The crap that piles up in the Hall

Budding Journalist and former propaganda generator for Michele Bachmann, Torey Hall, is proving his mettle at the corporate funded wing-nut Accuracy in Media website by interviewing the one and only Myron Ebell on a matter of national importance: The use of inefficient and out of date lightbulb technology.

Myron Ebell would complain about the use of transistors and silicon chips in place of vacuum tubes if he could find an idiot to print it.

Torey writes:

Myron Ebell, Director of Freedom Action, has found that the U.S. government’s favor of incandescent light bulbs over normal bulbs is another broken idea with damaging side effects to American businesses and citizens.

Presumably he meant to write "compact flourescent bulbs" and imply to his readers that the old fashioned 6-times more inefficient incandescent bulbs are the "normal" kind, but the copy-editing at AiM is so poor they failed to pick this up.

We get more:

At the bloggers briefing at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Ebell said, "Cass Sunstein believes the government can regulate the rules a bit because they know what’s good for the people,"... The illogical thing about government-regulated light bulbs is that they are marketed in a way that tries to convince people that they are actually good for business and the economy. In fact the "economy is being regulated to death, which is why it’s not growing," Ebell explained... He went on to say that "The light bulb ban is an outrageous government limitation on consumer choices and it’s an intrusion into the home of every American."

Reviewing Torey's recent output, it seems he is going to quite a few of these crappy bloggers briefings where he learns the art of listening to complete unadulterated crap and printing it without the slightest degree of further research.

Like this one by the a right wing christian home-schooling group parentalrights.org engaged in a long running battle to keep the United States out of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The only other nation in the world not to ratify this treaty is Somalia.

Somalia has an excuse (they've got other problems). Their government is not willing to openly defend rights of parents to, for example, mutilate the genitalia of their daughters. But in America right wing groups are quite happy to defend the execution of children, physical assaults on children and religious home imprisonment of children in order to starve them of contact with the outside world.

The United States has managed to ratify the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. This too was brokered by the United Nations, which presumably means it's suspect and strangles the market with too much regulation.

Do you know how much money you can make from selling children? It's big bucks. A lot of poor desperate people can lift themselves out of poverty by selling their younger daughters.

I guess even Mr Hall would be able to see through his veil of ideology to feel a little bit queasy at the idea. Somehow there's less of a problem with the sale of children's future in terms of the prospects for survival in the future of a wrecked environment.

A video for your edutainment

How hot does it have to get?

Deborah Zabarenko of Reuters wrote an exemplary article about how the denial industry was dealing with the latest accounts of 2010 being the warmest year on record:

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a key proponent of this view. In a telephone interview, Ebell questioned NASA's climate data for the 1930s, which he said had been "monkeyed with" by scientists aiming to show anthropogenic climate warming.

As for data kept by the East Anglia Center for Climatic Research, Ebell said it had traditionally been considered better than statistics kept by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, but that the "climategate" scandal showed the CRU numbers were "such a mess" that they could not be relied upon. (Independent investigations reached a different conclusion.)

"I think we have a real problem now with the historical datasets," Ebell said. "I have more faith in the ones before global warming became the greatest cause of the day for these people and they adopted a political agenda and they've been twisting the scientific evidence to fit their story."

Ebell said large-scale weather patterns like El Nino/La Nina had more influence on recent temperatures than greenhouse emissions. He also questioned temperature readings from surface stations, saying many were improperly positioned and failed to take into account the "heat island" effect of major cities.

Our intrepid reporter unfortunately failed to draw Myron out about which particular numbers in which dataset he could point to as being fiddled, or if he was making this allegation up -- as an actual scientist would be able to do -- but we'll let that pass. At least we have an explanation for why he is wrong.

"It's not about the science," said Oreskes, whose book tracked scientists who questioned human-spurred global warming back to their previous opposition to curbing tobacco use. "It's about defending their ideological position; they attack anything that they fear could lead to more regulation of the marketplace."

Coerced inaction

Myron Ebell is claiming credit for an anti-science anti-life proposed piece of legislation introduced in the United States whorehouseSenate called

S.228 - A bill to preempt regulation of, action relating to, or consideration of greenhouse gases under Federal and common law on enactment of a Federal policy to mitigate climate change.

The claim comes curtesy of NoNewsNow.com a division of the American Family News Network, who's wannabe Godfather says:

"Congress has not spoken on global warming; Congress has not made a decision [on] how to deal with global warming and what the law should be," notes Freedom Action President Myron Ebell, whose organization supports the measure. "Senator Barrasso's bill, if enacted, would shut the door and say, 'You can't do this; Congress will decide how to deal with global warming.'"...

"We're talking here about policies that are going to destroy investment in this country in manufacturing...in new energy supplies and energy producing plants, and that will kill jobs," he warns.

Here's how it starts with a denial of science:



Meanwhile there's no trace of this activity on CEI's FreedomAction Website. Maybe Myron saving it for later. Right now there is some serious environment dispoiling to get on with, with the headline invitation for people to Defeat the Job-killing oil spill bill.

I can't right now find links to the legislation he is talking about. But it's good to know where he stands when it comes any questions about the environment, no matter how stark.