The Myron Ebell Climate

Same old same old Myron the death merchant

2011-10-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell has found his love-child Presidential Nominee in the form of Rick Perry:

Perry as President promises to:
increase oil and gas production quickly and substantially on federal lands and offshore areas;
block or repeal all the Obama Administration’s new Clean Air Act regulations, including regulation of greenhouse gas emissions;
radically downsize the Environmental Protection Agency and turn local environmental issues over to the States;
stop allowing environmental law to be made by settling lawsuits with environmental pressure groups with consent decrees; and
eliminate all federal energy mandates and subsidies.
Perry claims that his plan will provide a major boost to economic growth and create 1.2 million new jobs. Looking over the plan, my guess is that 1.2 million jobs is a lowball figure if his proposals were fully implemented.

My oh my.

You have to get to the point where if the power elite of the United States of Amnesia wants to napalm their own nation, then fine. It's a shame we have to smell it and die off in the same ecosystem, but justice is harsh.

Who really cares if yanks are so supine they just let drilling companies contaminate their drinking water without a real fight?

You think I'm joking?

Look.

Myron also included some further gloating in his weekly stinkletter (after the usual Solyndra section) about Republican congress voting against some environmental regulation long in the making, but which they are too dumb to understand:

The House of Representatives voted 275 to 142 on 13th October to suspend implementation of the Boiler MACT (for Maximum Available Control Technology) Rule. The House approved a similar measure to block the Cement MACT Rule last week on a 262-161 vote.

Here is a lobbying video about the vote.

I mean, does anyone down there ever wonder what these regulations were about?

They were about reducing the emissions of mercury and other neuro-toxins into the air you breath in, absorb and cause damage to your brain. But that doesn't matter, because their brains are quite damaged already.

Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Of course, we don't ever count the jobs that come from deploying this Available Technology, do we?

That's because those jobs don't make money for the concrete company owners. Better for people to get sick, so that the medical company executives can make money from people's misery and disease.

Yoou guys have less self-awareness than a nest of rats.

Dead county register

2011-10-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

As the nation's favourite news-clown proclaimed: The Obama scandal that you have been waiting for is here

Myron Ebell is, of course, on the case.

This from 22 September from the Orange County Register:

"One is a particular scandal involving this particular company and loan guarantee. That's very juicy and embarrassing to President Obama." He said it has been revealed that the U.S. Department of Energy had a "simple model showing Solyndra would run out of money in September 2009. They knew that before the loan was made." And that's just what happened.

From Jacksonville news on 26 September:

There are two things going on in this scandal, according to Myron Ebell, director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. “One is a particular scandal involving this particular company and loan guarantee. That’s very juicy and embarrassing to President Obama.”

He said it has been revealed that the U.S. Department of Energy had a “simple model showing Solyndra would run out of money in September 2009. They knew that before the loan was made.” And that’s just what happened.

Further, it goes on with complete lack of logic:

Ebell also pointed to how, despite the government aid, U.S. companies still are lagging far behind [Comunist] Chinese producers of solar panels. One reason is lower Chinese labor costs. Another is that China still predominantly relies on coal-fired electricity plants.

In all his years, Myron has never had a problem with the huge turkeys funded by the Pentagon, like the $11billion crusader gun which was cancelled because it drove like a cow. That kind of spending on death machines that can never create any wealth.

Myron only hates spending on useful things, like green technologies. The one thing that would have really made him hate the Solyndra investment would be if it had worked and threatened his heart-warming ambition for the coal industry to kill as many of us as possible in the future.

That's quite a Wallop

2011-09-23T03:37:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell has penned an obituary for his former employer and member of the British upper class, Senator Wallop of Wyoming.

Funnily enough, Myron doesn't mention his teamwork with another famous member of the Wyoming delegation, Dick Cheney, whom he went to the extreme reaches of extremism on while in Congress.

Instead, what we have is the usual Washington insider bitching and gaming that would be laughable if it didn't have such deadly consequences.

... When it became known that I was one of a small group working to reveal that Speaker Gingrich was a committed environmentalist and the only obstacle blocking House passage of a bill to reform the Endangered Species Act, the Speaker’s office tried to get me fired. My executive director told them to get lost, and Malcolm immediately wanted to telephone Gingrich personally to put it a little more bluntly.

Myron got on the payroll due to his anti-environmental activity:

It was through my work on environmental and natural resource issues that I first got to know Malcolm and eventually came to work for him as policy director at Frontiers of Freedom. I too had grown up on a ranch in the rural West and had the same kind of first-hand experiences that he had of the disastrous management of our federal lands.

By "disastrous management", I don't think he's referring to, shall we say, "disasters" like an Exxon oil pipeline spewing oil all over people's property.

What he really means is the disaster when a rich businessman cannot rip all the resources out of the ground to make money now, now, NOW!

Then there's the incoherent anti-communist drivel, like so:

Malcolm often said that if government ownership of land and natural resources was the best way to protect the environment, then we should have found a Garden of Eden in the Soviet Union after the Iron Curtain came down. Instead, there was one environmental horror story after another.

You'd think it would matter whether the government is democratic or a dictatorship, wouldn't you?

But you're not going to get clear thinking from a character who takes credit for Ronald Reagan's huge anti-missile project, which remains a total boondoggle from start to finish that has never worked, will never work, and could never work.

It breaks my heart to think of how much we could have done with all that wasted engineering and time. How can a country be run by such morons?

There are many characters who leave the world in a worst place for having done their life's work. And Myron Ebell will always be friends with those kinds of people.

Where were you when the oil spilled?

2011-07-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

ExxonMobil's pipeline carrying oil from the dirty tar sands in Canada burst and is leaking into the Yellowstone river, ruining lots of country folk and rancher's PROPERTY.

Guess which dim whore who claims to defend PROPERTY RIGHTS from meddling environment regulation doesn't give a rat's ass about actual environmental devastation to PROPERTY?

Instead, here's what Myron Ebell is spending his precious press exposure banging on about:

"The government has taken upon itself to decide what people should buy," said Myron Ebell, head of Freedom Action, an activist group he described as "hardcore free market."

Ebell's group has been circulating a petition online that he said has garnered tens of thousands of signatures. Many of those who've signed have written their legislators urging an end to the ban...

Most of those who want to overturn the ban do not believe in global warming, despite the consensus among the scientific community.

"The evidence that the earth is warming up just isn't there," said Ebell. "It can't possibly be a crisis."

And the evidence that the richest corporation in history cuts corners and destroys many people's PROPERY just isn't there.

Can we have a brainwashing ban?

2011-03-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

Jason Mattera on Human Events has a piece against the US governments Great Outdoors Initiative intended to help millions of young Americans reconnect with our natural and cultural heritage.

According to Mattera and his friend Myron Ebell, the only thing the Great Outdoors is good for is mining, drilling and polluting. Anything else is nothing more than a brainwashing boot camp and land power-grab.

Myron continues:

The Obama administration’s America’s Great Outdoors Initiative is another attempt to expand public land ownership, waste taxpayer dollars, and indoctrinate young people in the belief that more government ownership and control is better for our environment...

Creating a conservation corps may make people feel good that the federal government is helping to provide employment for unemployed young people, but it would do much better to provide economic conditions so that private investors could create real jobs.

[The] unfortunate effects of the program [will be a] larger constituency that supports the federal land agencies, just as the Peace Corps has created a constituency for useless federal aid programs to poor countries.

Yadda yadda yadda yadda. We need more ignorance to do our evil work.

The fact is there's a difference between brainwashing and education. Education enriches and improves your life and the way you live, while brainwashing uses lies and false information to make you behave in ways that are harmful to you.

Speaking of which, the billionaire Steve Forbes suddenly seems to care about Mercury poisoning when it comes to phasing out old and inefficient technologies in the lighting department. Technological progress he does not want. He gets Myron Ebell to fill him in on the bollocks:

Cost savings are exaggerated. First, the [new] bulbs are tested under ideal conditions. Some household uses approximate these ideal conditions. Most do not. For example, if you turn a light on and off a lot, such as a bathroom light, you will save very little electricity because CFLs use a lot of electricity to start up. Second, CFLs tend not to last as long as advertised. Therefore, you end up replacing CFLs before they have achieved the savings needed to make up the [cost] difference [of the old-fashioned bulb].

Media Matters has covered this story. Turns out that every single allegation made in it is wrong or no longer accurate due to advances in technology.

As usual, if you want to know what's right, it's always the exact opposite of what the mass extinction engine known as Myron Ebell says.

Why don't you frack-off, Myron

2011-03-22T18:26:00.000-07:00

The strain of decorating his crappy blogposts with images each day has taken its toll, to the extent that Myron Ebell is having to put up flagrantly photoshopped images of the characters he seeks to smear.

The story, as lame as can be, refers to the following two-line paragraph in a morning roundup page that is evidently sponsored by "America’s Natural Gas Alliance"

ME WONDERS WHAT VAN JONES THINKS ABOUT THE ARTICLE – @VanJones68: “At least until public learns that fracking poisons H2O!”

Myron managed to pad this out to nine pointless paragraphs with a fake photo without linking to the tweet it was all about.

This is seriously pathetic.

Myron's yesterday offering was decorated with a map of Washington DC ringed by its glorious beltway road. There's only so many times you can use that graphic. Maybe it'll go on. This man is staggeringly uncreative. It takes 3 years to come up with a new idea.

In the piece he continuies to drool over the progress of a bill asserting the US Congress's power to forbid any air pollution law enforcement throughout the country. This is the same tactic as in the past, going against the power of the California Air Resources Board to regulate emissions in their state, because only the Congress has the power to raise fuel efficiency standards -- or to not raise them at all, as dictated by its corporate owners.

And in the crap before that he is complaining about the lack of dumping of nuclear waste, and how it continues to be temporarily stored on site at the power stations that created the mess. You see, the Japanese earth-quake proves how dangerous it is to keep this spent material on location. But not as dangerous as when it is actually in the reactor, eh?

It's the routine dishonesty that is all part of the Ebell's daily work. Here is a photoshopped image of Myron I did a few years back. I think it is quite flattering.

Inside the bum's way

2011-03-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell has returned to the CEI's globalwarming.org web-waves with a couple of posts on a newly revamped front page (which cunningly avoids any photos of retrieting glaciers) about the machinations in Congress. The new Republican majority is causing him to wet his pants with glee as it attempts to scrub out any and all programs to make this world a less dirty and dangerous place for humans to survive in.

He begins:

The House of Representatives took the first step on Thursday toward reclaiming its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

This is, of course, a lie. The House of Representatives has always had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. What Ebell actually craves is for it to claim the power to block every other institution in the country from performing the necessary functions required to promote the survival of the nation and the human species at large from environmental catastrophe.

Not all of us are blessed with the idiotic faith of the new chairman of the Energy Subcommittee on Energy and Power, John Shimkus, who can be seen here claiming that, according to the infallible word of god, "As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease."

Anyways, back to Myron, who drivels on for the rest of his piece:

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) chimed in that he was worried the Republicans would try to repeal the law of gravity. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) instead thought that Republicans were trying to repeal the first law of thermodynamics and cause children all over the world to get asthma... Preventing asthma is now the principal reason brought forward by the global warming alarmists in Congress to cripple the U. S. economy with energy-rationing regulations.

He goes on to claim that global warming is good for asthma, following an internet search that required the usual filtering out of all things authentically scientific.

Myron's second piece concerns some further congressional machinations over getting this inaction-forcing law through the senate.

Interestingly, he links to this article which concludes with a for and against section:

The Upton bill has drawn fire from environmentalists and public health advocates, including the American Lung Association.

The measure has been praised by the oil and gas industry, including refiners and the American Petroleum Institute.

So that's where he got his rant about asthma and showed off how much more he knew about the effects than the experts concerned.

Would you take advice from Doctor M. Ebell?

Not if you wanted to be able to take measures to live.

We're god's hands now.

And guess what: god doesn't have any hands anyway.

The crap that piles up in the Hall

2011-02-25T06:45:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-02-12T14:47:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-05T01:38:00.000-08:00

Myron Ebell is claiming credit for an anti-science anti-life proposed piece of legislation introduced in the United States ~~whorehouse~~Senate 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.

Gissa job

2011-01-14T16:46:00.001-08:00

A new person has joined the Linked-in community:

Hope his education field gets filled out more, as his bio at the CEI says:

A native of Baker County, Oregon, Mr. Ebell holds a B.A. from Colorado College and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. He also did graduate work at the University of California at San Diego and at Peterhouse, Cambridge University.

With one connection so far, he has a lot to catch up to Iain Murray's 368 connections. Iain is also interested in career opportunities, and he actually did get educated at an Oxbridge university before taking his talents in malicious political disinformation overseas to a country that is so uncivilized it is willing to reward people for this crap. Good riddance!

The only career move for any of these guys in the CEI to take is to follow in the steps of Wendell Potter and stand up for the truth about their history of lies.

Sadly there is no evidence that any of them has the slightest conscience. Even the ones with children.

And now, in French

2011-01-02T05:02:00.000-08:00

Don't look above your toes

2011-01-02T03:17:00.000-08:00

Former Prince of Darkness hack, now writing for advisers to Dick Cheney, young reporter Amanda Carey has penned a piece called Severe winter weather caused by global warming?:

As Colorado braces for epic snowfall, Great Britain literally comes to a halt because of record blizzards, and the whole northern hemisphere enters what is predicted to be an especially harsh winter, some climate change experts are blaming the cold spell on global warming.

Earlier this month, the website reportingclimatescience.com reported that warmer temperatures in the Arctic actually cause colder temperatures everywhere else.

"The Atlantic pressure system that controls the gateway that allows cold northern air to flow south into Europe has been stuck in the same 'open' position for a record 14 months, while the Arctic pressure system is amplifying the effect by driving even more cold air south," the website reported.

According to the theory, as cold air leaves the Arctic and the polar bears scramble to find the few remaining ice caps, that cold air hovers over Europe and the U.S. According to the report, the same phenomenon occurred in 1942, a phenomenon that, coincidentally, helped the Soviet Union repel the Nazi invasion.

Always good to bring Nazis into the story. That shows that the cold weather is God's work.

There follows some boring stuff about the North Atlantic Oscillation which is a weather system that determines where the boundary of cold and warm air lies, which varies from year to year (ie it oscillates).

In other words, the severity of the winter climate doesn't change, but the exact centre and boundaries of the winter patch varies.

Kind of like standing at the edge of the sea with the tide and waves sometimes washing across your toes; if you don't look up you will never see what is going on.

And when what is going on out there in reality is inconsistent with your rank ideology, call Myron Ebell to keep your mind focussed on the lies:

"They make this stuff up as they go along," said Myron Ebell, director of the Center of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "If this theory is true, a necessary consequence is that there will be less severe winter storms because arctic air masses will not be as cold.

According to Ebell, if the Arctic was getting warmer, the air rushing south would also be warm. This would reduce the difference between the two meeting pressure systems, leading to less severe winter weather. This hasn’t happened.

I can't believe Ms Carey bothered to print that.

Is Myron Ebell saying that he will not accept that the North Pole has experienced dramatic warming until he can stand outside in a T-shirt, and not go: "Brrr, it's cold out here"? How much sea ice has got to melt?

That's really stupid.

Ms Carey also phoned up some dipstick know-nothing at the Cato institute for his comment on climate models not being all that accurate.

But here is a comment from an actual climate scientist from earlier this year about the accuracy of climate models:

"While the emerging impact of greenhouse gases is an important factor in the changing Arctic, what was not fully recognised until now is that a combination of an unusual warm period due to natural variability, loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage and changing wind patterns working together has disrupted the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system, resulting in greater ice loss than earlier climate models predicted," says Dr Overland.

"The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic," he says.

The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. This is known as Arctic amplification - a much debated phenomenon at the IPY-OSC, where 2400 polar scientists have gathered to discuss the huge amount of research and new findings which are the direct result of the International Polar Year.

The changes are happening a great deal faster than the scientific community expected. Given the recent reduction of the area of multi-year sea ice and reduced ice thickness, it is unlikely that the Arctic can return to its previous condition.

"The changes are irreversible," says Dr Overland.

Does that scare you yet, Ms Carey?

No, it probably doesn't. All she's looking forward to is bleaching her hair blond and getting a job at Fox News Bubble in order to spew out lethal propaganda 24/7 fed to her by the likes of Myron Ebell.

What would Myron buy?

2010-12-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

Another year another United Nations Climate Change conference, this time in Mexico.

The silence from Myron Ebell is uncanny.

He has still received no gifts from his place on the Freedom Action Network, that lame CEI offshoot which tried desperately to market itself to the corporate money supply that pays for other (cough cough) grassroots organizations, like FreedomWorks· The team still has at its core the same set of CEI stallwarts Myron Ebell, Julie Walsh, Sam Kazman, Fred Smith, Sam Kazman, and looks like a failure.

The latest blogpost there to bring Xmas cheer to the world is by CEI-er Hans Bader is a screed about how unemployment benefits keep people from working, and how the economic stimulus spending destroys jobs. Way to go, Mr Bader. If poverty is good for the economy, maybe we would be better without a good economy -- at least by your measure of what is a good economy.

These fake political front groups, like the CEI, need to inflate themselves, so it is always possible that Myron has already been laid off. If so, one hopes he is enjoying his unemployment benefits, which you are entitled to -- even if your job for the past ten years has been fighting for the destruction of such expressions of civilization.

In any case, we leave you with some Christmas cheer:

The sheep look up

2010-12-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

The Republican Party apparatchik, Myron Ebell, who is a living lie every time he is described as being employed by a "non-partisan public policy group" outlines his plan for bringing misery, death and poison to millions of Americans:

The 2009 stimulus plan has done little besides pile up national debt, and a further stimulus would be equally useless. The fact is that the U.S. economy is going to struggle as long as the Obama administration keeps piling on new regulations that are strangling investment.

The environmental and energy regulations are the worst. They include
EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act,

the forthcoming SOX-NOX transport and ozone rules to shut down coal-fired power plants,

the arbitrary use of the Clean Water Act to stop surface coal mining in central Appalachia,

the de facto moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration,

the boiler MACT rule, the coal ash rule,

the cooling water intake structures rule,

the delay in approving the pipeline from the Alberta oil sands,

the cancellation of oil exploration leases on federal land in the Rocky Mountains, and

higher fuel efficiency standards for cars, pickups and SUVs, and heavy-duty trucks.

The administration is also rushing to develop regulations to limit natural gas production using hydraulic fracturing.

Myron just loves the smell of toxic pollution in the morning.

No regulation. Never. Any. Good.

Except last May when Myron spoke of the need for more scrutiny of the industry and regulations.

I guess it's quite easy to forget that event if you don't actually live on the shores of the Gulf and don't detect the diseases and cancers that are brewing.

Myron concludes with his extinct support for technological retreat back to the 20th century:

The Obama administration with strong support from the Democratic leadership in Congress is engaged in a multi-front war on coal, oil, and natural gas. At the same time, it is wasting tens of billions of dollars on dead-end renewables that raise energy prices. Taken together, the Obama administration is making consumers poorer and pricing U.S. manufacturing out of existence.

That is why investment capital is fleeing the U.S. There are undoubtedly many people who would like to invest in the American economy, but who in their right mind would take a chance that the Obama administration’s regulatory strangulation is going to be reversed. The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives faces an enormous challenge to limit and undo the damage done by President Obama to America’s long-term economic prospects.

To balance Mr Ebell's awesome fear and ignorance, it's necessary to include the contribution from Dean Baker, the man who knows the numbers and recognized the 6 trillion dollar property bubble when no one else bothered:

The stimulus has performed pretty much as projected. It created 2-3 million jobs and lowered the unemployment rate by between 1-2 percentage points. It also is coming to an end.

I'm not sure why anyone would have expected it to offset a downturn of this magnitude. The collapse of the housing bubble and the bubble in non-residential real estate cost us about $600 billion in annual construction demand. The loss of more than $6 trillion in housing wealth and an equal amount of stock wealth led to a drop in annual consumption of around $600 billion.

Pulling out technical fixes (the alternative minimum tax) and money to be spent in later years, the stimulus came to about $300 billion a year for 2009 and 2010. This was offset by declines in state and local government spending of around $150 billion a year, leaving a net government stimulus of around $150 billion a year.

Outside of Washington, it is not hard to understand that $150 billion in stimulus from the government sector cannot offset a $1.2 trillion loss in demand from the private sector. Unfortunately the reporters who cover economic policy aren't very good with arithmetic so they somehow can't get this.

Ram this up your Key-hole

2010-12-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

You don't call yourself "For Fairness, Balance and Accuracy in News Reporting" and then quote a nonsensical piece of scaremongering by Myron Ebell, like this:

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute [said] "As a candidate President Obama promised to work to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But the Obama Administration’s announcement of a moratorium on offshore drilling in the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf is only the latest in a string of policies designed to make us more dependent on foreign oil by reducing domestic production. President Obama is dishonestly pursuing policies that are the opposite of what he promised and that are against America’s economic interests and opposed by a strong majority of Americans. The United States is the only country in the world with potential major offshore oil resources that is not actively exploiting them. The Obama Administration has decided that it is better for Cuba to bring in China, Russia, and Venezuela to drill a few miles off the Florida Keys than to allow American companies to drill in American waters."

Oh, I get it. All oil anywhere in the world belongs to the United States -- even if it happens to be under someone else's territory. Maybe if the US put a bit more effort into the thousands of its own wells it already has there wouldn't be so much spillage.

Maybe if you hadn't spent so much time invading Iraq, you could have pulled off your coup d'etat in Venezuala in 2002 and completely starved Cuba into submission with that blockade.

The man who thinks Ebell deserves more exposure and is Editor of the ridiculously named Accuracy in Media Report is Cliff Kincaid, who has appeared on...

The Today Show, Hannity & Colmes, The O’Reilly Factor, The CBS Evening News, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and The Glenn Beck Show. He holds a B.A. in Journalism and Communications from the University of Toledo and previously wrote for Human Events, Oliver North’s Freedom Alliance, and served as a guest co-host on CNN’s Crossfire. Mr. Kincaid is also founder and president of America’s Survival (http://www.usasurvival.org/).

Oh dear, oh dear.

That USA survival has a lot of fun paranoia:

Appendix One: AIM Report on I.F. Stone August 1994

Newly-declassified FBI archives have provided smoking gun confirmation of a suspicion we and other conservatives harbored for decades: dispite his porturing as a non-political gadfly, journalistic icon I.F.Stone was an active member of the Communist Party, USA, at one stage of his career.

The rest of Cliff's site just gets better.

All I can say is Myron Ebell is in good company here.

Same can be said of a similar article over at the Washington Times:

"We are the only country in the world that has major, known, offshore energy resources that we are not exploiting," explains Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. A survey of oil executives reported Tuesday that the moratoria and regulatory slowdowns of western Gulf drilling - after the BP rig blowout - already was expected to hurt for many years to come. Before the ban, government was granting nearly 15 new Gulf permits per month; since the April explosion, it has issued only 16 total, even in shallow water. The result, according to the Energy Information Administration, will be a loss of 170,000 barrels per day in 2011 - which, in turn, will cause a greater dependence on foreign oil.

What do you mean "loss of 170,000 barrels per day"? The only way you do that is to leak it into the ocean. Seems to me that if you don't take it out, then it's still there, isn't it? Nothing is lost.

Or, to put it another way: If I don't eat my cake, then I still have it! Eh?

The Myron Ebell Climate says "Get Stuffed, Mr Kincaid and your UN-free zone." What are you frightened of? That they will send in their black helicopters and abduct you?

More family-friendly allegations of fraud

2010-11-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

Why does use of the word "family" so often carry a cloud of evil?

Chris Woodward of OneNewsNow, a division of the American Family News Network, has published Myron Ebell's latest unsubstantiated allegations of false climate data:

"These e-mails revealed that these scientists have been putting their political agenda ahead of their science, that they have been manipulating the data, and that they have been conspiring together to suppress scientific research and other scientists who don't agree with their conclusions," Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) tells OneNewsNow about the information released.

One example of manipulation involves the CRU's altering of temperature data for the 1930s to make them appear cooler than that of more recent decades, when in fact, it had temperatures similar to those of the last 20 years. But Ebell points out that many other issues remain unaddressed, which is why his organization and others are calling for a real investigation.

"There are also many references in these e-mails and in some of the files to other things that weren't part of the initial release of all these documents," he notes. "Where are the rest of the e-mails that are referred to in what we have? So, there's a lot there, I think, still to be discovered in terms of the conspiracy that was going on and the scientific fraud that was being committed."

The "rest of the emails" between the scientists are none of Mr Ebell's business -- especially in light of his deliberate misreading and misinformation about the ones that have been hacked.

What is, however, our business are the rest of the plans surrounding the leaked 1998 Exxon memo where he conspired to promote falsified science through fake "media-trained" scientists to the public and to policy-makers.

The data Myron is complaining about is partly available from CRU here, and the independent NASA GISSTEMP data can be downloaded from here, including all the software in an easy-to-use form.

On what basis does Myron Ebell believe the data has been altered, other than his malicious misreadings of a set of emails? If there is anything more to it, then he should be able to point to the numbers that have been changed, and actual evidence that they have been forged.

Unfortunately, a crap reporter such as Mr Woodward is too dumb to hold him to this standard, busy as he is fighting for the oligarchy with their billions of unearned inherited wealth.

Myron Ebell alleges the data is false

2010-11-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

Fox "News" Hack Julia Seymour tried to warmed up the corpse of climategate with a piece that began with the astonishing claim that when the story broke it wasn't reported across US broadcast network news for 14 days.

And then: "Since Nov. 19, 2009, the broadcast networks have only mentioned the scandal or the University of East Anglia in a paltry 12 stories."

I wonder if Ms Seymour counted among these "paltry" stories the New York Times editorial ("Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming.") or Newsweek's: "Newspapers Retract 'Climategate' Claims, but Damage Still Done"

Of course not! Ms Seymour is a Fox News Hack. Their motto is "Unfair and unbalanced".

Instead she takes some choice quotes from Mr Myron Ebell:

Twelve stories. Why so little coverage? Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), told the Business & Media Institute, "I think it’s pretty obvious why the networks and major papers have ignored ClimateGate. It’s because they don’t want to consider the possibility that the sort of monolithic [global warming] consensus that they support and are a part of is based on junk science."...

According to Ebell, the scientists involved were not making "mistakes" as the media emphasized, but "manipulating data." The CRU emails revealed "they were adjusting the [weather] stations they were using" to show warmer recent decades and cooler temperatures in the 1930s and '40s, Ebell said.

So Myron Ebell is directly alleging that scientists are fiddling the measurement data. That's quite something.

The thing about all the FOI requests and data disclosures from the climate scientists is it's now been possible to check and confirm the full data-set and calculations independently and transparently as has been done here.

So you've got what you want. There is nothing left hiding. You need to point to exactly what the problem is, or shut the f*** up!

But Myron is never going to shut-up until either (a) someone stops paying him to speak lies, (b) people stop printing these lies, or (c) he dies having devoted his entire life towards hastening the extinction of the human race.

Space man watch

2010-11-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

The pigs at the CEI are really preening themselves over the election triumph of ignorance over hope and making wild over-interpretations of it, such as a sudden widespread agreement with their agenda of environmental devastation.

None more so than Myron Ebell, who's place in the politico webpage hotbox is assured.

After whining about some congressional monkey-business by the Democratic party, that was probably made necessary by systematic bad faith Republican obstruction at every turn (and you will see what we mean in this coming congress), he writes:

The funny thing is that even trying to sneak the bill through didn't work. The American people figured out that cap-and-trade was code for higher energy prices and reacted with righteous fury when House Members went home after the vote for the Fourth of July recess. After hearing the outcry, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to postpone Senate debate on cap-and-trade and instead take up health care reform, which enjoyed much more public support.

In an uncharacteristic presentation of evidence that contradicted his hypothesis, Myron admitted:

44 Democrats — most in marginal districts — voted against the Waxman-Markey bill. True, 27 of them were defeated in the election; but in most of those races the Democrat defended himself by featuring his vote against Waxman-Markey. It is hard to find a Democrat who voted for Waxman-Markey and was in a competitive race mentioning that vote in the campaign. On the other hand, winning Republican challengers in races across the country attacked their Democratic opponents for voting yes on cap-and-trade.

In other words, being anti-human survival, like the Republican Party, didn't get the Democratic Party vote out. What a surprise. The mood swung against them in an election that was determined by an amazing and unnecessary level economic distress for so rich a nation.

The Republican Party is of course going to make it much much worse. But that's mostly a problem for the American people, who have made their bed and have to lie in it.

It's unfortunate the rest of us have to go down with this ship called planet Earth.

There are glints of hope that Myron isn't going to mention and would like to cloak in a massive oil spill if he can, such as the defeat of Proposition 23.

Here is a video featuring the previous generation of Republican politicians, before they turned into the space aliens they are now.

Diesel for brains

2010-11-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

Last week the EPA proposed some modest regulations to take trucks that burn 16 gallons of diesel per hundred miles off the market from 2014 where they are doing unnecessary harm.

Oh no!!!! howls Myron Ebell and the other preening pigs at the CEI.

USA Today published a small quote in their otherwise good article:

A conservative group that opposes government involvement in the economy denounced the proposed rules as "energy rationing." Myron Ebell, director of the center for energy and environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said, "The only way to increase fuel efficiency as quickly (as proposed) will be to move less freight," damaging the economy.

That's "less freight per gallon of diesel" to you, which is seen as a tragedy for all mass-extinction loving nihilists.

Over in the ghetto of "The New American" -- just like the old American -- magazine, Myron's feelings gets more exposure:

In response to the newest EPA suggestion, Myron Ebell, director of Competitive Enterprise Institute, remarks, "It is already in the interests of truck manufacturers and the freight industry to make trucks as fuel efficient as possible. The only way to increase fuel efficiency as quickly as EPA's proposal requires will be to move less freight. That means that commercial activity and economic growth will take a huge hit."

What Myron is alleging is that trucks are already as fuel efficient as possible -- the market actors having already pursued their interests -- notwithstanding any government regulations mandating fuel efficiency that would have illogically not been met.

This is as beyond laughable as his previous claim that there have been no deaths during the construction of any nuclear power plant ever. But you have to bear in mind the sorts of people he talks to.

Hat tip to this article in Think Progress where you can see Myron in action putting up direct lies onto the screen.

Break this china Ebell

2010-10-11T01:50:00.000-07:00

As the human experiment continues to race towards its avoidable mass extinction, lizards like Myron Ebell cheerlead the sorrow in the United States Senate, and the consequent inability of China to assist in negotiating around this existential dysfunction.

China is the economic competitor that the United States needs to race to the bottom against, modified by the fact that Americans can't feel the deadly smog clouds in Chinese cities. There's also a perception that they prefer to depend on coal power. Putting that together with Myron's undisclosed but very evident coal industry funding, there's a lot of room to spread disinformation and lies.

What has he been saying, apart from ignoring hydro-power as a renewable resource?

From 8 October:

The alternative to using the energy sector to foster perpetual economic stagnation would be to use the energy sector to underpin a new era of prosperity. All we need to do to undertake this radical change of direction is to take President Obama's advice and follow China's good example: clear away the regulatory obstacles to energy production, open federal lands and offshore areas to oil exploration, and start building coal-fired power plants... China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, is building two coal fired power plants every three weeks.

And from 1 October:

It amazes me that the idea that there is such a race [for clean energy technologies] has been repeated so often that it is now accepted as given. It would be news to the Chinese. China is in a race with the U.S., and they are winning it. It is the race for abundant and affordable conventional energy.

While China is now installing nearly as many windmills every year as the U. S., they are constructing at least twenty times’ as many coal-fired power plants. About 80% of China’s electricity comes from burning coal, which is why the wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers are closing factories here and in the EU and building new ones in China. The cost of manufacturing anything depends primarily on the costs of capital, labor, and natural resources -- and usually the most important natural resource component is energy. Assuming comparable capital costs, China has lower energy costs as well as lower labor costs than the U.S. If the U. S. wishes to remain competitive with China and insists on using higher-cost energy, then the only way to do it is to lower labor costs dramatically.

Of course, if the U.S. wanted to bring forward any technological innovation, then Myron's financially cheap coal policy will ensure that market forces will forbid it.

Oh, there's something else Myron says here:

Recently, some environmental pressure groups suggested that the next round of increases in Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards for cars and light trucks should be 60 miles per gallon by 2025. Today, the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation told the press that they were considering requiring increases of between 3 and 6 percent per year in fuel economy after the 35.5 miles per gallon average for cars and light trucks goes into effect in 2016. Six percent per year between 2017 and 2025 would get to 62 miles per gallon by 2025.

The 35.5 miles per gallon standard by 2016 is going to cause a major car crash. If the manufacturers somehow manage to produce a lot of cars that meet the target, it is unlikely that many consumers are going to want to buy them. The automakers will be forced to sell their tiny cars very cheaply and to raise prices on larger cars dramatically in order to meet the 35.5 mpg average. This is a recipe for bankrupting all the automakers and for a second bailout that will makes the taxpayer bailout of GM and Chrysler look cheap. To then raise the standard to 60 miles per gallon by 2025 is sheer fantasy.

Hey, I wonder what China is doing regarding this policy. From the New York Times:

Worried about heavy reliance on imported oil, Chinese officials have drafted automotive fuel economy standards that are even more stringent than those outlined by President Obama...

The new plan would require automakers in China to improve fuel economy by an additional 18 percent by 2015, said An Feng, a leading architect of China’s existing fuel economy regulations who is now the president of the Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, a nonprofit group in Beijing...

Mr. An estimated that the average new car, minivan or sport utility vehicle in China already gets the equivalent of 35.8 miles a gallon this year based on the American measurement system of corporate averages and will be required to get 42.2 miles a gallon in 2015.

By comparison, President Obama announced last week that each automaker will be required to reach a corporate average of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016.

What's Myron Ebell think of this kind of strategic longer-term national interest reasoning while he is busy advocating all the policies for economic and environmental devastation he can muster from a successful state at a distance?

Crickets.

No pressure at all

2010-10-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell summarizes his oily wet-dream on the politico Lies Inc. website:

Instead of continuing to pour taxpayer money into crony-capitalist projects, the Congress should:
overturn the Obama administration's moratorium on offshore drilling in the western Gulf of Mexico;

open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and natural gas exploration;

overturn the cancellations of oil and gas leases on federal lands throughout the West; and

compel the administration to start leasing offshore tracts off the coast of southern California and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Within a few years, the economic results would be stunning: increased domestic oil production, lower trade deficits due to lower oil imports, hundreds of thousands of high-paying and non-subsidized jobs, and tens of billions of dollars in lease auction and royalty payments to the federal treasury. Yes, that’s right — oil and gas production on federal lands and in federal offshore waters pays money into the treasury rather than taking it out.

But what about the kids?

What about them after we've dredged and burned every drop of fossil fuels at the pleasure of this generation and left them with nothing by a devastated environment.

I'll tell you about the kids...

China syndrome

2010-09-24T03:55:00.000-07:00

Not content with ensuring the de-development of the United States economy, now Myron Ebell has taken to advising the Chinese government:

Not buying it: While China may be increasing wind turbine and solar panel manufacturing to grow its economy, some people feel that it isn't as interested in applying the more expensive technology at home.

"It is impossible to tell why they are investing anything at all in [wind farms and solar power plants], which are not competitive with coal," said Myron Ebell, an ~~energy analyst~~know-nothing lying lumpsucker at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative research and advocacy group. "My guess is that it's window dressing for the West."

Ebell said China is excelling at making renewable energy parts for the same reason they are excelling at making all sorts of other things: low cost, high skilled labor; weak environmental laws; and cheap energy.

The Chinese, Ebell believes, are simply using the West's fascination with wind and solar as a chance to sell it products.

Reporter Steve Hargreaves for CNN blathered:

Indeed, while China has surpassed the United States when it comes to making the equipment, it has not yet caught it in terms of renewable energy production.

In 2009 China could produce 25 gigawatts of wind power and under 1 gigawatt of solar, according to Ernst & Young. The United States could produce 35 gigawatts of wind and 2 gigawatts of solar.

Errr, aren't you forgetting the 190 gigawatts of renewable hydro-power vs somewhat less in the United States.

This is exactly the sort of sloppy mis-reporting we can expect from a reporter who has Myron Ebell in his phone book who knows perfectly well the costs of coal in terms of mining deaths in China and the fact that their crappy coal is (a) a limited resource, and (b) not distributed everywhere in the country where you need it for electricity.

Why bother trucking this stuff thousands of miles when you can get the electricity you need from the sky? That's why.

This is the future -- unless Myron Ebell is successful at killing it first.

Dirty Ebell Proposition

2010-09-20T04:35:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell continues to speak out against jobs, new techonologies and anything that infringes his corporate sponsors' right to pollute and degrade the environment in perpetuity.

As usual, he gets a free fact-free airing on politico:

California's economic future depends on passing Proposition 23 and suspending AB 32. California's Democratic-controlled legislature and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have worked mightily the past few years to turn their state into an economic basket case...

California was the main economic engine pulling America forward for most of the past sixty-some years. That engine has been destroyed by its elected leaders through a wide array of economically disastrous policies. California once had a highly diversified economy that included considerable energy-intensive manufacturing. For example, California once had major auto assembly and airplane manufacturing plants. They are now gone...

The fact that the sate of California is now broke may force its government to reverse many disastrous policies. That will help to revive economic activity, but it is unlikely that sizable investments will be made in new businesses until the threat of the drastic energy-rationing measures required by AB 32 disappears.

Spending by oil companies in favour of this hope and green jobs killing Proposition 23 is in the tens of millions. The names include Adam Smith Foundation, Occidental Petroleum, National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, Tower Energy Group, World Oil Corp, Southern Counties Oil, California Trucking Association, Murray Energy, Berry Petrochemical, Boyett Petroleum.

Here is the anti video:

In the upside-down world of right-wing politics, the words of the proposition say that any green jobs program must be suspended until California's unemployment rate is below 5.5%. It's currently 12%. And jobs programs are needed -- unless you are part of the super-rich elite who don't care if the rest of the planet burns.

Meanwhile, on the Bone-heads Digest Myron writes:

[T]hree separate motions were filed in the federal D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals asking the court to delay implementation of EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations until the court rules on the lawsuit seeking to overturn the Endangerment Finding upon which the regulations are based.

One motion was filed by the State of Texas; another was filed by several non-profit policy and legal groups; and the third was filed by three industry trade associations.

That second link leads to a legal case made by Myron's employer, the CEI, plus the Ohio Coal Association and the "Coalition for Responsible Regulation". I wonder why he wasn't proud to mention that.

Oh, and also the third one is also by the Coalition for Responsible Regulation. No one knows who the hell they are. And Myron Ebell is certainly not going to tell you because that would give the game away -- You know the one where he is constantly trying to pass off regressively lethal special interests as real public interest concerns by lying, lying, lying and lying.

Myron loves failure

2010-09-12T15:25:00.000-07:00

Politico's fact-free zone decorated its lively debate Is climate science a settled matter? with comments from Junkman Steve Milloy as well as Myron Ebell pontificating about how all the winning Republican candidates are boneheads -- I beg your pardon -- don't believe in global warming.

And cap-and-trade, as far as applying a market-based solution to the problem, has as much future as we have. A very bad one.

Later, Myron Ebell got his boot in first on the Higher energy taxes to boost economy debate.

You see, oil company execs can never have enough private jets, so it's wrong to tax their profits and spend it on something productive.

This appears part of a broader plan by President Obama to force domestic petroleum production down. Other elements include the six-month moratorium on offshore leases in the Gulf, cancelling planned oil and gas leases federal lands in the West, and opposing new production on Alaska’s North Slope and offshore in the Arctic Ocean. Less energy and more expensive energy is extremely bad news for the American economy.

The president’s proposals to spend more taxpayer dollars on transportation infrastructure are a mixed bag. One of the bigger chunks is to go to high-speed rail projects. These are mostly colossally expensive boondoggles.

He then gleefully referred to a washington times article about how Obama's attempts to invest in future energy technologies has flopped with a lot of the money going abroad to buy the equipment that isn't manufactured in America.

It's all very depressing. Myron Ebell wants the president to fail, technology to fail, America to fail, and the human race to fail. And he loves it, like those mythical oil eating bacteria in the gulf of mexico that just love environmental devastation.

No nuclear power construction deaths ever??

2010-09-09T03:53:00.000-07:00

Blogger Paul Mulshine on NJ.com is the latest on-line correspondent to take comments from "expert" Myron Ebell and post them up without checking if they make any sense. Take a look at this one:

But then there’s the example of that windmill in Oregon that collapsed in 25-mph winds back in 2007 and killed a guy who was working on it. That means wind power has already killed more Americans than have been killed by nuclear power in all our history.

Is Myron Ebell suggesting that there has not been one accidental death during the construction or maintenance of any nuclear power plant in the US ever?

And this guy was dumb enough to print it, as opposed to saying to Ebell:

"Actually that statement about there never being a construction death in the nuclear power industry doesn't sound credible, even if you don't know anything like we do. Can you make up some other false statement instead that sounds a little more plausible? That's what you're paid for, isn't it?"

Generally we know that Myron Ebell is against all new technology, unless it's the kind that enables more fossil fuels to be burned, even though he says it would be less. So Myron's has to scare-monger as much as he can about these turbines and use what little material he has to draw on.

Ebell, who comes from Oregon, told me of what happened when a wind farm was constructed not far from where he grew up. "Within two months, one broke apart in high wind and a blade was found more than a mile away," Ebell said. "Can you imagine sitting on your front porch and seeing one of those coming at you?"

When did this happen? 1973? Could it have physically flown as far as anyone's front porch? Probably not. But, please, just imagine it did, so I can make you scared of these things.

What you are not supposed to be scared of, according to Myron Ebell, is anything to do with lovely clean and tasty fossil fuels.

They don't hurt anyone, do they?

Dumb blonde lines up her brain cell with Myron Ebell

2010-09-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

Here is a clip of one of the stupidest TV show hosts, Gerri Willis, aligning herself with Myron Ebell and helping him with his fallacies against another interviewee who had some actual knowledge.

Myron has two conflicting points of view:

(1) In the future technology and innovation will improve our lives and reduce our carbon footprint;
(2) All new energy technologies must be resisted

Marvel at how easily he changes the subject once the other guy points out that every new technological industries in America has come about as a result of massive government investment, while the dumb blonde busily proclaims that that was all in the past.

Myron Ebell: Well, certainly the federal government can create jobs by throwing taxpayer dollars into creating jobs, but it doesn't show what the total economic effect is, and in this case I think what you're going to see is a net loss of jobs because what the government is subsidizing is forms of energy that are going to raise our energy prices, higher electric rates, gasoline prices. And if we have less money in our pocketbooks because we've got higher utility bills we're going to be spending less money on other things. That measn fewer people are going to have jobs in things like restaurants, travel, all the things that we spend our money on.

Reid Detchon: If you think about how we are going to succeed in this country economically we got to make something. And we know that clean energy jobs are the future. You look at where the price of oil is going over the next ten twenty years. We've got to be prepared with alternatives, invest in electric vehicles and renewable energy like solar and wind.

Gerri Willis: I'm shocked that the government puts money into these companies when it looks like they're big time losers to me. Is the government typically very good at picking winners in any industry?

Ebell: No, and these subsidies go back to the 1970s and we have one failed generation of companies after another that collect these tax dollars. This is seldom a good investment.

Detchon: You know, from the beginning of American history the government has been deeply involved and working with the private sector whether you're talking about railroads, aerospace, telecom, the internet. Every major industry that this country has ever developed has been in partnership with the government.

Dumb blonde: That was a long darn time ago.

Detchon: We would not have the aerospace industry if it weren't for the government. We would not have the telecom industry if it weren't for the government. When you're starting a new industry with new technology you have to have some help, otherwise we'll just be buying all these products from China.

Blonde: Do you buy that Myron?

Ebell: No. Look, China is building one to two new coal fired power plants a week. They're building ten or twelve new nuclear plants a year. They've got this kind of window dressing of oh yes we're building solar panels, but the fact is the reason China is becoming the manufacturing hub of the world is not just that they have low labour costs, it's also that they have lower energy prices than we do. We're installing a lot of solar panels and windmills to raise our electric prices, and in fact these solar panels are being built in countries that rely on coal-fired power because it's so much cheaper. [Dumb blone laughs] So we're going to have all these green energy and we're going to be too poor to build anything because we won't be able to compete with the countries that have have cheap energy.

Blonde: Reid, what do you make of that? It seems like it bites you in the butt. Not only do the companies fail, but they're raising prices on the people who need to have low prices.

Detchon: I wouldn't want to have Myron on my investment team. You know you have to invest in new technologies and bring down the costs so they're going to be competitive with the conventional fuels. Otherwise you're just condemning yourself to the status quo. I think that the point of investing now, as has been shown in Germany and Japan is you bring down these costs very dramatically over time. You create jobs, three hundred thousand new jobs in Germany because of their solar investments, and you're creating an industry that is going to sustain this country's manufacturing base.

Blonde: I think that's debatable.

Ebell: I think Reid is way behind here on the news. Spain has had to drastically cut its solar and wind subsidies because they can't afford them. Germany is talking about the same thing. So is Britain. China is relying on the old technology coal fired power because it's cheaper. The future is not in higher prices. It's not pricing people out of jobs and pricing consumers out of products. It's trying to put them into jobs and make them able to buy products.

Crying over spilt oil

2010-09-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

A several person one-sided debate on NewsMax between Myron Ebell and other know-nothings from places like the Heritage Foundation produced the following lessons from the Gulf oil spill:

"Global warming is one prediction of doom after another," Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells Newsmax. "You know, we're all going to get malaria, or there will be hurricanes and tornadoes everywhere, or sea levels will rise drastically in a short period of time. It's just one claim of doom right around the corner after another."

No, Myron, it's about your great-grandchildren. It'll happen to them, but you don't care, do you? You think you'll be swept up to heaven with The Rapture before any of the consequences, don't you? That's because you don't believe in justice. There is no justice. Not from God. Not from nature. Only from society. And by the fact that you are still a free man shows there is very little of that yet to happen.

Ebell sees another parallel between the BP spill and global warming: The high costs associated with the government's response.

"The economic damage of the response is so much larger than the economic damage of the disaster," Ebell tells Newsmax. "It's many, many times the size, potentially. ... You certainly see this in global warming, where the medicine is so much worse than the disease.

Say what? Which part of the response caused more damage than the oil leak? Was it the government response of making BP pay to clean it up and the effect on its share price?

You're not even making sense here, Ebell.

Poppycock earth day

2010-09-05T09:27:00.000-07:00

Attempting to copy the success of the Tax Freedom Day when the nation as a whole has theoretically earned enough income to fund its annual tax burden -- thus promulgating the lie that we are all taxed evenly, and that public taxation is a bad thing as we drive around on publicly funded roads and enjoy books whose ability we can read as a result of publicly funded education -- someone has come up with Earth overshoot day, the day when humans have consumed all of the biological resources that Earth can provide annually and begins burning through a finite and depleting capital.

Reporter Mike Lee of the San Diego Union Tribune decided to include a ridiculous quote from Myron Ebell in his article on this:

"It is, of course, complete poppycock," said Myron Ebell at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. "As we become wealthier and more technologically sophisticated, our environmental footprint becomes smaller."

I mean, What the hell gives? The graphic on that article clearly shows wealthy and "technologically sophisticated" Americans consuming 5 planets of resources pro-rata, while poor and lower technology India rates 0.4.

What is the point of being a reporter if all you do is phone up Myron Ebell and print any old crap he spouts sight unseen? Hasn't anyone got a brain around here?

Politico's pointless website

2010-08-20T06:59:00.000-07:00

Over at the Arena, "Politico's daily debate with policymakers and opinion shapers", Myron Ebell has been making hay, taking advantage of the uncritical publication of his lies on a website that is better looking and more widely read than his globalwarming.org posts that are decorated with a chinese lady sucking on a plastic teat.

Myron writes along the conspiracy theory that Al Gore invented global warming to make money:

I used to think that we were just incredibly lucky that the alarmist movement was led by this group of second raters. I now realize that it isn't luck. Global warming alarmism attracts incompetents, know-nothings, and looney tunes...

Gore on the conference call acknowledged that cap-and-trade was dead and that the alarmists had lost in 2010. He bitterly blamed the usual suspects: Big Oil, King Coal, right-wing media, and professional deniers (I believe that is where he would put me and CEI)...

I can see why Gore is bitter. His comparatively modest investments in green energy promised to make him a global warming billionaire if cap-and-trade were enacted. Unluckily for him, the American people have said no emphatically.

How's that summer heatwave doing, Myron? Maybe you need to take a trip to Pakistan and see what you will eventually bringing home to your great grandchildren, wherever on the earth they live.

In the words of Richard Feynman after NASA managers had played fast and loose with the physical facts: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

As an unadulterated do-badder and dangerous fooler, you use your undeserved publicity to slander and smear the truth-tellers and do-gooders all you can, but that doesn't change the facts -- only the perception of them.

I'd like to see how long you can drive with your eyes closed. Everything will be fine until you die, for want of a little course correction in time that couldn't be made because you were not in favour

Why does Fiona Harvey care what Myron says?

2010-07-30T04:03:00.000-07:00

Financial Times? Well there's a useless churnalizing he-said-she-said rag.

In a short article by their Environment Correspondent, Fiona Harvey reported how international scientists had reviewed 11 different indicators and concluded that climate change was now so bad that there wasn't any room to doubt it.

It is like denying the existance of Uranium.

But the facts nonetheless remained the target of scorn for sceptics, she wrote. [You don't say!]

Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the US, said the new report would not change people's minds. "It's clear that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is."

Let's be clear about this. Nothing is going to change Myron Ebell's mind. Not even if Saint Agnes descended from heaven, smacked him across his jaw, and revealed him a vision of his great grand children dying like flies on a parched sun-blasted wasteland.

Myron doesn't care about the future, because he believes that God and the almighty dollar will sort everything out, no matter what anyone says. His brain is hollow. His heart is a rotten tomato. His feet are dead tar-soaked albatross bodies. He's gone. The locus of evil now lies with those who pay him, and those who print what he has to say in the public press.

James Hogan of the Desmogblog picked up on this:

Even this new Financial Times article about climate scientists confirming the unequivocal certainty that manmade emissions are warming the globe features multiple quotes from climate skeptics and deniers, including Pat Michaels and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Why bother to quote the skeptics here in an article about hard scientific evidence? It is their Climategate story that has been thoroughly debunked, not the science. If there is any lesson that came out of Climategate, it is that climate skeptics should be ignored, not continuously quoted.

The deniers' golden egg -- Climategate -- has been proven false. Yet they cling to the myth regardless.

Doesn't that tell us plenty about their "expertise" and motivations?

Roundup Myron

2010-07-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

The Myron Ebell keeps fighting for the death of the human race, even when we at the Myron Ebell Climate are otherwise engaged.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a good article 'Climategate' fallout may impact legislation

Five investigations into the "Climategate" scandal have now cleared a group of scientists accused of twisting data in an effort to prove the world is getting warmer... "The accusations were on A1, the exonerations are usually on A15," said Aaron Huertas, press secretary for the Union of Concerned Scientists...

"In general, I think the scandal has made the opponents of energy-rationing legislation stronger and more confident," said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank.

Ebell, who for years has been one of the fiercest critics of global warming science, doubts that Climategate by itself changed any votes in the Senate. But the scandal may have solidified skepticism about climate science among the public, he said. That would make any global warming bill harder for Senate Democrats to pass.

"The American public opposes policies that are going to raise their energy prices," Ebell said. "And I just don't see how they can get around that."...

...Unless you include more than just the financial prices of things. For example, when Myron gets a severe pain in his ear, he goes to the doctor, even though it raises the price he annually spends on medical supplies. That's because when you are in pain you will pay anything necessary to get rid of the pain.

Global warming causes pain, so we will pay money to get around it -- if it weren't for people lying about the effectiveness of such intervention, who want to sell you snake oil rather than real medicine. Because they are evil and don't care if you die.

It goes on:

Ebell and other critics call the investigations a farce, saying they represent an attempt by the academic community to defend their own.

"These establishment reports to whitewash this scandal - they have no credibility," Ebell said. "It's pretty obvious that they're not independent inquiries, that they were designed to come up with an exoneration. You need (an investigation with) people who don't have connections, who haven't written papers with the people who are accused or served on faculty with them."

Over at the Tennessean, there's an article about a climate change threat report:

Many are skeptical of the claims made in such reports, including Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates for limited government.

Ebell said these reports make shaky predictions, exaggerate the possibilities, and are written to scare people into supporting climate change. They run counter to other reports, which say global warming will mostly affect the North and South poles, he said.

"A lot of the conclusions are highly speculative and debatable and some just go against what we know," Ebell said. "A lot are based on computer modeling, and there is no climate model that can give useful forecasts for local and regional climate change. They have no scientific validity."

This is an interesting statement. The thing about predictions of the future based on physics and thermodynamics is you can either work it out with a pencil and paper (in which case your calculations will have limited complexity) or use one of these amazing computer devices.

Or, if you are Myron Ebell, you favour pulling it out of your ass.

For avoidance of doubt, we are well within the margin of error of the computer predictions, and it's all looking bad.

The Nashville Scene picked up on the Myron Ebell reference:

Update: Apparently the highest degree CEI's resident climate-change expert [Myron Ebell] holds is a master's in economics. Again, it's unclear why he's trotted out in the story as some sort of authority, aside from the fact that he disagrees with the premise of the EPA's report.

Finally Myron Blames Obama for the BP oil leak and fights against the Blowout Prevention Act.

Myron Ebell plants evil acorns

2010-07-15T03:46:00.001-07:00

I believe this is from last November, to Pajamas media.

No time for a transcript, but this is the good bit:

Myron: I think it's much bigger than the ACORN videos-- those were a bombshell, no doubt about that. [smiles] Congratulations.

The ACORN videos which purportedly showed a ridiculously dressed undercover republican couple getting advice on running their prostitution business were a total fraud, but it was enough to get all the a mainstream media that has no interest in the truth, and have this comunity organizing group shut down.

Myron smiled because he approved of this hit-job and found it impressive. And he was trying to perpetrate the same fraud with his CRU emails.

Unfortunately it's on a much bigger scale. While O'Keefe and his handlers were trying to make the lives of poor people in America that little bit more miserable by destroying one of the most effective community groups that they have, Myron Ebell is doing what he can to threaten the lives of the other five billion people, as well as most life forms on Earth.

What price energy independence?

2010-07-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

In a politico arena debate "with policymakers and ~~disinformation~~opinion makers", Myron Ebell wrote:

The U.S. has only 3 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. That is because many of the most promising areas, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off the coast of southern California, have never been explored. There are estimates of potential reserves in those places, but they cannot be counted as proven reserves.

Hey, Myron, what do you think this a map of? Disneyland?

Myron went on to outline his plan for the extinction of about 90% of the species on the planet, merely for the convenience of fat Americans driving their fat unemployed children to fat shopping malls in order to make fat coal company executives fabulously wealthy.

In 60 years' time, when your grandchildren will be living a period of could-have-been-avoided desperate crisis, they will thank you for the pleasure you gave to these dead pathetic people lying in their graves.

After producing more oil domestically, the next step would be to develop competitive alternatives. At present, there is one alternative that makes economic sense: producing liquid fuels from coal. The U.S. has the world’s largest reserves of coal. And beyond coal, the U.S. has colossal unconventional reserves in oil shale, most of which is under federal land in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. At the same time as we produce more oil and oil alternatives, demand is likely to go down in the medium to long term (by which I mean 30 to 60 years) as alternative auto technologies become affordable and attractive to consumers.

Meanwhile, further down the hopeless debate thread that just shows how irrevokably detached from reality and its consequences we now are, Dean Baker produced the one straightforward post in the whole lot:

The country is not going to be energy independent and everyone who is serious knows this. The only reason why this even comes up is nonsense from the oil industry and the drill everywhere crowd.

We have to get off fossil fuels because it is wrecking the planet. It will cost money to switch to cleaner energy sources and conservation, but it will also create jobs. It would be great if we could have a serious discussion about this, but the BP crew lie about the issues, and the way the media in this country work, any lie from a major industry group must be treated as a respectable opinion, no matter how outrageous it is. Therefore we will continue to hear nonsense on energy issues, not serious debate.

The fact that Myron Ebell gets quoted on the front page of the New York Times, and not Dean Baker, is evidence that we are completely screwed.

Wagons on the brain

2010-07-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

There is only one Myron Ebell and only one 160 page Independent Climate Change Email Review that fully exonerated the scientists on all matter of substance.

The CCE Review website includes minutes of every meeting, and all the evidence submitted to it, including bollocks from Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick complaining about how the panel was composed of scientists, some of whom were biased in favour of a belief in global warming, and had worked in East Anglia in the 1980s. Picky picky. Had it had some oil lobbyists who lie for money no matter what the consequences, that would have been fine.

For some reason, the terrible New York Times and the sad Seattle Times thought that Myron Ebell's opinion was worth printing -- without the additional qualification that he is wrong, dangerous, and has demonstrably no interest in the truth.

First, let's begin with this cheery blogpost by the mom of the Mom-and-Pop business known as the Cretinous Benderprize Intestines:

CEI's Myron Ebell was quoted on the front page of the New York Times today - "above the fold" - discussing the University of East Anglia's report on Climategate and university researchers’ leaked emails about shutting out skeptical scientists, not responding to requests for data, and presenting misleading global warming data. The so-called Russell Report was the second "insider" investigation of influential global warming scientists-advocates and their attempts to bury dissent from their orthodoxy. In its own report, Pennsylvania State University downplayed Penn State researcher Michael Mann's culpability. In a scandal that rocked the global warming community, the emailers only received mild slaps on the wrists from the investigators.

Here's Myron's NYT quote on the report's findings:

The university solicited and paid for the new report, which climate skeptics assailed. "This is another example of the establishment circling the wagons and defending their position," said Myron Ebell, director of energy and climate change policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington.

No surprise there. The "establishment" has a lot invested in catastrophic man-made global warming.

Thank you Justin Gillis of the New York Times for providing Myron Ebell and his CEI the oxygen of publicity so their cancer can live on for a little while longer. His article was titled: British Panel Clears Climate Scientists.

Meanwhile, over on the left coast, Henry Chu of the Los Angeles Times wrote a piece titled: British climate researchers had high scientific standards, review finds.

Did Henry Chu of the Los Angeles Times quote Myron Ebell? No, he did not! Because there is no reason to, unless it is to point out he is wrong and his words should never be trusted.

Unfortunately, Henry Chu wrote a second article, published in the Seattle Times, bearing the title: New 'Climategate' inquiry mostly vindicates scientists".

The title was wrong, the Myron Ebell "This is another example of the establishment circling the wagons and defending their position," quote was detrimental. Does the LA Times know he used their name in his byline to sell that crap?

You had to go to the blogs to have proper coverage, such as Climate change deniers exposed by the truth:

So have the deniers shut up? Of course not. Have they disproved the science? Discussing science scientifically is something they assiduously avoid!

Instead Myron Ebell of the so-called Competitive Enterprise Institute simply denounces the report as a whitewash, without giving any reasons. And Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit – the main attack dog against the “hockey stick graph” – focuses on the one and only criticism the UK enquiry made.

And: Climategate Burned by Reality:

To date, none of the pundits or anchor-creatures who made such a fuss last winter has been heard from. One Myron Ebell, flak for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington propaganda shop funded by tobacco, oil and coal interests, denounced the result as a “whitewash.”

Who could have expected anything else? To an operative like Ebell, whose scientific credentials are as nonexistent as those of Hannity, Palin and Brian Williams, intellectual integrity doesn’t exist. Facts are infinitely malleable in service of ideology.

People who call this “conservatism” are mistaken. It’s an updated version of what Orwell feared: a dogma-driven, obscurantist attack upon reason.

Meanwhile, Myron Ebell's further words on the CEI blog (posted by Christine Hall, because Myron is too important to handle his own blogging, says:

The Muir Russell report on the ClimateGate scandal does a highly professional job of concealment. It gives every appearance of addressing all the allegations that have been made since the ClimateGate e-mails and computer files from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Institute were released last November. However, the committee relied almost entirely on the testimony of those implicated in the scandal or those who have a vested interest in defending the establishment view of global warming. The critics of the CRU with the most expertise were not interviewed. It is easy to find for the accused if no prosecution witnesses are allowed to take the stand.

The Muir Russell report is thus a classic example of the establishment circling its wagons to defend itself. As was pointed out when the committee was appointed, the members are part of the old boys’ network and have several obvious conflicts of interest.

The professional whitewash attempted by the Muir Russell report will not succeed, however. That is because the evidence that data was manipulated by some of the scientists involved, for example to make the 1930s appear cooler in twentieth century temperature records, is simply too obvious and too strong to cover up.

As usual, lies, because Ebell, like McIntyre and McKitrick, was perfectly able to take his testimony to the panel and get it published if it wasn't too defamatory, like David Holland's. But he didn't. So by what right does the press take his untested testimony?

Drowning in fake whitewash

2010-07-02T22:56:00.000-07:00

I don't know why Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin thought she would improve her article Penn State clears Mann in Climate-gate probe by publishing a some unqualified garbage from Myron Ebell, instead of using the space to apologize on behalf of the paper for dangerously misleading its readers for months over a non-scandal which they should have known was wholly unfounded, but I guess we don't have any committees to investigate the misconduct of reporters, do we?

She's lucky. She can publish any old shite made up by the most unreliable sources, such as Myron Ebell, when she must know he lies consistently and is in the private pay of oil and coal interests that do not care if we have a future as a species on this planet or not.

"I'm pleased that the last phase of Penn State's investigation has now been concluded, and that it has cleared me of any wrongdoing. These latest findings should finally put to rest the baseless allegations against me and my research," [Michael Mann] said in a statement.

But the report will likely do little to quell the political debate over climate science, which has only intensified over the past year.

Myron Ebell, a global warming skeptic who directs Energy and Global Warming Policy for the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted that the Penn State ethics review only interviewed one of Mann's critics, MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen.

"It has been designed as a whitewash," said Ebell, whose group accepts contributions from the energy industry. "To admit that Dr. Mann is a conman now would be extremely embarrassing for Penn State. But the scandal will not be contained no matter how many whitewash reports are issued. The evidence of manipulation of data is too obvious and too strong."

In not so many words, Ebell is telling us that he will never shut up about this, no matter what evidence is put before him. That should be enough to rule him out ever again. That and his complaint that a committee of scientific inquiry should call lots of people who are not scientists as witnesses.

As to Lindzen's evidence, his contribution to the report was to say, in response to the information that the first 3 allegations had been dismissed:

It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these are the issues that he explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on.

When questioned, he agreed that there was nothing irregular about the accessibility and publication of Mann's data. There was and could be no cover up.

The story no one is getting, not this investigation, not Juliet Eilperin's crappy reporting, is that all of these results have been independently replicated with different software and a different set of data.

This is why it is real science, and not a matter of mistake, accident or manipulation. Case closed. You spend all your time discrediting some witness of an event as being unreliable. All of that should fall away if there is a second witness, and a third, and so on. How many more witnesses do we need before you give up?

No amount of evidence will ever shut Myron Ebell up. It is a matter of serious misconduct for a reporter to interview him in this context.

Stop breathing now

2010-06-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

"If you're against extra CO2 in the atmosphere then stop breathing" -- is one of the more stupid comments to come out of the Myron Ebell end of the human experiment.

But an equally dumb statement emerges in an article about people protesting offshore oil drilling:

Myron Ebell, director of the energy program at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said he declined an invitation to join hands. Instead, he's asking people to e-mail the Obama administration, asking the president to stop pushing for a moratorium on new offshore drilling.

"Many Americans are now so removed from material reality that they have no idea where the energy they use comes from," Ebell said.

"Anyone who is sincere about stopping offshore oil production should walk or bike to the rally and then forswear all use of cars, trucks, trains, airplanes and products transported by trucks, trains and airplanes," he said. "That, of course, includes nearly all the food consumed in the United States."

This is not possible, owing to the success of Myron and pals in fighting with every tooth and nail any policy that would allow for a transition from an oil and coal based economy.

Instead, the political power of the oil companies has been such that they have gotten everyone else's taxes to pay for the US military to fight their wars and clean up their environmental devastation. Their financial and media power has paid for Myron Ebell to lie on their behalf, and have his crappy words printed in newspapers and spoken on TV.

Meanwhile: "The sea's filling with oil. A lot of people are very sentimental about the sea... We're going with the democratic solution: blame the president."

And here's a slightly sadder one.

The usual dipsticks

2010-06-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell phoned in at minute 30 of G Gordon Liddy show:

Here's how Gordon the Watergate burglar began his show:

Attitude is everything. It's critically important. And thus a man seeking a job in the Mississippi sheriff's department was being interviewed, and the sergent said: "Your qualifications all look good, but there is an attitude suitability test you must take before you can be accepted." Sliding a service pistol across the desk, he said: "Take this pistol and go out and shoot six illegal aliens, six drug dealers, six muslim extremists, six liberal democrats, and a rabbit."

"I love this job. But why the rabbit?"

"That's the attitude," said the sergent. "When can you start?"

Here's the transcript of Myron's 15 minutes of teious waffle, during which time they successfully made no reference at all to the hole in the sea floor that was endlessly pissing oil out into the infinite blue ocean.

G Gordon Watergate Burglar: This IPCC, they said that thousands of scientists backed its claims on man-made global warming. But this may not be the truth. Could you speak on that?

Ebell: Heh-heh. Well, you know it's never been the truth, and various people have pointed this out going way back to the 90s when the first reports were being issued by the UN global warming panel, and they were claiming that all the scientists participating agreed with the whole report, and Richard Lindzen, a professor at MIT, a very distinguished scientist tried to get his name taken off the second assessment report in 1995 because he said:

"I don't agree with it; there are a lot of things I don't know about in other chapters, but I don't even agree with all the things that I know about."

And they wouldn't take his name off.

So this has been clear, but the global warming alarmists have been repeated this over and over, but now a scientist very closely connected to the ClimateGate scandal, all the scientists in the scandal, and it's also very active in the IPCC has admitted that all the critics have said all along, which is, These reports really reflect the view of a very small group of scientists. And I would describe them as a cabal. Maybe not an organized conspiracy, but certainly they are acting to get the political conclusions that they want out of these reports, and it's really 20, 30, 40 scientists in total. All the rest are just window dressing.

Crook Gordon Liddy: Wow. And the press went for this hook line and sinker?

Ebell: Absolutely. The mainstream media has repeated this over and over again, and they get it from con-men like Joe Rahm at the Centre for American Progress, and Gavin Schmitt, who not only works at NASA but uses his NASA job to produce propaganda for a website called RealClimate. And these guys have just repeated these lies over and over again. They know they're not true. But they're political promoters.

Guns Gays and Lord: The mainstream media, when someone asserts something, they don't publish it as if it were gospel. They check it out.

Ebell: I think most of the MSM went missing on this issue a long time ago. They have simply parroted what they're told by the IPCC, what they're told by scientists at NASA and NOA, and the Federal Government, and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and when people point out that these statements simply aren't true, they just ignore them. They say, these people are seen as eccentrics or are being paide by industry, or there's always some reason to go after the credibility of the critic, but never to check into the credibility of the establishment position.

GGL: At this point it seems to me these days everyone is aware of the fact that the global warming business is a hoax.

Ebell: Well, in some ways I think it's too strong a word. It's a contrived crisis, I would call it. And if that's what you mean by hoax, that's fine.

There's a lot of people who have decided, some of them very sincerely in the scientific community, that global warming is a crisis, and they have decided to do anything necessary politically to advance the agenda that they think will solve or address the crisis.

now some of these people I don't think are sincere. They;'re just totally phoney. But I think some of them really believe that it is their god given right or duty to twist the science, because they think it's so important to save the planet, and therefore underhand and dishonest means are somehow justified.

Course this goes back. Theres a long argument in politics and philosophy about whether to what extend the ends ever do justify the means. And here I think you will find some people -- Steve Schnieder is a good example at Stanford, one of the real long time leaders of the global warming alarmists, going back to the 80s -- that in order to win your point politically you exaggerate and say things that aren't true. I think Schnieder is a sincere alarmist. I think some of the others are just out to make their careers and promote their own interests.

Great Gas Larynx: For some years now, things have been cooler than warm, the sunspot activity is down to zero, and it's anticipated that it's going to stay that way for some while, and the opposite is happening.

Ebell: Well Gordon I am kind of a skeptical contrarian kind of person who's always somewhat self-critical of my own beliefs. I don't get so wrapped up in them I can't see beyond them. I do know some people who get so convinced of something that reality never intrudes. They see what they want to see. I think some of these people are deeply deluded because they've become true believers, and once you get into that mode of just believing in something so strongly, you can explain away all the inconvenient facts that are brought to your attention.

And you see this over and over with websites like RealClimate where no matter what comes up they have an explanation for it. And the explanations often contradict one another, but they've always got an explanation. I don't full yunderstand the psychology, but that's my best guess.

G. Mumble Legpain: The problem as I see it is more than an academic discussion, because Obama seeks to use this as a justification to impose this huge energy tax on us, which is going to be very very damaging to the economy. Could throw us into a double dip recession. It's something we have to let people know, that this crisis which he doesn't want to let to go to waste. is bogus.

Ebell: Yes. I think you've hit the most important point. We're being asked to change our use of energy, and lower out standard of living, and pay a lot more for energy, and use a lot less of it, and really put our economy not into a double-dip recession, but really into permanent stagnation, on the basis of a theory for which a lot of the evidence has been cooked up. And because the establishment has defended these people, this small group of climate scientists, their work has never adequately been checked.

We've got the hockey stick, Steve MacIntyre and McKitrick demolished that. They're not climate scientists, but they looked into it and said, Hey wait a minute, the evidence isn't here.

And now we've got the climate gate scandal, and it showed that they're manipulating the temperature data, makes the last couple of decades a lot warmer than, say, the 1930s.

And so we're being asked to buy this whole suite of very expensive policies to make us very much poorer on the basis that we can trust these guys, and whenever we look they're wrong.

And so I think that our Senators and representatives need to step back and say, Let's not go this way. Let's let the science get sorted out. Let's be much more critical of it, and let's forget about these energy rationing bills which President Obama wants us to pass.

Great Grovelling Liar: I of course am very familiar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. My daughter and I are going to be joining you at dinner at the end of this week. But I have to confess that I don't know that much about Freedom Action. Could you tell us about this organization?

Ebell: Gordon, it's a sister organization. It's not officially affiliated with the CEI. And it's an activist group. We're involved in political pushing and shoving. We're not a think tank. And I invite your listeners to check us out at FreedomAction.org. Or to join our social network, FreedomAction.net. We're trying to mobilize grass roots of political activists through the net. We're trying to establish a social network for activists to communicate with each other, and discuss the issues, and figure out how to come up.

For example, we were very active in the last month promoting the Murkowski resolution which would have stopped President Obama and his Environemntal Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gasses without any congressional approval. Unfortunately last Thursday it was narrowly defeated, but the WhiteHouse really had to pull out all the stops, and majority leader Harry Reid has to pull out all the stops to defeat it. In fact Harry Reid had to promise several senators that he would have a vote on another alternative bill that would delay the EPA for two years, and that got people like Jim Webb of Virginia to switch his vote.

But J Rockerfeller of West Virginia said quite correctly in the debate, I am voting for the Murkowski resolution because I don't want EPA turning out the lights on America. And in fact that's what the EPA is going to be doing as they block new coal fired power plants and constrict our electricity supoplies. The lights are going to be going out, assuming our economy ever recovers and starts growing again. There will simply not be enough electricity.

Gum Monster Label: Well, China is coming on-line with a new coal-fired power plant every single week. [Ebell: Yes] And we're going to restrict ourselves?

Ebell: And this is the crazy world we live in, supposedly having to compete against China and people like Senator John Kerry and Barbara Boxer, and Lindsey Graham the Republican of South Carolina -- in fact he said this on the floor of the House, well if we don't start building a lot more windmills and solar panels and get off oil and coal, we're going to fall behind the Chinese, and they're going to win the war for the new clean energy economy.

In fact, they're building so much new coal fired capacity that they're building more in a year than we built in the last 20 years. The reason is because coal is the cheapest source of reliable electricity, and like the United States, they have very large coal reserves, and so we're losing the race for affordable energy, not for renewable energy.

GGL: Solar panels are not a reliable source of energy at all. They all have to be backed up by coal. It's bizarre. It's just bizarre. Doesn't make any sense.

The Twitter feed for the CEI gala is here, and it includes this crappy photo of Fred Smith, and this one of MacIntyre and McKitrick receiving the annual Julian Simon award for scientific charlatanism.

I'm Myron Ebell and you don't need to know that BP paid for this message

2010-06-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell is furious:

The Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act is designed to undo key parts of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Court ruled that provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation that prohibited corporations, including non-profit 501C4s such as the NRA and Freedom Action, from exercising their first amendment free speech rights in political campaigns were unconstitutional. The DISCLOSE Act would require advocacy groups engaged in election-related activities, but not trade unions, to disclose their donors in a number of ways.

Under the deal the NRA made with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the NRA would now, along with trade unions, be exempt from the disclosure requirements. In return, the NRA has agreed to not oppose passage of the bill.

...

Myron Ebell, Director of Freedom Action, sharply criticized the NRA's sell-out.

"The NRA has proved itself to be part of the 'arrogant elite' it denounced just a few months ago," said Ebell. "Unfortunately, the only conclusion is that Mr. LaPierre is a hypocrite and the NRA is just another powerful special interest seeking special treatment.

"The new word from the NRA is, it's OK to deny free speech to Americans as long as the NRA gets a carve out," Ebell said. "Groups from every part of the political spectrum should vehemently oppose this plan that will chill free speech and participation in American elections."

I checked out what Lawrence Lessig says, as he's more from the preservation of the human species end of the political spectrum:

The vast majority of Americans -- both Democrats and Republicans -- considered the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United to be a colossal blunder. Whether or not the First Amendment compelled it (and IMHO, it didn't), as Justice Stevens rightly said in dissent, Americans don't believe that our politics needs more corporate influence. To the contrary, most believe it needs less. As we learn more about the blunders in mis-regulation bought by Wall Street billionaires, and as we watch black clouds of oil billowing from an offshore oil rig, never adequately inspected or monitored because regulators were "persuaded" by well (as in oil-well) funded lawmakers to turn a regulatory blind eye, who could think that this system needs more of the same? Who could believe that this system was working?

Being a pure idealist doesn't always win results. I just love to see the right wing party divided, with their their poor little corporate millionaires whinging about their free speech rights to talk like billionaires through Myron Ebell shaped meat puppets without declaring where their money is coming from.

Myron and his pals desperately want to be hired by BP so they can tell to the world about the great benefits of natural oils on sea life without looking like complete clowns at the end of their commercial. The bit they don't like about this law is where they'd have to end their TV ads like so:

(B) STATEMENT IF SIGNIFICANT FUNDER IS NOT AN INDIVIDUAL- If the significant funder of a communication paid for in whole or in part with a payment which is treated as a disbursement by a covered organization for campaign-related activity under section 325 is not an individual, the significant funder disclosure statement described in this paragraph is the following: 'I am XXXXXXX, the XXXXXXX of XXXXXXX. XXXXXXX helped to pay for this message, and XXXXXXX approves it.'

(i) the first blank to be filled in with the name of the applicable individual;

(ii) the second blank to be filled in with the title of the applicable individual;

(iii) the third, fourth, and fifth blank each to be filled in with the name of the significant funder of the communication.

At the moment only candidates' ads end with this type of formulation, as you can see at the end of this one by the Wicked Witch of the West:

As compromises and carve-outs go, selling out to the NRA looks like a pretty good deal from where I'm standing -- on the other side of the Atlantic, safely out of range of even the highest powered assault weapons that weird Yanks insist on clinging to.

Guns in America generally kill only other Americans, and this self-inflicted violence and damage does not necessarily get beyond their shores -- unlike their atmospheric and marine pollution, their foreign invasions, missiles, bombs, drugs, propaganda, diseases, lies and death.

If Myron Ebell is against it, it's almost always a good thing. So I call on Lessig to reconsider his position and support this bill whole-heartedly.

What's a few bullets between friends, when there are bigger threats to life at stake?

Myron feels comfortable with carbon-based fuels as our children's future

2010-06-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell is returning to form in this fact-check-less money.cnn article where he claims

While the BP spill is unfortunate, it's the first big spill in U.S. waters since 1969, said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

He's referring to an 11 day spill off the coast of California, before drilling got banned from there.

Myron has been fighting for a long time to have the ban lifted, owing to the fact that everyone has forgotten about why it was in place. This is in common with all his "Institute's" bone-headed campaigns against regulation that never refer to the usually perfectly reasonable ongoing reasons for the regulations to have been made.

That's before Myron Ebell and his pals are liars who don't care if you die.

I guess the massive BP leak from its pipeline on land in Alaska in 2006 doesn't count. This leak, which drained into the sea, was second only to the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaskan waters -- in which BP had a controlling stake.

Even if Myron's statement wasn't false, it implies that leaks anywhere in the rest of the world outside of U.S. waters don't matter. Which is a typical American attitude.

Myron went on:

Ebell thinks renewable energy isn't ready for prime time, no mater how much utilities are required to buy.

He also doesn't think global warming is a serious threat - not an opinion shared by most climate scientists.

"I think most of these claims are made up," he said. "Carbon dioxide is essential for life on earth."

You can't make this up.

If I had the chance, I'd get in Myron's six-cylinder Chevy TrailBlazer and drive it straight across his lawn and in through his living room wall when it was snowing outside.

"You crashed my car and ruined everything," he'd shout.

"Negative, Myron," I'd respond. "Your car is an important part of your life."

Next week, Myron appears on a radio near you.

Christopher Monckton demolition

2010-06-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

Forget the page layout. This is good. Original page is here.

Found it through desmogblog.

Skip the to any point in the middle when you're bored with the intro. It's all good stuff.

If only the same could be done for Myron Ebell, except he says so little these days he's practically evapourated off the planet.

The gift that keeps giving

2010-05-23T04:17:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell is an anti-environmental corporate arsonist. His job is to set a free-market fire on our life-sustaining environment in order to burn the whole thing up before anyone can stop it.

For the last ten years he's been keeping the flames growing while diverting the fire engines to other places through lies and hoax calls in order to ensure that everything is too late by the time that help arrives.

Myron's work is effectively done now. All he has to do is stand back and watch us burn. He gets the oil well pissing into the ocean from a mile deep leak. Doesn't matter what he does now; no one can stop the massive damage.

For example, two days ago the President signed a memorandum on fuel efficiency standards:

I want to introduce some of the folks who are onstage who have been integral in making today possible. You’ve already heard about the wonderful team here at the White House -- Carol Browner, Ray LaHood, and Lisa Jackson. But in addition, we have onstage a number of people who were absolutely critical. Martin Daum, the CEO of Daimler Trucks; Mr. Anthony Dunkley, who is a driver for Waste Management; Mr. G. Tommy Hodges, chairman of the board, American Trucking Association; Mr. Alan Reuther, legislative director for the UAW; Mr. Dennis Slagle, CEO of Volvo; Mr. Tim Solso, CEO of Cummins; and Mr. Daniel Ustian, CEO of Navistar. Please give them a big round of applause. (Applause.)

We also have with us some legislative leaders who have been champions of not only the auto industry but also the environmental movement, and I want to thank them for being here. One of the deans of the House of Representatives, Representative John Dingell -- please give him a big round of applause. (Applause.) Representative Ed Markey is here from Massachusetts. (Applause.) Representative Chris Van Hollen is here. (Applause.) And Representative Henry Waxman. (Applause.)

Normally this type of coalition would drive Myron Ebell berzerk. But he can sit back and relax with his tumbler of Martini, because it is now all too little too late. 20 years ago it could have made a difference. But today the effort is pitiful in relation to the scale of the problem, which requires a 90% cut in CO2 emissions by 2050.

That's why the wires have been dead on the name "Myron Ebell" for over a month.

But we keep monitoring it, because the man's got to earn a living somehow, just from day-to-day -- even though his offspring are totally doomed. After all, he didn't burn the planet for a proper prize, like Lee Raymond of Exxon and his $100million retirement payout; he did it for a pathetic little salary.

I wonder where he'll pop up next.

Room for lies

2010-05-10T16:56:00.000-07:00

The New York Times found space on its server drives for a few paragraphs of Myron Ebell:

The chance that the Senate will pass a comprehensive energy-rationing (a k a climate) bill this year remains close to zero. BP’s big oil spill in the Gulf changes very little.

You wish!

After outlining the recent sorry tale about America's dysfunctional governance in the face of an existential challenge, Mr Cambridge University Tie concludes:

Call it whatever you want, it’s still a tax that consumers will have to pay... What’s become increasingly apparent is that this legislation no longer has much to do with reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a monstrous collection of payoffs to big business special interests, ranging from Goldman Sachs to Duke Energy to General Electric.

Nobody likes Goldman Sachs. And nobody gave them as much money as the George W Bush administration through the TARP bail-out. But that didn't concern Myron Ebell one bit, because it was money badly spent.

This whole Cap-and-Trade thing is a red herring. It's an over-complex system that's designed to appeal to all those "Free-market" bozos like Myron and his friends by selling off property shares in the atmosphere in the hope that they'll stop treating it like a toilet. Isn't that what they always claim? Tragedy of the commons and all that? Funny how these narratives don't apply when it's their pals in Exxon who are plundering the commons. On no.

But instead Myron has been banging on about this Cap-and-Trade system -- a gift to guys with an ideology such as his -- being a tax. Well, what gives? Maybe we should just do it the obvious way, and call it a tax. It's a tax to clean up the oil spills. Doesn't matter what it's for, as long as the price of oil rises to a level that is actually representative of its costs.

I've found that even Exxon agrees with me:

One policy option that is intended to reduce emissions — and which has received much attention — is a cap-and-trade system. Before we rush to enact such a system, we must ask whether it can best achieve our shared goal of actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Cap-and-trade systems inevitably introduce unnecessary cost and complexity that undercut their effectiveness. It is important to remember that a cap-and-trade system requires a new market infrastructure for traders to trade emissions allowances. This new "Wall Street" of emissions brokers will take the emphasis away from the goal of reducing carbon emissions and focus on trading on price volatility instead.

There is another policy option that should be considered, and that is a carbon tax. A carbon tax avoids the costs and complexity of having to build a new market for securities traders or the necessity of adding a new layer of regulators and administrators to police companies and consumers. And a carbon tax can be more easily implemented. It could be levied under the current tax code without requiring significant new infrastructure or enforcement bureaucracies. A carbon tax is also the most efficient means of reflecting the cost of carbon in all economic decisions — from investments made by companies to meet their fuel needs to the product choices made by consumers. In addition, such a tax should be made revenue neutral. There should be reductions or changes to other taxes — such as income or excise taxes — to offset the impacts of the carbon tax on the economy.

Finally, there is another potential advantage to the direct-tax, market-cost approach. A carbon tax may be better suited for setting a uniform standard to hold all nations accountable. Given the global nature of the challenge, and the fact that economic growth in developing economies will account for a significant portion of future greenhouse gas emissions increases, policy options must encourage and support global engagement."

So what are we waiting for, eh?

Hey, Rex, what about putting aside a few thousands to hire a PR agent to take out Myron Ebell once and for all. Your company supported and paid him into existence. It's your duty to get rid of him and make sure he never appears in the New York Times, on the TV or anywhere from now on. It's lonely trying to hold out against him on my own all these years, you know.

The painful leak from his head

2010-05-06T01:14:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell has been remarkably quiet as that oil has continued to piss out of a deep water well into the Gulf of Mexico.

Who knew that drilling in mile deep water was so tricky?

But one bit of water is the same as another, isn't it, baby?

You never need to take account of the special situation and pass or enforce regulations that prevent enterprises having to cut all corners possible to compete in the market, do you?

Myron knows the need for regulations, even though he has spent his whole life lying about it.

But here he is in an Associated Press story from yesterday:

Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, which usually rails against too much government intervention into business, spoke Tuesday of the need for "more scrutiny of the industry" and regulations. That way drilling can continue.

Or to put it another way, so that drilling is sustainable. America, for all its severe faults, is not like Nigeria where you can just machine gun the people out of the way. You have to use the power of lies. Lies are awesome and powerful and control the masses, but they can't do everything.

I'd like to rephrase his statement on a little broader level.

There is an need for more scrutiny of the fossil fuel industry and regulations to get it out of politics. That way human civilization might survive.

Ultimately, Myron Ebell's view of capitalism is suicidally self-destructive. It is just so sad it has to wreck everything with it.

True conservative values inconsistent with life on earth

2010-04-12T02:15:00.000-07:00

The LA Times reported a story about Ronald Reagan's voice being used in radio ads to prove that "conservative values" aren't just what Myron Ebell pulls out of his ass. Reagan officially had more of a conservative mind than Ebell, so his sayings ought to trump them.

The Climate Conservative campaign is a good effort, and I support it. Ronald Reagan was from a more sophisticated era, when rank ignorance was not seen as a character strength. We used to think he was unintellectual and stupid (especially as alzheimer's crept in), but we didn't know what real stupidity was in those days. Reagan read Reader's Digest every month (link). Sarah Palin doesn't even know what she reads.

You can tell it's a good effort, because Myron Ebell is against it:

"I can say with no hesitation that Ronald Reagan, were he alive today, would not believe that global warming was a crisis and would not support energy-rationing legislation," said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute.

There's no saying what Reagan would believe if he were alive today, given the nature of the right wing wackos who would have his ear. We know he suppressed a 1978 prediction of the threat of climate change.

By 1988 his peer, Margaret Thatcher, was concerned with the issue, and nailed it in a speech:

For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons -- which has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century... It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s.

Another ten years on, a global treaty on greenhouse gasses was negotiated and signed between all nations, in 1997.

Then Myron Ebell and his pals got to work and, using the power of corporate controlled media and money interests, lied and bribed the United States and the world into inaction and drove us down the road of suicide and death.

It is not a mistake. It is not an error, or foolishness. It is deliberate. Our minds and systems of governance are too weak to resist today's machines of propaganda, and those of wield it are too irresponsible and dangerous.

Thanks Myron. Your name is recorded in the story of the downfall of the human race.

Sweet dreams.

Financial Times achievement hour

2010-03-28T12:44:00.000-07:00

As the damp squib of Human Achievement Hour (for celebrating only harmful out-of-date 20th century technology) fizzles, Myron Ebell lays into the upper classes for their frivolous concerns about the future of humanity on this planet.

I have no idea why reporter Fiona Harvey or her editor at the FT thought her piece about how members of the European monarchies -- usually so removed from everyday life on the ground -- even they were becoming radicalised by the fact that climate change was going to threaten their existence, would be improved by some ignorant grunts from Myron Ebell.

But such is the lack of standards in journalism:

Global-warming sceptics regard royals campaigning against climate change as a fad at best and at worst a form of political activism inappropriate for public figures who are meant to remain outside the realm of democratic politics. Myron Ebell, director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and one of America's most prominent climate-change sceptics, says: "The interest of royal personages in promoting global warming alarmism and supporting energy-rationing policies is a good example of out-of-touch elitism. It's a popular cause for them and other wealthy people who don’t have to worry about skyrocketing energy bills."

...

Among the royal activists on global warming, Prince Charles has shown the greatest willingness to try to influence politicians directly... The reason he is able to get away with this may be that in Britain, as opposed to the US, environmentalism largely transcends party boundaries. Margaret Thatcher was the first world leader to speak out strongly on the problem of climate change, in 1988... Ebell is scathing: "My guess is that Prince Charles's clueless comments tend to confirm the suspicions of ordinary people that global warming is just another fashionable cause."

Is it, Myron? Just a fashionable cause? It can't mean anything more? So, if a royal prince campaigns against AIDS, that's just a fashionable cause too? You're in favour of AIDS, are you, Myron? Lots of people dying.

You don't want these influential people weighing in and undoing all your hard work lying and persuading people to act against their own interests of survival. That's your problem, isn't it? They're not allowed to speak out, but you are with your full of crap statements all day, every day, aren't you Myron?

But why would any self-respecting media organization publish it?

Myron keeps boiling the oil

2010-03-19T04:45:00.001-07:00

Myron Ebell is spreading himself thin between Freedom Action Network work where he is pitching in against US healthcare reform (he likes it just the way it is), and wrecking any potential action to save us from the most life threatening effects climate change.

While it is morally acceptable (though sad) for the seriously defunct United States political system to self-inflict unnecessary pain and suffering on its own people through gross medical and financial maladministration, causing irreparable harm to the global environment is another matter.

Myron's expertise with the minutae of Congressional procedures exposes his pleasure in a system that consistently comes out with the wrong answer on easy questions.

Back to his CEI work, where Myron has decided to don his Cambridge University, England tie again:

This is the same one he wore to the Select Committe on Energy Independence in December 2007, as you can see from this picture:

(Although that was shortly after abandoning his tie for the CEI website that September in a picture he now uses for F.A.N.)

So, what has Myron been boiling the oil about this time?

Climategate: Alarmist Scientists Plan a Snow Job

According to recently disclosed e-mails from a National Academies of Science listserv, prominent climate scientists affiliated with the U.S. National Academies of Science have been planning a public campaign to paper over the damaged reputation of global warming alarmism. Their scheme would involve officials at the National Academies and other professional associations producing studies to endorse the researchers’ pre-existing assumptions and create confusion about the revelations of the rapidly expanding "Climategate" scandal...

In my view, the response of these alarmist scientists to the Climategate scientific fraud scandal has little to do with their responsibilities as scientists and everything to do with saving their political position. The e-mails reveal a group of scientists plotting a political strategy to minimize the effects of Climategate in the public debate on global warming.

As we well know, Myron's view is, as always, fossil-fuel-company-serving, and wrong. When he goes out and aggressively kicks someone, he pretends that it is wrong to kick back in any way.

These scientists are not cold-hearted calculating machines, they are human beings who -- as humans -- would quite like the human species to live at least beyond the end of the century.

Myron Ebell, on the other hand, doesn't care how many people he causes to die, if that is what he is paid to facilitate.

Myron has scoured the list-serve email messages for damaging content and hints of a conspiracy.

For a group of people who have been participating in a world-wide conspiracy to take over the energy supply, they do seem to lack any money or PR industry help as they pathetically consider raising money to buy an ad in the New York Times:

I would like to invite all members of the NAS (Ralph - please send this to all sections) - to sign a declaration that there is clear scientific evidence that burning of fossil fuels by humans will will alter the climate. I want that to be on the back page of the NYT and other newspapers in the US, sponsored by the NAS- without any outside contributions - unless they sign a contract making it clear that the NAS will not endorse any private companies. For this - I offer $1000.00 of my personal funds- but I will only donate these funds if 50 members of the NAS come with matching funds.

I mean, this is hopeless. This is disorganized, uncoordinated, unfunded, useless and unproductive.

As Myron knows, from his work on the Exxon and Chevron funded Action Plan in 1998 to train bogus scientists and systematically insert lies into the political system, you need professionals.

The kind of professionals who know about evil, like Bonner&Associates who send false letters in the name of citizens groups purporting to be in favour of corporate policies.

There's no point in paying for New York Times ads, folks. Just get out of your office, find Myron Ebell, and film yourself asking him a few questions about, say, his involvement in that 1998 Exxon conspiracy. Take along the documents. Does he admit he was there? Can he kindly explain to the viewers what he was trying to achieve? What were the names of the five bogus scientists they obtained the budget to hire and train?

We want answers to these very serious questions. Get out and get them.

No sense but the science

2010-03-08T01:50:00.000-08:00

Myron Ebell, whose part in the suicide of the human species is documented in this blog, has been working on overdrive on the so-called Climate-gate emails, condemning bad practice that has supported junk science. Myron doesn't know what science is.

Science is about sifting through all the distractions, personalities, cock-ups, conspiracies and general human failings in order to find out what reality is and what nature has in store for us. Myron is anti-science because all these manufactured overblown deliberate misinterpretations and fallacies are all he wants to talk about.

There's the thousand words on FoxNews website criticising The New York Times for not giving this -gate the fair coverage it deserves. According to Myron:

Broder further opines on his own behalf: "The battle is asymmetric, in the sense that scientists feel compelled to support their findings with careful observation and replicable analysis, while their critics are free to make sweeping statements condemning their work as fraudulent." That, of course, is not reporting, but agreeing with one of the alarmists' talking points.

And it is untrue. Anyone who has ever seen some of the leading scientific proponents of alarmism in action knows that they are not about "careful observation and replicable analysis." In fact, the major revelation of Climate-gate has been that top climate scientists refused to share their data and methodologies because they were concealing intentional data manipulation as well as incompetence. Which is exactly what their critics have maintained for years.

This is, of course, a lie. The NASA GISSTemp data is downloadable from here, as it has been for years, and the full calculations have been replicated using Clear Climate Code here.

But this interesting and relevant piece of data is not part of Myron's snot-mouthed narrative, so he gets on with the usual riff:

Dr. John P. Holdren... collaborator with Stanford Professor Paul R. Ehrlich of Population Bomb fame... has made a career of bending science to support left-wing politics and has an unblemished forty-year record of wild doomsday predictions that have all proven wrong.

Dr. Rajendra K Pachauri, the Chairman of the U. N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who is a railway engineer by profession... Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt... salary is paid by American taxpayers... spending a good part of his time during office hours and using government equipment to produce political propaganda for RealClimate.org... has received help from Fenton Communications, the key P.R. firm for the Soros-funded left.

Dr. James E. Hansen... is a highly political animal... is also increasingly kooky and extreme... a federal employee, was arrested for protesting at a coal mine in West Virginia.

Science is also about data. Knowing that the science is against them, Myron and his friends in the Bush Administration were certainly instrumental in preventing the launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory which would have given us seven years of inconvenient truths by now that no pack of emails could have dislodged.

Myron will also not be welcoming the imminent launch of CryoSat-2 for measuring sea-ice thickness (which fellow dipstick death-wisher Julie Walsh prefers to lie about). On the contrary, he would have been pleased in 2005 when the first launch blew up and saved him from having to account for the last five years of data that would have contradicted all his bollocks.

Science is the last thing he wants. Instead Myron has combed at length through random out of context quotes consistent with his narrative.

It's been a while since the Myron Ebell climate has kept up to date. In honour of this, I leave you with a denialist video from the horse's arse himself, Mr Nigel Farage.

Keep those small cars off the road

2010-01-20T00:58:00.000-08:00

The rusting hulk of Myron Ebell rolled up to the Detroit Auto show last week to argue that America and its car industry should keep charging down the same old hole like there is no tomorrow.

He said:

Uh, and I think you can see from the Detroit Auto Show that for the media there are lots of little green cars, and for the public who want to buy cars there are lots of muscle cars and pickup trucks.

And I think if you look at the new CAFE standards you're going to see that in 2016 the average car will be the smart car which is not selling -- there was an article in the Post yesterday that Mercedes Benz was in terrible trouble with the smart car because nobody wants to buy it. But that will be the average car. Many people will have to be satisfied with smaller cars than I saw in the Detroit Auto Show yesterday.

There are now many many concept cars that are even smaller that no one wants to buy.

From the Washington Post article:

"It's very difficult for Smart to duplicate the success of Mini," said Rebecca Lindland, director of auto research at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Mass. "The primary characteristic of Smart is that it's small. The primary characteristic of Mini is that it's irresistibly adorable, with performance thrown in."

The ForTwo, at 8 feet 10 inches, is more than three feet shorter than the Mini. Some Americans are reluctant to buy minicars because they are overshadowed on the road by massive pickups and sport-utility vehicles.

"The car is just so tiny in the U.S.," Lindland said. "I had a Mini and there were friends of mine who were afraid to drive with me."

America has a lot of very very deep problems. Myron and his friends are doing everything they can to make sure they keep them.

Meanwhile, over on the CEI blog Myron Ebell was thanked for helping with this post where they correctly blamed the Fed for the housing bubble (although the CEI thought it was great at the time) and lectured the government "to get out of the way of the productive sector" -- without whose bailout there would not have been any Detroit Auto show this year anyway.

The face of conservative ideology

2010-01-14T03:12:00.000-08:00

From the blog of Julie Walsh, Female, comes:

Washington, DC., January 8, 2009 – It has been reported in the London press (link to CNBC.com provided) that poor old-age pensioners are having to resort to buying books at thrift shops to burn to keep warm during the prolonged bitterly cold weather in the United Kingdom.

In response to this humanitarian crisis, Freedom Action is calling on former Vice President Al Gore to join an effort to collect and airlift copies of his science fiction bestsellers to British people in dire need.

"We are collecting copies of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Our Choice, and Earth in the Balance and will send them to Oxfam in the UK to distribute for free to vulnerable people trying to survive the cold weather," said Myron Goebbels, Director of Freedom Action. "We call on Mr. Gore to co-operate in our effort to relieve human suffering by providing copies of his books for burning in stoves and fireplaces."

It is appropriate that Al Gore's books should be used to help keep poor people warm, Ebell explained, "since the principal reason the British government is totally unprepared to deal with the brutally cold weather is because they have fallen for the global warming myths propagated by Gore himself in his bestselling books. Burning Gore's otherwise worthless books to keep people from freezing is their highest and best use."

Julie Walsh last featured in the Myron Ebell Climate last April when she exhibited a graph of Arctic Sea Ice Extent showing how the sea had refrozen over the winter from its shocking melt the previous summer -- and therefore there was nothing to worry about.

Hey, while we're on the subject of government unpreparedness for weather events, don't ever forget the CEI's pronouncement on the disaster in New Orleans.

"It was a lack of access to cars that led tens of thousands of people to remain in the city, says Sam Kazman, head of CEI's Automobility Project. "Many people may well choose a car-free lifestyle, but the notion that government should impose it in the name of sustainability is crazy. As Hurricane Katrina showed, it can be disastrous as well."

It's useful to have a simple mind when you don't want to be frightened by the rank evil you are part of.

Is Myron a climate change denier?

2009-12-22T09:22:00.000-08:00

Myron Ebell's trip to Copenhagen proved to be only slightly less useless than Senator Jim Inhofe's. Inhofe famously flew into the city, stuck his head out of the window, shouted "Hoax!", and flew all the way back home again.

Myron, on the other hand, stuck around a little bit to soak up the atmosphere for the purpose of regurgitating rotten lies about it for the rest of the year.

He was interviewed by Kim Parlee for the Business News Network. Parlee is [sadly] exceptional among TV reporters because she actually prepared for this interview!!! The transcript of the interview is as follows:

Parlee: I'm joined by here by Myron Ebell. He is the director for global warming fraudulence at the Crackpot Enterprise Institute, and probably best known for being a climate change denier. Is that a proper way of classifying you?

Ebell: Well, we don't deny that global warming is happening, or that climate changes. We just don't think that it's a big problem. We think it's a very modest problem that's; we don't really need 45,000 people flying to Copenhagen to try to solve it. Of course, they're not solving it, but we think it's unnecessary.

Parlee: Well you said before that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by the EU and the rest of the world to harm America's economy. Do you still believe that?

Ebell: [speaking slowly] We believe that global warming is used to create a regulatory framework to impoverish the richer nations. I think the context of me saying that global warming is a hoax was not fully captured by that quote. What we think is, not that global warming isn't happening, it's not a crisis that demands that we turn the whole world's economy upside down, and, of course, the richer countries to become considerably poorer, and force the poor countries to stay poor. We think that in fact if global warming turns out to be a big problem, the whole process going in here in Copenhagen, that started in Kyoto in '97, is a dead end. It's a very expensive, very destructive dead end that will be much worse than global warming. We believe that is global warming is a problem, the way to solve it is through technological innovation and creativity. And the most technologically capable societies are not the ones that are regulated to death, they're the ones that are free-markets that allow people to do things that invent things.

Parlee: Now having said what I said about the conference, looking like no solution is going to happen, amazing things happen when presidents and prime ministers fly in, and they may pull...

Ebell: A rabbit out of the hat.

Parlee: It might be a weak emaciated rabbit, but it will still be a rabbit. So it means it could happen here.

Ebell: Sure, you never know when people get together to negotiate. That's right.

Parlee: So what kind of agreement could we come up with if that's the case? Does that worry you that an agreement might come, when it might not be the kind of agreement that you want to see. You don't want to see any agreement.

Ebell: Well, I think the people who oppose energy rationing, like me, got very lucky with Kyoto in '97 because, at the time it was negotiated, it was absolutely dead in the United States senate. It would never be ratified. It doesn't matter who was president. The senate would never ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Even Senator John Kerry, who is here today, gave a speech a little while ago. John Kerry blamed president Bush when he ran against him in 2004 for the presidency, he blamed him for not being involved in the Kyoto process. But then when asked, he said, Oh sure if Kyoto came to the floor of the Senate, I would vote against ratification. So I think it's quite likely if some rabbit were pulled out of the hat here, it would probably again be a gift to us, and not to the people who want to ration energy. It will probably be dead in the United States congress as soon as it's negotiated. I think the only way the United States will get involved in this is to let the congress decide what to do, and take that to the international bargaining table, not take an international treaty and then take it to congress and say you have to do this. That's not the way our political system works.

Parlee: I've only got 30 seconds, but I have to ask you. The EPA has just come out and said that carbon dioxide is a dangerous substance. How did that ruling make you feel?

Ebell: We challenged that ruling as it was going along, and we announced the day that it went final that we will file suit in Federal Court to overturn it.

Parlee: And in terms of Copenhagen, what is the ideal outcome in terms of what you want?

Ebell: The ideal outcome would be to step back and say, Look, we've been on this Kyoto road since '97, and it's clearly not working to reduce emissions. What's reduced emissions in the last year is the global economic downturn. This process is not reducing emissions. Why don't we step back and figure out why it isn't working, instead of continuing to plough ahead into what is obviously a dead end. I'm a sort of obstinate driver and I often keep driving even though I know in the back of my mind I'm going in the wrong direction and I really need to stop and look at the map. I think they need to stop and look at the map.

Parlee: Myron Ebell, thank you for joining with us.

Next question (for which there unfortunately wasn't time):

So, Myron, what is the wrong with the process, and how do you think it would be made to work then, eh? If you knew it wouldn't work, you wouldn't be here.

Also, I'd like to have seen a little more quizzing on what he thinks is exactly happening to the climate? When will the north pole be ice free? What the hell does he know about anything, once he has discounted the testimony from everyone who does?

And while we're at it, exactly what technology is going to save our asses when climate change turns out to be the problem as predicted, and we become as frightened as we are when we are diagnosed with cancer -- in the way that we are not when we take risks with cancer.

All I have ever heard in terms of technological advances in five years of following this bonehead's unwarranted media exposure is the astounding innovation of being able to turn off six of the eight cylinders in his fat sport ute when it is idling in a traffic jam.

This is most crap. If we're going to stand for Myron Ebell betting our lives on as-yet, totally uninvented faith-based technologies, to be developed by the very same scientific intellectuals who are telling us that there is a big problem, we ought to require him to know more about technology than the absolutely pitiful knowledge he has of economics.

I expect my priests to have seen the bible before they preach our salvation on the basis of it.

Myron reduced to mush

2009-12-17T19:18:00.000-08:00

Some coal-hearted imbicile thought it was a good idea to send Myron Ebell over to Copenhagen (or "Hopenhagen" as he calls it). Not sure what the point of it was. He seems to be sending back exceedingly dull dispatches that get published in Politico, a "cross-discipline forum for intelligent and lively conversation" that is happy to publish lies from the likes of Myron Ebell.

Myron rambles:

Failure looms over Hopenchangen. Blah blah blah.

The question is, who is going to be saddled with the blame for COP-15's failure? There is only one obvious candidate: the United States. And the environmental movement is preparing the groundwork.

Myron sketches out the miserable scenario that is his wet-dream with its climax in the defunct U.S. Senate.

Should [Obama tell his negotiators to stop frustrating the hopes of the world], it will be a repeat of Kyoto in 1997. The negotiations were hopelessly deadlocked at the beginning of the last week [of Kyoto]. President Clinton sent (or allowed) Vice President Gore to fly to Kyoto and collapse the U. S. negotiating position. The result was a treaty that was dead in the Senate the minute it was signed.

It's probably too much to hope that Obama will make the same mistake that Gore made, but it is ironic that unless he does, the U. S. will end up being blamed for the failure here. It will be interesting to see to to what degree President Obama can succeed in keeping the blame from falling on him personally.

In an earlier post, Myron warms up his "climategate" riff:

There is another reason for President Obama to call for a global timeout on energy-rationing policies. The Climategate scandal calls into question much of the scientific research upon which the energy-rationing agenda is based. President Obama ought to include a call at COP-15 for a real investigation of the data manipulation and fraud revealed by Climategate rather than an establishment whitewash.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then in an extreme attack of dullness, the Fixed News website published 1400 words by Myron documenting the chaos of too many people and too few passes, and how so many of the hopeful delegates (like him) show up only for the last week because they are too thick to understand the technical meetings in the first half.

It's surpring Myron wasn't there to join his friends Fred Singer and Lord Monckton at their kooky fringe meetings to wind themselves up before going out on the street to call crowds of young people "hitler youth".

Myron concludes:

The real news is that there is now a tremendous amount of animosity and distrust between the U.N. establishment and the environmental establishment. They know that they need each other, which is why the mainstream environmental NGOs have not made a stink and why the establishment press hasn't made it a front page story. But the fissure arising out of the U.N.'s incompetence is going to take a long time to heal and could easily grow much wider.

That is the very good news coming out of Hopenchangen.

Oh, Myron, extinction is too kind. Are you really stupid enough to think you can live forever, like Robert Vroman?

I don't believe in human intelligence

2009-12-10T11:01:00.000-08:00

Myron Ebell twitched in front of the Fox Disaster Business cameras before a dizzying swirling computer graphics montage depicting the fires of hell.

The "Fair and Balanced" network decided it was a good idea to debate him against his paymasters, Massey coal mining company.

Q: Tell us a little more about [the evil] Mr James Hansen, the climate scientist who dared to protest at the gates of the coal mining mountain.

Myron: Well, James Hansen is an astronomer who's specialty is the climate of Venus (lie, lie, lie!). He's often described as the world's leading climate scientists. I don't think this is remotely true, but he is certainly the world's leading scientific alarmist about global warming and of course he is making a spectical of himself all over the world, not just in West Virginia. He advised the people in Britain that they should commit acts of civil disobedience to close down a coal fired power plant. He's a little bit kooky, I think.

Q: Well, Don, it must be upsetting to you to have a person protested at your very plant to be a person on who's back a lot of this research is now based.

Don Blankenship (Massey Energy CEO): I think that some of us who have paid attention know it's been a hoax for a long time, and Mr Hansen is just a part of the big hoax.

Q: Well, the funny thing is, Myron, is he actually admitted to Scientific American about four years ago that he at one time deliberately exaggerated the dangers of global warming. He said, "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time when the public and decision makers were relatively unaware of global warming issues." So he's essentially admitted that he did what Climategate shows a thousand times over.

Myron: Yes, that's right. Dr Hansen is the head of this small unit up at Columbia University that's part of NASA. They have one of the main temperature data sets, along with the one in England. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU who's now taken a leave of absence from his job because of his huge scandal. And in one of the emails he says, "Our dataset has a lot of problems, but it's really good and clean compared to the one done at NASA GISS. That's the one that Hansen is in charge of. So I think there's a lot of shenanigans going on here. They won't cough up the emails, the Freedom of Information requests to find out whether Gavin Schmitt, one of Hansen's boys uses NASA government time in order to do propaganda on behalf of global warming alarmism.

Q: Don, do you think that because of what's happened with climategate, and the more we find out the people on whose a lot of this legislation is based have had a chequered past to say the least, that the push for massive changes that would disrupt your industry and other industries in America is going to fail?

Don the coalman: I think it's going to fail, but I don't think they're going to quit trying because so much money's been invested in the windmill, solar panel, and all the other things that they have invested in.

Q: You think it will fail, but you think there will be a residual. Will it be enough to effect most businesses in the United States?

Don: Well, it'll effect some. I don't think the people who have advocated this will quit just over climategate because they've always shown that they will perpetrate a hoax, I don't think they will give up that easily. But windmills, solar panels, will double American's power bills. It will effect anybody who gets their power from those sources and fossil fuels, nuclear power or hydro.

Q: Myron, aren't there people at NASA that have questioned Hansen, some of them very recently?

Myron: Uh, yes. I think that the jig is up here. But as Mr Blankenship says it's going to cost us a lot of money even though they're probably going to fail. At some point in a war you probably know who's going to win, but that doesn't mean there might not be hundreds of thousands of casualties before the war is actually over. I think we're looking at major increases in energy prices as a consequence of this long alarmist campaign. It's not just the makers of solar panels. These scientists have gotten billions and billions of dollars in research money from federal tax money to promote this global warming scare story. So they're in it too.

Of course, we can ask what temperature records that Myron, Don and Fox Business News do rely on, or is their position based entirely on god-given faith, lies, convenience, and no data. Ignorance is strength!

Meanwhile, the Gistemp series is being worked on by volunteers on the Clear Climate Code project by volunteer programmers, while Myron combs through the CRU emails looking for stuff he can lie about.

What a downer. Here's a nice video to cheer you up.

Myron the Coal-funded citizen reporter

2009-12-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

A world of pain as Myron Ebell wears his pope of death outfit and questions various environmental offices about the "ClimateGate emails", berating people about the lack of scientific ethics. That's got to hurt. It's like being called a fantasist by L Ron Hubbard.

Here is The Video

In the first doorstep everyone must have been told to give them no comment.

It's dangerous to give these people any footage, because you know they will edit it in any way they can. If you pick your nose or give them the finger, it will make their day.

But one guy took the chance.

Worker: The consensus on global warming is settled by many more scientists that are involved in these emails... Some folks have been cherry-picking out of context. This isn't where the debate on global warming is. The debate on global warming is what we should do about it.

Myron: The CRU is really the Pentagon of research. This may be the Pentagon for this research.

Worker: I think that's completely inappropriate. We've got decades of research, much of which has improved just in the last few years. These are conversations that happened years ago. Once the information is public, we're talking about peer reviewed information that is settled.

Myron: Can I ask you another question?

Worker: I want to ask you something. What is your argument here? That we shouldn't be doing anything about global warming? Because that is the conclusion of scientists around the world. And we need to take action now.

Myron: Let me follow up by asking you about a recent email from Keven Trenberth of the National Center for Atmosphere Research, one of the really key people in the IPCC, a lead author and one of the real central characters. Kevin Trenberth in one of the recent emails, just a month ago said, "I think we need to be very embarrassed about the lack of warming in the last decade and the fact we don't have an explanation for it." Doesn't it bother you that all the scientists agree and yet global warming seems to have stopped in the late 1990s.

Worker: That's a ridiculous assertion. I think that you're cherry-picking a particular piece of information, not putting it into the global context. Obviously it's a complex system and to pick out one piece and call it evidence you.

Second CEI fuckwit: Do you think it helps your credibility if you just look at these emails and take them seriously and address some of the serious criticisms that some people.

Worker: I'm not particularly interested in what private citizens had in private discussions among themselves before the public scientific data came.

Myron: Smiling You're a denier!

Worker: I'm a global warming optimist. I believe that we'll solve this problem and I think the solutions will help us. It'll help the economy. It'll help create jobs. And I think the science is settled.

Scene 2 – Greenpeace

Myron: You don't have any thoughts about these emails that have been released, and documents?

Kert Davies: My main thought and interest is who stole them. They came into your hands. The ones that were cherry-picked. The ones that were on the original FTP site are the ones that your side would want to broadcast as scandalous. But it's already been debunked that this mention of a trick. It's not a trick. It's a mathematical solution.

Myron: To, quote, Hide the decline.

Kert: No.

Myron: That's what the email says: Hide the decline.

Kert: The trick is adding to the historical record a more current material record from the instrumentation.

Myron: Because the decline in the proxy records...

Kert: No, we're not going to hash it out for your TV show. Global warming is real. You're wrong, we're right, and I don't care where you go with this. But you're wrong.

cut

Myron: But it looks like a lot of the evidence on your side is phony. Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Van Sander, Kevin Trenberg, Gavin Schmitt. These are not people who were not central to promoting global warming alarmism. These are people right in the middle of it.

Kert: Are you assuming that they're fabricating data?

Myron: Read the emails. Look, they say things like, We've got to hide the decline. We've got to figure out how to explain why it hasn't been warming for the last ten years.

Kert: What you've got in these emails is some measure of exchange between scientists where they're debating the data. I don't honestly care what they do as long as we come out with the right conclusions in the science that drives policy.

Myron: Are you in denial about all this?

Kert: Not at all. I'm furious about it. It's been a revelation to see all this email. We'll see what happens. I'm sure there will be investigations on who hacked the computers, or if this information breaches any national security, because there were some government scientists involved. I think this thing is going to play out for many years.

Cut to the Center for American Progress who kindly let the wolf into their house without taking the precaution of recording their own footage of the following interview in case anything happened that it would be a shame for Myron to cut out.

Faiz Shakir: I don't think there's any concern about whether these are upending notions that climate change is already occurring. There is a consensus that climate change is occurring. The nobel prize willing IPCC has concluded that. And I don't think anything in these emails suggests otherwise. I don't see this as a terribly important news event in itself. There are some ethics of individual scientists I might have issue with. But in general I'm not at all interested in these emails.

Number 2: Have you had any chance to actually go through and read the emails.

Faiz: You know, I've read a few of them that have been reported by Reuters and some other news agencies, but I haven't had the time to go through and document every single one of these emails.

Myron: We need to figure out a way to explain how the world hasn't been warming for the last decade. How can global warming be going forward if the world hasn't been warming for the past decade?

Faiz: Right, do you have that email on you, Mr Trenberg's email?

Myron: I don't.

Faiz: I think if you look at the context of what he said, he said he was concerned there wasn't enough observable data, and he was concerned that he wanted to get more data. I think there has been a misinterpretation by those who are looking for a conspiracy theory in all this. They want to get emails and infer that there's an attempt to deceive the public about climate change, when in fact if you read these emails in the context that they were provided, particularly that one you referenced, he's merely saying, I want more observable data. Can I find it somewhere? Can we invest in trying to find more data so we can demonstrate to the public. So I don't think that there was an intent to deceive. Simply an attempt to clarify. And in many of these emails, the intent was there. Let's just present this data in a way that people can see it and understand it. Let's look at another way to show this data in a way that people like Myron Ebell will be convinced.

Myron: But the data is, from all of the main temperature sets, the satellite and the Hadley CRU datasets don't show any increase in the global mean temperature for the past decade.

Faiz: One second. What was the year of that data?

Myron: It's 2000. There was no warming.

Faiz: Those emails were sent in 1999.

Myron: There were recent ones from Kevin Trenberg.

Faiz: But that one that you referenced about the dataset is from 1999, if I remember correctly.

Myron: There were ones this fall the same. We've got to have a story to explain why the global mean temperature hasn't been going up. And in fact don't you agree that it's sort of worrying for people who think the world is in crisis. In fact, they ought to be happy. The world doesn't seem to be in crisis. Warming isn't a problem. There hasn't been any warming.

Faiz: Mr Ebell, we've had the hottest decade in history, this past decade.

Myron: You really believe that?

Faiz: Absolutely.

Myron: Jim Hansen had to take it back from the US record this summer. He had to say, Sorry I was wrong. It wasn't the case. It was the 1930s.

Faiz: Not only was it the hottest decade in history. You've got arctic ice sheets melting. You've got it going on in Greenland and Antarctica. We've got the species of the polar bear. The drought and the wildfires in Australia. We've got sea levels rising. All of these are observable and predicted by the IPCC reports.

Myron: You looked at sea level rise? There isn't any sea level rise in the last several years. There is none. If this is the warmest decade in history, there's quite a lot of evidence that the people at the CRU and Phil Jones didn't know what they were doing or they were intentionally manipulating the data. There are all kinds of documents in this treasure trove to show they were either intentionally manipulating the data, or they didn't know what they were doing. So I think this whole temperature record going back to about 1850 is very suspect. Don't you think it should be investigated to find out if that temperature record is accurate or whether we can't believe it any more? Because Phil Jones has already said that he's deleted or destroyed the data, right? The underlying raw data no longer exists.

Faiz: Mr Ebell, I have a concern for people who believe in conspiracy theories. I see the Glen Beck-ization of the Republican Party. You want to grab hold of the nearest conspiracy theory to justify things you already believe in that climate change doesn't exist. Grasping for emails to make that point. I think if you read these emails with the intent that they were written, there was no intent to deceive or manipulate.

Myron: There was no intent to suppress the science that disagreed with them, to try and lean on journal editors not to publish papers they didn't agree with, to try to get editors fired, to try to arrange peer review so that articles wouldn't be accepted. You do agree that that looks like a conspiracy.

Faiz: I said at the outset that there were some ethics of these people who are put into question. To the extent that there were efforts to suppress scientists with whom they had disagreements with, and to freeze them out, and to isolate them, I think that those type of ethics need to be questioned. But as pertains to the issue of climate change, we've got so much observable data, we've got so much going on, and yet you want ...

Myron: We can agree or disagree about that. But you do agree that the personal ethics problems. There really needs to be an investigation into these people and what they're up to, don't you think?

Faiz: What kind of investigation are you looking for, exactly?

Myron: The idea of trying to manipulate peer reviewed literature, the things you referred to as personal ethics problems. Don't you think that that ought to be investigated?

Faiz: I don't mind looking into that, as long as you and I can agree that the issue of climate change is settled.

Myron: Oh no, we can't. I think it's settled. But I think it's settled the other way. Global warming is not a problem.

This is useless. It's time there was a counter-attack. Where are all the datasets which these guys do support? There aren't any. They have nothing to contribute. It's all suppress suppress suppress.

It's funny how the fossil fuel industry and the shipping lines are making business decisions based on the understanding that the Arctic ice melt is continuing.

Meanwhile, here's some big sets of raw data sources that Myron doesn't need to talk about while he's got this subject going on.

Myron on the attack

2009-12-01T02:47:00.000-08:00

The smirking media-trained scientifically dissembling Myron Ebell showed up clean-shaved, powder-puffed and in his best suit on Fox news to debate against the scientist Kevin Tenberth talking over a Skype call from his office.

In this interview, Myron promotes his hypothesis of a whistleblower who was disgusted by the scientists, because it makes a better story.

While there might have been an insider, it is likely that he was paid. Although this will be difficult to reveal because lying is the PR industry's full time job, and they only rarely get caught out.

Trenberth: There are certainly disputes among the scientists about how to deal with the so-called skeptics, but not about the science itself. The science itself stands. And of course it's not dependent on a few individuals. There are hundreds of scientists around the world that are doing climate change science.

Q: Myron, was this hacking and posting of emails done for political purposes, do you think?

Ebell: I don't know, but you keep calling it hacking. There's no evidence that it's hacking. It may have been a whistle-blower who is simply disgusted by...

Trenberth: Well, it was hacking, supposedly from Russia.

Ebell: There is no evidence either way on that. Look, I don't want to Kevin Tenberth in particular. I think he's not one of the main gang leaders here. But he's part of a gang that I think is being revealed from these emails. Even more from the data files, as they're cooking the data. And "cooking" is a technical word for manipulating and falsifying the data. They have been doing this for years. I'm sorry, these people have already been revealed as not having any honour. Now they're being revealed as not having any sense of shame. They're just trying to brazen it out. If they had any honour they would come forward. Like Phil Jones, they would come forward and say: Sorry, you're right, I've been caught with the goods, I've been denying requests to share the data for years when I knew it had tremendous problems in it. I knew we were making things up. Fudge factors appear continually in these data files. We didn't know how to deal with it, but I wouldn't admit there were problems with it. This is shameful. They should be talking to their lawyers about it.

Trenberth: That is certainly a shameful comment. That is totally wrong with regard to everything Phil Jones has done. He has tremendous integrity. And the publications are very open about all the problems with the data and how it has been treated. Your charges are simply false.

Ebell: This is simply not true, Dr Trenberth, this is simply not true. There are emails that show he was denying Freedom of Information Act requests in Britain, and when he knew he had the data later he said I've deleted the data, I've destroyed it. It's been damaged. It's irrecoverable. And yet he said, I'm not going to answer these... (grin)

Trenberth: That's a misrepresentation also in both cases.

Ebell: It is not.

Q: There are emails that also seem a little bit childish, might be one way to put it. Here's one of them. It says: "Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him."

Trenerth: That sort of thing is unfortunate. It's not a comment that I made. And indeed on personal emails I'm sure you will find that kind of thing. But that doesn't undermine the integrity of the science at all. And the charges about the Freedom of Information Act are really quite flawed because a lot of the data are proprietary, and Phil Jones does not have the option of passing it on. And no data have been deleted. Let me assure you (Myron grinning and nodding like a cat playing with a half-killed mouse) unless it was a long time ago for reasons that don't have any malicious intent.

Myron, you know it. Every time you lie, a fairy dies.

Data should always have been published. The CRU was getting grief over this back in 2001. There is no excuse. The 2007 publication of GISTEMP resulted in the clear climate code project. With some encouragement, this could have happened here too. But you can't blame the climate scientists if they feel embattled by the world out there which gives safe harbour to monsters like Myron Ebell who lie and attack from all corners of the TV land.

The Jessica Lynching of Copenhagen

2009-11-25T01:32:00.000-08:00

The Copenhagen diagnosis, which is materially supported by professors around the world with access to non-imaginary data, concludes:

The ice sheets are both losing mass (and hence contributing to sea level rise). This was not certain at the time of the IPCC report.

Arctic sea ice has declined faster than projected by IPCC.

Greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to track the upper bounds of IPCC projections.

Observed global temperature changes remain entirely in accord with IPCC projections, i.e. an anthropogenic warming trend of about 0.2C per decade with superimposed short-term natural variability.

Sea level has risen more than 5 centimeters over the past 15 years, about 80% higher than IPCC projections from 2001.

Perhaps most importantly, the report articulates a much clearer picture of what has to happen if the world wants to keep future warming within the reasonable threshold (2°C) that the European Union and the G8 nations have already agreed to in principle.

In other words, Myron Ebell was right. Our climate models were inaccurate. But the changes are much worse than predicted. Everything is out of balance, and your children are going to live and die with it -- not just your great grandchildren and beyond.

Myron knows this, which is why he is not talking about it. He's got more interesting things to talk about, like a set of hacked emails from 1999 to 2009 between a small subset of the scientists who had obviously been driven insane by the work of the well-funded climate denial industry.

We, at the Climate, are in favour of disclosure, and would like to see more leaks from all sides -- including things like the 1998 smoking memo which involved Myron Ebell conspiring to:

Identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach. These will be individuals who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate. Rather, this team will consist of new faces who will add their voices to those recognized scientsts who are already vocal.

You won't be finding Ebell exposing those fraudulent scientists as incompetent, because they trained them and paid them to talk shite.

The emails themselves, as leaked, aren't the problem. What is the problem is the organized campaign to publicize and lie about them all over the press for the next 2 weeks in order to obscure the real bad news coming from Copenhagen.

This is standard media practice that always works with an incompetent and immature press that runs away from bad news.

We saw it with the feel-good Jessica Lynch story used to distract the news coverage from the violence, horror and first-degree murder that was ongoing during the first weeks of the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

The story was substantially embellished with false information like a Hollywood bedtime story to help the public sleep at night while their out-of-control government committed acts of slaughter day after day in their name.

This is just the same. And the timing of it is perfectly arranged.

Myron Ebell is part of the PR campaign to keep it going along, throwing in his own brand of lies to help it get maximum impact.

For example, he writes:

The next bit of context is that CEI -- the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which is where I work) -- had filed a petition with the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open a regulatory decision that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare on the basis of an affidavit by Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute. Michaels explained that it had recently been revealed that Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, had destroyed much of the original raw data he used to compile the global mean temperature record. EPA relied on the CRU global temperature record, but the lack of underlying data means that the CRU record cannot be analyzed or reproduced. That means that EPA must take Professor Jones’s work on trust, which of course is standard operating procedure in all good climate research. Dr. Michaels is clearly just being disagreeable. Everyone knows that we can trust Professor Jones’s honesty and utter scientific competence.

As Myron very well knows, there is a second global mean temperature record, established by James Hansen, known as GISTEMP. After a protracted battle from the climate change denial community, the raw data and the software to process it was disclosed in 2007.

Nothing was learnt, except that scientists write terrible software; an open source project was established to clean it up. But the results were unchallenged.

Same would happen if there was full release of the CRU data -- which is derived from the same reality. It's a stupid policy not to release it, because this is (a) bad practice, and (b) gives something for Myron Ebell and his pals to lie about.

Ebell has to lie about the veracity of the dataset, and he has to lie that the entire world record of climate change information resided in that dataset in order to maximize the damage of the first lie.

Knowing the full extent of the organized evil represented by Myron Ebell's life's work, it should have been easy to predict that something like this was going to happen.

The human species is entering the phase of resignation, and coming to terms with the fact that the funded support and social tolerance of organized public liars like Myron Ebell means that we fully deserve to die.

As the ecosystems on which our lives depend collapse, we'll find out what it feels to be a smoker dying of lung cancer -- we had it coming.

Myron Ebell finds his death panels

2009-11-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

Remember that trumped up death panel saga over socialized health-care? Well, Myron has been doing his duty and reading up the whole Climate Change Bill before congress and thinks he has his death panel scam in the form of Section 707.

He writes:

Section 705 of Kerry-Boxer, S. 1733, requires that the EPA Administrator must submit a report to Congress every four years beginning in 2013 including a determination of whether the legislation and other policies in place are sufficient to avoid greenhouse gas concentrations above 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent (ppm CO2-e).

In other words: It includes a determination of whether the policy working. (Myron doesn't like this, because he doesn't want the policy to work.)

Since concentrations are already at 430 ppm CO2-e and rising every year, there is no way that the policies in Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer can keep them below 450. The U. S. economy could shut down completely, and emissions from other countries would soon push atmospheric levels past 450.

Myron has explained that he knows the policy is not going to work to keep down CO2 concentrations anyway.

That's where section 707 of Kerry-Boxer is triggered. Section 707 directs the President to use existing authority to keep atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases below 450 ppm CO2-e.

In other words, if the policy is failing to achieve the desired outcome, the President must use his powers to do something about it.

Note how in Myron Ebell speak, zero carbon economy = no economy.

So much for the Roman Empire, folks. They didn't have an economy, because they did not burn any coal. But we're so much cleverer than the Romans, aren't we? We can make electricity without burning coal. But that doesn't matter.

Myron continues:

All those free ration coupons that big companies like Duke Energy and Exelon and P G and E are hoping to get won’t be worth anything because the President will be obligated to use whatever statutory authority exists to reduce emissions and get greenhouse gases back down to below 450 ppm CO2-e. All the command-and-control tools of the Clean Air Act will have to be used to require emissions reductions.

What section 707 actually says:

The President shall direct relevant Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions identified in the reports submitted under sections 705 and 706.

As Myron explains (rightfully, for a change) "appropriate actions" will probably not include giving away all the free pollution permits the President has at his disposal.

Myron checks in his discovery with his friend Senator Vitter (R-Louisiana) [flood? what flooded city?] to remind corporate America that they are legally bound to consider short-term profits above threats to the survival of the human species.

This kind of legislative farting around might be entertaining to you, Myron, because you're old enough not to live to see the real consequences. You can take comfort from the fact that you will die of natural causes before the end of this century, following a long and worthless life.

The death you have dedicated your life to bringing on is reserved for the younger generations. Thanks for that.

By the way, I strongly recommend looking at: Desmogblog's Another silly climate petition exposed for the way that you can technically analyse the signing pattern on a denial letter to uncover the networks of old farts who want the human race to die.

Last liar standing

2009-11-06T04:59:00.000-08:00

A coming to terms with reality has affected the US Chamber of commerce.

Myron Ebell explains:

"It appears that the Chamber has caved under enormous pressure from some of its biggest member companies. They have reluctantly enlisted in the effort to reward these big special interests with gigantic windfall profits at the expense of consumers and small businesses," said Myron Ebell, CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy.

"We invite small businesses whose interests are no longer being well-represented by the Chamber on this critical issue to drop their membership in the U. S. Chamber and join us at CEI in fighting against all energy-rationing legislation, even so-called compromises that only partly wreck the economy. We welcome their support. We will not capitulate," said Ebell.

Yeah, there will always be a home for conspiracy theorists at the CEI. We have your best death at heart. Here is one of those heart-warming fairy tales to tell their kids:

Meanwhile, over in the real world, here is a congressional hearing with Exxon where they explain just how little research budget they put into non-fossil fuel energy.

"So if you don't put research dollars in, does the new technologies come from the tooth fairy? How does it show up?"

Profit Care in California

2009-11-01T07:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Myron showed his sweaty face at the Rape All Natural Resources Summit sponsored by TuCARE in California.

What the hell is TuCARE? It stands for Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment.

Tuolumne County contains the famous Yosemite National Park, and happens to be one of those Republican strongholds in the almost sane state electorate of California.

The fact that Myron Ebell got invited as a keynote speaker to this event (along with the elected Republican state representatives) suggests -- without any further information -- that this is likely to be PR front group infested with lies and misinformation.

Guilt by association definitely applies here

As the gold motherlode press release of the meeting reports:

"If we thin our forests, science proves that we get more water yield," says TuCare President Mike Albrecht. "There's a real strong connection between forests and our watersheds."

I can't imagine what type of "science" he could be referring to, but the definitions of his words couldn't be clearer:

thin our forests - PR speak for "clear-cutting", also known as "thinning by 100%". Clear-cutting is the most cost-effective solution to apply when your economic model works on a concept of absolute property rights to convert the totality of this resource into money forthwith, and use this money to buy up the next tranche of forest to repeat the stripping on. This is known as a "sustainable business model".

water yield - The profit dividend yield from water company shares. These profits are predicted to go up, following a spate of resource mismanagement and drought -- just as Enron's profits went up when they engineered the California electricity crisis. It's important for the water companies to protect these profits by investing in spin and lies and by flying Myron Ebell over to their offices to explain how it's done.

It's important to note that, although Myron calls himself an "energy expert", he doesn't have anything useful to say about the capitalism-induced California electricity crisis of 2002. Instead, he blames every crisis on "regulation" -- even when the story was about deregulation.

If it doesn't fit with his bogus narrative, it didn't happen.

The fact is, markets -- when organized in the way he thinks they should be -- favour profits, NOT efficiency. And so much money can be made out of the inefficient management of natural resources, that the consequences are inevitable.

Myron fights for shareholder's rights to die

2009-10-26T04:13:00.000-07:00

In a parallel world where the human race does not knowingly choose the path that inevitably leads to a vile and miserable future for itself on its home planet, the US Chamber of Commerce made a statement on October 19:

Climatologists tell us that if we don't enact dramatic reductions in carbon emissions today, within 5 years we could begin facing the propagating feedback loops of runaway climate change. That would mean a disruption of food and water supplies worldwide, with the result of mass migrations, famines, and death on a scale never witnessed before.

Needless to say, that would be bad for business.

We at the Chamber have tried to keep climate science from interfering with business. But without a stable climate, there will be no business. We need business more than we need relentlessly higher returns.

Then, during the question and answer section where carbon capture and storage was correctly confirmed as being as fictional as seven levitating pieces of coal singing at your door, reality intruded:

Also, in the unfortunately real world, a Wall Street Journal editorial on 14 October condemned Apple and Nike for pulling out of the US Chamber of Commerce over its resolutely global-warming-denial stance -- when they should be putting shareholder's interests first.

Shareholders, you see, are theoretical entities in the minds of crackpot economists. They are not human beings who happen to depend on the continuing stability of the planet for bodily sustenance.

Myron Ebell concurred, with a letter to the editor on 22 October:

I would like to add a point to your editorial "Apple, Nike and the U. S. Chamber" (Oct. 14). In supporting energy-rationing legislation, Apple and Nike are as you observe being short-sighted about their own interests because they neglect to consider that the next step after enacting cap and trade will be tariffs on goods produced in countries that are not reducing their greenhouse gas emissions enough to satisfy the global-warming alarmist establishment. This will include those countries in which Apple and Nike manufacture their products.

Additionally, however, Apple, Nike and their ilk have failed to consider the effects of continually increasing energy prices. Higher energy bills will mean less money in people's pockets to spend on things like Nike shoes and Apple iPhones. A cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme will constrain economic growth for decades. It would be a great step forward if more company CEOs, would follow their own self-interest, realizing that few companies prosper when the economy is in the doldrums.

This is hopeless. At least he didn't mention jobs as he usually does. Myron doesn't care about jobs. An international carbon tax policy could create the economic climate that would allow Apple and Nike to bring back their manufacturing jobs from overseas back to where the products are consumed, so that people would have the income to buy these manufactured products.

But what does Myron know about the logic of flows of money? Does he think it seeps into the ground in China and returns back the US economy via rainfall?

For Myron, none of the today's current economic crises have happened. Shareholders' interests, my arse! At least it's logical. For whenever a shareholder's economic situation deteriorates, they always sell their shares to raise some cash. Then they no longer have any shares, and therefore the corporation is not responsible for their interests -- whatever they may be.

This logic is as corrupt as BlackWater dismissing their employee Mr Moonen shortly after he shot dead someone in Baghdad, and then claiming the act had nothing to do with them. The damage was done while he was under orders. Changing the relationship later doesn't alter the responsibility.

Today, the damage is being done by the corporations to people's future prospects. Some of these people are shareholders. Their future life interests are being violated by actions done today -- whilst they are shareholders.

But then there is a slippage of time. Because shareholders can and will sell back to the rich, for example, to afford to rent back a roof over their head in the fall-out of a mass corporate mismanagement of the economy -- they have no future!

The imaginary entity which embodies shareholder's interests has no concept of life beyond the end of the day. It is prepared to sell its own liver.

That's what you want us all to be like, Myron!

We return you to the message of hope from the alternative world:

The Chamber seeks a solid business solution - one that requires much less intervention, and has a proven track record. What we need is a carbon tax. Only thus will we be able to compete against Physics and create an environment where the best company wins and the best solution dominates. A carbon tax will mean new blood for Free Enterprise, and a fertile new foundation for long-term business prosperity.

The Chamber also calls on President Obama and the U.S. Congress to cease subsidizing old and failed technologies like the so-called "clean coal" hoax, and to incentivize tried and true clean technologies in their stead.

The Chamber expects to welcome back companies that have recently defected over our climate stance. But we also expect to reevaluate our relationship with other members - who continue opposing climate legislation, or who stymie progress through greenwashing and other stalling tactics. Corporate Social Responsibility just won't cut it anymore, folks - Mother Nature means business, and we do too.

We at the Chamber will put the full weight of our organization behind achieving these goals. The very future of business hangs in the balance.

Myron's salted body floating out at sea

2009-10-17T01:50:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell has been producing consistently dull writings of late.

On 13 October there was Senators Lindsey Graham and John Kerry: Yes We Can (Raise Your Energy Prices and Send Jobs Abroad) containing the usual fuzzy argument about how higher prices on fossil fuel consumption is going to drive out jobs, due to now uncompetitive manufacturing costs. But he doesn't like the import tariffs on high carbon products that would balance the situation. And he doesn't want any room to be created in the market for less efficient energy production industries like wind power to displace fossil fuel production. Less efficient = more jobs. Myron doesn't actually care about jobs, which is why he always, always lies about it.

Then on 16 October was the ultra-dull Socialist International Meets, but Carol Browner Can’t Make It. Ooooh! There's that scary word "socialism" which advocates for the public administration of all strategic sectors of the economy -- not just the police, judicial, military and transportation network -- for the public interest and maximum benefit to all, rather than just for a rich elite. There would be no argument, but for the rich elite paying for Myron Ebell and his friends to lie about how their system creates a better world in the long run, even though the claim is an insult to reason.

Slightly more interesting to follow was the Junkman on the next page with his blog-post Regulation Not Worth Its Salt.

It seems likely that regulation restricting sodium in foods would be ineffective because people would unconsciously adjust their diets to compensate. As the study puts it, "[sodium intake] is unlikely to be malleable by public policy initiatives", and attempts to change consumption would "expend valuable national and personal resources against unachievable goals."

Yeah, well if that were actually true, you'd think the Salt Lobby would be a little more relaxed about the upcoming discussion on dietary regulations. If -- as they claim -- reducing the massive salt dosage in processed foods caused people to buy salt in small boxes (with a higher profit margin) and put it in their salt shakers the salt manufactures would be encouraging it.

Logic is evidently not a component in these arguments.

The salt lobby website publishes irrelevant bollocks, like new fears over low salt:

A famous study conducted in volunteer soldiers marching uphill in the heat and sweating profusely showed that the six grams of salt per day recommended by today's government as the maximum intake, is not sufficient to avoid sodium depletion in active individuals. Forty per cent of the group of soldiers on the low salt (six grams) diet either collapsed from heat prostration or had to stop because of heat exhaustion, while in the group whose salt intake was 15 grams only one (the oldest man in the study) had any sort of problem.

For salt policy vaguely relevant to everyday civilians, Dr David McCarron is particularly popular. In 2007 they got a PR article published that described him as:

an internationally recognised and independent authority on the role of diet in heart disease

Here is Dr McCarron on the Salt Institute youtube channel with his theory that high blood pressure is actually because of too little mineral intake (ie not enough salt!).

His latest scientifically pointless excretion from this October was rebutted here.

Every couple of years he comes out with a "new study" presented as "new news" to a media that is too stupid to recognize it as the same as the old one.

So, for the benefit of those who can't do the research, here is the same old horseshit in The Independent in 1998 titled "Scientists clash over health effects of salt", and here is McCarron spitting out the same theory to The New York Times back in 1984.

These old junkmen just never go away. At least McCarron has a job in a real university, and so it's not necessary for him to lie all the time every day of the week to make an income. Those who work at the CEI, like Myron Ebell for example, don't have any honest work available to them. So nothing good whatsoever can ever result from their working lives.

Belt up, Myron

2009-10-08T03:10:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell is writing more of those Inside the Beltway columns for his long running Boneheads Digest publication.

The "Beltway" refers to the 103km ring road encircling Washington DC where insanity and dysfunctional administration reign supreme and the fate of the human race is sealed.

Myron Ebell loves to report on its failures and legislative gridlock that continues while his favourite oil companies and coal mines continue to grub millions of tonnes of fossil carbon from the ground and distribute it to be vapourized into the atmosphere as inefficiently and in as massive quantities as possible.

Myron is always keen to toss his own lies into the pot in order to slow the progress of reason and logic.

In absence of some definitive action, such as closing the mines and oil rigs by force, it's necessary to reduce demand, and this can only be achieved -- in the current economic model -- by raising the prices.

Myron has no problem with raised prices -- as long as the profits go to oil company executives to spend on their private jets. But if the difference went into the public funds, it could be returned to the public in the form of infrastructure investments that would make it easier to get by with less oil.

Myron understands this. Just as he understands it every single day when he drives to work and notices that government taxes, not private corporations, were the ones that paid to lay the tarmac and concrete of that beltway road. The economic theories he espouses are as false as the claim that the sky is green -- just open your eyes.

He also knows why any tax on fossil fuels (to reduce their use and pay for mitigating their damage) has to apply globally, so you don't just avoid the tax by making a set of goods off-shore and importing them. In preparation for branding the policy as protectionism, Myron writes:

The pro-labor union Economic Policy Institute warned in a report that four million jobs could be lost to foreign competition if cap-and-trade legislation does not include carbon tariffs on imported goods produced in countries without carbon reduction regimes. The report also noted that total global greenhouse gas emissions would likely increase as production shifted to countries that have less energy-efficient industries.

If you go to that link, you'd find that the Economic Policy Institute report begins:

Climate change is the most important environmental issue facing the United States and the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that the “scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal” (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 2009). Rising emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) are responsible for rising global temperatures, shrinking global ice masses, rising sea levels, and increasing the intensity of tropical storms. Continued change, aside from the obvious cost in human lives, would also entail potentially enormous economic costs. It is essential for the United States to develop strong and effective GHG regulations and to negotiate an international treaty to bring about global reductions in GHG emissions.

A well-designed climate policy can support the economic recovery, and green investments can support millions of new jobs, starting with the creation of over 1 million new jobs in the next two years (Bivens, Irons, and Pollack 2009) and ensuring that U.S. manufacturing comes back stronger and cleaner than before.

Poorly designed climate change policies, however, could slow or halt the recovery of significant segments of U.S. manufacturing—as identified in this report— and could even lead to increased global production of GHGs. It is essential for the United States to enact climate change policies that ensure a strong, broad-based recovery of the economy and encourage the growth of domestic manufacturing. One of the keys to achieving these goals is to include a border adjustment mechanism—a fee on the carbon content of goods imported from countries that do not restrict GHG emissions—in U.S. climate change policies.

Myron's purpose in life is to fight for a poorly designed climate change policy. In that way, he can make sure that only the bad stuff happens, and none of the good stuff. That's the choice he wishes to impose. This is what he wants. This is why he is an enemy of the people. And a civilization that permits people like him to thrive and be influential deserves its self-destruction.

Thank you Myron. It's a shame the rest of the species has to die off with you.

Telling the big lie about CO2

2009-09-28T12:04:00.000-07:00

Some outfit with a broken website called CO2 is green is running the following tissue of lies on American TV.

This links to a second outfit called plantsneedco2, that hosts this video:

The naration goes like this:

Over a quarter century ago when the atmosphere CO2 concentration was about 340 ppm, my father, Dr Sherwood Idso, stated in a small self-published book entitled "Carbon Dioxide friend or foe" that if the air CO2 content continued to rise, it would enhance plant growth and water use efficiency to the point that semi-arid lands not then suitable for cultivation could be brought into profitable production, further stating that the deserts themselves could blossom as the rose.

Ah, the great Idso family. They've been in these denialist circles a long time.

We experienced this exact same horseshit from Myron Ebell's Competitive Enterprise Institute back in 2006, with this nifty little video:

As the Climate reported in the same year, this kindergarden level understanding of biology is absolutely false. As reported experimentally, with added science, in Nature in 1993:

Evidence of a feedback mechanism limiting plant response to elevated carbon

IN short-term experiments under productive laboratory conditions, native herbaceous plants differ widely in their potential to achieve higher yields at elevated concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The most responsive species appear to be large fast-growing perennials of recently disturbed fertile soils. These types of plants are currently increasing in abundance but it is not known whether this is an effect of rising carbon dioxide or is due to other factors. Doubts concerning the potential of natural vegetation for sustained response to rising carbon dioxide have arisen from experiments on infertile soils, where the stimulus to growth was curtailed by mineral nutrient limitations. Here we present evidence that mineral nutrient constraints on the fertilizer effect of elevated carbon dioxide can also occur on fertile soil and in the earliest stages of secondary succession. Our data indicate that there may be a feedback mechanism in which elevated carbon dioxide causes an increase in substrate release into the rhizosphere by non-mycorrhizal plants, leading to mineral nutrient sequestration by the expanded microflora and a consequent nutritional limitation on plant growth.

There's a lot of other science demonstrating the fact that the eco-system has adapted its optimum performance to the historical level of CO2, and that elevated levels of this (combined with the elevated temperatures and greater droughts) is seriously disruptive.

In other words, there will be times of famine in the future. Things are not going to get better this way.

But this is America. It's perfectly okay to lie about things of this magnitude at a time when this future suffering could be avoidable. That's simply economics.

We are so screwed.

Ascending to despair

2009-09-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

Another week and another badly formatted post by Myron Ebell appears on www.globalwarming.org entitled Obama speech to the UN (September 22, 2009 @ 10:57 am).

The same text, only with paragraph breaks, pops up on www.openmarket.org, also entitled Obama speech to the UN (September 22, 2009 @ 10:57 am).

At around same time the same crappy text, with boldfaced bits, appears on www.opposingviews.com entitled Disputing the Global Warming "Facts" in Obama's UN Speech. This new site is an instant fail because it has somehow rated the CEI as a "Verified Expert". What kind of "verification" would that be then?

What was this thrice self-syndicated article about? Well, there is this speech by Obama at the hastily convened summit on climate change (the speed shows you the signs of panic among world leaders on this issue), and Myron's contribution is to pick the following five statements from it that are true to the best science we have:

[T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.

Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.

More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.

More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.

On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.

...and call them lies without making any proper arguments.

For example, to point two, Myron writes:

Reality: sea levels have been rising on and off since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago. The rate of sea level rise has not increased in recent decades over the nineteenth and twentieth century average.

which has little to do with predicted, future, avoidable, and self-inflicted rise in sea levels in the next two centuries and beyond. But what are his readers who lack logical faculties going to notice?

Myron then signs off with the usual brand of harebrained hogwash:

His policy prescription for poor countries is to promise them massive "financial and technical assistance".

The track record of paying off poor countries is that it has lined the pockets of corrupt leaders and bureaucracies with billions and tens of billions of dollars, but has done nothing to help those countries become prosperous. What these countries need is free markets and abolishing barriers to trade.

The global warming policies advocated by the Obama Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress would raise trade barriers and foster energy poverty throughout the world. Energy rationing is not the way forward and is not a message of hope for the poorest people in the world, who lack access to electricity and modern transportation.

ie don't give money or technology to poor countries; instead, the best way to help them is for fat Americans to continue to burn more coal.

Meanwhile, Myron Ebell is appearing on yet another of CEI's many front groups, the bizarrely creative commons licensed FreedomAction, where some extra info appears on his bio page:

Myron has lived in Washington since the 1980s, but has never gone native. He knows how the political establishment works, but has remained an outsider. He aims in his political work to speak truth to power and says that, "The people's voice must be heard above the clamor of the special interests if freedom and limited government are to survive."

Myron and his wife live in Prince George's County Maryland. They have four children and are longtime members of the Church of the Ascension and Saint Agnes in Washington.

Well, that's good to know.

Still, it's a bit of a bummer to leave you there, so let's end with the final paragraph from Obama's speech:

But the journey is long and the journey is hard. And we don't have much time left to make that journey. It's a journey that will require each of us to persevere through setbacks, and fight for every inch of progress, even when it comes in fits and starts. So let us begin. For if we are flexible and pragmatic, if we can resolve to work tirelessly in common effort, then we will achieve our common purpose: a world that is safer, cleaner, and healthier than the one we found; and a future that is worthy of our children.

What about the fat yanks

2009-09-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell performs his usual service of highlighting instances of bad journalism whenever he praises something as an excellent, I beg your pardon, shite article.

Myron writes:

The Washington Post has discovered that poor people in poor countries need access to modern energy. In an excellent article on today’s front page, Emily Wax details the energy poverty of Africa, India, and Pakistan. And she draws the obvious conclusion that has evaded most of the establishment media for years: that’s why India and other developing countries aren’t going to sign on to any UN treaty that mandates reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. They don’t need an energy diet; they need thousands of coal-fired power plants....

Of course, environmental pressure groups say that poor countries need to avoid “our mistakes” and build a new energy economy using renewable sources and new technologies. The problem is that most of these new sources provide a lot more sanctimonious self-satisfaction than energy. I recently drove through upstate New York on a mild summer day. I saw over seventy windmills in several groups along the way. Not a single one was turning. That’s because the wind doesn’t blow much in the summer (when demand is highest because of air conditioning). In sub-tropical countries like India there isn’t much wind at any time of year.

But there is a lot of sun you blithering block-head.

The WaPo article, even with its death-making Myron Ebell narrative, cannot be entirely cleansed of climate change consequences:

In New Delhi this summer, thousands of men, some wearing only underwear in protest, rioted over power cuts. The problem was exacerbated this year by a drought across Asia and Africa, which has caused rivers to slow to a trickle and mountain glaciers to shrink.

The incident, from last summer, is reported here.

The mountain glaciers are a different story. As they disappear, large areas of the global south will become uninhabitable for humans due to water shortages and rising sea levels. A least a billion people will very rapidly be without land or food.

This is going to be somewhat more stark for people than not getting their electricity 24 hours a day.

The fact is, Myron Ebell doesn't care if half the world's population dies in agony and destitution. Just so long as their governments buy more coal first.

How this story relates to America's massive over-consumption of power at the moment defies reason. The CEI has been working on this line for at least a year, trying to explain that if you reduce power use in America, then impoverished children in Africa will never have electricity.

This is the CEI video (initially banned) from April 2008:

What a load of bollocks.

Here's what Myron Ebell and a lot of our dead-to-the-world political policy-makers actually think:

CO2 Now!

2009-08-18T01:12:00.000-07:00

A story of the Climate Denial crock of the week, shown here:

leads to extremely fine Greenfyre's blog.

This also leads to the CO2 Now widget. To be added into the right hand panel.

It's considerably more meaningful than those crappy Dow Jones stock market numbers that are always reported at the end of the news. If you're young, it tells you what kind of world you're going to live in when you and your children grow old and finally learn just how fundamentally evil Myron Ebell's work has been during this critical stage in the human story.

When we failed.

The unhealthiness of the CEI

2009-08-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

It seems to take almost forever for a troll like the CEI to die off. Maybe it never will, like a pit of nuclear waste. Myron Ebell took a swipe in the health care debate, but in general the CEI has been pretty silent during this massive corporate-funded backlash against the hope of common human decency.

Which means they didn't get the contract. Instead, the execrable Daniel Hannan, friend of Myron and admirer of the CEI, has been all over the United States TV pushing absolute bogus lies about the state of the NHS and its qualities, thus:

He may even be doing it for free. Who knows. One day it should be possible to check on the declarations of interest he has registered at the European Parliament to see what's going on. In any case, he's doing a good job publicizing the views of the right wing party in England and making it more difficult to cover it up.

Meanwhile, I still can't get over how the front page of CEI website continues to declare that CEI celebrates the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11.

The Apollo program just happened to be probably the biggest most pointless government funded project of all time, so it's good to see the CEI praising something that the private sector is miserably embarrassingly crap at.

Bob Carter set to join Myron Ebell's armed madhouse

2009-08-12T02:56:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell has put his name down on the side of the anti-health care reform rioters with this sarcastic post:

Nothing like it ever happened during President Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq or the Republican Congress’s continual attempts to starve orphans and widows. The left always made their objections politely and using good grammar. Code Pink were a charming group of people. I don’t even remember an inappropriate slogan on a tee-shirt or a bumper sticker.

This is not a surprise. He's always in favour of any powerful private interests that make a fortune out of market-failure and mass misery.

"But both sides are equally raucous," you say. "How can you tell which side is right?"

Determining which of the sides is right is a matter for assessing the arguments, which we won't do here.

But you can easily spot the side that is wrong -- it's the side that is lying!.

Here's some of their statements:

A 77 year old with a brain tumour wouldn't get treated in England because their life is less valuable

Death panels will be set up to advise old people to end their lives.

Anyone over 59 in Britain is ineligible for treatment for heart disease.

Dental patients use superglue to fix their teeth because the waiting list is too long.

The extreme and costly human misery that is the US health care system is perfectly okay and the best possible world.

This whole issue would a minor one that, like gun control in America, wouldn't matter to the rest of the world because it only kills Americans -- except for the fact that it demonstrates how systematic institutional lying (from Myron Ebell and bodies like the CEI) succeeds in the the face of the most clear-cut immediate evidence.

That is why Chomsky and Roy have warned that this so-called democracy might be the endgame for the human race -- because lying works, and there are people as evil as Myron Ebell and those who pay for him and put him on the TV who do not care no matter how dire the consequences.

Myron's previous blogpost was kind of similar. In the same way, he equates the two sides of a debate on a common characteristic (neither of them is a full-time and accredited climate scientist), and says they are the same, even though one side bases their statements on a fair assessment of the science out there and the CO2 reduction effects of the legal measures taken (he's a lawyer), and the other doesn't.

Anyway, the argument is over. That means that if you are a spokesman who denies the severity of climate change, you have a lot of explaining to do with regards to the data. If you don't address it, and pretend it's not there, then you are quite obviously talking horse-shit.

Myron ends his article with the usual swipe at Jim Hansen, thus:

My point is that prominent scientists with long publications records, such as Bob Carter, are routinely described by the media as not being climate scientists and really not reputable scientists at all if they aren’t on the alarmist bandwagon.

On the other hand, lawyers expressing alarmist views are described as prominent scientists. And the scientists regularly put forward in the media as the world’s leading climate experts often turn out to be computer modelers with little or no background in climate science, Ph. D.s who spent their entire careers in administration, or astronomers who are experts on the atmosphere of Venus.

Bob Carter has form, with his positive appraisal of the
of Idso and Fred Singer's (that one) Nonscientific International Panel on Climate Change in June 2009.

That's pretty recent.

Maybe this dude is positioning himself to be one of Myron Ebell's "qualified scientists" like the esteemed Fred Singer.

Tim Lambert has been on Bob Carter's case in these posts here.

I'm looking forward to Myron citing Carter more often to back up his lies in the future. His list of names is getting a little too repetitive and short these days, and it needs some freshening up.

Who's the daddy of the country?

2009-08-10T00:52:00.000-07:00

The Myron Ebell Climate is back in business, and sputtering its coffee at the latest drivel produced by the Conservative Party selected Daniel Hannan MEP.

This fool makes his mark by describing Myron Ebell as an "exceptionally clever and thoughtful man", and the CEI as an "outstandingly meritorious outfit".

This follows him saying: "I’ve just spent three days in Washington meeting the various conservative think-tanks and institutions: Heritage, Young America’s Foundation, the extraordinary Nordquist Wednesday meeting - plus a detour to the Fox studios in New York."

Good dear lord.

He also calls Newt Gingrich "one of the greatest living politicians in the US."

Oh, and he can't help heaping praise on the economic miracle of Iceland which is based on the "enteprise of its people" ...as well as their uncanny ability to bank lots of fools' money and lose it all it one go.

No, I don't think Iceland's economic shell game is going to "bounce back soon enough", Dan. It'll take at least a generation for lessons to be unlearned that depositing money in cowboy banks run by a "sturdy free-standing citizenry" with no obvious collateral or insurance is not a sound idea. Not least because such fools now have no money left to gamble in such an unregulated and uninsured banking system, even if they wanted to.

Hannan's misunderstanding of finance is matched by his selective misunderstanding of climate change, illustrated when he exclaimed that if the Met Office "can't accurately forecast the weather two months in advance, why should we let them speak with such sacerdotal authority about what the temperature will be a century from now?"

Not even Myron Ebell is cataclysmically dumb enough to say something like that.

Instead, the Myron Ebell "taut and provocative" email that Hannan was getting so overawed argued that John Adams (2nd US president) was the true Jeffersonian (whatever that means; Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd US president), because:

...Jefferson may have said that that government is best which governs least, but he never had a useful thought about how to keep limits on government except to recommend revolution in every generation. Which is of course disastrous. But he was a very silly man - a true, because superficial and calculating, product of the Enlightenment...

Jefferson was the inventor of faux egalitarianism, which was a way of keeping the enlightened patrician (and slave-owning) class in power based on the rationale that they were protecting the interests of common folk...

Unlike Jefferson, Adams was obsessed with how to keep elites in check by dividing power and balancing power against power...

He was the deepest thinker of the Revolution and also the most important political figure (as distinguished from leader) - he made the strategy that led to independence, he led the public campaign for independence, and was the leading proponent for independence in the Continental Congress both rhetorically and behind the scenes...

...I have gone on about this because I think the past informs the present most usefully if we get our story straight.

And it's a past that existed before the development of psychopathic corporate entities that oversee the fossil fuel industry and that do not care about the threats to the survival of the species.

Opinions back then about politics or science may or may not be relevant today. It has no bearing on the intelligence of the people in question.

Of course, you could always go back to the father of the nation and 1st US president, George Washington, ("a poor general but a great leader" -- Ebell) and his farewell address of 1792:

[T]he apprehension of danger... urge[s] me, on an occasion like the present, to offer... some sentiments which are the result of much reflection [and] of no inconsiderable observation...

In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should [be] furnished for characterizing [political] parties by Geographical discriminations... One of the expedients of [political parties] to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts...

All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are... of fatal tendency [to the Union]. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion...

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of [political parties], generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty...

[A political party] serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another...

He's talking about you, Myron Ebell, and your wretched Republican Party and its ability to corrupt and ruin the nation.

Oh, and he says you also need taxes, you effing idiots:

As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit... [It is essential] that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue; that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant...

So, put the two together (the inevitable inconvenience and unpleasantness of taxes, and cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men who use the vehicle of political parties), and you get the state of the nation today.

It's a shame it has to take the rest of the world's ecosystem down with it.

Ryan Young's defecation of the day

2009-06-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

The CEI's demented blog is hitting hit new lows with contributions from their new "Fellow in Regulatory Studies", Ryan Young.

Since, to him, all regulations are bad, he's invented a game of picking a page out of the Federal Register at random, discovering he's unable to understand it, and then writing any old shite and linking to it.

Here's an example:

The ninth in an occasional series that shines a bit of light on the regulatory state.

Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Department of Transportation ($70.3 billion 2009 budget, 58,622 employees)

Before any regulation goes into effect, the proposal is released to the public for a comment period. Anyone who is interested can write the agency and say why they think the new rule is a good or a bad idea. CEI does this regularly, by the way (see here and here). [those links have nothing to do with this regulation -- MEB]

Agencies are legally obliged to take all comments into account before going forward with the rule. And sometimes, they really do listen.

Because of overwhelmingly negative comments, DOT has decided not to go forward with a proposed change to federal school bus policy (isn’t education supposed to be a local issue?).

Read all about it on page 30,499 of the 2009 Federal Register.

Except you can't "read all about it" on that link, because it's a note about the withdrawal (without a copy of the regulation), where it explains:

On November 18, 2008, FTA issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to amend its school bus operations regulations... to provide clarification about the regulations in the context of the recent decision by the U.S. District Court... and generally, to update the regulation based on experience and industry practice.

...Although FTA received a good deal of support for the NPRM, many commenters opposed it. Generally, critics of the NPRM believed that FTA was attempting to restrict opportunities for its grantees to provide transportation, when in fact, FTA was attempting to allow its grantees to provide service it historically has allowed.

FTA finds, moreover, that many commenters misunderstood FTA's objectives to rectify a significantly outdated regulatory scheme.

So it looks like a rewrite of an existing regulation, which you, Mr Young, probably haven't even looked at. And your point is what, exactly? Is your story only that it was withdrawn following consultation? And? So?

But it get's worse. Here's his previous post:

The eighth in an occasional series that shines a bit of light on the regulatory state.

Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.3 billion 2007 budget, 17,964 employees).

When an agency screws up really badly, political leaders will usually step in and pass some reforms. For example, the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent visa approval letters to two 9/11 hijackers – six months after the attacks. Congress responded by changing the agency’s name.

I haven’t heard of any outrageous bungling at the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste. But I’m wondering; OSW is also changing its name. It is now ORCR – the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery.

According to the "regulation":

On January 18, 2009, the Office of Solid Waste (OSW) was reorganized and changed its name to the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery (ORCR). The name change reflects the breadth of the responsibilities/authorities that Congress provided to EPA under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the primary authorizing statute. ORCR has three divisions, which consolidate the operations of the six divisions under the OSW structure.

What was the problem again? How did your twisted tiny mind arrive at the subject of 9/11 from this?

This from a guy who probably takes out his stinking garbage to the kerbside each week so that the hated Government bureaucracy can cart it away and deal with it. How dare the Government say anything about how mixed up it is. Don't you know we've got a planet to screw up here? We, at the CEI, are working as hard as we can.

And while we're at it, how dare the Government tell people not to flush plastic diapers down the toilet either, because it clogs up the sewage system and floods into the road and the Government has to come out and deal with it. Because you, Mr Ryan Young, don't sound like the kind of guy who would even notice when someone cleaned up your shite.

Your purpose is just to create it.

Myron's punny word play

2009-06-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

Trojan Hearse?

Dear oh dear. This is a pretty dire title from the dire man who is our one and only Myron Ebell.

The Murdoch empire's New York Post has just given Ebell another breath of publicity oxygen by publishing a shock-ed piece by him yesterday.

Now, apparently both Murdoch the elder and Murdoch the younger are concerned about climate change. So why do they want to publish malicious Myron Ebell lies in their paper, such as:

Realize, too, that almost every recession of the last 60 years, including today’s mess, has followed a sharp rise in energy prices.

Funny how the 1930s recession took the development of a whole new economic theory (Keynsianism), now being applied, to understand its reasons. To Myron, whose purpose is to spread any kind of lies about the facts of life in pursuit of oil and coal company short term money, the answer was simple. What stupid people we had in those days.

Of course, the official onset of this current recession did coincide with a huge oil price hike in 2008. But if you thought the housing bubble was going to carry on expanding had that not occured, you'd be pretty stupid -- which you would be if you ever took anything out of the latest Myron Ebell commentry. Myron blames the whole thing on to many regulations in the state of California.

He did not predict a recession on the back of the huge oil price rise in 2008, of course. Since that was a speculation bubble, not a tax, and all the money went into institutions like Exxon rather than into public funds, he was happy with it.

Myron Ebell is very happy for American families to pay high prices for gas, but only if private corporations get all the money. If there is any chance that the money will go into public social and infrastructure programs that directly benefit said American families, he can't stand it.

Myron also writes:

For that matter, similar government policies in Britain are already costing families $1,200 a year—and that’s in just the early stages.

Where? What? I've not heard of that. Is this something he picked up out of the latest Charles Dickens novel? Or is it part of the systematic misrepresentation of how people live in Britain, with an allegedly broken health service that not one of us would trade for that truly hellish one all the corporate-lobbiests are fighting hard to preserve in America?

Stay in hell, Myron.

Myron's Blaby reading list

2009-06-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

The right wing UK think tank Social Affairs Unit publishes the Standpoint Magazine which has Baron Lawson of Blaby on its advisory board.

So Myron Ebell is just the man to write a book review of Lawson's utterly shite book An Appeal to Reason: A Cook Look at Global Warming:

First published last year, Lord Lawson's Appeal is the best short book on the entire range of issues in the global warming debate that is available from a British publisher. This paperback edition with a substantial new afterword is therefore most welcome. Lawson is lucid, thoughtful and fair-minded. The book's highly useful footnotes and bibliography attest to Lawson's familiarity with the wide range of scholarship on the many scientific disciplines that contribute to understanding the climate and with the major economic analyses of the energy-rationing policies proposed to deal with warming.

That should not be surprising. Lawson was an active participant in the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, which took expert testimony from a wide range of scientists and economists. In 2005, the committee produced the best official report on global warming that has so far been done. Although leading peers from all three major parties were involved and agreed unanimously, their report has been ignored by all three major parties. Its conclusions, you see, were "sceptical".

Unusually, Myron's appraisal of this terrible report -- which has probably been summarized into Lord Blaby's publication -- is almost accurate.

The abstract includes:

We have some concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, with some of its emissions scenarios and summary documentation apparently influenced by political considerations.

There are significant doubts about some aspects of the IPCC's emissions scenario exercise, in particular, the high emissions scenarios. The Government should press the IPCC to change their approach.

As it turns out, years of political considerations have influenced the IPCC to seriously under-estimate the emissions and climate change scenarios. Today, in 2009, it appears that reality is, not surprisingly, running ahead of the predictions.

So, we're screwed, aren't we, as it was already looking bad on the over-conservative predictions.

Well, not according to Baron Stern of Brentford whose book, also reviewed by Myron, is called A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity, which is based on The Stern Review. Myron writes:

Although the mammoth Review appears to be a most professional piece of work and contains an impressive economic apparatus, its methodology and analysis have been rubbished by leading resource economists. The include William Nordhaus of Yale, Richard Tol with multiple academic appointments, Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge, and a team headed by David Henderson, former chief economist at the OECD (to whom Lawson dedicates his book).

...On the science, Stern claims that the case for alarm is indisputable. In fact, however, he does not base his case on scientific facts and observations but rather on the alarming predictions of computer models.

I'm sorry. I've got to stop you right there. When we put a rocket into space, its trajectory is entirely based on a computer models to send it to where we want it to go. You have a problem with that? What we have here are computer models telling us that the environment is going where we don't want it to go.

As Lawson points out, this is a public relations con by the alarmist industry. The computer models have no forecasting ability, nor do United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists claim that they do, however much they give that impression.

On the economics, in a section titled "Why some economists got it so badly wrong", he dismisses in two pages the economists, more distinguished and expert in the field than he is, who criticised his Review. Rather than explaining why this consensus is wrong, Stern mounts his high horse and claims that the economists who disagree with him do so because they are morally obtuse. This is comical. Lawson aptly compares him to Dickens's immortal creation, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House.

So there you have it. The "economists more distinguished and expert in the field than" Stern is are William Nordhaus, Richard Tol, and Sir Partha Dasgupta. Myron used these names before, massively exaggerating their qualifications and fraudulently claiming that their conclusions agreed with him during some Congressional testimony in December 2007, and they didn't complain, so it's safe to use them again. After all, no one outside the Myron Ebell Climate has heard of them, whereas people have heard of Bjorn Lomborg, whom Myron is not going to be so silly as to claim has any economic qualifications at all.

But let's finish the poncey review:

...Dickens's immortal creation, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House...

Stern's global deal looks to me like a series of Heath Robinson contraptions that must be made to run in perfect harmony. I'm not surprised that the Labour government finds it an alluring prospect, but I am disturbed that the intellectual adolescents now leading the Conservative Party have found an agreeable guru in Stern as well.

The Tories would in my view do much better if they listened to the sage advice of one of their soundest leaders of the past half century — the former Energy Secretary and Chancellor, Nigel Lawson.

Hey, Myron, you know when the food starts running out because the environment is so screwed and depleted (as predicted) that there's no longer enough to go around, you will cry Uncle for the government to hand out some food rations to your family, as always happens in a famine.

There are famines in all parts of the world today, and it ain't your corporations like your Exxons or Starbucks that organize the relief. It's usually the UN or some other government-backed organization.

You know why?

Because there's no f***ing money to be made out of feeding destitute people after a crisis when they've used up everything they have left.

This has been your Moment of Hatred. Good Day!

Lie! Lie! Lie!

2009-06-12T01:25:00.000-07:00

These two goggling newts appeared on Lawrence "There ain't no recession" Kudlow's execreble TV show, which is so loud-mouthed and ranty it makes The Myron Ebell Climate read like a computer textbook.

The show was a feast of hate for future generations of people -- which is just how Myron Ebell likes it -- and the segment was called "Drill! Drill! Drill!":

Kudlow: It is my view that the Obama administration doesn't want to drill! They're taxing oil companies! They're taxing gas companies! They don't like the oil shale play! The great basin in Wyoming is a phenomenal source! Let me just read you, Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation says [in a lie published as long ago as 18 December 2007]: "If full scale production of shale began within five years the US could completely end its dependence on OPEC by 2020."! Oil! Natural gas! Shale! Why not! Help me out here! We're going to get soaked again with a huge oil shock to wreck the economy!

Ebell: You're absolutely right, Larry. You're on the side of the American people. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, ever since they got into power, have been back-tracking the progress we made last year when people finally found out that this country has huge energy resources that have been locked up by the congress and previous administrations.

A lot of good things were done last year, and now Secretary Salisar at the Interior is cancelling oil leases. They all say they're in favour of it, just like Daniel Weiss (I don't know if he is in favour of it; he is different from the administration), but they say they are in favour of it in theory, but in practice everything they're doing is designed to raise energy prices.

...

Kudlow: Myron, I'm going to be crusading on this in the weeks and months! I'm going to go back to where I was last summer! Drill! Drill! Drill! Myron. But I want to ask you: Not only do they not want us to drill, but they don't want nuclear power either! So I don't get it. Aren't we playing right into the hands of our enemies overseas?

Ebell: Yes. President Obama and the Democratic Congress want energy prices to go up, and I believe that the Center for American Decline -- I'm sorry -- the Center for American Progress wants that as well.

Ultimately, the irresponsibility for what these clowns say on network TV in a popular format in which they are encouraged to Lie! Lie! Lie! without any fact checking or correcting of what they say rests with CNBC.

But that's no reason for anyone who still survives in the future not to hate Myron Ebell as the physical embodiment of everything in the nexus of media-power-politics-economics in this age which has doomed us to what could have been an avoidable disaster.

Meanwhile: Last night was CEI's 25 anniversary dinner. I wonder what's on the menu. If they can afford it, it's probably an endangered species like blue fin tuna.

We are fighting a war against future generations. And we are winning.

Is this the final generation of Ebells?

2009-06-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

Humanity could very well be in hell, where hell is defined as truth realized too late -- E. O. Wilson

ABC news broadcast the two hour special

Earth2100: Is this the Final Century of Our Civilization?.

The note from the producer says:

The scenarios in Earth 2100 are not a prediction of what will happen but rather a warning about what might happen. They are based on the work of some of the world's top scientists and experts, as well as peer-reviewed articles from publications around the world. These notes are just a glimpse of the wide and diverse sources used to develop this program.

It is important to add that not all of the scientists we interviewed would agree with each specific scenario we present, or with our exact time frame. For example, some experts think that the more catastrophic events we depict would be unlikely to happen before the middle of the 22nd century, while others, like Jared Diamond, think that they could happen much sooner.

Though there is some disagreement about the specifics, there is widespread agreement among the 50-plus experts we spoke to in the course of our 18 months working on this show that if we do not change course in the near future, the collapse of our civilization is a real possibility.

It is towards this collapse that Myron Ebell works night and day to drive us. He does it by lying and suppressing the facts while being paid by fossil fuel companies run by people who do not care if we all die.

The CEI's latest video offering is pretty stupid. It's always Al Gore, isn't it? The text ends with:

There is no global warming crisis.
The earth hasn't warmed for a decade.
But politicians are using this so-called crisis as an excuse to raise taxes, choke our economy and control our lives.
Don't let them push us into a new "1984".

I have no idea what that thing they've badly edited onto her white T-shirt is. I thought it was a penguin. The original had some kind of Mac symbol:

The Clinton one had an Obama symbol:

That's enough of that. It's not a game. This pissing about you do has miserable consequences. You ought to know that.

Myron the do-nothing bumbler

2009-05-31T15:28:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-05-21T00:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-05T22:17:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-05-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Colder brains digested

2009-04-28T01:23:00.000-07:00

This 24 April 2009 Cooler Heads Digest issue has a long and boring ramble from Myron Ebell about the recent Congressional hearings that's long and boring.

He says there were more than sixty witnesses, and he chose to highlight particular individuals from it for praise. These are:

The Exxon funded moron David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation.

A Dick Cheney off-the-record energy task force member and Dow Chemicals lobbyist with no other known qualifications, Paul Cicio of the "Industrial Energy Consumers of America"

Known nothing word-monger Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute.

Cato institute Scholar Robert Michaels who had a lot to say about the California energy economy which -- going by his long resume that includes a large number of papers explaining how great the 2002 California electricity crisis was for consumers -- is probably all wrong (but who's watching?)

The qualities of the witnesses so far listed on-line might not be great, but Myron Ebell didn't link to it in order to make it harder for his willfully ignorant dear readers to verify that his selection was appalling.

But his long article was pretty boring.

What was much more interesting is scale of the lying that was included in the next piece, penned by a one Julie Walsh wife of some pointless stuffed shirt at the Heritage Foundation:

Arctic Ice Recovers

Last century's and this century's sun make look the same, but they are very different. 'Between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were very rare and temperatures were low. Then sunspot frequency grew until, between 1930 and 2000, the Sun was more active than at almost any time in the last 10,000 years. The oceans can cause up to several decades of delay before air temperatures respond fully to this solar "Grand Maximum." Now that the Sun is becoming less active again, global temperatures have fallen for seven years,' according [www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/Willie_Soon-Its_the_Sun_Stupid.pdf!] to Willie Soon, a solar and climate scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Is it any wonder that, despite many news stories to the contrary, Arctic ice is now increasing and almost back up to average levels? However, Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan write in their Washington Post April 7 article, "New Data Show Rapid Arctic Ice Decline; Proportion of Thicker, More Persistent Winter Cover Is the Lowest on Record":

The Arctic sea ice cover continues to shrink and become thinner, according to satellite measurements and other data released yesterday, providing further evidence that the region is warming more rapidly than scientists had expected.

That's right. Some scary results by the scientists with the data can easily be debunked by some smiling woman associated with the right wing noise machine, merely by the citations of an idiot who publishes on a website called www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com and a couple of out-of-context graphs selected out of this directory.

We don't know which articles those graphs belong to, but let's go over her selection. Julie Walsh chose to point to this one:

which shows a slight two-day trending upwards from below average for the last few days of April, and skipped this one:

which shows a serious, consistent and gigantic decline for the month of September.

This is as bad as financial analysts who are trying to off-load their stock by pumping up a small up-turn in the Dow Jones average in order to sell it to some gullible punters.

Only much worse, because a lot more people are going to die.

Julie Walsh was a home educator for thirteen years, according to her bio. If this is her attitude to evidence, lord knows what wise characters she has educated now that will ensure the complete suicide of the next generation once they inherit their positions of authority in the US political system from their parental connections.

We are so screwed.

The 1995 decision to die

2009-04-27T01:54:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has obtained documentary proof that the fossil fuel corporations knew their denials of climate change science were lies back in 21 December 1995.

Go to that document to see the "Contrarian theory" and "Counterarguments" listed side-by-side, concluding with:

The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change. Jastrow's hypothesis about the role of solar variability and Michaels' questions about the temperature record are not convincing arguments against any conclusion that we are currently experiencing warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. However, neither solar variability nor anomalies in the temperature record offer a mechanism for off-setting the much larger rise in temperature which might occur if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases were to double or quaduple.

Lindzen's hypothesis that any warming would create more rain which would cool and dry the upper troposphere did offer a mechanism for balancing the effect of increased greenhouse gases. However, the data supporting this hypothesis is weak, and even Lindzen has stopped presenting it as an alternative to the conventional model of climate change.

That's over a decade ago. 1995 is so long ago that it's even before Myron moved from the Frontiers of Freedom (just one of many wingnut's festivals of hate) to the CEI in 1999, but of course he knew.

In receipt of this information, the fossil fuel industry made the fateful, conscious decision to suppress it and try their luck with denial.

Their strategy relied on the political process being defunct and controlled by money, the availability of people as evil as Myron Ebell to peddle the lies, and the corporate press being irresponsible enough to broadcast them.

This document preceeds by 2 years the 1998 action plan (which Myron worked on) laying out exactly how they would go about their disinformation campaign and attempt to murder the human race.

The 1995 document proves that it is murder in the first degree.

And for what? The result appears to be for nothing more than ten years of obscene corporate profits for people who were already drowning in money.

It's not like these oil guys fought a brutal civil war and left an Ozymandian wasteland in order to win the crown and become undisputed emperor of the world -- you know, achieve something in their pitiful pathetic lives.

"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Unbelievable.

The active, continual, knowing drive towards extinction is so tragic it can't even be captured by a future race in an ancient myth. The bad-guys don't have a motivation commensurate been knowingly doing.

What do you mean? They screwed the world to get enough money to buy a second yacht to fart about in? Come on. There's got to be more.

It's not possible for a story-teller to get this plot straight. Our psychological and sociological failings are so amazing we can't begin to believe them.

The anger about this document was brought up by Al Gore.

Now you know why they spend so much time demonizing him. He calls them what they are -- liars:

"These corporations ought to apologize to the American people for conducting a massive fraud for the last 14 years."

"Man-made global warming pollution causes global warming. That's not a cutesy issue. It's not an open issue. It's the opinion of the global scientific community. And, more importantly, that opinion is the opinion of the scientific studies by the largest corporate carbon polluters 14 years ago who have lied to you, and who have lied to the American people.

Full testimony; (with 330k views already!)

"The new evidence that's come just in the last few months shows that this may well be even worse than has been described."

Myron in the House (again)

2009-04-23T02:17:00.000-07:00

Like an invasive cancer, as soon as you feel temporarily free of him, Myron Ebell pops up with his disease-infested witless testimony to the US government in the form of the Committee on Energy and Commerce (The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, Day 2) 22 April 2009 hearings.

A broken link to his prepared statement on the CEI website was provided by shit Brit Iain Murray, so it was left to the Myron Ebell Climate to give enough of a damn to track down the proper webpage (listed above) to get his real testimony.

The PDF of his prepared statement is here, and the video of him giving it is buried in about a Gigabyte of failed statery in Panel 3:

Chairman Markey: [Myron Ebell] also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition. We welcome you to a place that needs that. Dr Ebell, thank you for your leadership in that area.

Myron Ebell: Mister.

Chairman Markey: Whenever you're ready, please begin.

Myron Ebell: Thank you Chairman Markey for inviting me to testify here today. Before I begin, let me say I refer to several studies and articles in my very short testimony, and I'd like to ask that they be submitted for the record. [gestures with his stack of waste paper]

And then this oil and coal funded disinformation campaigner lectured the room about the evils of special interests and how models (ie quantitative predictions of the future) don't matter.

This morning, with the administration witnesses, we heard some astonishing claims and very matter-of-fact conversational answers that this Bill will create jobs, that it will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and that it will help the economy.

I believe Dr Chu and Administrator Jackson said that several times, and I think Secretary LaHood said it at least once.

I think that each one of these is wrong, and certainly each one of these claims is arguable.

I'm not much for modelling. I think it depends, as Dr Cohan said, it depends on what the assumptions are, and you can get almost any answer you want out of a climate model or an economic model.

I would rather look at historical experience. We have many of the policies in your draft Bill, Chairman Markey, been tried today, and have been tried for several years on the European Union, and in California.

California is falling off an economic cliff.

Now, it's not the only reason. They have run up the price of energy so that they have the highest gasoline taxes in the nation, they have a continuing shortage of refined gasoline, they have among the highest rates of electricity, comparable to yours in Massechusettes. But it is one of the reasons that their economy is falling off a cliff.

They used to have a very substantial energy-intensive manufacturing sector, producing many emissions. They still consume all those things, but they get them from out of state. Somebody still has to produce stuff. So I am very skeptical of these claims.

Now, the second panel from the US Climate Action Partnership -- and I have some very harsh things to say about the members of the Climate Action partnership. It seems to me that these are guys on the make. They want to get rich off the backs of American consumers. And they want you to enable them to do it. And I would urge you to take a step back from the astonishing statement in your executive summary which the committee put out on this Bill, that says that this Title III programme was designed to conform to the recommendations of the Climate Action Partnership.

And I would also ask to submit to the record -- and I'm sorry he's not here -- a letter from Chairman Waxman in 2004 to the Administrator of the EPA complaining about this very thing. It was revealed that an EPA rule had been written with the cooperation of outside businesses and their lobbyists from a well-known DC law firm. And I think that Chairman Waxman was exactly right then, and I'd hope that you would think this over again.

Now, Mr Rogers said that this will all work if we have a well-designed programme. I would like to ask you in your experience how many government programmes that have been enacted in your time in Congress have been well-designed. I would just like you to keep that in mind as you consider this enormous, huge hit on the American people and economy and how easy it will be to design it so that it is well-designed. I just can't see it.

Now Mr Barton asked -- and since he isn't here I'll ask his question -- If you favour 100% auctioning would you still vote for this Bill? I will still oppose this Bill, but I do favour 100% auctioning. I think that 100% auctioning of the rationing coupons removes a tremendous amount of the opportunity for gaming this system, con-games, and corruption. So I would encourage you all to vote for an amendment that would have 100% auctioning.

Thank you very much.

This had run pretty much consistent with his written testimony, which includes the usual the-alternative-to-our-bust-American-economic-model-is-Stalinism argument:

It takes the most important economic decisions out of the hands of private individuals acting in the market and puts them in the hands of government. The record of central planning in the twentieth century has not been judged a success, and most centrally-planned economies collapsed towards the end of the last century. Perhaps the advocates of cap-and-trade can find some glimmer of hope in the persistence of Cuba and North Korea, which are both models of economies that have commendably low, indeed negligible, greenhouse gas emissions.

He wrote this using his reading ability, provided to him as a child by a centrally-planned education system, drove to the House on a network of centrally-planned highways, using gasoline refined by a handful of centrally-planned oil corporations who have no concern for the public interest (and it shows), and looks forward to healthcare in his old age under the centrally-planned government run Medicare.

There is always central planning. The question is its level of transparency, legitimacy, and its ends.

Myron didn't have time to stick around for the hearings on the Secrecy in the Response to Bayer’s Fatal Chemical Plant Explosion where he'd be able to see just how much contempt his beloved corporate money-making interests generally have for human life -- when they can get away with it. And they do, because they pay the salaries of totally evil toads like Myron Ebell who's job it is to insert destructive lies into public debates without regard to the effects this will have on the survival of the human species.

It never was a joke. It's not a joke now. You are a worm-tongued killer.

Update:

I got the Q&A section of the hearing, where Myron is found out for his BS:

Mr Inslee: Where did all those jobs go that left California?

Ebell: Um, I think most of them went abroad, or to the heartland states that have lower energy prices, lower taxes, uh, less stringent regulatory atmosphere, and... you know, I remember when Dr Chrimsky from the University of Alabama Huntsville testified before this committee. He said, You know California used to have a vibrant auto industry. In 2008 more automobiles will be assembled in Alabama than any other state. They have workers that work, and lower energy...

Mr Inslee: Mr Ebell, look, this is the obvious, and we go round and round with these things. I really don't get something that's fundamental this way jobs leave certain... Sometimes it's just there are certain concerns that are addressed in certain areas that may not be in others, and not least is the cost of labour, fair wages, a living wage, safe working conditions, small things like that.

I'm sure this country could still be incredibly productive at incredibly low cost if we maintained something like slavery, or we just forgot about child labour, or safe working conditions, or minimum wage. There's all sorts of ways to reduce costs.

I would like to think that we have matured and developed as a country where sometimes we just do that which is fair and right, even though it may increase the cost.

I think there's a fundamental philosophical difference that's going on here. But let's just speak to the matter at hand.

Dr Kreutzer [The Heritage Foundation], you just don't seem to see the need to act on greenhouse emissions. Would that be a statement. I want to start off with that. I really want your honest answer because I thought we had debated that, we were past that. If that is your premise, then it goes to the very heart of maybe some of your opinions.

Do you believe we should be taking any action reducing greenhouse gass emissions?

Kreutzer: I can only talk about what you propose in this Bill and elsewhere.

Mr Inslee: No no, let's forget about this Bill. Should we be addressing it in any form or fashion?

Kreutzer: If it's free, yeah. Why not? But it's not free. That's the problem.

Mr. Inslee: So it's the approach you object to. But you believe that truly greenhouse gas emissions pose a problem.

Kreutzer: I don't think there's enough evidence to say there is a catastrphic problem... I would like to have an economy that's strong enough that when we have the climate variability we're going to have with or without climate action, that we have an economy that's strong enough to get through it, as we have done for the past couple hundred years. We're going to get stronger and stronger and able to handle a foot and a half of sea level rise.

Later in a rambling statement by Representative Upton:

Mr Ebell, your comments I think were right on line as we look at the costs associated and what has happened to businesses. But how do you counter that with Dr Keohane's?

Myron Ebell: Thank you representative Upton. I appreciate your leadership on this issue. We know it can't be that inexpensive. If it were that inexpensive, we wouldn't be having these rancorous debates. The fact is that energy prices have to go up significantly if emission cuts are going to be made. President Obama recognized this when he was running for president, he said: "The market plan of a cap-and-trade system electricity rates would necessarily sky-rocket."

Peter Orsac, now the head of OMB, then head of CBO, he testified here, said, this won't work unless prices go up.

In the European Union there has been tremendous consternation at the price of the rationins coupons because they yo-yo up and down. The people who are actual serious about making emissions cuts keep pointing out that the price has to stay up in order to force emissions down. When it keeps yo-yoing up and down, nobody has the incentive to reduce their emissions. They're going to hope that they're going to get some cheap rationing coupons if not this month, next month.

So I just think it is beyond believability that this is going to be inexpensive. It's going to be incredibly expensive.

Later, the doddery Texan, Mr Hall asked (after some rambling about how unfair it is for product consumers to assume the carbon liabilities embedded in the product's manufacturing processes):

What evidence does US Cap have that China and other developing nations will not take strategic advantage of what will be a weakened competitive position of the United States under Cap and Trade?

Myron Ebell: Representative Hall, I don't believe that they have any evidence, and I think they do plan to take competitive advantage, and they also want to be paid for their emissions reductions. And I think you can see how expensive it is to reduce emissions when everyone believes it will be cheaper to reduce emissions in developing countries than it will be in the United States. And yet they're talking in the European Union and in China and India about sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to developing countries to reduce emissions. The idea that the EPA model is believable. No, it doesn't pass the laugh test.

Serious change with numbers

2009-04-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

For an example of everything which Myron is not (lies, woolly-mindedness, bullshit, and abject future misery), below is a video of David Mackay of Cambridge University.

Myron Ebell went to Cambridge for several weeks long ago. He even wears the tie.

He's been a bit lazy recently.

Unless he's now working under a pseudonym, I can't find any of his writings in his favourite wingnut publications like Human Events (last post 25 July 2007), or The Heritage Foundation (last sighting 22 June 2006). He's not even showing up in Cybercrap News (last quote 17 January 2008). His last appearance on the CEI blog was on 13 March this year.

Nothing is getting done. It's left to bone-heads like Sam Kazman to warm up his old story about road crash deaths being the fault of the guy who bought the littler car. The "study" he didn't link to is here. You can draw any conclusion you like if you ignore all the other damage cars cause, because you believe that only the driver-purchaser counts and you are too porridge-brained to comprehend what an economic externality really is.

You make me sick, you CEI monkeys, you and your pathetic feel-bad Earth Day video lies of your run-of-the-mill nothing-new Ayn Rand myths:

Overpopulation is good

Malarial mosquitos don't have DDT resistance

GM tomatoes that don't rot will be nutritious

Food companies save people from starvation

Global warming is the natural gap between ice ages

Bottled water saves disaster victims

Africans and Indians can afford Microsoft operating systems and get on-line

Supercapitalism is just a large version of a kid's lemonade stand

International banks help poor people with microloans

Private for-profit universities train effective scientists

And yes we can use that Rural Electric Cooperative footage from Haiti if we want to, even though we are against everything they stand for.

Stuff it. That's enough heartless intro. Roll the tape!

Pointless Ebell appearance of the day

2009-04-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

Species extinction entrepreneur Myron was selected briefly to make his damaging statement:

This Bill is a disaster. Higher energy prices are going to hit people in the pocket-book, and they are also going to cost a lot of people their jobs.

That's it!

Wingnut outlets covering this feeble ray of hope, such as the Cybercrap News Service and Heritage Foundation Cream left Myron out of their usual quote lists, knowing that he doesn't add value to their biased mis-reporting.

Myron Ebell doesn't have people's misguided trust anymore. Most sane people know that it is always in their interest to believe the opposite to what he tells them. If Myron knew renewable energy was better, he'd redouble his campaign against it because it would represent a greater threat to his beloved world-killing coal interests.

Cheer up, the world is getting nastier. Things are going to hit your children's ability to survive, not just your pocket-book, you pathetic appealer to trivial narrow-minded money-grabbing interests.

Defending dead end technology as usual

2009-04-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

Myron Ebell called in by NBC TV to defend out-of-date light-bulb technology with the usual set of lies about mercury pollution (he does not care when it's discharged from coal power stations) and lies about the effectiveness of government regulation with some bogus nonsense about having to pay money for up-to-standard washing machines.

There are better examples of government not getting enough involved between consumers and product, which NBC well knows about, such as when millions of childrens toys were manufactured with lead in them. Why don't they remind people of that, instead of making their audience listen to this harmful Myron Ebell bollocks?

Transcript follows:

First of all I have nothing against compact flourescent light bulbs. In fact I have a bunch of them in my house after our local power company raised their rates 39%. But there are plusses and minusses to these energy saving bulbs as there are to incandescent bulbs.

For example, I am very surprised that an environmental group that has waged war on Mercury in our environment would be so enthusiastic about compact flourescent lightbulbs.

I have here [waves some stupid paper] the EPA has long instructions about what to do if one of your compact flourescent light bulbs breaks. And they're very complicated, and it's not easy to actually do what they want you to do. You have to go to a lot of steps. You have to wear gloves. Air out the room. Don't use a vacuum cleaner. Put it in double bag it because...

Now look. Incandescent bulbs are very cheap and they use more energy. But for example when I replace bulbs in my house I put flourescent bulbs in the places where they are appropriate, and I didn't for example put them in places where I hardly ever turn on the light. It does just as well if I only turn it on for an hour or two a year than a $4 bulb.

Another example is that some places these bulbs don't work. For example, I've had very short life expectancy on some of these bulbs because they don't like rapid changes in temperature.

...

Q: Myron, is it that you are resistant to a government mandate of them?

Myron: Yes, I don't think there's a good track record for government mandates. If these bulbs are so superior, and they save so much money, then consumers will choose them, and you can see that more and more of them are being sold. Why should we restrict consumer choice?

The government has a very poor record on these mandates. For example, new washing machine standards went into effect at the beginning of this year. Consumer Reports reported on these new models that unless you can spend close to $1000 on a new washing machine, you cannot buy one. There is no model available that will actually get your clothes clean and not have to wash your clothes 2 or 3 times.

So I think you can see that when government gets involved between consumers and product, it often leads to very unfortunate and unintended outcomes.

It's much better to let consumers choose. And if this is a better technology, it will succeed.