Sustainability was one of the ideas the United Nations and the extreme environmentals and Warmists ran up the flag pole about a year and a half ago as a way of replacing what they had been attempting to do with “climate change,” namely, put massive amounts of control over people and private businesses, economies, along
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UN To Solve All The Worlds Problems With “Sustainable Development”
**Written by Doug Powers The ultimate goal is to clone Al Gore to serve as a weatherman at every local television station so he can offer the patented Hypocrite-Cast
A flack for Media Matters for America, the Soros-backed one-trick GOP-bashing pony, sent an e-mail peddling the group’s latest anti-Keystone XL “study” to the Senate Democrats’ communications director at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Mary Kerr. For some reason, Senate Republican EPW communications director Matt Dempsey with GOP Sen. James Inhofe’s office also ended up cc’ed on the e-mail. Ooops. Their mistake is our gained insight (or rather, confirmation of what we already assumed). Read on: From: Emilee Pierce [mailto:epierce@mediamatters.org] Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 09:11 PM To: Kerr, Mary (EPW); Dempsey, Matt (EPW) Subject: Heads up – MMFA study on media coverage of KXL out tomorrow Mary and Matt, I wanted to flag that MMFA will be putting out a major, quantitative report on media coverage of KXL tomorrow morning. The study will be similar to our EPA counting study (http://mediamatters.org/research/201106070010) — and will drill home the point the media bought right into Big Oil’s desired frame on KXL, focusing largely on the (inflated) number of jobs that could be created, without paying due attention to the many other important issues at stake. (Ranchers’ land, spills, climate change, etc.) We are hoping for a big media splash, but – more importantly – we’re hoping that allies will be able to leverage it to gain favorable coverage. I’ve pasted a very brief summary below – and will be sure to send along the final study as soon as it’s up. If you have any questions, please let me know. All the best, Emilee STUDY: The Press And The Pipeline A Media Matters analysis shows that as a whole, news coverage of the Keystone XL pipeline between August 1 and December 31 favored pipeline proponents. Although the project would create few long-term employment opportunities, the pipeline was primarily portrayed as a jobs issue. Pro-pipeline voices were quoted more frequently than those opposed, and dubious industry estimates of job creation were uncritically repeated 5 times more often than they were questioned. Meanwhile, concerns about the State Department’s review process and potential environmental consequences were often overlooked, particularly by television outlets. – ————————————– Emilee Pierce External Affairs Director for Climate and Environment Media Matters for America Matt Dempsey e-mails: “It’s not often that Senator Inhofe’s office receives emails of a heads up to promote the Media Matters agenda! So I will do my part and share with you tonight to help them get the ‘favorable coverage’ they want from their ‘allies’ on Capitol Hill.” We know at least one Democrat recycling the Media Matters talking points: Chicago Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), who tried arguing today that 20,000 jobs “is not that many.” Chicago Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) drew fire from Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) on Wednesday when she dismissed the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, suggesting the 20,000 jobs it could create were relatively insignificant in the scheme of the greater economy. “Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs, and investing in green technologies will produce that and more,” she said on Chicago’s WLS Radio Don Wade and Roma Show on Wednesday morning. “But I’ll tell you what, you know it seems to me that the Republicans would rather have an issue than a pipeline.” Coats, a vocal proponent of the project, which would transport oil from Alberta, Canada, to America’s Gulf Coast, swiftly responded in a separate interview on the same show later on Wednesday morning, suggesting Schakowsky has spoken insensitively. “Tell that to the 20,000 people that woke up this morning and didn’t have a job to go to,” said Coats. “ ‘Well, these don’t really matter’ — I mean, this not only is jobs, this is less dependence on Middle East oil.” “And here we have, you know, the president talking about becoming energy independent, but he turns down the easiest way to do that,” the freshman senator continued.
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E-mail of the day: Media Matters coordinates with Capitol Hill “allies” on Keystone XL; Plus: 20,000 jobs “is not that many”
An cool piece, at New York Times , ” Preserved in Tar, Relics From Long Before Freeways “: LOS ANGELES — No one expects to stumble across a cache of Picasso’s works in the middle of a desert. So who would think that just off bustling Wilshire Boulevard, tucked between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild, lie buried some of the most exquisitely preserved fossils in the world? The fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits are just that. They were first discovered in Maj. Henry Hancock’s asphalt mine in the 1870s, when Los Angeles was but a village. Since the early 20th century, more than one million bones have been excavated from the pits; when reassembled, they provide an extraordinary time capsule of the creatures that roamed Southern California 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. Interest in these animals today, however, is more than a matter of prehistoric curiosity. Many of the species found at La Brea disappeared altogether as the planet warmed at the end of the last ice age. The reasons for their demise are not yet fully understood, but may be especially pertinent to understanding the effects of climate change on animal populations today. The tar pits have so many fossils precisely because of the tar, which one can still see bubbling to the surface in spots throughout Hancock Park. The gooey asphalt that trapped and entombed the animals turns out to be a great preservative. Thousands of perfect skulls and nearly complete skeletons representing more than 200 vertebrate species have been retrieved from the death trap. Among them are many giant beasts, including mammoths, mastodons and the short-faced bear. (Only its snout was short; the bear stood more than 11 feet tall, much larger than today’s grizzly, polar and brown bears.) There are two species of bison — one of them with seven-foot horns — and some animals not typically associated with North America, including camels that stood taller than modern dromedaries. Big cats, too, are well represented. Most famous is Smilodon fatalis, better known (but misleadingly so) as the saber-toothed tiger, a powerful predator named for its protruding seven-inch canines. More than 2,000 of them have been extracted from the tar pits. And there was an even larger predator, the American lion, 25 percent bigger than the modern African lion. Imagine meeting one while jogging in Malibu. These big animals and their relatively recent demise raise some big questions. How did they get here? What are their relationships to living species? And why did they all go extinct, and so close together in time? Continue reading . (A bunch of shilling for action on climate change at the link.) I need to take my little guy here. He loves this stuff, and I’d forgotten about it myself.
An cool piece, at New York Times , ” Preserved in Tar, Relics From Long Before Freeways “: LOS ANGELES — No one expects to stumble across a cache of Picasso’s works in the middle of a desert. So who would think that just off bustling Wilshire Boulevard, tucked between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild, lie buried some of the most exquisitely preserved fossils in the world? The fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits are just that. They were first discovered in Maj. Henry Hancock’s asphalt mine in the 1870s, when Los Angeles was but a village. Since the early 20th century, more than one million bones have been excavated from the pits; when reassembled, they provide an extraordinary time capsule of the creatures that roamed Southern California 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. Interest in these animals today, however, is more than a matter of prehistoric curiosity. Many of the species found at La Brea disappeared altogether as the planet warmed at the end of the last ice age. The reasons for their demise are not yet fully understood, but may be especially pertinent to understanding the effects of climate change on animal populations today. The tar pits have so many fossils precisely because of the tar, which one can still see bubbling to the surface in spots throughout Hancock Park. The gooey asphalt that trapped and entombed the animals turns out to be a great preservative. Thousands of perfect skulls and nearly complete skeletons representing more than 200 vertebrate species have been retrieved from the death trap. Among them are many giant beasts, including mammoths, mastodons and the short-faced bear. (Only its snout was short; the bear stood more than 11 feet tall, much larger than today’s grizzly, polar and brown bears.) There are two species of bison — one of them with seven-foot horns — and some animals not typically associated with North America, including camels that stood taller than modern dromedaries. Big cats, too, are well represented. Most famous is Smilodon fatalis, better known (but misleadingly so) as the saber-toothed tiger, a powerful predator named for its protruding seven-inch canines. More than 2,000 of them have been extracted from the tar pits. And there was an even larger predator, the American lion, 25 percent bigger than the modern African lion. Imagine meeting one while jogging in Malibu. These big animals and their relatively recent demise raise some big questions. How did they get here? What are their relationships to living species? And why did they all go extinct, and so close together in time? Continue reading . (A bunch of shilling for action on climate change at the link.) I need to take my little guy here. He loves this stuff, and I’d forgotten about it myself.
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The Scientific Wonders of La Brea Tar Pits
Last weekend’s Boston Globe Magazine featured a gargantuan, 3600-word homage to rabid environmentalism in the form of a profile on 350.org founder Bill McKibben. The piece and President Obama’s disastrously short-sighted decision last Wednesday to reject permitting for Transcanada’s Keystone XL pipeline are both symptomatic of a much larger ailment plaguing liberal politicking in general and the Obama administration in particular: a continual willingness to sacrifice the well-being of the majority for an elite, hypocritical minority. The Keystone project, a 1,700-mile pipeline that would bring crude from Alberta’s oil sands to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast, has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect decent-paying American jobs and reduce our dependency on the oil of despotic, anti-western nations with questionably sane leaders. But radical environmentalists like McKibben – a second-generation jailed protestor and disciple of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry – seem either not to know or else don’t care what real poverty looks like. And McKibben is among the leaders of the voting contingent to which our president is pandering, purely for political reasons. The Harvard-educated McKibben, who was among the 1,252 people arrested during protests against the pipeline outside the White House last year, is on a mission to “end the tyranny of oil” and coal. Along with his worship of the false god of climate change, McKibben, like many leftist elitists, is committed to “social justice,” according to the Globe piece. What McGibben and his ilk overlook is that real social justice begins with a job, the dignity of work and the ability to care for and feed one’s own family. McKibben & Company’s quest is anti-jobs, and therefore anti- social justice. According to analysis released this month by the Brookings Institution, child poverty has risen 4% in the past five years. That’s an addition of 3 million impoverished kids, most of them added in the time Obama has been in office. The state with the highest rate: Mississippi, in the Gulf Coast – the very region in which many of the Keystone XL’s quarter-million jobs would have been created, and where the Obama administration’s six-month deepwater drilling moratorium cost Americans tens of thousands of jobs. T.V. talk show host – and Obama supporter – Tavis Smiley said recently, “Many of the ‘new poor’ are the former middle class.” Obama claims to be all-in for domestic energy production and job creation, but when handed a no-brainer like Keystone, he chooses to side with a radical minority. Why? As Michael Brune, the head of the Sierra Club said recently, “It shores up the base, definitely.” On Capitol Hill there has been almost universal silence from congressional Democrats on the matter. What does that say about what agenda really drives the Democratic Party? According to a “top Democratic fundraiser” has said the issues driving party donors are “Keystone and gay marriage.” But Obama and the Democrats may soon grow to regret the Keystone decision. There are about 25 million Americans unemployed or under-employed. If you’re out of work or struggling to get by, a politician focused on killing jobs and promoting gay marriage probably doesn’t sound like one with your best interests at heart. Besides all the jobs we now stand to lose out on thanks to Obama’s decision, we also face a considerable new security challenge in the form of a bolstered China. As Rep. Steve King ofIowa said this week: “ If we block [the pipeline] that oil will certainly go to China. It will enrich their economy.” Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper has no intention of waiting for the United States to reverse this wrongheaded move; his goal is to see Canada at the forefront of the energy game. Harper will travel to Beijing next month, where he will likely take part in talks on selling his country’s vast oil supplies to the Chinese government. And China is serious about quenching its thirst for oil. “Chinese firms aren’t just buying stakes, they’re buying whole operations,” reads a piece this month in Canada’s daily Globe and Mail. “It’s a new phase of China’s step-by-step Canadastrategy. It will change not just the oil patch but Canada’s foreign policy. And a game of international energy politics is afoot in Canada’s West.” When Obama finally turns around for a gander at his fellow Washington backers on this latest political choice, he will see he has precious few. Bob Beauprez is a former Member of Congress and is currently the editor-in-chief of A Line of Sight, an online policy resource. Prior to serving in Congress, Mr. Beauprez was a dairy farmer and community banker. He and his wife Claudia reside in Lafayette, Colorado. You may contact him at: http://bobbeauprez.com/contact/
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The cost of Obama’s ‘green’ appeasement
This has been the most quixotic campaign of the season. Huntsman’s the best dressed, but with his brand of moderate Republicanism, he’s 30 years too late. At Wall Street Journal , ” Clock Ticks for Huntsman in New Hampshire ” (via Google ): MANCHESTER, N.H. — Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has staked his presidential hopes on New Hampshire, a strategy akin to Rick Santorum’s shoe-leather campaign in Iowa that ultimately proved successful. But despite his ubiquity here, Mr. Huntsman’s level of support and his appeal to voters have been shaky. Mr. Huntsman has been a constant presence in New Hampshire since the summer, and because the state’s voters tend to decide late in the process, Mr. Huntsman says he is confident he will emerge a front-runner in the final days before the Tuesday primary. But Mr. Huntsman had only 7% support in Wednesday’s Suffolk University tracking poll of the New Hampshire GOP race, a loss of three percentage points from the day before. The Suffolk poll showed Mitt Romney holding his ground atop the GOP field, with 43% of the likely primary voters, while all others lagged far behind. “Who would have guessed that Rick Santorum, tooling around in his pickup truck, would have gone from nowhere to practically winning the caucus?” Mr. Huntsman said on CBS Wednesday. “New Hampshire’s going to result in the same thing” for him, he added. Mr. Santorum finished in second place in Iowa, a hair behind Mr. Romney. Mr. Huntsman presents his policy ideas without the sharp ideological overtones of some of his rivals, and he puts little emphasis on the social issues that have defined the candidacies of Mr. Santorum and some others. The former U.S. ambassador to China says he would simplify the tax code, jump-start manufacturing and wind up the war in Afghanistan. Unlike some of his rivals, he has said he defers to the judgment of scientists on climate change, and he has supported civil unions for gay couples. Right. Which is why it’s one and done in New Hampshire after next Tuesday. I’m not sure what the guy’s trying to get out of this. Maybe a job in the Romney State Department?
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Jon Huntsman Bets Big on New Hampshire
**Written by Doug Powers About three weeks ago, the LA Times reported that Newt Gingrich was involved in a book project revolving around environmental/economic issues, including a chapter addressing man-made global warming: At a time when the Republican presidential candidates are swiftly backing away from past moderate environmental positions, Newt Gingrich may be the only one with a book pending on the topic. Gingrich and Terry L. Maple have something of a sequel in the works to their 2007 book, “A Contract with The Earth,” tentatively titled “Environmental Entrepreneurs.” The duo’s first book called on policymakers and businesspeople on the right to show they had better ideas for protecting the environment and creating jobs than government did. The new book is a collection of essays by various businesspeople and scientists to be edited and stitched together by Gingrich and, mostly, Maple, a former chief executive of the Palm Beach Zoo. The author of a chapter on climate change is Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech whose work focuses on assessing the impact of climate change and communicating it to broader audiences, including those traditionally dubious of global warming, like Christian colleges. In Iowa on Thursday, Gingrich was asked about it, and, sounding like a man pledging never to be caught on the couch with Nancy again, Newt said this about the climate change chapter: “That’s not going to be in the book. We didn’t know that they were doing that, and we told them to kill it.” This came as a surprise to author of the apparently scrapped chapter : Newt Gingrich says he has killed a chapter on climate change in a post-election book of essays about the environment. But the intended author of the chapter, who supports the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change, says that’s news to her. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech, confirmed in an e-mail interview that she had been asked to write a chapter on climate change for the former House speaker’s book. She said she was approached by former Palm Beach Zoo CEO Terry Maple, Gingrich’s coeditor, at an annual meeting of Republicans for Environmental Protection. Asked to confirm her chapter was dropped, she replied, “I had not heard that.” Hayhoe was less restrained in a couple of tweets she posted Friday night. “so much ‘spare’ time wasted I cd’ve spent w family, & 2. what an ungracious way to find out, eh?” she asked. She followed that with “Nice to hear that Gingrich is tossing my #climate chapter in the trash. 100+ unpaid hrs I cd’ve spent playing w my baby” If things don’t work out for Gingrich in this primary season the chapter may stage a miraculous comeback and wind up in the book after all. Newt might not be on the global warming loveseat at the moment but there’s some change under the cushions he may someday go back for. On a related but separate note, at 7 p.m. EST the Des Moines Register will publish the results of their final poll before Tuesday night’s caucuses. **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
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Gingrich Axes Chapter on Climate Change in Forthcoming Book
GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich said Thursday he’s axing a chapter on climate change from his forthcoming book — though the intended author of the section said that was news to her, according to National Journal . The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month the book will more or less be a sequel to the former House Speaker’s 2007 book, “A Contract with the Earth,” describing it as a “collection of essays by various businesspeople and scientists.” The Times said it would include a chapter on climate change by Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech who has said there is “no debate” about the reality of climate change and “the fact that humans are the primary cause.” A woman expressed concern to Gingrich about the chapter during an Iowa campaign stop Thursday, saying she’d heard Rush Limbaugh talking about it on his radio program. “That’s not going to be in the book,” Gingrich said to her in a video of the exchange. “We didn’t know that they were doing that — we told them to kill it.” After the woman stepped away, Gingrich beckoned to a staffer and said, “Remind me when we get back to the bus about Rush and global warming.” Watch the exchange below, via National Review: National Journal had Hayhoe’s reaction to the news: Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech, confirmed in an e-mail interview that she had been asked to write a chapter on climate change for the former House speaker’s book. She said she was approached by former Palm Beach Zoo CEO Terry Maple, Gingrich’s coeditor, at an annual meeting of Republicans for Environmental Protection. Asked to confirm her chapter was dropped, she replied, “I had not heard that.” Limbaugh had hit out at Hayhoe on his Dec. 19 program, saying she would be contributing to Gingrich’s book and calling her “one of Newt’s experts” who believes in man-made global warming. In 2008, Gingrich appeared in a now-infamous ad with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, saying the two agree “our country must take action to address climate change.” He has since called it “the dumbest single thing I’ve done” in recent years.
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Gingrich Says He’s Scrapping Climate Change Chapter From Upcoming Book
