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Bravo, James Hacket: FT.com - US green policy will kill economy, says oil chief

Washington’s energy and environment policy risks plunging the US into an economic tailspin that could turn it into “the world’s cleanest third world country”, one of the US oil industry’s most successful chief executives has warned.

James Hackett, chairman and chief executive of Anadarko, one of the US’s largest independent oil and gas companies, said in an interview: “The histrionic and maniacal focus on carbon dioxide is intellectually repugnant to me.” It was “taking the economy into a tailspin”.

FT.com | Climate change: The despair edition

Things may be looking a little brighter today in the financial world - at least, there are signs of ‘cautious optimism’ - but gloom is beginning to set in about efforts to reach agreement on climate change. A Guardian survey of attendees of a scientific conference in Copenhagen last month suggested that a large majority of climate scientists do not believe that a climate increase of more than 2°c, a threshold which is thought vital to avoid devastating damage, will be averted.

But there are other signs of despondency, particularly focused on the US.
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Meanwhile James Hackett, chief executive of successful oil company Anadarko, told the FT that the Obama administration’s “histrionic and maniacal focus on carbon dioxide” was “taking the economy into a tailspin”. Other oil companies may make far more supportive noises in public, but Carola Hoyos observes that Hackett’s assessment “echoes the private views of many oilmen less willing to be quite so direct and reveals the fissure developing between the industry and Washington”.

Don't Expect Much From The Next Kyoto - Forbes.com

The Copenhagen Climate Convention is months away, but likely DOA already. Here's why.

The Copenhagen Climate Convention is still eight months off, but it already looks likely that the follow-up to the Kyoto Climate Protocol will end without agreement on dramatic new action to curb global greenhouse gas emissions. The reason? American politics.

Christopher Monckton - Letter to Represenatives Ed Markey & Joe Barton

Nearly all of your nation’s scholars and scientists owe their primary livelihood to the involuntary generosity of the taxpayer. Some of your rent-seeking, scientific-technological elite, taking willful and shameless advantage of the taxpayer’s largesse and of the scientific illiteracy that is now widespread, are mightily enriching themselves by misleading your Congress into appropriating disproportionately large sums to permit them to address the non-problem of anthropogenic “global warming”.

The right policy to address a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Therefore I am copying this letter to the President of the United States and to Madame Speaker Pelosi, with a recommendation that they should heed President Eisenhower’s warning, and should abandon all measures and expenditures in attempted mitigation of anthropogenic “global warming” until global mean surface temperature shall have increased by at least 2 Fahrenheit degrees compared with the temperature in the year 2000. That small, harmless, beneficial increase is not likely to occur for at least a century, if then.