The National Anxiety Center

Media Hypes BPA Ban, Endangers Everyone's Health

2012-03-01T13:58:00.002-08:00

By Alan Caruba

A direct threat to the health of millions worldwide is being hyped by the media, continuing the anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-illness agenda of environmental organizations to ban BPA, a chemical that protects against food-borne disease and increases the safe use of all plastic containers.

From January through June 2011, I wrote and posted a six-part series called “The BPA File” that anyone can read on the blog I created for the series. Thoroughly research and documented, it was written because of my concern that this particular effort to ban the chemical would, like the ban on DDT, cause millions to die.

On February 16, Matthew Glans, the Midwest Director of The Heartland Institute’s Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, posted a commentary on its “Somewhat Reasonable” blog, “Media Biggest Proponent for BPA Ban.” My research files are filled with hundreds of examples of this and one need only Google “BPA” to find thousands of references to the chemical with the single theme of banning it.

As Glans points out and my series confirms, “Chemical BPA is a chemical used in plastics for many consumer products. Amongst other uses, BPA (is) most commonly used in hardened plastics and as part of the safety liner for food and beverage cans.” (Emphasis added)

BPA is an acronym for Bisphenol-A and it has been in use for more than six decades, tested hundreds of times, and never found to post a threat to health, but rather as an essential packaging element to protect it.

Glans quotes an article by Business and Media Institute’s Julia Seymour who wrote that the “Fear of chemicals and ‘toxins’ is rampant among the so-called ‘environmental’ left. Unfortunately, that phobia infects national media coverage as well. For more than a decade, the Left has been on the attack against BPA, a product that is commonly found in plastics and other products.”

Ms. Seymour noted that “The Food and Drug Administration has a deadline of March 31 to respond to a petition by the National Resources Defense Council—an environmental group—that seeks to ban BPA. NRDC argues that the FDA should ban BPA on the basis that it causes harm to humans.”

If you read my BPA series, you will learn that BPA has been tested here and in other nations and has been found to pose no health threat whatever.

“Meanwhile,” said Ms. Seymour, “the media have exaggerated the threat of BPA for years. On the Feb. 25, 2010, CBS ‘Early Show’ broadcast, Katie Lee crossed the line from hype into outright falsehood when she said of BPA: ‘And that’s been shown to cause liver disease, heart failure, all sorts of things.”

“The Business & Media Institute analyzed ABC, CBS, and NBC reports as well as The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal that discussed BPA from Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2011.”

Incredibly, Canada, Japan, Denmark and France have banned the use of BPA for several products, including baby bottles. To date, “the FDA has been unwilling to declare BPA unsafe.” There’s a reason for that. Its history and the many tests of BPA have found it to be entirely safe.

Let’s understand a fundamental determination of what is toxic or not. As Paracelsus (1492-1541) said long ago, “All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison.”

If you take too much aspirin, too many sleeping pills, too many pain-killers, too many of any medication, it will likely kill you. This is why directions for their use are printed on every bottle. Substances like arsenic can be found in potatoes, but the amount of arsenic is so low that its ingestion poses no threat whatever. Moreover, our bodies possess organs that clean such substances from our bodies and evacuate them every single day.

The real toxins are the lies the media prints and broadcasts without researching the claims of environmental organizations that thrive on the income such scare campaigns generate and whose fundamental agenda is the reduction of the world’s population “to save the Earth.”

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Lower Than Pond Scum

2012-02-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Between 1955 and 1959 I was a student at the University of Miami. It was perhaps the best four years of my life and remembered fondly for its combination of fun and learning. On Thursday, February 23, President Barack Obama was on the UM campus to tell the biggest bunch of lies about energy in America I have heard compressed into a single speech.

This President has already set records wasting taxpayer’s money on a range of so-called clean energy and renewable energy “investments”. Solyndra, the solar panel company that went bust and stuck taxpayers with a half-billion in loan guarantees is just one of those “investments” and I keep waiting for someone to ask why public funds are being flushed down the toilet when, if the companies involved were viable, they could not raise private venture capital?

“And we’re making investments in the development of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance known as algae,” said the President. “Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17% of the oil we important for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in America.”

All politicians put the best face on their pet projects, but to flat-out lie about one of the most idiotic ideas to replace oil when this nation has enough oil, domestically and offshore, known and estimated to exist, defies the imagination. It is an insult to every one of us. And Obama wants to pump $14 million into algae, otherwise known as pond scum.

It is very likely that, like the solar panel and other “clean energy” scandals that we know about and will learn about as time goes alone, the average American is unaware that, by 2008, there were fifteen (15) algae startup companies. When I heard Obama talk about algae, I could practically hear the campaign fund-raising bundlers scurrying like rats from company to company.

To those of you not intimately and well informed about algae, it is that organic stuff that gathers in ponds and swamps and, in aggregate, is politely called “plant-like organisms that are usually photosynthetic and aquatic.” It is scum. It has no roots, stems, or leaves. It is scum.

In a marine environment it is called seaweed. Algae have chlorophyll and can manufacture their own food through photosynthesis. Algae, the scientists tell us, produces more oxygen than all the plants in the world in addition to being an important food source for marine creatures as diverse in size as shrimp and whales.

The notion that millions would be “invested” to turn algae into fuel ranks just above the idiocy of converting thousands of acres of corn into ethanol instead of food.

Barack Obama has been lying about so many things for so long I doubt he even knows when he is lying or even cares. It’s not enough to dismiss this saying that all politicians lie because many do not. Some in Congress right now are desperately trying to get the public in general and voters in particular to understand that America has more debt per capita than Greece. We are on the precipice of financial collapse and Barack Obama just wants to spend more and more and more; some of it on pond scum.

During his UM speech, he derided those who have for decades been saying that America has to allow oil companies access to its vast reserves in order to reduce our dependence on imported oil. “We’ve heard the same thing for thirty years,” he said. He’s right. And administrations and Congress have blocked access for just as long. It’s our oil!

He went further, though. “It means that anyone who tells you we can drill our way out of this problem doesn’t know what they’re talking about—or isn’t telling you the truth.” That’s rich, coming from someone who lies almost as often as he exhales. Oil is a global commodity. The more that’s available to the market, the lower its cost. Domestic oil always costs consumers less than imported oil!

The truth is that oil production on federal lands declined last year by eleven percent on lands controlled by the Obama administration and six percent for natural gas in 2011.Oil and natural gas production on federal lands is down by more than forty percent (40%) compared to ten years ago. The Obama administration, in 2010, issued the lowest number of onshore leases since 1984. In 2011, it held exactly one offshore lease sale.

On February 24, one day after the Obama speech, the U.S. Geological Survey released a report on the amount of oil estimated to exist in the North Slope of Alaska. “The amount of oil that is technically recoverable in the United States is more than 1.4 trillion barrels, with the largest deposits located offshore, in portions of Alaska, and in shale in the Rocky Mountain West. When combined with resources from Canada and Mexico, total recoverable oil in North America exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels.

In a 2008 Wall Street Journal interview, Obama’s Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, famously said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels of Europe.” Anyone who does not believe this administration has a deliberate policy of achieving this goal is just not paying attention. Remember that the next time you fill your car’s gas tank.

This is the same President who stopped the building of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada that would provide more oil for our refineries and not cost the American taxpayer one penny to build. This is the same President who imposed a moratorium on oil from the Gulf of Mexico even after the courts told him to remove it. It caused the loss of an estimated 12,000 jobs while rigs departed for Cuba, Brazil and Mexico.

Between now and November, the President will be out campaigning and telling the same lies. The rise in the cost of oil isn’t just a seasonal thing though prices have usually gone up in the summertime when people travel more for vacations. It’s up because the Iranians are closing in on making their own nuclear weapons and their own missiles to hit, not just Israel, but the U.S. It’s up because it is essential to ensure that the tankers oil-producing nations around the Persian Gulf can enter and exist it via the Strait of Harmuz.

The world isn’t running out of oil and is not about to run out. The Earth floats on an ocean of oil despite the rising demand from Asia and other developing nations. To replace foreign oil with algae-based fuel would require a chemically-controlled tank the size of the State of Colorado, about 69.3 million acres.

In 2010, Obama’s mandated biofuel production was less than ten percent of foreign oil imports. It is impossible for biofuel of any description to replace foreign oil imports; just as it is idiotic to pay $41,000 for an electric car when you can have a gasoline-fueled car for around $16,000.

Pond scum is not a rational substitute for oil and spending $14 million on its production as a fuel is beyond absurd. It is the same confidence game as selling “carbon credits” to avoid the hoax of “global warming.”

© Alan Caruba, 2012

"Fakegate" Blows Up in Warmist Faces

2012-02-21T08:31:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

On February 16, I published “Anatomy of a Global Warming Hoax” concerning the theft of the private records of The Heartland Institute’s board meeting and the creation of an alleged forged document intended to harm its reputation as a long time advocate of the real, not fake, science that has been the basis of the global warming—now called “climate change”—hoax.

The Feb 21 issue of The Wall Street Journal published an editorial, “The Not-So-Vast Conspiracy” noting that “As for ‘the largest international science conference of skeptics’ Heartland will, according to the documents, spend all of $380,000 this year on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. That’s against the $6.5 million that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) costs Western taxpayers annually, and the $2.6 billion the White House wants to spend next year on research into ‘global changes that have resulted primarily from global over-dependence on fossil fuels.’” (Emphasis added)

The global warming hoax has cost taxpayers billions since it was initiated and earned the purveyors of “carbon credits” millions as industry and others paid for the privilege of emitting “greenhouse gas”—primarily carbon dioxide—as part of doing business. Currently the European Union is trying to shake down the airline industry by charging them a surtax on their emissions as they fly tourists and businessmen to that beknighted continent. Most of the exchanges that sold the credits have since closed.

The infamous “Cap-and-Trade” legislation that thankfully died in Congress was part of this scam.

We now know that the document theft was either perpetrated or abetted by Dr. Peter E. Gleick, a water and climate analyst, and founder of the Pacific Institute. A contributor to Huffington Post and prolific castigator of global warming “skeptics” and “deniers”, Dr. Gleick has admitted his part in the effort to depict The Heartland Institute, its board and its donors as part of the worldwide conspiracy to debunk the hoax.

Since 2008 Heartland has sponsored six conferences that brought together scientists and others who presented ample evidence of the absurdity that carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” was causing the Earth to heat up. Unfortunately for the real IPCC conspirators, the Earth entered a natural cooling cycle in 1998 and, in 2009, thousands of email exchanges between the IPCC scientists were posted to the Internet revealing their growing panic over the failure of Mother Nature to cooperate with their lies, most if not all of which were based on bogus computer models.

Even The New York Times that had trumpeted the false allegations based on the purloined documents, published a Feb. 20 article, “Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers” reporting that “Dr. Gleick distributed the documents to several well-known bloggers and activists who support the work of mainstream climate scientists and who have documented the Heartland Institute as a center of climate change denial.”

The Times is incapable to not slandering organizations and individuals who have fought long and hard to rip the mask of respectability from the perpetrators of the hoax. The “mainstream scientists” to whom it refers are, of course, the IPCC scientists behind the hoax. “Climate change denial” is nothing less than the propagation of the truth about the hoax.

For me, the most interesting aspect of all this has been the way The Heartland Institute has responded to Dr. Glieck’s chicanery. From the moment that documents, real, altered and fake, were posted on sites like DeSmogBlog.com and others, Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, went after the then-unknown identity of the person who secured the documents threatening legal action.

When Dr. Glieck publicly admitted his part in a Huffington Post statement, Bast released a statement saying, “Gleick’s crime was a serious one. The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland’s staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety.”

The key word in Bast’s statement is “crime.” As John Sullivan, a British-based attorney and an active “denier”, author and blogger, noted, Bast said “A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage”, adding that Dr. Gleick faces being financially ruined by a civil prosecution and “is also liable to a criminal investigation as such falsification of documents is a well-known brand of white collar crime.”

Some time ago I wrote a commentary saying that some of the global warming conspirators needed to go to jail for their crimes. As events unfold, that yet may occur insofar as they were the recipients of public funding and United Nations support as the IPCC published their false “science” amidst alarmist global warming claims.

Perhaps their greatest crime was the debasement of meteorological and climate science. Beyond that, their attacks on the reputation of the brave scientists who stepped forward to refute them is the very definition of slander and liable. The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the National Geographic, and other “mainstream” news publications will unfortunately be given a pass for advancing their lies even to this day.

The Heartland director’s meeting was devoted to a program to deal with the torrent of false teaching in our nation’s schools intended to warp the perceptions and knowledge of students regarding global warming. That, too, is part of the crime committed against a national and worldwide population that was deliberately misled.

The warmists are in retreat and for that everyone owes a great debt of gratitude to The Heartland Institute and all the others who joined in the effort to refute the greatest hoax of the modern era.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Greener Than Thou

2012-02-20T15:51:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles are destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.

Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.

Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.

A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).

Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.

To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth's creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.

For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.

Environmentalism is essentially irrational.

It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.

Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less—less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress—when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”

The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.

What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.

The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.

Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.

Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.

Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”

That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.

Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather—which they cannot control—and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.

Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.

Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.

The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.

© Alan Caruba, 2012.

U.S. Hostages Abroad and High Gas Prices at Home--It's Jimmy Carter Redux

2012-02-15T14:54:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

A lot of things that a President cannot control can gravely affect his chances of being reelected. In 1979, the combination of an oil embargo and the Iranians taking U.S. diplomats hostage ended any hope of a second term for Jimmy Carter.

As this is written, there are 19 U.S. citizens being held hostage in Egypt, but you are hearing little to nothing about that in the mainstream media.

The economy is going to affect President Obama’s odds of being reelected this year and Americans who are notorious for gaging the impact of inflation by watching the cost of gasoline at the pump rise are going to blame Obama. An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and a possible conflict will drive prices through the roof.

When Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.61.Averaging $3.50 at present, the price of a gallon of gas is predicted to rise to $4 and even $5 by summertime.

If the U.S. was not dependent on imported oil, we could control our own fate, but for decades every effort possible has been made to drive up the cost of automobiles and gasoline, led by environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, two notorious anti-energy foes, in combination with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Little wonder they are in a full war against the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada or that the Obama administration has been trying to convince Americans it favors opening access to existing and new oil reserves.

Dan Kish, vice president of the American Energy Alliance, recently took note of the political maneuverings over the American Energy and Infrastructure Act of 2012, saying “At the end of the day, the American people don’t care whether federal lands are opened in one large piece of legislation or in separate smaller pieces.”

“The bottom line is that the Federal government currently leases approximately 2.4 percent of the land owned by U.S. citizens, while lands equaling ten times the State of Texas are kept off limits by Federal regulators. With reports coming out that gasoline could approach five dollars a gallon by this summer, we cannot wait any longer to begin tapping these resources.”

If the Obama administration really wanted to create jobs and improve the economy, it would “lift the embargo on American energy,” said Kish, “and open our onshore and offshore resources for robust exploration and development.”

“The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the nation has six times the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia”

In 2010, while oil, natural gas and coal accounted for 78 percent of U.S. energy production, its producers received 11 percent of all federal energy subsidies. By contrast, subsidies to the wind industry increased 10-fold, from $467 million in 2007 to $4.9 billion in 2010.

Closer to the pump for Americans was the deal the Obama administration struck with thirteen auto manufacturers in July 2011 to boost new car fuel economy standards from 35.5 miles per gallon (mpg) in 2016 to 54.5 mpg in 2025.

The claim made was that it would save Americans $1.7 trillion over the lifetime of vehicles and $8,000 per vehicle by 2025. Higher gas prices as the result of increased costs of imported oil and higher automobile prices that will result from this deal will cancel out any alleged savings.

Who wants to be fooled again by this administration?

And what business is it of the federal government how much mileage an auto gets?

The U.S. government has been messing around with the fuel economy program—believe it or not—for forty years. The result was the rise in sales of Japanese auto companies and European imports while Detroit saw General Motors and Chrysler come so close to collapse they had to be bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars.

The culprit has been the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program and Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute calls it “a case study of unintended consequences. If the fuel-saving technologies requisite to meet the new standards are such a great bargain, why do we need a law forcing automakers to adopt them?” Good question!

Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation crowed that “Today’s announcement is the latest in a series of executive actions the Obama administration is taking to strengthen the economy and move the country forward because we can’t wait for Congressional Republicans to act.” That’s right, they blamed by-passing Congress and the deal on Republicans!

Meanwhile, the only thing CAFE standards accomplish is an increase in the cost of automobiles and a decrease in the safety of their occupants as cars are forced to be lighter and more vulnerable in a crash.

In a February 2nd opinion published in The Wall Street Journal, Alaska Governor Sean Parnell welcomed news that Congress might finally be moving in the direction to permit Americans benefit from access to their own oil.

Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) to oil exploration and production would have obvious benefits. “This legislation opens 400,000 acres of the ANWR coastal plain’s 1.5 million acres” that represent “less than three percent of ANWR’s 19 million total acres.”

The other way Americans have been forced to pay more at the pump have been the mandates for the mix of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline. Why? Because its advocates claimed that this would reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but in fact ethanol increases CO2 emissions while at the same time reducing the mileage of every gallon of gasoline. And there is absolutely no scientific justification for reducing CO2 emissions because the mandate is based on the totally debunked global warming hoax.

The cost of building new oil refineries in America was increased exponentially by the Clean Air Act of 1970. There have been no new refineries since 1976. There are currently 149 refineries in the U.S. Requiring them to make different blends for different regions of the nation has done little more than to drive up the cost at the pump. The taxes on gasoline have been a bonanza for the federal government and the states.

The good news is that two new refineries are being developed, one in Yuma, Arizona, and one in Union County, South Dakota. The bad news is that Sunoco Inc has just announced it will continue to exit the refining business due to the lack of profitability. In business for 117 years, Sunoco has been gradually shifting out of refining, reducing its capacity 43 percent since 2009.

Come November, if drivers of cars are shelling out $5 a gallon at the pump, a lot of voters are going to be very unhappy. If our citizens are still being held hostage in Egypt they will be even less happy.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Global Warming Hoax is Now Killing People

2012-02-13T17:48:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

By Friday, February 10th, an estimated 500 Europeans had died from the freezing weather gripping the continent. This is the price they and British citizens are paying for embracing the global warming hoax, spending billions for wind power when they should have been building coal-fired and other sources of energy to heat their homes and businesses.

As the British daily, The Telegraph, reported on Friday, “Serbia has started implementing power cuts in a desperate bid to stave off the collapse of its national grid as the country suffers the effects of days of freezing temperatures.”

I and others have been warning for years that the Earth has been cooling since 1998 and that the planet is on the cusp of a new ice age because the average length of an interglacial period of warmth between such ages is now coming to an end after the passage of some 11,500 years.

All aspects of global warming legislation and spending programs must be utterly reversed if we are not going to see huge losses of life and the disruption of entire economies.

The Ottawa Citizen published an Agence France Presse article on Friday reporting that “Thick ice closed vast swaths of the Danube on Thursday, crippling shipping on Europe’s busiest waterway, as the death toll from bitter cold across the continent rose…as it has every day for nearly two weeks.” The report noted that “Navigation was impossible or restricted in Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria, as ice covered the river or formed dangerous floes in shipping lanes.”

No shipping means no delivery of coal and oil and no shipping of food and other necessities. Europe is freezing over as the United States has been experiencing an unusually mild winter thus far. That, too, is likely to yield to the increased cooling of the planet and then, maybe, Americans will realize the threat to their lives that the closing of coal-fired plants, instigated by the Environmental Protection Agency, really means.

In England, the Mail, reported on Sunday, February 12th, that large numbers of its elderly citizens are being “frozen to death as fuel bills soar: hypothermia cases among the elderly double in five years.” England, now gripped by foolish green notions of renewable energy, has covered itself with wind turbines, despoiling its countryside and coasts while proving unreliable and incapable of meeting its energy needs.

Figures showed that “1,876 patients were treated in hospital for hypothermia in 2010-2011, up from 950 in 2006-2007” reported the Mail. “Three-quarters of victims were pensioners, with cases soaring among the over-60s more than any other age group.”

In Europe, other news organizations reported that “Many of the dead were homeless people, who literally froze to death as the temperatures dropped to minus 50 degrees in some parts of the continent. Their bodies were found in the streets buried under snow, in rivers, and in doorways. Dozens of people were also killed in weather-related accidents.”

Writing in a Turkish newspaper, the Hurriyet Daily News, Sophie Quintin Adali, an analyst for a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, said, “As if the debt crisis weren’t bad enough news, the climate freeze sweeping across Europe is wreaking havoc by severely disrupting travel, business and people’s lives. Local authorities, indeed whole countries, are caught poorly prepared.” Turkey is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.

“The lack of readiness should come as no surprise because for decades the sensationalist message of global warming has dominated the public area,” said Ms. Adali.

“Politicians and decades of political environmentalism have a lot to answer for,” said Ms. Adali. “The man-made climate theory…is still supported by a mighty European Union bureaucracy and a green network addicted to public funds.” Even now, the Green Climate Fund “through which millions of taxpayer’s money will still be disbursed” is threatening the lives and the economy of people worldwide.

The current freeze is not just affecting Europe, but reaching across the Mediterranean to North African nations. And at some point America will feel it too.

We have not built a single new nuclear plant in America since 1978. EPA rules are forcing the closure of coal-fired plants throughout the nation. The national grid for the distribution of electricity is in need of upgrades.

The nation’s policies are controlled by the most environmentally insane administration in its history, wasting billions on so-called green energy. Its new budget raises taxes and proposes a trillion-dollar deficit without any significant effort to cut the spending that has left this and future generations in debt while the price of gas soars to new heights.

America and the rest of the world have been horribly deceived by the United Nations Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel that continues to drive the global warming hoax. The lying scientists who got on the global warming gravy train, the politicians that embraced it, and the media that misled millions are all culpable, all responsible.

They should be driven from office, defunded, and chased through the streets like villagers in pursuit of Frankenstein.

People are freezing to death in their homes and in the streets. What will it take to drive a stake into the heart of the global warming monster?

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Editor's Note: You can learn more from Robert W. Felix's article, posted here.

Signing Global Warming's Certificate of Death

2012-01-31T14:20:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

The sixteen names of the scientists who jointly signed the article in The Wall Street Journal, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” on January 27th are mostly unknown to the general public. Perhaps the best known would be Harrison H. Schmidt, a former Apollo 17 astronaut and U.S. Senator. Others might recognize Burt Rutan, an aerospace engineer and designer of Voyager and SpaceShip One.

Moreover, not only were the signers distinguished scientists, but they came from places like Paris, France and Cambridge, England, Jerusalem, Israel, and Geneva, Switzerland. Mostly climatologists and meteorologists, some were physicists and astrophysicists. Antonio Zichichi, one signer, is president of the World Federation of Scientists. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the combined credentials of these men represent some of the best minds on planet Earth in their respective fields.

What brought them together? On the surface it was just another of the countless articles that have been published over the years as scientists of real merit and courage took on the juggernaut of those for whom global warming had become a vast flow of government and foundation funding.

The effort was to “prove” that carbon dioxide (CO2) was building up in the atmosphere and would soon incinerate Earth by trapping the heat from the sun. It had not done that in the 5.4 billion years of the Earth’s existence, but the “warmists” claims came day after day and year after year. They permeated every aspect of society and you can go into any school in America and find textbooks still selling this garbage.

Until, that is, 2009 when thousands of emails between the small clique of scientists working for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were leaked on the Internet and it became clear that even they knew the Earth had entered a cooling cycle around 1998. The challenges to their bogus computer “models” were coming like cannon balls against their academic castles in America and England.

Starting in 2008, The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based 27-year-old, non-profit research organization, sponsored four international conferences on climate change, attracting the top scientists and world leaders courageous enough to speak out against the global warming hoax. The momentum of opposition began to build against those who, from the late 1980s had warned that, in Al Gore’s words, “the world has caught a fever.”

The Wall Street Journal article said, in the plainest language, that candidates for public office “in any contemporary democracy…should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true.”

In fact, scientists had been signing petitions opposing the global warming hoax for a very long time. The problem was that the mainstream media either paid them no attention or dismissed them as "skeptics" and "deniers".

With a light touch, the Wall Street Journal article noted that “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over ten years now.” It wasn’t as if the warmists did not know it. It was more like they regarded it as a problem to be solved by changing references to global warming to “climate change.”

Their current dying gasps have to do with warnings about “extreme climate events” that have been occurring for eons; tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, floods and earthquakes; now all routinely attributed to too much carbon dioxide.

The article calmly said, “The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant.” Indeed, more CO2 in the atmosphere is a good thing, aiding increasing crop growth and healthier forests and jungles worldwide.

Someone needs to tell that to the Environmental Protection Agency that is striving mightily to shut down coal-fired energy plants for emitting CO2. Add their efforts to do the same to a wide swatch of American industry and you get an agency that is in great need of being abolished.

“There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.

In time, historians may look back and conclude that the January 27th article was, in fact, global warming’s death certificate, signed by an international group of scientists who could not be disputed no matter how many times the warmists jump up and down and cry that the sky is falling.

It has taken a very long time for most of the public to come to the conclusion that they have been the object of an elaborate hoax. In America polls demonstrate that global warming is at the very bottom of their concerns these days. In time, wind and solar power, electric cars, biofuels, and other environmental delusions will join that list.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

How to Murder a Superpower

2012-01-22T06:39:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.

It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue. Our vital transportation sector and all others that utilize petroleum-based products will suffer, too.

While President Obama babbles about millionaires and billionaires, everyone will be impoverished by the loss of jobs and revenue our energy sector produces now and can produce in the future.

This isn’t an “energy policy.” It’s a “no-energy policy” and it is a guarantee of economic disaster.

Obama’s decision to reject a permit for Canada’s XL Keystone pipeline is just one example. It is a job-killer and a revenue-killer. There are thousands of pipelines serving America’s energy needs and the XL Keystone pipeline would ensure that Canada’s own vast energy reserves would flow to America. It is one of our key trade partners and Obama has slapped it in the face.

In early January, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, announced a new 20-year, million-acre ban on uranium mining for federal lands in Arizona, despite the fact that these lands hold the highest-grade of known uranium deposits in the United States. It is an outrage that a new GOP-Congress will have to overturn if the nation is to be assured of sufficient uranium to power its nuclear plants and for weapons development. If the ban remains, these uranium resources would be inaccessible until 2023!

Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that Salazar’s announcement “further compounds a man-made energy crisis that has been planned and executed in Washington, D.C.”

At the same time we are learning of enormous natural gas discoveries that can reduce our energy bills and turn sleeping little towns into boomtowns, environmental organizations have launched a vast propaganda campaign against “fracking”, a technology that has been safely used for more than fifty years. Their claims about dangers to the nation’s supply of fresh water are baseless. Their claims that fracking has caused earthquakes in Ohio are absurd.

Need it be said that the Environmental Protection Agency has turned its eyes on fracking and is working on a report due later this year that will likely call for harsh crackdowns on its use and more regulations to throttle the expansion of natural gas extraction?

The EPA has just released a report of those power plants that top the list of its regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. There is no basis in science to justify the reduction of CO2. Indeed, since it is a gas on which all vegetation depends, much as oxygen is vital to all animal life, reducing it would impair great crop yields and healthier forests.

These regulations are based on the global warming hoax that blamed CO2 for warming the earth. That is utterly false. The Earth is currently in a perfectly natural cooling cycle and the climate of the Earth is almost entirely based on the Sun—solar radiation—along with the actions of oceans, clouds, and even volcanic activity that spews tons of particulates into the atmosphere.

Coal-fired power plants account for fifty percent of all the electricity generated in the United States. Fifty percent! And yet the EPA is determined to shut down dozens of them providing that vital factor in the lives of all Americans and the economy, nor does this take into account the billions that energy producers have spent to upgrade their technology to reduce emissions.

The Obama administration fuel economy agenda, a call for 54.5 miles per gallon ignores simple physics. There is a finite amount of energy a gallon of gas can generate. If you dilute it with ethanol as is currently required, you get even less mileage. The administration is trying to circumvent Congress by issuing standards based on regulating “greenhouse gas emissions”, but there is no need for this. It is a false argument. The Center for Automotive Research says that the proposed new standards would cause the retail price of average motor vehicles to increase by more than $11,000.

Americans and the nation’s future are being victimized by Obama administration policies. The 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, was released on January 12th by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, measures the many factors that contribute to the economic health of a nation—things like property rights, regulatory efficiency, open markets, free trade and labor policies.

Economic freedom is declining worldwide as governments try to spend their way out of the global recession. The United States fell to 10th place. In 2009 it ranked 6th, in 2010 it was 8th, and in 2011, it was 9th.

We are witnessing the deliberate murder of a superpower.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Keystone Debacle

2012-01-19T17:37:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Future historians may conclude that President Obama’s decision to reject a permit for the building of the XL Keystone pipeline was a key factor in his defeat for a second term in 2012.

One can only hope that, in the course of the campaign, Republicans will focus public attention on the deliberate “no energy” policies of the Obama administration that have thwarted the creation of jobs, the generation of electrical power for homes and businesses, as well as fueling our transportation needs.

The Obama administration policies also meant that billions in tax revenue have been lost. Tapping U.S. energy reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil would also be a major step toward greater national security, freeing the nation from dependence on foreign oil.

In a recent article posted on The Heritage Foundation’s website, Rob Bluey reported that “oil and natural gas production on federal lands is down by more than forty percent (40%) compared to ten years ago.”

“Under the Obama administration, 2010 had the lowest number of onshore leases issued since 1984. The Obama administration held only one offshore lease sale in 2011.”

Following the President’s announcement regarding Keystone, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, Thomas Pyle, said that “Tens of thousands of American jobs died today because of the president’s rejection of the Keystone EL pipeline permit. For more than two years, the administration has delayed, hoping to get past 2012 without having to reveal the president’s true anti-job, anti-energy agenda. Because of today’s announcement, Americans will continue to send $70 billion overseas every day to purchase foreign oil.”

The secret President Obama wants to keep from Americans is that the price of domestic oil is always cheaper than foreign oil. Oil industry expert, Seldon B. Graham, Jr. says that this price deferential is “never reported by the media. The media only reports Wall Street speculators’ guesses of oil prices six months in the future…the U.S. price is always lower than the OPEC price.”

In February 2011, a CNS News article reported that “A new study says drilling on Alaska’s Outer Continental Shelf could make Alaska the eighth largest oil resource province in the world—ahead of Nigeria, Libya, Russia and Norway.”

In announcing the decision on the Keystone pipeline, the President boasted that, under his administration, “domestic oil and natural gas production is up”, but Bluey pointed out that “The vast majority of America’s new oil and gas production is happening on private lands in states like North Dakota, Alaska, and Texas.” Private, not public lands. One result is that North Dakota’s unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, the lowest in the nation.

Who favored the president’s decision?

An environmental organization, Green for All, hailed the decision. Its CEO, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, said, “This project would have helped Big Oil and their allies get richer at the expense of American workers and permanently damaged our environment.” How does it help to kill 20,000 jobs and an estimated 100,000 related to the pipeline?

The Sierra Club, another environmental organization, claimed that the pipeline would bring “toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada to refineries and ports in Texas.” If it was corrosive, it could not be transported by a pipeline, but ethanol which is mandated for use in gasoline is so corrosive it cannot be transported by pipeline and requires fleets of trucks instead. Echoing Green for all, the Sierra Club said, “Thank President Obama for standing up to Big Oil and rejecting the Keystone XL oil pipeline.”

Friends of the Earth, another environmental organization, branded Big Oil as “one of the most profitable and most unscrupulous industries on the planet.” Profits equal dividends for investors in oil companies. Profits equal jobs for thousands of Americans. Profits ensure that more oil can be discovered and extracted…except on federal lands and offshore because of present administration policies.

By contrast, James M. Taylor, a Senior Fellow for Environmental Policy of The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, said, “The Obama administration has confirmed the fears of everyday Americans that it is more interested in paying off environmental extremists and other far-left groups than it is in laying the foundation for a growing economy.”

“The Obama administration’s decision to block construction of the Keystone XL pipeline demonstrates as poignantly as a slap in the face that President Obama is either completely out of touch with the American people or is callously indifferent about our ongoing economic woes,” said Taylor. “I suspect that in the November elections voters will severely punish President Obama for this foolish decision.”

I suspect Taylor is right!

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Eco-Absurdity

2011-12-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

Hurricanes seen from outer space

By Alan Caruba

There are no lengths and no depths to which Greens—environmentalists—will not go to advance the greatest hoax of the modern era. It used to be called “global warming”, but when that was exposed as based on falsified computer models put out by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the term “climate change” was adopted to mask it.

Billions of dollars have been wasted on claims of a massive increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere and entire careers, organizations, and government agencies have been financed to advance the hoax.

So much depends on this cash flow that the fraud’s machinery continues to function. Yet another IPCC conference on climate change began on November 30 in Durban, South Africa for the purpose of extending the absurd Kyoto Protocols that some nations signed onto with the promise of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions.” The original protocols exempted China and India. The U.S. refused to participate and many industrial nations have indicated they have no intention of doing so this time around.

As just one example of this BIG LIE, on November 30 I received a news release from the Missouri State University stating that one of its professors was “delivering a message in Washington, D.C. today urging the nation’s leaders to address the moral issue surrounding climate change.”

Oh, so now global warming is a moral issue, too?

As I have frequently noted, climate is something measured in centuries, while weather is forecast in days and, even then, can prove to be incorrect. The definition of the weather is “chaos” as it is subject to change in just hours as various “fronts” shift course. Even the most powerful events like hurricanes are difficult to predict and the U.S. mainland has not been hit by one in years. By the time Hurricane Irene arrived on the East Coast this year, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm.

This and the revelations of “Climategate”, the thousands of emails exchanged by the IPCC meteorologists of the University of East Anglia’s climate center, has hardly made a dent on the frantic efforts to keep the global warming lie alive.

“Michael Nelson, MSU associate professor of environmental ethics and philosophy, is part of the Climate Ethics Campaign, a team of representatives from government agencies, business and environmental organizations delivering a national climate ethics statement to President Obama and Congress.”

Here’s where it really gets absurd. Having blamed global warming for everything, this gang of hucksters assert that “’Missing from the international debate is the deeply disturbing moral and ethical implications of climate change.’ Nelson said ‘Climate change is a real, dangerous and rapidly worsening problem that cannot be driven solely by short-term economics or national self-interest.’”

The level of fear-mongering reaches new heights with the Climate Ethics Campaign claim that “Climate change-related impacts are already harming and killing people here and abroad. Unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, the resulting natural disasters, floods, diseases, illnesses, water and food shortages, and environmental degradation, along with associated rising violence and social breakdown, will injure or kill millions more every year.”

So, there you have it. Either we spend billions on “climate change” or people will die and societies will suffer turmoil. Can you name a single day when the weather somewhere has not killed someone? Do societies experience turmoil because of the weather or because they oppress their population? And can anyone do anything about the weather? No.

I fully expect these charlatans to announce that Santa may not show up on Christmas Eve if we don’t do something about climate change..

The weather, deemed too warm or too cold, continues to be touted as the result of too much CO2 in the atmosphere even though it is a mere 0.038% of the atmosphere and meteorological science has established its impact is virtually non-existent. There is no correlation between its increase and the climate except that it shows up well after any change.

Prof. Nelson, apparently concerned that his job is on the line, said, “We want to urge every citizen to push for policies that reduce emissions and prepare for climate change.”

Some of those policies threaten to further undermine the nation’s economy in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion that CO2 is a “pollutant” and is falsely trying to use the Clean Air Act to shut down every coal-fired plant for the generation of electricity—even though they provide fifty percent of all electricity generated.

These aren’t just bad policies based on utterly false and debased science, but they represent the real threat to the lives of all Americans and to the economy in general.

There is no real “ethical” component to climate change. There is only the need to clean up after a hurricane, blizzard or flood in order to help people get their lives in order again. That is already addressed in part by government agencies like FEMA.

The time has long since passed when the U.S. and other nations should pay any attention, let alone waste any more time and money on the “sustainable” schemes being pushed by the United Nations and the many organizations dependent on this massive fraud..

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Climategate, Part Duh!

2011-11-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

At what point will it finally occur to the pea-brained legion of journalists, academics, alleged scientists, United Nations propagandists, and others still blathering about “global warming” and “climate change” that there is no global warming and that the climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years on planet Earth?

It would appear that no amount of the evidence of fraud is sufficient to convince them they have either participated or been taken in by the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Perhaps, though, the latest release of thousands of emails between the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change perpetrators may push them toward a rational conclusion and release the rest of humanity from the penalties and costs imposed by the global warming hoax.

It’s not that the IPCC is not relentless in this ugly business. A report released on November 18 by these reprehensible liars predicted “more extreme weather events.”

Well, duh! There isn’t a day that goes by without an extreme weather event occurring somewhere on the Earth. One might consider the weather at the northern and southern poles extreme. Or the heat of the Earth’s deserts? Then throw in the usual blizzards, floods, and droughts—and you have a non-stop variety of “extreme weather events” to which to point.

To put it another way, the whole hoax was working just fine until the Earth began to cool around 1998. So naturally the IPCC had to (1) change the terminology from global warming to climate change, (2) deny that its “scientists” were lying, and (3) continue the pathetic prediction scheme by pointing to “weather events.”

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, “The scientific link between climate change and extreme weather, however, isn’t uniformly clear, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988 to assist policy makers with climate change.”

That’s right, this whole farce has been going on since 1988. At what point will the “enablers” of global warming accept defeat? Not soon if one considers that the IPCC is laying on another climate conference to be held in Durban, South Africa from November 28 to December 9. It will be the 17th opportunity for these deceivers to gather to wine and dine while taxpayers from the many nations they represent pick up the tab.

Here’s the kicker. “Christina Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “the report also underscored the need for governments to take action to reduce emissions.”

What emissions? Carbon dioxide? A trace gas in the atmosphere (0.038%) that has no effect whatever on climate or weather?

Does anyone grasp how costly all the lies about “emissions” have been and continue to be? The Christmas tree to be erected at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. comes complete with the purchase of so-called “carbon offsets” to pay for its transport 4,200 miles across the country from California. Eighty million tons of “carbon credits” were purchased.

Bear in mind, that tree and all others depend on carbon dioxide in the same way humans and other creatures depend on oxygen! CO2 is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. Without it, we all die.

But what is one Christmas tree compared to an entire nation, Australia, whose government just imposed a carbon-emissions tax on everything? The tax will drive existing heavy industry and other generators of CO2 from the nation that can afford to leave and make those who cannot less competitive with global manufacturers and other businesses. Some business will just shut their doors.

This kind of deception is global. The International Energy Agency announced in early November that “dangerous climate change will be essentially irreversible within little over five years.” The news report concluded saying “The IEA uses conclusions from research collated by the United Nations. Most climate scientists agree with the U.N. conclusions, although recent polls show a growing proportion of the public in many countries is skeptical of climate change.”

No, most climate scientists do not agree with the U.N. data because they know how flawed and frequently fraudulent it is. This kind of casual journalistic reference is a lie, along with all the rest of the global warming and/or climate change data from “official” sources like the IPCC and IEA, et al.

In early November the U.S. Department of Energy published “estimates” of global carbon dioxide emissions for the year 2010. Writing in Forbes, James Taylor of The Heartland Institute, took note that the Department concluded that “emissions rose by 6% from 2009 to 2010. This constitutes the largest rise yet recorded.” And then he added that “global temperatures have not risen during the past decade.”

There is no correlation. Never was.

Whether it is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the U.S. Departments of Energy, Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency, all depend on people being too ignorant or indifferent to grasp the truth that everything done in the name of global warming, climate change, or carbon dioxide emissions is a costly, evil deception.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama's Green Energy Fail

2011-11-21T14:25:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

Watching Secretary of Energy Steven Chu face nearly five hours of grilling by a congressional committee seeking answers to the multi-billion dollar loss taxpayers have taken after the department dispensed their money in pursuit of its Green energy program was a reminder that ideology is not a substitute for reality.

Dr. Chu received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 for his work at Bell Labs, shared with colleagues, on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. At the time he was appointed to head the Department of Energy, he was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkley. He also had gained notice as an environmental enthusiast advocating a shift away from fossil fuels—coal, natural gas and oil—to combat “climate change.”

At one point Dr. Chu thought that painting roofs and other structures white would help reflect the sun’s radiation and save the nation and the world from global warming. Another nutty idea of his was a global “glucose economy” to create a “low-carbon economy” by shipping glucose from tropical plants would replace oil, the energy source that fuels transportation worldwide and serves a multitude of other uses.

Why any of this nonsense qualified him to be the chief administrator of the Department of Energy defies understanding. A footnote to this is the fact that the Department was the creation of the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter whose “windfall profits” legislation drove much of the oil industry out of America despite the fact that the U.S. sits atop some of the greatest deposits of oil in the world.

The loan guarantees of grants made by the Department of Energy are turning out to be a huge scandal for the Obama administration, rivaling the Department of Justice’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to the drug cartels of Mexico. When you toss in an unemployment rate that rivals that of the Great Depression, it is hard to understand why anyone would suggest that Obama will be reelected.

As reported in The Washington Post in September, “A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.”

This works out to $5,077.574 per job created.

We are now familiar with the Solyndra scandal, one of the companies that received loan guarantees despite grave misgivings of DOE staff members. It declared a very predictable bankruptcy as a manufacturer of solar panels. Its failure was blamed on competition from China, also a major producer of wind turbines.

Between solar and wind technology, the failure of these two Green energy producers touted by the Obama administration, is beginning to be noticed at the same time the Environmental Protection Agency is hell-bent on closing down coal-fired electrical power plants and the companies that mine coal.

Another DOE beneficiary was BrightSource, another solar firm which received a $1.4 billion bailout. It turns out that the DOE officials involved was Sanjay Wagle, formerly a principal in Robert Kennedy, Jr’s firm. In 2010, BrightSource whose largest shareholder was Kennedy’s VantagePoint Partners, had $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million.

Just how many billions the Obama administration’s Green energy program will have lost by the time they are eventually calculated will be testimony to the general failure of solar and wind power. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club is celebrating Obama’s decision to delay approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, estimated to generate 20,000 jobs.

The Department of the Interior has just delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio “for up to six months” and an industry group estimates that drilling in the Utica shale affected by the delay would produce 204,500 jobs by 2015.

In mid-November, Lisa Murkowski, a Senator from Alaska, wrote an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the Obama administration’s proposed expansion of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico are its first concession since its moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. The administration still opposes offshore drilling on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Sen. Murkowski pointed out that “Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Canada and Russia are all moving ahead on offshore development adjacent to our borders,” noting that according to the Department of Interior, “our offshore areas hold more than 86 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Artic Oceans is projected to hold 20% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas.”

Why anyone thought Dr. Chu was qualified in any fashion to run the Department of Energy defies the imagination. Why anyone still believes that solar and wind energy can replace traditional proven sources of energy is testimony to environmental propaganda and myth-making.

Green energy is simply one more way the Obama administration has set about destroying America’s capacity to generate the energy needed for everything requiring electricity. It is one more way to impoverish the nation. And he is running for reelection in 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

System Failure on a Global Scale

2011-11-19T18:42:00.000-08:00

By Alan Caruba

We are living in times when the structures involving the global financial system, national security, and self-governance are under attack, decaying, or just self-destructing due to all the ills to which humanity is prone.

Wars in the twentieth century were always an example of either the failure of nations to resolve their differences or of the ancient human inclination to steal whatever they can from their neighbor. Wars organize this into armies for that purpose. The other cause for war is the necessity to rid the neighborhood of the crazy guy who’s hoarding weapons and building bombs.

What is occurring of late, however, goes beyond the usual casus belli to something far greater, a loss of faith in national and international banking systems, aggravated by the failure of nations to act in a prudent fashion to protect the wealth of their citizens and their national sovereignty.

The cause of this is socialism, the polite name for communism. Like Islam, it exists for world domination, the control of the population for the enrichment of those holding the reins of power. It is no accident that the U.S. Congress is filled with millionaires or those who soon will be.

Communism, the creation of a man who never held a job in his life, Karl Marx, and its theoretically gentler version, Socialism, has proved to be a failure wherever it was implemented. It is always introduced as the antechamber to utopia, a better life for everyone and it has always led to the slaughter of millions in the name of achieving it. It is just another form of slavery.

Socialism, as practiced throughout the United States and Europe, dependent as it is on the “redistribution of wealth” in the form of “entitlement” programs is now crashing down around the heads of various elected leaders.

As the former British Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, once famously said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

When you pile on debt beyond the mind’s capacity to imagine and you empower “super committees” or hold desperate meetings as are occurring in Europe, public faith in national currencies begins to disappear and with it a rational world in which goods and services generate income.

We are now 66 years since the end of World War Two, the war that followed “the war to end all wars”, World War One. Peace—the absence of war—lasted a scant twenty-one years in Europe before the latter cataclysm began in 1939.

Times of turmoil are the perfect opportunity for tyrants of every description to emerge, organize the collective anger, and launch new wars. In the past 66 years of “peace” there has been a succession of wars, usually between Communist and Capitalist nations such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars or civil wars. The recent wars and revolutions in the Middle East have been about oil and who gets to pump it out of the ground.

Threatening the entire world is the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Islam is less a religion than a battle plan for global conquest that has the added fillip of enslaving its adherents in a faith system that demands total obedience on pain of death. Unbelievers in general face this threat. Israel in particular always has.

Capitalism isn’t a perfect system, subject to periodic cycles of recession and depression, but it does require a greater measure of individual freedom than any other in order to encourage the kind of innovation and risk-taking that creates vast wealth-producing economies.

The problem the West is facing has been brought on by the profligate and often corrupt waste of the people’s wealth. This has been the result of metastasizing laws whose ultimate purpose is to keep populations from demanding more freedom from rapacious taxing, borrowing, and spending. Even central banks are powerless against this. Ours, the Federal Reserve, has responded by printing dollars out of thin air.

On November 18th a proposed constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget failed in the House. The U.S. is currently $15 trillion in debt. The worst fears of our Founding Fathers are coming true. Presiding over the nation is a Marxist ideologue and his henchmen.

When the Congress of the United States of America refuses to obey the limits of the Constitution, you have failure.

When that same Congress refuses to reform “entitlement” programs and reduce massive spending, you have failure.

When the Federal Reserve—a central bank that is not a part of the federal government— owns most of the nation’s debt, you have failure.

In my lifetime, the United States of America went from a largely Capitalist system and society to one of near total government control. It is Socialism supported by an insane system of taxation lacking even the appearance of fairness.

The United States has moved too far away from the purpose of the Constitution, established to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”

We are that posterity,

In the decades since the last Great Depression a succession of Congresses has bankrupted the nation once again. It is happening as well in Europe because nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and France thought they too could defy common sense and fiscal prudence.

It is system failure on a global scale.

Americans and the citizens of Europe are the unwilling victims of too much government, too much regulation, too much corruption, too much taxation, and the general inclination of those in charge to acquire as much wealth for themselves while keeping the rest of the population complacent with “redistribution of wealth” schemes that always fail.

The Tea Party movement is calling for a restoration of America. We have precious little time to do that and it is the Democratic Party in league with unions who oppose that goal.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Global Warming: An Obituary

2011-11-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

By Alan Caruba

I used to write obituaries when I was a young journalist and I daresay they are one of the best read sections of any newspaper. We have arrived at a time when the obituaries for global warming (now falsely called climate change) are increasing.

The October 25th edition of The Wall Street Journal sports an editorial titled “The Post-Global Warming World” commenting on the fact that the 17th annual United Nations-sponsored climate change conference in November is likely to be an even greater flop than recent ones. Few, if any, nations will sign on to the huge hoax of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) to save the world from burning to a crisp.

Considering the long years of media-driven drivel about global warming, the hoax should have been over by now, given the exposure in 2009 of thousands of emails between the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conspirators and growing body of evidence that everything they asserted was a great steaming pile of horse manure.

If there was ever a reason for the U.S. to stop funding the U.N., this is it.

I have predicted the death of global warming several times, but like a Hollywood zombie global warming is kept alive by its massive propaganda machine and useful idiots in the media.

Since the late 1980s The New York Times has engaged in the most horrid effort to convince its readers and the world that the IPCC should be taken seriously even though its successive reports have proven to be an offense to real science and the truth. No opportunity was ignored to advance the hoax even in the face of incontrovertible facts of every description.

Global warming has become a green religion to be taken on faith, but its claim to legitimacy was the “science” it put forth. That science began to come into question when a natural cooling cycle began in 1998. Glaciers began to noticeably grow along with the ice shelves of the Arctic and Antarctica. Snow arrived earlier and in greater abundance than previous decades.

Global tropical cyclone activity has been at historic lows and the frequency of U.S. hurricanes has declined. The latest, Irene, was rapidly downgraded to a tropical depression by the time it made landfall.

So, naturally, when Elisabeth Rosenthal, a blogger on “Green” topics for The New York Times wondered out loud “Where Did Global Warming Go?” I was curious to know her answer. Turns out that, despite being heralded on the covers of Newsweek, Time, The Economist, and countless other “news” magazines, in TV documentaries, et cetera, it hasn’t gone anywhere

After lamenting that, since his visit to the 2009 Copenhagen UN conference on climate change, President Obama has failed to mention global warming every day, Rosenthal wrote “But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.”

No, nearly every other nation has concluded it was a massive and very expensive fraud. That is why the forthcoming UN conference is going to implode. Policy makers are trying to extricate themselves from the useless solar and wind projects to which billions were committed. As soon as Obama is out of office and the Environmental Protection Agency is scaled back to its original 1970 objectives we can begin to attend to the rebuilding of the nation’s economy.

Note Rosenthal’s use of the term “climate change” rather than “global warming.” Note, too, that the 2009 Copenhagen conference was a huge failure with none of the nations in attendance agreeing to do much more than get together again, preferably in Cancun, Mexico, 2010, where the weather, unlike Copenhagen’s was not at risk of the huge blizzard that forced Obama to leave early lest he be trapped there until the snow melted.

“Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified,” Ms. Rosenthal lamented that “Mr. Obama now talks about ‘green jobs’ mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, but not the planet.”

People who worry about “the planet” and not about real problems such as how to feed seven billion of its human inhabitants or how to provide enough electricity to keep the lights on in the world’s cities or who think “improving the economy” is a poor choice to make when more than 14 million Americans are out of work are seriously out of touch with reality.

“He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address,” said Rosenthal, pouting over something about which neither Obama, nor anyone else on planet Earth can do anything except to clean up the mess left behind by hurricanes, floods, and other forces of nature..

The climate, measured in hundreds of years, as opposed to the weather which is unpredictable more than a week from now, is the result of the activity of the Sun, the oceans, volcanoes, clouds, and cosmic rays. It is determined by the immutable laws of physics.

“The fading of global warming from the political agenda is a mostly American phenomenon,” wrote Rosenthal, apparently unaware that the European Union is about to collapse because several of its member nations are so deeply in debt that makes the U.S. look like a paragon of prudent fiscal policy. Rosenthal appears to be unaware of the rapid political changes occurring across the northern tier of African nations called the Maghreb and elsewhere throughout the Middle East.

Like the urchins “occupying Wall Street”, Rosenthal chides Americans who “prefer bigger cars and bigger homes. We value personal freedom, are suspicious of scientists, and tend to distrust the kind of sweeping government intervention required to confront rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

Since when is valuing personal freedoms, many of which are protected by the Constitution, and being suspicious of those scientists who have been claiming we’re all going to die, or questioning sweeping government intervention anything other than a deeply embedded American tradition and a very good idea under any circumstance?

Since 2008 the Heartland Institute has sponsored six International Climate Change Conferences, the last in Washington, D.C., June 30-July 1. Haven’t heard about them? Maybe that’s because the mainstream media has gone out of its way to ignore them. The conferences, however, have contributed to the growing body of knowledge disputing global warming to the point where, even in the nation’s capitol, the topic has become little more than the slow revelation of the utter mendacity of the hoax and its perpetrators.

Where has global warming gone? Onto the ash heap of the history of the last twenty-plus years of bad policies, wasted billions of the public treasure, and all of it driven by the UN’s mendacious “science.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Killing Energy, Killing Jobs, Killing America

2011-10-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

By Alan Caruba

America has been under attack since Barack Obama took the oath of office on January 20, 2009. The primary target has been the nation’s ability to generate energy for electricity and transportation, without which this nation will slide into Third World status and economic decline.

This appears to be the goal of this administration from the President to his Secretaries of Energy and Interior, to his Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. There is no other rational explanation for what they are doing.

We are days away from the latest Environmental Protection Agency assault in the form of the “MACT” rule allegedly to reduce mercury and other emissions that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says will reduce electricity generation in America by about 81 gigawatts in the years ahead. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said “this could compromise the reliability of the electric system if as much as 8% of generating capacity is subtracted from the grid.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that eleven Governors have written the EPA to ask that it delay the final rule in November. Twenty-five state Attorneys Generals have filed suit “to lift a legal document known as a consent decree that the EPA is using as a fig leaf for its political goals.”

As but one example, in Illinois, Ameron announced the planned shutdown of its Meredosia and Hutsonville energy centers, The Meredosia center generates 369 megawatts. The Hutsonville center has a generating capacity of 151 megawatts.

The EPA, even before the Obama administration, has been using the 1970 Clean Air Act to bludgeon the nation’s ability to access the energy resources required to generate electricity, primarily coal that provides 50% of such generation, and oil that fuels our transportation capability.

In late October, James J. Mulva, the CEO of Conoco-Phillips, addressed the subject of the growing discoveries of natural gas being found throughout the nation. “More than 600,000 Americans already explore, produce, store and produce natural gas, according to consultancy IHS Global Insight.”

At least 15 states now produce shale gas and others may join them,” noting that the largest shale area, the Marcellus which covers much of the Northeast” “already supports 140,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone.”

The Obama administration, beginning with the president’s admitted goal of shutting down as much of the coal industry as possible, has demonstrated his intention of deterring the provision of energy. When the BP Oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the administration imposed a moratorium on all drilling. The decreased production cost 360,000 barrels a day in addition to lost jobs related to oil drilling in the Gulf. Rigs that are needed to drill have since been moved to other sites around the world.

The U.S. is home to more than 150 billion barrels of conventional oil that has the capability of generating thousands of new jobs if access to it was permitted. The most immediate result has been the rise in the cost of gasoline at the pump. Two courts ordered that the moratorium be lifted.

Oil companies currently pay more than $30 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxes. Meanwhile the Obama administration has been wasting billions in loan guarantees to essentially useless solar and wind power companies, the latest of which, Solyandra, will cost taxpayers millions when the solar panel producer went belly-up. Others will follow.

Meanwhile, the President crisscrosses the nations demanding higher taxes on companies engaged in coal, oil and natural gas. When Jimmy Carter imposed a windfall tax on oil companies many ceased to explore for new sources here, moving their efforts to other nations. Today, by withholding the necessary permits to produce energy in Alaska, the Trans Alaska Pipeline System is operating at one third of its capacity.

A proposed pipeline from Canada still awaits approval and, on November 6th, led by the Sierra Club, the largest protest against its tar sands is expected to draw thousands to Washington, D.C. to join hands and circle the White House to ensure the Keystone XL pipeline is kept from providing the U.S. with the oil extracted. The proposed pipeline would reduce the U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. The U.S. already has more than 50,000 safely operating oil pipelines to support our transportation and other needs.

In January 2010, Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, warned that the Obama administration “continues to embrace Washington-dominated, command-and-control energy policies focused on mandates, subsidies, and political favors—not market forces.” He criticized “subsidizing one form of energy,” wind and solar, “while restricting the exploration of another,” warning that it “will lead to several measurable outcomes, increasing energy prices across the board, fewer jobs, and a weaker footing in the global economy..”

Nearly two years later, that warning has come true with a vengeance.

Oil, coal, or natural gas, it doesn’t matter to an administration and a president determined to restrict the amount of energy Americans need for their present and future needs. The result, in part, has been a stalled energy sector and a contributing factor in an economy with an estimated 20 million unemployed or under-employed.

The losses in income taxes and the taxes paid by this industry sector, in addition to the hideous borrowing and spending by the Obama administration is doing enormous harm to America and yet Barack Obama wants a second term in office.

Little wonder that Americans fear for the future of the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Difficulty of Predicting the End of the World

2011-10-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

By Alan Caruba

I am beginning to feel sorry for Pastor Harold Camping who predicted the end of the world would occur on May 21, 2011 and, when it didn’t, predicted that it would end on October 21 instead. Oops.

The fact is that men of varying theological and astrological inclinations have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time. Predictions can be found in Hindu, Taoist, Scandinavian, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim eschatology—the branch of theology that is devoted to final events.

There is brief mention of it in Jewish literature but the term “messiah” referred to a human leader who would lead the Jews out of bondage and unite the nation. The most famous is Moses in the story of Exodus until Christians adopted the belief that Jesus was, in fact, the messiah and would return. Similarly, the Muslims adapted this to refer to the Twelfth Imam, a mythical figure whose return would be hastened by all manner of earthly death and destruction.

The very fact that all major faith systems have some version of a messiah or an end of the world story suggests that the fear of this event is deeply imbedded in human psychology and no doubt is related to the fact that we all die at some point. Conveniently, most religions have their version of what will occur when that happens and usually have a destination such as heaven or paradise for those who have lived moral lives and hell for those who have not. A Hindu gets to come back, but must dodge doing so as a cockroach.

The most famous prediction is the Mayan one that predicts December 21, 2012 as the end of the world. Technically, the calendar began on August 13, 3114 BC and the cycle it asserted ends in December 2012. Its longevity is testament the fascination that the Mayan calendar has evoked. Need it be said that Mayan civilization is no more, so in that sense it was accurate, but off by several thousand years.

In its most basic terms, the end of the world ends for every one of us when we die. Human vanity, being what it is, most of us can barely conceive of the world without our being in it. Some religions preach that we should embrace death and an afterlife while others, more pragmatic, suggest we make the best of the one we have in the here and now.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in the course of his soliloquy about suicide refers to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” while Macbeth laments, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time” concluding it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, said we should “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

We are besieged by scientists who keep telling us that a stray asteroid could destroy the Earth by randomly colliding with it out of the great vastness of space. Others content themselves with calculating when the Sun will go supernova billions of years hence. Then there are the known extinctions that coincided with magnetic reversals.

In the1970s the United Nations climate clowns cooked up a huge hoax about global warming which has gone awry thanks to another completely predictable and natural cooling cycle that began in the late 1990s. That has not prevented the UN from trying to assert complete control over the world’s nations and their populations by scaring them into believing yet another end-of-the-world scenario.

For the record, a predictable new Ice Age is on its way, due to begin any day now since the last one ended about 11,500 years ago. When it does arrive, its affect will be swift and play havoc with the northern hemisphere. Meanwhile, winter around the world is becoming harsher in duration and effect.

Lawrence E. Joseph undertook “a scientific investigation into civilization’s end” in “Apocalypse 2012” published by Morgan Road Books in 2007, concluding that the Mayan calendar is a poor guide to the end of the world. “I think doomsday has a profound if unspeakable allure for those who are unhappy with themselves, their society, their Maker. It’s a form of vicarious revenge that anyone can take on life’s unfairness.”

“At any given point in history,” Joseph wrote, “there has always been a chorus of eccentrics predicting the end of the world. If only so much of the information about 2012 did not violate one’s sense of intellectual decorum: prophecies from Mayan shamans, interstellar theories of obscure Siberian geophysics, ruminations of South African psychics, and decrees of kabbalist rabbis.”

“Indeed, no single source, no matter how persuasive, could or should move one to seriously ponder the imponderable of the world tumultuously metamorphosing in 2012.”

With luck, if we are not struck dead by lightning or a sixteen-wheeler whose driver has fallen asleep at the wheel, the victim of an Iranian nuclear bomb, plus a multitude of other ways to shuffle off this mortal coil, we shall be around on December 21, 2012.

Nobody gets out of this world alive.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Will Warmists Face Justice for their Deceptions?

2011-10-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

By Alan Caruba

When you murder someone the case is never closed. The same holds when you murder the truth. No matter how long it takes, truth is defended despite all the calumnies heaped on those who stand firm against the lies and the propaganda intended to persuade those who have been deceived.

Ultimately, truth is its own defense. There never was a shred of truth in the claim that humans were causing the Earth’s climate to heat up by using so-called “fossil fuels” and engaging in manufacturing and other activities. There was no dramatic “global warming” in the 1980s until the present.

The Earth’s climate has warmed very slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age, dated to around 1850. Five hundred years of extremely cold weather had gripped the northern hemisphere starting around 1300. The much heralded “climate change” is, unlike the weather, measured in terms of centuries, not days, weeks or years. It is used by politicians that do not know what they are talking about. It is also used by charlatans, but I repeat myself.

Under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a massive fraud was engineered. The object was to turn carbon dioxide (CO2), a common though minor atmospheric gas, into a commodity that could be traded in exchanges around the world that would issue “carbon credits” to utilities, industrial facilities, and others who would be required to pay for permission to produce energy and products. It was an audacious scheme.

It began with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, otherwise known as the Kyoto Protocol. It set binding targets for the reduction of CO2 by 37 industrialized nations and the European community and was adopted on December 11, 1997 and entered into force on February 16, 2005. The U.S. never signed the Protocols. They were rejected by a unanimous vote in the Senate.

It was a complete lie without any basis in science. C02 plays no role in climate change and reducing whatever amount industry and other human activities might produce would be meaningless.

Surely the people behind the scheme knew this. The IPCC charged a small clique of climate scientists to come up with “proof” that global warming was happening. In England they were located at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and, in America, they were led by Dr. Michael Mann working first at the University of Virginia and later at Penn State University.

Dr. Michael Mann's "Hockey Stick" Graph

Mann’s research, assisted by co-authors Bradley and Hughes, was published in 1998. “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations” became famous for a graph dubbed the “hockey stick”. Its sudden upward curve, intended to demonstrate a dramatic increase was based on tree ring reconstruction of climate over a thousand years.

To say it attracted attention is an understatement. It and other studies produced by the IPCC clique became the cornerstone of the “global warming” hoax. The problem for Dr. Mann was that Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, along with Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph concluded it was bogus science and published a paper in 2004 criticizing it.

In science, when a theory or hypothesis is put forward, the data supporting it is as well. Years went by before McIntyre could get access to it. The tree ring data had been provided by Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit. Neither Dr. Mann, nor Briffa made it available, but McIntyre was able to secure it from another source. When he plotted all the tree ring data, not just the parts cherry-picked by Mann, the “hockey stick” disappeared.

In November 2009, thousands of leaked emails between Dr. Mann and other "warmists"---scientists responsible for the global warming hoax, revealed nothing less than a massive fraud.

Flash forward to a freedom of information (FOI) request by Chris Horner on behalf of American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center. Despite stonewalling for years, Dr. Mann’s former employer, the University of Virginia complied in May 2011, agreeing to release Dr. Mann’s computer files containing the data he had kept hidden for more than a decade.

Serendipitously, a similar FOI issued to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed the level of financial gain received by another key player in the global warming hoax, Dr. James Hansen, a longtime NASA employee and the man credited with generating the hoax with testimony before a congressional committee in 1988. He has been the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies since 1981

It turns out that in 2010 alone he received “between 236,000 and $1,232.500 in outside income”! When you add in all the awards and speech fees Dr. Hansen has received over the years it is a tidy sum while he exploited his taxpayer-funded position. The agency had resisted disclosing this information for years, but as a federal employee Dr. Hansen waives privacy interests as a condition of employment.

A former government employee, Vice President Al Gore, became the face and voice of the hoax, earning millions in the process.

What has the global warming cost Americans? Joanne Nova of the Science and Public Policy Institute has estimated that the U.S. government spent more than $32.5 billion on climate studies between 1989 and 2009, nor does that include about $79 billion more spent for related climate change technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks for “green energy” (solar and wind).

For deception on that scale, one might think they will be punished at some point, but it will likely be years more before those responsible for the global warming fraud will stand before the bar of justice, if ever.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The EPA Gets Caught in a Big Fact Lie

2011-10-01T18:09:00.000-07:00

By Alan Caruba

The notion that the Environmental Protection Agency uses “science” to justify their regulations is false, just like most of the claims they issue on various aspects of the nation’s environment. Their favorite scam is to estimate the number of deaths they will prevent with some new draconian regulation.

The EPA is the American equivalent of the Gestapo, a ruthless enforcement agency with a very Green agenda that is opposed to the use of many beneficial chemicals, every form of energy, and the right of people to be left alone.

At the top of its list of priorities is the destruction of the nation’s economy with special attention to all forms of energy production. Manufacturing anything comes next, followed by afflicting the nation’s vast agricultural sector. The EPA insists that dust is a pollutant. You can’t farm without generating DUST.

To understand the threat the EPA poses it is necessary to understand that proposed Clean Air regulations are based on the claim that “global warming” is real, is happening, and is caused primarily by carbon dioxide (CO2). The claim is utterly without any scientific merit..

There is NO global warming. At least not the kind Al Gore lies about.

The North and South Poles are not melting; they gain and lose ice in a perfectly natural cycle that has been going on for billions of years. The polar bears are not disappearing. Drilling for oil in ANWR will have zero effect on the caribou. Et cetera!

With our vast reserves of coal and natural gas, the U.S. does not lack for the ability to generate electricity or to refine oil for transportation.

If you want to stay warm this winter, you better hope that utilities keep producing the electricity for your home or apartment’s heating system. Fifty percent of that electricity is produced by cheap, abundant coal and the EPA is hell bent to shut down as many coal mines as possible, leading in turn to the shutdown of utilities that burn coal. Natural gas accounts for just over twenty-four percent of electricity generation and it need hardly be said that the EPA is wary of fracking, the technology to access it.

Blowing the Whistle on the EPA

The big news—the kind even the mainstream media was unable to ignore—was that the EPA’s own inspector general has released a report accusing the agency of cutting corners regarding the “science” cited to justify its effort to declare CO2 a “pollutant.”

Simply stated, without CO2 all life on Earth dies.

It is a gas that plants use for their growth. From a blade of grass to a giant redwood, all depend on CO2, as do all the crops grown coast to coast. Enormous quantities of corn and wheat are grown that contribute to the U.S. economy, feeding both livestock and humans in wondrous ways. Take away vegetation and the animals die. Take away the animals that grace our dinner plates and we die.

Absurdly, the EPA says it is a “pollutant”, a dangerous hazard to our health.

No, the most dangerous hazard to our health is the EPA.

The EPA insists on ignoring all the other natural sources of CO2 as well as the fact that it constitutes less than one percent, 0.038 percent of the atmosphere. The oceans of the world gather it, store it, and release it. The EPA, though, says that when man is involved, it is pure evil.

Mind you, every human exhales about six pounds of CO2 every day. The fact is that the air Americans inhale daily is clean is due to the agency’s early efforts to mitigate some abuses. Those were the days before the EPA abandoned a rational, fact-based approach to its stated objectives. One of its legacies is the idiotic required inclusion of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline. Made from corn, it actually produces more CO2 to produce and use.

The EPA effort to regulate CO2 came along with the invention of the global warming hoax that claimed CO2 was “trapping” the Earth’s heat. That is why CO2 and others are deceptively called “greenhouse” gases (GHGs). Manufacturing everything from a donut to megawatts of electricity emits GHGs.

Finally, even the EPA’s inspector general blew the whistle on the utterly deceitful way the EPA arrives at its justification for a vast matrix of regulations that has been stifling the economy for years. The IG has charged that the EPA did not meet its own guidelines for peer review to ensure the integrity of the science stated.

Anyone who has been following the rise and fall of the global warming hoax knows that “peer review” has become a highly corrupted practice. Real peer review is critical to the integrity of any scientific study. When major science journals abandoned the peer review process to publish gibberish about global warming, they put all other new scientific studies at risk.

As Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted, the EPA’s regulation of CO2 emissions would require “230,000 full-time employees to produce 1.4 billion work hours to address the actual increase in permitting functions” that would result if the EPA is allowed to get away with this scandalous hoax. It would cost an estimated $21 billion per year. By contrast, the EPA’s budget request for fiscal year 2012 is $8.973 billion.

The EPA claims that the Clean Air Act gives it the power to regulate CO2, but it does not. It was never intended to, but the Supreme Court in one of its more idiotic rulings opened the door for the EPA claim. In his dissent from Massachusetts v EPA, Justice Antonin Scalia quipped that, as defined by the Court, “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an ‘air pollutant’”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) pointed out that “The EPA’s determination has led to a mountain of Clean Air Act regulations that could cost over a million jobs.” It is noteworthy that Sen. Barrasso said, “EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has regularly assured Congress and the American public that its finding is based on sound scientific practices.” It isn’t. Jackson “should testify immediately,” said Sen. Barrasso, “the American people deserve the truth.”

The EPA has been short on the truth about all of its claims for four decades and needs to be shut down in order to let a truly science-based agency replace it with strict congressional oversight and limitations.

The time is long overdue to pull the plug on the Environmental Protection Agency.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Slow, Certain Death of the Global Warming Theory

2011-09-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

By Alan Caruba

I have been predicting the death of the global warming theory since late in the last decade when it became obvious that the Earth had entered into a cooling cycle. By 2009 the leak of thousands of emails between the “scientists” whose computer models the claims were based upon revealed they were in a state of panic regarding this obvious phenomenon.

Employed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming (IPCC), those “scientists” have since been protected by the universities who benefited greatly from the huge grants of public funding they received. The issue of whether such men should be prosecuted for deceiving the entire world remains to be decided.

The lead player, Dr. James Hansen, still on the payroll of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is the man who told Congress in 1988 that global warming threatened mankind and the Earth. He has since switched to lying about coal and oil, two of the fossil fuels on which the economies of all nations depend, claiming they are deadly pollutants that must be abandoned in favor of “clean energy”, wind and solar.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the most public face of “global warming”, has become a public joke. Recall, however, that he received a Nobel Prize and an Oscar in additions to the millions earned from the sale of “carbon credits” to offset “greenhouse gases.” Some exchanges devoted to these credits have closed their doors. The proposed Cap-and-Trade legislation based on them lingers in Congress.

One need not be a climate scientist or meteorologist to conclude that humans have nothing to do with the climate or the weather. Watching huge hurricanes wreak havoc, along with other weather-related events should be enough for anyone to conclude that humans do not “cause” such things.

Occam’s Razor is the ancient principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely the correct one, but billions in public funding, taxpayer’s dollars, have been diverted to the “research” that corrupt scientists have used to justify the global warming fraud.

MIT Professor, Dr. Richard Lindzen, an internationally recognized authority on atmospheric science, said, "Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age."

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to those courageous scientists that stood their ground against the global warming fraud. Recently the Heartland Institute, in concert with the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and the Science and Environmental Policy Project, published “Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report.” It is 430 pages co-authored by Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Robert M. Carter, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, all of whom have been among the scientists repeatedly slandered as “global warming deniers” and “skeptics” for their efforts to educate the public.

The report, in careful documented, scientific language identifies the way the warmist’s computer models over-estimated the amount of warming, ignored the fact that increased carbon dioxide benefits plant growth, that there is less melting in the Arctic, Antarctic and on mountain tops than claimed, and that there is no sign of acceleration of sea-level rise in recent decades.

A recent Rasmussen survey indicates that upwards of 60% of Americans have concluded that humans have nothing to do with “global warming” or any other aspect of the climate. This is extraordinary when one considers how the mainstream media, the curriculums in the nation’s schools, and the unceasing efforts of major environmental organizations have tried to impose the global warming claims on the public.

In a similar fashion, “The Other Climate Theory” by Anne Jolis, an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, describes how a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has put what may well be the final nail in the global warming coffin. The work of physicists using particle beam technology, CERN confirmed that the Sun’s cosmic rays enhanced cloud formation. The IPCC’s 2007 report had peremptorily dismissed this possibility, but then the IPCC’s reports have been the basis for the global warming fraud, asserting a “consensus” among scientists that never existed.

Thus the scientific method of describing a phenomenon, formulating a hypothesis to explain it, and performing tests to confirm or reject a hypothesis, has once again demonstrated that “global warming” is just so much hot air.

This is not stopped the Environmental Protection Agency from doing everything in its power to destroy the energy sector of the nation based in part on the global warming fraud.

Universities across America have entire departments and units devoted to keeping the global warming fraud alive. The mainstream press is heavily invested in it. Schools continue to frighten children with its claims. All this and other efforts will fail because science—real science—does not support it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Cheating Students of an Education

2011-09-16T13:33:00.000-07:00

By Alan Caruba

It says something about the dreadful state of American education when “bullying” has become the greatest issue of the day.

As millions of American youngsters return to school, they continue to be indoctrinated with programs designed to teach that homosexuality is okay, that sex education is more important than history or math, and that they should care less about individuality than the group.

This is straight out of former Soviet-style education than an educational system that previously turned out generations who fought and won World War Two, contributed to a thriving economy, put men on the Moon, and were focused on achieving competence in reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 2001 I wrote a four-part series noting that the rot in our school system is not new. It dates back to the 1960s and earlier.

I got to thinking about this when I read a September 15th Wall Street Journal article, “SAT Reading, Writing Scores Hit Low” by Stephanie Banchero. “SAT scores for the high-school graduating class of 2011 fell in all three subjects areas, and the average reading and writing scores were the lowest ever recorded, according to data released Wednesday.”

In 2008, a Washington Times commentary by Dan Lips, an education analyst at the Heritage Foundation, noted that “Spending from all levels of government has soared. Today, the average student in American public schools can expect more than $9,200 to be spent on his or her behalf this year by taxpayers—a real increase of 69 percent over 1980 per-pupil spending. Yet this additional spending hasn’t meaningfully changed student outcomes.”

Lips warned that “it has become painfully clear that the federal government can’t solve the problems in America’s public schools”, but it is precisely the federal government’s takeover of the nation’s educational system that is the reason for the continual decline. It is yet another failed legacy of the Carter years, signed into law as a cabinet-level department in 1979, it began operation in 1980.

The statistics all reveal a long period of educational decline and the SAT scores are just one more example, but there are other indices, not the least of which is a huge dropout rate that has left countless Americans ill-prepared for any meaningful employment.

Meanwhile, there has been a relentless effort to infuse textbooks with a national curriculum as the result of the concentration by the “big four” textbook publishers. It has produced a one-size-fits-all approach to education nationwide, mostly geared to the dictates of only three states, California, Texas, and Florida because they represent about 30 percent of the K-12 market.

In 2001 the trend was already noticeable. “The result is an increasing trend toward texts that are long on visual gimmicks, short on factual information, and homogenized in content,” said that president of the Center for Education Reform, Jeanne Allen.

The introduction of “No Child Left Behind” that George W. Bush signed into law on January 8, 2002 has proved to be yet another top-down mandate that relied heavily on testing, testing and testing. Rapidly, teachers began to “teach to the test” in order to avoid the loss of funding to their schools.

Simply put, the federal government should get out of the business of education.

The regressive role of teacher’s unions was spotlighted when the then-new Governor of New Jersey took them on, insisting that teacher’s pay more for their pension and health benefits. The unionizing of teachers is as responsible as the federal takeover of education in America for the decline.

Recently, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said, “I’m tired of giving out fake diplomas” when he introduced a slate of education reforms of his state. The SAT scores underwrite his view that students are graduating from high school without the education they need to move onto colleges and universities.

Gov. Christie wants to focus on individual schools rather than districts as a measurable unit of success or failure. He wants to emphasize “outcomes” such as graduation rates, achievement gains. He wants to measure success by high standards that directly correlate to college and career readiness. He wants considerably less bureaucratic paperwork that requires more administrators than teachers. And he wants a clearly defined schedule for intervention in schools that are experiencing persistent education failure.

Something is amiss when students entering kindergarten are expected to have mastered reading skills that are supposed to be taught in the next grades. When did it become the job of parents to deliver five-year-olds to the local school with skills already in place that are the job of the school to teach? Why do these same children graduate from high school with horrid reading and writing SAT scores?

The education of today’s students has to be returned to the control of local school boards and those boards have to be freed from the demands of teachers’ unions that are interested solely in health and pension benefits, and the salaries of administrators and teachers.

Failing that and America will continue to have another generation of students that, since the 1960s, have literally been cheated of a proper education, no matter how much money is thrown at it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Subversion of Education in America - A Four-Part Series (2001)

2011-09-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

The Subversion of Education in America: Lesson #1
By Alan Caruba

I’ll bet you think that the problems with our nation’s schools are a fairly recent phenomenon. Wrong. It dates backs to the 1960’s. Those that have implemented the subversion of our educational system have sought to fly well below the radar of public awareness, depending on stealth and duplicity to achieve the wreckage that has already stunted the lives of thousands who have passed through it.

In this and three other commentaries, I will walk you through the history of the problem with the help of an extraordinary book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. The facts I will share with you are found in a fat compendium of research by this former senior official with the US Department of Education who discovered the mother lode, copied it, and fled. She is one of America’s unsung heroes.

As Iserbyt points out, in the 1960’s "American education would henceforth concern itself with the importance of the group rather than with the importance of the individual." The purpose of education would shift to focus on the student’s emotional health, rather than academic learning. Remember the 1960’s? Sex, drugs and rock’n roll? Drop out, tune in, and turn on? Just about everything that is wrong with America today had its genesis in this pathetic decade of youthful self-indulgence."

In 1965, there were two major federal initiatives developed with funding from The Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed that year. One was the 1965-1969 Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program and the other was the publication by the government of "Pacesetters in Innovation", a 584-page catalogue of behavior modification programs to be used by the schools.

Let me repeat that: a catalogue of behavior modification programs! We’re not talking of programs to teach students anything. We are talking about programs to indoctrinate children passing through the system to believe in values contrary to those on which this nation was based.

In brief, the intention was to create a generation or two of Americans who would accept the United Nations, not the United States, as their new "nation", a global nation, one-world government. The last thing the conspirators wanted was a nation of individuals who could or would actually think for themselves. This is how we ended up with Bill Clinton, the classic student achiever of the 1960’s.

Iserbyt writes that, "In 1960, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Convention Against Discrimination was signed in Paris. This convention laid the groundwork for control of American education—both public and private—by UN agencies and agents."

Now connect the dots. In 1960, "Soviet Education Programs: Foundations, Curriculums, Teacher Preparation" was published under the auspices of the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was the blueprint for the US school-to-work restructuring that would take place and it would rely on the "Pavlovian conditioned reflex theory." The mastermind of mind control and conditioning was a psychologist, Dr. B.F. Skinner who was the guru of the mess that passes for education in America today.

Though hard to believe even now, the US adopted the Soviet Communist approach to education. In 1961, Rep. John M. Ashbrook tried to alert Congress to what was happening. Citing a document published by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare called "A Federal Education Agency for the Future, " he called the new education programs "a blueprint for complete domination and direction of our schools from Washington. Guess what? He was right.

That is why the educational reform this nation really needs is the complete elimination of the US Department of Education. It won’t happen. For the same reason we are now only learning that those "Red baiters" of the 1950’s were right to assert the Department of State was shot through with Communists, no one in 2001 is going to believe that the US Department of Education is modeled on Communist theories.

The Subversion of Education in America: Lesson #2
By Alan Caruba

Just how did education in America turn from being a system that imparts knowledge to one that uses behavior modification techniques to influence the attitudes and beliefs of those passing through it?

To achieve this, beginning in the 1960’s, the perpetrators of the subversion have employed deception to achieve their goals. Earlier this month, a New Jersey daily newspaper ran an editorial, "Let board members speak", noting that members of a local school board had been restricted from speaking to the press to avoid "confusion" about the board’s programs and objectives. "But this isn’t about ‘confusion’," said the editorial. "It’s about control", adding "And it is insulting to the public and the idea of open local government."

There is nothing "open" about the effort to subvert education in America. It only has that appearance because it takes place at presumably local school boards or in a state education department. Always, the vehicle is a governmental agency. The controlling player, however, is the US Department of Education.

The objective of those who control our educational systems has long been to produce poorly educated, little world citizens, ready to forego the liberties guaranteed by the oldest living Constitution. The system introduced into American schools mirrors the Soviet and Communist Chinese systems that produce a compliant and complacent population.

To achieve this, they have had to dumb-down the students passing through the system. On February 17^,2001, the Los Angeles Times reported that the president of the University of California "wants to eliminate the SAT as a requirement for admission to all eight of the university’s undergraduate campuses." What a great way to further dilute all standards for academic achievement!

In January 2001, the Times reported that the University of California kicked out 2,009 students, six percent of last year’s freshman class, for failing to master basic math and English skills in their first year of classes. These are skills that should have been mastered in their first twelve years in California schools! It means that the diplomas they received are worthless pieces of paper.

This pattern repeats itself from state to state because it is the educational system that is failing American students. The President’s emphasis on testing misses the point entirely!

In the January/February 2001 issue of The American Enterprise, devoted to why some few schools succeed while the majority fail, Karl Zinsmeister writes that "it’s extremely interesting how many common traits are shared by the successful schools we profile. A remarkably similar basic formula applies in almost all of these places: high demands on students, strict discipline, a strong and unapologetic moral component, including a respect for religion, an emphasis on teaching intellectual basics, a preference for time-tested books and curricula, clear standards of dress, grooming, and comportment, and an insistence on politeness, respect and courtesy."

Compare that to schools in your area where the way students dress is an offense to decorum, the language they use is replete with profanities, and their chief complaint is that they have too much homework.

President Bush has bought into the Education Establishment’s systematic stupification of students. He is not the first President to fall prey to this effort. To learn the facts, you must read The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt.

The President has proposed a five billion-dollar program to help children learn to read. Please! Please, please, will someone explain to me why spending even more money will answer the question of why our schools, soaking up billions a year, are NOT teaching this already?

One need only look at the realities of education in Texas to see why the call for national testing standards is a deception. An excellent article by Jerry Jesness in the November 2000 issue of Reason magazine blows away the hype about the test scores of Texas students. Despite apparent improvements, a closer look at the test scores of basic skills places young Texans in 39^th place for SAT scores.

In 1984, the State adopted the Texas Educational Assessment of Minimal Skills that established minimal standards for graduation. The result has been that a considerable amount of time is spent "teaching to the test" in schools throughout Texas. Students are taught strategies to pass the text. For example, the acquisition of real arithmetical skills is sacrificed to methods that include drawing and counting sticks! This is not progress and the test is, essentially, meaningless.

All this was foretold back in the 1970’s as the "educrats" continued their efforts to undermine the teaching of basic knowledge. In 1976, Catherine Barrett, then president of the National Education Association, gave a speech in which she said, "First, we will help all of our people understand that school is a concept and not a place. We will not confuse "schooling" with education. The school will be the community, the community the school." This predates Hillary Clinton’s "it takes a village" concept, but it reflects a communist view that all of society must be employed to form the views of students. Individualism is bad. Conforming to the group is good.

Barrett went on to say "We will need to recognize that so-called ‘basic skills’ which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one quarter of the present school day. The remaining time will be devoted to what is truly fundamental and basic---time for academic inquiry, time for students to develop their own interests, time for a dialogue between students and teachers…more than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values, a philosopher. Students will learn to write love letters and lab notes."

You may want to read this again. The then-head of the NEA was talking about turning the school day into one devoted to just about everything other than the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic. Teachers were, instead, to become "agents of change."

The change incorporated into today’s educational programs is intended to change the entire social structure of our society and the values that had made it great. Competition and achievement in the acquisition of basic knowledge and the skills to implement that knowledge are jettisoned in favor of changing attitudes about family, patriotism, religion, and sexuality. Look around you and ask yourself why we now except all forms of "families." Look around you and ask why we live in a cultural environment drenched with sexuality without responsibility. Ask yourself why millions fail to vote. Look at the way the expression of religious values is continually derided.

In 1972, Dr. Chester M. Pierce, MD, of Harvard University wrote an article entitled "Becoming Planetary Citizens: A Quest for Meaning" that appeared in the November issue of Childhood Education. He was concerned that children, by the age of five, "already have a lot of political attitudes", among which were "a tenacious loyalty to his country and its leader." What he wanted was a child who entered kindergarten "with the same kind of loyalty to the earth as to his homeland…"

This is a formula for degrading patriotism and loyalty to everything for which this nation stands in favor of creating citizens of the "global government" being pursued by the United Nations and the environmentalism that preaches against the use of the earth’s natural resources.

All throughout the 1970’s, the Federal government funded these goals. Local educational systems were taken over by programs designed to destroy local control. I do not want President Bush’s education proposals to succeed because they reflect the continued subversion of our nation’s schools by the Department of Education.

The process dates back to the 1960’s, continued through the 1970’s, and in the following discussion of education in America, we will see how they increased through the 1980’s.

The Subversion of Education in America: Lesson #3
By Alan Caruba

This will come as a surprise to you—everything about the nation’s educational system does—but Congress back in 1970 recognized that the federal government is supposed to have limited authority when it comes to education. An amended General Education Provisions Act specifically articulated a "Prohibition against Federal Control of Education.

It forbids the federal government from exercising any "direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration or personnel of any education institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system."

The loophole through which the subversion of our education system was accomplished was federal funding of "research" and "development."

By the 1980’s (see the previous two editions of Warning Signs for a look at the 1960’s and 1970’s by clicking on the Archives below) the effort to turn schools from places where students actually learn something to places where their values, beliefs, and cognitive skills were determined by "Outcome Based Education", behavior modification programs. The objective of these programs is to turn students in to little citizens of a one-world government where they are mere economic units, not individuals, nor people who give much thought to individual liberty.

Individual liberty was the reason the American Revolution was fought and is the philosophical basis for every word in the US Constitution. A generation or two of Americans who are systematically robbed of any knowledge of this are ripe for an authoritarian takeover.

The father of this movement is Prof. Benjamin Bloom and his book, "All Our Children learning." Published in 1981, it is the bible of OBE. In it he says, "The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students." No, the purpose of education is to provide students with a sufficient knowledge of basic skills in writing, reading, arithmetic, as well as history and the sciences. Thus prepared, they are likely to be the kind of citizens that will question efforts to deprive this nation of its sovereignty in favor of a world government run out of the United Nations.

It gets worse. Writing in The Effective School Report, Dr. Thomas A. Kelly, Ph.D., stated that "The brain should be used for processing, not storage." This is the view of education that says you prepare students to take a test determined by federal standards of what they should know. The student is merely to process predetermined bits and pieces of information. The best example of this is the rat’s maze where the rat learns to follow a specific path to get a piece of cheese.

This is a simplified explanation of why today’s children have difficulty acquiring and retaining a body of useful, long-term information such as multiplication tables or who the nation’s presidents have been, the 50 States of the Union, when the Civil War was fought, where India can be found on a map, the names of the earth’s oceans, et cetera!

The whole movement to utterly change the direction and purpose of our nation’s schools picked up momentum in the 1980’s and, sorry to say it, it occurred on Ronald Reagan’s watch. The harsh truth about the subversion of the nation’s schools has not been a Democratic or Republican program. It has occurred no matter who was in office or who controlled Congress. It happened because few politicians were paying any attention to what was really occurring over at the Department of Education.

In her book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America", Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt, says, "The real purpose of this project was to propose a radical redesign of the nation’s education system from one based on inputs to one based on outputs." It switched, in other words, from a curriculum of content a student was required to learn, to a series of answers the student was supposed to repeat when tested. Or as Iserbyt explains it, the system turned away "from one oriented toward the learning of academic content to one based on performance of selected skills, necessary for the implementation of school-to-work…" The schools, with direction from the DOE and grants from major foundations, as well as input from corporate leaders, were redesigned to produce workers.

Well, what’s so bad about that? We need workers. Ask anyone responsible for the management of any size organization, from a local bakery to a major corporation, what their primary problem is and they will tell you it’s finding good workers. That is to say, finding people with even the most basic education or skills to perform any job with a minimum of competency. That is the result of the education system that has been foisted on this nation.

Take away their pocket calculators and the newest generation of workers cannot add or subtract. Take away "spell check" on their computers and they are helpless to spell accurately. These are basic skills Americans used to learn in one-room schoolhouses heated with a wood-burning oven. They could also tell you the branches of the US government and a whole lot more than today’s graduates.

In the 1980’s the DOE says Iserbyt, "effectively transformed the essential character of the nation’s public schools from ‘teaching’---the most traditional and conservative role of schools---to ‘workforce training’---perceived as liberal and ‘progressive.’" It is a particular irony that one of Ronald Reagan’s campaign platforms was the abolishing of the Department of Education. He was right. He didn’t do it.

What, in fact, happened was that control of the schools and their curriculums increasing moved up the decision-making ladder away from local school boards and even state education departments. Administrators and teachers were delighted with this because it eliminated the "meddling" of locally elected and locally responsible school board members.

The instrument for this was the development of a "Course Goals Collection" completed by the DOE in 1980-81. "The collection consists of fourteen volumes with 15,000 goals covering every major subject taught in the public schools from K-12." Remember that 1970 prohibition on any federal government involvement in instruction? Nobody else did either.

In 1981, 70,000 copies were distributed, despite the fact that only approximately 16,000 school districts existed. And you wonder why every state now has the same goals? With remarkable success, Outcome-Based Education became the way American students were to be trained to believe the same things, have the same values, and to ignore those they were taught at home.

This is important because values are supposed to be the job of parents. Some parents are Catholic. Some parents are Protestant. Some are Jewish or Moslem. Some are liberal and some are conservative. Their values no longer seem to matter. That’s why there no longer is a moment of prayer in any school in America. That’s why the school day often does not begin with the salute to the flag or a recitation of a pledge of allegiance. Much of the day is spent "teaching to the test" whose standards were determined in Washington, D.C., not by the parents, not by the local school board, not by anyone you know!

How was this achieved? Because, according to a 1981 report by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, "Federal funds account for approximately ten percent of national expenditures on education. The Federal share of educational research and related activities, however, is ninety percent of the total national investment."

Thus, as Iserbyt notes in her book, "just about everything that goes on in the classrooms of American public schools, with the exception of salaries, school buildings, buses, and the purchase of equipment, is either a direct or indirect result of funding by the U.S. Department of Education—as research!"

It should come as no surprise that, by the end of the 1980’s, writing in the January 25, 1989 issue of Education Week, Chester E. Finn, Jr., the former head of the DOE’s research branch, would tell business leaders that he favored a "national curriculum." Flashback to the congressional prohibition on a curriculum determined at the federal level. Consider it null and void. The people in the DOE obviously did.

Little wonder, too, that in 1989, then-President George H. Bush unveiled "America 2000" (now known as "Goals 2000") to the National Governor’s Association that virtually set in concrete the whole behavior modification movement that has been foisted on the American education system.

That same year, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s Elementary Global Education Framework was announced. Its goals were to create "Human beings whose home is planet earth, who are citizens of a multicultural democratic society in an increasingly interconnected world, and who learn, care, think, choose, and act, to celebrate life on this planet, and to meet the global challenges confronting Humankind."

NO! We are talking about AMERICAN students going to AMERICAN schools in the sovereign nation of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. We are not sending kids to school to become citizens of the world, programmed to deal with global challenges, i.e., threats to the environment that require we all cut back on the use of energy or pick up the bill to bring developing nations up to speed. That is exactly the game plan of the United Nations and the worldwide conspiracy of socialists masquerading as environmentalists.

That is, however, what is going on in our schools TODAY. That’s why President George W. Bush’s proposal to throw $5 billion at those schools, presumably to teach a subject, reading, they should already be teaching, is a continuation of the same bad ideas that president’s since Eisenhower have been rubber-stamping. And then ignoring.

The Subversion of Education in America: Lesson #4
By Alan Caruba

I have lived my whole life in an affluent, suburban community in Northern New Jersey. When I attended its schools in the 1940’s and 1950s, the vast percentage of graduating seniors went onto college. Their parents had migrated from Newark during or just after WWII because the schools had an excellent reputation. Today, they are not much better than those of the inner city.

Here’s an excerpt from a letter to the editor in our local weekly. "I understand that our education officials have yet to detail for the public exactly what measures have been taken to ensure that a first-rate education will be provided for students." This stonewalling is endemic to education bureaucrats across the nation. He thinks he’s going to get an answer. He won’t.

"I was horrified to learn that 34 percent of the eighth grade students in (our) Middle School were found only partially proficient—the worst grouping—in the 2000 GEPA math section. Simply put, we rank 97^th out of 97 schools in this failing category. Further, this dreadful performance has been repeated over the past several years.

"As a homeowner and a taxpayer, I want to know how the district’s school budget increased from $5l million five years ago to $70 million today, a 37 percent increase over four years, during which time these poor test scores have not gotten measurably better and our last place ranking has not moved out of the cellar."

Throwing more and more money at our nation’s current education system is not the answer. The system is inherently flawed because it is not intended to provide a basic 3R’s education.

President Bush proposes to introduce a national educational standard and then test to it, but we already know American students are deficient in all the areas of knowledge the schools are supposed to be teaching. The tests today’s students take are more about their values than about any body of knowledge they have acquired. Today’s schools are not about educating students. They are about teaching attitudes and values.

If you have been reading my series over the past three commentaries in this series, you already know that the system has been designed to deliberately dumb down students.

The architects of this attack on our nation’s youth can be found in the US Department of Education. They have adopted psychological methods of conditioning and jettisoned the teaching of information and basic skills. It is called "Outcome-Based Education."

Today’s students, as opposed to their grandfather’s or even their father’s education, are being systematically conditioned to think in "global" terms about humanity, nations, religions, and, of course, the environment. They are conditioned to be citizens, not of the United States, but of the world. That’s what you need when you’re creating a socialist one-world governmental system and that is exactly what is occurring at the United Nations.

Today’s students are taught not to make value judgments about other nations, even if they are authoritarian dictatorships. They may not know where Brazil is on the map, but they "know" all the rain forests are disappearing. They don’t know when the Civil War took place or why, but they "know" that all the Founding Fathers were slave-owners. They also "know" that America’s history is one of destroying the native Indian nations, taking their land, and exploiting it with farms, mining, and the destruction of whole forests. They cannot tell you what the Bill of Rights is, but they "know" the US is the leading contributor of "greenhouse gases" to the atmosphere, thereby causing global warming. It is a full course of lies.

They haven’t a clue about the individualism, sacrifice, daring and innovation that made this nation great, nor its political system, and most certainly not its history.

As Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt writes in her book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, they aren’t being "taught the difference between free enterprise and planned economies, i.e., socialism; between ‘group thinking’ and individual freedom and responsibility."

By the 1990’s the decades of effort to overturn an education system that taught specific bodies of information and the skills to use them—arithmetic, spelling, history, civics, science—had effectively been transformed into today’s touchy-feely system. It is a place where a student’s feelings of self-esteem are more important than whether they actually know anything other than the specific answers to the test. Thus teachers now "teach to the test" (their paycheck depends on it) rather than provide a broader body of knowledge. It is a place where competition is discouraged as unfair to those less qualified for any reason. It is a place where socialist attitudes and values are the priority, not knowledge.

Given President George W. Bush’s enthusiasm for education that is "accountable" and "will leave no child behind", will it surprise anyone that the "America 2000 Plan", written in 1991, was presented to the American people by Lamar Alexander, the Secretary of Education serving his father, President George Herbert Walker Bush?

The "America 2000 Plan" proposed to radically restructure American society, beginning with its schools. It was intended to affect 110,00 public and private schools. When you’re trying to create good little socialists, you can’t afford to have anyone who is being taught to think independently or asked to incorporate moral and ethical values.

The "voucher" program exists to give the federal government control over private schools because, whoever pays the piper, chooses the tune. Schools that accept voucher students will soon find themselves required to accept federal education regulations as well.

Goals 2000 and School-to-Work programs introduced to transform our schools reflect what Iserbyt describes as "the internationalization of education with exchanges of data systems, curricula, methods, et cetera, all essential for the implementation of the international socialist management and control system being put in place right now."

Everything, including the SAT college entrance tests, has been degraded to mask the dumbing down those who are passing through our schools. Today’s SATs permit students to use electronic calculators, ask fewer questions in general and fewer multiple-choice math questions in particular. Reading passages now ask definitions from context and the formerly difficult antonym section, calling for linguistic and intellectual subtleties, has been dropped entirely.

My hometown’s parent who could not get any answers from his district’s school board could not know that this is repeated across America in school after school. Parents are routinely lied to. Worse, today’s parents are often required to put their child put on a regimen of Ritalin, a mind-altering drug. We’ve got seven million government-approved drug addicts going to school in drug-free zones!

To the individual parent, there seems to be no way to resist the juggernaut of a system that routinely turns out thousands of "educated" morons. Some choose to home-school their children. Others who can afford it send them to private schools. Still others shell out for after-school tutoring services. Why? Because the schools have been "restructured."

President Bush is not providing a solution. He is part of the problem. His father was part of the problem. Presidents going back to Eisenhower have been part of the problem because they failed to see that introducing Soviet-style educational methods—behavior modification to produce good little socialists--into American schools was destined to bring us to this point.

Education is not about national standards and national testing. It’s about individual schools in individual school districts, all answerable to their communities and to the parents of the children entrusted to them. It’s not about how the child feels, but about how well the child learns. There is pride in learning, but if there are no grades, how does anyone, parent, child or teacher know what, if anything, is being learned?

Congress will probably give President Bush the $5 billion he wants to throw away on failed reading programs, and money for the national educational standards and testing he wants. Previous Congresses have gone along, failing or refusing to see how the educational system has been corrupted. The Republican "Contract with America" and the campaign promise of Ronald Reagan to dismantle the Department of Education had it right. It didn’t happen. It is the only hope to reverse the damage and return schools to local control.

Sit down with your child and watch "Jeopardy" together. If neither you, nor your child knows the answer to anything other than the television or film questions, you’re in trouble. Now multiply that against an entire population of Americans who don’t know the answers either.

END

Permission to republish or reprint this series in whole or in part must be secured via email or other written communication from The National Anxiety Center (acaruba@aol.com) or 28 West Third Street, #1321, South Orange, NJ 07079.

The series is Copyrighted by Alan Caruba, 2001. Any use of the series, in whole or in part, must contain attribution to the author, The National Anxiety Center, West Third St., Apt 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079 and/or the Center’s URL, http://www.anxietycenter.com/.

The Enemies of Meat - A Four-Part Series

2011-09-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

All dates, unless otherwise specified, refer to events in 2008

This is a four-part series about the falsehoods regarding the consumption and production of beef. It will expose a classic “scare campaign” designed to influence public opinion and policy.

Demonizing Beef: Consider the Source

Back in 2005 I wrote a commentary, “The War on Meat”, because for a long time I had been aware of a propaganda campaign about beef that emanated from a variety of sources that included the animal rights loonies, a variety of dubious think tanks putting out “studies” about the horrors of eating meat, as well as other sources.

In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) issued a report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow” that was so full of absurd claims, dressed up to look like science, that I made a mental note to revisit the issue.

When, in early August, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) compared the murder and beheading of a 22-year-old on a Greyhound Bus by some deranged passenger, to “acts of cruelty and killing performed every day by the meat industry” it reminded me how divorced from reality PETA is and, at the same time, how consistent the attacks on beef production and consumption have been.

By late August, USA Today ran an article noting “Animal rights groups pick up momentum.” A spokesman for the Animal Agriculture Alliance, an organization that defends the livestock industry, noted that “Ultimately, their goal is to eliminate animals being used as food,” adding that, “There’s a real danger when we allow a very small minority of activists to dictate procedures that should be used to raise animals for food.”

The real twist to the issue of livestock production came with the FAO report because it equated the raising of beef worldwide with the inane claims of another United Nations agency, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That really got my attention because the IPCC has, in recent times, been thoroughly discredited by conferences and petitions of scientists worldwide who have examined its global warming claims and concluded that they are based on seriously and often deliberately flawed computer models.

In early September, The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based, non-partisan, independent think tank had also taken notice. In an article published in Environment & Climate News, it noted that “Global warming activists are putting agriculture firmly in their crosshairs, launching new efforts to restrict meat production and consumption.” Noting that “Global warming activists say keeping livestock at a farm uses too much energy,” the article cited the way “the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations attributed 18 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions to livestock.”

Never mind that the Pacific Research Institute reports that “Worldwide, livestock production provides livelihoods for 1.3 billion people, and particularly in developing countries livestock are also a source of renewable energy for farming activities, and a source of organic fertilizer.” So at least one-sixth of the world’s population benefits from raising livestock and, of course, meat’s many nutritional elements benefit consumers. As incomes have begun to rise in nations like China, the consumption of meat has risen as well.

As Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out, “I think this shows is that (global warming alarmism) is really about controlling people’s lives rather than saving the planet.”

Environmentalism has always depended on some form of alarmism and that is why the FAO report on livestock production requires a strong dose of truth to offset its many distortions. Let us begin with the assertion that global warming is occurring. It isn’t. The Earth has been cooling since 1998. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a miniscule element of the Earth’s atmosphere, barely 0.038%. Thus, to predicate an attack on livestock production because of global warming is to engage in the kind of boldfaced fraud we associate with Al Gore.

Curiously, there is relatively little overt criticism of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization despite the occasional passing notice of its abject failure to make a dent in the frequent problem of famines. Due to its vast bureaucracy the FAO has been known to stand by while people died, engaging in internal politics and favoritism.

One study, written in 1988, and released by the Heritage Foundation, took note of its chronic problems, reporting that it was created in 1945 “with the lofty aspiration of feeding the world’s hungry. It has not done so, despite at that time more than $8 billion in outlays.

“The sad fact is that the FAO has become essentially irrelevant in combating hunger. A bloated bureaucracy known for the mediocrity of its work and the inefficiency of its staff, the FAO in recent years has become increasingly politicized. As in the case of other U.N. agencies, the FAO is anti-Western and oblivious, even hostile, to the role of free enterprise in development. It embraces the collectivist ideology espoused by the radical leftist nations who now dominate U.N. proceedings.”

Not much has changed since the Heritage Foundation was first issued twenty years ago and today’s use of the FAO to lend credence to the discredited global warming hoax.

The issue at hand is whether free people in a nation founded on liberty will stand by and permit massive hoaxes like global warming or organized attacks on its thriving beef production industry determine what they will eat while undermining an important element of the nation’s economy.

In the second part of this series, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s assertions will be refuted with facts, most of which will come from agencies of the U.S. government.

As Part Two of my four-part series on beef production and consumption continues, we look at the way an animal rights group like PETA taps the global warming hoax to justify requiring everyone to accept a vegetarian diet.

PETA: Saving the Earth by Not Eating Meat

As the vast global warming hoax begins its inexorable death, an equally vast campaign against the raising of livestock and the consumption of meat continues, led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and supported by the propaganda machinery of the United Nations through its Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The assertion that the raising of livestock worldwide is contributing to “global warming” is so obviously absurd that one might easily and quickly dismiss it, but the fact remains that this continues to be the cornerstone of a campaign to end the consumption of beef by more than six billion people around the world.

Dating back to the pre-history of man, the eating of meat has been part of the human diet. In February 2005, I wrote about “The War on Meat”, noting that humans have twenty teeth devoted to eating meat, but only twelve for fruits and vegetables. Moreover, the human stomach is designed primarily to eat digest lean meat, while the small intestine, pancreas, and liver are mainly herbivorous, designed to digest vegetables, fruits, fats, and farinaceous (starch) foods.

However, if you go to the website of PETA, you will find a page titled “Meat and the Environment” that cites a 2006 FAO report that accuses the meat industry as “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”

Growers of livestock are accused of land degradation, climate change, and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and the loss of biodiversity. A number of environmental organizations such as the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and Environmental Defense, have joined in this Big Lie. Colluding with the United Nations agencies, their capacity to spread lies through the mass media and into our nation’s schools represents a threat to our health and our economy.

Little known to the public, however, is the fact that PETA which campaigns against the raising and processing of livestock for food, targeting restaurants, grocers, ranchers, and others, routinely kills animals, primarily pets, entrusted to their care. The same holds true for other allegedly “humane” organizations. In 2007 PETA killed over 19,200 dogs, cats, and other “companion animals.” Over the last five years, it killed more than 90% of the animals it took in. PETA receives nearly $30 million a year from people who think that it is working to protect animals.

The truth, however, is very different from the lies of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, an agency that receives very little scrutiny from the world’s press. Founded in 1945, the FAO was intended to contribute to expanding the world economy by promoting sustainable rural development with an emphasis on the poorest farmers, promoting food productions and self-reliance, and raising the level of nutrition of the world’s population. Fortunately for mankind, it has no mandatory powers and relies instead on the promulgation of bogus reports like “Livestock’s Long Shadow.”

The largely urban population of the United States cannot be expected to know how it is that an extraordinary variety of meat products are found daily in the nation’s supermarkets or enjoyed in its restaurants and fast food establishments. That job belongs to the more than 800,000 beef producers throughout the nation who provide a year-round supply of wholesome and nutritious beef at affordable prices.

Consumers have already begun to notice how the environmentally-inspired mandates to turn corn into ethanol, a fuel additive, have driven up the cost of beef and other food products. They have learned that Congress for thirty years has denied access to America’s vast reserves of oil and that its ethanol mandates have increased the cost of beef production along with the provision of affordable gasoline and all other petroleum products.

Today beef production technologies are based on sound science and are subject to strict government review. The safety factor of beef products is a modern marvel.

Charges that beef production is responsible for a score of threats to the environment is easily refuted when one considers that more than half the agricultural land in the United States is unsuitable for crop production and that grazing animals on this land more than doubles the land area that can be used to produce food in the United States. Rather than creating erosion, foraging animals such as cattle help stabilize the soil and promote expanded growth of grasses.

Despite this, United Nations agencies continue to urge policies that do nothing for the alleviation of hunger, but instead further an agenda for the socialist redistribution of wealth common to communist regimes. U.N. agencies have consistently sought to thwart the development of gene-slicing technology to enhance crop production along with the banning of pesticides and herbicides to protect crops, animals and humans.

Its ban on DDT has been called “tantamount to withholding antibodies from patients with infections; it is mass murder, and the U.N. is a co-conspirator in the deadly campaign against the chemical’s use.” Its charge that the Earth is warming when it is, in fact, cooling, is a pure deceit.

By contrast, a three-ounce serving of lean beef contributes less than 10% of calories to a 2,000-calorie daily diet while, at the same time, providing an excellent source of protein, zinc, vitamin B-12, selenium, and phosphorus, as well as being a good source of niacin, vitamin B-6, iron and riboflavin.

In essence, the campaign against beef production and consumption is a campaign against the health of all who enjoy its benefits and, along with efforts to curb all forms of energy use, constitutes an insidious war on the welfare of the world’s population and economy.

Part Three of the Center’s series on beef production and consumption takes a look at why eating beef is one of the best choices one can make for their health.

The Food Police have a ‘Beef’ with Beef

In August 2007, Claudia H. Deutsch of The New York Times wrote an article, “Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change.” Talk about grasping at straws!

This alleged science writer was apparently unaware that the Earth has been cooling since 1998, nor that a legion of scientists, climatologists and meteorologists, have been coming forth to blow great big holes in the global warming hoax.

“The biggest animal rights groups do not always overlap in their missions,” wrote Deutsch, “but now they have coalesced around a message that eating meat is worse for the environment than driving. They and smaller groups have started advertising campaigns that try to equate vegetarianism with curbing greenhouse gases.”

Deutsch quoted Matt A. Prescott, manager of vegan campaigns for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), as saying, “You just cannot be a meat-eating environmentalist.” The Humane Society got into the act as well. Deutsch cited a webpage that asserted that, “switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry”; a quote from Paul Shapiro, the senior director of the Society’s factory farming campaign.

Putting aside the fact that claims regarding carbon dioxide (CO2) increases have no impact on the warming of the Earth—they constitute 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere—such claims are so absurd they challenge credulity. They are, however, part and parcel of the general attacks on the production and consumption of beef.

Americans have grown accustomed to the “food police”, those groups that are forever warning them about eating just about anything. The cry is that Americans are suffering “an obesity epidemic.” Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has opined that Americans should eat like 18^th century serfs, dining “on perhaps a pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots a day.”

The abundance of a wide variety of nutritious and delicious beef and other meat items in supermarkets across the United States is a triumph of science and animal husbandry. Some 800,000 producers of beef not only feed Americans but contribute to the economy through their exports.

Through science-based improvements in breeding and animal nutrition, beef production in the United States per cow has increased from about 400 pounds in the mid-1960s to 585 pounds in 2005 according to industry statistics.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS), U.S. consumers spend a smaller percentage of their disposable income for food consumed at home (6.5%) than any other nation in the world. It has been Congressional mandates to convert corn—a major feed product for cattle—into ethanol that have driven up the cost of meat and other food products while reducing mileage and adding CO2 emissions.

Those who raise livestock for America’s dinner plates are also strong stewards of the land and more rightfully qualify to be called environmentalists than those seeking to convince people they are part of the bogus global warming hoax.

More than half the agricultural land in America is unsuitable for raising crops. Grazing cattle is an example of the responsible land management that has been in use for hundreds of years. In effect, grazing allows the use of the land while, at the same time, battling erosion, invasive plant species, and wildfires. It’s not just cattle grazing, it’s also proper environmental practices to protect water and encourage natural grasses.

Beef producers and farmers remain the targets of animal rights and environmental groups who consciously ignore the fact that food is required for human life while they focus on the energy required to produce it.

What cannot be denied are the health benefits of beef products. Not only to they provide the nutrients for energy, they do so with fewer calories, providing in addition a range of vitamins and minerals for a healthy lifestyle. This doesn’t stop the propagandists from claiming that meat is responsible for a variety of cancers and other alleged health threats.

The vegans will not tell you that diets rich in meat are a major factor in the regeneration of blood and in tissue repair. As a tissue builder, muscles and other elements, meat has no equal. Meat is easily digestible because the human body is designed to process it. The body literally requires less effort to convert meat than it does for fruits and vegetables!

The world is full of busy-bodies and scolds, many of whom are politicians who seek to expand the power of government by intruding into private and personal decisions about what people can eat. Why should some restaurants be required to provide caloric information about everything they serve? Why should some cities seek to restrict fast-food establishments? Why are you and I being treated like children or fools who are not responsible for what we eat, how much we eat, and where we eat?

Beef production has NOTHING to do with global warming because there is NO global warming. What warming occurred after the Little Ice Age ended in 1850 has been completely natural. So-called “greenhouse gas emissions” from animals, humans, or energy use, has no impact on the climate. For that you need to look at the Sun, the oceans, clouds, volcanic eruptions, and events well beyond the activities of mankind.

Hungry? Have a steak. Have a hamburger. Have some ribs. Eat some meat!

This fourth and final part of my series on beef production and consumption is a roundup of the many claims put forth to assert that the raising of livestock poses a threat to the planet and that people should stop eating meat. The general absurdity of these claims should be enough to dismiss them.

Absurd Claims About Meat

Over the years Americans and others around the world have been subjected to a barrage of such absurd claims about beef production and consumption that, in a rational world, they should be dismissed on sight.

With enough money and enough coordinated effort, we have witnessed how vast portions of the world’s population can be convinced, along with their elected leaders, that the Earth faces destruction because we drive cars, use air conditioning, and eat meat. In recent years, however, leading climatologists and meteorologists have spoken out against the global warming hoax and it too shall pass into history.

My interest in the many attacks on meat was spurred by the fact that I was raised in a family where dining well was enhanced by a mother, Rebecca Caruba, who was an internationally famed teacher of haute cuisine, a cookbook author, and an authority on wine. The many ways various meats, fish, and other delectable foods could be prepared made dinner in our home a stellar event every evening.

In 2005, Frank Murray, the author of many outstanding books on nutrition, sent me a copy of “You Must Eat Meat” that he co-authored with Max Ernest Jutte, MD. Murray, a senior editorial advisor for Let’s Live magazine, spelled out the many reasons why meat should be a vital part of everyone’s diet and health regimen. It dispels the many myths surrounding meat, drawing on medical data.

Let’s briefly examine recent claims about beef production and consumption. In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, linking the worldwide provision of meat in people’s diets to global warming, deforestation, land erosion, air and waterpollution, and a host of other “reasons” to drastically scale back the raising of livestock and the eating of meat.

It was and is a wholesale attack on a multi-billion dollar industry, critical to the economies of many nations and the health of millions of people.

The animal rights advocacy group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, (PETA) has long maintained a campaign against those who raise livestock and, of course, against the eating of meat. PETA is an aggressive vegetarian group fueled by an estimated annual budget $30 million that is famed for its outrageous promotional campaigns designed to gain media attention. The gap between their claims and the truth is vast. Other think tanks and allied groups aid in the dissemination of lies about eating meat.

Here’s what you need to know when you encounter the anti-meat propaganda:

Global warming. The only warming the Earth has encountered has been since the Little Ice Age ended in 1850. It has been completely natural and repeats the same cyclical warming periods. The claim that anthropogenic, man-made, warming has occurred due to the generation of “greenhouse gas” emissions—based entirely on flawed computer modeling by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—has been completely dismissed by thousands of climatologists and meteorologists, some of whom were advisors to the IPCC, but whose criticisms were ignored. Similar claims that the world’s livestock and other animal emissions contribute to a non-existent global warming are baseless. Fears surrounding carbon dioxide (CO2) have no basis in fact as this and other greenhouse gases constitute a very minor element of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Damage to the environment. Claims that the raising of livestock harms the environment—land, air and water—are equally without merit. More than half of the nation’s agricultural land is unsuitable to the growing of crops. By grazing cattle and other animals, the production of food products is doubled. Moreover, foraging animals such as cattle help stabilize the soil and promote the expanded growth of grasses. The nation’s 800,000 beef producers have avested interest in being good stewards of the land and engage in a number of programs that ensure that theirs and federal lands are properly managed. Their livelihood is closely connected to preserving a healthy, safe, and clean environment.

Eating meat threatens human health. This is surely the most scurrilous lie of all. This highly politicized claim is wrongly reflected in the nanny-state inventions of dietary guideless issued by government agencies. They are primarily devoted to issues of weight gain or loss, but people come in different shapes and sizes, and a one-size-fits-all approach to proper nutrition is absurd. A well-fed population is taller, has more energy, and is more immune to disease precisely ecause, in the case of meat, it receives more protein and a wide variety of life-enhancing vitamins and minerals. Naturally nutrient-rich foods like lean beef ensures that people receive more essential nutrients in fewer calories.

Cruelty to animals. Finally, let’s address the claims that livestock is subject to cruelty in the way they are raised and ultimately processed for food. Common sense suggests that poorly fed and maintained livestock produce fewer pounds per animal. The reality is that modern beef production is devoted to raising beef that yield more and leaner, fat-free meat than as recently as a decade ago. The technologies involved are subject to both sound science and strict government review that include public health veterinarian inspections and safe food handling requirements in restaurants, supermarkets, and in recommended practices by consumers. Humane practices are required by law from the ranch to the processing plant.

There is no doubt that the war on meat will continue because there are many people invested in the often absurd and frequently outrageous claims made regarding its production and consumption.

There is, however, no reason to avoid meat as a valuable element of one’s diet or denying oneself the pleasures we associate with the many ways it is prepared for our dinner table.

About the Center

2011-09-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

Alan Caruba, the founder of the Center, has been debunking science frauds and others since 1990 by providing the best, documented, and insightful commentary to as wide an audience as possible, including many mainstream publications that publish the commentaries.

Caruba has been a longtime contributor to many leading news and opinion websites that include Canada Free Press, CNS News, and Family Security Matters. His daily blog posts are routinely re-posted on dozens of comparable websites, blogs, forums and other Internet outlets, giving them a far-reaching national and international audience of readers.

His blog, "Warning Signs" and Facebook page are popular gathering places for fans of his commentaries. An updated list of the websites and blogs that post his writings can be found at Caruba Editorial Services. His monthly Internet report on new books is Bookviews and his popular media spoof, The Boring Institute, also has a blog.

Since purposefully raising fear and anxiety over various issues is the main weapon used by various special interest groups, the Center was named for this practice and exists to refute it.

It was apparent that decades of having been told the Earth was doomed due to global warming, that the nation’s forests were disappearing, that there was no place to put the garbage, that virtually every species was endangered, that drilling for oil or natural gas, or mining coal and other minerals was a danger, and that just about anything you ate, drank or breathed could kill you, too many Americans had fallen prey to these deceptions.

Through the Center, Caruba has responded with articles and news releases based on scientific data. Out of this early effort came the realization that the environmental movement—the Greens—had a political agenda that was international in scope. That it was, in fact, based on failed socialist economic theory and sought to impose a world government directed by the United Nations.

It became obvious, as well, that the United Nations, through its Environmental Programme, including its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was directing the many efforts to cripple the economies of capitalist nations by restricting their access to their own and other natural resources.

This was further supported by programs that were intended to restrict land use, attacking rancher’s grazing rights or the construction of any new housing or other facilities. Many of these programs are an attack on property rights, the keystone of capitalism.

Legislation such as the Endangered Species Act, the vast matrix of

U.S.

environmental laws, and through a myriad of international treaties, protocols, and conferences everything that can be done to slow or stop development of any kind has been undertaken.

Efforts to leave millions vulnerable to diseases can be seen in the

U.S.

and U.N. attacks on the use of pesticides such as DDT. This has contributed directly to the needless deaths of millions from Malaria and other insect and rodent-borne diseases. The World Health Organization, after three decades, has called for the use of DDT to fight Malaria.

The attacks on genetically modified food crops are yet another way to reduce the provision of vital grains and other food sources.

Caruba has become a popular guest on radio and television, and the Center receives media coverage throughout the year. He is available for speaking engagements.

The Center is highly dependent on donations to cover to the cost of operations. They are, however, not tax deductible.

The Center’s office is in South Orange, NJ 07079.