By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
The Food and Drug Administration today said it has " some concern" about a ubiquitous, estrogen-like chemical called BPA, used in consumer products ranging from baby bottles to dental sealants and the linings of metal cans, but the agency didn't call for a ban of the chemical or a change in consumer behavior.
That's a subtle, but significant change from the agency's 2008 position, in which the FDA said that BPA is safe.

BISPHENOL A: What to know about 'everywhere chemical'

Although the FDA stopped short of telling parents to change formulas or throw out old bottles, officials said they are encouraging manufacturers to stop making baby feeding products containing BPA. The agency also wants to help manufacturers to find safer materials to line metal cans of liquid baby formula.

The agency also is looking into ways to expand its authority to regulate BPA, in case scientists do find definitive evidence of harm, says Joshua Sharfstein, the FDA's principal deputy commissioner.

Federal officials say they will continue studying the issue. The National Institutes of Health is investing $30 million in BPA research, whose results should be available within two years. Meanwhile, officials offered suggestions for reducing exposure to BPA, such as not pouring boiling water in plastic bottles, which can cause BPA to leach out.

Yet some environmentalists were frustrated by the FDA announcement, saying that it gives parents mixed messages.

Sarah Janssen, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the FDA should have given parents clear instructions to avoid BPA in food packaging, even as scientists conduct more research. By expressing concern but not banning the chemical, the FDA is likely to confuse parents about the best way to protect their children, she says.

The American Chemistry Council, an industry group, agreed that the FDA announcement may confuse consumers.

While the announcement confirms that " exposure to BPA in food contact products has not been proven harmful to children or adults," the council says it is " disappointed that some of the recommendations are likely to worry consumers and are not well-founded."

Canada has banned BPA in baby bottles, a move that led the six largest manufacturers &mdash which make more than 90% of the baby bottles in the USA &mdash to stop using the chemical, says Sharfstein.

Vist wwww.infinitehealthresources.com for more information on the healthy lifestyle.

The Wall Street Journal - Monday, November 16, 2009

Technology has transformed the office, made it possible to communicate instantly around the globe and put the world's art, music and books at our fingertips. Can it now help improve the environment? Technologists say yes, as they use computing power to save energy, reduce waste and produce power more efficiently. Try our quiz to see how well you know green IT.

1) Which of these roles for information and communications technology has the potential to yield the biggest reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030?
A. Retrofitting existing buildings
B. Designing new buildings for reduced emissions
C. Telecommuting and virtual meetings
D. E-commerce and replacing paper
Answer: D. According to a study by the World Wildlife Fund, a big increase in online shopping and in the use of electronic transactions and documents to replace paper bills and publications could eliminate nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gases a year from the environment. That's about twice the reduction estimated to result from either making existing buildings more efficient or designing new buildings that constantly monitor and adjust air conditioning and heating to minimize waste. More telecommuting and virtual meetings would save about 160 million tons of emissions a year, it estimated.

2) Toyota Motor Sales cut energy use in its Torrance, Calif., data center by 10%. How did it manage that?
A. It stopped keeping track of dealer sales, shutting down four blade servers.
B. It moved all storage to an Amazon.com cloud-computing center.
C. It redirected air flow from air conditioners and separated intake and outflow ducts.
D. It planted heat-absorbing vegetation on the roof.
Answer: C. The Toyota Motor Corp. unit hired International Business Machines Corp. to analyze air flows in the building and their effect on temperature. Air flows can create uneven temperatures in a facility, which results in inefficient temperature control&mdash for instance, bringing hot spots down to the desired temperature takes more cooling than is necessary for the rest of the space. By changing the air-flow patterns, Toyota was able to cut its air-conditioning use.
3) Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular technology for laptops and cellphones, because they are light and long lasting. They also can be disposed of with little environmental impact. What country produces the most lithium?
A. Argentina
B. Bolivia
C. Chile
D. Denmark
Answer: C. Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile SA is the world's largest lithium miner, with mines in Chile and in Argentina, the No. 2 producing country. Bolivia is considered a promising prospect for future development.

4) Match the product, service or initiative with the company that dreamed it up.
A. Dell 1. ecoMeter
B. CA 2. Plant a Tree
C. Lexmark 3. Eco Ultra Small
D. Lenovo 4. Eco-simulator
Answer: A-2. Dell Inc. will plant a tree for each corporate laptop sold under some sales plans. It says each tree will soak up enough carbon dioxide over its projected 70-year life to offset the carbon used in making and powering a computer.
B-1. CA Inc.'s ecoMeter is software that helps chief information officers visualize, monitor and manage the use of energy in data centers and other facilities.
C-4. Eco-simulator is Lexmark International Inc.'s online service that measures the environmental impact of a user's printing.
D-3. Lenovo Group says its M58p Eco Ultra Small desktop contains 10% recycled plastic.

5) What is a zombie server?
A. One that causes so much trouble it is said to scare IT managers out of their wits.
B. One that is running but isn't connected to any live data.
C. One that keeps running even though it has nothing to do.
D. A special server at Amazon.com that serves hit novels to teenage girls.
Answer: C. IT managers trying to understand why their data centers use so much electricity sometimes find that they have a number of servers that produce hardly any useful work. These servers sometimes were authorized for an ambitious sales campaign or other project that never achieved its goals but never was completely shut down. Such servers are good candidates for elimination, with their jobs to be taken up by other servers with computing power to spare. A study of four unidentified data centers by McKinsey and Co. discovered that 146 of 458 servers were running at less than 3% of capacity.

6) What is the fastest-growing source of energy consumption in data centers?
A. High-end servers
B. Midrange servers
C. Networking devices
D. Storage devices
Answer: D. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, storage devices' consumption of electricity grew 191% between 2000 and 2006. Over that period, storage devices rose from consuming the least power in the four categories to the most, at 32.3% of energy usage.

7) What area of green technology is likely to offer IT veterans the most new job opportunities?
A. Smart grids
B. Solar-cell development
C. Engineering projects designed to fight global warming
D. Lithium battery development
Answer: A. A January 2009 report by Kema Inc., an energy consulting firm, estimated that in the U.S. alone, smart-grid development efforts could create up to 280,000 jobs directly by 2012. Jobs include installing smart meters in homes and designing software to manage the energy use of networks of homes and businesses more efficiently.
IT-networking skills match up neatly with smart-grid work, according to CleanEdge.com, a jobs Web site.

8) Match the high-tech company with the organization that ranked it No. 1 in some aspect of environmental responsibility.
A. Hewlett-Packard 1. Greenpeace
B. IBM 2. Newsweek
C. Intel 3. Environmental
Protection Agency
Answer: A-2. Hewlett-Packard Co. took the top spot in Newsweek's 2009 Green Rankings of the 500 largest companies in the U.S.
B-1. IBM was atop the " leaderboard" of Greenpeace's CoolIT Challenge, due to " an extensive range of climate solutions and action to reduce its own emissions."
C-3. The EPA said Intel Corp. was the biggest purchaser of renewable energy last year, accounting for 48% of its power.

9) What percentage of corporate PC users leave their computers on nights and weekends when they aren't in use?
A. About half
B. Hardly anyone
C. About 25%
D. Almost everyone
Answer: A. According to the nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy, less than half of corporate PC users shut their computers down overnight, even though they aren't using them. Turning them off would save an estimated 20 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions a year&mdash roughly equivalent to the impact of four million cars.

10) What makes Windows 7 greener than Vista and other older Windows operating systems?
A. Microsoft prints the product manual on recycled paper.
B. It won't run on high-energy microprocessors.
C. It reduces processor activity while the computer is idle.
D. It adjusts for intermittent power from wind turbines and solar panels.
Answer: C. It reduces background activity by electronically checking all connected devices at once and then going to sleep, rather than checking them at random times, which requires a central processor to be in operation almost constantly. It also reduces power consumption in other ways: It can be configured to stop searching for a network connection when a network cable isn't plugged in. It suspends Bluetooth radio connectivity when it senses the Bluetooth device is in low-power mode. And it dims displays after shorter periods of inactivity than previous models.

Investor's Business Daily - November 23, 2009

Junk Science: Hacked e-mails from Britain's Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA's James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact.

For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests.

Now, it turns out, it's the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth.

We don't know who " Deep Throat" is. But according to an interview in Investigate Magazine's TGIF edition with Philip Jones, director of the Hadley Climate Research Unit at Britain's East Anglia University, the incriminating e-mails documenting collusion and fraud among top global warming scientists, including a few from Jones himself, are genuine.

In one e-mail sent to Michael Mann, director of Penn State University's Earth System Science Center, Raymond Bradley, a climatologist at the University of Massachusetts, and Malcolm Hughes, a professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona's Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research, Jones speaks of the " trick" of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:

" I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Hide the decline? " Keith" is Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit, also involved in the bogus manipulation of data.

An e-mail from scientist Mick Kelly to Jones also speaks of manipulating data to hide the fact that Earth is actually cooling: " I'll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again, as that's trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent coldish years."

In another e-mail to Mann from Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, copied to Dr. James Hansen of NASA, Trenberth says: " Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming. We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow."

Trenberth also says: " The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't." He goes on to say that " the data is surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Well, that much is true. We have reported on information obtained by Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat on the inaccuracy of temperature-monitoring stations around the country and the screwy places these scientific stations are located. Daily temperature data are gathered by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center and the 1,221 or so weather observation stations it monitors around the country.

Watts and a few volunteers decided to check a few of them out. They found one station in Forest Grove, Ore., that stands just 10 feet from an air-conditioning exhaust vent. Another station in Roseburg, Ore., is on a rooftop near an AC unit. In Tahoe, Calif., one is near a drum where trash is burned.

When bad numbers aren't enough to show global warming, it's okay to just make them up. Hansen, the NASA scientist who began the climate scare, was himself caught fudging the numbers when he declared October 2008 the warmest October on record.

This despite the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's registering of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranking it the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So how did Hansen claim it was the warmest October ever? As Christopher Booker wrote in the U.K.'s Telegraph: " The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running."

As it turns out, Mann is the creator of the discredited " hockey stick" graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Bradley and Hughes were also involved in the famous graph, which purports to show a sudden and sharp spike in global temperatures the day man first dreamed of taking an SUV to the mall.

Canadian researchers and others have thoroughly debunked the hockey stick, finding serious problems with the study, including calculation errors, data used twice and a faulty computer program that produced a hockey stick out of whatever data were fed into it.

Their study also totally ignored major events such as the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850).

The warming debate was never over, only censored. We have noted how the Environmental Protection Agency has engaged in an ongoing cover-up of its own analyses of climate change and discouraged public dissent.

EPA lawyers Laurie Williams and Alan Zabel produced a video in which they said cap-and-trade is a " Big Lie" and carbon offsets are a " Big Rip-off." At the EPA's insistence, Zabel and Williams took down the video from their Web site, but not before it was copied and widely circulated.

Alan Carlin, senior research analyst at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics, dared to say, in essence, that Emperor Al Gore and his toadies at EPA were wearing no clothes.

After examining numerous global warming studies, Carlin, who holds a doctorate in economics with an undergraduate degree in physics, said his research showed that " available observable data ... invalidate the hypothesis" that humans cause dangerous global warming.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg who has received death threats for citing how Earth's history doesn't quite jibe with current prophecies of doom, says: " CO2 never was a problem, and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing."

Ball says he has " watched climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists." " Surely," he says, " this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the carbon credits shell game."

These inconvenient truths may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The Wall Street Journal - Tuesday, November 24, 2009

'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to " Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.

The " two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions&mdash a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a " unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the " common cause" to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals and to give tips on how to " hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.

A satellite image of Tropical Storm Ida. Some climate researchers claim that an increase in tropical storms is proof of anthropogenic climate change.
Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all. Those who have responded have insisted that the emails reveal nothing more than trivial data discrepancies and procedural debates.

Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn't have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

Consider the following note that appears to have been sent by Mr. Jones to Mr. Mann in May 2008: " Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?" AR4 is shorthand for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, presented in 2007 as the consensus view on how bad man-made climate change has supposedly become.

Read a Selection of the Emails
Climate Science and Candor
In another email that seems to have been sent in September 2007 to Eugene Wahl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Paleoclimatology Program and to Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Climate and Global Dynamics Division, Mr. Jones writes: " [T]ry and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with."

When deleting, doctoring or withholding information didn't work, Mr. Jones suggested an alternative in an August 2008 email to Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, copied to Mr. Mann. " The FOI [Freedom of Information] line we're all using is this," he wrote. " IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI&mdash the skeptics have been told this. Even though we . . . possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part of our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don't have an obligation to pass it on."

It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren't averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. " I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. " Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."

Mr. Mann's main beef was that the journal had published several articles challenging aspects of the anthropogenic theory of global warming.

For the record, when we've asked Mr. Mann in the past about the charge that he and his colleagues suppress opposing views, he has said he " won't dignify that question with a response." Regarding our most recent queries about the hacked emails, he says he " did not manipulate any data in any conceivable way," but he otherwise refuses to answer specific questions. For the record, too, our purpose isn't to gainsay the probity of Mr. Mann's work, much less his right to remain silent.

However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.

&ldquo You can get a Platinum LEED-level home that doesn't look like a rocket ship or cost $500 per square foot,&rdquo Mr. Schmetterer says. &ldquo Modular homes of the past have been uninspired cookie-cutter boxes. We take historically inspired designs and add rigorous green specifications throughout. When a prospective partner or homeowner sets foot in one of our houses, the misconceptions about modular are shattered.&rdquo

&ldquo Our turnaround time is so quick that we don't have to build ahead of the market,&rdquo adds Mr. Jupiter. &ldquo Our only speculative project is the first model home in a development, and that's our sales center. We build subsequent houses on demand, and deliver them in 60 to 90 days at a price of $150 to $200 per square foot.&rdquo

But having a green home is only part of the equation, says Mr. Jupiter. Knowing how to live in it is key to a green operation.
&ldquo That involves an educational process: knowing how to control room sensors, changing filters on the HVAC, optimizing all the appliances and energy settings,&rdquo he says. &ldquo None of this is rocket science it's just a matter of education. People come out of our model centers knowing the difference between not green, green and Platinum LEED.&rdquo

Having a green home is only part of the equation. Knowing how to live in it is key to a green operation.
S. Douglas &ldquo Doug&rdquo Walker, senior vice president of UDR, an apartment REIT, a publicly traded company that develops, buys and owns real estate, based in Highlands Ranch, Colo., says his company decided to focus on green development in the expectation that shareholders and lenders will soon require LEED certification and/or other bona fides, such as the Energy Star rating bestowed by a U.S. government agency.

&ldquo We're invested in 164 communities, comprising 45,249 residential units, in 10 states plus Washington D.C,&rdquo he says. &ldquo In regards to our business model, we develop properties from the ground up, redevelop existing properties, and acquire and sell apartment communities. We've taken a proactive approach when it comes to incorporating green technology into our portfolio. Today, all our new development projects have applied for some level of LEED designation.

&ldquo If we choose to renovate an existing community to make it more energy efficient, we may empty the entire building, retrofit it from top to bottom and re-tenant it, or we might start by working on the common areas that directly reduce our operating expenses. It could be something as simple as adding motion sensors to control the lights, and programmable thermostats. We're also testing LED lights, which have longer life and more efficient output. One drawback to green products is that prices are high due to short supply. Once manufacturing can match the demand prices are likely to go down and more people can benefit from the products.

The Empire State Building &mdash certainly the most iconic building in New York City, and arguably in the whole U.S. &mdash is undergoing a sustainability makeover that its owners hope will qualify it for Gold LEED-EB (LEED for Existing Buildings) certification by 2013. Dan Probst, chairman of energy and sustainability services at Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle, the large global real estate services firm, which is managing the project, says the nearly 80-year-old building has been fairly easy to work on, and greening it has not involved many complicated or high-tech initiatives.

&ldquo It came down to a handful of tasks,&rdquo he says. &ldquo One was upgrading the building's 6,500 windows: adding a suspended coated film and a gas fill between the double panes for better installation. We're adding thermal barriers behind existing radiators, since so much heat had been leaking out of the building. We're doing lighting retrofits that will allow more use of sunlight, with controls that will allow dimming when lights aren't in use.

&ldquo You'd be surprised how much better an old building can be made to perform. This is important because there's demand [from investors, government agencies, lenders, stockholders] for more transparency &mdash more reporting and comparison &mdash in energy use and environmental impact.&rdquo

&ldquo Look for the small changes you can make, then go deeper,&rdquo says Dave Pogue, San Jose, Calif.-based national director of sustainability for CB Richard Ellis, the world's largest real estate services company. &ldquo We're trying to implement a wide range of programs across a portfolio of more than one billion square feet of property we manage in the Americas. Our first job was to understand where our buildings were in terms of sustainability. To do that we worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and embraced their Energy Star program. Second, we've trained more than 2,000 CBRE employees on energy efficiency and sustainability.&rdquo

Perhaps most important to a green initiative is to get tenants on board, Mr. Pogue says, since they'll often be obliged to change their behavior, and, for example, pay more attention to the conservation of energy.

&ldquo Our first phase was aspirational the next was operational and now it's informational,&rdquo he adds. &ldquo We're developing an environmental dashboard that will tell you how your building is performing on various standards of sustainability, including aspects of LEED certification. We plan on introducing this tool by the end of this year.&rdquo

Tenants may be willing to pay a higher rent for a more sustainable building, Mr. Pogue says, and in any event, according to California law, many buildings in that state will soon have to publicly reveal their levels of energy use &mdash a regulation that other states are likely to adopt.

&ldquo This is a growing movement,&rdquo he concludes. &ldquo If you don't improve your buildings to a good standard, there will be a market penalty. We're already at a point where sustainability gives you an edge.&rdquo

Jack Rizzo, chief sustainability officer and head of global construction at ProLogis, an industrial REIT that owns logistics centers world-wide, has devised a global standard that incorporates LEED and various European and Asian equivalents, such as the U.K.'s BRE Environmental Assessment Method. It's relatively easy to gain certification from any individual agency, and combining them to achieve a common standard isn't much extra work, he says.

&ldquo Our tenants lease our buildings on a triple-net basis [where the tenant or lessee agrees to pay all real estate taxes, building insurance and maintenance], so they pay the utilities,&rdquo says Mr. Rizzo, &ldquo so our energy-saving design elements keep their costs down. Our construction costs have risen maybe 1% or 1.5%, since we've started using more recycled product, and costs of development can be slightly higher if you use the greener standards, but our buildings' cost of operations range from 25% to 40% lower as a result.&rdquo

&ldquo If you don't improve your buildings to a good standard, there will be a market penalty.
We're already at a point where sustainability gives you an edge.&rdquo
Some critics claim that buildings that conform to LEED and other standards don't actually perform any better than less-green buildings. But Jack Buettell, global sustainability manager for Hines, a Houston-based property management, investment and development company, says that the practical effectiveness of those standards depends largely on the expertise of the building's operators &mdash and to a lesser extent, tenants.

&ldquo Operating performance is as important as design and construction performance,&rdquo he says. &ldquo It comes down to level of knowledge and experience. We maintain an ongoing list of best practices, tools and tips that we get from our managers all over the world.&rdquo

Several companies have been set up to provide sustainability assistance to real estate developers and investors. One of these is Falls Church, Va.-based JDM Associates, where John Klein, the company's principal, advises owners to &ldquo look for the low-hanging fruit.&rdquo

&ldquo Most important is to benchmark your past and current energy consumption, water use, and your contribution to the waste stream,&rdquo he says. &ldquo Once we understand your consumption, we'll benchmark your operational procedures to find out how efficiently you're operating your facilities. Then we'll work together to find the low and no-cost opportunities to increase efficiency.&rdquo

&ldquo We train and educate property management teams and end-users we also drill down into technologies to ensure that you have the most cost effective and energy efficient lighting and HVAC and are operating them in the most efficient way. It's not expensive to green your building. In fact, it adds green to your bottom line, through greater net operating income and enhanced value.&rdquo

Mr. Klein claims that an older building with older technology that's well run can outperform a new building with the latest technology, if it's poorly run. Well-trained employees who are committed to efficient operations and management are crucial.
Having utility companies on your side is a must, too, says Ken Floyd, vice president of customer solutions at Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based supplier of electrical power and natural gas.

&ldquo Every watt we generate should be the most cost-effective, when factoring in the cost of carbon or environmental impact,&rdquo he says. &ldquo But we need to find ways to reduce consumption so as not to generate a watt. If developers approach us early in the process, in the predesign, we'll embed our experts in the process and help them with the building's design, the day-lighting, the location and design of mechanicals. In many cases we can help with the LEED certification process.

&ldquo One big problem is education and awareness. Getting building tenants and owners to take responsibility for managing their environmental footprint is the biggest challenge.&rdquo

Last week at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Wisconsin, former Vice President Al Gore took questions from journalists about global warming for the first time in years. I attended to ask him about factual errors in his movie, " An Inconvenient Truth."

You wouldn't know it from the sparse media coverage, but the British High Court found so many errors in Gore's movie in 2007 that British schools no longer can show the film without the equivalent of a health warning.

I asked Gore if he intends to correct the record. He dodged the question, and the so-called reporters defended his right to be evasive by shutting off my mic.

The encounter was disappointing but not surprising. I served years of hard time as a liberal journalist in Europe and learned that covering the environmental beat meant toeing the line of extremism &mdash no inconvenient questions allowed.

But it is now time for journalists, and the consumers and businesses that will pay the ultimate price, to start questioning the conventional wisdom about global warming and exposing its true cost. If alarmists like Al Gore get their way, millions of American families will watch as their dreams of a prosperous and pleasant future disappear.

The evidence of environmentalism run amok abounds in Europe. Spain believed the spin that environmental regulation can create " green jobs" and boost the economy. Now the country has 18% unemployment. Britain could suffer blackouts because of policies that require the country to replace coal with fuels like solar and wind power that aren't readily available or reliable.

Unfortunately for Americans, many of the lawmakers who represent them in Congress seem unwilling to learn from Europe's mistakes.

The Senate is now considering a bill that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., co-authored to create a European-style " cap and trade" system for carbon dioxide emissions, and he just won the endorsement of a key swing senator. International pressure on the United States to adopt such legislation also will increase in December at climate talks in Copenhagen.

That's bad news for taxpayers. The Obama administration reluctantly admitted last month that cap-and-trade would cost the average American family $1,761 a year.

That is a rosy prediction. A Heritage Foundation analysis pegs the cost at an average of $2,979 a year and as much as $4,600 a year by 2035. Jobs will disappear, energy prices will skyrocket, and the American Dream will become an unattainable fantasy for many.

Wealthy environmental elites like Ed Begley Jr., who is featured in our documentary " Not Evil Just Wrong," think that is just fine. They love to tell everyone how " happy" people are in the Third World, where poverty, disease and premature deaths are common. But if they really loved it, they would move themselves and their families to Fiji and burn all of their passports.

Instead, environmentalists live comfortably, flying around the world telling other people they should forsake air travel and drive cars that cost as much as many people pay for a place to live. All the while, the environmentalists try to scare people with stories about dying polar bears and lemurs.

Their hysteria knows no bounds. The British government is now spending nearly $10 million to air ads that feature an animated puppy drowning, a rabbit crying and a carbon monster spewing soot from the sky.

The ad is so laughable that even the journal Nature mocked it. But Britain wouldn't be spending that kind of money unless it expected a return on the investment in the form of new converts to the false doctrine of global warming.

That's why it's so important for journalists who inform the public to ask tough questions, both about the science behind global warming and the financial impact on consumers and businesses.

Americans had better hope their country's journalists start grilling Gore and his colleagues. Otherwise, more people will be misled, and the country will be feeling Europe's green-induced economic pains for years.

It's a tall order: Over the next few decades, the world will need to wean itself from dependence on fossil fuels and drastically reduce greenhouse gases. Current technology will take us only so far major breakthroughs are required.

What might those breakthroughs be? Here's a look at five technologies that, if successful, could radically change the world energy picture.

They present enormous opportunities. The ability to tap power from space, for instance, could jump-start whole new industries. Technology that can trap and store carbon dioxide from coal-fired plants would rejuvenate older ones.

Success isn't assured, of course. The technologies present difficult engineering challenges, and some require big scientific leaps in lab-created materials or genetically modified plants. And innovations have to be delivered at a cost that doesn't make energy much more expensive. If all of that can be done, any one of these technologies could be a game-changer.

SPACE-BASED SOLAR POWER

For more than three decades, visionaries have imagined tapping solar power where the sun always shines&mdash in space. If we could place giant solar panels in orbit around the Earth, and beam even a fraction of the available energy back to Earth, they could deliver nonstop electricity to any place on the planet.

The technology may sound like science fiction, but it's simple: Solar panels in orbit about 22,000 miles up beam energy in the form of microwaves to earth, where it's turned into electricity and plugged into the grid. (The low-powered beams are considered safe.) A ground receiving station a mile in diameter could deliver about 1,000 megawatts&mdash enough to power on average about 1,000 U.S. homes.

The cost of sending solar collectors into space is the biggest obstacle, so it's necessary to design a system lightweight enough to require only a few launches. A handful of countries and companies aim to deliver space-based power as early as a decade from now.

ADVANCED CAR BATTERIES

Electrifying vehicles could slash petroleum use and help clean the air (if electric power shifts to low-carbon fuels like wind or nuclear). But it's going to take better batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries, common in laptops, are favored for next-generation plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. They're more powerful than other auto batteries, but they're expensive and still don't go far on a charge the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid coming next year, can run about 40 miles on batteries alone. Ideally, electric cars will get closer to 400 miles on a charge. While improvements are possible, lithium-ion's potential is limited.

One alternative, lithium-air, promises 10 times the performance of lithium-ion batteries and could deliver about the same amount of energy, pound for pound, as gasoline. A lithium-air battery pulls oxygen from the air for its charge, so the device can be smaller and more lightweight. A handful of labs are working on the technology, but scientists think that without a breakthrough they could be a decade away from commercialization.

UTILITY STORAGE

Everybody's rooting for wind and solar power. How could you not? But wind and solar are use-it-or-lose-it resources. To make any kind of difference, they need better storage.

Scientists are attacking the problem from a host of angles&mdash all of which are still problematic. One, for instance, uses power produced when the wind is blowing to compress air in underground chambers the air is fed into gas-fired turbines to make them run more efficiently. One of the obstacles: finding big, usable, underground caverns.

Similarly, giant batteries can absorb wind energy for later use, but some existing technologies are expensive, and others aren't very efficient. While researchers are looking at new materials to improve performance, giant technical leaps aren't likely.

Lithium-ion technology may hold the greatest promise for grid storage, where it doesn't have as many limitations as for autos. As performance improves and prices come down, utilities could distribute small, powerful lithium-ion batteries around the edge of the grid, closer to customers. There, they could store excess power from renewables and help smooth small fluctuations in power, making the grid more efficient and reducing the need for backup fossil-fuel plants. And utilities can piggy-back on research efforts for vehicle batteries.

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE

Keeping coal as an abundant source of power means slashing the amount of carbon dioxide it produces. That could mean new, more efficient power plants. But trapping C02 from existing plants&mdash about two billion tons a year&mdash would be the real game-changer.

Techniques for modest-scale CO2 capture exist, but applying them to big power plants would reduce the plants' output by a third and double the cost of producing power. So scientists are looking into experimental technologies that could cut emissions by 90% while limiting cost increases.

Nearly all are in the early stages, and it's too early to tell which method will win out. One promising technique burns coal and purified oxygen in the form of a metal oxide, rather than air this produces an easier-to-capture concentrated stream of CO2 with little loss of plant efficiency. The technology has been demonstrated in small-scale pilots, and will be tried in a one-megawatt test plant next year. But it might not be ready for commercial use until 2020.

NEXT-GENERATION BIOFUELS

One way to wean ourselves from oil is to come up with renewable sources of transportation fuel. That means a new generation of biofuels made from nonfood crops.

Researchers are devising ways to turn lumber and crop wastes, garbage and inedible perennials like switchgrass into competitively priced fuels. But the most promising next-generation biofuel comes from algae.

Algae grow fast, consume carbon dioxide and can generate more than 5,000 gallons a year per acre of biofuel, compared with 350 gallons a year for corn-based ethanol. Algae-based fuel can be added directly into existing refining and distribution systems in theory, the U.S. could produce enough of it to meet all of the nation's transportation needs.

But it's early. Dozens of companies have begun pilot projects and small-scale production. But producing algae biofuels in quantity means finding reliable sources of inexpensive nutrients and water, managing pathogens that could reduce yield, and developing and cultivating the most productive algae strains.

Going Clean

It's well known as a major investor in wind- and solar-energy projects. But General Electric Co. also hopes its growing role as a venture capitalist will give it an edge in a broader spectrum of emerging green technologies.

Since its first investment, in lithium-ion battery maker A123Systems Inc. in January 2006, the venture-capital group at GE Energy Financial Services has put $160 million into a portfolio of 20 companies focused on renewable energy, power-grid and energy-efficiency improvements, and, to a lesser extent, advanced oil and gas technologies.

GE sees these later-stage, clean-energy start-ups as a way to get a sneak peek at emerging technologies. Through its venture arm, it also gets a piece of the ones it believes will be ahead of the pack in the global shift to a reduced-carbon economy.

Kevin Skillern, the VC group's managing director, says it's too early " to tell if we've turned one dollar into two or three dollars." But at GE, there's another key metric: technology. Mr. Skillern says GE is also interested in how the portfolio companies can help its businesses.

" This is a vehicle that provides our larger company with a window into what could be a $15 billion to $20 billion industry in emerging energy technologies," he says.

Mr. Skillern, who grew up in Houston and worked for more than a decade in the oil industry, got his M.B.A. at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. He went back to the oil patch after he graduated, at a time when many of his classmates were pursuing Internet start-ups. But the seed of venture investing had been planted, and GE Energy Financial Services' venture capital was the perfect new patch to let it grow.

We met with Mr. Skillern at GE Energy Financial Services' offices in Stamford, Conn., to discuss how the large conglomerate is influencing the clean- technology industry through its venture investing. Excerpts from that conversation follow.

Seeking Relationships

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Were there any particular challenges for GE to get into clean-technology venture-capital investing?

Julian Puckett

Kevin Skillern of GE Energy Financial

KEVIN SKILLERN: We've had to upgrade the relationships with the major investment firms. In this type of investing, we're doing it as a group of investors, as a syndicate, so relationships are paramount. Only about 5% to 10% of the investments make the vast bulk of the profits, ultimately, so clearly you want to be having relationships with the best investors, the best firms.

When we started this endeavor, we were not well known as an investor in this domain, and the big companies are not always perceived positively by other financial investors. There's a lot of suspicion and concern, and we certainly didn't have a reputation of being a world-class partner. Another aspect to that is, as one investor at a top-three firm told me, " Aren't you the ones we're trying to beat? Aren't we trying to disrupt GE?"

There's been a change in philosophy toward GE and other large companies from the investment community, as well as the companies, as they realize the challenges of scaling up these businesses into very large, challenging markets. And I don't think it's just the market environment that has been the catalyst for this change.

WSJ: What is your investment selection process?

MR. SKILLERN: We see probably 1,000 to 1,500 business plans a year, and the selection process is similar to other financial investors. There are three simple factors that are the drivers of valuation: Is the market large and compelling? Is the technology transformational? And are there an adequate number of A-players in the management team that will build an enduring business?

The extra factors that matter for GE have to do more with the scope [of the technology] and how strong a fit it is with different aspects of GE. Ideally we'd love to see both a technical collaboration opportunity, where there is some value to be added beyond the capital, as well as a commercial collaboration opportunity in markets that matter to us.

Adding Value

WSJ: What value is added by GE?

MR. SKILLERN: There's a commercial value that we add, of trying to sell their products to GE and to GE customers. There's getting access to senior decision-makers. There are joint going-to-market programs.

On a technical basis, we have what's considered one of the world's leading corporate research centers that really is our secret weapon in valuation of companies. Then, on the expertise side, these companies are scaling up, looking for project finance, looking for how to fund themselves, to access government grants. So we're pretty smart advisers on some areas where conventional investors wouldn't have that kind of expertise.

As an example, there's a company in California called Soliant Energy. They're an emerging leader in rooftop concentrated photovoltaic systems. When you put the system together, you have to solder, and whiskers [stringy threads resulting from the heat] come up. That causes a problem, because too many of them could lead the unit to short circuit. We were able to go to our appliances business that has the exact same issue, but had already studied it. So we saved [Soliant] months of work and thousands of dollars to provide a quick insight because we are connected within our company.

WSJ: With GE being such a vast company, it's hard to imagine that there aren't silos that prevent the collaboration you talk about with the portfolio companies.

MR. SKILLERN: GE is a very progressive company and very thoughtful about what's going on in the world. If there's a better mousetrap, we want to know about it, and we want to work with the people who have the better mousetrap.

People are interested in trying to be involved and seeing what's happening at the leading edge of these areas. What that enthusiasm has enabled, is that through our vehicle, we fostered relationships with what we call the top 100 emerging technologies stakeholders across GE in all these different areas that matter&mdash from carbon capture, to biomass, to wind and solar, even biofuels and water.

Battery Bet

WSJ: One of your group's major investments has been in the lithium-ion battery maker A123Systems&mdash a $70 million investment. Is that a bet in the electrification of transportation?

MR. SKILLERN: Our view is that this electrification trend is obviously a significant and enduring one.

Ultimately, the question for the electric vehicle is whether or not the capacity that's being installed and the technology development make the cost come down in a way that gets to that price point that allows very deep penetration. The magic number in the U.S. market: If it would end up with a price premium over conventional vehicles of $5,000 to $6,000 for the batteries, the uptake on that type of price premium, we think, would be very high. And our collective view has been that the likelihood of that panning out in the U.S. market is pretty high.

WSJ: How do you view the rise in government policies to regulate carbon emissions?

MR. SKILLERN: It is a driver of the macro opportunity but in very specific instances it's almost never the individual driver of any of these technologies today. I'd predict that over the next several years you'll see more opportunities that are driven specifically by the carbon policy.

We're starting to see some compelling technology in this area. You have companies that are developing alternative carbon-capture approaches, you have companies that are developing infrastructure that's designed to help move carbon dioxide around the world, you have companies that are developing services to account for carbon footprint.

It's not something that our group has made an investment in to this point, but I'd be surprised if we didn't make an investment or several investments in this area over the next 12 to 24 months.

The biofuels industry, hit hard by the global credit crunch, is getting a shot in the arm from a new source-the oil majors.

Among the oil companies, BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC have been the most active investors in the sector. But it's even beginning to attract more-conservative companies like Exxon Mobil Corp., whose chief executive, Rex Tillerson, once famously dismissed corn-based ethanol as " moonshine." Exxon announced in July it was investing $600 million in an algae-to-fuel start-up, Synthetic Genomics Inc.

" It was a major signal to the biofuels industry," says Bruce Jamerson, chief executive of Mascoma Corp., a producer of cellulosic ethanol, which is made from inedible plant materials.

Big Oil and biotech may seem an odd combination. Oil companies' profits are driven by traditional, fossil-based gasoline and diesel. Biofuels are alternatives that have a marginal market presence. So why switch to switchgrass?

The answer is the low-carbon policies now being put in place across the developed world. In the U.S., for example, the Renewable Fuels Standard mandates growth in annual sales of biofuels through 2022. The Department of Energy expects U.S. production of biofuels to increase from less than half a million barrels a day in 2007 to 2.3 million barrels a day in 2030. Inevitably, that will erode the oil majors' conventional business.

Choren Industries hopes to produce 18 million liters of biodiesel a year from wood residue.
." The oil companies&hellip see a world of restrictions coming on high-carbon fuels, and they need alternatives," says Mr. Jamerson.

Making the Cut
The biofuels industry also is benefiting from a sharper investment focus among the big oil companies. For years, companies like BP and Shell had a scattershot approach, investing across the entire clean-energy spectrum. BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, describes the company's initial policy as " a thousand flowers blooming all over the world." But last year, he says, the company began narrowing its investments down to those that it considers commercially viable and a good match with its existing business. Biofuels made the cut, in part because they fit nicely into the company's existing infrastructure of refineries, pipelines and distribution networks.

" Oil companies have a natural affinity for the biofuels business," says Katrina Landis, head of BP's Alternative Energy division. Combining their knowledge of how to produce and market transportation fuels with the potential of biotech start-ups creates a " very powerful partnership," she says.

Shell made a similar move, announcing in March that it wouldn't be expanding its wind and solar portfolio, and would concentrate instead on biofuels along with carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a technology to counter global warming by trapping carbon dioxide from the emissions of power plants and burying it deep underground.

Within biofuels, the majors have largely eschewed corn-based ethanol to focus on the next generation of fuels, which don't rely on food crops. They're mostly producing fuel from cellulose, the fibrous backbone of plants.

BP, for instance, has a joint venture with Verenium Corp., a maker of cellulosic ethanol. Chevron Corp. has one with lumber giant Weyerhaeuser Co. to make fuel from biomass such as switchgrass, a prairie grass native to the southeastern U.S. And Shell is working with Canada's Iogen Corp. to produce fuel from wheat straw, and with Choren Industries GmbH of Germany to make fuel from wood residue.

.Peanuts or Seeds?
Some in the industry are dismissive of the funds the majors are committing. " It's less than peanuts for them, given the size of their investment budgets," says Steen Riisgaard, head of Novozymes AS, a Danish company that provides enzymes used in the production of bioethanol.

Shell, for example, has spent about $1.7 billion on alternative energy and carbon-emission-reducing technologies like CCS in the past five years, while its total capital investment budget last year was $32 billion. BP's investments in alternative energy totaled $1.4 billion last year, about 6% of its capital-expenditure budget for the year, and will fall to between $500 million and $1 billion this year as the global economic slowdown saps demand for energy.

But others think of the current level of investment as just the start of a long-term trend. " The bigger investments will come beginning next year, when commercial deployments start to gain pace," says Carlos Riva, chief executive of Verenium.

" The investment in dollar terms doesn't tell the whole story," adds Mr. Riva. Another key contribution is the " management skills [the oil majors] bring, in terms of design and engineering and the delivery of large-scale commercial projects."

" That's something the biofuels industry really needs," he says.

Ultimately, some industry insiders see a future of integrated biorefineries, where the majors will have a suite of low-carbon products they can blend at varying strengths for different markets.

For now, though, the majors are maintaining a cautious stance even as they invest in biofuels, a position shared by industry analysts. " It's an exciting area, but it's unproven," says Angus McCrone, senior analyst at New Energy Finance Ltd., an alternative-energy research firm. " We still don't know if you can produce them at a cost that's economic.&hellip It's a gamble."

But a number of public-health advocates have already come up with what they think is the solution: heavy taxes on some routine foods and beverages that they have decided are high in calories. The taxes, the advocates acknowledge, are intended to limit consumption of targeted foods and help you to accept the diet that they have determined is best.

In cities and states across America&mdash and even at the federal level&mdash this idea is getting increased attention despite its regressive nature and inherent illogic.

While it is true that since the 1970s Americans have increased their average caloric intake by 12%, they also have become more sedentary. According to the National Center for Health Statistics 2008 Chartbook, 39% of adults in the U.S. are not engaging in leisure physical activity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that 60% of Americans are not regularly active and 25% of Americans are not active at all. The average American spends the equivalent of 60 days a year in front of a television, according to a 2008 A.C. Nielsen study. This same research data show that the average time spent playing video games in the U.S. went up by 25% during the last four years.

If we're genuinely interested in curbing obesity, we need to take a hard look in the mirror and acknowledge that it's not just about calories in. It's also about calories out.

Our industry has become an easy target in this debate. Sugar-sweetened beverages have been singled out in spite of the fact that soft drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks and sweetened bottled water combined contribute 5.5% of the calories in the average American diet, according to the National Cancer Institute. It's difficult to understand why the beverages we and others provide are being targeted as the primary cause of weight gain when 94.5% of caloric intake comes from other foods and beverages.

Those pushing for this tax lack some essential facts, not to mention some basic common sense. Over the past 20 years, the average caloric content of soft drinks has dropped by nearly 25%. This is due in large part to a determined focus by our company and others on the diet/light category with brands like Diet Coke, Coca-Cola Zero and Powerade Zero. Even soft drinks with sugar, like Coca-Cola, contain no more calories (140 calories in a can) than some common snacks, breakfast foods and most desserts served up daily in millions of American homes. And while obesity rates have skyrocketed, sales of regular soft drinks decreased by nearly 10% from 2000 to 2008, according to the industry publication Beverage Digest.

So where are all of the extra calories in the American diet coming from? Research from the United States Department of Agriculture shows that added sugars, as a percentage of total daily available calories, have declined 11% since 1970. Yet the percent of calories from added fats and flour/cereal products has increased 35% and 13%, respectively, during that same time period.

Will a soft drink tax change behavior? Two states currently have a tax on sodas&mdash West Virginia and Arkansas&mdash and they are among the states with the highest rates of obesity in the nation.

Obesity is a serious problem. We know that. And we agree that Americans need to be more active and take greater responsibility for their diets. But are soft drinks the cause? I would submit to you that they are no more so than some other products&mdash and a lot less than many, many others.

As a leader in our industry, we have a role to play in solving this issue. Globally, we have led the industry for nearly 30 years with innovations across the diet and light beverage categories. Today, more than 25% of our global beverage portfolio is comprised of low- or no-calorie beverages.

Policy makers should stop spending their valuable time demonizing an industry that directly employs more than 220,000 people in the U.S., and through supporting industries, an additional three million. Instead, business and government should come together to help encourage greater physical activity and sensible eating and drinking, while allowing Americans to enjoy the simple pleasure of a Coca-Cola.

Mr. Kent is CEO of the Coca-Cola Company.

The Wall Street Journal - October 29, 2009

Donning FDR's cape, Eisenhower's stripes and JFK's boat shoes, President Obama observed in Florida on Tuesday that his " clean energy economy" will require " mobilization" on the order of fighting World War II, building the interstate highway system and going to the moon. Of course, the only " mobilization" going on at the moment is on behalf of ethanol, whose many political dispensations the biofuels lobby is finding new ways to preserve even as the evidence of its destructiveness piles up.

The latest embarrassment arrives via the peer-reviewed journal Science, not known for its right-wing inclinations. A new paper calls attention to what the authors (led by Princeton's Tim Searchinger) call " a critical accounting error" in the way carbon emissions from biofuels are measured in climate-change programs world-wide. Bernie Madoff had a few critical accounting errors too.

Though you won't hear it from the biofuels lobby, ethanol actually generates the same amount of greenhouse gas as fossil fuels, or more, per unit of energy. But this was still supposed to be better than coal or oil because ethanol's CO2 is " recycled." Since plants absorb and store carbon that is already in the atmosphere, burning them as fuel would create no new emissions, whereas fossil fuels release CO2 that has been buried for millions of years.

With everything supposedly balancing out, the cap-and-trade programs run by the United Nations and European Union&mdash and maybe soon the U.S.&mdash treat biofuels as carbon-neutral. The Science study argues that this is a false economy, because it doesn't consider changes in land use. If mature forests are cleared to make room for biofuel-growing farms, then the carbon that would otherwise accumulate in those forests ought to be counted on ethanol's balance sheet as well.

Cap-and-trade programs exacerbate the problem because developed countries (where emissions are putatively capped) get credit for reductions from ethanol&mdash despite the fact that their biofuels are generally grown in developing countries (where emissions aren't capped). So if Malaysians burn down a rain forest to grow palm oil that ends up in German biodiesel, Malaysia doesn't count the land-use emissions and Germany doesn't count the tail-pipe emissions.

Given these incentives, the authors cite a study showing that by 2050, " based solely on economic considerations, bioenergy could displace 59% of the world's natural forest cover. . . . The reason: When bioenergy from any biomass is counted as carbon neutral, economics favor large-scale land conversion for bioenergy regardless of the actual net emissions." In other words, not only is cap and trade self-defeating on its own terms but it also risks creating a genuine ecological disaster.

By way of a solution, Mr. Searchinger and his coauthors modestly suggest doing away with the regulatory three-card monte and counting net ethanol emissions from where they are actually emitted. But this is political heresy on Rep. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee, which passed its own cap-and-tax program in July with the votes of farm-state Democrats, because the bill all but banned the Environmental Protection Agency from studying land-use changes. So much for letting " the science" guide public policy.

In Florida, Mr. Obama said the only people who could oppose his climate plan are " those who are afraid of the future." On this one, at least, the President is right.

China, India Cancel out Copenhagen

Climate Change: With less than two months to go before the big Copenhagen Conference on global warming, two major nations have said " no thanks" to the no-growth agenda. For that reason alone, so should we.

Following a deal signed late Thursday between China and India, anything we might agree to do in Copenhagen is likely moot anyway. The two mega-nations -- which together account for nearly a third of the world's population -- said they won't go along with a new climate treaty being drafted in Copenhagen to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.

They're basically saying no to anything that forces them to impose mandatory limits on their output of greenhouse gas emissions. Other developing nations, including Mexico, Brazil and South Africa, will likely reject any proposals as well.

The deal was already in trouble. Three weeks ago, the Group of 77 developing nations met in Thailand to discuss what they wanted to do about global warming. Their answer: nothing.

William Hawkins, writing in the American Thinker, quotes a piece in China's Science Times journal that sums up how China -- and other developing nations -- feel:

" Why do the developed countries put an arguable scientific problem on the international negotiations table?" the article's author, Wang Jin, asks. " The real intention is not for the global temperature increase, but for the restriction of the economic development of the developing countries."

They see clearly what the rest of us seem to miss -- that, for all its bad science, the Copenhagen Conference is about the world's Lilliputians tying down its Gullivers, not about global warming at all.

So, thanks to China and India, Copenhagen is dead -- just as Kyoto was when it was signed in 1992, though no one knew it at the time. Without them, no global treaty on climate change will be workable.

The two nations are not only the world's most populous (with, together, more than 2 billion people), they are also the fastest-growing major countries. China is now the world's No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases, and India is catching up fast.

Even with their participation, Copenhagen should have been a non-starter for the U.S. Indeed, the main reason for the greenhouse gas deal, all but admitted to by its major participants, is to cripple the U.S. economy -- the most successful economy in the world.

True enough, as green critics keep saying, we produce nearly 20% of the world's CO2 and other greenhouse gases with just 5% of the world's population. But our GDP of roughly $14 trillion is nearly 25% of the world's total -- in line with our gas output.

We provide jobs and consumption not just for Americans, but for tens of millions of people overseas whose livelihoods depend on satisfying the massive American market.

In case you're still worried about warming, stop. Since 1998, the data show global temperatures have fallen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says this can't be happening. None of the IPCC's models shows a possibility of rising CO2 output and declining temperature.

But even Paul Hudson, the pro-warming-theory BBC climate correspondent, recently had to admit: " For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Yet, the IPCC estimates that " remediation" of the warming trend will cost about 1.7% of world GDP. In the U.S., that's about $240 billion a year. For the entire world, it's about $1 trillion a year -- or $71 trillion over the next 70 years or so.

Proposals to slash CO2 won't work anyway. Department of Energy estimates indicate that 97% of all CO2 emissions would continue even if humans didn't exist.

Even so, climatologist Chip Knappenberger estimates that laws like the recent Waxman-Markey bill would, if fully enacted, reduce future warming by just 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 -- not enough even to measure accurately.

Can the world really afford to give up $71 trillion in the coming decades to solve a phantom problem?

Given the shoddiness of the science behind warming claims and the refusal of the biggest CO2 emitters to play along with the climate change sham, it would be economically ruinous for the U.S. to do anything other than wish the rest of the world a nice day, and go about our business

Save the Light Bulb!

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will effectively phase out incandescent light bulbs by 2012-2014 in favor of compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs. Other countries around the world have passed similar legislation to ban most incandescents.

Will some energy be saved? Probably. The problem is this benefit will be more than offset by rampant dissatisfaction with lighting. We are not talking about giving up a small luxury for the greater good. We are talking about compromising light. Light is fundamental. And light is obviously for people, not buildings. The primary objective in the design of any space is to make it comfortable and habitable. This is most critical in homes, where this law will impact our lives the most. And yet while energy conservation, a worthy cause, has strong advocacy in public policy, good lighting has very little.

Even without taking into account people's preferences, CFLs, which can be an excellent choice for some applications, are simply not an equivalent technology to incandescents in all applications. For example, if you have dimmers used for home theater or general ambience, you must buy a compatible dimmable CFL, which costs more, and even then it may not work as desired on your dimmers. How environmental will it be for frustrated homeowners to remove and dispose of thousands of dimmers? What's more, CFLs work best in light fixtures designed for CFLs, and may not fit, provide desired service life, or distribute light in the same pleasing pattern as incandescents. How environmental will it be for homeowners to tear out and install new light fixtures?

None of these and other considerations appear to have been included in the technical justification for this law. Instead, the decision appears to have been made entirely based on a perception of efficiency gains. Light-source efficacy, expressed as lumens of light output per watt of electrical input, has been used as a comparative metric justifying encouragement of CFLs. But this metric is flawed for one simple reason: It is a laboratory measurement and a guide, not a truth, in the field actual energy performance will depend on numerous application characteristics and product quality.

If energy conservation were to be the sole goal of energy policy, and efficacy were to be the sole technical consideration, then why CFLs? If we really want to save energy, we would advocate high-pressure sodium lamps&mdash those large bulbs that produce bright orangish light in many streetlights. Their efficacy is more than double what CFLs can offer. Of course this would not be tolerated by the public. This choice shows that we are willing to advocate bad lighting&mdash but not horrible lighting.

Not yet, at least. Energy regulations pending in Washington set aggressive caps on power allowances for energy-using systems in commercial and residential buildings. These requirements have never been tested.

Here's my modest proposal to determine whether the legislation actually serves people. Satisfy the proposed power limits in all public buildings, from museums, houses of worship and hospitals to the White House and the homes of all elected officials. Of course, this will include replacing all incandescents with CFLs. At the end of 18 months, we would check to be certain that the former lighting had not been reinstalled, and survey all users to determine satisfaction with the resulting lighting.

Based on the data collected, the Energy Independence and Security Act and energy legislation still in Congress would be amended to conform to the results of the test. Or better yet, scrapped in favor of a thoughtful process that could yield a set of recommendations that better serve our nation's needs by maximizing both human satisfaction and energy efficiency.

As a lighting designer with more than 50 years of experience, having designed more than 2,500 projects including the relighting of the Statue of Liberty, I encourage people who care about their lighting to contact their elected officials and urge them to re-evaluate our nation's energy legislation so that it serves people, not an energy-saving agenda.

Smoking Papers On Global Warming

Climate Change: A Treasury Department analysis says a cap-and-trade law could cost American families more than $1,700 a year. No wonder administrators tried to keep the study secret.

The House narrowly approved &mdash by seven votes &mdash the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in June over complaints that it would be an undue financial burden to American families. It passed after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi strode to the chamber floor and claimed that " this legislation means jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs. Let's vote for jobs."

Even some of the bill's supporters had to roll their eyes at the assertion. It was a talking point intended to convince those who have not been paying attention to the legislation's severe shortcomings, not wise and experienced lawmakers who know better.

Throughout the debate, the bill's defenders said Waxman-Markey would cost " less than the price of a postage stamp per day," a small price to pay, they declared, for saving the Earth from global warming. Their evidence: a Congressional Budget Office report that estimated the cost would be $175 per household a year.

But, as is often the case in Washington, it's what they didn't say that was more important.

While the House debated and eventually voted, filed away within the walls of the Treasury Department was an internal estimate that projected a cap-and-trade law would cost Americans up to $200 billion a year in new taxes. These taxes won't be levied directly but will be paid when power providers and other carbon dioxide producers buy CO2 emission allowances from the federal government and then pass the costs on to customers &mdash as will inevitably happen.

Overall, the costs would be " the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15%," Declan McCullagh reports on his " Taking Liberties" blog on CBSnews.com.

" At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year," McCullagh wrote.

Had it not been for the efforts of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the analysis would have likely remained a guarded secret.

A handful of Treasury documents related to cap-and-trade, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases were made public Tuesday, but only after CEI's Christopher Horner used the Freedom of Information Act to force its disclosure.

" In short," Horner wrote on National Review's " Planet Gore" blog, the Treasury documents are " a candid snapshot of what they're admitting to each other, while telling you a, ah, different story &mdash to your face."

But the government is allowing only so much candor.

The estimated cost of a cap-and-trade program in terms of higher energy prices has been, unsurprisingly, edited out of one of the Treasury documents. A thick black line follows the sentence that opens with " While such a program can yield environmental benefits that justify its costs, it will raise energy prices and impose annual costs on the order ... ."

In two other documents, passages explaining the " significant costs and potential revenues" generated by " domestic policies to address climate change" were covered by black ink.

The only logical conclusion is that the figures are so staggeringly large that bureaucrats, and possibly elected officials, feel that they have to hide them from the public.

Treasury's censors weren't able to expunge everything, though.

A separate administration transition memo drafted two days after the election notes that the " Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1% of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation."

In other words, under cap-and-trade, the economic costs of environmental regulation would double overnight.

Horner has said he'll ask the courts to force the government to release the redacted references to increases in energy costs as well as other parts that have been blacked out.

We wish him the best. The country needs more people like him and fewer government officials who, for political purposes, conceal information that the public has a right to know.

Compiled By The New York State Funeral Director's Association, INC.

Funeral Rites and customs vary greatly by religion. We have put together information to assist you should you have to attend a funeral where the deceased's religion funeral etiquette may not be familiar to you. The information detailed below includes - the beliefs of various religions (in alphabetical order) about death, their visitation/funeral practices, and mourning rituals. Unfortunately space does not allow us to cover every practicing religion.

Assemblies of God
Beliefs about death
According to Johnson and McGee in their book, How Different Religions View Death and Afterlife. Though death is in the world because of sin, Assemblies of God believers do not see death as a punishment rather death is a transition into the presence of Jesus where the rewards of heaven are realized.

Visitation
The coffin will be open unless the family requests otherwise. The coffin is not closed until after the funeral service is concluded.

Funeral Practices
Funeral customs follow those of the Protestant church. Hymns are usually sung by a soloist as opposed to the entire congregation. There are bible readings, a eulogy and a sermon, which is designed to encourage the faith and hope of the family and friends of the deceased.

Mourning Rituals
Although tears are common, a sense of joy in the hope of resurrection is promoted.

BAPTIST
Beliefs about Death
According to Johnson and McGee in their book, How Different Religions View Death and Afterlife, there are at least 52 different Baptist orders. Most of them are &ldquo born again&rdquo but do not believe they die because of this rather they believe they die because they are born. While the Baptist doctrine of hell &ldquo poses many difficulties&rdquo for them. Those who believe in hell are struck by the &ldquo obvious pain of eternal separation from loved ones who are not believers.&rdquo

Funeral Practices
Funeral services are seen as something for the living rather than the deceased. Funerals for those who have consciously rejected Christ (unbelievers) are intentionally very comforting for attendees. Johnson and McGee state, &ldquo The goodness and mercy of God are spoken of as well as any and all humanity desirable characteristics of the deceased. The general attitude is one of emphasizing the positives and providing bases for future ministry to the mourners.&rdquo

Mourning Rituals
&ldquo There may be those who mourn morbidly or in a sustained traumatic fashion for dead loved ones who were non-believers.&rdquo

EASTERN ORTHODOX
Beliefs about Death
Orthodox Christians believe death is a necessary consequence of human life and is necessary to achieve everlasting life.

Visitation
Similar to a Rosary in the Catholic Church, visitation at the funeral home includes a series of three prayers called Trisagion The Holy Icon (a picture of Christ) is a present at the foot of the casket and is kissed by mourners.

Funeral Practices
The Eastern Orthodox holds a special vigil over the dead (parastasis or panikhida) as a time for contemplation. The funeral service, which is typically held at the church, includes hymns, chants and bible readings but it is very short, about 5 or 10 minutes. The casket is open during the service. As mourners pass the body they again will kiss the Holy Icon. Burial is preferred, but the Orthodox Church allows cremation if the law of country requires it.

Mourning Rituals
Orthodox Christians pray for the departed and ask God to take mercy on the departed's soul.

HINDU
Beliefs about Death
Hindus believe death is a part of the continuing cycle of life, which includes birth, life, death and rebirth. The soul of the dead transfers to another body following death.

Visitation
The visitation period is held in the funeral home and tends to be short. If there is a large Hindu population in the area, the visitation may be a more traditional one.

Funeral Practices
The funeral is held in a funeral home. Since Hindus generally cremate their dead, the body is bathed in preparation. Then it is laid in a coffin wrapped in white cloth. During the cremation ceremony the body is carried three times counterclockwise around the pyre, then placed upon it. The chief mourner then hits the cremation switch.

Mourning Rituals
The days of mourning are considered a time of ritual impurity. Mourners cover all religious pictures in the house and do not attend festivals and or take part in the marriage ceremonies. Mourning period length varies, though excessive mourning is not condoned.

JUDAISM
Beliefs about Death
Jews believe that death a normal part of the Life Cycle and that the spirit (nashomer) of the deceased returns to God who gave it life as soon as the burial takes place.

Visitation
Most Jewish families do not have a visitation prior to the burial. In keeping with traditions based on Biblical tenets burial takes place as soon as possible.

Funeral Practices
Most families will have a funeral take place within 24 hours from the time of death. Of course with the need for relatives to come from all over the world, in this and age, some burials might be held off for 48 hours after the death. A shomer (watchman) stays with the remains and reads the Book of Psalms in keeping with tradition dating back to Biblical times. The spirit (nashomer) of the deceased traditionally watches over the body in which it lived until the time of the burial and the psalms are read to keep the spirit as calm as possible. For most traditional families, a taharah (washing and Purification) is performed by the members of the Chevra Kaddisha (Sacred Society) on the day of the funeral. Most families will have a chapel service and the form a procession to accompany (levayah) the deceased to the place of burial. After the casket is lowered into the grave and the earth is placed on the casket to a minimum height to ensure covering the top of the casket, the Kaddish can be recited. Flowers are not usually part of the service, even thought most funerals in Israel have flowers placed on the grave.

Mourning Rituals
After the family leaves the grave, they return to their home for a traditional meal of consolation and they then observe a seven day period of mourning (shiva) which allows the mourners to receive friends at home and not worry about their normal life. The mourners will be wearing a kreeah ribbon or have their clothing cut to indicate to the community who the mourners are when they enter the house. Most families will cover the mirrors at the house of the shiva so the mourners do not need to concern themselves as to how they look during this intense period of mourning. Many visitors and family members will provide food for the family observing the shiva. It is best to speak to the family to find out they observe Kashrut (Kosher dietary laws) before sending food to the home. The full mourning period for the deceased is broke up into different parts, but the entire year (11 months due to the Jewish lunar calendar) is observed for the deceased. A monument may b e placed above the grave 30 days after burial but usually before the first anniversary of the date of death (yahrzeit date).
Note: There may be some variations in the funeral practices, which are based on different traditions in the Traditional, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist communities.

LUTHERAN
Beliefs about Death
Lutherans believe that in death Christians are taken to God in Heaven where they await the resurrection of the body and the second coming of Christ. Lutherans believe that faith in Jesus is their salvation.

Visitation
Viewing of the body is conducted at the funeral home with an open casket.

Funeral Practices
Tradition states that the Lutheran funeral service be held in a church. However the funeral home is more common today so that the casketed remains do not have to be transported. Although the casket may be open before the service, it is typically closed and covered during the service. There are payers, readings, scripture, music and a eulogy. Communion may or may not be served.

MUSLIN/ISLAM
Beliefs about Death
Muslims believe that there is another world after death.

Visitation
All family is in attendance and the casket is open. Visitation is usually restricted to one hour.

Funeral Practices
The corpse is bathed and wrapped in a plain cloth (called a kafan). Prayers are conducted while mourners face the direction of Mecca. Worshippers offer the funeral prayer &ldquo God is Great&rdquo while folding their hands across their chests. The opening chapter of the Koran is read quietly. In addition to prayers for the deceased mourners recite prayers for Abraham and Muhammed and for all in their religious community. According to Islamic law, only burial in the ground is allowed.

Mourning Rituals
Mourners gather and offer prayers for the forgiveness of the deceased (Janazah). Once the body is buried, Muslim mourners offer one final prayer for forgiveness.

PRESBYTERIAN
Beliefs about Death
Presbyterians believe that the consequences of life have a bearing on whether you to heaven or hell after death, and those consequences begin immediately following one's death.

Funeral Practices
Most funerals take place two to four days after the death. Services are held in church. It is suggested that the casket be closed and covered. There is a strong emphasis placed on resurrection and, as such, a plain cross (not a crucifix) is used. The Presbyterian funeral service will include readings from Scripture, singing hymns, a sermon and the recitation of the Affirmation of Faith. The Presbyterian Book of Order suggests that fraternal, civic or military services be held separately from the religious part of the funeral service.

Mourning Rituals
Mourners are encouraged to provide the &ldquo ministry or presence&rdquo to the family. Phone calls, letters or visits are appropriate.

ROMAN CATHOLIC
Beliefs about death
In the face of death, the Catholic Church confidently proclaims that God has created each person for eternal life. The Church's liturgical and sacramental life, and the proclamation of the Gospel, makes this mystery of death present in the life of the faithful. At the death of a Christian, the Church ministers to the sorrowing and consoles them in its funeral rites with the comforting word of God and in the sacrament of the Eucharist. During these rites, the Christian community affirms and expresses the union of the Church on earth with the Church in heaven.

Visitation and Funeral Practices
The Church's funeral rites have three stages or stations consisting of the Vigil, the Funeral Liturgy, and the rite of Committal. At each of these stations and following its ancient customs, the Church manifests its care for the dead and calls the community to respect and honor the bodies of the dead and the places where they rest. Each station should be marked with dignity and reverence for the body, because Christians believe the body was the temple of the Holy Spirit on earth.
The Vigil, also called a wake or visitation, should be a time of prayer, remembrance of the life of the deceased, the reading of the word God, and an opportunity for the community to gather in the presence of the body. It is a time to reflect on the life, death and ultimate resurrection of the person who has died.
Following the Vigil, the body is brought to the Church for the second station, the Funeral Liturgy. The Liturgy, consisting of the Mass, is the principal celebration the Catholic Funeral. At this time, sacred scripture, a homily, prayers, psalms, hymns and symbols affirm the Christian belief in eternal life with our Creator. During this time the entire Catholic community is encouraged to participate.
Following the Funeral Liturgy, the body is taken from Church to the cemetery for burial or entombment for the third and final station, the rite of Committal. Scripture and prayers of commendation mark this final stage. While cremation is now permitted, burial or entombment is the strong preference of the Church, following the ancient Christian customs. When cremation is the family's choice, the Church encourages the same three stations of Vigil, Funeral Liturgy in church with the body present followed by the rite of Committal with burial of the ashes. The Church reminds the faithful, that the cremated remains, or ashes, should also be treated with the same reverence, care and dignity, as is the body.

SHINTO
Beliefs about Death
According to www.selectedfuneralhomes.org, &ldquo When a Shinto dies, his spirit lives forever under the protection of ancestral spirits and Kami, or Shinto divinities. The Shinto performs daily rituals at shrines in their homes to bring the spirits of the dead back to earth. They offer food, drink and burn incense. These rituals ensure that the dead are always remembered.&rdquo

Funeral Practices
While Shintoism is simple in nature, the ceremonies are very complex and do not allow for personalization. Each stage of a Shinto burial is performed according to ancient rituals. A burial contains over 20 procedures. The kich-fuda, koden and bunkotsu are three of the procedures. The kich-fuda is a time of serious mourning where close family and friends wear all black and carry stringed prayer beads. The bunkotsu stage is one of the final steps, where ashes are given to close family members to put in their home shrines.

Mourning Rituals
It is during the koden procedure, friends and family offer monetary gifts to help with funeral expenses.

SIKHISM
Beliefs about death
According to www.selectedfuneralhomes.org, Sikhs &ldquo go through a constant cycle of birth and rebirth until their soul breaks free and meets with God. Sikhs remain continuously aware of death, repeating payers and performing righteous deeds so they may eventually break the cycle of birth and death. Since death is viewed as an act of the Almighty, Sikhs are expected to keep their emotions under control.&rdquo

Funeral Practices
The family prepares the deceased with a yogurt bath and dressings that bear the five symbols of a Sikh: kirpin, the Sikh knife representing compassion and one's duty to defend the truth kara, a stainless steel bracelet kachera, a special Sikh underwear kanga, a small comb and kesh, or uncut hair. The family recites many prayers throughout the preparations to help the soul leave the body and become one with God. Once the body is prepared, the family carries it to the crematorium followed by a procession of friends and family. Sikhs continue to recite many prayers. Since all of the payers are recited in Gurmukhi, the original language of the Gurus, guests are not expected to join. Both men and women must wear headgear during all ceremonies. A scarf covering the head is adequate. There is no requirement for color of clothing.

Mourning Rituals
The Sikh mourning period lasts between two to five weeks. The family may decide to hold a number of ceremonies during that time period. Flowers and cards are appropriated gifts. Foods are also appreciated but nothing with meat, fish eggs or alcohol.

Please read on.

Investor's Business Daily - September 3, 2009

Could The Feds Seize The Internet?

Security: A Senate bill lets the president " declare a cyber security emergency" relating to " nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?

We wish this was just a piece of the fictional " Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyber emergency that the president would have the power to define and declare.

Wait a minute. Didn't the left recently weep and gnash its teeth over President George W. Bush's wireless surveillance of communications between real, live terrorists who want to kill us and their American contacts? Would Congress have given Bush such a sweeping power?

Have we already forgotten the administration wanting Americans to spy on their neighbors and report " fishy" communications opposing health care to flag@whitehouse.gov? Didn't oodles of our e-mail addresses wind up in the White House from which then came unsolicited e-mail supporting ObamaCare?

A working draft of the legislation, which is in its second incarnation, obtained by an Internet privacy group, would grant the secretary of commerce access to all privately owned information networks deemed critical to the nation's infrastructure " without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access." Where's the ACLU?

Sen. Rockefeller says he wants to prevent a " digital Pearl Harbor," and so do we. We have written extensively about the threat posed by foreign hackers and governments such as Russia and China to our power grids and the like. Chinese hackers have even penetrated Pentagon computer networks. We are also mindful of sacrificing a little liberty in the name of security and winding up with neither.

" The cyber security threat is real," said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which obtained the draft of S. 773, " but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy."

Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Mother Jones the bill was " contrary to what the Constitution promises us." According to Granick, granting the Commerce Department oversight of " critical" networks such as banking systems would grant the government access to potentially incriminating information without cause or warrant, a violation of the Constitution's prohibition against unlawful search and seizure.

The Euro-Meddlers

Global Warming: Given rising voter anger, members of the U.S. Senate can't be blamed for going wobbly on costly cap-and-trade legislation. But maybe members of the EU Parliament can buck them up. Let's hope not.

Not satisfied just with ruining their own continent's economy, a few Euro-pols want to come over here and do us the same favor.

The Waxman-Markey version of cap-and-trade already passed the House in June on a narrow 219-212 vote. Now these members of the European Parliament want to lend support as their green-left comrades in the U.S. Senate ponder doing the same.

With China and India saying they won't take part in this green nonsense, the Euro-socialists' only hope is to get a foolish U.S. to pass an economically ruinous cap-and-trade bill by 2012. That's when the failed Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gases expires.

" We have had signals from the Senate that it would be useful to send a delegation from the European Parliament before they take a decision," said Jo Leinen, the Euro-Parliament's top green official.

" Useful" ? Memo to Congress and the Euro-pols: Cap-and-trade is wildly unpopular with Americans. No matter how many suave European continentals you send here, it won't change voters' minds.

Yet, as long as they're here, we hope they'll submit to a town hall meeting or two to answer a few pointed questions, such as:

Why did CO2 emissions actually increase by 0.8% in Europe after the first phase of their plan began in 2005?

Why did European officials create more carbon permits than CO2 emissions, thereby causing the price of carbon to collapse?

What should American politicians tell their tax-wary constituents, given that 56% in a recent Rasmussen poll said they wouldn't pay one penny more in taxes to cut greenhouse gases?

While they're at it, they should also address the growing number of studies that show cap-and trade would be an economic disaster.

A recent Heritage Foundation study found that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill would cost the average family of four $4,609 a year and reduce overall GDP by $9.4 trillion by 2035. Some 2.5 million jobs will disappear over the same time.

Similarly, a George C. Marshall Institute review of a number of studies found similar high costs and huge job losses, on average. Taxes, for instance, would rise $2,000 by 2030. Food costs would go up $2,500 a year. Energy prices would grow 145%.

Such economic losses are intolerable. The Euro-pols are, of course, always welcome here. We can use their tourist euros. But they might want to watch some Tea Party YouTubes before they come over and start pushing Euro-style taxes on Americans.