Environment

The Obama administration's crony green subsidy scandal is erupting like a solar flare in Washington. But do you know what your kids are learning in their environmental education classes about this red-hot taxpayer eco-scam? Chances are: not much.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Democratic apparatchiks at the National Education Association are disseminating solar power propaganda masquerading as math and science curricula.

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency's Inspector General issued a report on the agency's "compliance with established policy and procedures" in connection with its "Greenhouse Gases Endangerment Finding." This was the finding that "greenhouse gas," or "GHG" emissions, including carbon dioxide, are in essence forms of air pollution, endanger public health, and must therefore be regulated.

As would sadly be expected, what the IG actually found and what the Associated Press's Dina Cappiello reported about the IG's findings sharply differ. Here's what IG Arthur A. Elkins, Jr. wrote in his press statement:

The Solyndra scandal is certainly an "embarrassment" for the White House, as some network news reports have called it. But somehow those same reports have still failed to criticize Obama's green jobs programs for fiscal waste, even the government loan program that gave Solyndra millions.

To their credit, all three broadcast networks aired stories in September about the California solar company that declared bankruptcy in August after getting a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government in September 2009. But out of 11 network stories on Solyndra this year (most in September), not a single one used the company's failure to criticize the loan program it used to get more than half a billion taxpayer dollars.

On Tuesday and Wednesday's World News, reporter Brian Ross exposed e-mails indicating that the Obama administration gave a $535 million loan to the green company Solyndra, despite deep  misgivings inside the government about its viability. Yet, Good Morning America has declined to follow-up on the ABC scoop.

GMA completely ignored the story, failing to even mention it in a news brief. The morning show did, however, find time to devote over five minutes to the divorce of reality TV star Michaele Salahi. While his own network minimized the new developments, Ross was able to explain the details on Wednesday's O'Reilly Factor.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, a solar company that was given over a half a billion dollars in stimulus funds declared bankruptcy this week.

Although most news outlets did at least give this story some coverage, two organizations owned by the same company with intricate ties to the Obama administration completely ignored it.

Barack Obama's Hope and Change ether appears to be wearing off on Robert Redford.

On Friday evening, the Oscar-winning actor and environmental activist published a rather scathing piece at the Huffington Post about the man Hollywood blindly put all its faith behind in 2008:

As NewsBusters reported moments ago, a solar company the Obama administration loaned 535 million taxpayer dollars to as part of the 2009 stimulus plan filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Wednesday.

Although it's still too early to gauge how the rest of the president's fans in the media will cover this if at all, NBCBayArea.com reported the local event in a rather shocking fashion under the headline "Solyndra Filing a Disaster for Obama":

Elisabeth Rosenthal, an environment reporter who has blamed about every problem under the sun on global warming, called on China and India to turn off their air conditioners to save the planet in the Sunday Review – “Oh, to Be Warm In Summer’s Heat.”

Rosenthal's personal temperature preferences (she complains of shivering in air-conditoning crazy Hong Kong) are apparently to be locked in as global policy to fight greenhouse gases.

Tim Graham, the Media Research Center's Director of Media Analysis, appeared on the Fox Business Channel, Monday, to discuss the media's hyperbolic coverage of "Hurricane" Irene.
   
Graham asserted, "Well, I don't think there's any doubt that the media are interested in trying to cover this 24/7 and it's a little hard to sell it as tropical storm coverage for hours and hours." Speaking of Al Sharpton's political hyping of the storm, Graham quipped, "He is not a meteorologist."

[See video below.]

In the days leading up to Hurricane Irene's march through the Northeast,  journalists repeatedly suggested that the storm was yet more evidence of climate change.

"The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?" asked the New York Times' Justin Gillis in his August 28 piece.

HLN guest host Don Lemon asked scientist Bill Nye on Wednesday if the storm was proof of climate change. Nye answered that it was "consistent with all the predictions of climate change models" and added that the United States is behind the times in taking action on climate change. "There's no other developed world country that isn't very concerned about climate change," Nye asserted, and ABC's weatherman Sam Champion agreed.

[Video below the break.]

Never let a natural disaster go to waste. In August 2010, New York Times environmental reporter Justin Gillis reacted to that summer's heat waves and flooding with “In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming” on the front page of the Times. So it was no surprise he took advantage of Hurricane Irene in Sunday’s edition, “Seeing Irene as Harbinger of a Change in Climate.”

Gillis’s latest story, admittedly written when Irene looked more dangerous than it turned out to be, was also guilty of disaster hype.

The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?

Nobel laureate Al Gore claimed on Friday that scientists involved in advancing the theory of global warming wouldn't do it just for the money.

Without recognizing the hypocrisy, he also told FearLess Cottage consumer advocate Alex Bogusky that scientists espousing a skeptical view of his money-making theory are exclusively doing so for their own financial benefit (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The media must really believe Rick Perry can defeat their beloved President Obama for they are coming at the Texas governor with guns blazing.

On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen likened Perry to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy because of his disbelief in manmade global warming:

While campaigning President Obama promised to create 5 million “green” jobs, and shortly into his term he announced a “task force” to do just that. His stimulus package included tax credits for renewable energy companies, allotted funds for weatherization and more. Now with the economy once again on shaky ground the President may pivot back to jobs in September, specifically of the “green” variety.

More than two years later after those initiatives began, the results are dismal. In fact a number of the very companies the Obama administration touted as future job creators have gone bankrupt or had to lay off employees instead. But you won’t hear about this from ABC, CBS and NBC very often.

As government spending supporters in the media press for a new, bolder stimulus plan to get the economy going, they love to refer to the Depression Era Hoover Dam as a shining moment in Keynesian economics.

When this surfaced on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, George Will marvelously noted, "You couldn't build the Hoover Dam today because they'd discover a snail darter in the Colorado River and would stop it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Times reporter Ashley Parker’s profile of Texas Gov. Rick Perry on the campaign trail in New Hampshire portrayed a more cautious and subdued candidate, days after Perry’s claim that actions taken by Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, were potentially “treasonous,” a remark that offended the delicate sensibilities of Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum, who found it simply “horrifying.” Parker's Thursday piece from New Hampshire, “Day After Fed Uproar, Perry Tones It Down," featured six paragraphs on an exchange on global warming between Perry and N.H. citizen Jim Rubens, described by Parker as a “a Republican activist and high-tech investor from Etna."

But Rubens is also a consultant with the left-wing environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists, a fact Parker didn’t include but which found its way into the Los Angeles Times: “One of his questioners was Jim Rubens, a Republican from the village of Etna who works as a consultant for the Union of Concerned Scientists.” UCS, which was formed in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, has lobbied against Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") and nuclear power.

New York Times environmental reporter John Broder, who in February 2010 called skeptics of global warming “deniers” and “relatively uninformed,” warned on Thursday’s front page that worrisome “Republican orthodoxy” on the evils of the Environmental Protection Agency “may prove a liability in the general election, pollsters and analysts say.” The headline had loaded language: “Bashing E.P.A. Is New Theme In G.O.P. Race.”

Opposition to regulation and skepticism about climate change have become tenets of Republican orthodoxy, but they are embraced with extraordinary intensity this year because of the faltering economy, high fuel prices, the Tea Party passion for smaller government and an activist Republican base that insists on strict adherence to the party’s central agenda.

World News' Diane Sawyer on Monday hyped a disaster at a rock concert in Indianapolis as an example of "weather gone wild" and linked it to global warming. Hyperbolically connecting the tragedy to other weather events, she proclaimed, "Something strange going on around the globe."

The anchor teased the segment by warning, "And tonight, the weather gone wild. Winds that come out of nowhere. Floods swelling streets. Heat breaking records in all 50 states. Snow where it hasn't fallen in decades." The program also hid the identity of a global warming activist. [See correction below.]

[See video below. MP3 audio here.]

The credit downgrade must be having truly deleterious effects on New York-based reporters. At least one is hyping the merits of "freeganism," which is just a politically correct euphemism for dumpster diving.

"Amid S&P downgrades and widespread panic about financial markets, an anti-consumerism movement quietly marches on: Freeganism," ABCNews.com's Reshma Kirpalani argued in an August 8 article: 

On Monday's NBC Today, correspondent Martin Fletcher reported on a deadly polar bear attack in Norway and explained: "The attack began at dawn with a bear looking for food....it's believed that with global warming, food is scarce. A post-mortem showed this polar bear was 110 pounds underweight, with almost no fat reserves. It must have been starving."

Fletcher began the report by declaring: "And today in the Arctic Circle, one of the most beautiful and hostile places on the planet, it's warmer than usual. There isn't much food for the polar bears. So when a group of British youngsters on a wildlife adventure trip set up camp for the night they became bait for a bear."

 On Saturday’s World News, ABC anchor Dan Harris seemed to fret that the current debate over the budget is taking attention away from an "unprecedented assault" that is being "quietly" waged by conservatives "on environmental regulations." As the report from Blair, West Virginia, focused on a coal mining technique that destroys the tops of mountains, correspondent Jim Sciutto featured two soundbites supporting restrictions on such mining with only one opposed.

And, while Harris in his introduction shined a light on conservatives as the group who want fewer mining regulations, the one soundbite that Sciutto included in the report that was on the more anti-regulation side was centrist Democratic Congressman Nick Rahall of West Virginia. And no liberal label was used for those who were shown supporting the regulations, including environmental activist  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Harris set up the piece:

Global warming, aka climate change, is the scapegoat for everything from record snowfalls to disastrous tornadoes. As such, it is also the perfect route for governments to closely control their citizens by regulating the smallest of details, like which lightbulbs they are allowed to use, to supposedly fix the problem.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who grew up under totalitarian rule, is speaking out against what he sees as the latest government attack on democratic freedom, environmentalism, which he argues closely parallels the thefts of freedom under communism. Do you agree with him? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Broadcast and cable networks have failed to cover a liberal interest group's exploitative TV spot claiming any cuts to the EPA would be equivalent to spoon-feeding toxic particles to infants, even though the proposed cuts would only pare back funding to pre-recession levels.

The video, released in March amid debates in Congress to curtail the EPA's regulatory authority, has since re-emerged as a commercial on MSNBC. While depicting an adult feeding a small child helpings of baby food from jars labeled dioxin, mercury, and arsenic, a narrator frets: "If the EPA wasn't cleaning millions of toxic particles out of the air, they'd be going, well, somewhere else...Protect the EPA. Protect our kids."

Despite the impression left by American Family Voices, the group responsible for the advertisement, that cuts to the EPA would kill children, the numbers tell a different story.