Funny, I thought carbon emissions were still rising. The Telegraph reports:

Global warming at a standstill, new Met Office figures show

The Met Office has downgraded its forecast for global warming to suggest that by 2017 temperatures will have remained about the same for two decades.

A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth.

The forecast compares how much higher average world temperatures are likely to be than the “long-term average” from 1971-2000.

It had been thought that this would be 0.54C during the period 2012 -2016 but new data puts the figure for the 2013-2017 period at 0.43C.

This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre’s 160-year record – suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period.

However, it is thought that factors such as ocean current patterns may be behind the slowdown and scientists say the “variability” in climate change does not alter the long-term trend of rising temperatures.

The rest here.

Via the Los Angeles Times, Matt Damon’s anti-fracking film made less than $5 million on its opening weekend:

Via the Washington Free Beacon:

The U.S. Export-Import Bank recently steered hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loans to Spanish green energy conglomerate Abengoa, which happens to share an advisory board member with the bank.

The Ex-Im Bank approved a $78.6 million direct loan to Spain-based Abengoa in December. It also approved a $73.6 million direct loan to a wind farm in Uruguay, which is owned by Abengoa.

Former Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson sits on both the Abengoa International Advisory Board and is currently listed on the Ex-Im bank’s website as a member of the advisory committee that helps guide bank policy.

Richardson was not listed in the Ex-Im Bank’s November announcement of its 2013 Advisory Board members.

“Mr. Richardson had no role or communication with anyone in the Bank regarding that transaction,” said a spokesman for the Ex-Im Bank. “His appointment to the Advisory Board was made public only after he had been fully vetted by the Bank, which occurred after the initial press release was issued.”

It is unclear, though, if Richardson joined the Ex-Im Bank’s advisory board before or after the decision to extend the loan was made. The Ex-Im Bank did not immediately respond to a follow-up inquiry.

The rest here.

Not only is Harry Reid incredibly insensitive to the 1,000+ people who lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina, he’s a liar on two counts when he says 1) it’s been two months and “we” haven’t gotten to New York and New Jersey and 2) when he says Sandy was worse than Katrina:

I really do believe it is important that I have the record reflect the reason we have gotten as far as we have on Sandy is because of the senior Senator from New York. It is too bad that it has taken so long. When we had that devastation from Katrina, we were there within days taking care of Mississippi, Alabama, and especially Louisiana—within days. We are now past 2 months with the people of New York and New Jersey.

The people of New Orleans and that area, they were hurt but nothing in comparison to what happened to the people in New York and New Jersey. Almost 1 million people have lost their homes; 1 million people lost their homes. That is homes, that is not people in those homes. So I think it is just unfortunate that we do not have the relief for New York and New Jersey and the rest already. It has to be done. We have to meet the needs of the American people when an act of God occurs.

Reid is really arguing apples and oranges. The immediate needs of New York and New Jersey are being met — the apples. People of the area might not be happy with the pace of reconstruction, but only in the land of unicorns can reconstruction be done faster. The recent $9.7 billion allocated to FEMA was so that the insurance program didn’t run out of money, not that it was out of money and not able to make disbursements.  Here are the numbers from FEMA. If Reid would like to dispute these numbers, then I look forward to it:

And to Reid’s second lie, PolitFact has already ruled a similar claim “mostly false“:

Environment New Jersey claimed that October’s Hurricane Sandy is “the most destructive Atlantic storm, ever.” Sandy may be the most destructive storm to hit a part of the Eastern Seaboard but in terms of most destructive Atlantic storms, that title goes to Katrina, which formed in the Atlantic and whose damages topped $100 billion, according to Hurricane Center data. Sandy, however, is very high on the list, with damages totaling at least  $82 billion. Still, that’s not number one in today’s dollars or compared with storms adjusted for inflation in 2010. We rate this statement Mostly False.

Now for the oranges — the long term funding — which is what Reid is whining about. What New Jersey and New York politicians want is money to make the areas hardest hit by Sandy safer. For example, Sen. Menendez is quoted in the Star Ledger:

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed that while settling claims is crucial, money to rebuild infrastructure and protect the coastline against future storms is just as important, if not moreso.

“The Army Corps beaches we had saw very little consequence to property and lives,” U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said, referring to areas where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built flood protections. “Where we did not, we saw terrible consequences … We don’t need another Super Sandy all we need is a bad Nor’easter and we’re in trouble.”

Well, yes. Building homes yards from the ocean or on barrier islands does entail certain risks from storms, even a “bad Nor’easter.” That’s always been the case.

Why should taxpayer dollars rebuild areas that will just get flooded again? The Obama administration has suggested that rebuilding the area won’t be “business as usual“:

Speaking in Lower Manhattan at a conference on waterfront restoration organized by the Municipal Art Society and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Mr. [Shaun] Donovan [U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development] said long-term redevelopment would go beyond repairs and “just recreating what was there.”

He said the recovery would require building sturdier structures but also questioning whether rebuilding makes sense in some cases. He later told reporters that “the vast majority of communities can be rebuilt safely.”

He said making a recovery would involve “thousands of decisions” on matters like what materials to use, how to protect New York Harbor and ways to improve infrastructure like long-neglected tunnels and transit systems.

“Our response won’t be business as usual,” he said. “We need to harness this momentum to address weaknesses we’ve known about for years.”

Mr. Donovan was short on specifics, saying, “My job is to come in and work with states and local communities to decide what the vision is and what makes sense.”

Well, we still don’t have any specifics, do we?

Of further note, Gov. “Climate Change Is Real” Christie, Mayor Bloomberg, and Governor Cuomo need to put their money where their climate-change mouths are. If they really, truly believe the models bandied about, then they should be the first ones calling for new zoning, moving housing away from the ocean and other steps that would economically devastate their respective beach communities.

They can’t have it both ways. If the rising ocean is such a threat, they shouldn’t be asking for federal dollars to rebuild houses in its path.

Or, maybe they’re just hypocrites.

Drudge is giving top-of-the-page billing to this Yahoo! News piece titled, “Whoops—’Cash for Clunkers’ Actually Hurt the Environment.”

But this is really old news. Just a few of the links we posted back in 2009 saying this very thing.

And more importantly, we knew at the time that Team Obama was fudging on cash-for-clunkers, but, as usual, the MSM cheered on the program as a success when it was already clear that it was not.

Reuters:

The controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline received a boost on Friday when Nebraska regulators said its proposed new route would avoid many of the ecologically-sensitive areas that led the U.S. government to block it last year.

The new route for the $5.3 billion Alberta-to-Nebraska pipeline, backed by TransCanada Corp, would avoid the ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region but would still cross part of the massive Ogallala aquifer, the Nebraska environment regulator said.

If built, Keystone XL would link Canada’s booming oil sands production with the refineries and ports of Texas’ Gulf Coast, carrying some 830,000 barrels of oil per day. The project has been targeted by environmentalists concerned about carbon emissions from oil sands production and the risks posed by oil spills to water supplies in the Midwest.

The U.S. State Department is working with Nebraska as it forms its own environmental assessment of pipeline that is one piece of a continental realignment of oil flows between Canada and the United States.

The rest here.

China: cold hits 28-year low, 1,000 ships trapped in ice.

CBS Miami:

Every time you turn on the lights, you may be putting yourself at risk, according to a disturbing new study.

Energy efficient bulbs are eco-friendly and can save you big bucks, but experts say that they could also have a dark side.

“When there is something in your house, you don’t perceive any danger, you wouldn’t get that close to an x-ray in a doctor’s office,” explained Miriam Rafailovich, Professor of Materials Science at Stony Brook University in New York.

“It can also cause skin cancer in the deadliest form, and that’s melanoma,” said Dr. Rebecca Tung.

In every bulb that researchers tested they found that the protective coating around the light creating ‘phosphor’ was cracked, allowing dangerous ultraviolet rays to escape.

The rest here.

Via the Media Blog, Al Gore’s Current TV has been acquired by al-Jazeera.

Al-Jazeera received its initial funding through a decree from the Emir of Qatar, and Qatar, of course, gets its wealth from its vast oil and natural gas reserves.

I guess the carbon footprint of who Gore sold to wasn’t all that important.

In Barack Obama’s America, it’s always opposites day.

“We can’t simply cut our way to prosperity,” said the president upon signing the fiscal cliff deal — a deal that included no cuts in federal spending. “Cutting spending has to go hand-in-hand with further reforms to our tax code so that the wealthiest corporations and individuals can’t take advantage of loopholes.”

But Obama himself demanded that the fiscal cliff deal include billions in tax breaks for Obama’s corporate cronies — including Big Green.

“A Republican Senate aide familiar with the cliff negotiations tells me the White House wanted permanent extensions of a whole slew of corporate tax credits,” reports Washington Examiner reporter Tim Carney. “When Senate Republicans said no, ‘the White House (was) absolutely insistent,’ another aide tells me.”

“General Electric and Citigroup, for instance, (got) a tax provision that allows multinational corporations to defer U.S. taxes by moving profits into offshore financial subsidiaries,” continues Carney. “The K Street firm Capitol Tax Partners, led by Treasury Department alumni from the Clinton administration, represented financial clients like Citi, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. . . . CTP represented green energy companies like GE and the American Wind Energy Association. These companies won extension and expansion of the production tax credit for wind energy. Hollywood hired CTP, too: The Motion Picture Association of America won an extension on tax credits for film production.”

If this sounds like a contradiction of everything Obama says, it is. But it is only a continuation of Obama’s first term handouts to the One Percent — from green car tax breaks for millionaires like Leo DiCaprio and Sen. Carl Levin to “smart grid” payouts to Big Utility.

Audacious? Yes. Audacious, too, that most of the media continues to ignore it.

Fisker’s insurance carrier — XL Group plc — is refusing to pay for the 300 Fisker Karmas destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.

Chalk it up to more bad karma, I guess.

The American Wind Energy Association, a lobbying group, is very happy the “cliff” deal extends the tax credit on wind energy for another 12 months:

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 1, 2013 – Congress has included the long-sought extension of wind energy tax credits in final passage of a bill to avert the “fiscal cliff” that now moves to President Obama for his expected signature.

America’s 75,000 workers in wind energy are celebrating tonight over the continuation of policies expected to save up to 37,000 jobs and create far more over time, and to revive business at nearly 500 manufacturing facilities across the country. The extension of the wind energy Production Tax Credit (PTC), and Investment Tax Credits for community and offshore projects, will allow continued growth of the energy source that installed the most new electrical generating capacity in America last year, with factories or wind farms in all 50 states.

The version included in tonight’s deal would cover all wind projects that start construction in 2013. Companies that manufacture wind turbines and install them sought that definition to allow for the 18-24 months it takes to develop a new wind farm.

The rest of their release here.

Maybe banning DDT wasn’t such a good idea after all:

MAE SOT, Thailand — Clipboard in hand, Dr Francois Nosten worked his way down a ward of malaria patients. He stopped in front of five-year-old Ayemyint Than, who sat to attention and smiled. The smile told Nosten as much as his lines of graphs and figures.

“She’s doing well,” he said, moving to an older man, whose pale face and dull sunken eyes told a very different story. “Day five, and he’s still positive?” he asked another of the doctors. “That’s not very good. It means he was very slow to clear the parasite, no?”

To Nosten, it was further evidence of an alarming rise in resistance to artemisinin, currently the front-line drug in the treatment of malaria. He fears it could be the start of a global “nightmare” in which millions of people could lose their lives.

I once had an otherwise hippie environmental-engineering professor who’d served in the Peace Corps say that banning DDT was one of the dumbest decisions ever made.

The WSJ’s Dan Niel gives an update of his 2012 review of the Fisker Karma and it’s not good for Team Obama’s taxpayer-funded turkey stimulus project:

First and worst: I was too easy on the Fisker Karma, a range-extended plug-in electric luxury sedan built in Finland and imported by the Orange County, Calif.-based company. I really wanted this car to be great, and I have great respect for Henrik Fisker, whose company, having received a highly vetted Department of Energy loan, got smeared during the presidential campaign, a la Solyndra. As unfair as these attacks were, they should have been inadmissible evidence in my judgment of Karma; instead, I found myself rooting for Fisker as an underdog.

In the review, published in February, I tied myself in knots trying to praise the Karma, even resorting to the “world’s most interesting car” banality. But in the end, I see in hindsight, the car is too heavy, too overpromised in terms of performance and efficiency, and it is just too durably weird-looking to love. Put a jar in your Fisker Karma, and put a dollar in the jar every time somebody asks you, “What the hell are you driving, mister?” You could put a kid through college that way.

Also, in the article on the Karma, I fumbled this joke: “At 5,300 pounds, the Karma is the heaviest four-seater this side of a Cessna.” Flying enthusiasts wrote in to say that I was wildly off the mark. A Cessna 175 weighs about 1,400 pounds. Holy cow, how did I get that so wrong? It’s like being asked the weight of a skyscraper and guessing three hens.

In any event, in the second edition, the joke will run thus: “…the heaviest four-seater this side of 3.78 Cessnas.” See? Better.

I don’t get it. In the first paragraph, Neil complains that the Karma was “smeared “in the presidential campaign, but his second graph goes on to list all the things wrong with the car, thus confirming why the car was smeared in the first place.

The march to end the incandescent light bulb renewed . . .

HOUSTON — At the Light Bulb Depot near his home in The Heights, Randy Gingrich just bought another batch of florescent bulbs.

“Since I started three years ago, I haven’t replaced a compact fluorescent yet,” he says. “So I’m happy with that.”

“In my ceiling fans, each one of mine has four lights,” says Allen Tabb, who’s been selling light bulbs for 16 years. “So instead of using 240 watts of electricity, I only use 60 watts of electricity. And I get the same light output.”

Sure, fluorescent bulbs are more expensive than old-fashioned incandescent bulbs and some people complain about losing a special glow in their homes. But in the long run, homeowners say they’re cheaper.

Besides, pretty soon Americans won’t have much choice.

As the New Year arrives, new rules bring the nation closer to the end of the traditional incandescent light bulb. Energy efficiency legislation adopted by Congress and signed by former President George W. Bush in 2007 is gradually phasing out the standard bulbs that have illuminated American homes for more than a century.

The new rules have applied to 100 watt bulbs since the beginning of 2012. In 2013, the restrictions have expanded to 75 watt bulbs. In January 2014, the new rules will apply to 60 and 40 watt bulbs.

The regulations don’t exactly ban incandescent bulbs. Some bulbs reportedly could meet the new standards, although they would be markedly more expensive. And many types of specialty bulbs have been exempted from the law.

If it seemed like retiring EPA Chief Lisa Jackson carried out her job with a religious zeal, you’d be right.

Barack Obama’s pick as his first EPA administrator told a 2010 National Council of Churches conference in New Orleans that government and religious leaders must unite in their “moral obligation” to heal the planet and “build on the religious and moral reasons for being good stewards of our environment.”

“The question now is, ‘What we can do?’” the green-church devotee concluded, adding that her efforts were blessed by the White House’s Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership.

Her legion of Washington media disciples — who would have condemned such moral bravado by the Religious Right — ignored her rhetoric. But in punishing those she deems carbon sinners, Lisa Jackson has done enormous harm to American workers.

Today, thousands of coal miners are without work as her power plant regulations (backed by a president who embraced Jackson’s crusade, calling global warming “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation”) have bankrupted mining companies such as Patriot Coal and forced others such as OhioAmerica and Alpha Natural Resources to downsize. An oil opponent, Jackson successfully lobbied the president to reject the transcontinental Keystone Pipeline, costing the U.S. some 20,000 jobs. Her global warming zeal extended to autos when she took the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards (CAFE) away from the Transportation Department — mandating that auto companies meet a pie-in-the-sky standard of 54.5 mpg by 2025 in an attempt to eliminate the internal combustion engine (the industry is spending millions on lobbying to water down the rules).

Jackson’s holy war created a rogue agency unanswerable to Congress. Her coal and CAFE edicts were done without the input of America’s elected representatives, creating a backlash that has led to endless hearings before Congressional Republicans. Despite the House revolt, Jackson’s agency churned on with its wave of rules. The resulting job consequences were illustrated in a dramatic photo-op with coal miners and Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign at a Murray Energy facility in Ohio — an event met with a near blackout by national media.

Rumors abound that Jackson’s resignation is the result of controversy over secret e-mails that Jackson authored exposing her War on Coal. But her public actions are scandalous enough. Having forced the shutdown of dozens of coal plants, the EPA chief  dropped one final bomb before Election Day — announcing carbon caps that effectively end new coal plant construction in the U.S.

“This agency (knows) no bounds,” said Chris Hamilton, senior V.P. of the West Virginia Coal Association after the new rules were announced. “Their actions don’t take into consideration people’s livelihoods, jobs, or the existing liability of energy companies.”

With more regulations in the pipeline covering everything from “environmental justice” (Jackson subscribes to the radical theory that the location of industrial plants discriminates against poor minorities) to natural gas fracking, the reign of Jackson cannot end soon enough.

Well, the good news — I guess — is that the battery didn’t explode:

Two key Toyota models, the flagship Camry sedan and the Prius v wagon, failed an important new crash test conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an insurance industry group.

Honda’s newly redesigned Accord tied for the top safety rating with the Suzuki Kizashi, a car that will soon no longer be sold in the United States. The redesigned Ford Fusion also scored well.

The results raise concerns that the Toyota models can’t provide protection from serious injuries in common accidents. The automaker’s new Prius v, a wagon version of the popular hybrid, scored last among 18 cars tested, with “poor” ratings in five of seven categories. The Camry — America’s bestselling passenger car — scored next to last.

“Toyota engineers have a lot of work to do to match the performance of their competitors,” said Adrian Lund, the insurance group’s president.

There’s non-embeddable video of the crashes of not only the failed Toyota models, but other brands that did well at the link above. A picture of the Prius V in all it’s glory:

A great editorial on the failure of Team Obama’s attempt at “political venture capital.” The opener:

Silicon Valley’s investment wizards are fleeing the so-called green economy, and not a moment too soon for American prosperity. As painful as the era of enviro-investing has been for taxpayers and shareholders, there’s an emerging silver lining. It’s likely that in 2013 fewer people will spend their time trying to turn political projects into companies.

A recent survey from our corporate cousins at Dow Jones VentureSource and the National Venture Capital Association finds that “clean technology” is inspiring pessimism among venture capitalists. Fully 61% expect less clean-tech investment in 2013 compared to 2012. On the flip side, a majority expect more investment next year in business information technology, a traditional U.S. economic strength.

The survey reflects a natural and healthy shift in Silicon Valley. Talent and resources are moving back to the technologies that gave the valley its name—and away from trendy eco-projects that failed.

The rest here.

A hilarious review. The opener:

If Matt Damon & Co. really wanted to make a movie that would scare American audiences off of fracking for good, they should have just made a movie dramatizing fracking’s potential threat to America’s beer. Instead, what we get is a quaint love story wrapped in a conspiracy movie, draped in a toothless political polemic, festooned with mawkish aimlessness.

It didn’t have to be this way. Promised Land’s script was originally developed with Dave Eggers, the acclaimed, award-winning author. The film offers the considerable acting skills of Damon, Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt, Hal Holbrook, John Krasinski, and Scoot McNairy. And, due to the hotly controversial issue of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, the movie has had the honor of being slammed by the Heritage Foundation and petroleum lobbyists.

Promised Land is also directed by Gus Van Sant, a man who has a keen artist’s eye for both mainstream fare and indie grit. (Yes, Van Sant and Damon are reunited, so beware of the lame and painfully obvious Good Will Fracking headlines.)

See? Nothing but good résumés and intriguing publicity behind this movie. And yet it putters out into both embarrassment and creative lethargy, fueled (if that’s the term I want) by an acute lack of focus and commitment. Promised Land struggles to compel just as much as it fails to inform. By the film’s end, Matt Damon will have taught you precisely two things about fracking: That it’s bad for cows, and even worse for heartfelt dramatic monologues delivered by Matt Damon.

The rest here.

Details here.