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Al Gore buys them. So do the Grateful Dead, Hollywood celebrities and, increasingly, many climate-conscious executives and consumers. For those who travel the world by air but don't want to contribute to global warming in the process, compensating with so-called carbon offsets has become a fashionable solution. The sale of these credits for environmentally friendly activities, investments in everything from wind energy to carbon stored in forests, jumped from $97 million in 2006 to $331 million worldwide in 2007 – about a quarter of it in the United States. But one global green leader does not offset its travel, even...

Climate: Czech President Vaclav Klaus once called global warming a new religion, a Trojan horse for imposing a global tyranny worse than communism. Details about the Copenhagen Conference prove how right he was.The first of three marathon negotiating sessions designed to hammer out the details of the Copenhagen Accord on climate change to be signed in December began on Sunday, March 29, in Bonn, Germany. From what we know, it will be a surrender to tyranny as significant as another negotiated 71 years ago. A 16-page informational note obtained by Fox News outlines the goals and agenda of the United...

...The idea of sacrificing anything as a country is so mid-20th century and more than a little distasteful. Remember Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson writing about sacrificing at the altar of freedom and refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots? Seems a bit disgusting now. I mean blood? Icky. And altars…let’s not even get started on religion, it’s not PC to worship anything anymore, even freedom. But don’t worry, you don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s examine some examples: Spending – The stimulus bill embodies this “easy route” attitude. Let’s review, the country is...

Have you seen the infomercials for Lipozene? If you haven’t (and thank god you haven’t) Lipozene is a pill that is supposed to cut weight. The hook is that taking this pill will let you cut body fat “without changing your lifestyle.” How remarkable! No personal sacrifices required. No dieting, no exercise. This pill is perfectly targeted at those Wal-Mart shoppers who are so fat that they immediately sink into a motorized scooter upon entering the store. With Lipozene you don’t even have to suffer the indignity of ordering a diet coke with your Big Mac. So you ask, “AJ,...

You’ve all heard of carbon offsets. You get to use as much energy as you want, then you pay someone in a third-world country to plant a few trees so you don’t have to feel guilty about it. Maybe if the Catholic Church had called its 16th Century products “sin offsets” instead of indulgences, they could have avoided the whole Reformation thing. Al Gore loves offsets. He buys enough of them to make up for the 17,768 kilowatt-hours of electricity he used each month at his Nashville home in 2008. That’s over twenty times more than the average American household....

Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump...As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million. Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once...

The Lower Mainland's health authorities will have to dig more than $4 million a year out of their already stretched budgets to pay B.C.'s carbon tax and offset their carbon footprints. Critics say the payments mean the government's strategy to fight climate change will further exacerbate a crisis in health funding. "You have public hospitals cutting services to pay a tax that goes to another 100 per cent government-owned agency," NDP health critic Adrian Dix said. "That just doesn't make sense." The Fraser Health Authority will pay $616,000 in carbon tax this year, rising to $821,000 next year, officials there...

LONDON (Reuters) - Air travelers are paying vastly differing prices to offset their contribution to climate change, in some cases three times market levels, despite efforts to increase transparency in an unregulated market. Under a regulated carbon market, countries and companies buy offsets to help them meet binding international climate targets. Prices have halved in recent weeks as recession reduces industrial output and expected emissions. But prices which consumers pay in an unofficial market have lagged behind those falls. Carbon offsetting is offered to tourists and business travelers by many airlines and offset developers so as to allow people to...

Abstract: President-elect Barack Obama said attacking global climate change is a "matter of urgency" that will create jobs as he got advice from Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the issue. Obama made clear he would adopt an aggressive approach to global warming when he takes over the White House on January 20. He and Vice President-elect Joe Biden met for nearly two hours with Gore at Obama's presidential transition office in Chicago. Obama hopes addressing climate change can create the kind of jobs that will help pull the U.S. economy out of a...

Until recently, the USA's foot-dragging was about the only thing stopping the Western World from jumping off a cliff over the increasingly preposterous global warming hoax. But with the last grownups scheduled to leave Washington next month, Europeans have been forced to drop the sanctimonious posturing and defend sanity. Chancellor Angela Merkel has been keen to promote herself as a tough actor on climate change, but with a new EU climate deal in the making, she's issued a new caveat: It must not jeopardize German jobs. Merkel used to exploit the hoax with the worst of them, even traveling to...

Sneaky: Current credit bailout bill contains carbon tax provisions! If you look at page 180 of the 451-page monster bailout bill that easily passed the Senate yesterday (PDF here), you will see that it includes at Section 116 language about the tax treatment of “industrial source carbon dioxide.” It also provides, at Section 117, for a “carbon audit of the tax code.” What could a provision about the tax treatment of “industrial source carbon dioxide” and another provision about doing a “carbon audit” of the tax code possibly have to do with restoring confidence in Wall Street’s troubled credit and...

Keeping track of your carbon footprint could become as simple as slipping a mobile phone in your pocket: a London-based start-up company has developed software for mobile phones that uses global positioning satellites to work out automatically whether you are walking, driving or flying and then calculate your impact on the environment. Carbon Diem's inventors claim that, by using GPS to measure the speed and pattern of movement, their algorithm can identify the mode of transport being used. It can therefore calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that a journey has emitted into the atmosphere – without any need for...

Results of a program using Aspen’s Canary Initiative to sell carbon offset credits to Democratic National Convention attendees are a little underwhelming. The program, set up by the DNC Host Committee through the Denver Convention and Visitors Bureau and rolled out about a week before the convention started, raised a total of $18.34 worth of Canary Tags...

On Thursday, former U. S. vice-president Al Gore delivered a major address calling on his country to abandon all fossil fuels within 10 years. By 2018, U. S. electricity and fuel should come entirely from "renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources," he said. Tickets to the event encouraged attendees to "please use public transit, bicycling or other climate-friendly means" to reach the lecture hall. So how did Mr. Gore and his retinue arrive? In two Lincoln Town Cars and a full-sized SUV that sat idling with the air conditioners blasting while the Gore party was inside. It was 34...

The next US president must improve America's car-dominated cities by levying London-style congestion charges and cracking down on sprawl, British researchers said yesterday. Barack Obama or John McCain must end eight years of "laissez faire" urban policy under the Bush administration and take on America's car-loving public, employing vehicle charging in places such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, says a joint report by the UK's Centre for Cities think-tank and the US Brookings Institution. It urges a new incumbent of the White House to emulate policies that have been credited with improving British cities, including limits on building...

MONTEREY, California (AFP) - A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California. "We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page. "We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with...

David Suzuki's recent suggestion that politicians who fail to march in his environmental crusade should be imprisoned has inevitably attracted much comment. Although he subsequently declared that his remarks should not be taken literally, they raise ever-recurring questions over Dr. Suzuki's objectivity, and whether those who follow him really comprehend his core beliefs, and their political implications. One unlikely group of recent converts to Suzuki-ism is the National Hockey League Players Association, NHLPA, whose members are hardly known for their hairshirt lifestyles. Nevertheless, a large number of players have -- at Dr. Suzuki's behest -- secured places for themselves in...

As government waste goes, $89,000 will barely register on the meter. However, it did provide a relatively inexpensive demonstration on the costliness of political fads and the vacuousness of carbon-offset markets as a solution for purported anthropogenic climate change. It also, once again, demonstrated the connection between contributors and policy: The House of Representatives has presumably learned that money cannot buy love or happiness. Now, it turns out it's not a sure solution to climate guilt, either. In November, the Democratic-led House spent about $89,000 on so-called carbon offsets. This purchase was supposed to cancel out greenhouse-gas emissions from House...

Recent evidence shows "the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us," climate campaigner and former US vice-president Gore said. snip

aving climate campaigner Al Gore round to your house is to open yourself to a self-flagellating guilt trip, Irish rock star Bono confessed Thursday. Sharing a stage with the former US vice president at the annual gathering of world movers and shakers in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, the U2 frontman joked that their friendship was a source of pressure on the domestic front. "He's been round my house and it's like... here's the recycler Al, you know... I've got a posh car, but it runs on ethanol Al," Bono said. Acknowledging that a career in rock music was...

Corporations and shoppers in the United States spent more than $54 million last year on carbon offset credits toward tree planting, wind farms, solar plants and other projects to balance the emissions created by, say, using a laptop computer or flying on a jet. But where exactly is that money going? The Federal Trade Commission, which regulates advertising claims, raised the question Tuesday in its first hearing in a series on green marketing, this one focusing on carbon offsets. As more companies use offset programs to create an environmental halo over their products, the commission said it was growing increasingly...

The overriding environmental issue of these times is the warming of the planet. The Democratic hopefuls in the 2008 campaign are fully engaged, calling for large — if still unquantified — national sacrifices and for a transformation in the way the country produces and uses energy. The Republicans do not go much further than conceding that climate change could be a problem and, with the notable exception of John McCain, offer no comprehensive solutions. In 2000, when Al Gore could have made warming a signature issue in his presidential campaign, his advisers persuaded him that it was too complicated and...

Earlier this month Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson refused to briefly answer a question about global warming at a debate in Iowa, suggesting 30 seconds wasn't long enough to lay out his views on the issue. During a recent telephone interview with Radio Iowa, Thompson was given an unlimited amount of time to talk about global warming. He said it was a problem. "We don't know the extent to which it's warming. We don't know whether or not it's part of a cycle. We've had cooling periods in our country. We don't know the extent to which man-made causes are...

Children are among those who are most devastated by climate change, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) announced today. “They pay with their health, their development and – too often – also with their lives,” Hilde Johnson, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director, told reporters in New York. Every year, three million children under the age of five die from environment-linked diseases, such as diarrhoeal disease, respiratory infections and malaria, and the agency predicts that these numbers will rise with climate change, she said. Curbing climate change and UNICEF’s top priority – to protect and support the health, development and education of...

As NewsBusters reported, Nobel Laureate Al Gore made a fool out of himself at the United Nations climate change meeting in Bali Thursday by chastising America for having the exact same global warming policy the Clinton administration had when he was vice president in 1997. Marvelously, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton was on Fox News the following day speaking inconvenient truths about the Global Warmingist-in-Chief that sycophantic media members disgracefully refuse to share with the citizenry. With that in mind, get your popcorn ready, kick your feet up, and listen to the facts about this issue spoken in a fashion...

Dear friend, In four days I'm going to Bali, Indonesia to address the UN Climate Change Conference. In front of representatives from the world's countries, I will speak about the need for a visionary treaty to be completed, ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by 2010. I need you, your friends and family to sign this petition calling for a new, positive leadership role by our elected leaders. I will bring your signatures on stage with me as a clear demonstration of our resolve. This petition shows our commitment to solutions to the climate crisis. Please add...

Awhile back, I saw a fellow planting a tree to offset the effects of carbon dioxide emissions. What I couldn't figure out was how moving a tree from one hole to a different hole would have any effect on global warming. I decided to try this myself. After working all day moving a tree, I placed my thermometer next to the hole from which the tree came out, and took measurements. Next, I measured the temperature next to the hole with the tree in it. Believe it or not, the second hole showed cooler temperatures by approximately 10 degrees. I...

You can thank me (or throw eggs at me), not the miscounting in Florida, for Al Gore not being the president of the United States. You see, Tennessee did not vote for its favorite son in 2000. I was a voter in Tennessee in 2000. Had Gore been able to carry the state that knew him best, there would have been no need for recounts in Florida. Throughout the three weeks of recounting, the media descended upon Florida. No one came to Tennessee to ask us why we had not voted for our own former U.S. Senator. We did not...

During another typically bizarre day for Heather Mills, the former model yesterday urged people to try drinking milk from rats and dogs to help save the planet. Media-shy Heather started off by storming out of a radio interview with London's LBC station. She then drove a gas-guzzling Mercedes 4x4 to Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park to speak about ecological matters - and kept the engine running for part of the morning. Once there she proceeded to launch into an extraordinary ecological rant and exhorted the assembled crowds to try drinking rat's milk instead of cow's milk in a bid to...

As irrefutable evidence mounts that Nobel Laureate Al Gore's climate alarmism is about nothing other than lining his supposedly green pockets with green currency, manmade global warming skeptics around the world wonder when the former vice president's house of cards will collapse. Without question, if Gore were to lose the support of almost universally adoring Hollywoodans, the scam would implode quicker than a Democrat demanding a recount after losing a close election. As such, the following comments by actor and environmentalist Robert Redford, reported by the New Statesman last week, should bring hope to folks not buying the snake oil...

Cannot be posted due to copyright issues: http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/11/who-is-the-gree.html

The picture of a French president who jogs, vacations in New Hampshire and even seems comfortable around President Bush is so unusual that it has earned Nicolas Sarkozy the nickname of Sarko the American. That, along with France’s toughened stand against Iran’s nuclear appetites, won Mr. Sarkozy bipartisan applause in Washington this month. It is certainly a relief to have a French leader who wants to improve relations with the United States. The two countries have plenty of common interests, including fighting terrorism, keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons and nurturing democracy in Lebanon. Washington and Paris still differ on...

'WE have turned out the lights in the studio," NBC's Bob Costas told viewers of Sunday's Dallas Cowboys-Philadelphia Eagles game, "to kick off a week that will include more than 150 hours of programming designed to raise awareness about environmental issues." Discerning viewers with eyes keen enough to pierce the sanctimonious glare of Costas' candlelit silhouette may have noticed that the stadium's klieg lights still shone brightly. On a typical game day, a large football stadium burns about 65,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and 35,000 cubic feet of natural gas. The cars driving to the game spew about 200 metric...

The growth in human population and rising consumption have exceeded the planet's ability to support us, argues John Feeney. In this week's Green Room, he says it is time to ring the alarm bells and take radical action in order to avert unspeakable consequences. We humans face two problems of desperate importance. The first is our global ecological plight. The second is our difficulty acknowledging the first. Despite increasing climate change coverage, environmental writers remain reluctant to discuss the full scope and severity of the global dilemma we've created. Many fear sounding alarmist, but there is an alarm to sound...

Line up some of the more notorious Nobel Peace Prize recipients, such as Kissinger, and if you had to identify the biggest killer of all it was probably Norman Borlaug, one of the architects of the Green Revolution, which unleashed displacement, malnutrition and death across the Third World. If the Kyoto Accords were ever implemented, and they never will be, the net impact on greenhouse gases--99.72 percent of them natural in origin--would be imperceptible, but the devastation to Third World economies and life expectancies would rival that caused by Borlaug's seed strains. Already the hysteria about anthropogenic global warming stoked...

A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors. For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m "in the near future". "The Armageddon scenario he predicts," declared Burton, "is not in line with the scientific consensus." I'll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere...

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain? Earlier this year Gore experienced a notable public relations debacle. The Tennessee Center for...

Today we will learn whether Al Gore has won the Nobel peace prize. As someone who cares passionately about climate change, I'll be saying a little prayer. That he doesn't win, of course. The former US Vice-President has already taken over from Michael Moore as the most sanctimonious lardbutt Yank on the planet. Can you imagine what he'll be like if the Norwegian Nobel committee gives him the prize? More to the point, can you imagine how enormous his already massive carbon footprint will become once he starts jetting around the world bragging about his new title? Just after Gore...

Are the stars aligning for another Al Gore moment in the presidential campaign? The former-vice-president-turned-climate-change-crusader long has hovered over the campaign despite his professed disinterest in becoming a candidate. Now, with rumors of a possible Nobel Peace Prize swirling, he's once again back in the conversation. The peace prize announcement is due on Friday, so he doesn't have long to wait to learn if he has pulled off a unique grand slam for 2007: an Oscar, an Emmy, a bestseller and a Nobel. It would vault him once again back into the center of speculation about whether he might jump...

Funny! (hat tip Jonah at NRO)

If you're wondering who's largely to blame for the alleged heating up of the climate you need look no further than Jane Fonda. That's what "Freakanomics" columnists Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt suggest in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. "If you were asked to name the biggest global warming villains of the past 30 years, here's one name that probably wouldn't spring to mind: Jane Fonda. But should it?" the authors ask. According to Editor & Publisher, the two cite Fonda's anti-nuclear thriller "The China Syndrome," which opened just 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident in...

Former vice president Al Gore's pronouncement that he is likely to endorse one of the Democratic candidates for president before the primary season is over has set off a slew of speculation about who his choice might be. Truth is, the courting of the "Goreacle" began many months ago. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Gore huddled in Nashville in December, and Gore has also met with former senator John Edwards (N.C.). Gore and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) conferred as recently as last week. Not surprisingly, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) has not met with Gore. Neither has Sen. Joseph...

There are two important prerequisites for this new carbon credit business: 1) Your country must have signed the Kyoto Protocol (the United States has still not signed it as of March 2007). These credits are made possible by the Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). That's why sometimes this new line of trading is also referred to simply as "CDM" business. 2) You have to register your "carbon saving" project with the United Nations before you can sell your credits to other international purchasers. This is an amazing opportunity for the developing countries to get rich while overhauling their energy infrastructure....

For all the money spent, nobody can say if the offsets have done much to alleviate global warming.... Without government regulation and mandatory caps on emissions, all that is left to drive offset sales is guilt and marketing. Offset companies charge what the market will bear. "How much are you willing to spend to feel good or to impress your neighbors?" asked Marland, of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For Katy Hansen, a 29-year-old law school student, the answer was $429.99. She wanted to offset the travel of the guests to her May wedding in Madison, Wis., and paid San Francisco-based...

As Lee Eames took his seat at the front of the Friends Room at the Columbia Public Library on Saturday afternoon, he was stricken by the low attendance for the first meeting of his Citizens for Gore campaign. “I’m a little disappointed in the turnout, but when I started this project I hadn’t broken my hip,” Eames told a group of four supporters of former vice president Al Gore. Inspired by the 220 regularly meeting Gore groups across the country, Eames hopes to assemble a Columbia group that will help influence the 2000 presidential candidate to run for the presidency...

Feeling guilty about the amount of deadly greenhouse gases you emit by driving that big SUV or using your air conditioner during the summer? Well, don't count on an easy fix. While celebrities like Al Gore and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger burnish their green credentials by buying so-called carbon offsets that fund projects like wind farms to make up for their energy excesses, environmental advocates nationwide criticize the effectiveness of the programs. Their concern: The carbon offset market, which is largely unregulated, lacks the standards or the oversight needed to make sure that the projects consumers send money to are actually...

Residents are 'green' hypocrites, poll finds Californians want immediate governmental action, but are unwilling to make personal sacrifices By Steve Geissinger MEDIANEWS SACRAMENTO BUREAU Contra Costa Times SACRAMENTO -- Many Californians' alarmed talk about global warming amounts to a lot of hot air. Experts say residents are growing more opinionated on the issue -- and hypocritical. A survey by the Public Policy Institute of California shows most residents think dirty air from cars is helping foster disasters such as drought and hurting their health through ailments such as asthma. They want immediate action from government officials and presidential candidates with...

Junk Science: Carbon Offsets — Buyer Beware By Steven Milloy Congress began investigating the carbon offset industry this week. The inquiry could produce some “inconvenient truths” for Al Gore and the nascent offset industry. "snip"So how many offsets supposedly compensated for the CO2 sins of Al Gore and the dozens of individuals credited with producing a movie shot in Nashville, Los Angeles, and Beijing? According to a Web site release from NativeEnergy – which has since been removed – it only cost 40 tons of offsets (worth about $480) to make “An Inconvenient Truth” carbon neutral. It’s an absurdly low...

Al Gore maintains that he won't seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 -- but his actions seem to belie his words. Gore has kept himself very much in the public eye as the White House races kicked into gear, providing plenty of evidence that he's eying another run for president: His award-winning global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" brought him back into the limelight last year. His new book "An Assault on Reason" is a best seller, and when he launched his national book tour in May, one observer said the event seemed "more like a campaign stop...