Global warming scare stories block progress

Joe Romm, the village idiot at Climate Progress, has made it his personal mission in life to destroy the Breakthrough Institute, using as few facts as possible while doing so.

Climatology School « the Air Vent

In this post we’ll review a few items which at first glance may contain temperature signals, however on careful examination are not ‘actual’ thermometers.

Give up coal? No, let’s not (Sept. 20)

Coal has environmental drawbacks, but so do other forms of generating vast amounts of electricity. Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee notes that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has announced plans to cover 1,000 square miles in the desert Southwest with solar collectors. Other federal energy goals call for 186,000 50-story windmills, covering an area the size of West Virginia. Alexander calls this a "massive intrusion into the natural landscape." By comparison, coal plants and the mines on which they depend occupy only a few square miles each.

Steven F. Hayward and Kenneth P. Green: Energy independence, security? How about energy realism | Washington Examiner

On the Right and elsewhere, the leading shibboleth is "energy independence." Although it sounds attractive, the idea of total self-sufficiency in energy makes no more sense than total self-sufficiency in textiles, food, autos or timber. (The U.S. currently imports about one-fourth of its timber: Where are the calls for "ending our dependence on foreign timber"?)
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Fair enough, though it turns out we only import about 15 percent of our total oil use from the Middle East. Our leading foreign oil supplier is the suspect nation named Canada. No. 2 is Mexico.