“We can’t have an energy strategy that traps us in the past,” President Obama proclaimed in March 2012. “We need an energy strategy for the future – an all-of-the-above strategy for the Twenty-First Century that develops every source of American-made energy.” 

At first blush, this sounds like common sense. The US economy and lifestyle “depend on inexpensive and plentiful energy,” the Congressional Research Service noted in a 2005 report, but people tend to forget this until world events cause gasoline prices to spike. Then Washington reacts, CRS continued – passing the Energy Policy Acts of 1992, 2005 and 2007. However, the US still does not have a “comprehensive long-term energy policy” that balances increasing supply with conservation and defines the proper interplay between government and market forces.

EU policy makers have grossly underestimated the difficulties and risks of their drive to decarbonise the power sector. They have failed to take into account the huge changes in the economic, commodity and financial environments and adjust policy accordingly. A crisis in UK energy policy looks increasingly likely and therefore utility companies and investors would be prudent in limiting their future exposure. --Peter Atherton and Guillaume Redgwell, Liberum Capital, 30 April 2013

When the crisis hits there will be three possible casualties, the government of the day, the consumer, and the investors who have funded the government’s radical energy policy. Whilst no doubt there will be plenty of pain to go around, in our view investors should be under no illusions that the government of the day will seek to protect itself and the consumer (who are also the electorate) by heaping most of the financial pain on to investors. --Peter Atherton and Guillaume Redgwell, Liberum Capital, 30 April 2013

© Egidijus Mika | Dreamstime Stock PhotosApparently, global warming has left the building. It’s May 1, and 5 inches of snow are predicted for the Rockies.

Temperatures hit 70 in the region on Monday. But in a few days, residents will need to bring back the winter coats, CNN reported.

“Crazy temperature contrast,” said meteorologist Kathy Sabine, in CNN.

Watch Full Morano interview here.

Ezra Levant speaks with Climate Depot’s Marc Morano on April 29, 2013 about James Hansen who has turned to calling Canada’s government names.

Selected Excerpts from Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano’s interview on Sun News: 

Family fears about the rising cost of living have soared in the last year, according an official government study.

Three in five people are worried about being able to pay rising energy bills while almost a third are concerned about being able to meet mortgage repayments.

But in response to the survey, Energy Secretary Ed Davey claimed that ‘climate change issues’ were uppermost in people’s minds, despite just five per cent of people saying it was the top challenge facing the country.

Gas and electricity charges are up to 7.6 per cent higher than a year ago, keeping inflation its highest level since May 2012.

The latest public attitudes tracker reveals worries about energy bills are higher than at any point since the research began a year ago.

Trofim Lysenko became the Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin.  He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from the changed plants, which sharply contradicted Mendelian genetics.  As a result, Lysenko became a fierce critic of theories of the then rising modern genetics.

Under Lysenko’s view, for example, grafting branches of one plant species onto another could create new plant hybrids that would be perpetuated by the descendants of the grafted plant.  Or modifications made to seeds would be inherited by later generations stemming from that seed.  Or that plucking all the leaves off of a plant would cause descendants of the plant to be leafless.

…snip…

After a 16-month investigation, state regulators Monday said that natural gas fracking, contrary to highly publicized claims, isn’t to blame for high methane levels in three families’ drinking water in a northern Pennsylvania town.

For fracking proponents, it was another piece of good news. The oil and gas industry still was unwrapping the federal government’s acknowledgment that fracking isn’t nearly as harmful to the environment as it previously claimed. By dramatically lowering its methane emissions estimates from natural gas drilling sites, the Environmental Protection Agency has made it much more difficult to argue that the fracking boom is accelerating climate change.

The developments Monday in Franklin Forks, Pa., also will make it much more difficult to argue that the wildly successful drilling method is harmful to drinking water.

Another powerful negative-feedback mechanism which acts to reduce the effects of global warming has been identified, as scientists say that rising temperatures cause plants to emit higher levels of planet-cooling aerosols.

"Aerosol effects on climate are one of the main uncertainties in climate models," explains Pauli Paasonen of Helsinki uni. "Understanding this mechanism could help us reduce those uncertainties and make the models better."

Aerosols - suspended particles - in the atmosphere have various effects. Black carbon soot absorbs sunlight and heats the world up, but most other kinds of aerosol tend to cool things down, mostly by presenting nuclei for clouds to form on and so reflecting heat back into space. There is widespread scientific agreement, even among firmly pro-warmist researchers, that aerosols have powerful effects - but just how much aerosol can be expected in the atmosphere of the future is not at all well known, and current models aren't thought to handle this factor at all well.

The past 17 years of flat global temperatures are creating a big chill for lots of global warming doom-premised industries. Those experiencing cold sweats must certainly include legions of climate scientists who have come to depend upon the many tens of billions of taxpayer bucks for studies that would have little demand without a big crisis for the public to worry about. And that amount pales in comparison with the hundreds of $ billions we spend on generous subsidies, lost tax revenues and inflated consumer costs for otherwise non-competitive “green energy” industries which depend upon those scary climate reports, or the insane economic penalties imposed  upon all segments through EPA’s climate-premised regulatory rampage.

Cooler temperatures blow ill-winds for government bureaucrats, crony-capitalist rent- seekers, and other hucksters whose ambitions depend upon hot air.  Even Western Europe, the cradle of carbon-caused climate craziness and cap-and-trade corruption, is feeling a cold draft. As Alister Doyle, reporting from Reuters in Oslo, recently observed: “Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015 to combat global warming.”

Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to "transactional sex" for survival.

The resolution, from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and a dozen other Democrats, says the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. It says these changes can be particularly harmful for women.