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Extremely high, potentially unhealthy levels of lead dust have been found in the Allegheny County Health Department's dilapidated office building in Lawrenceville that houses the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. The highest test reading of 337,000 micrograms per square foot was taken in August... Results of tests done Dec. 2 and 3 in Building One found lead dust levels of 32,800 micrograms per square foot on a windowsill in Room 305 and 10,900 micrograms per square foot on a windowsill in Room 309 -- both food safety division offices. The tests found 8,400 micrograms per square foot on a windowsill...

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” ---Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environmental Program - Opening speech, Rio Earth Summit, 1992 From a certain perspective, some things don’t make sense. Change the perspective and they make perfect sense. Most people value their lives very highly. Why would you strap a bomb onto your body and walk into a restaurant and blow yourself up? From a conventional perspective it makes no sense. But from the perspective of a person who believes that by doing so he enters...

When can a Christmas gift be something extra special to a conservative and more like a lump of coal to a liberal? When it comes in the form of a book, "TIME TO EAT THE DOG? the real guide to sustainable living," by Brenda and Robert Vale.

Nevada's stimulus-funded weatherization programs are living down to expectations of inefficiency and incompetence. What a surprise. Of all the debt-growing, make-work boondoggles crafted by Congress this year, the "green jobs" grants set aside to make low-income homes more energy-efficient left elected Democrats especially excited: "We're handing out welfare, creating jobs and saving the planet!" The state got $18.6 million in weatherization funds, with the condition that all the money be spent by June 30. About 1,850 homes with incomes at or below 200 percent of the poverty level were supposed to get new insulation, new caulking and the minor repairs...

Beekeepers have to scratch this season to find much to be thankful for. Too-cool, too-rainy weather almost everywhere gave American farmers great soybean and field corn crops this season, but kept summer blossoms from producing much nectar and kept bees from gathering what little there was. In lots of places (the Dakotas and Midwest and much of the east) the bees were barely able to keep up with feeding themselves and their young this summer. Everything they gathered they turned into more bees ... and, unfortunately, more mites. Excess honey just wasn't in the equation, leading to the worst honey...

THE BOOB TUBE: .....Sharp introduced the first AQUOS liquid crystal television in 2001 (it came to Canada in 2002). I don’t know this offhand, by the way — I learned it in an information session I attended on Sharp’s new AQUOS LE700 series of LED backlit flatscreen televisions a few months ago......

An Irish company, Steorn, today began public demonstrations of an ‘over-unity’ device powered by rotating magnets. Developed over a six year period, the Orbo technology provides a new energy source to power electrical devices and cars. It is claimed to produce more energy than it consumes at a ratio of 3:1, which has led to considerable skepticism from the scientific community. In a Press Release, Steorn announced a six week period for public examination and evaluation in Dublin Ireland from December 15 to January 31, 2010. Plans exist to develop the Orbo technology for commercial production and distribution. If the...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

"Climate change," the scam formerly known as "global warming," has been exposed as the crypto-Marxist hoax many of us suspected for years that it was. In Copenhagen, at the ridiculous charade of a "summit" on the dangers of carbon emissions producing record carbon emissions, the lofty rhetoric about saving the planet and the long-suffering polar bears has been ripped down like a sheet covering an unfinished masterpiece. Underneath, the masterpiece turns out to be an ugly reality as old as human history, a good old fashioned shakedown, in which the greediest of the greedy, those assert the right confiscate the...

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Leadership: Alaska's ex-governor asks a question we'd like answered: Why is California's current governor pushing the same policies in Copenhagen that helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? The movie series that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name involved cyborgs traveling through time to alternately try to destroy or save one John Connor, who would grow up to be the leader of the resistance against a race of machines that ruled the planet. Prominent in the series was his tough cookie of a mom, Sarah Connor. Another Sarah has taken the lead in another resistance against another group...

Hybrid gasoline-electric and all-electric cars will continue to cost more than vehicles with a conventional internal combustion engine for the foreseeable future, putting the new technology beyond the reach of many car buyers. Sales of hybrid and all-electric cars therefore may be limited to affluent buyers who can afford to make an environmental statement and the vast majority of vehicles will continue to be powered by gasoline or diesel engines. While promising, the new lithium-ion battery technology won’t significantly reduce pollution or dependence on foreign oil by 2030.

Regulations: The Clean Water Act is being rewritten to give a government bureaucracy the power to regulate every body of water from the Mississippi River to a rain-flooded field. The first casualty may be American coal. With all the concern for the harm that cap-and-trade and regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant might do to the American economy and free markets, the Environmental Protection Agency is doing quite enough damage with an existing law on the books — the Clean Water Act. Congress plans to revise it to make it an even more powerful bludgeon against industry, energy producers and...

Ecological disaster has long been a hallmark motif in many science fiction stories and movies, from "The Day of the Triffids," where alien plants take over earth to "Them," the classic science-fiction movie about ants transformed into giant arthropods by the atomic bomb. In the Hugo-winning science fiction novel "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner, (perhaps the ultimate environmental disaster novel), the final solution to stopping the environment from being destroyed by man is to kill off the most "wasteful" nation on earth, the American people! James Cameron's new sci-fi extravaganza, "Avatar," set to open Friday, says virtually the...

<p>"Why is Governor Schwarzenegger pushing for the same sorts of policies in Copenhagen that have helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment?" Palin wrote on her Facebook page. "Perhaps he will recall that I live in our nation's only Arctic state and that I was among the first governors to create a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with climate change."</p>

What's going on at the Copenhagen Conference? Here's one of the days activities from week one. LECTURE ON SAFE PRACTICE FOR RESCUING POLAR BEARS: WHAT NOT TO DO! (This is important, pay attention!)

On July 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by executive order as an independent agency joining together a number of functions from different federal agencies. The EPA says its mission “is to protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment – air, water and land – upon which life depends.” An Administrator appointed by the President of the United States runs the agency, which is not a Cabinet agency, although the Administrator is usually given cabinet rank. Lisa P. Jackson is the current Administrator, and the EPA’s Website notes that the “FY 2010 Budget...

Climate Control Zealots want to force the U.S. into 3rd world status and forcibly reduce and control the population of earth...what they say: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” “Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.” “The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.“

Energy Department keeping nuclear repository options openDepartment of Energy lawyers are forging ahead with their defense of a license application to build the nation's nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. They met a deadline last week for filing briefs on questions that Nevada's attorneys raised with a nuclear regulatory panel, which is tracking safety concerns about plans for turning the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, into a burial site for 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste. The briefs were filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board despite the Obama administration's stance that Yucca Mountain...

Copenhagen is supposed to be the crowning achievement of the Global Warmers/Climate Changers. Leading up to the big day, there was even a name change to more easily facilitate the smooth exchange of the wealth of developed countries to those whose dictators refuse to “share the wealth” with their citizens. The name change from “global warming,” came about when the earth did not cooperate with the “global” part of the name,” and especially with the “warming” categorization. The new name became “climate change.” Even with the name change, the earth is still in non-compliance with the scientific agenda. It has...

DES MOINES, Iowa — A central Iowa plant could soon begin producing jet fuel from poultry fat. Bolingbrook, Ill.-based Elevance Renewable Sciences plans to build a $15 million plant in Newton, adding onto an existing biodiesel operation. The experimental operation plans to use plant oils and poultry fat as building blocks to replace petroleum-based chemicals used to make myriad products, including jet fuel, lubricants, adhesives and even cosmetics and candles. "It allows us to make a very interesting slate of products, which is different and somewhat in contrast to how poultry fat is used today," said K'Lynne Johnson, Elevance's chief...

Perhaps when the history of our times is written, ours will be called The Era of Narcissistic Catechisms. To understand why this is the case it is enough to consider the fortunes of two green movements. On the main stage of global affairs this week we have the much touted UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. Standing with 15,000 delegates representing green activism groups and politically correct scientists the world over are international celebrity leaders like Nobel Peace Prize laureates Barack Obama, Al Gore and Desmond Tutu and their fellow celebrities and Oscar and Grammy winners Al Gore, Leonardo Dicaprio,...

Cambridge, MA - A review of more than 200 climate studies led by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has determined that the 20th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1000 years. The review also confirmed that the Medieval Warm Period of 800 to 1300 A.D. and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900 A.D. were worldwide phenomena not limited to the European and North American continents. While 20th century temperatures are much higher than in the Little Ice Age period, many parts of the world show...

Radical environmentalists are forging a new socialist post-democracy that is slowly undermining representative government. The myth of global warming along with the Environmental Protection Agency have become the hammer and sickle of eco-Marxism - the new green-red alliance that seeks to destroy capitalism and the sovereign nation-state. The United Nations climate-change summit in Copenhagen represents a major victory for international socialism. It also marks the triumph of ideological fanaticism over reality. National governments will announce at Copenhagen major cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. President Obama vows to commit the United States to reducing carbon-dioxide levels by 83 percent from 2005 levels...

Big thinkers and custodians of the planet that they are, lefties north of the border are endorsing China's compulsory one-child policy... for the entire world. At least, lefties at Canada's Financial Post are making the endorsement, but surely they speak for most of their fellow totalitarians-in-the-making everywhere. The problem, as they see it, isn't so much global warming or cooling: its overpopulation. A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days. The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies...

Not content to have the government control the very air we exhale, some liberal members of Congress want to regulate every drop of water in the country and the land on which it sits. If they get their wish, the government would exercise dominion over land, air and sea to an extent never before seen.

Coca-Cola Warns Green Taxes Could Cut Its Profits By 50% Coca-Cola and Unilever have warned that their profits could halve over the next decade unless they reduce their emissions, as business leaders in Copenhagen called for a global fixed price on carbon dioxide. By Rowena Mason Published: 7:09PM GMT 11 Dec 2009 Coca-Cola announced that it would reduce the carbon footprint of its supply chains Photo: Reuters The two companies acknowledged that green taxes and regulation would cause profits to fall 47pc by 2018 in the consumer goods sector if no effective action was taken. Unilever and Coca-Cola both announced...

Tired of waiting for Congress to pass the “Cap-and-Trade” bill, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it will initiate its own measures to control carbon dioxide emissions. The thrust of the EPA’s approach will be to determine a carbon emissions “budget” for every individual household and assess fines and penalties for those whose emissions exceed an allowable amount. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson acknowledged that this approach would be more costly than a cap and trade system, but defended it as “leverage to induce Congress to take action. Carbon dioxide is the most dangerous pollutant because there are so many...

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) — Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels. In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

The bottom line at the Copenhagen Climate Conference is the same bottom line found in every Obama proposal -- the redistribution of wealth from you to anybody else the government designates. "Redistribution of Wealth" has been the holy grail of one world levelers for over 150 years. At Copenhagen, the same folks who failed to impose a "New World Order" through international communism, and who have also failed (so far) to impose world government through the U.N., believe they have the right formula at last. The plan is simple. Hijack the science of climatology; hype evidence that the earth is...

COPEN­HA­GEN — The top Amer­i­can envoy to cli­mate talks here flat­ly re­ject­ed argu­ments Wednes­day by diplo­mats from poor lands that the Unit­ed States owes a debt to de­vel­op­ing na­tions for decades of Amer­i­can emis­sions that con­tribut­ed to glob­al warm­ing. It was not the first time that the Amer­i­can ne­go­tia­tor, Todd D. Stern, had dis­missed the no­tion. But his words high­light­ed the di­vide that per­sists between the poor and the wealthy as near­ly 200 na­tions try to sketch the out­li­nes of a new pact on cli­mate change here. Asked about argu­ments by diplo­mats and some protesters that the Unit­ed States should...

As the Climate-gate controversy continues to grow, amid charges of hiding and manipulating data, and suppressing research by academics who challenge global warming, there is one oft-repeated defense: other independent data-sets all reach the same conclusions. "I think everybody is clear on the science. I think scientists are clear on the science ... I think that this notion that there's some debate . . . on the science is kind of silly," said President Obama's Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, when asked about the president's response to the controversy on Monday. Despite the scandal, Britain's Met, the UK’s National Weather Service,...

My county of residence in Virginia is currently divided over a proposed wind energy project along the mountaintop involving more than 2,500 acres of the ridgeline. Not surprisingly, the project has strong sentiment on both sides. The wind has been a tool of humans since at least as far back as 5000 BC when it was used to power boats on the Nile, then a few centuries later used to pump water and grind grain, and in the 1880s someone figured out how to use it to produce electricity. However, the first central electricity generation facilities developed in 1881 were...

California: While Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worries about rising seas, his state sinks below the waves. Don't mess with Texas, they say. But California and the nation could follow its lead. Last Wednesday, Gov. Schwarzenegger released a new report based on research compiled by the California Energy Commission claiming that by 2100 San Francisco Bay would be more bay than San Francisco, with Fisherman's Wharf and Treasure Island under the rising waters of climate change. His show-and-tell, which included a new Google Earth application the commission spent $150,000 to help develop, goes a long way toward explaining the once-Golden State's slide...

Science: For two years, our space agency has refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has repeatedly corrected its climate figures. A leading researcher threatens to sue to find more inconvenient truths. What's become known as "Climate-Gate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his FOI requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly...

The unauthorized release of hundreds of e-mails from the British University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has outraged Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Oddly, it is not the implication in the e-mails that much of the purported climate research carried out to promote the global warming crisis is flawed, bogus, or worse that has gotten the Senator’s dander up. “A lot of people are trying to make a big deal about the irregularities of the research,” Boxer said. “However, the more critical issue is the violation of privacy. These scientists had no expectation that their communications would be made public....

The transformation of America’s environmental movement began, as ex-United Steelworkers board member David Foster recalls, in late 2004 in a borrowed conference room at a table surrounded by union officials, top aides and the always-present group of Washington assistants. “We’re in this together,” Foster remembered Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope and Frances Beinecke, head of the Natural Resources Defense Council, telling USW President Leo Gerard. About the same time, another group of environmentalists began networking with equally unlikely partners. Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, asked General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt to help lobby for a national...

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” • Kenneth Watt, Ecologist “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” • Life Magazine,...

Sanibel, Fla., was one of the first U.S. cities to endorse the Earth Charter nearly a year ago as a part of Earth Day celebrations. It was also the first U.S. city to withdraw its endorsement. This controversial document, promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev and Maurice Strong for a decade, is seen by many to be an effort to create a new "16 Commandments" to serve as the foundation for a new global religion. Sanibel citizens were not happy about the endorsement. Forty-two citizens and five former mayors signed an open letter, published in a local newspaper, demanding that the endorsement...

The City of Calgary introduced its blue box, curbside recycling program this year, and there was rejoicing. Calgary, the last major Canadian city to offer it, had, until recently, asked citizens to deliver their own recyclables to green bins located every few blocks, or to hire, at $10 a month, a private pickup service. To those concerned about environmental appearances, it was embarrassing. "It means something to me that we're the last large city in Canada to implement curbside recycling," said Druh Farrell, the alderman championing the program. Approving the $50-million plan (plus another roughly $50-million a year recycling tax...

The hot air is leaking out of the global warming balloon.

Why are global warming advocates so secretive about their data? So far, the spotlight has been on the University of East Anglia and its refusal to release their surface temperature data, by far the most comprehensive long-term worldwide surface data available, but global warming advocates reassure us that this shouldn’t really concern us because some other data sources reportedly show the same thing. Unfortunately, the problem of secretiveness is hardly limited to the University of East Anglia. . . .

The world continues to thirst for oil with in an ever increasing fervor, yet simultaneously struggles to fully grasp and appreciate the obstacles encountered by those who bring that oil to their local pumps. There has always been a necessary trade-off when it comes to technology and industrial advancement, as in order to experience the many benefits modern society offers us, we have to agree to give up some portion of nature and accept a certain amount of environmental damage. But recently the oil industry has been seeking ways in which they can continue to bring us the oil that...

It's beginning to trickle into the American consciousness that we have been the victims of a massive scientific fraud. Soon, Americans will turn their ire against the people who betrayed their trust. If Barack Obama knows what's good for his political future, he won't be standing anywhere nearby when that happens.

Warming Scandal: Despite the incriminating e-mails, administration science adviser John Holdren still thinks man causes global warming. And Sen. Barbara Boxer thinks it's the whistle-blowers who should be arrested. Time was when Barbara Boxer thought it was just fine for the New York Times and Washington Post to spill national military secrets and war plans on their front pages. The people had a right to know where and how they were being led. But we are not dealing here with the Pentagon Papers, the location of terrorist prisons or the surveillance of al-Qaida and its operatives. Boxer, top Democrat on...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to implement strenuous new regulations regarding carbon dioxide emissions without authorizing legislation from congress...the EPA sent its final proposal on CO2 emissions to the White House for review in November. The exact contents of this proposal is as of now unknown. If it follows earlier EPA assessments, which it most likely will, then the EPA will assert its power to regulate and cut CO2 emissions regardless of whether Cap and Trade becomes law or not. The EPA justifies this by claiming that CO2 is a pollutant. This is downright nuts considering that there...

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning. As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard. The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd...

President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs might think that Climate-gate is a nonevent, but on Monday Pennsylvania State University announced that it was launching an investigation into the academic conduct of Michael Mann, the school's Director of the Earth System Science Center. And Tuesday, Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, announced that he would stand aside as director while his university conducted an investigation. Dozens of researchers at other institutions could soon face similar investigations. . . .

<p>LONDON — Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.</p> <p>The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.</p>

Enron executives worked closely with the Clinton administration to secure support for the Kyoto Protocol because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a financial windfall. An internal Enron memo circulated immediately after the 1997 Kyoto meeting - and first reported by The Washington Post - shows the company believed the treaty "would do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States." So Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to reduce...