and is anticipated to last at least two to three decades.

Europe’s experience with “renewable” energy has been a disaster. Great Britain is facing blackouts that will make economic growth impossible and wreak havoc on the daily lives of the English. As with other European nations, it has driven up the cost of electricity.

The American energy consumer is being lied to and stolen from in the form of the cap-and-trade bill under consideration and other obstacles.

The nation as a whole is being put at risk for lack of access to our own vast energy reserves, coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as nuclear power that will be needed to reverse the present recession, unemployment, and the ability to grow our way back to prosperity.

Editor’s Note: To read the report, click on
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=f7bd7b77-ba50-48c2-a635-220d7cf8c519

I am always amazed at the variety of choice that exists in my local supermarket. There are other supermarkets in the area, but the one I frequent most has lower prices on most items and almost anything you want to purchase allows one to select among several brands available.

We Americans may not think much about choice when it comes to what we buy because we have so many choices. It is the mark of a free marketplace where competition determines winners and losers. It says a lot about a society that puts a high premium on freedom.

Your government, however, has decided that, in 2012, you can no longer choose to purchase and use Thomas Edison’s iconic invention, the 100 watt incandescent light bulb. By 2014, all such bulbs will be banned from sale. That’s right, they will vanish from the shelves of supermarkets and other outlets.

As this is being written, your government is debating taking away your choice to purchase health insurance. Or not. If it gets its way, everyone, old and young, healthy or ill, everyone will have to buy health insurance—most likely the brand issued by the government because it will drive most present insurance companies out of business. That is so un-American as to defy belief.

In Europe, thanks to a European Union ban on incandescent light bulbs, consumers are cleaning out the shelves to stockpile a supply when they can no longer be sold. As Jason Lomberg, the Technical Editor of Electronic Component News, a trade publication, noted recently, “The ban has proved to be massively unpopular. All across Europe its media are reporting huge increases in the sales of incandescent sales. In Germany alone, sales for 100 watt bulbs rose by 80% to 150%.

Why were the EU and U.S. bans put in place? It is the view of environmentalists who insist that incandescent bulbs are less energy “efficient” than compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) and that consumers must be denied the choice between them.

They are less “efficient”, but it is equally true that CFL’s unnatural, bluish light takes time to achieve full brightness, about three minutes on the average. At least a quarter of them fall short meeting their rated service life, meaning you will have to buy more of them.

In addition to the fact that some “emit a headache-inducing buzzing sound” the worst thing about fluorescent light bulbs is that they contain mercury. As a recent issue of The DeWeese Report points out, they “contain poisonous liquid mercury over 300 times the EPA’s standard accepted safety level.”

“In addition, days after a bulb has been broken,” noted Tom DeWeese, “vacuuming or simply crawling across the carpeted floor where the bulb was broken can cause mercury vapor levels to shoot back upwards of 100 times the accepted level of safety.” Who crawls on the floor? Babies! Whose closer to the floor than you? Pets!

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection reported that a woman was quoted $2,000 for cleanup of a broken compact fluorescent bulb in her house.

The politicians in the U.S. Congress, pandering as always to the crazed environmentalists, enacted the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that put the ban in place to begin in 2012.

The Obama administration has declared war on the building of new coal-fired energy plants despite the fact that they currently provide just over half of all the electricity we use daily, nor has a new nuclear plant been built in decades. It won’t allow any offshore exploration and extraction of oil or natural gas either. So, while allegedly providing for “energy independence” the government is thwarting any new provision of electricity.

But you will be forced to buy fluorescent light bulbs to ensure “energy efficiency” while one of the greatest inventions, the incandescent light bulb, is banned from use. The result will turn all U.S. landfills into toxic dumps.

Where the government finds the justification for destroying your right of choice continues to elude my grasp.

What it portends are supermarkets with far less products and food choices than currently exist because some environmentalist or vegetarian has decided that coercive laws are the best way to take away the freedom of choice that is quintessentially American.

This ban must be repealed along with so-called healthcare “reform” and the hideous “cap-and-trade” law, renamed as the “American Clean Energy and Security Act”, that will raise the cost of electricity in the name of saving the Earth from a “global warming” that is NOT happening.

As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

By now, anyone paying any attention whatever to the weather has begun to notice that it is getting colder earlier in the U.S. and that this is occurring around the world.

On www.iceagenow.com, Robert W. Felix, the author of “Not by Fire, but by Ice” and “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps”, reports on current weather events. A recent visit contains these items:

Storm now heading for Ireland & Britain predicted 100 days ago Snow likely to follow – 18 Oct 09

Significant snow in Argentina’s Southern Andes – 19 Oct 09

Czech Republic: Most snow in 100 years – 16 Oct 09

Snow across Central and Eastern Europe – 15 Oct 09

Earliest October Snowfall on record in Southern Germany – 15 Oct 09

Why then is a United Nations conference on climate change to be held this December in Copenhagen still claiming that the Earth faces the dreaded “global warming”?

Why is “global warming” the justification for terrible legislation such as the cap-and-trade bill currently festering in Congress?

Plainly stated, there is no “global warming” and the Earth is, in fact, in a new cooling cycle that began in 1998. Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General, Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, Australia’s governing body, the European Union, Al Gore and the President of the United States who will attend the UN conference, are all lying.

They are lying to impose a One-World Government on every nation stupid enough to ratify the December conference’s treaty on “climate change.” That has been the goal of the United Nations since its Environmental Program initiated the global warming hoax with an “Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. To learn more, Google “Agenda 21.”

Suffice it to say, the Kyoto Climate Control protocol that followed exempted China, India, and undeveloped nations from having to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide. In 1998, the U.S. Senate passed a unanimous resolution refusing to ratify this pack of lies. Today’s Senate, as well as House, is controlled by the Democrat Party and it is hell-bent on “global warming” legislation such as “cap-and-trade” and other horrid laws and regulations.

The reason the UN environmental program has been able to perpetrate the greatest hoax in modern times can be traced to the “computer models” they cited to justify the “science” of global warming.

Computer models are used by the U.S. Weather Service to predict conditions around the nation and you may have noticed via your local weather forecast that they are just barely reliable. At best, they have about a 50-50 chance of getting it wrong within a period as short as four days. This is because no computer model can predict the action of clouds. Yes, clouds! They are a significant factor in weather.

Worse, however, is the way these computer models have been deliberately manipulated by global warming alarmists such as James Hansen, a complete loony who unfortunately and inexplicably heads up the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a post he’s held since 1981.

A computer model he produced in 1971 predicted global warming well into the next century and blamed it on “fossil fuel CO2 emissions.” Greens like Hansen are united in their opposition to the use of any energy other than solar and wind energy for anything. Solar and wind account for about one percent of all the energy Americans consume daily.

In a commentary by Norm Kalmanovitch, he noted that “As with the 1971 model, the 1998 model was proven to be false when global warning ended after 1998 even as carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise at unprecedented rates.” Carbon dioxide is vital to all plant life on Earth and, as such, vital to all life on Earth. The more the better. It would produce higher crop yields and more forest growth.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has also perverted computer models for the purpose of advancing its One-World government agenda; the same one that will be advanced in Copenhagen in December. The same one President Obama is salivating for the opportunity to sign.

The IPCC’s continued global warming lies, Kalmanovitch noted “not only made no mention of the fact that from 1998 to 1999 the Earth cooled more than it had ever cooled during the entire global temperature record, but emphatically stated that from 1997 to 1998 the Earth had warmed more than it ever had.”

The next time anyone tells you that the Earth is warming, they are lying to you.

In economics, “rent seeking” is a term that describes the process by which corporations, unions, trade groups, and individuals try to gain unfair advantages through politics and lobbying rather than via competitive trade in the free marketplace.

Going “Green” has proven to be one of the favorite ways by which corporations position themselves to benefit.

“Global warming” and the reduction of “greenhouse gas emissions”, primarily carbon dioxide from various forms of energy use, is the reason given for the hideous “Cap-and-Trade” legislation making its way through Congress. It will enrich some corporations that have rolled the dice on “renewable” energy (solar and wind) and, in particular, the utilities supporting its mandatory system of “carbon credits” to be traded among energy producers and users.

Business Week recently took note of the way global warming positions are rather dramatically dividing the business community. Apple became the fifth large member company to resign or reduce its role in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber’s “aggressive opposition to climate change legislation.” Nike also resigned.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Al Gore is a member of the board of Apple and that Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook, “happens to sit on the board of Nike.” The Journal further noted that “Both companies may figure they can afford a U.S. carbon tax because most of their manufacturing is done outside the U.S.”

This is a classic example of rent seeking, giving them an advantage over competitors whose manufacturing is U.S.-based in the event they (and the rest of us) have a carbon tax imposed on them.

Business Week reported that, under the leadership of Thomas J. Donahue, the Chamber “has moved sharply to oppose much of the legislation and many of the regulations and policies streaming out of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress on health care, labor issues, and finance.” Good! The Chamber deserves support and praise for this.

But Business Week reporters, Theo Francis and John Carey, like so many of their colleagues continue to fall into the same trap of ignorance and inaccuracy, writing that “The Chamber vehemently opposes legislation now before Congress as well as moves by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate harmful carbon emissions.” They are NOT harmful. They play no role whatever in the Earth’s climate.

That is a major reason the Chamber is opposing legislation and regulations based on the false science and claims about carbon emissions. Beyond that, the impact of such legislation and regulations would be to literally wreck the economy that is based on access to affordable and abundant energy.

A reading of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill reveals it is about much more than carbon credits. The Institute for Energy Research notes that half of the bill’s 1,428 pages conjure up the carbon credits scheme. “The rest of the bill is packed with regulations that would completely alter the United States’ economy.”

Here’s just a sample:

It would mandate that utilities provide 20 percent of electricity from qualified renewables by 2020, up from 2.8 percent today. This means that solar and wind providers, now producing barely one percent of the nation’s electricity, would by virtue of legislation, gain the funding to be competitive. In a free market, they are virtually uncompetitive and heavily reliant on government subsidies just to exist!

Think you’re paying enough for electricity today? The Waxman-Markey bill would establish a new $1 billion annual tax on electricity from coal and natural gas-fired power plants. Coal generates just over half of all the electricity Americans use. Nuclear is responsible for about twenty percent with the rest coming from natural gas and hydroelectric power. The proposed tax just drives up the cost of energy for everyone.

It gets worse if that’s possible, the Waxman-Markey bill would establish a new $30 billion revolving loan fund to subsidize wind turbines, solar energy, fuel cells, batteries, biomass equipment and other energy sources. Who is a major manufacturer of such items? General Electric. This bill is pure “rent seeking” by GE.

Gazing into their crystal ball, Waxman-Markey requires utilities to develop large scale plans for electric vehicles and would increase the ceiling on loans to auto manufacturers to build electric cars. Can you say General Motors or Chrysler, both currently owned by the U.S. government instead of those who invested in them or made loans to them.

This vile legislation would even establish a “National Climate Adaptation Program” to empower federal zoning of land and oceans. Federal zoning! Not local zoning where decisions over land use is closest to the people most affected by them. Federal zoning as in the communist concept that the state owns all the land!

Make no mistake about it, while some corporations are polishing their Green image, the federal government—your government—is making plans to own every square inch of land in America. It’s not just unconstitutional. It is a move toward dictatorship.

For sixty years I lived on a little street called Brookside Road. The name came from a real brook, a Depression-era project lined with smooth rocks that was serene and beautiful, bounded by trees on both sides.

Some in the federal government want to exert control over that brook and over every drop of water in America. It is an attack on private property and it is emblematic of the real agenda of environmentalists. It is Communism.

The American Land Rights Association recently issued a notice. “Having been slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court’s two recent decisions that the words ‘navigable waters’ in the Clean Water Act limited federal agencies to regulation of navigable waters only, Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress are striking back.”

I wrote a recent commentary on the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to circumvent the wording of the Clean Air Act in order to regulate carbon dioxide, the gas upon which all vegetation relies in the same way humans and other creatures require oxygen. Now the EPA in conjunction with the Corps of Engineers wants to control all waters nationwide.

It is a naked grab for power that the Founding Fathers feared. John Adams wrote that “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”

Private property is so essential to freedom that the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution specifically says “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” There would be no just compensation if the EPA acquires the power to decide how Americans can use water and where.

Just as we have already seen examples of how U.S. agriculture is being sabotaged by the Endangered Species Act, denying water to farms in Oregon and California, there are countless other examples of how these “environmental” laws are used to keep new plants to generate electrical energy from being built and the thwarting of all manner of other development.

Environmentalism used to mean conservation, but now it is just Communism, first, last and always.

The proposed language to change the Clean Water Act would replace “navigable waters”, i.e., rivers, lakes, and bays, on which a ship, barge or boat could travel, with the all-encompassing phrase “waters of the United States.”

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center – he blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com

No single government agency has grown so big and so fast as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and no single agency threatens constitutionally guaranteed property rights and nationwide economic growth than the EPA.

It is the Blob that ate America.

Signed into law by Richard M. Nixon in 1970, the EPA has so consistently twisted the truth about the environment that its announcements must be dissected like a cadaver to find any verifiable facts.

This agency of the government is so brazen that it is currently trying to bully Congress, the seat of government, into passing the horrid Cap-and-Trade bill so that it might then regulate stationary sources that emit more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year.

In its endless quest for more and more power over all aspects our lives, the EPA wants to rewrite the 1970 Clean Air Act to include so-called greenhouse gases. That is why its Senate sponsors have obligingly renamed it a “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.”

It is based entirely on the global warming hoax.

The EPA has been the spear point for the global warming hoax, the creation of many worldwide and domestic environmental groups that continue to lie, saying it is caused by humans. There is, however, NO global warming. The Earth has been into a cooling cycle for the past decade. The current cooling is predicted to last for decades to come.

The platform for the global warming hoax has been provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The EPA is justifying its latest power grab claiming that the regulation of greenhouse gases will avoid a global warming that is NOT happening.

The EPA has such a disdain for real science that it wants to declare greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), as “pollutants” when in fact CO2 has nothing to do with either warming or cooling.

The simple truth is that water vapor constitutes 95% of all so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and CO2 represents an infinitesimal 3.616%. Man-made CO2 whether generated by industry or just a backyard barbeque is an even more miniscule 0.117%. CO2 molecules in the atmosphere are so diffuse as to render this gas unable to cause any climate change.

The EPA proposal reflects the effort of environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club to thwart the construction of any new plants to generate electricity. This is especially true of coal-fired plants that currently provide half of all the electricity used daily. Costly technology to capture and clean emissions is already in place wherever coal or other fuels are utilized.

All industrial activity is the ultimate target. What the nation’s industrial and manufacturing sector really generates are jobs, profits, stock dividends, and tax revenue.

The climate/energy bill has no basis in scientific fact. Despite a Supreme Court decision, CO2 can in no way be defined as a “pollutant.” CO2 is vital to all vegetation from backyard gardens to wheat fields to forests. Humans and other mammals exhale it. Vegetation absorbs and uses it. More CO2 would, in fact, mean more robust harvests and greater forest growth worldwide.

Simply put, the Clean Air Act was never intended to include greenhouse gases and that is the EPA’s dilemma as it seeks to do what it clearly was never intended to do.

The very idea that humans have any control over the climate is so absurd as to render the forthcoming UN climate conference little more than a gathering of liars and idiots.

The only good news is that Obama’s environmental czar, Carol Browner, now says that the cap-and-trade or pollution control act will not likely come to a vote until December. Then or ever, it would strangle economic growth in America at the same time such growth is taking place in the world’s emerging powers such as China and India.

While the rest of the world is encouraging industry to provide the jobs and revenue needed for their population, the United States President and Congress would hand the Greenhouse Gun to an EPA eager to pull the trigger on our own growth.

We are going to go from cotton fields to bedrooms in order to connect the dots on the many ways the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups have conspired to deprive Americans of beneficial chemicals that protect crops and humans from insect pests.

Only a scant two percent of the U.S. population engages in the farming that feeds all the rest of us and provides a bounty for export. Farm kids will tell you how they were on a tractor by the age of eight or nine, working the fields from early morning until dusk. When they get older, a lot of them decide to take up another way of making a living because farming is very hard work.

Since the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, not to mention the Department of Agriculture, a life spent farming has become increasingly more difficult thanks to the endless regulations regarding land and water use, what products they can use to fend off the pests and weeds that attack crops, and the manner in which they can be applied.

Why should this matter to you? Ask yourself that question while you are prowling the aisles in your favorite supermarket. Here’s the equation to keep in mind: No farmers. No food. And that includes livestock that depend on feed like hay and grains. If you like a nice cotton shirt or dress, remember that it started in a farmer’s field.

On August 3, the Western Environmental Law Center sent out a news release to brag about that way the 6th Circuit had issued an order denying the pesticide industry’s petition for rehearing in National Cotton Council v. EPA No. 06-4630. The order upheld the Court’s earlier finding that pesticide residuals and biological pesticides constitute pollutants under the Clean Water Act.

Just about everything is a “pollutant” as far as the EPA is concerned, but they really hate pesticides. Now farmers seeking to protect their crops will be required to get a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit. If their neighbors or just about anyone objects, they won’t get it.

Let me tell you about some of the pests that attack cotton. They include Alfalfa Looper, Boll Weevil Song, Cotton Bollworm, Cutworms, Leafhoppers, Pink Bollworm, Saltmarsh Catapillers, Silverfish Whitefly, Webspinning Spider Mites, and something called Thrips.

Those are just a few of the insect pests that attack a cotton crop and they are just a few of the hundreds of insect species with which farmers of every kind of crop must contend. The invention of pesticides tipped the struggle in their favor, allowing them to protect crops in a fashion that permits them to feed the rest of us.

Now, here’s where it goes beyond just the problems farmers encounter. The rest of us are subject to every kind of disease imaginable because a lot of insect pests transmit them. They did so quite famously during the Black Death that wiped out a third of Europe’s population and, these days, they spread Lyme Disease, West Nile Fever, Rocky Mountain Fever, Dysentery, and all manner of nasty stuff, including the Bubonic plague.

By 1996 the EPA had whipped up everybody’s fears that pesticides were so harmful to children that even more regulation was needed, so Congress obligingly passed the Food Quality Protection Act and it amended the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.

While it is true that the EPA hasn’t banned a pesticide since DDT, it is equally true that it has found all kinds of ways to eliminate a variety of pesticides from use. Usually they cite “studies” in which some rats are stuffed so full of high doses of a pesticide that it causes them to become ill. Short of drinking a pesticide directly from the bottle, this is not likely to happen to you. Most structural pesticides are so diluted when applied that they are a threat solely to the pests.

All of which means that, while the farmers are encountering difficulty dealing with Mother Nature’s nasty creatures, the rest of us are increasingly vulnerable to them as well. A case in point is the raging population of bed bugs that was the subject of a recent EPA “summit.”

Simply put, if the EPA had not forced Ficam, a bendiocarb applied with water, and chlorpyrifos, formerly known as Dursban off the market, there would be NO bedbug problem because either one of these excellent pesticides would eliminate them.

The EPA’s message to us is that we should learn to love bedbugs because they are difficult and costly to eliminate these days. Fortunately, they do not spread disease.

And you thought the EPA was “protecting” you?

No, they are protecting the “environment.”

There’s an ancient Scandinavian legend that says, “A long time ago, the universe was made of ice. Then one day the ice began to melt and a mist rose into the sky. Out of the mist came a giant made of frost and the earth and the heavens were made from his body. This is how the world began and this is how the world will end, not by fire, but by ice. The seas will freeze and winters will never end.”

Thus begins “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, a book by my friend, Robert W. Felix, published initially in 2005. You can pick up a copy from www.iceagenow.com. While you’re there, pick up “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps” as well. Taken together, both books explain why the Earth, now at the end of an interglacial cycle, is heading into its next ice age and why Darwin got it wrong with his theory of slow, evolutionary mutations accounting for various species being different from one another.

The Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. Homo sapiens, the human race as we know it, have been around for about 40,000 years. We date our modern ancestry back to the Cro-Magnon man who superseded the Neanderthals. The development of agriculture, growing food rather than hunting it, dates back some 7,000 years and civilization in the form of city-states and nations is relatively new; only about 5,000 years.

For all that time, tribes tried very hard to appease the gods of sun and rain to ensure a good harvest. They would sacrifice the spare virgin or offer the hearts of captives. There were elaborate dances and prayers created by the shamans and priests, but humans never quite got the knack of actually controlling the weather or climate because they can’t and never could.

That is until Greenus Homo Sapian came along. This creature who emerged out of the conservation movement hit its stride around the 1970s. Greenus is the Bigfoot of climate, the Satchquatch of weather.

After devoting a decade in the 1970s to correctly predicting that a new ice age was on the way, Greenus, also known as Greens, discovered that they could scare a lot more people by claiming that the Earth was suddenly and dramatically warming.

It turned out to be a fabulous fund-raiser and allowed them to pursue an agenda intended to rid the Earth of as many nasty Homo sapiens as possible. This would be accomplished by getting all kinds of beneficial chemicals banned from use; pesticides, herbicides, anything made from plastic, as well as genetically modified crops that could feed the billions of Homo sapiens.

Mostly, though, the Greens’ enemy were “fossil” or “dirty” fuels that just happened to generate the energy required for all modern society everywhere; coal, oil and natural gas.

The instrument of this “global warming”, according to the Greens, was carbon dioxide, a gas that is vital to all life on Earth. Without carbon dioxide (CO2) not a single bit of vegetation would grow. Remember agriculture? No crops, no food. And, if CO2 was forcibly limited by crazy “Cap-and-Trade” schemes, the Greens could depress the economies of nations.

Carbon dioxide was especially abundant in the atmosphere during the Jurassic period and the vegetation was so thick that lizard-like creatures became giants called dinosaurs. They were the masters of the Earth until something happened and they disappeared. Did a giant meteor wipe them out or was it a cyclical magnetic reversal that corresponds time and again with species extinction and the sudden appearance of entirely new species?

The “global warming” myth originated in the United Nations, an organization seeking to be the single, unelected governing institution for the entire Earth. A conspiracy of alleged scientists was brought together as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988. Ever since, we have been assailed with claims that “global warming” was such a threat to the Earth and mankind that radical changes were required to avoid it.

The Greens, however, are running smack into a brick wall called reality.

All over the Earth, temperatures have been steadily falling. It is getting cooler and colder everywhere.

In a recent, desperate effort, the Union of Concerned Scientists announced that “Global warming made it less cool.” That’s right. It’s getting cooler because it’s getting warmer.

Newborn babes arrive fresh from the womb laughing at this absurdity.

At sites like Iceagenow.com and over at the most excellent www.climatedepot.com anyone with access to the Internet can learn about how weather records are being broken daily around the Earth as it cools. In Al Gore’s hometown of Nashville, cold temperatures broke a record set in 1877 when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

Chicago, Cincinnati, Peoria, California, the Arctic—everywhere!

So, who are you going to believe? The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The Union of Concerned Scientists? The Sierra Club? Friends of the Earth? U.S. government agencies like NOAA? The National Geographic? Newsweek? Time? President Obama? His cabinet Secretaries? The endless succession of “czars” he keeps appointing?

Congress? You better not believe Congress because they are getting ready to pass the “Cap-and-Trade” bill, incongruously named the American Clean Energy and Security Act. It will crush what’s left of the U.S. economy by imposing taxes on all energy use while dolling out billions to the least effective form of energy, wind and solar energy.

As America and the rest of the globe grow colder, do you really want to pay more for the energy to heat your home? All in the name of avoiding a “global warming” that is not happening?

Or will you cast out the liars in Congress who keep telling you that it’s getting warmer when it’s obviously getting colder?

Will you rebuke a President who is lying to you by returning the Republican Party to power in 2010?

It’s getting colder everywhere.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center – he blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com .

England had “Mad King George” who was probably bipolar and eventually went completely insane around 1810. It would take another ten years before his suffering ended and he passed away, but his powers had passed to the Prince of Wales by then. In those days they knew when people were crazy and even provided an asylum from which we get the word “bedlam.”

As the days and week go by, they might as well post a sign outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where our President conducts the affairs of state. It should simply say, “Welcome to Bedlam.”

One example of the kind of dangerous insanity circulating like swamp gas around the White House is Dr. John P. Holdren, Obama’s science advisor. He is so nuts that even The New York Times reporter, John Tierney, asked “Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor?”

When Bjorn Lomborg published “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, Holdren joined in an attack published in Scientific American that The Economist called “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance.”

In a book that Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man who is now responsible for U.S. science policy advocated that women be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not, not unlike the Chinese one-child policy. Holdren also thought that single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies taken from them and given to other couples.

Holdren thought it would probably be a good idea that the population in general should be sterilized by intentionally putting infertility drugs into the nation’s drinking water or food.

Holdren believed that those who “contribute to social deterioration” should be required by law to “exercise reproductive responsibility” or to put it in its purest Nazi terms, they should be sterilized.

As history reveals, the Nazis began by gassing the mentally challenged and moved on to wholesale genocide for Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and everyone else deemed an enemy of the state.

Holdren, who served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006, holds views that are seriously out of touch with reality and totally out of synch with actual climate data.

Writing in Scientific American, he said, “the ongoing disruption of the earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.”

Virtually no climate scientist believes that “man-made greenhouse gases” have anything to do with “global warming” because (a) there is no global warming and (b) greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide play no role whatever in climate change.

On July 13, the Space and Science Research Center called for the firing of Dr. Holdren and of NOAA administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenko, while denouncing the Cap-and-Trade act, more formally and, in a spectacular act of mass deception, named the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

“These two individuals,” said the Center, “and other agency heads orchestrated and then signed off on the recently released government report, ‘Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.’ This report was a piece of blatant, politically motivated bad science and pure propaganda intended to reinforce the ‘big lie’ that global warming is still a threat to the planet.”

Meanwhile, over at the Environmental Protection Agency, a 37-year employee and analyst who offered a report seriously challenging the accuracy of global warming data found himself literally silenced and then alleged to be mentally unstable.

The Environmental advisor at the White House is Carol Browner, a former EPA Director during the Clinton years, close friend of Al Gore, and someone who shares his radical views on the environment and global warming. She answers to no one, not even the White House press corps who has not been able to get a word out of her. For all we know she is in her office assaying chicken entrails and shiny stones to come up with more environmental advice for the President.

Did I mention that the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, thinks we can save ourselves from global warming by painting the roofs of our buildings white?

There must surely be a few sane people among the mounting number of “czars”, advisors, and assistants, but so far the results of their accumulated advice have been frightening.

The economy is in free fall, the Cap-and-Trade bill in the Senate is based on climate fiction, billions are being given to the least practical form of energy generation, wind and solar, and the White House is talking about “reforming” the nation’s health system.

Every day the White House treats Americans to the Crisis-de-Jour; the latest nonsense being a Swine Flu “pandemic” and a questionable vaccine that will be forced on school children and others.

It’s bedlam!

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com . He blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com .

If those of you who have doubts that the Earth is dramatically warming and that the planet is about to be plunged into the kind of heat that will likely destroy all life, then it must be puzzling that so many people continue to believe that “global warming” is happening when the planet is quite obviously into a decade-old cooling cycle that is likely to last for several more decades.

A large component of this belief is the indoctrination in the nation’s schools in which virtually every subject area has been given a “green” component and textbooks are filled with references to drowning polar bears, disappearing rain forests, rising sea levels, and the usual claptrap about “global warming.” No child could pass through such an avalanche of junk science without becoming convinced of its authenticity.

An example of this occurred when Michael Kundu, “a whale photographer” and school board president in Marysville, Washington, threw a fit after receiving The Skeptic’s Handbook by Australian science communicator, Joanne Nova.

The 16-page booklet is published by The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank headquartered in Chicago. The booklet was sent to all 14,000 public school board presidents, accompanied by a letter from climate scientist, Bob Carter, a professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.

Kunda sent an email to other school board presidents encouraging them “to stuff that junk mail directly into the recycle basket.” I picked up my copy at a three-day climate change conference sponsored by Heartland in March of this year in New York City. The conference featured seminars led by national and internationally leading climate scientists, all of whom demonstrated that the “science” of “global warming” is balderdash.

The vitriol of the school board president reflects the desperation of “global warming” advocates such as Al Gore who keeps revising his End of the World predictions and is now demanding “global governance” to save the Earth. Considering that the hoax was generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this is global governance we can do without.

The “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on energy use that will drive up the rates that utilities charge all Americans, passed the House and is now in the Senate for consideration. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is on record saying that if the Senate doesn’t pass the bill there will be droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening pollution and, one assumes, plagues of frogs and locusts.

Did I mention the desperation surrounding the “global warming” hoax? Yes, I did. The Greens have reason to be desperate because both “global warming” and the economy-killing legislation based on it is in big trouble in the U.S. and increasingly around the world. At the recent G-8 conference, both China and India made it clear they have no intention of destroying their economies in the name of something that is not happening.

You can and should ignore President Obama’s promises of millions of “green jobs” and “energy independence.” The jobs are a myth and, for decades, the U.S. government has made it impossible to access our own vast reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, negating any hope of greater energy self-sufficiency.

The White House just announced its guidelines that will allow “renewable energy” companies, about 5,000 in all, to apply for some $3 billion in government funds—your money. Three billion dollars on wind and solar power that currently accounts for just over one percent of the electricity we use daily! Without subsidies, few of these companies would even exist. Even billionaire T. Boone Pickens has tossed in the towel over his plan to install hundreds of wind turbines.

Meanwhile, back in Heartland’s Chicago, a July 9 news report noted that “For the 12th time this meteorological summer (since June 1), daytime highs failed to reach 70 degrees Wednesday. Only one other year in the past century has hosted so many sub-70-degree days up to this point in a summer season—1969, when 14 such days occurred.” It’s getting colder in Chicago and I guarantee you that it is going to get colder there and everywhere else in the U.S.

It behooves the school board presidents and members around the nation to take a look at the “environmental” agenda being taught in their schools because it is mostly the same kind of lies being told by Al Gore, Sen. Boxer, along with Reps. Henry Waxman, and Edward Markey, the authors of Cap-and-Trade.

Kudos to The Heartland Institute for leading the effort to educate the public, our nation’s legislators, and those responsible for the education of our children in this national life-and-death struggle to demonstrate that real climate science totally rejects this hoax.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com . He blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com .