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The media needs to start asking hard questions. Here is where they need to start. 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."

The Toyota Prius, the car favoured by celebrities wanting to flaunt a green conscience, is to become bigger and more sporty, with a larger engine, quicker acceleration and a top speed of well above 100mph. The changes – coming at the expense of fuel economy and carbon emissions – will be incorporated in a new version to be introduced at the Detroit motor show in January. The decision risks denting the image of the Prius as one of the greenest cars on the road and will be seized upon by critics, who accuse the car’s owners of being smug and...

Sometimes, Jennifer Ross feels she cannot make a move at home without inviting the scorn of her daughters, Grace, 10, and Eliza, 7. The car she drives? A flagrant polluter. The bath at night to help her relax? A wasteful indulgence. The reusable shopping bags she forgot, again? Tsk, tsk. "I have very, very environmentally conscious children - more so than me, I'm embarrassed to say," said Ross, a social worker in Dobbs Ferry, New York. "They're on my case about getting a hybrid car. They want me to replace all the light bulbs in the house with energy-saving bulbs."...

Will the Wall Street bailout be the beginning of the New (Green) Deal? Environmental activists are trying to figure out ways to advance their global-warming-regulation agenda by exploiting the current financial crisis, including the Wall Street bailout bill to be voted on by the House. The good news for them is that they may not need to succeed, since someone with a very Green agenda will be in charge of implementing the bill should it become law. As reported by Carbon Control News (Sep. 24), "Environmentalists and some Democrats are seizing upon the financial sector crisis to call for major...

Amid the energy crisis, Democrats are losing the high ground on the environment to a GOP that is pushing oil drilling. As the election enters its endgame, Democrats and their environmental allies face a political challenge they could hardly have imagined just a few months ago. America's growing dependence on fossil fuels, once viewed as a Democratic trump card held alongside the Iraq war and the deflating economy, has become a lodestone instead. Republicans stole the energy issue from Democrats by proposing expanded drilling -- particularly lifting bans on offshore oil drilling -- to bring down gasoline prices. Whereas Barack...

“Kill your air conditioner,” wrote Joe Klein in Time Magazine. “The unnecessary refrigeration of America has become a chronic disease.” What? I’m tempted to laugh at the lunacy. It’s as silly as banning the light bulb in an attempt to save the planet. Who could be that stupid? Well, in a few years incandescent light bulbs will be illegal. We’ll be forced to buy compact fluorescents, which require Hazmat disposal teams when broken. In today’s green environment, nothing is too insane. Frighteningly, our industry is increasingly considered politically incorrect. A decade ago, the New York Times reported that an Italian...

OXFORD, Mississippi (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Friday that if elected he might have to scale back his plan for energy investment to help pay for a proposed $700 billion financial industry bailout. "I want to make sure that we are investing in energy in order to free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. Now, that is a big project. That is a multi-year project," Obama said in a televised debate with Republican rival John McCain.

<p>A founding member of the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois met in New York City tonight with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p> <p>Jodie Evans, who co-hosted Obama's first major fundraiser in Hollywood in February 2007 just after Obama announced his candidacy and is a top fundraiser and donor to Obama's campaign, led a delegation of leftist anti-American groups that held a private meeting near the United Nations. The stated purpose of the meeting was to "serve as an opening for diplomatic resolution" to prevent war between Iran and the United States.</p>

Democrats to let the moratorium expire on September 30. From AP. Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in an month-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer. Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election. Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign...

For at least at least a year, Americans struggling to pay record gasoline, heating oil and natural-gas prices have begged Congress to permit energy exploration off the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts, where 80 percent of the nation's known energy reserves sit just waiting to be tapped. But every time Congress had a chance to lift its moratorium on offshore drilling, Democrats and liberal Republicans told consumers to stop their whining. But with the public now solidly behind more drilling and with the congressional elections just seven weeks off, House Democrats found themselves between a rock — voters — and...

It took 4.2 million gallons of oil spewing from a blowout at a rig in the Santa Barbara Channel 40 years ago to ignite the modern conservation movement, trigger new environmental protections and lead to a moratorium on new offshore oil drilling. But the high price of a gallon of gasoline is fueling a change in attitude. Recent national polls indicate that seven out of 10 people support new drilling offshore along the federal outer continental shelf, which extends from three to 200 miles beyond the shore. If costly new exploration in those areas is allowed, oil from those fields...

Environmentalism Is the Threat—Part III Time to Start Taking Names [Articles in this series: 1. Evil Incarnate | 2. Green Hegemony | 3. Environmentalism Is the Threat—Part I, Part II, Part III] Things like weather, climate, animal populations, extinctions, long-term ecological relationships, and the behavior of the seas are impossible to predict because, as we've seen: 1. there are too many causative variables bearing on all these kinds of things and they can never all be known, 2. life itself is always unpredictable, and 3. because all these kinds of things are determine by chaos-theory type cycles, usually many of...

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...

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, offsetting 0.9 tons of carbon emissions.

California's two energy agencies Friday endorsed a plan that would require utilities to obtain a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. The California Energy Commission, a policy-and-planning agency, and the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates utilities, issued the joint recommendation that, if implemented, would be the most ambitious renewable-energy plan in the U.S. But the target raises questions about how much the goal could cost consumers. The plan's price tag is "the question of the hour," says Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, an economist who chairs the California Energy Commission. She endorses the goal but said it could be...

A green British jury has perverted an ancient legal right, using it to excuse eco-terrorism. As The Independent reports: The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage. Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate...

Western do-gooders are impoverishing Africa by promoting traditional farming at the expense of modern scientific agriculture, according to Britain's former chief scientist. Anti-science attitudes among aid agencies, poverty campaigners and green activists are denying the continent access to technology that could improve millions of lives, Professor Sir David King will say today. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from Europe and America are turning African countries against sophisticated farming methods, including GM crops, in favour of indigenous and organic approaches that cannot deliver the continent's much needed “green revolution”, he believes. Speaking before a keynote lecture tonight to the British Association for the...

Word around Detroit is GM and the EPA are apparently duking it out over the Chevy Volt. The problem is this: Is the Volt an electric car or a hybrid? How you define the Volt is important, because it dictates how the official EPA fuel-economy numbers will be calculated.

Western do-gooders are impoverishing Africa by promoting traditional farming at the expense of modern scientific agriculture, according to Britain's former chief scientist. Anti-science attitudes among aid agencies, poverty campaigners and green activists are denying the continent access to technology that could improve millions of lives, Professor Sir David King will say today. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from Europe and America are turning African countries against sophisticated farming methods, including GM crops, in favour of indigenous and organic approaches that cannot deliver the continent's much needed “green revolution”, he believes. Speaking before a keynote lecture tonight to the British Association for the...

In addition to her frightening lack of qualification to be vice president (much less president) of the United States, Palin is an evangelical, anti-choice, pro-gun, right-wing conservative who wants creationism taught in schools. Although in the past two years the Arctic summer sea ice shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded, Palin apparently does not believe it is human-induced or cause for alarm. Oil and gas drilling. Palin has supported oil and gas drilling plans anywhere in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the central Arctic, the entire Arctic Ocean, and in fish-rich Bristol Bay and Cook Inlet....

As Ed Craig notes here, Palin’s home-run speech not only raised her market value, but the value of energy common sense as well. Palin offers conservatives (if the Goracle disciple at the top of her ticket agrees — a big “if”) a real opportunity to bring the dangers of green extremism home to Joe Sixpack. Here in Michigan, two counties are key to winning this swing state (they are national bellwethers too): White-collar Oakland and blue-collar Macomb which sit shoulder to shoulder north of Detroit. Palin’s personal story will be a powerful magnet for Oakland’s decisive soccer/hockey mom electorate. But...

DENVER--The Democratic Party has boasted that its convention here will be "the most environmentally-sustainable" gathering in the party's history, complete with a director of sustainability, low-power lighting in some areas, and calculations of carbon footprints. Some of the goals include diverting 85 percent of waste that would normally go to a landfill, finding hundreds of people to sort waste into recycling-compost-landfill containers, and devising what The Wall Street Journal described as "lean 'n' green" catering guidelines that say food described thusly must not be fried and shall contain three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white. That...

BRUSSELS (AFP) - Car makers are not doing enough to meet proposed EU targets for cutting carbon dioxide emissions, according to a report Tuesday, with some German and Japanese brands facing the biggest challenge to make the grade. The European Commission wants all carmakers to reduce average emissions to 120 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre (0.6 miles) by 2012. < > The average car emission last year stood at 158 grams... < > The Friends of the Earth environmental group believes that the planned EU measures do not go far enough to address the problem of global warming and...

SEATTLE - Only in Seattle could an event touted as a way to help the environment get washed out during what is supposed to be the driest time of the year. Car-free days is part of Mayor Greg Nickels' campaign to encourage people to walk, bike or take mass transit. One neighborhood is closed off to car traffic during selected weekends this summer. On Sunday it was the area around 14th and Republican on Capitol Hill, a residential area that's normally quiet anyway. "I think it promotes awareness of whatever we're promoting awareness of," said resident Thomas Hubbard. "A car...

New York and 11 other states are suing federal environmental regulators over greenhouse gas emissions from oil refineries, the New York attorney general's office said on Monday. The suit, led by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, charges that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the federal Clean Air Act by refusing to issue standards, known as new source performance standards, for controlling global warming pollution emissions from oil refineries. Note: Other states in the suit are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. New York City and Washington D.C. also joined in...

The plastic grocery bag is fighting for its crinkly life.From the city of San Francisco to Los Angeles County, more than a dozen local governments around the state have proposed or passed plastic-bag restrictions, ranging from recycling mandates to outright bans.Now, a proposal in the Legislature would put a 25-cent fee on all disposable bags – paper or plastic – given out at drug and grocery store check stands starting Jan. 1, 2010. It has won key support from the grocery and retail industries and faces its next legislative step today. Those in favor of the fee, led by Assemblyman...

(Fortune) -- What do Oreo cookies made by Nabisco, Cheez-It crackers from Kellogg's or General Mills' Fiber One Chewy Bars have to do with global warming and the destruction of tropical rainforests? A lot, say environmental activists. The link between the supermarket shelf, climate change and shrinking rainforests is palm oil, a controversial ingredient that may now be the most widely-traded vegetable oil in the world. Here's the problem: Demand for palm oil, which is found in soaps and cosmetics as well as food, has more than doubled in the last decade as worldwide food consumption has soared. Farmers, in...

SAGINAW - T-Boone Pickens says they're the wave of the future. But a wind turbine meant to save one Saginaw family on electricity has instead sparked a huge headache for their neighbors. "It makes a terrible air raid noise," says Debbie Behrens, about the high-pitched whine made by the turbine. "It's driving me crazy." What's worse, is that Debbie and her son Lance both say that high-pitched hum is now causing them problems, physically. "You occasionally have the dizziness," explains Lance, "The ringing in the ears, I've never experienced the ringing in the ears." It turns out, there is a...

Environment: The power of persuasion. Psychologists say they have it and aim to use it to persuade us that we need to be more sensitive to protecting the Earth.But that's putting it mildly. If we were looser with our words, we'd say the 148,000-member American Psychological Association plans to condition the public so that, in the words of Douglas Vakoch, clinical psychologist at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, today's "increased environmental concern" won't "become just another fashionable trend." Among the agenda items from the group's meeting last week in Boston, USA Today reported, were stepped-up "efforts...

As the members of the MSM continue to beat the drums for “renewable” energy, and T. Boone Pickens promises pie-in-the-sky free energy from windmills the corruption surrounding Green Energy is beginning to be revealed. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars are involved and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is only the latest to be found with her hand in the cookie jar. Here’s the unvarnished truth: the world has been getting most of its energy from fossil fuels for over a century. During the 20th century we began to see the use of nuclear energy. In the US that path to...

Mayor Bloomberg is proposing a "green" plan that has the potential to drastically change the New York City skyline and shores. It's part of his effort to make New York the most energy efficient city in the nation. The mayor's "windmill power plan" is the boldest environmental proposal yet from the billionaire independent, who has been trying to make energy efficiency a legacy of his administration. Speaking at a major conference on alternative energy Tuesday night in Las Vegas, Bloomberg proposed putting windmills on top of city bridges, and skyscrapers, and turbines in the Hudson and East Rivers. In terms...

Quite unconcerned with the suffering of his fellow Americans, green lefty blogger Chris Bowers of Open Left is positively delighted that Americans are paying an arm and a leg for their gasoline. Bowers opines that sky-high gasoline prices constitute a "major progressive victory" and are actually good for America: "Higher gas prices have created a broad shift in American behavior that is good for the environment and good for progressives." The fact that mass transit ridership is up, while driving is down, helps the environment, he argues. Bowers contends that increased reliance on mass transit and reduced driving is good...

Walt Neidlinger spent years trying to keep a Wal-Mart-anchored shopping complex from being built near his Wind Gap home. The traffic would have been suffocating for their little community, neighbors argued, so when the massive retailer and its partners packed up their plans and left Plainfield Township last year, Neidlinger was ecstatic. He figured he'd wait for the next plan to come along and remembers thinking, ''What could be worse than Wal-Mart?'' Over the past year, Neidlinger says, he's gotten an answer: RPM Recycling -- the metal-shredding plant on the same land -- causes daily noise that sounds like a...

Mass transit is not a greener form of transportation. Some transit systems take twice as much energy per passenger than private cars do and are highly dependent on fossil fuels, according to studies from the Department of Energy (DoE). But how can this be? A full bus or trainload of people is more efficient than private cars, sometimes quite a bit more so, says Brad Templeton, founder of ClariNet Communication Corporation. However: Transit systems never consist of full vehicles, but in order to encourage riders, systems offer frequent service which results in emptier vehicles outside of rush hour. Transit vehicles...

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats. To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this...

John Yancey leans against his truck in a field outside his home, his face contorted in anger and pain. John Yancey doesn't like the Maple Ridge Wind Farm turbines and the deal his father signed for them. "Listen," he says. The rhythmic whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of wind turbines echoes through the air. Sleek and white, their long propeller blades rotate in formation, like some otherworldly dance of spindly-armed aliens swaying across the land. Yancey knows the towers are pumping clean electricity into the grid, knows they have been largely embraced by his community But Yancey hates them.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and 24 other representatives on Capitol Hill have asked the government to reconsider mandating that all Americans use exclusively compact fluorescent bulbs, or CFLs, in light of growing concerns over the safety and environmental impact of the bulbs. As WND reported, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 was signed into law in December, phasing out the use of traditional, incandescent light bulbs in favor of CFLs beginning in 2012 and culminating in a ban on incandescent bulbs in 2014. "Most Americans, if you ask them, have no idea that the government has already...

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: "S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash." The story began: "Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents' trash to make sure pizza crusts aren't mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom." Isn't that what homeless people do -- rooting around in other people's garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper...

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Whether you want to see the multi-million dollar home of a Hollywood celebrity or the scene of an infamous crime, Los Angeles has a guided tour to suit almost every taste. But away from the well-worn tourist routes of Beverly Hills and Hollywood, Robert Cabrales is preparing to take a bus-load of sightseers on a journey that he says aims to expose the city's "dirty little secrets". Organized by the advocacy group Communities for a Better Environment (CBECAL), the "Toxic Tour" takes eco-tourists through the sights and smells of some of Los Angeles' most notorious environmental...

Continuing her push for a comprehensive energy plan that includes increased oil drilling, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., reminded Americans that the Democrats message to save the planet doesn’t add up. The world has been saved already, she says. Responding to Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s comment about creating an energy policy to help save the planet, Bachmann added religion to the energy crisis during her interview with OneNewsNow, a Web site run by Christian American Family News Network. “[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she’s just trying to...

A Georgia company looking to solve America's energy problem has finally teamed up with the federal government, hoping to make millions of barrels of oil every day from virtually anything that grows out of the Earth. Bell Bio-Energy, Inc. says it has reached an agreement with the U.S. Defense Department to build seven test production plants, mostly on military bases, to quickly turn naturally grown material into fuel. "What this means is that with the seven pilot plants – the military likes to refer to them as demonstrations – with those being built … it gives us the real-time engineering...

Continuing her push for a comprehensive energy plan that includes increased oil drilling, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., reminded Americans that the Democrats message to save the planet doesn’t add up. The world has been saved already, she says.Responding to Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s comment about creating an energy policy to help save the planet, Bachmann added religion to the energy crisis during her interview with OneNewsNow, a Web site run by Christian American Family News Network.“[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she’s just trying to save the...

You can just see the planning meeting for what organizers are calling the Greenest National Political Convention ever. "Special perks for hybrids? Check. Biofuel powered buses? Check. Solar powered green area? Check. Bike racks? Nope. Sorry, the Secret Service says they're too dangerous." The Colorado Independent reports that bicycles will not be allowed on the Pepsi Center grounds, nor Invesco Field when Senator Obama gives his acceptance speech, during the convention because the Secret Service dubs them a security concern. There will be bike parking allowed across the street at the transit center, but even though car drivers, transit users,...

Which gets better gas mileage, a Hummer or a scooter? No contest. But which is more polluting? It may not be what you think. "It's true. The cleanest scooter is still dirtier than a car," said John Swanton, air pollution specialist with the California Air Resources Board.

Last week, I confessed to being a bad traveler. This week, I confess to something much worse. I resist and resent the demands made on me by environmental imperatives. I don’t want to save the planet. I just want to inhabit it as comfortably as possible for as long as I have. Things reached something of a crisis point a few days ago when my wife asked me to read a communique from Greenpeace. (She thought, she told me, that if I read it rather than hearing about it from her, my unhappiness would be directed at the organization.) It...

"It's not just the economic downturn that has harmed the green order. People have become wary of environmental causes that can turn out to do more harm than good. They don't want wind turbines marching across Britain's moors when nuclear power stations can do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They worry that washing and bleaching all those non-disposable nappies may be damaging the ozone layer, that the massive incentives for biofuels have distorted the world food market, and that green taxes are actually stealth taxes."

Every journalist in the land seems to be going ga-ga over the new "energy saver globe". This is the eco-friendly alternative to the devilish and grossly inefficient incandescent bulb. We are being incessantly told by our media mavens that the new alternative is cheaper in the long term than the old light bulb and that it will save just oodles and oodles of energy and that it would be irrational not to buy it. The funny thing is that Joe Public has to be mandated by arrogant politicians into buying the next best thing to sliced bread. Why is this...

Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes. Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the “nutbag ecologists” are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans....

For years, hyperactive environmentalists have burned votive candles to the spirit in the sky, hoping she'd levitate energy prices high enough to make alternatives to oil economically feasible. That day has come. Result: The oil has hit the fan. With gasoline over $4 and with life as they love it in the suburbs being shut down, did people call for the windmills? Nope. A heavy majority want to drill the bejeezus out of anywhere in America we can find familiar black slop.

Before Congress spends billions to build public schools that meet "green" environmental standards, it should review Washington state's experience, which shows that green buildings have higher than expected costs, and the energy savings and other projected benefits are either small or nonexistent, says Todd Myers, director of the Center for the Environment at the Washington Policy Center and an National Center for Policy Analysis E-Team adjunct scholar. Several pilot schools in the Olympia, Northshore and Spokane school districts were created to test the effectiveness of green building strategies. By the summer of 2007, all but one of these schools had...