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When Webster Groves High School purchased solar panels to put on the roof of the school, no one told them they could catch on fire! The fire department was called on Saturday to put out the flames ... Plumes of black smoke could be seen coming from the roof at Webster Groves High School Saturday. Firefighters say solar panels caught fire around 2:00pm. Nearby residents noticed the smoke and called the fire department. The panels are above the new science wing.

Wind farms in this corner of Wyoming have killed more than four dozen golden eagles since 2009, one of the deadliest places in the country of its kind. But so far, the companies operating industrial-sized turbines here and elsewhere that are killing eagles and other protected birds have yet to be fined or prosecuted - even though every death is a criminal violation. The Obama administration has charged oil companies for drowning birds in their waste pits, and power companies for electrocuting birds on power lines. But the administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind-energy company, even those that...

A leading venture capital firm gets taken to the clean energy cleaners. The story in the New York Times says Kleiner Perkins has been “humbled” by the past decade’s performance. That seems appropriate. The nation’s most famous venture capital firm had a stunning 35.7 percent annual rate of return in the decade of the 1990s. That was before they met Al Gore. Somewhere around the time Gore had won his Academy Award for warning the world about global warming, the former Vice President was hired on as a senior partner at KPCB. Fortune wrote an article describing Gore sitting in...

“Without much fanfare, the Department of Energy (DOE) recently updated the list of loan guarantee projects on its website,” the Institute for Energy Research noticed on Wednesday. ”Unlike in 2008, when Barack Obama pledged to create 5 million jobs over 10 years by directing taxpayer funds toward renewable energy projects, there were no press conferences or stump speeches.” Uh-oh. Why weren’t there any celebrations? President Obama loves a good celebration. Why, we just found out about the super-secret star-studded bash he held after his inauguration. Maybe it’s because the IER divided the $26 billion spent on “green jobs” by the...

Robert Wagner has written one of the most intriguing articles I've seen here at Seeking Alpha, titled "90% Of Green Stocks Will Go Bankrupt ... So Buy The Sector?" He's right -- 90% of green stocks will go bankrupt. But this is true in every area of technology, and always has been. Only one computer company from the 1950s remains a player in the space: IBM (IBM). (Honeywell (HON) is in other businesses and Unisys (UIS) is not a mainstream player.) Only two companies from the 1970s PC revolution are still in the game -- Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT)....

Barely a day after the Washington State Senate voted to fund a study that would explore ways to enforce tougher greenhouse gas emission standards, a respected academic spent nearly two hours presenting scientific evidence suggesting the assumptions on which that legislation was based were wrong. Dr. Don Easterbrook, a professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University, on Tuesday told the Senate’s Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee he was relying on an old maxim in science: “In God we trust; everyone else bring data.” “Well, I’m bringing data,” he said. “You’ll hear very few opinions from me. When I’m finished,...

In his 2013 State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama called on Congress to pursue a solution to climate change, or else he would do it on his own. The same week, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D–CA) and committee member Bernie Sanders (I–VT) introduced the first major bill that would institute a carbon tax, the Climate Protection Act of 2013 (Boxer–Sanders). One glaring problem with the bill is that it would not preempt regulation of greenhouse gases by federal agencies. Even worse, the bill effectively turns the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator into a...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Last week on this program a young man of 13 years old called. A young boy called from Wilmington, Indiana. He was a very, very bright, articulate guy who called here to tell me that he finally had proven to himself that global warming was a hoax. He'd gone to his local library. He'd researched it and he had found it, and he told me why he thought the left and liberals don't recognize it as a hoax is because they don't want to. So I offered the young man an iPad. I said, "Somebody like you...

The Solyndra-fication of the Department of Energy loan-guaranteed Fisker Automotive, whose many merits as a hybrid sports car maker were once hailed throughout the land, is almost complete. The supposedly green-tech company announced that they intend to lay off nearly all of their regular employees on Friday, and that they will maintain about 53 senior managers and executives — mostly to pursue buyers for the company’s assets. The WSJ reports: Struggling electric-car maker Fisker Automotive Inc. is dismissing 150 of its remaining 200-employee staff on Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter. …The company has been looking for...

Associate Director of College Communications, Unity College claims in a press release this month: “Every college or university that claims to be holding a ‘green’ commencement needs to have divested from investments in fossil fuels, or admit that they cannot truly make that claim.” “As the first college in the United States to adopt sustainability science as its central focus, Unity College ascended to the leading-edge of higher education, training the next generation of environmental leaders to pursue trans-disciplinary solutions to the earth’s most pressing problems including global climate change.” “With a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees in...

A California billionaire is pledging to spend as much of his fortune as necessary to make climate change “the defining issue of our generation.” Tom Steyer, who made his riches as a hedge fund manager, told The Hill on Tuesday that he wants to make climate change a campaign issue for years to come and Democratic support for environmental protections as widespread as support for gay marriage and immigration reform. “The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people. We want a smashing victory,” Steyer said of candidates he judges to be on the...

The Economist has been fairly consistent in its stand that carbon dioxide emissions from man-made sources are the chief cause of global warming. But in an editorial this week, it sounds less certain. Global warming predictions haven’t panned out as predicted in the past decade, but the why is a bit fuzzy, the magazine admits. Greenhouse gas emissions have soared during the past 15 years, the magazine notes, with 100 billion tons of carbon having been added to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. Still, both air and ground temperatures during that time have remained virtually unchanged. In fact, the...

COMPLETE TITLE: Government Scientist Threatens “Murderous Rampage” After Watchdog.org Exposes Massive Spending at Secret Junk Science Lab ~ ~ ~ ~ Nutty Professor Kerrilee Ann Crosby threatened a “murderous rampage” after a conservative group exposed massive spending at a secret green junk science lab.Watchdog.org reported: A woman angered by a Watchdog investigation into the government lab where she works retaliated by threatening mass murder against this news organization in several Twitter posts. “Have you ever felt like going on a murderous rampage? Start at @WatchdogCO ‘s offices. They perpetuate lies like this,” Kerrilee Ann Crosby tweeted last month while working...

NYT's Krugman: Skeptics 'punished in the afterlife' --- McKibben: 'White America' has failed

This DOE project explores a variety of strategies designed to curb America’s greenhouse gas emissions up to 80 percent by about 2050. Arguably the most controversial of those reports covers the “effects of the built environment on transportation.” To put it plainly, the “built environment” report lays out strategies the federal government can use to force development away from suburbs and into cities, supposedly for the sake of reducing carbon dioxide emissions given off by all those suburban commuters. The Obama administration wants to force so-called smart growth policies on the country: get out of your car, stay out of...

The manipulation behind Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link by Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 1, 2013 A NY Times science story (by Justin Gillis, March 1) illustrates some interesting points about science journalism - esp. in the contentious and politically charged issue of climate change. A scientific journal, in this case the renowned Science magazine, wants to gain publicity for its journal among the non-scientific readers of the NY Times. So it sends out a press release about a scientific paper it plans to publish. Of course, it has been 'peer-reviewed' to the satisfaction of...

Environmental activists make money telling us all how terrible things are; climate scientists appreciate the help promoting their data, we do have a bit of a train wreck coming at us emissions-wise, but climate scientists also know there is a risk of backlash if there are too many hyperbolic claims, and that 'green fatigue' will set in if every change in temperature and every storm is attributed to global warming. That's why even the IPCC, no wallflower when it comes to using media talking points, wishes media would not attribute local weather to climate change(PDF). And then there is the...

Standard climatological and economic techniques, combined in an investment appraisal of the proposed Sanders/Boxer carbon dioxide tax (U.S. Senate, 2013), show that even at a zero inter-temporal discount rate the cost of the Bill’s proposed CO2 mitigation if applied worldwide over ten years is 15 times greater than the benefit in the cost of warming-related damage avoided by the intended cut in CO2 emissions, which is here assumed to be – but is in reality unlikely to be – achievable at the stated cost. Fraction of global CO2 emissions abated: By 2023, on business as usual, U.S. CO2 emissions will...

Earlier this week in his State of the Union address President Obama made some observations on climate change so brimming with falsehoods I'm surprised his nose didn't fall off. It really doesn't matter where he himself was deliberately lying or whether he was merely lending the gravitas of his office to the deliberate lies of others. The point is that the President of the USA has access to any number of fact checkers and advisers and if he stands up and addresses the nation with a farrago of complete untruths then the buck stops with him. This dissembling and mendacity...

A large global warming protest with a very Canadian connection is scheduled for Sunday February 17th at the White House. The protest, organized by the Sierra Club and 350.org, is being dubbed as the biggest climate rally in U.S. history and is meant to encourage President Obama to veto the construction of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from northern Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. In a telephone interview with Yahoo! Canada News, 350.org's Daniel Kessler said that he is expecting tens of thousands of people including "several groups" from Canada. Obama is expected to...