Environment

You can't make this up.

You might excuse the Associated Press for engaging in a bit of hyperbole in a Friday item headlined "Northeast braces for temps near boiling point." After all, it has been miserably hot in many parts of the country, including here in Greater Cincinnati.

But, as readers will see after the jump, the unbylined AP item's writer clearly doesn't understand the point at which water boils. Brace yourself (light-blue "highlighting" is mine; HT to an NB tipster):

Bill Maher on Friday once again got caught in his own hypocrisy.

As HBO's "Real Time" host waxed philosophic about socialism and "shared sacrifice" for the good of the country, Reason TV's Nick Gillespie stumped the sometimes comedian by asking if he would give up his cars or his television show to reduce his carbon footprint (video follows with transcript and commentary):

British media mogul Rupert Murdoch has spent the past few weeks facing ethics inquiries as a result of his News of the World phone hacking scandal. Now British-government-owned media giant BBC is being questioned for its journalistic ethics in muzzling global warming skeptics in its taxpayer-funded broadcasts.

Because BBC believes skeptics' views "differ from mainline scientific opinion," the network plans to reduce airtime to the "minority" views. The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank that serves to challenge the costly environmental policies countering a possibly fabricated problem, describes the attack on skeptics as "using the 'science-is-settled' mantra as a smokescreen to silence critics of climate taxes and green policies." Coming from a government-funded network, the political agenda the network is trying to push should be making the same headlines the News of the World scandal has created.

Green Vehicles is no more. The world will somehow have to get by without the lovely vehicle pictured after the jump populating our streets and highways.

Given that its owner put an "I've giving it up" blog post last Tuesday, and even though Drudge just caught it a few hours ago, it's pretty safe to assume that the Green Vehicles debacle won't be a national establishment press story.

It is, however, a fairly hot story in Salinas, California, a city of about 150,000 fifty or so miles south of San Jose.

New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane gave a dressing down to reporter Ian Urbina’s heavily criticized recent Sunday front-page article on natural gas extraction, “Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush,” in his Sunday column, “Clashing Views on the Future of Natural Gas.” The benign headline concealed a reasonably incisive critique, accusing Urbina of making unsubstantiated claims and failing to provide sufficient opposing views.
 
Urbina (pictured) has also penned questionable articles on the supposed environmental dangers of “fracking,” a process used to extract natural gas from shale. Brisbane wrote Sunday:

Nobel laureate Al Gore must be noticing the public's continued lack of concern for his money making myth about carbon dioxide destroying the planet.

On Tuesday, he announced a new campaign and worldwide event to re-energize global warming hysteria:

Bill Maher on Friday proudly equated the Casey Anthony verdict with Republican thinking.

Unfortunately for him, conservative author Ann Coulter was present, and when she got the chance to respond during the internet-only Overtime segment of HBO's "Real Time," she nicely exposed some of the host's most delicious hypocrisies (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Over the past three years, the number of believers in anthropogenic global warming has been on a steady decline, while the number of believers in natural planetary warming and cooling cycle has been on a steady incline. The shrinking pool of people who still swear by Al Gore's Hollywood version of the climate trend is especially populated with journalists and politicians who refuse admit they were wrong and consider any science debunking manmade global warming.

As the numbers fail each year to match Gore's wild predictions, it is becoming increasingly difficult to form any logical support for Gore's gloom and doom global warming scenarios. To rectify the situation, the global warming community has quietly rebranded its cause as 'climate change,' which allows activists to push an environmental agenda without the threat of the earth's temperature not rising with it.

Having friends in Washington is one of the quickest and dirtiest paths to success, but when President Barack Obama is the one helping you out by discriminately favoring your company's products over others, very few in the media seem to care.

Flashback to the early 2000s during former President George Bush's first term. The mainstream media pounced on former Vice President Dick Cheney's association with Halliburton, an oil company for which Cheney once served as CEO. The Bush administration supposedly favored Halliburton by rewarding the company with a number of multi-million dollar oil contracts in the Middle East, purportedly only using a bidding process to make the game look fairer.

Today it's a different fuel and a different president, but Obama has an almost identical story: favoring the clean-technology companies of his financial supporters through rewards of federal money. This time around, though, the media is giving his shady dealings a free pass.

Foreign affairs expert Walter Russell Mead wrote a fabulous piece in "The American Interest" Friday that should be must-reading for those on both sides of the global warming debate - especially members of the Al Gore-loving media.

In "The Failure of Al Gore," the registered Democrat and Obama supporter listed the reasons why the former Vice President has actually been a terrible leader for the green movement, and why a "fawning establishment press" have aided and abetted his disgrace:

Chris Matthews on Wednesday made it clear that like Al Gore, he believes the media should only be telling one side of the story when it comes to manmade global warming.

Such came out in the middle of a discussion about Gore's new article in Rolling Stone magazine when the "Hardball" host told his guests, "I hate that so-called evenhanded so-called objective journalism" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A frothing Chris Matthews on Wednesday excoriated Rush Limbaugh as "evil" for spreading "lies" about global warming.

The Hardball host highlighted a new Rolling Stone article by Al Gore that chides Barack Obama for not doing enough on climate change.

Matthews, however, chose to attack Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh: "These people are evil in what they're doing. I'm not saying their souls are evil, but what they're doing is really, really wrong and it's not the President." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Debuting in theaters this Friday, the seemingly innocuous Disney-Pixar film 'Cars 2' has become a tool to wedge a fight against fossil fuels in favor of alternative forms of energy.

When John Lasseter moved from executive producer to executive director last year, he overhauled major portions of the plot into a good vs. evil story against big oil.

The Supreme Court on Monday unequivocally rejected the notion that courts should force power companies to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, but none of the major broadcast networks covered the unanimous decision on their evening newscasts or morning shows.

The New York Times teased the ruling on the front page of Tuesday's paper, directing readers to a thorough analysis of the 8-0 decision, but ABC's "Good Morning America" and "World News," CBS's "Early Show" and "Evening News," and NBC's "Today" and "Nightly News" all skipped a decision that prevents environmentalists from using the courts to impose greenhouse gas regulations on electric utilities.

For years America's media have been enthralled by anything that supports the theory that carbon dioxide is warming the planet leading to an imminent cataclysm if governments don't regulate this partially man-made gas.

By contrast, reports that might undermine CO2's importance in global warming, like the following released Tuesday by the AAS Solar Physics Division in Las Cruces, New Mexico, predicting a sharp decrease in solar activity in coming years, typically get either little attention or are downplayed:

[Update below:] Anderson Cooper last June had advertised CNN's telethon raising money for the Gulf oil spill through the National Wildlife Federation.

The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) will be honoring CNN's Anderson Cooper as a "Wildlife Hero" at its 75th Anniversary celebration June 15. A spokesperson for the organization confirmed that Cooper will be receiving the award for his coverage of the Gulf oil spill last year.

The NWF identifies itself as "the nation's largest conservation organization," working through education, preservation of habitats and ecosystems and protection of wildlife.

On Sunday, New York Times movie critic John Anderson issued a favorable profile of “If a Tree Falls,” a partisan documentary from Marshall Curry featuring convicted arsonist Daniel McGowan of the environmental terrorist group Earth Liberation Front: “Activist or Terrorist, Rendered in Red, White and Green.”

When Daniel McGowan moved in with his sister after college, he was so passionate about recycling that he took all the labels off her canned food. The problem was, he didn’t wait for her to open the cans. 'I didn’t know if I had soup, or what kind of soup; I don’t know if there’s peas, or corn,' Lisa McGowan said in an interview. 'He said, 'I never thought of that.'

Some would call Mr. McGowan overeager. The government calls him a terrorist.

The problem is, McGowan isn’t in jail for taking labels off canned food items but for arson and conspiracy related to the destruction of two lumber companies in Oregon, domestic terrorism credited to the Earth Liberation Front.

Good news, we’re doomed, says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in Wednesday’s "The Earth Is Full." (Has the globe-trotting Friedman never been to Texas?) But we can still save ourselves eventually, as long as we realize that "the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less." But does that "own less" solution include the privileged columnist as well?

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century -- when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all -- and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

If you're like me, you've been waiting for feminist claims that global warming is harder on women and therefore should be a greater concern to the public.

Actress Sigourney Weaver of "Alien" fame did just that Thursday with an astonishingly ludicrous article published at the Huffington Post - a website rife with astonishingly ludicrous articles:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lobbed incendiary accusations at the coal industry on "Morning Joe" today in a segment that devolved into a nearly 10-minute advertisement for his new anti-coal documentary.

The left-wing environmental activist juxtaposed fossil "fuels from Hell" with "patriotic fuels from Heaven," though neither co-host Joe Scarborough nor Mika Brzezinski pushed back.

"Right now the rules that govern the American energy system were written and devised by the incumbents, by the carbon cronies, to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most toxic, most addictive, and destructive fuels from Hell rather than the cheap, clean, green, abundant, wholesome, and patriotic fuels from Heaven," blathered Kennedy.

[Video embedded after the page break.]

Mild-mannered Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty may have his own Rev. Wright, Salon.com's Justin Elliott sensationally alerted readers of the War Room blog Thursday morning.

The reason, Elliott argues: the former Minnesota governor's preacher believes in manmade global warming and wants a liberal immigration reform policy enacted into law:

Jessica Alba received an overwhelmingly positive reception on "Morning Joe" today while lobbying for legislation that would give the EPA broad-sweeping powers to regulate chemicals in consumer products.

Despite her cheerful demeanor, the Hollywood starlet made a spate of damning claims against the chemical industry that she failed to substantiate, while the MSNBC panel nodded in approval.

[Video embedded after the page break.]