With More Vacation Days and Separate Travel, Price of Obama’s Annual Hawaiian Holiday Rises | Hawaii Reporter

Travel time for Air Force One direct from Washington D.C. to Hawaii is about 9 hours or $1,635,813 each way for a total of $3,271,622 for the round trip to Hawaii and back.

The cost for USAF C-17 cargo aircraft that transports the Presidential limos, helicopters and other support equipment to Hawaii was not made available. However, the flight time between Andrews Air Force Base and Hawaii is at about 21.5 hours roundtrip, with estimated operating cost of $12,000 per hour. (Source: GAO report, updated by C-17 crew member). The United States Marine Corps provides a presidential helicopter, along with pilots and support crews for the test flights, which travel on another C-17 flight. That is $258,000, not including costs for the 4 to 6 member crew's per diem and hotel. 

Mrs. Obama’s early flight to Hawaii costs about $63,000 (White House Dossier), but add security and personnel for a total of about $100,000.

Warming denialism is in the political eye of the beholder - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[Bob Carter] Manne's skeleton of climate truth turns out to have as its backbone the well traversed and sound scientific understanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which means that adding more to the atmosphere (as human activities do) has the potential to cause mild, and perhaps even measurable, global warming. But as the skeleton building proceeds from here, many needed bones are substituted by the flimsy straw of special pleading arguments casuistically set up for later routing. When Manne has finished we are confronted not with a single climate skeleton, but instead by an army of straw climate men.

Articles: Harvard's Deep Green Pockets

Imagine these considerable efforts at one university multiplied at thousands of private and governmental institutions. This lobbying network is not only well-funded and extensive, it also has a built-in mechanism for self-perpetuation: the green interns and all the students being taught by all-star environmental professors will supply the next generation with its Sustainability Engagement Managers. Exxon can't come anywhere close to competing with this.

Climate change skeptics have reason to be optimistic that global warming activists are fighting a losing battle. The Durban climate conference, described by the Wall Street Journal as "a wash out," passed another meaningless resolution promising action by 2020. At the Think Green event, Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus lamented that President Obama used the phrase "climate change" or "global warming" in speeches 69 times in 2009, 73 times in 2010 and only once in 2011, leading to what he sees as "a crisis in environmental lawmaking"-his crisis being that nothing is happening. In other words, climate legislation like Cap and Trade is dead. The scientific front also brings promising news; mainstream Science magazine reports a study summarized by The Economist: "Good news at last? The climate may not be as sensitive to carbon dioxide as previously believed."

Enron Romm: History Should Not Forget — MasterResource

Smearing and innuendo, common fare over at Climate Progress, is hardly fair play. But in this case, Joe Romm has something embarrassing to hide. Enron was his darling company.

Specifically, Romm was not only a cheerleader of Enron (Enron is “a company I greatly respect,” Romm would say). He was also an unpaid consultant and collaborator with the infamously fraudulent division, Enron Energy Services (EES), purveyor of energy efficiency service in (gamed) long-term contracts.

It is timely to reestablish the linkage between Joe Romm and once-mighty Enron Corporation, a company which went bankrupt ten years ago this month. Perhaps this history will help the combustible Romm to deal with the arguments more and funding links less. (Besides, would he like for his critics to bring in the funding link between George Soros and Center for American Progress?)