David Koenig’s Wednesday coverage at the Associated Press of Exxon Mobil’s annual meeting contained a predictable headline and related content telling us that the company wouldn’t “explicitly ban discrimination against gays because the company already banned discrimination of any type and didn’t need to add language regarding gays.” Koenig’s report apparently couldn’t be considered complete without a contribution of misleading climate statistics and statements from the wire service’s Seth Borenstein.

Borenstein’s apparent input consisted of the following four paragraphs (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

(more…)

In remarks which will more than likely be ignored by the establishment press, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in essence blamed yesterday’s deadly tornado which struck Moore, Oklahoma on Republicans who have “run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings.” Whitehouse was intensely upset because, in his view, these red state ignoramuses who are allowing ever more intense, climate change-caused storms to occur and leading the world to doom because of their inaction still expect the rest of the country to pay for disaster relief in their states as they deliberately inflict damage on blue states like his own and Oregon. As a free bonus, he threw in a detestable Cold War analogy.

The video of Whitehouse’s speech as presented at the Senator’s own YouTube channel follows the jump. View the video; Whitehouse’s condescending contempt for people who won’t accept what history will likely record is one of the greatest attempted hoaxes ever perpetrated on mankind is something to behold (HT to FreeRepublic for transcript; some editing was necessary to match the actual speech; bolds are mine):

(more…)

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Wednesday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

There’s lots of interesting and not widely known information in a Wall Street Journal editorial which appeared online last night and in today’s print edition:

A Tale of Two Oil States
While the shale boom lifts Texas, California sits on vast resources.

Texas and California have been competing for years as U.S. growth models, and one of the less discussed comparisons is on energy. The Golden State has long been one of America’s big three oil producing states, along with Texas and Alaska, but last year North Dakota surpassed it. This isn’t a matter of geological luck but of good and bad policy choices.

Barely unnoticed outside energy circles, Texas has doubled its oil output since 2005. Even with the surge in output in North Dakota’s Bakken region, Texas produces as much oil as the four next largest producing states combined. The Lone Star State now pumps nearly two million barrels a day, and Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman (who is also oil commissioner) says “total production could double by 2016 and triple by the early 2020s.” The entire U.S. now produces about seven million barrels a day.

… More than 400,000 Texans are employed by the oil and gas industry (almost 10 times more than in California) and Mr. Smitherman says the average salary is $100,000 a year. The industry generates about $80 billion a year in economic activity, which exceeds the annual output of all goods and services in 13 individual states.

Now look to California, where oil output is down 21% since 2001, according to Energy Department data, even as the price of oil has soared and now trades in the neighborhood of $95 a barrel.

This is not because California is running out of oil. To the contrary, California has huge reservoirs offshore and even more in the Monterey shale, which stretches 200 miles south and southeast from San Francisco. The Department of Energy estimates that the Monterey shale contains about 15 billion barrels of oil, which is about double the estimated supply in the Bakken.

… in April a federal judge blocked the breakthrough drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in the state. The judge ordered an environmental review of the drilling process that Texas, North Dakota and other states have safely regulated for years.

… California has also passed cap-and-trade legislation that adds substantially to the costs of conventional energy production and refining. The politicians in Sacramento and their Silicon Valley financiers have made multibillion-dollar and mostly wrong bets on biofuels and other green energy. Texas has invested heavily in wind power but not at the expense of oil production.

… Another contrast is that most Texas oil is on private lands, which owners are willing to lease at a price. In California much of the oil-rich areas are state or federally owned, and leasing doesn’t happen because of political constraints. In California it can take weeks or even months to get approval for an oil rig. The average in Texas? Four days.

In short, Texas loves being an oil-producing state while California is embarrassed by it. And it’s no accident that Texas has been leading the nation in job creation since the recession ended.

… California has the natural resources and technical expertise to be the next Texas if it wants to be.

… Imagine how fast the U.S. economy would grow if California were more like Texas.

Here’s an unstated point: If California goes broke, which is well within the realm of possibility, and comes crying to the rest of the nation for a bailout, the answer should be “Hell no!” — not just because it’s bad public policy in the first place, leading to any number of additional states and locales which will want to get in line, but because it has had the resources to sustain itself, and has refused to do so.

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.

(more…)

From a Thursday evening editorial:

The alarmists want to place the world in servitude to the models that are predicting global warming. But those models can’t even reconstruct the past.

A researcher at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg analyzed climate models to see how closely their predictions fit with history, in this case, precipitation in China from 1961 to 2000. What Tinghai Ou found should crimp the alarmists’ plans to establish regimes that punish and limit man’s use of fossil fuels.

“Only a few climate models were able to reproduce the observed changes in extreme precipitation in China over the last 50 years,” says the university’s Department of Earth Sciences.

Ou himself said that the “results show that climate models give a poor reflection of the actual changes in extreme precipitation events that took place in China” during the period he examined.

“Only half of the 21 analyzed climate models were able to reproduce the changes in some regions of China,” he said. “Few models can well reproduce the nationwide change.”

Ou’s work is important. If the models can’t get the past right, how can they be trusted to predict future climate?

Seems more like guesswork than solid science to us.

Oh, it’s worse than that. It’s an agenda-driven scam.

Science Daily has the original press release.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Saturday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

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:

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Obama’s speech promises four more years of what hasn’t worked, and threatens to ruin what has.

_______________________________________________

This column went up at PJ Media on Thursday and was teased here at BizzyBlog yesterday.

_______________________________________________

As the 2004 presidential election approached, so-called “progressives” took to calling themselves “the reality-based community.”

Originally adopted as a defiant rebuttal to the Bush administration’s alleged dominance by faith-based, fact-denying zealots, it has morphed over time into a more widely used and arrogant expression intended to communicate the following: “We have the facts on our side and we understand how the world works. Anyone who disagrees with us is in denial, delusional, and dangerous.”

For some time now, I’ve considered compiling a list of some of the most ridiculous and untenable beliefs held by hardened members of the left, now known as “mainstream Democrats.” Thanks to President Barack Obama, I have now crossed out that task on my to-do list. He and his speechwriters worked it up for me, and for posterity, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. As such, I’ll only need to deal with a few of the most blatant examples of truly dangerous and delusional reality denial here.

On the economy, Obama insisted that “the true engine of America’s economic growth” is “a rising, thriving middle class.” No sir. A prosperous middle class is the result of a free-market economy operating in an environment where the rules of the game are clearly understood and evenhandedly enforced. We largely had those conditions in place during the 1980s, when during the first 14 full quarters following a recession which was arguably as serious as the one which officially ended in June 2009, the economy grew by 20 percent.

To a greater extent than commonly understood, we no longer have those conditions. This largely explains why the economy has grown by only 7.5 percent during the past 14 quarters. The fact that it has grown at all is almost a miracle, given the unprecedented level of cronyism; stifling over-regulation; misguided and corrupt attempts by the government to pick winners and losers, invariably leading to the selection of hordes of losers; and powerful deterrents to hiring, which will only became worse as the impact of Obamacare’s definition of a full-time employee as someone who works 30 or more hours per week and therefore must be covered under an employer’s insurance plan spreads. Census Bureau and other data show that these government-driven and government-imposed conditions are in fact gutting the middle class.

Speaking of ObamaCare, Obama claimed that it “is helping to slow the growth of health care costs.” No it’s not, according toan Employee Benefit News report which cites the government’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

[A] separate CMS report projects that even after PPACA is fully implemented, U.S. health spending is expected to reach nearly $4.6 trillion by 2019, growing at an average annual rate over the next decade of 6.3%, as opposed to a 6.1% rate anticipated before reform.

By 2019, health care is predicted to account for nearly one of every five U.S. dollars spent or about 19.6% of the gross domestic product, 0.3 percentage points higher than projected previously, CMS economists concluded.

For those in touch with reality, 6.3% represents faster growth of health care costs, not “slower.”

In discussing the federal government’s precarious financial situation, Obama claimed: “Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion.”

Unfortunately, Obama’s statement includes over $1 trillion in spending cuts which haven’t happened, and savings of hundreds of billions in interest costs which won’t occur unless those spending “cuts” (really reductions in projected spending increases) really take place.

But it’s in the area of “climate change” — the supposedly less threatening term replacing “global warming” — that Obama reveals how dangerous it is when we have an unapologetic, unreality-based White House occupant.

Marc Morano at Climate Depot exhaustively demonstrated in a Wednesday post that the climate-related assertions in Obama’s speech are almost entirely without basis (links in Climate Depot quotes are in the original post):

• Obama: “[T]he 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15.” CD: “Global temperatures have essentially been flat lining for 16 years now. The halt in global temperatures has shown up in multiple data sets and peer-reviewed literature.” Even NASA climate change crusader James Hansen has admitted that “Mean Global Temperature Has Been Flat For The Last Decade” — which perhaps explains why he didn’t write that “Obama has four years to save the planet,” as he did in January 2009.
• Obama: “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods — all are now more frequent and intense.” CD: “(The) EPA says heat waves were worse in the 1930s”; “flooding has not increased in the United States over records of 85 to 127 years”; “Wildfire numbers since 1950 have decreased globally by 15%.”
• Obama: “We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy … (and other natural disasters) were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act before it’s too late.” CD: “Sandy was terrible, but we’re in a relative hurricane drought.”

What will happen if Congress doesn’t buy into Obama’s unreality and fails to “act soon to protect future generations” from this non-existent calamity? Why, he’ll do everything he can to force his unreality upon us:

I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

Kirsten Powers, one of an apparently very few sane liberals remaining on our non-warming planet, recognized the chilling nature of that threat: “The edict on climate change was despotic, not liberal.”

Despotism is the final refuge of those in power who choose to remain trapped in their unreality. They believe they can ultimately bend reality to their will. The more their flawed perceptions cause them to fail, the more despotic such people become.

We truly live in dangerous times.

It’s here.

I intensely appreciate the folks at PJ Media fast-tracking the column’s yesterday and getting the column up withing just a few hours of its submission — something I didn’t even ask for.

The column will appear here at BizzyBlog tomorrow afternoon (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

Last night in his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama claimed: “Nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.” Even considering the inclusion of “should” as a wiggle word, that’s a laughable claim.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush is one among what will surely turn out to be a legion of pundits and reporters who will ignore Obama’s deficit promise while extolling “his new spending proposals” (while describing them as “relatively modest”). It was a speech Thrush said “could have been comfortably delivered by JFK, FDR or LBJ.” Sorry, Glenn, but JFK and LBJ, hardened libs that they were, would not have countenance such a speech in the context of four consecutive annual deficits of over $1 trillion and a national debt that’s over 100 percent of the nation’s annual economic output. Several paragraphs from Thrush’s vain attempt to make Obama’s speech some kind of seminal moment follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

(more…)