Payne: Millennials New 'Sins'

"If you speak to the average 20-something or Millennial about the concept of sin," writes Daniel Payne @ thefederalist.com, "you may be treated to a kind of quasi-Unitarian dismissal of the concept, a sort of uncomfortable rejection of the notion of ecclesiastical proscription in any sense: 'I’m very spiritual,' you’ll hear a lot, 'but not religious'."

Yet the Millennials, having sloughed off the religious notions of their parents and grandparents—at least one-third of Generation Yers are more or less without religion—have taken it upon themselves to adopt a new set of mandates and dictates to guide their lives.

Call them the “new sins,” a number of commandments by which one might stay on the narrow way. The old interdictions now cast aside, a new series of injunctions must be obeyed: and like most religions and denominations, adherence to these commandments is held sacrosanct, any deviation from them fairly blasphemous.

Read The New Sins of 'Nonjudgmental' Millennials for Payne's take on Millennials'

• climate change dogma;
• the church of gay sex; and
• the priestly class of Washington DC.

Think Twice Before Killing Coal

"When it comes to discussions about energy and climate change, we need a lot more numbers and a lot less hyperbole and wishful thinking," argues Robert Bryce at NRO.

The green Left continues to push the claim that the reason there’s been no major action to cut carbon dioxide emissions is that some evil cabal — quarterbacked by climate “denialists” who have a “hostility to science” — has been blocking change. (By the way, that’s exactly what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed on June 9.)

The reality — as shown by the numbers — is far different. Coal, oil, and natural gas continue to supply about 87 percent of all global energy because those sources are able to provide the vast amounts of energy the world needs at prices consumers can afford. And for developing countries in particular, coal remains the fuel of choice because it is cheap and abundant, deposits are geographically widespread, and its price is not influenced by an OPEC-style cartel.

We can discuss the need for more action on climate change. But in doing so, we must also recognize that the U.S. has been leading the world in reducing its carbon dioxide emissions. Between 2005 and 2013, according to the BP numbers, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell by 8.7 percent. For comparison, emissions in Germany, which has spent about $100 billion on subsidies for renewables, have fallen by 4.6 percent. But the numbers in absolute terms are even starker. Since 2005, U.S. emissions have fallen by 563 million tons. That’s 17 times the reduction seen in Germany, where emissions have fallen by 40 million tons since 2005.

Meanwhile, since 2005, China’s emissions have grown by 71 percent, or about 3.9 billion tons, which is about six times the total reductions achieved in the U.S. and Germany. In the Middle East, emissions have jumped by about 600 million tons, an increase that effectively cancels out the combined reductions achieved in both the U.S. and Germany since 2005.

The punch line here is obvious: Numbers don’t lie. And when it comes to discussions about energy and climate change, we need a lot more numbers and a lot less hyperbole and wishful thinking.

Dunn: Obama is Bursting the Left's Bubbles

Conservatives live adult-like in a world as it is. Liberals live child-like in a world of their dreams, and Obama is bursting the left's bubbles, writes J.R. Dunn.

Everyone, without exception, lives in a bubble, an area of individual consciousness made up of education, experience, and worldview. ...

But left-wing intellectual bubbles have been cold, desolate places since the Reagan era. With the catastrophe of the Great Society, the undeniable success of Reaganism, and at last the collapse of the USSR, leftist illusions were shattered, leaving little but blasted dreams and bitterness,  expressed as PC and related programs that amounted to little more than gestures of revenge.

Then came Obama, who brought it all back to life again.

Under Obama, however, Leftists' glorious dreams have turned to nightmares, and Dunn cites several examples: the military 'illusion', foreign policy, the 'surveillance state', 'climate change', and government-run health care.

The best way to undermine leftism is to let it operate for awhile. Expose the country at large to the nightmare realities of life under a Lyndon Johnson, a Jimmy Carter, or an Obama, and you will inoculate the citizenry for a generation to come.

This is occurring. We are seeing the utter collapse of the leftism program as it exists in the U.S., a collapse merely intensified and sped up by the fact that the Messiah has cut every corner and broken every rule of American governance. His abuse of pen and phone have so far produced only chaos. There is no reason to believe the next two years will be any different.

And all those bubbles?  They’ll begin to dim and cool down once again. The inhabitants -- the millions of true-believing Birkenstock wearers across the country -- will attempt to keep their spirits up with tales of betrayal and racism, but it won’t last. Eventually they will reach the same state they were in before Obama ever appeared. There they will remain, because the one thing Obama will have done is reinforce the legend of a leftist rebirth. These people will now never emerge into a real America. Instead they will wait for the appearance of a true messiah, sleeping until Der Tag in the same manner as Charlemagne or Barbarossa.

Ethanol Produces More Pollution Than Gasoline

"Well, this is going to be a heartbreaker for the hysterical global warming crowd," writes Katie Pavlich. "According to a new study, emissions from burning corn are worse for the environment and produce more CO2 or 'global warming' gases than the burning of traditional gasoline." She quotes from the AP story:

Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration's conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change.

A $500,000 study paid for by the federal government and released Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change concludes that biofuels made with corn residue release 7 percent more greenhouse gases in the early years compared with conventional gasoline.

Moore: Game Up for Climate Change Believers

In a review of Rupert Darwall's new book, The Age of Global Warming, Charles Moore offers a helpful summary of an era of catastrophic global warming predictions that ended last month with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report's admission that "the answer to the problems of climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation." [Fox News reporter Doug McKelway filed this news report on the latest IPCC study and Washington's reaction to it.]

Most of us pay some attention to the weather forecast. If it says it will rain in your area tomorrow, it probably will. But if it says the same for a month, let alone a year, later, it is much less likely to be right. There are too many imponderables.

The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming ... has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. ...

Like most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been inflicted on us over the past 30 years or so in the name of saving the planet.

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. ...

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. ... The G7 Summit in Toronto in 1988 endorsed the theory of global warming. In the same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up. The capture of the world’s elites was under way.  Its high point was the Kyoto Summit in 1998 ...

The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. ...The warmists’ idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. ... The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have “the green crap”, but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard.

Last week, the latest IPCC report made the usual warnings about climate change, but behind its rhetoric was a huge concession. The answer to the problems of climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation, it admitted. So the game is up. 

Will: Perfect Climate for Liberals

George Will on Obama's $1 billion "Climate Resilience Fund:

Viewed through the proper prism, most liberal policies succeed because they can hardly fail. Each achieves one or both of two objectives — making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.

Consider Barack Obama’s renewed anxiety about global warming, increasingly called “climate change” during the approximately 15 years warming has become annoyingly difficult to detect. Obama says “the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.”  ...

When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side. Obama is, however, quite right that climate change is a fact. The climate is always changing: It is not what it was during the Medieval Warm Period (ninth to 13th centuries) or the Little Ice Age (about 1500-1850). ...

Climate alarmism validates the progressive impulse to micromanage others’ lives — their light bulbs, showerheads, toilets, appliances, automobiles, etc. Although this is a nuisance, it distracts liberals from more serious mischief. And conservatives incensed about Obama’s proposed $1 billion “climate resilience fund” — enough for nearly two Solyndra-scale crony capitalism debacles — should welcome an Obama brainstorm that costs only a single billion.

Read Perfect Climate for Liberals.

Hayward: Green Energy Bubble Bursting Everywhere

"The green energy bubble "is bursting loudest at the moment, and as usual environmentalists are slow to see that they're about to get run over by a revival of the hydrocarbon economy," writes John Hayward at powerlineblog.com. "Those old dinosaurs may have been big lumbering animals, but the nimble fossil fuels they threw off are crushing the so-called green “fuels of the future” beloved of fruit-juice drinkers and vegans everywhere." Three examples:

• The New York Times reported "Obama pushed hard for the final approval of Shell Oil's long sought permit to begin drilling in a new offshore oil field in Alaska."
• "Obama has grown very quiet about climate change ... He's not attending the UN's 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit that started the whole climate diplomacy circus."
• Germany's "pledge to phase out nuclear power is looking increasingly unrealistic" and "some leading Social Democrats have called for building ... more coal-fired power plants."

Concludes Hayward:  "Have a nice day, green weenies. Your party is over. Deal with it."

Scientists Chastise NASA on its Man-Made Global Warming Advocacy

NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. got a letter from 49 former NASA scientists, engineers, and astronauts last week "admonishing the agency for it's role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into questions." The key points made in the letter:

• "The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA's history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements."
• "We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change, are not substantiated."
• "We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject."

Read the full text of the letter.

A Big Blow to Man-Made Climate Change Theory

Environmental extremists who prey on fears of a man-made climate change Armageddon have been busted ... by hard science published in Nature, the world's most prestigious scientific journal.  "New, convincing evidence," writes Lawrence Solomon, "indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun -- not humans."