Tag Archives: Global Warming

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Report finds Labor Department’s green jobs program failing

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From the liberal Washington Post.

Excerpt:

A $500 million Labor Department program designed to train workers for green jobs has come up far short of its goals, with only 10 percent of participants finding work so far, the agency’s assistant inspector general has found.

The report said the low rate makes it unlikely the program will meet the goal of placing nearly 80,000 workers in careers in energy efficiency or renewable energy by 2013.

“Grantees have expressed concerns that jobs have not materialized and that job placements have been fewer than expected for this point in the grant program,” said the report from Assistant Inspector General Elliott Lewis.

The report comes as the Obama administration has been on the defensive about making a $528 million loan to Solyndra LLC, a now-bankrupt solar panel maker that has become a target for critics of the administration’s green energy program.

The $500 million for green jobs training was part of the $787 billion stimulus act passed in 2009. Although the money was awarded in a series of grants in 2009 and 2010, only one-third has actually been spent by grantees. Lewis’ report said the rate of expenditures has been decreasing. He suggested the department should consider returning unused money that may not be needed.

“At this point, there is no evidence that grantees will effectively use the funds and deliver targeted employment outcomes by the end of the grant periods,” the report said.

[…]Another problem the report highlighted is that workers who completed training and were placed in green jobs have had trouble retaining their posts. Of the 8,035 workers placed, only 1,336 — or 2 percent of the overall target — have held those jobs for at least six months.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who requested the audit, said the report “paints a pretty bleak picture of the program’s effectiveness in job creation.”

“It’s hard to see how leaving $300 million in unused funding for the program in the hands of the Labor Department benefits either the taxpayers or the unemployed,” Grassley said.

The news media loves the Democrats and they are constantly making fun of Republicans for doubting evolution and global warming. I submit to you that believe in green jobs programs is the scientific equivalent of flat-Earthism. And I have the numbers to prove it. They have the blind faith and the insults. We have the evidence.

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New Operation Fast and Furious e-mails sent to White House official

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From CBS News. (H/T Director Blue)

Excerpt:

Late Friday, the White House turned over new documents in the Congressional investigation into the ATF “Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal.

The documents show extensive communications between then-ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office Bill Newell – who led Fast and Furious – and then-White House National Security Staffer Kevin O’Reilly. Emails indicate the two also spoke on the phone. Such detailed, direct communications between a local ATF manager in Phoenix and a White House national security staffer has raised interest among Congressional investigators looking into Fast and Furious. Newell has said he and O’Reilly are long time friends.

ATF agents say that in Fast and Furious, their agency allowed thousands of assault rifles and other weapons to be sold to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels. At least two of the guns turned up at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December.

The email exchanges span a little over a month last summer. They discuss ATF’s gun trafficking efforts along the border including the controversial Fast and Furious case, though not by name. The emails to and from O’Reilly indicate more than just a passing interest in the Phoenix office’s gun trafficking cases. They do not mention specific tactics such as “letting guns walk.”

[…]Among the documents produced: an email in which ATF’s Newell sent the White House’s O’Reilly an “arrow chart reflecting the ultimate destination of firearms we intercepted and/or where the guns ended up.” The chart shows arrows leading from Arizona to destinations all over Mexico.

[…]Congressional investigators for Republicans Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) have asked to interview O’Reilly by September 30. But the Administration informed them that O’Reilly is on assignment for the State Department in Iraq and unavailable.

Director Blue has posted some of the e-mails featuring ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office William D. Newell, Obama’s homeland security adviser John Brennan and then-White House National Security Staffer Kevin M. O’Reilly.

He concludes:

It’s no longer a question of whether Eric Holder knew; it’s whether President Obama knew and approved of Operation Fast and Furious. The rogue ATF operation sent thousands of military-grade weapons to Mexican drug cartels. And at least two of the weapons were discovered at the scene of last December’s killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

When will the rest of the mainstream media (non-CBS)  start to cover this story? Or are they afraid to? Is this too big for them to cover? Are they afraid of the White House exerting pressure on them?

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New edition of British atlas exaggerates global warming effects by 1500%

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From the radically leftist New York Times. (H/T Dennis Prager)

Excerpt:

The news release promoting the latest edition of Britain’s influential Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World hailed it as “the Greatest Book on Earth.”

Not the way climate scientists see it.

“Fiasco” was the word chosen by one scientist in an e-mail to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., alerting his colleagues to erroneous claims made by the publishers of the atlas (whose name derives from The Times of London) about the speed at which Greenland’s glaciers are melting.

He also feared that a map in the atlas, along with news accounts repeating an error in the news release, could pull climate scientists into another vortex of damaging controversy.

The news release, echoed by the news media, claimed that Greenland had lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover from 1999 to 2011. That translates to 125,000 cubic miles, according to a rough calculation by Etienne Berthier, a glaciologist with the University of Toulouse, enough melted ice to raise sea levels three to five feet.

The corresponding map in the atlas itself indicated that significant portions of Greenland’s coastline had become ice-free.

Glaciologists, previously bruised by an exaggerated claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers in a 2007 United Nations report that became fodder for global warming skeptics, mobilized as a truth squad.

On blogs, on radio programs and in newspaper columns, they stated emphatically that Greenland has not lost 15 percent of its ice cover in recent years. The retreat, they said, is more like one-tenth of 1 percent. They were quick to add that nobody at the atlas had consulted them.

“It was a case where, really, the community came together really fast with both barrels blazing,” said Mark Serreze, director of the snow and ice center in Colorado. “Everyone had some real bad memories of this whole fiasco that had to do with Himalayan glaciers. No one wanted to see that again.”

The glaciers error in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Climate Change, although just a footnote, led to a torrent of criticism focused on climate scientists after it was identified early in 2010.

I blogged about the Himalayan fraud here.

I also wrote before about how Greenland used to be much less cold during the Medieval Warming Period.