Environment

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) wants any federal disaster relief sent to his tornado-ravaged state to be offset by other spending cuts, but CNN's Carol Costello thinks his stand to be either "extreme" or very untimely.

"This is either extreme fiscal responsibility or a raging case of 'this is not the time,'" Costello mocked on Facebook and Twitter. The Senator is sticking to his fiscal principles, since he has in the past demanded the same be done with federal aid to other states, but the liberal CNN anchor decided to inject her own bias into the story.

As NewsBusters reported, a deadly tornado stroke Oklahoma Monday.

At approximately the same time it was bearing down to kill innocent people, Lizz Winstead, the co-creator of Comedy Central's Daily Show, commented on Twitter, "This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives":

On Wednesday's All In show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes boosted the efforts of convicted felon Tim DeChristopher as he interviewed the environmental activist who served two years in prison for making illegal bids in an oil lease auction that he had no way of honoring.

Hayes gave the activist a forum to encourage more law-breaking as part of the environmental movement as DeChristopher suggested that only "civil disobedience" would be effective.

Jeffrey Kluger showed up on Saturday’s CBS This Morning to do what he does best: clang the alarm bells over global warming. The TIME magazine senior editor even went so far as to warn that Manhattan may soon be underwater.

Kluger was brought on to discuss a recent reading -- atop an observation station on a dormant volcano -- finding that atmospheric carbon dioxide is at its highest level in 2 million years. Back then, he informed us, sea levels were 66 feet higher than they are now. He then struck an ominous tone: “What this means is we are on the west side of Manhattan at this moment. If this keeps up to what it was back then, we would be swimming at this address.” [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

Today’s proof that National Public Radio is your taxpayer-funded rip-and-read press-release service for the Left: a Morning Edition story summarized as “College Divestment Campaigns Creating Passionate Environmentalists.”

Reporter Elizabeth Shogren compared Brown University's anti-coal campaign to anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s: “Students at more than 300 colleges in the United States are asking their school's endowment fund to distance themselves from any coal-producing companies.” NPR’s chasing after Rolling Stone and The Nation magazine in promoting the fight to stop "climate change" from baking Earth:

Teasing an upcoming story on Thursday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams fretted over "The dramatic changes we've watched happen to our planet" as shown in "jaw-dropping images from above." In the report that followed, correspondent Rehema Ellis lamented: "From melting glaciers to vanishing rain forests to non-stop urban sprawl. All visible through millions of satellite images collected by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Appearing for his regular "Miller Time" segment on FNC's The O'Reilly Factor on Tuesday, comedian Dennis Miller denounced former Vice President Al Gore as a "detestable cat" and "a phony," as he recommended that "everybody should shun Al Gore" after he sold Current TV to Al-Jazeera.

After host Bill O'Reilly joked that Gore was a "personal friend' of Miller's, the comedian made a point of denying any friendship with the former Vice President as he began his response:

On the May 5, 2013, edition of C-SPAN 2’s “In Depth,” British journalist Melanie Phillips spoke candidly of her new autobiography “Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain” and pointed out the flaws in liberal group think.

Phillips spent 20 years working at Britain’s left-wing The Guardian where she finally realized that many journalists were out of touch. She explained how journalists see the conclusion first, and then distort evidence and facts to prove their point. “There are quite a number of people who … start with the conclusion and say let’s make the facts fit the conclusion.”

You would think university professors would have some respect for books regardless of their content.

Apparently that's not the case for two San Jose State University professors who actually published a picture at their department's website of the two of them burning a book skeptical of anthropogenic global warming.

Previewing an upcoming story for NBC's Rock Center on Friday's Today, correspondent Ann Curry warned that tribes of the Amazon rain forest "are sharpening their spears and preparing their blow guns to fight Ecuador's new plan to auction as much as 8 million acres of the rain forest for oil drilling." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

She then cited Boston University biology professor Kelly Swing arguing that "America, a top importer of oil from Ecuador, shares responsibility for this coming conflict....And the toxic legacy of past oil drilling in other parts of the rain forest." A sound bite played of Swing declaring: "We're definitely guilty in this story."

The Obama administration has flushed almost $200 million of the American taxpayer's money down the drain on another green company failure but ABC and NBC have yet to report on it. On Monday, the electric car company Fisker Automotive failed to make a $10 million payment on a $192 million federal government loan, bringing it closer to bankruptcy. Only CBS, on Thursday's This Morning, mentioned it - and then only gave it 15 seconds.

Fisker joins Solyndra in what has turned into a long list of Obama administration supported green companies that have turned into boondoggles for the American taxpayer that the Big Three networks have virtually ignored.

Nightline co-anchor Bill Weir on Tuesday belatedly celebrated Earth Day by touting a left-wing environmentalist who is pushing for new carbon taxes and opposing the construction of the Keystone oil pipeline. Weir failed to label Bill McKibben as a liberal. Instead, the journalist simply referred to him as an "organizer," an "agitator" and a "lobbyist."

Weir lectured his audience, "So, how does [McKibben] convince a nation of oiloholics to dry out? Well, he organizes and agitates and lobbies for a tax on carbon. He gets arrested for protesting that big new pipeline from Canada and tries to convince colleges to dump their oil company stock." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Unlike Weir, McKibben's own website has no problem with ideological labels. One post begins, "So you’re a progressive and you’ve been sitting on the sidelines of the Keystone XL fight. Sure, you’ve heard about the pipeline but you haven’t yet drawn your sword and taken up the struggle."

When the State Department held a hearing on the Keystone XL pipeline in Grand Island, Nebraska, the Associated Press displayed an obvious preference for one side: the pipeline-haters. They couldn't quote one Nebraska resident who might favor the job-creating project.

Grant Schulte’s report was 18 paragraphs long, and most of them obsessed over what the eco-protesters wanted. The only pipeline proponent quoted arrived in paragraph 12....after some newspapers might cut the article for space. Schulte began with a thrill over possible civil disobedience against Team Obama:

Update (April 5): Fisker has laid off three-quarters of its workforce at its headquaters in Anaheim, owes DOE approximately $193 million | With a substantial repayment of the $529 million loan guarantee it received almost four years ago -- courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer -- coming due at the end of the month, the electric car company Fisker is exploring the idea of filing for bankruptcy before then. Sources have confirmed that an influential law firm from Chicago has been hired to help with the proceedings.

The major networks have been reticent on the subject however, as if they have no intention of breaking the next Solyndra-like scandal.  It should be noted that no cars have been built since last July, and 200 of Fisker's American employees were recently furloughed.

The saga all began in 2009 when the Obama administration handed out $1 billion worth of loans to two electric car manufacturers, Fisker and Tesla. The latter appears to be on the verge of becoming profitable, but that assumes there's going to be a substantial number of people willing to pay near $1200 per month in leasing charges.

Fisker promised to do the majority of its auto assembly in Delaware, home of Vice President Joe Biden. Private investment partner Al Gore predicted that tens of thousands would be rolling off the the assembly lines there someday. But alas, two years later, it was revealed that production had shifted to Finland, where 500 workers had been hired to build the $100,000 cars called Karma.

Another report exposed that only 40 cars had been built at the time, and just two had been delivered. One of which was to actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio. Adding insult to injury, over 230 were recalled in late 2011 because of a fire hazard risk in the battery compartment. Luckily, very few were in the hands of consumers anyway.

Asked for comment back in October of 2011, founder and executive chairman Henrik Fisker was defiant. "We're not in the business of failing; we're in the business of winning," he said. "So we make the right decision for the business. That's why we went to Finland." Nearly a year and a half later, he would resign from the company that bears his namesake - citing 'differences with company management' in a March 2013 statement.

Now that the Kirkland & Ellis law firm is getting involved, to presume that a bankruptcy filing is coming isn't far-fetched. We'll keep our eyes open for the media's attention to this, but we're not holding our breath.

In an exclusive Wednesday interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, CNN founder Ted Turner expressed his hopes for President Obama and advised him to "get this global climate change under control."

During the 6 p.m. ET hour of The Situation Room, Blitzer teed up Turner to give Obama advice and promoted his new biography "Last Stand." He added that "Turner's politics clearly lean left" and noted "his admiration for former President Jimmy Carter." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Yesterday, Juliet Eilperin wrote for the Washington Post that “the public interest in climate change is waning.”  Posted to Chris Cillizza’s Fix blog, it’s odd that Eilperin didn’t use any hard numbers in this piece.  Citing Pew, she did say that support has dropped six points since last October, but what, pray tell, was the support at that time?  Ten percent? Twenty-five?

Maybe she omitted the hard numbers for the simple reason that Americans have NEVER viewed this as a high priority issue.  Let’s go back to January when President Obama – and the media – were pushing hardest for gun control policies. Aa Washington Post/ABC Poll found that 18 percent of all adults viewed addressing global warming as a high priority.  Concerning the partisan breakdown, only 26% of Democrats and 7% of Republicans thought that stopping the polar ice caps was of the highest national urgency.

NBC's Al Roker was appalled by a poll of conspiracy theories that showed 37 percent of those surveyed believed global warming was a hoax. During a discussion, on Wednesday's Today show, of a Public Policy Polling survey that included respondents' views on everything from the John F. Kennedy assassination to the existence of Bigfoot, co-host Willie Geist reported: "Global warming is a hoax. Thirty-seven percent believe that."

To which Roker responded with an audible, "Wow!" and then later scolded global warming skeptics: "Okay, two words: Superstorm Sandy!" (video after the jump)

A quick review of recent dispateches from the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, finds four items which unskeptically take claims of "global warming" at face value -- and that's just from Thursday and Friday.

Too bad for AP, and the public at large being brainwashed by the incessant repetition of what is proving to be patently false, that we're nearing the two-decade mark of flat worldwide temperatures, and that even reliably leftist outfits are starting to backtrack.

AP Reporter Dina Cappiello at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, has put up what I guess is supposed to be an analysis of President Obama's possible actions relating to "climate change" that is so bad that an adequate critique would require a college term paper -- at one of the few colleges left which doesn't brainwash and intimidate students into believing the alleged unassailability of contentions about man-caused "global warming."

So other than noting that Cappiello "somehow" forgot to note a Bloomberg News report about Obama's plan to "expand the scope of a Nixon-era law that was first intended to force agencies to assess the effect of projects on air, water and soil pollution" to now include "climate change" -- an action which if carried out to its full potential could stop virtually any project anywhere -- I'll just post key paragraphs and let commenters have what promises to be virtually endless fun picking Cappiello's work apart:

New York Times economics reporter turned liberal columnist Eduardo Porter really buried the lead in his latest column, "A Model For Reducing Emissions." And what is that model, exactly? The recession!

Who would have thought the United States would one day be a leader in cutting greenhouse gas emissions?

So, Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog posted today that the Earth is warming at an alarming rate.  In fact, it’s rising “faster than it has been in 11,000 years.”  Of course, this is rubbish.  Global temperatures have stagnated for the past sixteen years, and 1936 saw warmer temperatures than 2012.  The blog’s author, Phil Plait, has cited Think Progress and another so-called media watchdog group, which shall not be named, in his posts – so you know it has a left-wing tilt.

Incivility. It is a word that tripped off the lips and pens of liberal commentators great and small after the deadly 2011 shootings in Tucson that ended the political career of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. One of the most vocal critics of the right’s incivility in word and deed was The New York Times, which ran more than one finger-wagging editorial and found column inches for more of the same from its opinion columnists.

So what ever happened to the left’s j’accuse campaign? It was buried under an avalanche of its own shameless and uncivilized behavior that ranged from death threats to candidate Mitt Romney leading up to last November’s election to tweets of ‘F**k white people’ in response to Obama’s victory.

In a report on Monday's NBC Today about declining penguin populations in Antarctica, correspondent Kerry Sanders didn't take long to lay the blame on man-made climate change: "Penguins are most certainly the ambassadors to the bottom of the world....But the ambassadors are also sounding an alarm....ten of the world's 18 penguin species are in trouble....The ice that dominates this landscape is melting faster than ever before." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Sanders fretted to biologist Fabrice Genevois: "Is that a canary in the coal mine for us as humans?" Genevois agreed: "Yeah, I mean that could be the canary in the coal mine, exactly." After hyping data that "2012 was the hottest year ever on record," Sanders posed this question: "So if the ice is melting in some parts because of our use of fossil fuels, because of global warming, what are we supposed to do?" He then informed viewers that he consulted scientists who found the solution: "...we can do something like just start carpooling."

The Washington Post editorial board today endorsed a plastic bag tax being considered in the Maryland General Assembly, insisting that the 5-cent excise tax will reduce plastic bag litter which clogs the state's streams and raise some "$7.3 million in revenue, a quarter of which would be retained by retail establishments like grocery stores." "It's a sensible measure that will help the environment -- if lawmakers have the spine to stand up to special interests," the paper huffed in its concluding line.

But what the Post failed to mention is that the bill, SB 576 -- entitled the Community Cleanup and Greening Act of 2013 -- specifically EXEMPTS plastic bags used to wrap newspapers, an exemption which obviously favors the Washington Post company:

The rogue collection of bureaucrats known as the Environmental Protection Agency continues its lawless ways. The establishment press continues to serve as enablers.

In January, a federal court vacated the EPA's regulations mandating the use of cellulosic biofuels which weren't produced at all until last year, and barely exist now. In response, the agency, directly defying the court, increased the production requirement of these fuels for 2013. In covering the story, as I noted at NewsBusters on January 31, the Associated Press's Matt Daly only wrote that "An oil industry representative said the Obama administration was thumbing its nose at a ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia" -- as if the agency's action was only a matter of some eeeevil oil guy's opinion.