Details here.

Here’s the trailer for the anti-fracking film, Promised Land, which looks like the least entertaining romantic-comedy ever made:

I look forward to everyone who thinks global warming is an issue to change their diet accordingly.

Well, unless you have a sleigh to travel in.

Now we know the reason why the Obama administration spurned General Motors’ offers to buy back U.S. Treasury stock until after the election.

In fact, there are 13 billion reasons.

A month after Obama’s re-election — an election won in part on the Obama campaign’s boast that it saved GM and Chrysler — GM announced Wednesday that it would buy back 40 percent of Washington’s stock at just half the price needed for taxpayers to break even on their investment. That’s at least a $13 billion loss according to the Detroit News (other news outlets peg the loss at $21B when all shares are sold).

Ironically, the GM losses will not negatively impact the TARP program’s bottom line because the banks that also received TARP money have paid back their loans with profit to the taxpayers. That is, Obama’s demon Wall Street banks are covering his keister on GM losses. You can’t make this stuff up.

GM’s losses, however, do not include the billions lost in Delphi salaried workers’ pensions plans that were gutted by the White House (even as UAW Delphi pensions were made whole) and billions more lost by pensioners (Indiana teachers and firefighters among them) when Obama’s White House Task Force illegally gave preference to Democrat-donating Big Labor over secured bondholders.

Though GM has been desperate to unload federal shares for months to escape the “Government Motors” stigma, the losses would have been a nightmare for an Obama campaign that claimed its bailout was an unmitigated success. Indeed, selling the shares during the campaign would have exposed Obama (and the Obamedia’s) Big Lie that he did not let GM go bankrupt. GM’s stock price suggests that Obama’s managed Chapter 363 bankruptcy was a less efficient solution for taxpayers than Mitt Romney’s managed Chapter 11.

The share price further reflects the fact that GM continues to struggle with more efficient rivals unburdened by union contracts, government mandates forcing it to sell unprofitable green vehicles, and underfunded pension obligations.

“Almost a year and a half ago, Treasury could have sold taxpayers’ GM stake for about $30 a share. They wouldn’t. Shares are now down about 20 percent from then, resulting in an additional loss in value of about $3 billion for taxpayers,” reported the National Legal and Policy Center in scolding the White House decision last September not to sell immediately. “Treasury will continue to gamble taxpayer money on GM and continue to stay invested as they market-time their exit.”

“Unfortunately for America,” the NLPC concluded, “the gains they seek by the gamble are political rather than monetary.”

Matt Ridley writes in today’s WSJ:

Matt Ridley: Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change

Evidence points to a further rise of just 1°C by 2100. The net effect on the planet may actually be beneficial.

Forget the Doha climate jamboree that ended earlier this month. The theological discussions in Qatar of the arcana of climate treaties are irrelevant. By far the most important debate about climate change is taking place among scientists, on the issue of climate sensitivity: How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to pronounce its answer to this question in its Fifth Assessment Report next year.

The general public is not privy to the IPCC debate. But I have been speaking to somebody who understands the issues: Nic Lewis. A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr. Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.

He first collaborated with others to expose major statistical errors in a 2009 study of Antarctic temperatures. In 2011 he discovered that the IPCC had, by an unjustified statistical manipulation, altered the results of a key 2006 paper by Piers Forster of Reading University and Jonathan Gregory of the Met Office (the United Kingdom’s national weather service), to vastly increase the small risk that the paper showed of climate sensitivity being high. Mr. Lewis also found that the IPCC had misreported the results of another study, leading to the IPCC issuing an Erratum in 2011.

The rest here.

Bill Gertz at The Free Beacon writes:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is supporting a bid by General Electric to export jobs and nuclear technology to China by seeking assurances from Beijing that it will not steal or transfer valuable reactor technology, the Free Beacon has learned.

Clinton’s support for a future deal with GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, a Wilmington, N.C., company, to make reactor vessels in China for a nuclear plant it hopes to build in India was disclosed in a cable sent Nov. 21 to the United States Embassy in Beijing.

The cable directs embassy officials to seek Beijing’s assurances that GE-Hitachi nuclear technology would not be transferred to other states or stolen, as outlined under the terms of a 2003 U.S.-China agreement on nuclear technology cooperation.

Disclosure of the Obama administration’s support for GE-Hitachi’s bid to manufacture nuclear goods in China comes as GE’s chairman and CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, continues to head the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which advises President Barack Obama on ways to improve the nation’s economy and create jobs.

The rest here.

Details here.

The green truck future. . . has been cancelled.

Introduced to much fanfare in 2009, Government Motors — er, General Motors — quietly killed the Chevrolet Silverado Hybrid pickup this week when it unveiled its new, redesigned, 2014 pickup lineup.

“There wasn’t enough volume to justify the investment,” a GM spokesman told Fox News. But Washington loved it! The media raved about it! Its sister SUV, the 2008 Chevy Tahoe Hybrid, won Truck of the Year at the December, 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show!

“This is a milestone in many respects,” said Green Car Journal editor Ron Cogan of the truck hybrid’s 21 MPG rating. “The importance of GM’s accomplishment can’t be overstated.”

“GM promised they would use hybrid technology and use it where it would make the most difference, on their biggest vehicles,” added Carl Pope, Sierra Club executive director and a Los Angeles judge. “They have delivered.”

But the media market and the consumer market are two different worlds. In the real world, trucks have to sell.

And consumers have ignored Chevy’s lineup of trucks as too little bang for the buck.

The $42K Silverado Hybrid sold for a whopping $9,000 more than the 16 MPG gas-powered pickup (meaning the conventional truck only costs $600 more for fuel each year — assuming 10,000 mile annual mileage — even at $4 gas. Do the math).

The Silverado Hybrid sold just 1000 copies last year (a paltry percentage of total, 415,000 Silverado sales) — down from 1900 when it was introduced in 2009. The Tahoe Hybrid (still available, for now) is also running out of gas — selling just 500 last year (80,000 gas-powered Tahoes sold) compared to 4,600 in 2008.

“Price, we think, will be the fulcrum on which these hybrid trucks’ fate balances,” wrote a Car & Driver review almost as an afterthought in 2008. “Too expensive, and these will become just as much of a footnote to green history.” Price is a factor? Stop the presses.

Like most hybrids — the total hybrid-electric market continues to struggle at just 3 percent market share despite dozens of offerings over the last decade — Chevy’s hybrids are major headlines in the press, and footnotes on consumer wish lists.

COP-18 in Doha is over. On to Warsaw for COP-19!

The latest chapter in the seemingly interminable climate change negotiation saga has sputtered to a close. Whether it ended with a bang or a whimper (or something in between) depends on one’s perspective.

For those who believe humans are causing catastrophic climate change — or simply crave control over the world’s energy and “unsustainable” economic systems — Doha resulted in bitter failure.  

Only 37 of 194 nations signed the treaty that replaces the Kyoto Protocol, which expires December 31. That means the new agreement is legally non-binding and covers only 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. While the European Union joined in and remains committed to “carbon trading” (making former UNFCC chair Yvo DeBoer happier in his new role as a carbon trader, á la Al Gore), the United States, Brazil, Russia, India, China, Canada, Japan, and other major emitters refused to sign, and the treaty sets no specific emission limits. Atmospheric CO2 levels will thus continue to climb — causing climate campaigners to express consternation over disastrous weather events, imminent devastation, species extinctions, injustice for the world’s poor, and the disappearance of island nations beneath the waves.

For those who say computer models are meaningless, climate change and weather extremes are natural, and economic growth should be sustained to lift more billions out of poverty, Doha represents a partial success. Few nations signed the treaty, the Obama Administration did not commit to it, the document is not binding, and countless billions of dollars will be available for continued economic development and disaster relief — instead of being squandered on fruitless attempts to control Earth’s infinitely complex climate and weather.

Even Christina Figueres, DeBoer’s successor at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, could proclaim victory. She wants to keep the planet’s temperature from rising more than the internationally agreed maximum of two degrees Celsius. That goal has arguably been reached already. There has been no detectable increase in average global temperatures for 16 years.

In fact, while last summer was hot and dry in much of the continental USA, nearing records set during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, it was a very cold summer in Alaska and parts of Europe. Winter 2012 was snowy and nasty in Central Europe and very cold in South Africa and South America, where the seasons are reversed. Britain just had its coldest autumn in nineteen years, leaving 2012 on course to be second coldest year since 1996. Himalayan glaciers are growing, interior Greenland is not melting, summer Antarctic sea ice is near record extent, and seas are not rising any faster than for the past 100 years. 

All this helps explain why climate alarmists keep changing their rhetoric: from global cooling to global warming, to climate change to climate disruption, and now to extreme weather. Indeed, they are now trying to link every unusual weather event to CO2 (and now methane, or natural gas, the fuel produced through hydraulic fracturing or fracking). However, as Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. has noted, when the Atlantic hurricane season starts next June 1, it will have been 2,777 days since the last time a category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane made landfall along the U.S. coast — the longest such period since 1900. 2012 also marked the quietest U.S. tornado season on record; only twelve tornadoes touched down in the United States in July 2012, shattering the July 1960 record low of 42.

Of course, there are always disasters and human tragedies at the hands of a not-always-benevolent Mother Nature. Hardly a year has ever gone by without many such weather events somewhere on Planet Earth.

This year, however, climate alarmists have blamed virtually all of them on humans and CO2 emissions – from Sandy in the USA to 2011 and 2012 typhoons in the Philippines, and droughts in Africa. It’s easy to see why. As a Greenpeace director cogently explained, “The key issue is money” – as in the redistribution of wealth from rich, formerly rich and soon-to-be formerly rich nations to still poor countries. The other issue is power and control: as in who gets to make energy, economic, and human health and welfare decisions: individuals, families, communities and nations – or eco-activists and UN bureaucrats. 

That brings us to the in-between: the uncharted waters separating “bitter failure” and “partial success.”

As climate activists and media “journalists” have observed, there is no legally binding agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The world’s two biggest CO2 emitters, China and the United States, did not sign. What was agreed to contains only vague promises that, “beginning in 2020, at least $100 billion a year will flow from public, private and other sources” to poor countries, supposedly to help them cope with the “devastating effects” of climate change and “extreme weather.” There is no agreement as to where that $1 trillion per decade will come from, or how much will be available annually between now and 2020, especially if the global economic downturn continues.

But don’t believe the vague promises, bitter failure, and bitterly disappointed rhetoric. The climate alarmists got a lot of what they came for, they gave up little or nothing, they’ll be back for more, and in the meantime they will still get billions of dollars annually from taxpayers — to conduct climate change causation, mitigation, adaptation, and compensation “research,” issue “balanced reports,” and attend many more conferences (all expenses paid) where virtually no one except alarmists is allowed to speak or participate in official “discussions” and “negotiations.”  

More than 7,000 environmental NGO activists attended the Doha confab — and next time around they won’t forget who sent them, now that Jonathan Pershing, chief U.S. negotiator for climate change at Doha, has pointedly reminded them who paid for their presence in Qatar. They and the official delegates will be there for specific objectives: more money, more power, more control.

In Doha, they reached several benchmarks that they had achieved during previous COP events. Most important, they enshrined in the treaty the concept of “loss and damage” supposedly resulting from “manmade climate change” — and secured pledges from “rich” nations that poor countries would receive billions of dollars per year in “aid” to repair any “loss and damage,” as part of a “climate compensation mechanism.” They also incorporated “principles” of “equity” and “justice” and “common but differentiated responsibilities”– to distinguish between nations that “caused” climate change and “extreme weather events” and countries that presumably did not or are “especially vulnerable.”

It is true that words like “compensation,” “fault,” and “liability” were excised from the final treaty language and that it will be all but impossible to determine how much, if any, loss and damage from a tornado, hurricane, typhoon, flood, or drought was due to “manmade climate change” versus how much from natural climate change and natural, normal extreme weather events. Who will pay how much, from existing aid programs versus new programs, and through what U.N. or other conduits, will likewise have to be decided at one of the presumably many future Conferences Of Parties to the new climate agreement.

“This is just the beginning of the process,” a Greenpeace activist, helpfully explained.

Indeed, the “parties” — and thus their taxpayers, food, and energy consumers, and citizens hoping to pursue their dreams — are slowly but surely, piece by piece, surrendering their rights, freedoms, sovereignty, and hard-earned wealth to a gaggle of unelected and unaccountable activists, agitators, bureaucrats, autocrats, and kleptocrats. The slippery slope is just ahead, if we are not already on it.

The scientific case for manmade global warming disasters grows weaker by the day. But no one should ever underestimate the desperation, audacity and political brilliance of those who have staked their careers, reputations, salaries, and pensions on the notion that our energy use and quest for improved living standards for all humanity have somehow usurped the natural forces that have driven climate changes from time immemorial. We underestimate the alarmists at our peril. 

Detroit - Up is down. The sky is green. Right-to-work is anti-collective bargaining.

On the eve of a historic Lansing vote making Michigan a right-to-work state, President Obama waded into the controversy Tuesday with a big bag o’ bunkum. But, ironically, the very truck engine plant from which he made his remarks may one day be saved by Michigan’s new right-to-work (RTW) commitment.

The president came to the foreign-owned Daimler  Detroit Diesel plant in Redford, Michigan to campaign for higher taxes to avert the fiscal cliff – but what his UAW crowd wanted to hear was anti-RTW red meat about the forced payment of union dues.

“What we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions,”  the president fibbed about right-to-work which does nothing of the sort. ” These so-called ‘right to work’ laws, they don’t have to do with economics; they have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money. We don’t want a race to the bottom, we want a race to the top.”

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

Governor Snyder is poised to sign RTW legislation because RTW states are growing faster than force union states like Michigan, RTW states’ wages are growing faster, and RTW Indiana is taking jobs from Michigan. The president in entitled to his own opinions- but he isn’t entitled to his own facts.

But even as UAW workers wore stickers reading “The President Saved the Auto Industry. Don’t Let Snyder Destroy It” – and Democratic Congressmen called One Tough Nerd “sneaky” – Obama was notably shy to criticize Michigan’s governor by name. Indeed, Snyder was one of the local officials that met the president at Detroit Metro when Air Force One touched down early Monday afternoon.

Perhaps Obama understands that Snyder himself had a lot to do with the $120 million Daimler investment in Detroit Diesel that the president touted in his remarks Monday. Snyder visited Daimler last March to discuss business opportunities in Michigan. Daimler’s U.S. trucking operations are not without a history of union controversy, and the irony is that Daimler may look more favorably on Michigan (as are other businesses) now that it knows it will be a right-to-work state.

That is, the very plant that Obama used to criticize right-to-work may one day be saved by RTW. Truck plants like Daimler’s have a lot of location options – from Mexico to Canada to southern RTW states. Michigan’s new RTW will help keep such plants here.

“Gov. Snyder’s meeting with Daimler executives in Germany underscored the strong relationship between Michigan and the company and demonstrated that Michigan is more business-friendly than ever,” said Michael A. Finney, Michigan Economic Development Corp. CEO.

More business friendly than ever thanks to right-to-work? Don’t think that businesses like Daimler haven’t noticed.

The editors of the Washington Times write today on the upcoming surge in food prices thanks to Team Obama’s mandates on ethanol use to fuel our cars:

Efforts of lawmakers to buy votes in midwestern states are hitting taxpayers in the wallet. A report by the accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) last month calculated the full impact of the congressional directive pouring ethanol into the gas tanks of Americans. This crony capitalist corn scheme drives up prices not just at the pump but at the drive-through as well.

The analysis commissioned by the National Council of Chain Restaurants concluded the federal government’s Renewable Fuel Standard would increase the cost of eating out by $3.2 billion every year. Under this mandate adopted in 2005, an arbitrary and increasing amount of ethanol must be sold each year. It’s a policy guaranteeing a windfall for suppliers of the corn used to make this unnecessary fuel additive.

For 2015, these agribusiness giants will sell an extra 6 billion gallons of their product, not because Americans want it, but because Uncle Sam says so. To meet the increasing — and artificial — demand, farmers must shift production away from crops that put food on the table or feed livestock. This comes at a cost.

The green eyeshades figure that the reallocation of farming resources will drive up the cost of corn by 27 percent, pork 15 percent, potatoes 13 percent, beef 8 percent and eggs 11 percent. This means items on the supermarket shelves become less affordable. The cost of french fries, Big Macs and Egg McMuffins also goes up.

The rest here.

New Yorkers who found themselves in the flood zone are doing something remarkable: they’re moving to areas that didn’t flood — and they’re doing this all by themselves, without any feasibility studies, FEMA directives, or any other nannyesque policy of Mayor Bloomberg.

Boris Johnson writes in today’s Telegraph:

Ignore the doom merchants, Britain should get fracking

It’s green, it’s cheap and it’s plentiful! So why are opponents of shale gas making such a fuss??

If it were not so serious there would be something ludicrous about the reaction of the green lobby to the discovery of big shale gas reserves in this country. Here we are in the fifth year of a downturn. We have pensioners battling fuel poverty. We have energy firms jacking up their prices. We have real worries about security of energy supply – a new building like the Shard needs four times as much juice as the entire town of Colchester.

Our nukes are so high-maintenance that the cost of disposing of their spent fuel rods is put at about £100 billion – more than the value of all the electricity they have produced since the Fifties. The hills and dales of Britain are being forested with white satanic mills, and yet the total contribution of wind power is still only about 0.4 per cent of Britain’s needs. Wave power, solar power, biomass – their collective oomph wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding. We are prevented from putting in a new system of coal-fired power stations, since that would breach our commitments under Kyoto. We are therefore increasingly and humiliatingly dependent on Vladimir Putin’s gas or on the atomic power of the French state.

The rest here.

Detroit Free Press:

Bankrupt battery maker A123 Systems Inc. on Sunday said it will sell most of its assets to the U.S. arm of Chinese auto parts conglomerate Wanxiang Group Corp. for $256.6 million.

Wanxiang America Corp. won an auction conducted under the supervision of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.

A123′s government business will be sold separately, for $2.25 million, to Navitas Systems, of Woodridge, Ill.

A hearing seeking the necessary court approval of the sale is scheduled for Tuesday. The deal must also be okayed by the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal inter-agency committee that reviews sales of U.S. companies to foreign owners. The company has about 2,000 employees.

It’s not a done deal yet as there is sure to be political pressure brought against Team Obama for a) this stupid investment in the first place and b) now letting China get the company once the research has been paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

Now, the fact that the research was funded by taxpayers really has nothing to do with the court’s decision. This is a typical result of what happens to an early-stage venture company and if Team Obama and Nobel-winner Chu didn’t want bankrupt taxpayer-funded failures ending up in the hands of U.S. competition, then maybe they shouldn’t have been playing venture capitalist in the first place.

Unlike previous UN climate gatherings, COP-18 in Doha is attempting to make a “serious” statement about lowering its carbon footprint. No, it’s not requiring delegates to forgo their jet travel, five-star hotels and restaurants, air conditioning, limousine rides, or anything that exacting.

But the COP chieftains have instituted a “paperless” policy, depriving delegates of daily programs and copies of negotiating documents that keep them relatively informed. And while this policy has allegedly “saved” 217 trees as of yesterday (I know this because the U.N. keeps a running tally prominently displayed on electronic billboards throughout the conference site), it has angered many who find this policy a means to keep the public in the dark about the current status of demands and negotiations.

Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, made this point at a CFACT press briefing in Doha yesterday. She noted that in all her 17 years of attending U.N. climate gatherings there has never been this much difficulty getting up-to-date information or reluctance to accomodate informed public input into the process. A harsh indictment, indeed.

The U.N. sought to compensate for this inconvenience by creating an app that delegates could place on their smart phones, which featured links to various documents as they are updated. However, the app has been extremely slow in posting any changes online, rendering it essentially useless.

Ms. Adams believes, as do many other delegates (even those on the fringe left), that this is being done deliberately, to squelch public input into a process that could affect energy and economic systems; lives and livelihoods; and jobs, hopes, and dreams for billions of people. That is very probably the case.

Whether or not it was the COP chiefs’ intent, the absence of information has made for a lot of frustration, as well as downtime lounging in coffee shops for most in attendance here.

Without much inside knowledge as to the current status of negotiations, many attendees looked to side events to pass their time or learn something. Some of these events, like those dealing with financing and mitigation, would test the endurance of a seasoned Buddhist monk. But others were more amusing, like an initiative known as “Chant,” which seems to be urging humanity to sing its way into environmental bliss. I had an opportunity to participate in this workshop and lend my own “voice” to this effort.

Anyone wanting to join in this eco-Woodstock event can do so by going here.

CFACT, for its part, put on a press briefing during this lull yesterday — calling on the U.N. to suspend its efforts to create a new climate change agreement. The press conference was attended by numerous media outlets including the Times of London, Associated Press, Chinese National Television and many others. It featured not only Cathie Adams, but also a video of Senator James Inhofe (R., OK), who stated:

“The focus of this year’s global warming conference — like all the conferences before — is not the environment. It’s about one thing: spreading the wealth around.”

Senator Inhofe went on to praise CFACT and Craig Rucker, Marc Morano, and Lord Christopher Monckton as voices of reason in the climate change debate. He added, “I have counted on groups like CFACT to provide on-the-ground reports” that keep America and the world informed.

To view the entire press conference, click here.

Meanwhile, despite keeping the public and delegates in the dark, negotiators continued to negotiate. The Ad-hoc Working Group advanced its amendments for a second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol, and Christiana Figueres announced that the Ministers are now set to approve them. A final document is expected today. 

Of course, all this will have minimal impact on global greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric concentrations of those gases — to say nothing of the Earth’s climate and weather, which are driven by dozens — even hundreds — of complex natural forces.

Russia, Japan, and Canada have formally withdrawn from the process. Brazil, China, India, and the rest of the developing world will still be held to no binding commitments. This leaves largely the EU nations and Australia (which together represent approximately 15 percent of global emissions) as the only countries left to carry the economic wrecking ball of hydrocarbon and CO2 emission limitations.

There is no word yet on what the U.S. delegation plans to do. However, it is clear that the delegation will have a hard time selling to Congress whatever ultimately comes out of Doha.

Reuters:

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Thursday sharply criticized President Barack Obama, a fellow Democrat, for failing to make global warming a priority issue, saying action was more urgent than ever after the devastation in the Northeast from Superstorm Sandy.

“I deeply respect our president and I am grateful for the steps that he has taken, but we cannot have four more years of mentioning this occasionally and saying it’s too bad that the Congress can’t act,” Gore told the New York League of Conservation Voters.

Gore was the surprise guest to introduce New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spoke about the city’s response to Sandy, which slammed into the city on October 29, killing 43 people, destroying homes, and knocking out power, mass transit and telephone service in huge swaths of the city.

Nationally, the storm caused at least $50 billion in damage and killed at least 131 people, officials said.

Much of Lower Manhattan flooded from the storm surge, a danger many climate scientists warn will become more acute as the burning of fossil fuels contributes to higher global temperatures that speed the melting of polar ice, raising sea levels.

Bloomberg has long sounded alarm bells about climate change and the city’s vulnerability to major storms. His blueprint for infrastructure needs, called PlaNYC, aims to cut the city’s carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2030 and he has pushed to limit dependence on coal, a leading source of carbon emissions.

Bloomberg showed a picture of Gore and himself painting a city roof with white paint, a technique that keeps temperatures down and helps cut energy consumption.

The mayor also echoed some of Gore’s sentiments about leadership in Washington, saying cities were “not waiting for national governments to act on climate change.”

But Bloomberg added: “We had help from every part of the federal government. Everything we asked for we had. Now we’ve got to get some money out of them, but that’s another issue.”

The city has asked Washington for $9.8 billion to pay for costs from Sandy not covered by insurance or other federal funds.

Much of Gore’s remarks centered on leaders in Washington, who he said had abdicated responsibility on carbon as humans treat the atmosphere as an “open sewer.”

The rest here.

Get the popcorn.

This year’s climate conference in Qatar — though in the public eye — is the most secretive ever.

The U.N. has never really enjoyed allowing any debate about the climate. At the first annual climate talks I attended, at Bali in 2007, the then-chief clerk of the conference secretariat — at no notice — threw us out of a validly-booked room because too many members of the press were attending our daily press conferences.

She also complained to the head of my delegation because I had dared to write an article for the Jakarta Post recommending that my fellow delegates deal with the non-problem of global warming by having the courage to do nothing about it.

In those days, though, we had the right to attend just about every negotiating session; to meet and talk to national negotiating delegates; to leave letters on their desks; and to watch the negotiations as they unfolded, blow by blow.

Not any more. The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), the only environmental group that the U.N. allows to voice any alternative to the imagined (and imaginary) “consensus” at its annual talks about talks about the climate, has been too effective.

Last year, half of the prolix negotiating text at Durban was hastily dropped within half a day of my blog posting revealing what not one of the world’s news media had bothered to cover, namely: the actual contents of the final negotiating text, including proposals for a World Climate Court, rights of legal personality for “Mother Earth,” and a halving of CO2 concentration, which would kill many plants and animals by depriving plants of adequate amounts of carbon dioxide to grow and prosper.

Today, as yesterday, I tried to get a copy of the Doha draft. However, the U.N. has gone paperless – it says to make a petty gesture towards cutting the staggering but irrelevant “carbon footprint” of these conferences. Now it is almost impossible for anyone to track down any of the vital documents. They seem not to be available from the “PaperSmart” booth (“not much Paper and not that Smart,” as one disgruntled delegate put it).

Nor can one get into most of the negotiating sessions, which are labeled “Parties and Observer States Only” on the official timetable — if you can find one. I tried to get into a plenary session, but it had been canceled without warning, leaving dozens of us sitting in an empty conference hall for over an hour.

Since it is no longer possible to follow what is going on at these conferences even if one is an accredited delegate, I decided to visit some fringe events and talk to some journalists.

I put on Qatari national dress (a white djellabah and black-corded kheffiyeh), which a prominent Doha businessman had unexpectedly presented to me at dinner the night before. The outfit is astonishingly comfortable in the Doha climate — cool in the heat of the day and yet warm enough to sit out and drink sweet green tea in the suq, as the crescent moon of Islam climbed above the Sultan’s turret.

The security inspectors, wearing Arab costume identical to mine, were startled to see a paleface staring out at them from under the seemly-pinched wimple of the kheffiyeh. One of them helped me to arrange it in the distinctive and stylish Qatari fashion.

My first visit of the day was to a thinly-attended press conference given by SustainUS, a heftily-funded Obama-supporting youth group. I arrived in the room just half a minute before the previous press conference was about to end, and stood quietly by the door so as not to disturb the speakers.

#more#At once a bossy woman from the UN leapt up from her seat by the door and told me that I was obliged to follow the Rules for Press Conferences (which, as far as I know, have never been promulgated publicly). I told her that she should address all such points to our head of delegation. She snapped that one of the rules was that immediately upon entering a press conference one must sit down.

I pointed out, reasonably enough, that the previous press conference had now ended.

SustainUS told us that Hurricane (sic)Sandy was All Our Fault, and young people who had put Obama into office now expected him to do as they told him, or else.

I pointed out that Sandy was not a hurricane but an extra-tropical storm; that global warming had had precious little to do with it; and that the proof that neither Sandy nor any other extreme-weather event in the past few years could possibly have been caused by global warming was that there had been none for 16 years.

The response from one of the youths was that global warming had been accelerating and it was “flat out false” to say there had been none for 16 years. Yet, to the contrary, it was flat out false to say it was flat out false to say there had been any warming for 16 years.

Next, I had arranged to meet a journalist from one of London’s leading daily newspapers. He walked straight past me, not recognizing me in my Qatari dress, and jumped when I waved to him.

He said he would like to spend some time walking through the conference with me. I took him to see the freak-show in the Exhibition Hall, where various fringe groups had set up booths the size of rabbit-hutches (at great profit to the U.N.) to promote everything from Climate Gender Equality Rights, which the journalist knew about and rather approved of, to perpetual motion power stations, which he rather didn’t. “Bang goes the second law of thermodynamics,” he murmured.

He took me to meet the spokesmen for the UK Met Office, whose recent forecasts — delivered by a $50 million computer that uses enough electricity to power a small town whenever it is turned on — have consistently exaggerated global warming.

After we had had an amiable scientific discussion with the Met Office, whose spokesmen said climate sensitivity was not really their thing, the journalist asked me the standard question: “But what if you’re wrong about the climate?”

In that event, I said, after 16 years without global warming there would plainly be plenty of time to adjust if I were wrong, but those 16 warmless years suggested I might be right.

Then he said something highly revealing: “How do you dare to question doctors of climate science who have spent nine years studying their subject?” This, of course, is the clapped-out logical fallacy of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation or authority of a supposed expert.

His deployment of this fallacy showed that — though he was himself a mathematician — for political reasons he had not the slightest intention of using his knowledge to verify any of the supposed “facts” about the climate that had been handed down to him from on high by those “doctors of climate science” with their “nine years’ study.”

My answer was that one should check what it was within one’s own power to check. If that checking revealed the clock striking 13, then it mattered not a whit how many years’ study the promoters of error had devoted to their subject. They were wrong.

The journalist was unmoved. He said he knew of no climate scientist who had ever expressed a point of view contrary to the imagined “consensus.” And this even though, just moments before, I had mentioned a dozen names, with the dates of their leading papers, during our conversation with the Met Office.

This was a closed mind. There are many of them here — not merely unwilling but by now unable to think independently for themselves. Once the Central Committee has handed down the party line — Hoc volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas (I will have this done, thus I have commanded that it be done, and let my demand substitute for reason) –they switch off their brains, salute, obey, and become grievously offended if anyone, however justifiably, dares to show any signs of curiosity.

I had come straight to Qatar from Vilnius, where I had given the annual address to the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, whose president had later taken me to visit the Museum of Genocide in what had been the KGB headquarters and prison during the 50-year Soviet occupation of his brave country.

There, among the miserable cells that have been kept as they were when the KGB had fled Eastward after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, I saw the evidence of how anyone who had questioned the Party Line or told jokes about the Central Committee — however mildly — had been locked up, starved, made to stand all day at least 18 inches away from the cell walls, allowed to visit the bathrooms only once a day and to shower in cold water only twice a month, interrogated for days on end without sleep, tortured unspeakably, and killed without mercy. I wept.

Wherever there are closed minds, cruelty and death may not be far away. Let us open those minds while there is still time.

A camel, as Winston Churchill used to say, is an animal designed by committee. The climate scare, like a camel, is an animal designed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Trying to ride a camel for the first time can be what Chinese adventurer Kai Lung would have called “a gravity-removing episode.” Under the rustling palm-trees by the balmy shore of the Gulf, I approached my first camel, Aziz, with that intrepid curiosity that built a great Empire.

My lovely wife says animals and children are attracted to me because I have never grown up. I addressed Aziz with an elegant quatrain from Fitzgerald’s perfect translation of the world’s most charming drinking-song, the Rubaiyyat of Umar Khayyam:

Awake! for Morning in the bowl of Night
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight –
And lo, the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

Aziz listened politely, nuzzled me in a friendly way, sniffed my hand thoughtfully, slobbered over it liberally, and then directed a long nostril at my face to get better acquainted. I stroked his neck, wiping the slobber off on it, and he burbled contentedly.

Or so I thought. His handler, with a rapid “chk-chk-chk,” brought him down to his knees and told me to climb on quick.

Not quick enough. Before I was halfway into the cloth-covered saddle, Aziz lurched to his feet, flinging me into an elegant and spectacular parabolic trajectory. Upon re-entry, I achieved terminal velocity and crashed firmly into a convenient sand dune, executing a well-judged judo fall of which my Staff Sergeant would have been proud. I remembered to go completely limp at the last instant. Sand sprayed in all directions and a new peninsula was created on the Gulf shore.

#more#As I tottered to my feet, dented but unbowed, the two camel-handlers and my three friends were in such fits of unbecoming laughter that I forgot to emulate William the Conqueror by grabbing a fistful of sand and saying, “See, I hold all Araby in my hand” (or at least that part of it that had not been flung into the Gulf by my impact.

Aziz was chk-chked back on to his knees and, this time, I was quicker, leaping into the saddle before we headed skyward.

The object of the exercise was to obtain four camels, affix to their flanks bold placards bearing the words “STOP” “CLIMATE” “HYPE” and the “CFACT” logo of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, which does not believe warmer weather is a bad thing or that humans are somehow causing climate cataclysms. The idea was to get a suitably atmospheric photograph of our simple message against the backdrop of the verdant palms, the golden sands, the azure sea, and the cerulean sky.

This, too, was a gravity-removing exercise, with which my Staff Sergeant would not have been at all impressed. “Your job in the field is to take charge,” he would holler. “If you don’t, somebody else will. Or, worse, nobody else will.”

Among the dunes and the flies, nobody took charge. First we got all four camels onto their knees and stuck the placards on. Then we realized that some placards were on the wrong flank of some of the camels. Then, when we’d gotten all of the placards on the same flank, the message read: “HYPE CLIMATE: STOP CFACT,” which was not at all what we were trying to say.

Meanwhile, back at the Doha conference centre, the climate camels were lumbering uncomfortably in all directions and getting nowhere. The usual five alarm warmist factions were manoeuvring:

• The European tyranny-by-clerk, which needs global warming to be a problem because it can then arrogate yet more centralizing powers to itself, yea, even unto the last fluorescent light bulb. The EU will sign anything, because the unelected Kommissars, who have the sole right to propose Europe’s laws, do not have to care what the people think, and they want more central power in their hands. They are also advising the envious U.N. on how to grab all political power by stealth — a treaty here, a treaty there, until suddenly democracy has been stolen away forever.

• The BRICS bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — which is not really a bloc at all. None of these emerging nations can afford to allow the vicious policies of the anti-development Greens to interfere with their most vital mission: which is to expand the use of fossil fuels to give their people affordable electricity, lift them out of poverty, reduce malnutrition and disease, benefit the environment by stabilizing their populations, and end the cutting down of trees and wildlife habitats to provide fuel for open fires that heat homes, cook food, and cause tuberculosis. They will sign any treaty that does not bind them to limit their emissions.

• The fly-specks: The small island states and other economically tiny nations in the undeveloped world. Their ambition is to extract as much money from the wealthy West as they can get, based on claims that industrialized nations are causing global warming that is sinking their islands.

• The unfooled: Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, who have stayed clear of the now-defunct Kyoto Protocol, which will unavoidably expire December 31 because there was no agreement to extend it by October 3, as its own terms require.

• The fools: In this category, Australia stands alone. Its absurd carbon dioxide tax is almost 50 times more expensive than letting global warming happen and adapting in a focused way to its consequences.

• The United States: Also in a category of its own, Obama’s U.S. is a house deeply divided. The “Democrats” — more like Communists these days — will do whatever it takes to destroy all (such as fossil-fuel corporations) who fund their Republican opponents. Also, they will sign any treaty calculated to wreck the economy of the West. The Republicans, however, will not. No climate treaty will be agreed to by the U.S. Senate, where Senators Inhofe, Coburn, Hatch, Vitter, and others have spoken out clearly and consistently against climate-extremism.

Today, His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, Emir of Qatar, addressed the conference. He announced that Qatar now aims to generate one-sixth of its electrical power by solar power, reducing its dependency upon the oil that makes it — per capita — one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, and the single highest carbon dioxide emitter on the planet.

The real reason for the Emir’s switch to solar power is economic, not climatological. He provides free electricity to his nation, and every gallon of costly oil that he burns for his people is a gallon he cannot sell. Since he has hundreds of thousands of acres of empty sand available, soaked in sunshine more than 300 days a year, solar power, though more expensive than oil in the short term, may one day prove cheaper than oil for this country.

The Emir also confirmed the hopes expressed by the president of the conference, Abdullah bin Hamad al Attiyah, that a real deal would be struck here in Qatar.

However, the climate camels are all heading in opposite directions, and bucking off their riders. Will there be a deal? Yes, of course there will. There always is. The triumphant announcement of success after the talks go into an extra day is now a routine element in the choreography of these stage-managed farces.

If they really want to make the world laugh, all they have to do is film Monckton of Arabia trying to ride a camel.

Back in the desert, we were still trying to get the camels to behave. We told the handlers to rearrange the camels in the right order, but their English was no better than our Arabic, and anyway we were all shouting conflicting orders at them, and the camels had their own ideas of where they wanted to go. The Three Stooges would have done things better than us.

This pantomime went on for half an hour, until I took a command decision to arrange the camels in single file, sit them down, and then affix the placards to their flanks with duct tape, reading from left to right.

“Never go into the field without duct tape,” Staff would holler. “If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t move, paint it. If it wobbles, fix it with duct tape.”

The Arabs, however, read from right to left, and one of my friends — a photographer — thought the photo would look more artistic that way around.

Later that millennium, we got the camels and the placards in the right places: “STOP CLIMATE HYPE — CFACT.” We gave them our money, shot our photographs, and it is now safely on the record for all time:

The moving finger writes and, having writ,
Moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

Satisfied, we went for an uncomfortable but triumphant ride on the camels in the kindly breeze, with Aziz tossing his head upward from time to time to snatch a mouthful of leaves from a passing palm-tree. But not before I had briefly become one of the first Brits in space.