Yesterday there were claims made that that a skeptic organization had received a private donation of several million dollars, and alarmists were up in arms.
Compare that to the billions of public money stolen from taxpayers to finance scams like Solyandra, and the hundreds of millions which fly around for garbage like this:
Researchers from the University of Colorado and Kansas State University have been awarded a grant for more than $850,000 to study the impacts of climate change on prairie dogs in the Boulder area.
CU to study impact of climate change on Boulder prairie dogs -
the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a theater company with a grant of $700,000 to produce a stage play to “educate” the public regarding the claims of global warming.
Private donations represent freedom. Government fraud and theft is corruption and slavery.
The alarmists have had no good news for a couple of years now regarding their AGW faith.
They now have Deniergate or HeartlandGate or whatever they like to call it. And it does not amount to a hill of beans. Since the story broke yesterday, it has been all over the bloggersphere, but today the story is already starting to fall off. It is garnering no traction with the public. OTOH Climategate happened over two years ago and people still blog about it. Deniergate will be forgotten in a week. Just watch.
Klem you are spot on in your analysis. The night that the Climategate emails came out I stayed up most of the night reading what I could in near disbelief. I remember doing a Google search of “climategate” the next morning to find only 10,000 hits because the emails had been removed as the web site owners were afraid they were fake. Once the UEA/CRU confirmed their authenticity and the web sites consulted their lawyers the emails were put up again. By the second day they were available there were 20 million hits and the peak was around 36 million hits.
In contrast I just Googled “deniergate” and after 2 days there is only 9,600 hits which is pathetic. What is funny is that the climate chickenhawks were so giddy because they thought they had HI by the nuts and today they are left holding their own nuts and giddiness has succumbed to anger (their normal state) because they have exaggerated the evidence (what’s new?) and even the lukewarmer blogs are ripping them to shreds for not verifying the authenticity of the HI documents before spouting off.
Some lies seem more tolerable than others
to both hotties and coolies (and nukies).
http://enenews.com/scandal-germany-not-restarting-nuclear-reactors-due-to-cold-in-fact-germans-now-massively-exporting-electricity-to-help-nuclear-powered-france-this-winter-reuters
Who lied, and about what?
If you follow Mike’s link it takes you to an eco-whacko site. The denizens of the site have seized on the fact that Germany is exporting electricity to France during the “cold snap” as some sort of vindication for “renewables” and also a rebuke of Nuclear power. Of course, even a little studying of the situation reveals that they they’re dead wrong.
#1 France has to import electricity because they use electricity to a much greater amount per capita than Germany because France uses electricity for heating. Germany does not. Frances energy model is based on cheap nuclear generated electricity, but during the “cold snap” those nuclear resources were tapped to the max. How they construe this as a failure of Nuclear is something only a eco-whacko can fathom.
#2 Mike’s friends are also implying that Germany’s renewables saved the day. They’re wrong again. Germany’s coal and oil. seems to have saved the day. Germany still pwered mostly by coal, and the ability to bring in her reserve fossil power on demand is what made the difference.
…three Austrian coal and oil-fired power plants with a combined capacity of 935MW and 100MW of German cold reserve was secured on Tuesday, but only around 600-700MW of it was used.
http://www.icis.com/heren/articles/2012/02/09/9531044/power/edem/germany-fires-up-reserve-electricity-generation-capacity.html
Thanks Joe for the heads up. Warmists breaking through the defenses, in our midst! And I almost wasted a click!! Clearly the bs artists and econuts are trying to dupe us, one way or another.
Best to ask Gosselin who is telling the truth here. Can’t trust Reuters.
Steve, I’m pretty sure most of those lunatics don’t have the slightest clue as to what freedom means nor the application of freedom.
They think “Freedom” is a government works project.
This is why I call them insane.
Mindblowing. I’m still waiting for a study on how easy money impacts mother nature’s mood swings. Good luck generation YMe.
Hi Steven,
I’m no expert, but you may have made a typo in the line about Solyndra – which seems to suggest that they got Billions of taxpayers’s cash. According to Wikipedia, they got about $25 Million in tax write-offs, as a start-up company…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
See, $25 million, not Billions.
If you were thinking of Billions spent on subsidizing energy company start-ups, perhaps you were thinking of this lot:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/05/tax_holiday.html
“These programs were put in place at a time when oil companies were “emerging industries” that needed government assistance to create the market and infrastructure vital to domestic production. ”
Heck! 100 years is quite long for a tax holiday. These guys are still getting at least $2 Billion per year in tax-breaks, and declaring profits of tens of billions of dollars.
Silly warmists have scored an own goal and don’t realize it.
Money is like CO2, CO2 from nature or money from the government is good. It’s the Capitalist CO2 and Money that is evil.
What about this one from DEFRA to Reading University :-
£146000 for “Addressing vulnerabilities and building capacity for adaptation of agriculture to climate change in China”
Has it occurred to these morons that our industries are shutting down and moving out there?
Or these three humdingers the LSE got paid for :-
1) To construct an intellectually, rigorous and politically feasible narrative for global action on climate change – £36000 from the European Climate Foundation.
2) To increase the level and impact of communication services by the Grantham Research Institute (these are a PR body set up to promote the global warming scare) aimed at the public and decision makers in the public and private sector – £417000 from the Grantham Foundation.
3) To improve European climate policy by addressing a set of theoretical or ehtical questions that arise as society adapts to climate change – £128000 from the EU
Decades ago a prairie dog habitat was set up at Comanche trail state park in Big Spring TX. I loved watching them frolic and play in their fenced-in habitat and it seemed like a good idea at the time to re-establish a small colony, since early ranchers saw them as pests and eliminated as many as they could. (They dig holes that horses broke their legs in, damage crops etc..) Well, prairie dogs borough and dig like crazy, industrious fellows, and prolific breeders. Less than a year later there were holes outside the ‘habitat’, and a few years later they were all over the place, including the airport runways at the now closed Web Air Force base (closed in 1978, thanks Jimmy Carter).
Fast forward a few decades later, everyone is being over-whelmed by these varmints. In Lubbock, where they had the same idea of re-populating, they have resorted to poisoning, trapping and various other methods including sucking the little buggers up in a ‘vacuum truck’. Ah… the unintended consequences of bureaucratic feel-good decision making, carbon tax anyone?
If alarmists were moral creatures, they would welcome the lack of warming since then it would mean that their models have overestimated global warming, and that mankind wouldn’t suffer so many consequences – they wouldn’t say it’s a “travesty” that they couldn’t explain the lack of warming.
If I had a patient with a pancreatic mass on CT scan, and thought it was cancer, then if the biopsy came back as a benign adenoma instead of pancreatic cancer, I wouldn’t say it was a travesty. I would eagerly inform the pt of the good news and rejoice I was wrong.
Better to spend the $700K on a research grant to a university materials science dept. to invent cheaper alternative energy technology.
Here is the play, “The Great Immensity”: http://thecivilians.org/current/the_great_immensity.html
The website: http://thegreatimmensity.org/
Think in terms of paying back campaign contributions & buying continueing votes and support, and you’ll see why ‘climate’ grants are spread around.
Has anyone calculated a total sum spent on the alarmist’s brainwashing/misinformation campaign? Probably well in the billions.
We’ll never know the true cost, because much of it would be in the form of wealth prevention.
Absolutely correct, massive damage done and very difficult to measure it. Unfortunately most people don’t think about what didn’t happen because of stupid policies.
In any case, yes, it’s tens of billions (if not hundreds of billions when you add in other sources) just in the U.S.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/file-uploads/USGCRP-CCSP_Budget_History_Table_2.pdf
When ideology prevailed over science:
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/02/10/lawrence-solomon-the-fallout-of-the-nobel-scam-of-1946/
If climate chickenhawks reporting on faked documents isn’t bad enough, it just got worse.
‘Foundation statement on Heartland Institute’
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
“The Charles Koch Foundation today released the following statement about the Foundation’s support for the Heartland Institute:
“Our giving to the Heartland Institute has been repeatedly misrepresented in recent stories by the media as reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s unfortunate that those reporting on the matter did not seek the facts as they would have found the Charles Koch Foundation provided $25,000 to the Heartland Institute in 2011 for research in healthcare, not climate change, and this was the first and only donation the Foundation made to the institute in more than a decade. The Foundation has made no further commitments of funding to Heartland,” said Tonya Mullins, director of communications for the Foundation.”
http://www.charleskochfoundationfacts.org/2012/02/foundation-statement-on-heartland-institute/
So all that big Koch money that climate chickenhawks cried about was nothing more than wishfull thinking or a fantasy, take your pick. Either way it was nothing more than a defense mechanism, a sort of circuit breaker, to prevent their climate chickenhawk mind from exploding from the reality that they, with far more money and 99% of the media helping them, failed to pursuade anyone to join their cause.
What a blow to their ego this must be now that we all see how micro-teeny the Heartland climate budget was compared to theirs. lol
The climate chickenhawks with their crybaby sissiness, have elevated Heartland’s status to heroic proportions. The last time so much was accomplished with so little was here:
http://getasword.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Battle-of-Thermopylae-in-300.jpg
lol
This is a repost of the first part of a comment from me, above, which has been in moderation for 9 hours:
Hi Steven,
I’m no expert, but you may have made a typo in the line about Solyndra – which seems to suggest that they got Billions of taxpayers’s cash. According to Wikipedia, they got about $25 Million in tax write-offs, as a start-up company…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
See, $25 million, not Billions.
$535 million from the Federal govt + $25.1 million from California. As Solyndra’s cost per watt was not (and never would be) competitive with other solar technologies, let alone China (and their currency manipulation), Solyndra was a failure from the start.
We should be spending a relatively small amount of money on basic science research into new efficient cheap forms of alternative energy, not orders of magnitude more money on subsidies/loan guarantees (with subsequent default) on old expensive or obsolete technology that has no future. We did not tax (analogy cap-and-trade) or subsidize (analogy Solyndra) the typewriter industry to spur the development of the computer age, but we did invest some money in R&D, DARPA, etc.
For the record, I also have for years opposed subsidies for oil companies, corn ethanol, etc.
Hi John,
I have to fold now, – other places to be -, but just to say that I think you have several good points. Corn ethanol is an abomination, for a start. To paraphrase a wise man, whose name I forget, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is simple, elegant, quite obvious, and wrong.”
Steve said: “Compare that to the billions of public money stolen from taxpayers to finance scams like Solyandra,”
To me that means more than one (hence the word “scams”). Steve is certainly correct – there are dozens of companies like Solyndra, some of which got more money and some less, and some of which have already done bankrupt as well. Check out CBS’ reporting:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7394970n&tag=cbsnewsVideoArea;cbsnewsVideoArea.0
And of course 80 percent of these “investments” (HA HA) went to Obama fundraisers:
http://biggovernment.com/whall/2011/11/16/80-of-green-energy-loans-went-to-obamas-top-donors/
“scams like Solyandra”
Notice the 5th letter. In Modern English the “-s” indicates that a word might be plural. Going back to Middle English, & earlier, we see the use of the Germanic “-en” for plurals, but without looking it up, I’m fairly sure the use of “scam” is fairly exclusive to Modern English, so “-s” seems fairly appropriate.
“scams like Solyandra”
Further, we take careful note of the word “like”. This is a comparison word. In this context it indicates that Solyndra is being used as the exemplar.
Given that the DOE has admitted to tossing around some 2.6 billion USD in subsidies to various shell corporations promising green energy, I’d say that billions is a low guess. More likely to be tens of billions. And that’s only the United States. Think of how much was spent in Europe over the last decade to build Spanish solar plants that can produce electricity at night.
LOL
Part 2:
If you were thinking of Billions spent on subsidizing energy company start-ups, perhaps you were thinking of this lot:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/05/tax_holiday.html
“These programs were put in place at a time when oil companies were “emerging industries” that needed government assistance to create the market and infrastructure vital to domestic production. ”
Heck! 100 years is quite long for a tax holiday. These guys are still getting at least $2 Billion per year in tax-breaks, and declaring profits of tens of billions of dollars.
All the more reason for comprehensive tax reform supported by Republicans and Simpson-Bowles and some moderate Democrats, eliminate loopholes, and flatten the tax rate. This can be done in a revenue-neutral fashion, or slight positive to help reduce the deficit/debt. Efficiency gains would ultimately grow the economy and tax revenues as American companies become more competitive on the world stage. Obama’s idea (floated for years) to not “reward companies for shipping jobs overseas) could easily be incorporated into tax reform.=, but cannot be done in piecemeal fashion benefitting just one political party.
Congress (both parties) will never do this because closing loopholes = lobbyists lose power and influence = less donations = less power for Congressional members.
Closing loopholes would also make things far more transparent.
The more oil we retrieve domestically, the more royalty revenue (12-18%) the Treasury gets per barrel of oil. The money can be spent on green tech research (not subsidies). While Canadian oil (i.e. Keystone XL pipeline) won’t lower gasoline prices due to inelastic demand and OPEC controlling oil supply, it would help national security and reduce price volatility in the oil markets as speculators would have less to fear from Middle East tensions. This is more a national security issue than a jobs issue.
A productive essential industry that pays $billions in income taxes and collect $billions in excise taxes not paying enough taxes to make Comm-libz happy is not my idea of a subsidy. When one looks at how much money the oil industry pours into govt. coffers one has to ask is the oil industry subsidizing the government?
Because taxes not being collected is the same as cash taken out of my pocket and given to Obama donors?
CBS: 11 More Solyndras In Obama Energy Program … Only 11?
What do prairie dogs taste like? Are they good with some of that KFC flavor?
How about Three Mile Island prairie dog thighs at Hooters?
Cheap protein maybe?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/energy/climate-change
A version of truth from the whitehouse end of the telescope. Breathtaking in its range to spend yours, mine, and theirs (borrowed) money.