This Week in Climate News

Ho-hum, another day, another solar power company in bankruptcy, this time in down in Australia, and for the same reason: the subsidies ran out.  Instead of calling it “green energy,” maybe we should just start calling it “socialist energy” because it has the same flaw: sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.

I noted last week the Climate Inquisition’s success in forcing the resignation of the editor of the Journal of Remote Sensing, who for some reason declined to suggest that the offending Spencer-Braswell paper be withdrawn, as is the usual procedure if a paper is later determined to be wrong.  There’s a good long commentary and analysis of this whole matter from blogger William Briggs (“Statistician to the Stars”—I like that) that is worth reading.

Meanwhile Financial Times columnist Peter Foster has an interesting bit comparing climate orthodoxy to Keynesian economic orthodoxy—a comparison that had not occurred to me but which makes complete sense.

A question I frequently get from time to time is how much the U.S. government is spending on the whole climate change racket, and the answer is: nobody knows.  One sign that the matter has got completely out of hand is that nearly every government bureau has a climate program, because who wants to be left out of this action, especially if it means money.  One estimate a couple years ago from the Science and Public Policy Institute put the number up around $7 billion in 2009, and cumulatively at $79 billion since the whole bandwagon got rolling in the late 1980s.  (By contrast, the U.S. spent a total of about $500 million for the decade-long acid rain study in the 1980s—up to that point the largest scientific study of an environmental problem.)

There’s a new report just out from the Government Accountability Office that puts the number at $8.8 billion in 2010, and a cumulative $103 billion since 2003.  Your tax dollars at work.

Oh, and while we’re at it: remember the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (“reggie,” for short), the effort of northeastern states to demonstrate that cap and trade could work?  Looks like it is slowly collapsing.  I’m sure the New York Times and the major TV network news programs will be right on this.

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