An Inconvenient Voice: Dr. Alan Carlin » The Foundry

Ever hear of Alan Carlin? Probably not, and that is the way the Obama Administration wants to keep it. Dr. Carlin is an Environmental Protection Agency veteran who recently wrote a damaging report warning that the science behind climate change was questionable at best, and that we shouldn’t pass laws that will hurt American families and hobble the nation’s economy based on incomplete information.

Despite its promise to put science above politics, the Administration has suppressed Carlin’s report, banned him from writing or speaking about climate change, told him to forget about attending any meetings that addressed his main job function—climate change—and gave him a new assignment: up-dating a grants data-base. One supposes that, by dedicating its distinguished scientists to data-entry tasks, Obama’s EPA is able to free up true-believing interns to do its research.

Cost Is No Concern - Drew Thornley - Planet Gore on National Review Online

This, of course, should come as no surprise, since thorough cost-benefit analyses are completely absent, thus far, from federal decison-making on climate issues. In fact, there appears to be no need for them, since no cost is too high to save all of us from climate catastrophe. If honest, exhaustive analyses were performed, they'd be DOA anyway.

Liberal Groups Upset With Obama For Rapping Climate Change Bill’s “Protectionism” | The Plum Line

Liberal groups allied with the White House are fuming — mostly in private — about some comments President Obama made yesterday attacking a provision in the climate change bill that he called “protectionist.”

Some Things Money Can’t Buy, For Everything Else There’s Waxman-Markey | The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Like cap and trade itself, the passage of Waxman-Markey is an example of legislation as indulgence. Carbon credits, like papal indulgences, don’t actually limit carbon emissions anymore than indulgences sped one’s soul to heaven. Perhaps in theory they do, but in reality the concessions to industry are always too great, the compromises entrenching industry status quo and crowding out innovators and alternative energy start-ups. But meaningless legislation does wonders to ease a guilty conscience – the conscience of a liberal, perhaps, who sneers that opponents of Waxman-Markey have a “contempt for hard science” that is “unforgivable.”

Perhaps doing nothing is not, in fact, the worst course of action, when doing something is little more than an expensive illusion.