Wall Street Journal’s Crony Capitalist Conference Turns Sour

Times have changed since the Wall Street Journal held its first “ECO:nomics—Creating Environmental Capital” conference at the super-swanky Bacara Resort in Santa Barbara. I was there in 2008 (but, alas, stayed at the Best Western in downtown Santa Barbara) when several hundred investors and corporate CEOs listened to leading crony capitalists, including Jeff Immelt of GE, James Rogers of Duke Energy, Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical, and John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers (where Al Gore was also a partner), smugly explain how they were going to strike it rich off the backs of consumers and taxpayers with green energy subsidies and mandates, federal loan guarantees, and the higher energy prices that would make renewable energy competitive with coal, oil, and natural gas once cap-and-trade was enacted.

This year’s sixth annual conference, which I didn’t attend, was also held at the Bacara Resort, but the mood was apparently different

Wind Industry: Killing 200,000 birds per year is ‘most benign’ | JunkScience.com

If held accountable like the oil industry, wind would be fined at least $7.3 billion annually for bird kills.

Why Environmentalism Looks Goofy and Awkward | Planet3.0

The turnout to the [anti-Keystone] demonstrations is smallish and uncompelling.

The Climate Science Caricatures…Jyllands-Posten Features Massive 4 Full Pages Of Climate Science Skepticism!

Huge doubt over claims made by alarmist climate scientists is now spreading to leading Scandinavian publications, the Jyllands-Posten in Denmark for example