Power-hungry TVs will be banned from store shelves in California after state regulators adopted a first-in-the nation mandate to lower electricity demand.

On a unanimous vote, the California Energy Commission on Wednesday required all new televisions up to 58 inches to be more energy efficient beginning in 2011. The requirement will be tougher in 2013, and only a quarter of all TVs on the market currently meet that standard.

And then I found out that Los Federales did the same thing.

There will be three consequences of the Nannyfornia law. 1st, the costs will skyrocket for those that meet the standards. 2nd, people will go out of state, or even down to Mexico, to purchase their TV’s. 3rd, there will be fewer choices. I witnessed something similar first hand in NJ back in the day when they jacked the taxes on automobiles. So, people went to Pa., NY, and Delaware to purchase. Cars in NJ were on short supply. Dealers were going out of business. NJ repealed those taxes quickly, though. Something like this will never go away.

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Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asserted at a hearing this year that Mr. Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

The Goracle responded with the ultimate in socialist chutzpah:

“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” Mr. Gore said. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”

But then, that’s how business is done, in a world run by the likes of Al Gore. You convince your government cronies to force people to pay for whatever you have to sell. The “green revolution” extolled by the Slimes will come about when all the green has been transferred from those who produce wealth to those who have friends in Big Government.

Bureaucrats just shoveled over $560 million of our money at Silver Spring Networks, in which Gore’s Kleiner Perkins outfit has invested heavily. He’s also working plenty of other angles:

He is a founder of Generation Investment Management, based in London and run by David Blood, a former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (the firm was quickly dubbed Blood and Gore). Mr. Gore earns a partner’s salary at Kleiner Perkins. He has substantial personal finances invested at both firms, officials of the companies said. …

Mr. Gore’s spokeswoman would not give a figure for his current net worth, but the scale of his wealth is evident in a single investment of $35 million in Capricorn Investment Group, a private equity fund started by his friend Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay. …

He has a stake in the world’s pre-eminent carbon credit trading market and in an array of companies in bio-fuels, sustainable fish farming, electric vehicles and solar power.

Capricorn holds a major stake in Falcon Waterfree Technologies, the world’s leading maker of waterless urinals. Generation has holdings in Ausra, a solar energy company based in California, and Camco, a British firm that develops carbon dioxide emissions reduction projects. Kleiner Perkins has a green ventures fund with nearly $1 billion invested in renewable energy and efficiency concerns.

In short, if it’s economically useless but likely to be subsidized if not imposed by the watermelons running our government, Gore is getting a fat cut from it. He needs the money to pay his gargantuan power bills.

His next big project: a $300 million campaign to ban fossil fuels in electricity production within 10 years. Since windmills and pixie dust just don’t work, and nuclear power is frowned upon by moonbats, where the electricity will come from is something for people to worry about later — like how to pay for all the government subsidies to inefficient ecokook technology.

On a tip from Charles O. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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When Obama said that his stimulation package has created 1 million jobs, did he include Chinese jobs in the calculation?

China’s manufacturing sector expanded at its fastest rate in 18 months in October, the eighth straight month of expansion, and Obama just happens to have gotten back to trying to push cap-and-trade last week.

The actual amount of new jobs stimulation has created is… Well, 2.7 million have been lost.

We should remember that Obama thought the unemployment rate would only reach 9 percent if the stimulation package didn’t pass.

Again, it’s just a question of who is going to be stimulated.

With our two trillion deficit, other nations’ currencies are being stimulated, the Euro having hit $1.50 on the dollar last month.

If we ever want to buy energy in the future–not that we will if cap-and-trade passes–we will have to convert our worthless dollar now that it’s not being used for oil trading.

All the new energy jobs that cap-and-trade is going to create? Well, China is building one clean coal plant a month.

We could probably profit off clean energy, too, having 27% of the world’s coal reserves, but Obama would rather kill jobs and bankrupt the industry (his own words) than support the clean coal alternatives he lied about supporting during the campaign.

It strikes some as odd that even in a time of great job loss, when he’s bragging about how many jobs his accountants created, that Obama would knowingly push forward with this plan to raise energy rates instead of creating jobs. He’s been reaching out to the communists in Cuba, Venezuela, and Honduras, so maybe this is his latest diplomatic efforts to a communist nation, along with refusing to meet the Dalai Lama, or maybe it’s just his concessions to China in return for them holding up our increasing debt.

Or maybe it’s part of his reward to China for winning Al Gore’s support with their CO2 reduction programs.

Gore has said, “Chinese leaders are mobilizing a national effort to introduce CO2 reduction initiatives, and have already begun the largest tree-planting program the world has ever seen.”

As has been noted, their CO2 reduction efforts involve building one coal plant a month.

As for their tree-planting efforts, only 15% have survived, and they have been counting shrubs as trees.

Counting trees like Democrats count stimulus jobs.

China’s “Great Green Wall” stimulus plan has been ongoing since 1978 and has 42 years left to go. That must be what Paul Krugman is talking about when he says the stimulus hasn’t been big enough.

All this talk about stimulus is on top of the healthcare bill the Democrats still haven’t passed. Maybe if they do it right, they can stimulate the Canadian healthcare industry, which has been losing jobs for some time to people seeking healthcare in America.

Everyone around the world loves Obama. I can see why.

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President Barack Obama signed an executive order earlier this month requiring federal agencies to set a 2020 greenhouse gas emission reduction target within 90 days – and he followed up by asking  “our brave men and women in uniform” and government employees to compete in the GreenGov Challenge.

“As the largest consumer of energy in the U.S. economy, the federal government can and should lead by example when it comes to creating innovative ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase energy efficiency, conserve water, reduce waste, and use environmentally responsible products and technologies,” Obama said when he signed the order on Oct. 5.

Maybe Obama should be the one to set an example first. He can reduce his own carbon footprint by chilling out on the number of flights by AF1 for campaign stops, trips to have lunch with the Mrs., and jetting to Europe to pimp the Olympics. Oh, and turn down the thermostat as it gets colder. He could reduce the number and size of the vehicles that follow and drive him and the family around. Turn the lights off in the rooms he isn’t using in the White House. Oh, wait, sorry, reducing CO2 output is always for someone else. My Bad.

“This Executive Order builds on the momentum of the Recovery Act to help create a clean energy economy and demonstrates the Federal government’s commitment, over and above what is already being done, to reducing emissions and saving money,” he added.

????? I thought the Porkulus was to put people back to work????????

“Some of the top ideas will be presented to the Steering Committee on Federal Sustainability – a group comprised of a senior official from each agency who is responsible for delivering among other things, each agency’s sustainability plan,” the contest announcement says.

In other words, Obama, as usual, has outsourced this program to everyone else, it will take a long, long time, and it will be long on talk, short on action, just like all his other initiatives. But, remember, with those on the Left, intentions are what matter. Results? Eh. Whatever.

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For years, leading plaintiffs’ lawyers have promised a legal assault on industrial America for contributing to global warming.

So far, the trial bar has had limited success. The hurdles to such suits are pretty obvious: How do you apportion fault and link particular plaintiffs’ injuries to the pollution emitted by a particular group of defendants?

Today, though, plaintiffs’ lawyers may be a gloating a bit, after a favorable ruling Friday from the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, which is regarded as one of the more conservative circuit courts in the country.  Here’s a link to the ruling.

The suit was brought by landowners in Mississippi, who claim that oil and coal companies emitted greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming that, in turn, caused a rise in sea levels, adding to Hurricane Katrina’s ferocity. (See photo of Bay St. Louis, Miss., after the storm.)

For a nice overview of the ruling, and its significance in the climate change battle, check out this blog post by J. Russell Jackson, a Skadden Arps partner who specializes in mass tort litigation. The post likens the Katrina plaintiffs’ claims, which set out a chain of causation, to the litigation equivalent of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

At first blush, this looks like just another meaningless and hysterical law suit, but, think about this for a moment. The plaintiffs are going to have to provide actual, factual, relevant, and meaningful evidence, and actually debate the merits of man made global warming in the public eye. The defense will be able to provide relevant, factual, and meaningful evidence, such as the “no warming in the last 10 years” information, all in the public eye. If the climahysteric plaintiffs lose, this could be a major slap in the face for the AGW movement.

Al Gore has been challenged to debate after debate after debate, yet, refuses to engage in one. The Washington Posts’ Andrew Freeman chickened out on a debate with Climate Depot’s Marc Morano. The US Chamber of Commerce called for a climate trial, and, rather than anyone taking them up on it, they were demonized. Lord Monckton has offered to debate any climate alarmist, and none will take him on. Perhaps this trial will shed some reality on the situation, and finally put to rest the notion of anthropogenic climate change. Until they bring it back up in a few years, of course.

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With enough technological advances, the world could get to a dramatically lower level of greenhouse gas emissions at a cost of between one and three percent of global GDP per year, according to a report issued Tuesday by a group of economists. That price tag is in line with previous economic estimates aimed at meeting more modest climate goals.

Eh. It’s only a 1-3 percent loss of GDP. Globally. No big deal. We can all live with walking to work, buying a smaller house, being unemployed, knitting clothes for our kids, right?

The authors of the report assumed that a doubling of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere would translate into an average global temperature rise of 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, twice as much as what some traditional climate models have suggested. According to their analysis, policymakers could reduce carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million by either 2100 or 2200.

Hmm, it’s sounding like those “economists” – and, I thought only climatologists were allowed to chime in? – have a bit of an agenda. That can’t be right, right? The media would never trumpet anyone with any sort of bias, right? Just who are these economists that wrote the report for The Economics for Equality and The Environment (E3 Network)?

Economists in the E3 Network believe:

• A clean and safe environment is a birthright of every person. It is not a commodity to be distributed on the basis of purchasing power, nor a privilege to be distributed on the basis of political power.
• Safeguarding the natural environment is inseparable from promoting social justice. Without a fair distribution of wealth and power, neither the free market nor government regulation will guarantee environmental quality and human well-being.
• Today’s environmental challenges demand new thinking. By engaging with real-world problems economists can help craft effective solutions and build a more just and sustainable future.

To these ends, we assist democratic and participatory decision-making in public policies to protect people and the environment.

Ah. Far Left Progressives. Who receive their funding from the Ecotrust, a group whose mission creep turned them from people concerned about the environment into a group concerned with “social justice.” Which also feeds off of tax payer money.

A group of eight leading climate economists has a message for United States senators now considering a bill to cap emissions: don’t think of long-term mitigation costs as a massive expenditure, but rather a form of reasonably-priced “planetary climate insurance.”

Only left wing climate alarmists would call for destroying the world wide economy in the name of “planetary climate insurance.” Do you ever get the feeling that they aren’t really thinking about the best interests of actual people? You can certainly expect energy prices to rise significantly, since those “alternative energy sources” are barely viable. Too bad more and more and more actual scientists are coming out to say that the whole AGW movement is the same that comes from the backside of a cow.

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Successful countries are called upon to severely restrict economic activity; backwards hellholes — usually ruled by socialist tyrants — face no such restrictions. But that’s not enough to guarantee equal poverty for all, so they slipped in a clause on page 122 decreeing that some countries will be expected to:

(a) Compensate for damage to the [less developed countries'] economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees;

(b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.

The environmental refugee business is science fiction out of an Al Gore fever dream, but the damage to our economy if we are forced to buy “opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity” for the entire Third World with our economy shackled in pointless CO2 restrictions will be quite real. The phrase “environmental justice” is Newspeak for “spreading the wealth around” until there isn’t any left to spread, while masking the injustice in sanctimonious ecofreak blather.

Liberal elitists dream of a one-world government under the thumb of which everyone but them is a half-starved, powerless peasant with zero chance of ever accomplishing anything, because anything we create will only be expropriated. The United Nations exists for a single purpose: to make this nightmare come true. Comrade Obama is on board with the program, as is every last liar in the governmedia who pays lip service to the nonexistent global warming crisis.

Via What’s Up With That? On a tip from WUWT reader. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara warned on Wednesday the 2016 Olympics could be the last Games, with global warming an immediate threat to mankind.

“It could be that the 2016 Games are the last Olympics in the history of mankind,” Ishihara told reporters at a Tokyo 2016 press event ahead of the vote.

“Global warming is getting worse. We have to come up with measures without which Olympic Games could not last long.

“Scientists have said we have passed the point of no return,” said Ishihara.

Is Chicken Little Syndrome contagious? Can they come up with a shot for it? Or, perhaps, a smack with ye olde cluebat? Meanwhile, even the NY Times notices something missing from the Kerry-Boxer AGW bill

Senate leaders, in unveiling their long-expected climate bill today, followed the lead of their colleagues in the House: the word “climate” is not mentioned in the bill’s title. How far things have come, or retreated, since the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, the Safe Climate Act of 2007 or even the Climate Security Act of 2008.

The avoidance of the C word in the bill’s title, “ Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” seems at odds with the urgent arguments put forward by backers of the legislation that emissions are climbing and climate is changing more drastically than previously predicted.

As the Times points out, it could have something to do with the fact that people place climate change WAAAAAAAY down on the lists of things people care about. Down at the bottom of the article, we also see more phrase changing. It’s almost like Boxer and Kerry are afraid to tell the truth.

Over to higher energy prices

President Barack Obama’s administration put the brakes on 79 applications for surface coal mining permits in four states Wednesday, saying they would violate the Clean Water Act.

Without the coal, energy prices will go up. Law of supply and demand. It’s what Obama said he wanted to do, and he was speaking specifically about coal fired plants. Oh, and let’s not forget about the job and health insurance losses that will come with this. Obama’s Porkulus in reverse.

In other AGW news

• CIA Opens Center on Climate Change and National Security
• Inhofe Responds to EPA Announcement on Climate
• Breathtakingly stupid climate fraud from Kerry and Boxer

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A climate change bill circulating in the Senate on Tuesday is slightly more ambitious than one passed in the House of Representatives, but still has many details to be worked out on how to encourage companies to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases.

The legislation by Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry to be formally unveiled on Wednesday aims to reduce smokestack emissions of carbon dioxide by 20 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050 — from 2005 levels.

Sweet! And, such transparency! Halp us Jon Carry, halp us!

Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee is expected to continue working behind closed doors to fill in other details before trying to sign off on the bill by the end of October.

John McCain has already stated he could never support this legislation, and James Inhofe said that he cannot imagine it being debated and passed this year.

The Senate Democrats’ bill also aims to encourage more “clean vehicles” and to improve airliners’ fuel efficiency. It also would help those who suffer job losses from climate control efforts with a “worker adjustment assistance” program.

With a wave of the mighty fairy wand and some unicorn poots, all will be well. As Bob Ellis at The Dakota Voice writes

This bill would cost millions of American jobs, raise our electric bills by 40% or more, hinder much-needed refining capacity, hurt foreign trade, block much-needed power plant development, require home inspections and environmental retrofitting before we can sell our homes, regulate how much water we can use in our own homes,

Courtesy of the Green Hell Blog, we have a look at the draft of the Senate version of the cap and trade global warming tax bill.

Apparently, not to be outdone by the asininity and hostility toward the American people of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate has upped the ante and called for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases, even more egregious than the House bill.

All this to “fix” a problem that doesn’t even exist!

Whether it exists or not, bottom line, Democrats see this issue as a way of controlling more of America’s economy, its businesses, and its People.

BTW, just be thankful I didn’t add one of my special Barbara Boxer photoshops!

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It’s official. It’s getting hot down here. And if we don’t stop burning oil and coal, the Big Apple will be cooked.

According to a high tech study commissioned by a concerned Mayor Bloomberg and generously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, climate change caused by human-created greenhouse gases is threatening the health, livelihood and security of New Yorkers—especially those who take the subway to work.

The New York City Panel on Climate Change, led by an elite? team of NASA scientists and climate experts from Columbia, CUNY and Rutgers, has concluded that unless carbon emissions are drastically reduced all over the world, New York faces dangerous increases in temperature (up to 7.5 degrees), extreme weather (hurricanes and intense storms) and sea level rise (as much as 4.5 feet).

And it continues on in that vein for quite some time. I’d ask the writer to pony up some real evidence, but, I do not think they have anyone actually named “Staff Writer” working for them. I guess no one wanted to actually take credit for the story, realizing just how unbelievably absurd it actually it. All you need to see is the picture at the story to realize how far beyond even Al Gore’s alarmism this story goes.

Meanwhile, Steven Chu says no biscuit for you

Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

“The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” (In that case, the Energy Department has a few renegade teens of its own.)

You realize that he basically just called most of the American public idiots, right? Apparently, you aren’t allowed to think for yourselves, you just need to follow the Official Party Line, Comrades, and do as Dear Leader says.

Anyhow, good news! Supermodel Gisele Bundchen has become the U.N. Environmental Ambassador. And, the U.N. has no problem using kids to push their scientific fraud (via Tom Nelson)

Well, it’s a darn good think she practices what she preaches. Wait, what? She is a helicopter pilot, burning lots of fossil fuels? Huh? She owns a private plane, too, so she can “bop from the US to Sao Paulo to Paris without worrying about connections or waiting in lines?” It’s no wonder AGW ranks dead last among issues facing the country in the latest Bloomberg poll when those who are Climate Alarmists do not walk the talk.

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