I can hear it now, ol’ Nanny Nancy gettin’ up and screeching “Pass this bill or we’ll kill this planet!” Or something to that effect. The Waxman-Markey bill passed the House yesterday evening thanks to the defections of 8 Republicans and despite the “no” votes of 44 Democrats. Michelle Malkin has a wanted poster up for “The 8 cap-and-tax Republicans…and the 44 Democrats who voted no”, along with phone numbers so that you can call those 8 suckers and let them know just how much you are looking forward to paying out the wazzoo for so-called “green” energy in the not so distant future.

After all, they’re all like just saving the planet man, don’t ya know? Like Gaia has any trouble handlin’ her own stuff!

In “Voting For Economic Suicide” Hugh Hewitt puts it in perspective:

They could not have read the bill.

A 300 page amendment to a bill that greatly impacts every American and greatly burdens every American business was introduced at 3:00 AM Friday and passed 16 hours later.

The spectacle of the House voting for a massive tax increase and a 300 page amendment they could not have read is a low point for post-segregationist Congresses. Never have so few read so little about so important a proposal, and yet brazen forward oblivious to the the deeply embarrassing charade it presents to the world. Banana republics make a better show of governing themselves than did the U.S. House of Representatives today.

{…}

The country knows the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Democrats are drunk on power and lurching so far to the left as to stun even partisan Democrats. The Senate may stop this attempt at economic suicide, but independents and Republicans cannot allow the public to forget the recklessness of today’s abdication of responsibility by the hard left House leadership.

There is even a part of the bill called “placeholder”, which will deal with market associated financial derivatives that will have to do with carbon emissions — PLACEHOLDER????!!!!!! So, not only has no one actually read this monster but some of it isn’t even written yet???!!! — and they passed it anyway? And these are the same jokers that are full-speed freight-training a government-option health care bill that they say will be done this summer! Yeah, like we want folks like this to be in charge of our rectal exams! Sheesh!

The 2010 elections can’t come soon enough. The economy isn’t turning around, unemployment is getting higher, government is meddling more and more in our business and private lives — Guess that’s the “change” part of Obama’s hopichanginess he promised.

Perhaps it should have been called “Hopeless Change” . . .

The Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Brooks attended the Heartland Institute’s conference in New York: Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis? Not much coverage of this one by the MSM. Wonder why?

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.

Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google “Heartland” and “Quadrant”).

Yet the terrifying thing, as President Klaus observed in his magisterial opening address, is that there is no dialogue on these issues. When recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he found the minds of his fellow world leaders firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers. As I said in my own modest contribution to the conference, there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.

I really like Ace’s take on all this:

What are you going to believe, actual data or models that are shown to be unable to predict actual events? How you answer that questions says all that needs to be said on where you stand on the whole issue.

So to sum up, we are going to destroy our economy by taxing and regulating it to death while starting a trade war with a major trading partner (who we expect to continue to finance our reckless spending) all in the name of solving a problem that doesn’t actually seem to be happening.

Yup!

Technorati Tags: Christopher Brooks, Global Warming, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, Richard Lindzen of MIT

Once upon a time, the Obama administration told them-there Congress critters that his Global-Warming-Hysteria CRAP & TRADE plan to control carbon emissions would cost $646 billion spread out over eight years. Now it’s more like TWO TRILLION DOLLARS! Maybe he just misplaced a decimal place or two?

A top economic aide to Mr. Obama told a group of Senate staffers last month that the president’s climate-change plan would surely raise more than the $646 billion over eight years the White House had estimated publicly, according to multiple a number of staffers who attended the briefing Feb. 26.

“We all looked at each other like, ‘Wow, that’s a big number,’” said a top Republican staffer who attended the meeting along with between 50 and 60 other Democratic and Republican congressional aides.

The plan seeks to reduce pollution by setting a limit on carbon emissions and allowing businesses and groups to buy allowances, although exact details have not been released.

At the meeting, Jason Furman, a top Obama staffer, estimated that the president’s cap-and-trade program could cost up to three times as much as the administration’s early estimate of $646 billion over eight years. A study of an earlier cap-and-trade bill co-sponsored by Mr. Obama when he was a senator estimated the cost could top $366 billion a year by 2015.

A White House official did not confirm the large estimate, saying only that Obama aides previously had noted that the $646 billion estimate was “conservative.”

I have to agree with the House Republicans on this one:

“The last thing we need is a massive tax increase in a recession, but reportedly that’s what the White House is offering: up to $1.9 trillion in tax hikes on every single American who drives a car, turns on a light switch or buys a product made in the United States,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner. “And since this energy tax won’t affect manufacturers in Mexico, India and China, it will do nothing but drive American jobs overseas.”

Sounds like a bunch of crappin’ and tradin’ all over the American taxpayer.

More o’ that there CHANGE we can all believe in — Oh, ya betcha yo’ ass!

Technorati Tags: climate-change, cap-and-trade program