Author Archive

The walls are crumbling. Science is winning. Economic armageddon is averted.

Over the weekend, the Toronto Sun reported that James Lovelock had shocked the world with his recantation of global warming hysteria. In a piece entitled Green ‘drivel’ Exposed, writer Lorrie Goldstein notes the ‘godfather’ admitted, to MSNBC in an interview 2 months ago, to having “been unduly “alarmist” about climate change. Unlike many “environmentalists,” who have degrees in political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at age 92, was a much-honoured working scientist and academic. Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

Elsewhere, The Telegraph reports Fritz Vahrenholt, one of Germany’s earliest green energy investors, is no longer convinced that humanity is the primary cause of “catastrophic” global warming.

For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN’s climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.

Finally, reporting on RIO-20, the globalists “sustainable development” summit held in Brazil, The Independent tagged the latest in a seemingly-never-ending series of junckets for the illuminati “a hoax that accomplished nothing.” At least by their inaction the delegates kept trillions of dollars in the pockets of people who’ve actually earned it.

Climategate: Scientists, Governments, Private Industry Conspire to Fool the World, Susanne Posel;Infowars.com;June 22, 2012

The American Tradition Institute (ATI), through their Environmental Law Center (ELC), have requested a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that the University of Virginia release emails and specified files that display correspondence and communications sent and received by Mann while during his tenure at UV.

ATI’s Senior Fellow Greg Walcher writes on his website:

The U.S. economic recovery from the Great Recession is tepid at best. The nation’s economic growth for the first quarter was a paltry 2.2 percent, well below expectations. Foreclosures and the inability to get financing are dampening hopes for new housing starts. Gasoline prices are pinching family budgets. This month’s unemployment figures released yesterday, show virtually no change.

With more than 20 million Americans either seeking work, under-employed, or giving up entirely on finding a job, one would think that aiding the economy and putting workers back on a payroll would be Washington’s primary focus. Although the oil and natural gas industry holds great promise for creating well-paying jobs, the federal government seems intent upon preventing its growth and success.

The United States has huge deposits of oil and natural gas to be developed. A study by the analytical firm Wood MacKenzie calculates that just increasing access to currently underdeveloped regions could result in nearly 700,000 new jobs in the United States by 2030. Moreover, data show that the oil and gas industry provides some of the best-paying jobs in the country.

In his State of the Union speech in January, President Obama spoke of the need to increase domestic energy production, specifically mentioning increasing oil and natural gas production. With a growing population that will need more energy, the oil and gas sector can be an engine of job creation that can help pull the economy out of the doldrums – as the President said.

Consider the scale of the oil and gas industry’s contribution to the national economy. Just in 2010 the industry invested $266 billion in new projects and enhancements to refineries and other facilities. It paid out $176 billion to 2.1 million U.S. employees and oil and gas leaseholders. Another $35 billion was returned as dividends to investors, which include many of the nation’s pension and retirement funds, and $31 billion was paid in government taxes, royalties and fees. In total, that is equal to more than half of the Obama “stimulus” plan spending.

But it appears the Administration’s actions will not match its rhetoric. Despite the President’s call for an “all of the above” energy strategy, ten separate federal departments and agencies are considering regulations on hydraulic fracturing, the technology without which the sharp increases in domestic oil and natural production would not be possible. It is, in truth, more of a “none of the above” strategy.

Although the President recently signed an executive order creating a task force to coordinate these regulatory actions, the drive for more regulations seems unstoppable. The American Petroleum Institute says that “adding potentially redundant federal regulation could stifle the kind of investment that has led to lower energy prices for consumers, more American jobs, and increased energy security.”

In my home state of Colorado, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has prompted criticism over its proposal to scale back the amount of acreage available for oil shale and tar sands development. The boards of three counties have passed resolutions against the BLM’s plan, demanding more public input. The Mesa County statement claims BLM has been hijacked “by a host of anti-oil shale pro-wilderness groups steering BLM’s every move.” Sound melodramatic?

Consider that the estimated 1.5 trillion barrels of oil in the Piceance Basin shale formation exceeds all of the known oil reserves of the entire world – yet is still largely off limits under current federal policy.

Even without it, Colorado’s promising Niobrara shale formation and other energy activity is helping to fill America’s energy needs and creating jobs. It’s estimated that the oil and gas industry already employs 50,000 Coloradans directly, and indirectly supports 190,000 more jobs. But the state’s energy potential could be cut short by piling on additional federal regulations, while walling off some of our most energy-rich lands.

If we really want to create jobs, shouldn’t we ramp up domestic energy production, rather than slow it down?

For Immediate Release:

Contact: Sean Parnell

571-289-1374

[email protected]

American Tradition Institute Responds to Misleading Guardian Article

May 9, 2012 – The American Tradition Institute (ATI), a nonprofit 501(c)3 think tank advocating for free-market environmentalism, sought to correct the misleading and inaccurate implication of an article that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian online, “Conservative thinktanks step up attacks against Obama’s clean energy strategy” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/08/conservative-thinktanks-obama-energy-plans). The article incorrectly implies that a recently disclosed memo concerning taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies for wind energy titled ‘National PR Campaign Proposal’ edited by ATI Senior Fellow John Droz, Jr. is an ATI document.

“While we would be pleased to be part of any education campaign to inform the public about the problems with expensive, unreliable wind energy and why taxpayers and ratepayers should not be forced to subsidize an uneconomical form of energy, the memo is not an ATI document, it is something that John Droz, Jr. did entirely on his own,” said Tom Tanton, ATI’s Executive Director. “ATI has been a longtime skeptic of policies that give big taxpayer subsidies to industrial wind energy and force ratepayers to pay higher electric bills, and we applaud the initiative shown by Droz to independently begin formulating an educational campaign on this issue.”

As a result of the misleading Guardian article, several environmental extremist groups and sympathetic blogs have falsely claimed that the memo was an ATI product (see: ‘The Guardian Exposes Fossil Funded Groups Coordinating Renewable Energy Attacks’ at DeSmogBlog.com and ‘Shocking New Oil Propaganda Plan to Fool Americans’ at HuffingtonPost.com).

“The article is clearly intended to whip up further animosity and hysteria against groups that challenge the need for high-cost energy that has no meaningful environmental benefit,” said Dr. David Schnare, Legal Center Director at ATI. “The article really only gets two material points right — opponents of forcing taxpayers and ratepayers to subsidize industrial wind talk to each other, and ATI is at the forefront of educating the public on this issue.”

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ALEC Releases Economy Derailed: State-by-State Impacts of the EPA Regulatory Train Wreck, by ATI Fellow Todd Wynn

Washington, DC- April 23, 2012¬- For the past 42 years, Earth Day has been used to draw attention to environmental issues. In honor of Earth Day 2012, ALEC has released Economy Derailed: State-by-State Impacts of the EPA Regulatory Train Wreck celebrating the true story of America’s clean air and water successes by highlighting improvements in environmental quality over the past three decades. However, Economy Derailed also exposes the risks posed by the EPA’s recent regulatory onslaught. This excessive regulatory campaign has little to do with public health yet will have an immense impact on American quality of life.

Economy Derailed reveals that numerous EPA regulations are causing the shutdown of power plants across the nation, destroying jobs, raising energy costs, and decreasing reliability of electricity. Ranked according to potential job loss, the top ten states most impacted by the EPA are Illinois, West Virginia, Ohio, Alabama, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina – all of which could shed over 20,000 jobs. Illinois will be the worst hit with jobs at risk totaling 38,382.

“Never before has the EPA undertaken such an immense regulatory assault on the production of affordable and reliable energy,” notes Economy Derailed author and ALEC’s Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force Director Todd Wynn. “The EPA is depriving Americans of desperately needed jobs and making it more difficult for families to make ends meet. Ironically, by increasing the cost of energy, the EPA’s actions will have dangerous unintended consequences for the health of all Americans.”

Major findings in the report include:

• Environmental quality in the United States continues to improve, despite the doomsday rhetoric coming from the EPA and environmental groups. Mercury, carbon monoxide, ozone, lead, nitrogen oxide, particulates, fine particulates, and sulfur dioxide have all decreased in both ambient concentrations in the atmosphere and in total emissions.

• Electricity rates could increase 10.35 percent on average due to just five EPA regulations. Eleven states could see rate increases of over 20 percent. The state of Iowa has the highest potential rate increase at 32 percent.

• Over 100 power plants across the nation could be shut down due to pending EPA regulations. Ohio would be the worst hit with 13 power plants being retired early. Illinois is expected to lose the most total electricity generation: over 8,000 megawatts or enough energy to power over 6 million homes.

• A broad and diverse coalition – representing millions of workers, companies, state legislators and state officials across the country – have openly voiced opposition to escalating EPA expansion.

“States need to get involved in pushing back against EPA overreach that is threatening economic growth, and the standard of living of Americans in every state”, declared ALEC Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force Chair Representative David Wolkins (IN).

ALEC’s Economy Derailed: State-by-State Impacts of the EPA Regulatory Train Wreck is available at www.regulatorytrainwreck.com.

Roanoke Times, April 1, 2012 This week’s topic: Should faculty emails be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act?

Point: Faculty emails should not be exempt from FOIA

David W. Schnare

Schnare is director of The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center

Roanoke Times, April 1, 2012 This week’s topic: Should faculty emails be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act?

Point: Faculty emails should not be exempt from FOIA

David W. Schnare

Schnare is director of The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center.

In a little-noticed paragraph after the famous “military-industrial complex” warning, President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address cautioned: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Based on faculty emails, we see Ike’s fear proving to be well-founded, especially with respect to global warming.

Because university faculties have always been closed, exclusive and highly self-protective tribal societies, few tools exist to peek behind the ivy-covered walls. For public universities, state Freedom of Information laws offer citizens the means to see how these public servants spend the people’s money.

The tension is between the right of citizens to monitor the work of their employees and the need for faculty to be able to conduct research without undue interference before it is published. The American Association of University Professors has recently suggested that faculty simply be exempted from FOIA so that their discussion of research not be “chilled” by those who paid for it.

If completely exempted, the Lysenkoism of a small academic clique revealed by “Climategate” emails would never have been exposed. Those emails revealed this clique barred publication of research challenging their own conclusions. Nor could the public have found out that a North Carolina faculty member used grant funds for projects other than intended and hid this from the grantor. And, as President Eisenhower feared, formation of critical global warming policy has been kept secret at a time when public inspection of the foundation of those policies was most needed.

A recent Virginia FOIA request found that at one university, of 15 professors conducting research, not one kept a research log. In one case, a professor could not duplicate his findings for lack of such research discipline. Without FOIA, this execrable faculty misbehavior would never have been uncovered.

Nevertheless, faculty need the freedom to be curious without undue interference. Thus, emails about research should not be subject to FOIA prior to publication of the research, but should be available upon publication. Where research has not produced a publication, records should remain protected as long as the research is under way, but no longer. Current law respects this. All other emails on official accounts are rightly subject to FOIA. Faculty thereby have the incentive they need to be ethical and otherwise professional, while both the public and other scholars have the opportunities to learn and extend knowledge. Faculty should embrace this.

Counterpoint: Balancing academic freedom and the public’s right to know

Kathi Westcott

Westcott is senior counsel to the American Association of University Professors.

The American Association of University Professors, founded in 1915, has a long history of supporting public access to information. Indeed, as teachers and researchers, the calling of the association’s members is to impart knowledge to others. Our foundational statement on academic freedom holds “[t]he common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” Academic freedom — or freedom in research, teaching and participation in institutional decision-making — is essential to these purposes. It may seem counterintuitive to suppose that Freedom of Information requests can be at odds with academic freedom. However, we have found that this can be the case.

The United States Supreme Court has also long recognized the importance of academic freedom in a democratic society. In the 1950s, when faculty members who refused to sign loyalty oaths or disclose political affiliations were being summarily fired, or worse, the Supreme Court articulated a clear link between academic freedom and a free society:

“Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.” Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957)

The link between academic freedom and our democracy is as essential today as it was in the 1950s era loyalty hearings and in the 1990s when tobacco companies used open records requests attempting to influence scholarly research about cigarette advertising.

Academic discussions between colleagues near and far are meant to test theories and assist in proving and disproving hypotheses. The ability of scholars and teachers to freely exchange communications relevant to their scholarship and teaching is central to a valid peer review system.

The goal is to produce the best possible results — and achieving this goal depends on an open, unfettered exchange of ideas. Efforts to use FOI and public records requests to selectively divert portions of academic communications (for example, about climate change theories) for the purpose of publicizing incomplete information, out of context, disrupts the academic process and has a chilling effect on future academic work. This hurts all of us.

Distinctions are logically made between requests deserving production of documents (for example, requests for information about a public institution’s finances) and those requests where information is exempt from disclosure. Virginia’s statute provides for the exemption of records related to academic research.

The public good is served by preserving academic freedom through the use of statutory exemptions or a balancing approach which recognizes that requests for faculty emails related to scholarship and research requires a heightened justification because of their intrusive and potentially chilling nature.

Schnare’s rebuttal:

Four hundred and fifty words permits a writer to identify a problem but not offer much of a solution. Thus, this “rebuttal” is not so much a rebuttal as an offering to the academy on how to understand and preserve academic freedom while preserving the citizens’ rights to government documents.

The starting point has to be an understanding as to who “owns” the public records of a public university, which includes all emails stored on university computers. These do not belong to the professors as these emails are merely “copies,” no different from file copies of correspondence routinely found in government files. Nor, interestingly, do these emails belong to the University. They belong to the Commonwealth – in other words, to the citizens of the state. As found in Freedom of Information Acts (FOIAs), the university is the “custodian” of the emails, not the owner.

Under FOIA, the University has multiple duties. One is to conserve and provide the emails for use by the owners – the citizens. Another is to protect the citizen’s interests in the records by not making them public if, in so doing, it works against the public interest. Hence, under FOIAs, there are “exemptions” that allow the custodian to hold back emails under FOIA. What might they hold back, and for how long?

Public universities are competitors within the market-place of ideas, which includes the market-place for grant money. Emails that reflect the preparation of grant requests, the actual research and the preparation of final papers and reports should not be released until after decisions on the grants are made or the final papers and reports are published. To release them would give away the competitive advantage the university holds. Once research is completed and either published or rejected by the peer-reviewed literature, or abandoned, or once it has simply become stale and no longer of interest to the market-place of that particular kind of research, the emails no longer hold value that surmounts the public’s potential interest in them and then they should be released.

Why release these emails? There are many reasons, although FOIAs usually require no reason at all. After all, there are the citizens’ records and they have a statutory right to look at the records they paid for. However, there is an important academic reason to have such records available to all. They still contain information that is only valuable if released to the public.

Communications on research contain discussion on the dead-ends, the missteps, the false starts, the alternative ideas and similar detritus of research. This grist of the research process never appears in final reports and publications, but academics who work in the subject area want and need such information. It promotes efficiency in research. While the original researchers have learned their lessons, they have a duty to share those lessons with their academic community and release of such emails is the only means to do so. Indeed, without their release, the market-place of ideas is poorer and cannot benefit from the new investigator whose creativity may be sparked by the unused thought of the earlier generation.

There are many other academic opportunities resting within such emails, including analysis of peer tribalism, for example. It would be an intellectual crime to disallow the academy from having the opportunities that might arise from the ashes of old endeavors on the false assumption that a public university must, forever, hide the challenges faced by an academic as she works through a problem and produces knowledge. Knowledge is not free and to hide knowledge cannot be the intent of academic freedom.

Westcott’s rebuttal:

Unpublished scholarly communications should not be made available through public records requests because these communications go to the very heart of the academic discovery process. A process so vital to the development of new, unique and sometimes controversial scholarship and teaching that it is not only protected by Academic Freedom but also by Virginia’s own public records law. Virginia’s law exempts data and records related to scholarly work conducted at public colleges and universities “where such data, records or information has not been publicly released, published, copyrighted or patented.”

It appears as though ATI seeks to intrude into those communications that ultimately were never published at the conclusion of Professor Mann’s research. These types of “behind the scenes” communications allow faculty members to refine their work and ultimately publish that information which has been peer reviewed and found to be sound. Professor Mann’s climate research has been independently reviewed more than a half dozen times with every panel concluding that his work is and was sound. The distorted picture painted by ATI and other interested parties has not panned out. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, ATI continues to pursue legitimately protected communications that are essential to the development of new research whose conclusions benefit all of society. It is hard to view these efforts as anything but an attempt to chill research with which ATI and others disagree.

Lord Monckton Debunks Global ‘Warming’, MARCH 22, 2012, By KATY GRIMES in CalWatchdog

Monckton, together with Tom Tanton, a renewable energy expert and special consultant to the energy and technology industries [and Executive Director of ATI], testified to a packed room in a special legislative hearing Wednesday on climate change and carbon trade. Tanton and Monckton gave an even more detailed presentation at an event later that evening.