From Canada Free Press, by David A Nace:

In 2004, Al Gore, former Vice President and author of Inconvenient Truth, started Generational Investment Management (GIM) to provide funding to businesses associated with alternative energy. GIM also happens to own 10% of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which will issue the carbon credits that Cap and Tax legislation is based upon.

In 2007, Al Gore became a partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiman, Perkins, Claufield and Byers (KPCB). This firm is heavily invested in renewable energy and electrical grid improvements. The market for their products is almost completely dependent on government programs in the form of subsidies, tax breaks or regulation. Al Gore’s contribution to KPCB is to promote government intervention into the energy markets.

It is not surprising that venture capital firms and investment firms that will have a stake in the trading of carbon credits, have made extensive campaign contributions to those legislators proposing Cap and Trade legislation. Clearly, the American public looses in the form of higher energy costs and lost jobs however, a few politically well connected individuals will have much to gain as the result of further government regulation of energy consumption.

From the corner of the National Review Online, by John Derbyshire:

Al Gore on Conan O’Brien’s show the other day: [Don’t miss following this link to watch the short video – JB]

Conan: Now, what about … you talk in the book about geothermal energy …

Al: Yeah, yeah.

Conan: and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that’s generated from the core of the earth …

Al: Yeah.

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that’s a mile and a quarter if you’re not as science-y as Al) you’ll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth’s core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius … The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was “several million degrees,” we’d be a star.

The Story of Algore, from Modern Cautionary Tales:

Once upon a time there was a tyrant named Algore. He was a rich man, but he felt he could never be rich enough, so he took more and more from the people he ruled over until they were very poor and miserable. He made them hand over whatever they possessed willingly, by telling them that if they didn’t, the seas would boil up and flood the land and drown them all. They believed him because he told them that Science proved he was right, and all the people had a great reverence for Science. Secretly, Algore bribed as many scientists as he could to say that what he said was scientific fact. The few scientists who refused to lie for him were frightened into silence by the tyrant’s teams of Mockers and Vilifiers. So the people were convinced that the only way they could survive was to do as Algore said.

They stopped heating their houses in winter, and many perished from the cold. They stopped eating what they liked and tried to keep alive on a diet of raw roots, and many died of hunger. They became parched because Algore allowed them very little water, and many died of thirst. Algore allowed them very little light in the long nights of winter and the short nights of summer, and many died of sheer sadness and boredom.

Almost every family had once possessed a motor car, but Algore got his scientists to say that motor cars were hastening the boiling of the seas. They had had money to pay for flights in airplanes, but the scientists told them that flying hastened the boiling of the seas. So they gave up driving and flying and only went to places they could walk to, and many died of exhaustion.

Some of them tried secretly to use coal to warm themselves and cook hearty meals, and oil to fuel cars and airplanes. But they were always caught and punished. Many such ‘selfish saboteurs’ were executed for the ‘worst of crimes’ – hastening the boiling of the seas.

‘Where can we get some power from, to light our houses, to cook our food?’ some brave voices from among the dwindling population dared to ask the tyrant.

‘From the windmills I have given you,’ Algore deigned to reply.

The people stood gazing up at the humming windmills, waiting for a breeze to turn them so that a tiny bit of power might be made, to give them a tiny bit of light and warmth. Breezes arose, the windmills stirred, but there was never enough power to save them from hunger and cold.

They fell on their knees and begged Algore to save them.

‘Very well,’ said Algore loftily. ‘I will let you use a little oil, a little coal. You may warm your houses, cook your food, drive your cars, even fly in airplanes, if you will pay me for granting you permission each time you do it.’

In that way, Algore took every last thing from the people, down to the last coin the hardest worker had worked for.

Algore was now very rich indeed. He grew very fat and smooth. Day and night he chuckled in his warm, brightly lit palace over how clever he had been to cheat the people out of everything they had worked for. He boasted to the scientists he had bought, and to his henchmen of Mockers and Vilifiers (and their henchwives), and to silly foreign admirers who gave him prizes for being the Prophet of the Boiling Seas, about how powerful he was.

He had come to believe the story he had made up. He thought he had only to say something and it would be true. So one day he said to the cold, hungry, miserable remnant of the people that he had thought of a new way to give them light and heat, without waiting for a wind to turn the windmills.

‘We will siphon up the heat from the molten centre of the earth,’ he announced. ‘Down there the temperature is millions of degrees, measured in either Celsius or Fahrenheit.’

But even among the remnant of the people there were some who knew this wasn’t true, and for the first time they began to doubt that Algore knew anything about Science at all. Even his tame scientists could not bring themselves to say that the centre of the earth was millions of degrees hot, and some of them hung their heads and covered their mouths in shame. ‘We let him go too far,’ they said.

But it was too late for regrets. Most of the people he had ruled over had perished, the land was dried up, the fields were gone to dust, the houses had crumbled, the cities were empty, and the cold sea lapped on the shore as it always had and always will.

From Investors.com (Investor’s Business Daily):

With less than two months to go before the big Copenhagen Conference on global warming, two major nations have said “no thanks” to the no-growth agenda. For that reason alone, so should we.

Following a deal signed late Thursday between China and India, anything we might agree to do in Copenhagen is likely moot anyway. The two mega-nations — which together account for nearly a third of the world’s population — said they won’t go along with a new climate treaty being drafted in Copenhagen to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.

They’re basically saying no to anything that forces them to impose mandatory limits on their output of greenhouse gas emissions. Other developing nations, including Mexico, Brazil and South Africa, will likely reject any proposals as well.

The deal was already in trouble. Three weeks ago, the Group of 77 developing nations met in Thailand to discuss what they wanted to do about global warming. Their answer: nothing. …

They see clearly what the rest of us seem to miss — that, for all its bad science, the Copenhagen Conference is about the world’s Lilliputians tying down its Gullivers, not about global warming at all.

So, thanks to China and India, Copenhagen is dead — just as Kyoto was when it was signed in 1992, though no one knew it at the time. Without them, no global treaty on climate change will be workable.

The two nations are not only the world’s most populous (with, together, more than 2 billion people), they are also the fastest-growing major countries. China is now the world’s No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases, and India is catching up fast.

Even with their participation, Copenhagen should have been a non-starter for the U.S. Indeed, the main reason for the greenhouse gas deal, all but admitted to by its major participants, is to cripple the U.S. economy — the most successful economy in the world.

True enough, as green critics keep saying, we produce nearly 20% of the world’s CO2 and other greenhouse gases with just 5% of the world’s population. But our GDP of roughly $14 trillion is nearly 25% of the world’s total — in line with our gas output.

We provide jobs and consumption not just for Americans, but for tens of millions of people overseas whose livelihoods depend on satisfying the massive American market.

In case you’re still worried about warming, stop. Since 1998, the data show global temperatures have fallen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says this can’t be happening. None of the IPCC’s models shows a possibility of rising CO2 output and declining temperature.

But even Paul Hudson, the pro-warming-theory BBC climate correspondent, recently had to admit: “For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.”

Yet, the IPCC estimates that “remediation” of the warming trend will cost about 1.7% of world GDP. In the U.S., that’s about $240 billion a year. For the entire world, it’s about $1 trillion a year — or $71 trillion over the next 70 years or so.

Proposals to slash CO2 won’t work anyway. Department of Energy estimates indicate that 97% of all CO2 emissions would continue even if humans didn’t exist.

Even so, climatologist Chip Knappenberger estimates that laws like the recent Waxman-Markey bill would, if fully enacted, reduce future warming by just 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 — not enough even to measure accurately.

Can the world really afford to give up $71 trillion in the coming decades to solve a phantom problem?

Given the shoddiness of the science behind warming claims and the refusal of the biggest CO2 emitters to play along with the climate change sham, it would be economically ruinous for the U.S. to do anything other than wish the rest of the world a nice day, and go about our business.

Lawrence Solomon writing for the Financial Post exposes fibs and crimes in the global warming racket:

This week, the doomsters were embarrassed to learn, once again, that the planet was not in grave peril. Antarctica, their greatest candidate for catastrophe, was not melting at an ever-faster rate, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters, but at the slowest rate in 30 years. To add to their frustration, they couldn’t even lash out at the lead author, Marco Tedesco of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department of City College of New York — the doomsters had praised his previous reports showing high rates of Antarctic melt.

The latest news from the Arctic — delivered daily via satellite — is no better. Two years ago with the Arctic ice in rapid retreat, the doomsters, convinced of the coming of an ice-free Arctic, could scarcely contain themselves. Now, with the Arctic ice in rapid return, their anticipation of disaster seems more a cruel hoax of Nature. …

The red faces aren’t all caused by Nature’s refusal to cooperate in Earth’s demise. The clean carbon folks have recently discovered that they’ve been in bed with organized crime. Scotland Yard and Europol, among numerous other law enforcement agencies across Europe, are hot on the trail of scam artists believed to have made off with £1-billion by illicitly trading carbon credits. In Australia, authorities are investigating claims that a supplier to Carbon Planet, a carbon trading business, has been using fake carbon trading certificates to persuade forest dwellers in Papua New Guinea to sign over the rights to their forests under a UN scheme called REDD, for “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.’’ Australia’s REDD-faced Climate Change Minister Penny Wong may now be unable to tout Carbon Planet — about to list on the Australian stock exchange on the promise of A$100-million in REDD assets — at the upcoming climate change meetings in Copenhagen. Other dodgy carbon dealings led to the suspension of the UK branch of SGS, one of the world’s largest clean energy auditors, and of the Norwegian certification company DNV.

If universities could blush, Stanford would be setting the skies ablaze with its latest embarrassment, an attempt to censor a global warming documentary about to be released that had filmed one of its professors, global warming catastrophist Stephen Schneider. “You are prohibited from using any of the Stanford footage you shot, including your interview of Professor Stephen Schneider,” Stanford demanded in a letter. “Professor Schneider likewise has requested that I inform you that he has withdrawn any permission for you to use his name, likeness or interview in connection with any film project you may undertake.”

What caused Stanford and Schneider to go ballistic over the release of the documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, by independent Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer? He asked Schneider about his many predictions of global cooling catastrophe in the 1970s. …

David Solway writes (read it all here):

Al Gore is among the most prominent of the ever-swelling herd of GW parasites and hypocrites. Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, notes that Gore “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year” (Townhall.com., July 29, 2009. ) Gore is a partner in the venture capital investment firm Klein Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has recently floated a $500 million special fund for “green investments” from which Gore will profit handsomely—this is the same firm, incidentally, that is behind Terralliance, an “oil wildcatter,” which is about as nongreen as one can get (Fortune Magazine, Brainstorm 2008 and VentureBeat Clean Tech, July 16, 2008).

But it doesn’t stop there. According to several news outlets (The Tennessean, March 17, 2000, The Wall Street Journal for June 29, 2000 and March 19, 2007, USAToday, March 18, 2007, and many others), Gore earned $570,000 in royalties from Pasminco Ltd. for a highly toxic zinc mine on his property. Quantities of zinc, barium, arsenic, chromium, lead and trace amounts of cyanide were released into the adjacent Caney Fork River—which served as a backdrop to his film An Inconvenient Truth. The river and surroundings are plainly not “as pure as they came,” as Gore had insisted in his book Earth in the Balance that “the lakes and rivers [that] sustain us” should be.

There are also trace elements of pure insanity in Gore’s hypotheses. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2009, Gore suggested that the Earth was heading toward Venus-type CO2 levels. American Congressmen are obviously not aware that the atmosphere of Venus is made up of 97% CO2 while that of the Earth is .038%. But Gore continues to be coddled by the powers of officialdom…

But what is most distressing is the corporate and government resolve to monetize what we might call “climate consciousness” and to impose its radical agenda for increased social control, with all the power and profits that pertain thereto, upon the unsuspecting public. The totalitarian mindset, in whatever form and at whatever stage in its evolution, is a monstrous thing, and Climatocracy is one of its most arresting contemporary manifestations. Global warming, said Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, “has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices” (Global Warming Politics, May 18, 2009). As Vaclav Klaus brooded in an article for the Financial Times (June 14, 2007), we might one day find ourselves living under a regime that would in many ways resemble the Communist nightmare from which half of Europe has only recently emerged.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, demands world-wide redistribution of wealth and the curbing of economic activity in order to ‘save the planet’ from poverty, hunger, disease, and insecurity. This must be done within four months he says, or  else…

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.

Any agreement must be fair, effective, equitable and comprehensive, and based on science. And it must help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change…

The science is clear… What is needed is the political will. We have the capacity. We have finance. We have the technology. The largest lacking is political will. That is why I will convey some meetings focused on climate change. I have invited all the leaders of the world … Two years ago, only a handful of world leaders could talk about climate change. Today, leaders of all the world, all the countries on every continent are aware of the threats we face now. This is great progress, for we need leadership of the very highest order. Awareness is the first step. The challenge now is to act. Since my first day as Secretary-General, I have spoken out about the grave climate change threat. My words, at times, have been blunt. When the leaders of the G-8 agreed in July to keep the global temperature increase within two degrees centigrade by the year 2050, that was welcomed and I welcome that statement. But I also said again, it was not enough. But leaders have agreed to cut green house gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. That is welcomed again. But that must be accompanied by the ambitious mid-term target by 2020 as science tells us to do. There I said, while I applaud their commitment, that is not enough. I called for matching these long-term goals with ambitious mid-term emission reduction targets.

Let me be clear about what we need to do.

There are four points [of] very important key political issues.

First industrialized countries must lead by committing to binding mid-term reduction targets on the order of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels. Unfortunately, the mid-term emission targets announced so far are not close enough to this range…

Second, developing countries need to take nationally appropriate mitigation actions in order to reduce the growth in their emissions substantially below business as usual…

Third, developed countries must provide sufficient, measurable, reportable and verifiable financial and technological support to developing countries… Significant resources will be needed from both public and private sources. Developing countries, especially the most vulnerable, will collectively need billions of dollars in public financing for adaptation. I am talking here about new money – not re-packaged Official Development Assistance…

Fourth, we need an equitable and accountable mechanism for distributing these financial and technological resources, taking into account the views of all countries in decision-making.

Accomplishing all of this requires tough decisions. It will take flexibility and hard work to negotiate the most difficult issues. Trust between developed and developing countries is essential. When governments succeed in sealing a deal in Copenhagen, we will have shown the spirit of international solidarity. We will have shown leadership – political will…

Roll on, Copenhagen. Only, while they’re at it, why don’t they agree to make gold out of moonbeams? The science is clear.

From The Vancouver Sun:

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.[He] is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed. It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour — cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks — can reverse the trend. But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science … presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety [so that they can have yet another excuse to control our lives – JB].

 While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years. The dynamic and changing character of the Earth’s climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behavior. Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth’s evolution.

 (Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth’s daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

 So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

Notes on the ‘global warming’ scam.

Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph: 

It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.

His predictions have proved so wildly wrong – along with those of the Met Office’s £33 million computer model which forecast that we should now be enjoying a “barbecue summer” and that 2009 would be one of “the five warmest years ever” – that the propaganda machine has had to work overtime to maintain what is threatening to become the most expensive fiction* in history.

* According to the Science and Public Policy Institute, ‘the US government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technologu research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.’

Check out the full report at scienceandpublicpolicy.org

Deroy Murdock writes at ScrippsNews:

Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006.”

Earth’s temperatures fall even as the planet spins within what global-warmists consider a thickening cloud of toxic carbon dioxide.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii consistently and reliably has measured CO2 for the last 50 years. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily for a half-century.

For December 1958, the Laboratory reported an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 314.67 parts per million (PPM). Flash forward to December 1998, about when global cooling reappeared. CO2 already had increased to 366.87 PPM. By December 2008, CO2 had advanced to 385.54 PPM, a significant 5.088 percent growth in one decade.

This capsizes the carbon-phobic global-warmist argument. For Earth’s temperatures to sink while CO2 rises contradicts global warming as thoroughly as learning that firefighters can battle blazes by spraying them with gasoline.

So, to defeat so-called “global warming,” there is no need for the $864 billion Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Kyoto Protocols, elaborate new regulations, or United Nations guidelines. Instead, let the cold times roll.

It is one thing to have a national debate about a serious problem, with adults differing over which solution might work best. Reasonable people, for instance, can dispute whether growing federal involvement would heal or inflame our healthcare system’s serious maladies.

But as so-called “global warming” proves fictional, those who would shackle the economy with taxes and regulations to fight mythology increasingly resemble deinstitutionalized derelicts on an urban street corner, wildly swatting at their own imaginary monsters.

From The Heritage Foundation, by Dan Holler:

“On this Earth Day,” President Obama declared April 22, “[I]t is time for us to lay a new foundation for economic growth by beginning a new era of energy exploration in America.” 

Sure, the current era of energy exploration — oil, gas, coal and nuclear — has been marred by lousy government policy and radical environmentalists. But it’s hardly over. America’s ability to harness affordable, abundant and reliable energy sources created a strong foundation for the world’s largest, most dynamic economy.   

If the energy of the “past” were scarce or prohibitively expensive, starting a new chapter would make sense, but that isn’t the case. Rather, the President’s desire to scrap our economy’s current foundation in favor of expensive, unproven technologies is colored by his stated belief that human activity is causing global warming. 

Bizarrely, in his Earth Day address, the President said, “We still need more oil, we still need more gas.” Although Obama seems to recognize the essential role carbon-based fuels play in our economy, he clearly wants to see them phased out as quickly as possible. His $3.6 trillion budget request makes seven significant changes in the tax code and essentially declares war on domestic oil and natural gas production!

The most outlandish is a tax on production in the Gulf of Mexico, from which the nation produces significant quantities of oil and natural gas. Several tax deductions are targeted for elimination…

The budget also takes aim at what many consider the only silver bullet in the debate on energy and climate: nuclear power… But nuclear energy is critically important to our future…

It’s important to note that nearly 85% of our nation’s energy is carbon-based … Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is doing his part to  reduce energy by shutting off access to many of our nation’s most promising energy reserves. One of those reserves, the Green River Formation, contains an estimated 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of shale oil. Saudi Arabia’s official reserves pale in comparison, with a mere 289 billion barrels of oil.

Why does Salazar believe more R&D into this vast resource is unnecessary? Again, the answer is simple: He realizes we cannot have a new energy economy if the “old” is nowhere close to being depleted. Salazar has also repealed valid leases in Utah without a hearing and constructed hurdles that could prevent natural gas exploration in Colorado and oil exploration on Alaska’s North Slope.         

As if that weren’t enough, the President’s chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff, believes coal and even nuclear may be things of the past, saying, “We may not need any, ever.” Combined, those two sources provide nearly 70% of our nation’s electricity supply. At least Wellinghoff acknowledges, “Natural gas is going to be there for a while, because it’s going to be there to get us through this transition that’s going to take 30 or more years.”

Enter House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). He’s on a back-door mission to stop natural gas production in the Marcellus shale of Pennsylvania. A process known as “hydraulic fracturing” is necessary to gain access to the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas there. The state has regulated that process for the past 60 years, but Waxman would like to use the Safe Drinking Water Act to regulate it, thus giving the final authority on its use to the anti-carbon Environmental Protection Agency.

In less than four months in office, the President has laid the groundwork to transform our energy infrastructure by making “clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.” Of course, all that requires making traditional energy more expensive to struggling American families and businesses.

Some very powerful individuals, Wellinghoff included, believe we can increase our renewable electricity generation 23-fold with almost no economic or consumer pain… In truth, no one knows exactly how much renewable energy will cost or if it is even possible. But the fact that vast amounts of conventional resources remain available at a much lower price suggests the government will have to engage in severe market manipulation if it hopes to achieve its goal. 

Last summer’s record gasoline prices should serve as a reminder of how a misguided energy policy can weaken America. For nearly four decades, the federal government has placed restrictions and outright bans on both onshore and offshore energy deposits. A systemic abuse of the legal and regulatory systems by radical environmentalists has been equally as damaging. According to the Chamber of Commerce, environmental groups “have organized local opposition, changed zoning laws, opposed permits, filed lawsuits, and bled projects dry of their financing.”

Ironically, these radicals oppose projects that will actually produce cleaner energy than today’s infrastructure, including relatively clean coal, nuclear and windmills. Their obstruction combined with inept government policies has undermined economic growth, weakened American energy security and actually prevented pollution-saving technology from being implemented. A radical, government-mandated, expensive conversion to renewable resources will create many more problems than it pretends to solve…

 According to USA Today,  a whole lot of nuclear power plants may be built. 

The nation’s nuclear power industry — stuck in a decades-long deep freeze — is thawing. Utilities are poised to build a new generation of nuclear plants 30 years after the Three Mile Island accident, whose anniversary was Saturday, halted new reactor applications. The momentum is being driven by growing public acceptance of relatively clean nuclear energy to combat global warming. Several companies have taken significant steps that will likely lead to completion of four reactors by 2015 to 2018 and up to eight by 2020. All would be built next to existing nuclear plants. Southern Co. (SO) says it will begin digging an 86-foot-deep crater this June in Vogtle, Ga., to make way for two reactors after recently winning state approval, though it won’t pour concrete until it gets a federal license, likely in 2011. At least five power companies have signed contracts with equipment vendors. And Florida and South Carolina residents this year began paying new utility fees to finance planned reactors. The steps signal that a nuclear renaissance anticipated for several years is finally taking shape. Seventeen companies have sought U.S. federal approval for 26 reactors since late 2007.