Myron the do-nothing bumbler

Welcome to the Myron Ebell Climate, your weakly lightning rod of hatred that is charged by the people in the future looking back in time at your pathetic antics.

After 36 hours of Waxman-Markey HR2454 footage and participation, Myron Ebell summed it up with this boring post in Human Extinction.com:

The committee debate did have its amusing moments. When Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) offered an amendment to take carbon dioxide off the list of pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act, Markey replied, "We might as well say that the Earth doesn't revolve around the sun or dinosaurs never roamed the Earth as say that carbon [dioxide] isn't a pollutant." Apparently, the gentleman from Massachusetts has been promoting global warming as a crisis for two decades without learning that carbon dioxide is a naturally-occurring trace gas without which life on Earth would not be possible.

Myron advises that the longer the final vote on the Bill can be delayed, the more it will lose its momentum to the contradictions within it (eg gifting the carbon coupons to the biggest polluters rather than selling them) and to his "energy tax" disinformation.

Myron is gleeful over this opinion survey commissioned by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (yes, the organization whose video footage the CEI used against their wishes in their claim that fat Americans cutting down on their energy use would cause Haitian villagers to lose their streetlights) that says people don't want their electricity bills to go up.

Well, what do you know?

The point is, the price can go up, but the electricity bill can remain the same because you use less of it. If everyone just pays more for the same, it's not working, and there's no point to it.

It's funny how Myron Ebell's understanding of market logic breaks down when there is an attempt to harness it towards combatting a now doubled threat to human survival (an important event if there was one). Clearly, higher energy prices should create a vibrant and innovative market in technologies which reduce energy consumption (eg smart appliances, more efficient refridgerators, new lightbulbs), and the excess profits could be invested in more efficient plants and energy infrastructure that's not old fashioned like burning coal.

That's what you would expect -- unless you are, like Myron, against using modern technology to avert serious disaster; in which case you throw everything you've got towards destructively picking apart any measure that works towards that end because you hate life as we know it.

The comments to his article do improve the flavour:

Formally Worried Independent, Florida - I say kill all the liberals, here is my logic.

Liberals claim humanity is the cause of global warming, which I don't believe in, but stay with me.

The more liberals get killed, slowing down or stopping their CO2 emmissions into the atmosphere, this ends their supposed global warming.

tc, hilliard - Waxman looks like a turd. A creepy, moustached pedophile turd.

Meanwhile, in other polling news, over 51% of Americans are either alarmed or concerned about global warming.

They want someone to do something.

But Myron is arguing for doing nothing. This is not very good. This is not going to work. And his rhetoric -- which is usually about misselling policies that benefit the rich as necessary to protect the poor -- can't deliver anything that is constructive.

He has got to go. Now!

Fuel standards and the ban on job exporting bankrupted GM?

Cause and effect are getting mixed up by this MSM
junk programme called The Kudlow Report on NBC where some tosswit shouts to the audience like a used car salesman to a deaf retiree whom he's trying to rip off.

Myron Ebell is running with his small cars kill theme, while Kudlow is running with the myth that only SUVs are profitable.

They both commit the direct and devious error of causality.

Throughout the Bush administration, there was no further fuel standards regulation, or limitation on how many jobs could be exported over-seas. And then the US automakers went bankrupt -- partly because there had been no regulation to prepare them for the inevitable changes in the market when fuel prices became high and the credit bubble burst.

Following this, new standards have been proposed, monumental bail-outs have occurred, and there is beginning to be some necessary regulation.

But you can lie to people that the latter events caused the former, can't you Myron and Kudlow. It's easy, once things get a little bit into the past to get the events out of order.

Oh yeah, the price of doing nothing is end of life as we know it.

Sweet dreams.

Transcript follows:

Ebell: The cars people are going to be given a choice are going to be smaller, have less performance, and they're going to be less safe than the current mix of cars that are on the market.

Kudlow: Blah blah car makers out of business due to prior fuel standards, blah union wages, therefore they're losing their shirt and the SUVs out to dinner and the consumers may not be buying it as well because they can't be making it profitable.

Hwang: This is good for consumers, good for America, save money with fuels.

Kudlow: What's the evidence for saving money on fuel?

Hwang: Talking points waffle, not able to process this total nonsense question.

Kudlow: Myron, I always thought free market and free enterprise stimulated schumpeterian innovation and entrepreneurship, so I'm not sure about how regulation stimulates that. Sounds a little like Government control. This 33% rate of return number from the White House, what do you think of that?

Ebell: Not much. I think you've got it right, Larry. Free markets and consumers making choices are what stimulates innovation and technological process. The fact is that the government has been stifling innovation through all of these regulations. We would be far ahead with renewable energy if we didn't have all these mandates and subsidies. These people become corporate welfare dependents.

Now we have General Motors and Chrysler are essentially government managed. If you think they were poorly managed under private ownership, wait till you see President Obama and NRDC start making the decisions for what kind of cars you're going to be able to drive.

Kudlow: Nobody's explained to me how they're going to make money on these cars, and that's the think I'm going to ask you. Will the government let GM make their parts in China? If they have to make them at home, they can't do it. Whereas their competitors, Honda, Nissan, they can do it overseas more cheaply.

Hwang: Firstly, I have to respond to the earlier points. What I just heard was completely counterfactual to the market place today, which is that for the last 20 years the government has failed. It has failed Detroit in setting higher standards unlike in other countries who have much better fuel economy, and they're delivering vehicles to the US market place that are much more competitive than the Detroit product.

Kudlow: But nobody is buying these cars.

Ebell: Can I respond? Toyota's pickups get poorer mileage than GM's pickups. The fact is they sell a lot of smaller cars which they produce at lower wages and lower production costs overseas. They can't compete in the big car market. Their cars are actually less efficient than the Americans ones.

Kudlow: Two fleet rule, imports, our car makers can't do that. These requirements for greener cars, we helped bankrupt them, did we not?

Hwang: I believe American workers can compete.

It's fairly hateful, I believe

The Tea Baggers channel KQNM AM 1550 broadcast a Rio Grande Foundation phone-in show with Myron Ebell on May 16.

It's got a question about what he thinks of the Myron Ebell Climate -- obviously he forgot to instruct the interviewer not to ask about that.

It's got a phone-in called who believes global warming is due to the magnetic poles flipping. Myron gently suggested people use the similarly false reason of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is much more complicated and not so immediately wrong.

Rough transcript follows:

Q: How do you describe CEI

Ebell: We're a fairly small non-profit non-partisan institute...

Q: I've noticed we have something in common. We've both worked for the National Taxpayer's union... [more drooling over his pathetic record]. You were called one of the six nationwide climate criminals by Greenpeace. That's quite an honour.

I didn't even notice this, but I was looking around on the internet. You have a blog set up to oppose you. Someone has set up a blog opposing you. The Myron Ebell Climate. Are you familiar with this?

Ebell: I've heard of it. I don't look at it. It's fairly hateful, I believe.

Q: Well, the thing that they wrote, this one wasn't too hateful. It was May 14. You're talking about this Waxman-Markey Bill which is now working it's way through Congress. You go through point-by-point that it's a tax. It's an indirect sneaky tax, but it's a tax. A tax on energy prices. And you talk about how it's going to impact the poor people, and on and on. And at first I thought you were just self-flagellating yourself, calling yourself a knuckle-brain, but then, oh, it's some other guy. That is a goal I think that all of us should have, such an impact on the public policy debate that people who hate us set up blogs directly to oppose what we're saying. So I think that says a lot for your level of impact on the public policy debate.

But I want to move on to this Waxman-Markey legislation. It's really the reason we're here... Why don't you tell us a little about this Bill and it's impact on New Mexico.

Ebell: Well, you know, Henry Waxman, who represents Beverley Hills, a very very wealthy district, is the chairman in the most powerful committee in the House... He has promised to have a Global Warming Bill out of his committee before next Friday... He released a draft in early April, and ever since then things have been going wrong.

It's a huge Bill... 932 pages. What it's got is a cap and trade system. Cap and trade means we'll cap the level of emissions, and every year the cap will go down. So every year the economy will have to use less oil, coal and natural gas and just do without energy or use just some more expensive alternative. And under the cap each company that produces coal, oil or natural gas will have a certain number of ration coupons. If some company is going down out of business, they will be able to sell their coupons to a more flourishing business to expand or use more energy. And so this is a very complicated rationing system that is designed to force consumers and manufacturers to pay higher prices for energy, and the way the Bill is turning out it's a way to reward a lot of special interests, big businesses that hope to get rich off of higher energy prices. In your state PNM hopes to make a bundle off this as they raise consumers electricity rates...

Q: The energy committee was the one Waxman was put on by Nancy Pelosi from John Dingle who was a Michigan Democrat...

Ebell: Wasman has been in since the Watergate class of 1974, but John Dingle has been in Congress since 1957. He replaced his father who diad suddenly. He's been in for 52 years. He's the guy who's responsible for putting together all the big regulatory bills: The Clean Water Act, The Clean Air Act, The Endangered Species Act. He's the guy who understands how to build coalitions, he believes in big government. He was supportive of global warming legislation. He was committed to putting it together, but President Obama told Pelosi that he would prefer to have Waxman as Chairman because Waxman is way to the left of Dingle, and he would prefer Waxman to be in charge of his two big policy initiatives: nationalizing healthcare, and nationalizing our energy industry.

Q: So, two good arguments for term limits. But that's a whole different show... The committee has an agreement on the legislation, right?

Ebell: There were hearing from mid to late April with all the big corporations that support global warming and hope to get rich off of energy rationing, and then it became apparent that there were not enough votes on the committee to pass the Bill, so they have been doing deals until yesterday on HR2454. The Bill now has give-aways to every special interest in the country. Utilities will get some of the rationing coupons for free. Some of the manufacturing industries will get some. Natural gas will get some... They're trying to pay off people in key districts. It's quite likely that every Republican will vote against this bill, and that means they can't lose more than 7 democrats, and there are 15 democrats that have problems because they represent districts that rely on energy production, or use a lot of energy...

Q: We've got Anne on the line.

Anne: A PBS program 4 years ago explained that according to ocean sediments that every thousand years the poles start to switch. And they have heard that the magnetic pole is often out in the middle of the Pacific... and this is why the polar ice-caps are melting. It is a natural cycle, and they are suppressing this information because the greed level is bottomless. Thank you for your work.

Q: Thank you Anne. There are a lot of reasons why the climate is changing. I haven't heard of that one in particular... Is this something you've heard, Myron?

Ebell: Let me generalize her point. There are a lot of cycles in terms of where the magnetic pole, there are cycles in sunspot activity, the ocean currents run in cycles.

For example there is this Pacific decadal oscillation that runs between 20 and 30 years. For the last 20 years it's been pushing more warm water up into the Arctic and places like Alaska have been warming up. That seems to have stopped in the last couple of years, and the PDO is entering it's low phase where it's not pushing water up. So if you look at the temperature of the world: from about 1975 to 1998 we had some warming, since 1998 the global average temperature is flat, it's declined slightly, though not statistically significant. We are now in a period of no warming at all and yet we're supposed to sign on to this legislation that will flip our economy and turn it inside out in order to save our society and economy from global warming.

It's a kind of crazy thing. The alleged problem seems to be going away and we're being asked to switch 85% of the energy we get from coal oil and natural gas and switch to things that cost 2, 3, 4, 5 times as much...

[A commercial break followed]

[I haven't got time for this crap]

Ebell: [More waffle about California failing its own emmissions targets how there's no longer any manufacturing in the state.] [This crap writes itself, going on about how ineffective all the regulation is, with all the work-arounds, etc]

California, because of all it's regulation, is going to go bankrupt in a few months.

[More bollocks about it harming poor people, and causing energy prices to skyrocket.]

There... That wasn't so hateful, was it Myron? All I'm doing is documenting the evidence to make sure you can't sink into anonymity when the apocalypse comes.

You, yes you, are responsible for the way the human race is failing to preserve itself. It doesn't matter what disconnected ideology you have persuaded yourself to believe. This has nothing to do with what reality is dishing up for us. A scientist tries to adjust his state of mind to account for the evidence and counter-evidence he or she can find. You, on the other hand, just run with some dangerously false concepts, and you don't care if it leads to extinction.

You can also believe that the existence of The Myron Ebell Climate is a sign of success if you want to. But it doesn't make it so. It's nothing more than a distinction which sets you apart from all your maliciously lying pals in the CEI. Like having a brain tumour, for example. That's all.

Tax tax tax tax tax

This Myron Ebell is going on like a broken record now. Here's his considered eight point refutation of the Waxman-Markey Bill:

• 1. It’s a tax.


• 2. It’s an indirect, hidden, sneaky tax, but it’s a tax.


• 3. It’s a tax on energy that will raise prices on energy and all goods and services that are produced with or use energy.


• 4. It’s a tax that will fall more heavily on poorer people because poorer people spend a higher percentage of their incomes on energy than do wealthier people.


• 5.It’s not a one-time or steady tax, but a tax that will cause energy prices to increase every year.


• 6. It’s a tax that will destroy jobs in energy-intensive industries, which are concentrated in the States that use coal for electricity.


• 7. It’s a tax that will raise energy prices more in States that depend on coal for electricity.


• 8. It’s a tax that will create perpetual economic stagnation.

So??? That's the point of it. Of course, a knuckle-brain like Myron can't tell the difference between a tax that is for raising revenue (like the income tax) and a tax that is intended to discourage use and raise funds to mitigate the damage (like cigarette and alchohol taxes -- these are substances that you shouldn't be encouraged to use and whose abuse results in great costs to the public funds).

Such distinctions are far too subtle for a complete simpleton.

Also, we could also note that claim 8 is false, unless we're talking about economic stagnation to the coal and oil industries (who pay Myron's salary so that he can harm us with his lies), and claim 4 is deceitful, because it doesn't count the poor who generally benefit from the spending of these taxes raised.

Taxes on heating fuel will go up, but the money can be used to pay for house insulations and thus reduce the demand. Why don't people save and invest in their own house insulation and reap the payback made from the savings in fuel costs? I don't know. They just don't. And that's one good example of many for why the so-called free market frequently doesn't work. If you're going to assume that consumers are all slick calculating machines capable of rationally assessing the cost benefit of each action they could do and taking responsibility, then you're living in a fantasy world.

But that's what you do, Myron. If people were intelligent and reasonable in all matters, then you wouldn't have a job, would you, because no one would be interested in letting you lie to them, would they?

Americans For Despair

Last year on 13 May 2008, Erik Telford of Americans for (oil company) Prosperity registered the noclimatetax.com domain.

Telford is the one who knows how to use the video camera and film his mates dressed as Fidel Castro at their pathetic crashing of the Michael Moore film in 2007 about the death dealing (but extremely profitable) US health care system.

Yesterday they achieved a coup (with regards to the Myron Ebell Climate) by obtaining a quote from Myron Ebell himself in their noclimatetax pledge:

Through the NoClimateTax.com Web site, thousands of activists from across America have asked members of Congress and state legislators to sign a written pledge committing them to oppose any efforts to use anti-global warming legislation as a vehicle to raise taxes.

"We're excited to have CEI, NTU, and IFL on board this important effort," said AFP Policy Director Phil Kerpen. "With these key allies helping promote the pledge to their members and directly with elected officials, we hope that a majority in Congress will commit in writing to take tax hikes off the table during discussion of what is supposed to be an environmental bill."

"The Competitive Enterprise Institute joins Americans for Prosperity in urging Members of Congress to sign the NoClimateTax.com pledge," said Myron Ebell, CEI's director of energy and global warming policy. "Cap and trade would be a huge indirect tax on the American people and probably the biggest tax increase in history. As President Obama rightly said, ‘electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.'"

Nothing new here. But we can see the devil spawn of FredC and MaryR Koch and other Koch Family Foundations whose revenue-making industries are Transforming Daily Life^TM funding the wide spread of astroturfing loons, having to converge into the so-called coalitions to make themselves appear formidable.

The No Climate Tax Pledge seems to work by mailing off a letter to every elected office holder with a fill-in-the-blanks bit, which says:

I, ______________________, pledge to the taxpayers of the state of _______________ and to the American people that I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue no matter what the consequences for the nation's long-term survival will be for taking this kind of blind rejectionist stance.

There's a fascinating database of Pledge Takers where you can see various signatories like this one which is a plain form with a witness signature, or this one which is a crappy card, or this one which is a big Tim Phillips fax. Each one is followed by a crappy press release with all the same words in the name of their fake local chapter.

That press release is from last year, but others are from more recent times. They don't have the web capabilities to give us, for example, a sign up graph. But I imagine they're steadily (on the Koch payroll) bringing in names with consistent work and possibly tactical campaign donations to get Republican morons to spare the few seconds to take this pledge.

Now with Myron Ebell on board, it should really take off.

My jet!

One of the biggest challenges for us in the oil and coal industry is preventing strong action on climate change.

It used to be easy: we ignored the problem, bought bigger and bigger private jets, and politicians always followed our lead.

Leaders are negotiating a binding global treaty to stop the climate crisis. They'll create millions of new jobs in a new cleaner economy.

My jet!

The real Exxon ads that have been blitzing the airwaves are fronted by people like Erik Oswald. I can't in-line the video, so you'll have to go here.

The world has two real large challenges right now.

One of them is to make sure we have energy to supply our economies, improve the standard of living for people all over the world.

And the second challenge is to be able to do that without harming the environment.

It's a massive amount of energy that's needed, and it's projected to grow over 30% over the next 25 years.

There's plenty of oil around for the future. The challenge is they're in more difficult places.

You have to make very large investments, and underlying it all, is technology.

ExxonMobil has developed breakthrough technology like R3M.

The Earth has electro-magnetic waves. With R3M listening devices you can make sense of those waves, which allows you to see deep below the Earth's surface before you've even drilled a well.

Drill baby drill, eh, you death-wishers

More highlights:

* "We invest for the long term so we know we are able to support growth that the economy needs.link

* "I think we are at a turning point in the history of energy. Energy use is projected to be 35% higher in 2030 than in 2005." link [And I thought "turning point" meant "change of direction"]

* "It's going to be oil and gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar. We're going to need them all." link

And the worst one:

To maintain energy security in this country, we need all sources: alternative energies, solar, wind, and there are vast resources of oil and natural gas here in the US that are untapped.

We're able now to access oil and gas a mile down and seven miles out. We can do this safely. We can do it in an environmentally friendly way, and provide enough energy to fuel fifty million cars and a hundred million homes for 25 years.

... and then it won't frigging matter will it? It'll be 30 years too late and you will have encoded three more decades of living the high-life into the memories of your rotting carcass of a brain.

At least it's good to see the daddy coming out and doing lying PR work and showing what they're really about, instead of hiring poxy bone-heads like Myron Ebell to lie for them.

It's an improvement. Exxon are having to pay for these TV slots, instead of the so-called news sections bringing in Myron Ebell for free and making out that he was some kind of voice of reason.

Unless the money going into the TV network's coffers from these ads are a method to buy out their editorial line. The whole political/information system is corrupt to the core like a suicide cult. This species deserves what it gets in the future of its own choosing.

Wankers!

At least in the UK where public opinion doesn't make a difference, this lying crap was kept off the air.