A big hat tip to Dennis Ranch for the links to these two editorials: First -- Al Gore And Climate Ka-Ching
Gore's reaction to the death and destruction caused by a cyclone ravaging Burma was to utter an emphatic "I told you so" Tuesday on National Public Radio. In an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air" broadcast, the jolly green giant made the charge while talking about the paperback release of his ironically named book, "The Assault on Reason."
Ignoring the fact that the rising death toll is due in part to an incompetent, isolationist and authoritarian government that allows most of its people to live in shanty towns of tin and bamboo, Gore claimed that "we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming."
In other words, people die in Rangoon because of an SUV in Richmond, Va.
There's a "trend toward more Category 5 storms," Gore claimed, and this trend "appears to be linked to global warming and specifically to the impact of global warming on higher ocean temperatures in the top couple of hundred feet in the ocean, which drives convection energy and moisture into these storms and makes them more powerful."
Except, as we recently noted, the trend in the world's oceans -- as shown by measurements taken by a fleet of 3,000 high-tech ocean buoys first deployed in 2003 -- is toward cooling. As Dr. Josh Willis, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, noted in a separate interview with National Public Radio, "there has been a very slight cooling" over the buoys' five years of observation.
As Joseph D'Aleo, the Weather Channel's first director of meteorology, told National Review Online's Deroy Murdock that the slight warming trend "peaked in 1998, and the temperature trend the last decade has been flat, even as CO2 has increased 5.5%. Cooling began in 2002." He added: "Ocean buoys have echoed that slight cooling since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed them in 2003."
Which all leads to this little bit of information:
So why the hype? Well, global warming is a growth industry designed to keep Earth and some bank accounts green.
Gore himself joined the venture capital group, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers just last September. On May 1, the firm announced a $500 million investment in maturing green technology firms called the Green Growth Fund.
The group announced another $700 million to be invested over the next three years in green-tech startup firms. But if the green technology business, uh, cools down, there will be no return on that investment. There would be no need for such investments if global warming wasn't a threat. So Gore just launched, among other things, a $300 million on an ad campaign to convince us it is so.
Speaking at a conference in Monterey, Calif., on March 1, the former vice president admitted to having "a stake" in a number of green investments into which he recommended attendees put money rather than "subprime carbon assets" such as tar sands and shale oil. He also is co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offsets that allow rich polluters to continue polluting with a clear conscience.
Second -- Democrats' Windfall Tax - On You
The planned 25% tax on windfall profits would be imposed on oil company earnings above what the Senate's wise members decided was "reasonable." Never mind that what's "reasonable" to one person might be punitive to another.
Senators also want to impose steep penalties on "price gouging" -- despite the fact that some 17 separate studies have found it doesn't exist. The plan amounts to little more than an attempt to impose price controls -- a socialist tool dressed up in populist garb.
Democrats hailed their new measure as an attack on "the root causes of high gas prices." That's one of the more laughable comments to emerge from the Senate in some time.
As any student who's taken Econ 101 at the local junior college can tell you, higher taxes don't encourage production; they discourage it. But Senate Democrats apparently played hooky the day taxes were discussed. They should at least have read the report from their own nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in 2006.
Emphasis mine. The last time we instituted Price Controls on gasoline prices was during the Carter administration and this led directly to the huge gas lines. Typical that the Democrats would try something like this again and in such an underhanded way...
