North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem is announcing a lawsuit against the State of Minnesota over the latter state’s restrictions on using power from coal plants, among other sources.

“It is unfortunate it has come to this. As Minnesota seeks to rebuild its economy, it will need energy,” said Stenehjem in a press release. “Much of that energy will need to come from sources outside Minnesota.”

In its lawsuit, North Dakota alleges that the Next Generation Energy Act violates the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, unconstitutionally interfering with North Dakota’s energy production. The NGEA imposes prohibitions on energy imported from North Dakota, and while the law does make some exemptions the State of North Dakota is alleging that those exemptions benefit only Minnesota-based businesses and projects.

Read the rest at Plains Daily.

a href=”http://www.globalclimatescam.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/epa-200×200.jpg”>Fifty three of the Senate’s 59 Democrats gave unelected, overpaid bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a green light yesterday to do pretty much whatever they choose in their quixotic crusade against global warming. All 41 Republicans and six brave Democrats voted for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution nullifying the EPA’s recent usurpation of authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the U.S. economy to combat greenhouse gases. Thankfully, this craven surrender of congressional authority isn’t the last word on the issue, assuming that the November elections produce a Senate with enough backbone to reassert the legislature’s rightful power.In the meantime, it’s vital to understand how bureaucracies function. Whatever else they may do, leading bureaucrats always do two things, regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress: They limit choices available to the rest of us by imposing regulations that increase government power and thus justify expanding their budgets and staffs; and they protect themselves and their turf by suppressing internal dissent, often at any costs.

Read the rest of this editorial at the Washington Examiner.

The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to seize new power to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide unless Congress acts to stop them. 

Carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor a threat to human life or the environment. Despite new predictions that the Earth is entering a new cooling phase, the EPA intends to cap carbon dioxide emissions to stop nonexistent global warming. The impact this will have on business, jobs and the economy is staggering. Carbon dioxide is emitted as a byproduct of virtually every energy source. Everything from transportation, heating, electricity, manufacturing and more will be impacted.  

Senator Lisa Murkowski plans to bring to the Senate floor on June 10th, her resolution to disapprove the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated using the Clean Air Act. The resolution is brought under the rules of the Congressional Review Act. It cannot be filibustered and needs only 51 votes to pass. 

Senate passage of S. J. Res. 26 will send a strong message to the White House and will put pressure on the House to vote on the resolution. It appears that the vote will be very close and could go either way. It’s critical that Senators hear from their constituents.

Take Action!

• Click here to contact your Senator
• Rallies are planned around the nation on Thursday, June 3rd at the local offices of Senators who will be back home for a Senate recess from May 28th through June 7th. Visit your senators’ local offices in person and register your support for the Murkowski Resolution.

Click here for more information about the EPA’s plans and the Murkowski Resolution.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R - Alaska)

By Phil Kerpen

President Obama has been very made clear that his top domestic priorities are health care and global warming. We all know what happened on health care. Now the date is set for the key Senate showdown on global warming: June 10. That’s when the Senate will vote on a resolution introduced by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (S.J. Res. 26) that would overturn the EPA’s global warming regulations. It’s not subject to filibuster. There is no place for weak-kneed senators to hide. In just two weeks we’ll know where every member of the Senate stands.As I’ve previously discussed here in the Fox Forum and documented on www.ObamaChart.com, the Obama administration is not waiting for Congress to enact a national cap-and-trade program to move ahead with its global warming agenda.

Under the watchful eye of White House Climate czar Carol Browner (who originally developed the legal theory of using the 1970 Clean Air Act as a global warming law, bypassing Congress) the EPA is moving forward on a staggering regulatory power grab that includes about 18,000 pages of appendices and will eventually regulate nearly every aspect of the U.S. economy.

Read the rest of this editorial at Fox News.

FOIA Response Long Overdue

By Stephan Dinan

The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.

Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.

Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.

“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”

Read the rest of this story at the Washington Times.

Pennsylvania State University professor and climatologist Michael Mann recently threatened to sue a group for its video satire of his climate science entitled “Hide the Decline.”

The video, created by Minnesotans for Global Warming (M4GW) refers to an email from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit director, Phil Jones to Prof. Michael Mann and two other scientists. “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie [sic] from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” writes Prof. Jones in the November 16, 1999 email.

Jones has temporarily stepped down from this position pending an investigation, although he was cleared in March in a British House of Commons inquiry (pdf).

Prof. Mann’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to one member of MG4W. It claims that “the use of Dr. Mann’s likeness” taken from the PSU webpage “is not authorized and infringes on various copyrights” and is being used by M4GW for “commercial exploitation.”

The video not only takes a picture off of the PSU website, but it appropriates significant footage from two Jib Jab videos, “Tree Slaughter” and “My Boss is a D–bag.”

“Finally, the referenced video clearly defames Professor Mann by leaving viewers with the incorrect impression that he falsified data to generate desired results in connection with his research activities,” states the letter, dated March 3. “This false impression irreparably harms Dr. Mann’s personal and professional reputation.”

Dr. Mann is currently under investigation by his own University to determine whether he deviated from “acceptable faculty conduct” and undermined the public trust in his science. However, the inquiry committee dismissed three other allegations, as previously documented in an Accuracy in Academia special report, “Mann Overboard.”

Read the rest of this story at Austrailian Conservative.

By Reuters

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) are scheduled to formally unveil on Wednesday a compromise U.S. climate change bill they want passed this year.

Besides bringing down emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming, it would expand offshore oil drilling and nuclear-power production in a move to appeal to a broader number of senators.

Here are highlights of the bill, called the “American Power Act,” according to a summary of the legislation being circulated to senators and obtained by Reuters:

Carbon emissions reductions
By 2020, carbon pollution would be cut by 17 percent from 2005 levels. By 2050, a reduction of more than 80 percent would be achieved. These are the same goals included in the climate bill passed by the House of Representatives in June. The short-term goal is slightly less than the 20 percent cut approved in November by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The summary did not specify, but sources have said the carbon-reduction requirements on utilities would begin in 2013.

Carbon price collar
Carbon prices would rise at a fixed rate over inflation. Initially, floor and ceiling prices for carbon pollution permits required of electric utilities would be set at $12-$25. The floor would increase at 3 percent annually over inflation and the ceiling at 5 percent annually over inflation.

In the event of unusually high carbon prices, a strategic reserve would ensure the availability of “price-certain allowances.”

Backers aren’t calling it “cap and trade,” but in practice, that is what it appears to be.

Read the rest of this story at Cnet.

Global Warming Hysteria Might be a Crime

By Steve Milloy

Are academics some special subspecies of humans who are beyond suspicion and above the law? That’s the question being played out in a drama between Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the dead-end defenders of global warming’s poster junk scientist, Michael Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli is under assault by the climate-alarmist brigades for launching an investigation into whether any fraud against taxpayers occurred with respect to Mr. Mann’s hiring by the University of Virginia and his receipt of government grants. Mr. Cuccinelli recently sent the university a civil investigative demand requesting e-mails and other documents pertaining to Mr. Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s rationale is simple to understand: Mr. Mann’s claim to fame – the infamous “hockey stick” graph – is so bogus that one cannot help but wonder whether it is intentional fraud.

Developed in the late 1990s, while he was at the University of Massachusetts, Mr. Mann’s hockey-stick graph purports to show that average global temperature over the past millennium was stable until the 20th century, when it spiked up, presumably because of human activity. The hockey stick was latched onto by the alarmist community, incorporated into government and United Nations assessments of climate science and held out to the public (particularly by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth”) as proof that humans were destroying the planet.

But by the mid-2000s the hockey-stick graph was revealed for what it was – pure bunk.

Skeptics first became suspicious because the hockey stick failed to show two well-known periods of dramatic swings in global temperature – the so-called Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Mr. Mann’s indignant refusal to share his data and methods with skeptics only added fuel to the fire. Eventually, skeptics discovered that the hockey stick’s computer model would produce a hockey-stick graph regardless of what data was input. But it gets worse.

Mr. Mann apparently created the hockey stick by cherry-picking data he liked and deleting data he didn’t like. While the vast majority of the hockey stick is based on temperature data extrapolated from tree rings going back hundreds of years, the tip of the blade (representing the late 20th century) was temperature data taken from thermometers. Beyond the obvious apples-and-oranges problem, Mr. Mann appended the thermometer data to the hockey stick at a point at which the tree-ring data actually shows cooling. This cooling trend data was then deleted. This is what is referred to by the now-famous “Climategate” phrase “Mike’s Nature trick to … hide the decline.”

Read the rest of this piece at the Washington Times.

Damn the Data; Full Speed Ahead!

By Dr. Pat Michaels

Climategate, Copenhagen, Snowmageddon in the nation’s capital, the EPA ruling that CO2 endangers us all, and Senate Republicans pushing for a global-warming tax. Has it been a great run-up to Earth Day, or what?

Never has a public-policy agenda been pursued with so little regard for scientific fact or public opinion. In March, 48 percent of Americans agreed that global warming, while real, is exaggerated. When Gallup first asked this question in 1997, only 31 percent thought the threat exaggerated.

Despite this shift in sentiment, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and John Kerry (D., Mass.) and President Obama insist upon ramming a new global-warming tax (called a “fee”) through the Senate. The bill is slated to be introduced next week, and vulnerable Democrats — weary already from the pugilistic health-care debate — are fleeing the legislation in droves.

And for the measure’s primary backers, the backdrop of recent developments on the climate-science landscape could not possibly be less fortuitous.

Climategate revealed that a small but influential coterie of climate scientists did everything they could to present messy global-warming data as a “nice tidy story,” meticulously crafted to “hide the decline” in tree-ring-based temperatures. (I use quotes because those are the words of the warming-alarmist scientists themselves.)

The fact is that tree rings are pretty poor indicators of annual warmth, especially in recent years. Dendrochronologists call this the “divergence” problem (cynics call it other names). Phil Jones, the central figure in Climategate, actually eliminated the “divergence” rather than “hiding the decline.”

Read the rest of this article at National Review.

Despite an all-out attempt by the environmentalist lobby and mainstream media to blame Americans for supposed man-made climate change new polling finds rational thought and scientific literacy are winning out on the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, a grassroots advocate of property rights and economic progress warns officials Thursday.

“The ‘man-made global warming’ hoax is going the way of bloodletting and witch burning,” said Donny Ferguson, Western Tradition Partnership’s National Director of Media and Public Relations.  “Americans know environmentalism is nothing more than discredited socialism hiding behind a mask of junk science.”

Rasmussen Reports polling released this week finds belief in so-called “man-made global warming” and support for the environmentalist agenda at all-time lows.  The polls were conducted independently by Rasmussen and were not conducted or paid for by any group or individual.

A Rasmussen poll released Tuesday finds only 16 percent of adults say national leaders should focus on stopping global warming instead of creating jobs. A whopping 72 percent of adults say creating jobs is the bigger priority.

“This should be a warning to any public official considering voting for carbon taxes, land grabs or other environmentalist schemes.  The American people are on to you.  They know advocating capitalism and protecting private property are best for the Earth and humans,” said Ferguson.

The poll also found 59 percent of Americans are aware there is significant scientific disagreement with the politically-motivated theory of “man-made global warming.”  Only 25 percent think scientists agree on the issue.  Sixty-five percent of adults who consider themselves politically independent say there is no scientific consensus in favor of supposed “man-made global warming.”

Another Rasmussen poll released Monday finds the number of voters who consider global warming a serious problem has dropped eight percent from a year ago.

Rasmussen finds “43 percent now say global warming is not serious…the number who say global warming is not serious at all is at its highest level measured in regular tracking in over a year. The overall number of voters who question the seriousness of global warming crossed into the 40s for the first time in January. Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters say global warming is caused by long-term planetary trends, while only 33% blame human activity.”

The poll found 48 percent of voters say any climate change is the result of natural planetary trends, a statement backed up by billions of years of scientific data.  Only 33 percent think human activity like lightbulb use can cause long-term, global-scale climate change.

“Belief that human activity is the primary cause of global warming has declined significantly. In April 2008, the numbers were nearly the mirror image of the current findings. At that time, 47% blamed human activity, while only 34% named long-term planetary trends as the reason for climate change,” Rasmussen reported Monday.

“Americans oppose the radical environmentalist agenda, and they want their public officials to agree with them,” said Ferguson.

WTP is a fast-growing, grassroots-supported non-profit organization advocating rational, responsible natural resource development and land use policy.  For more information, go to http://www.westerntradition.org.  For more information on this issue, or to schedule an interview, contact Donny Ferguson at 703-200-3669 or at donny.f@westerntradition.org.