There is a lot at stake for former Vice President Al Gore with the Global Warming* issue. Without the threat of Global Warming, he is rather out of a job. Who would hire Al Gore to come speak about the threat of normal weather? Without Global Warming, who would ever buy a carbon credit from the corporation he is affiliated with? Without Global Warming, Al Gore just becomes another washed up Vice President who did not make it to the ultimate status prize of the presidency.

I can understand why Al Gore keeps insisting that Global Warming is a serious threat to the planet.  All of Al Gore's current prestige and status and livelihood are tied to this fabricated crisis.

President elect Barack Obama's buy-in is more difficult to understand, but buy-in he did. Obama meets Gore, urges urgent action on global warming:  (My emphasis throughout)

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday reiterated the need to address global warming as he discussed the problem with former Vice President Al Gore. Flanked by Gore and Vice President-elect Joe Biden, Obama told reporters in Chicago, ‘‘All three of us, I think, are in agreement that the time for delay is over, the time for denial is over.’’

‘‘We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now: that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt within a serious way,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s what I intend my administration to do.’’

Obama met with Gore ‘‘to listen and learn from Vice President Al Gore on the extraordinary work that he has done around the issue of climate change,’’ for which the former vice president won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Obama is still bent on his environmentally friendly energy program, his green jobs plan--even though they won't solve our energy problems or help our economy.

When people realize what his energy plan will cost, both in Cap and Trade costs and increased utility costs, they might HOPE things will CHANGE back to cheaper un-green energy. From geophysicist David Deming:

"Let the politicians take note. People will not like what you have in mind. California is arguably the most liberal state. Yet last month they defeated, by nearly a 2-to-1 margin, a law that would have forced California utilities to obtain half their electric power from renewable sources. What the Obama administration proposes is much more radical. Their cap-and-trade proposal will dramatically increase the energy costs of the average consumer and likely drive our crippled economy into a severe depression.

Why a president, facing the economic crisis our country seems to be headed toward, would embrace such expensive, inefficient green energy and crippling cap and trade proposals is beyond me. It is beyond geophysicist Deming too, who stated in his commentary, Global warming freeze:

This is an absurd spectacle. Our advanced civilization is being systematically mismanaged by technologically illiterate lawyers responding to political pressures from irrational fanatics. Would someone please tell these people it is impossible to overturn the laws of thermodynamics?

We cannot improve our economy by artificially forcing people to use expensive, unreliable and inefficient energy sources.

As Deming concludes, "To the extent global warming was ever valid, it is now officially over." Now we just have to get the politicians to look at the facts, because I cannot afford to pay triple WE energies bill charges!

*The term Global Warming is morphing into the term Climate Change because world temperatures have not cooperated over the past 10 years. Many examples cited in Global warming freeze? point out that current data shows warming "is now officially over."

Please, comment content should relate to the subject of the post. Although I try to respond to many, do not interpret my lack of a response as agreement.

Links: 

Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" is quoted a lot these days in regard to ethanol and rising food prices. There are many interpretations as to what she meant by it--some debate whether she said it at all.

The most interesting explanation I ever heard came from a UWM theater department teacher. She said that "cake" was the term for a gasket made from dough strips used to seal oven doors. When the baking was finished, the very over-baked, virtually inedible dough gaskets were scraped off and discarded. The poor would dig these out of the garbage and attempt to eat them. In other words, the bakers used food for a purpose other than human or animal consumption, and the insensitive Marie said the starving could always eat the gaskets.

I think that explanation fits in rather well with today's food for fuel fiasco. But I am adding to the travesty of diverting food into ethanol production, the misuse and abuse of water used for producing biofuel. Hence my version of Marie's statement, Let them eat and drink ethanol!

People are waking up to the fact that ethanol is not the answer to energy independence. Even Former President Clinton, at a campaign stop for his wife in Pennsylvania, said, "Corn is the single most inefficient way to produce ethanol because it uses a lot of energy and because it drives up the price of food."

Some people are aware that food-to-fuel mandates have increased demand on water resources. Corn in particular requires irrigation in most areas. We noted this on our last few trips out west--hundreds of acres of corn fields all being irrigated. Water is becoming a rare resource in some areas. (If you live west of the sub-continental divide on Sunnyslope Road, you have probably been paying attention to water rights issues.)

But what most people don't realize is that ethanol production causes water pollution too--both in the growing of corn and in the production of ethanol itself--regardless of the plant source. 

Corn is a nitrogen needy plant and is very soil depleting. (Remember how the Native Americans taught the Pilgrims to put a fish in each hill of corn?) Well today's farmers rely heavily on nitrogen rich fertilizers. The Washington Post stated, "Increased agricultural production also means increased fertilizer use. The National Academy of Sciences reported last month that meeting the congressional food-to-fuel mandate by 2022 would lead to a 10 to 19 percent increase in the size of the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" -- an area so polluted by fertilizer runoff that no aquatic life can survive there."

Polluting farmland runoff is not the worst of it. Ethanol factories also exude an alarming amount of polluted water. I have heard it described as a glycerin type effluent that causes fish die off.

Water Use and Pollution Syrup, batches of bad ethanol, and sewage are dumped into streams, threatening fish and plants with chloride, copper and other wastes which deprive waters of oxygen when they decompose. A state inspector in Iowa reported that a creek next to the ethanol plant in Sioux Center was milky and smelled like sewage.

Water Supply Can't Meet Thirst For New Industry ...Nowhere is the growing clash between economic development and water conservation more evident than in the push to build ethanol plants that typically guzzle 3½ to 6 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced. Minnesota's 15 ethanol plants together consume about 2 billion gallons of water per year.

Drunk on Ethanol MTBE pollutes ground and surface water, but so does ethanol. With each gallon of ethanol you get 12 gallons of sewagelike effluent produced by the fermentation/distillation process.

So, let's see... biofuel production causes local and world wide food prices to rise, food shortages, water shortages due to irrigation, pollution from fertilizer runoff, and pollution to waterways from ethanol production. (Don't forget air pollution from burning ethanol.)

And most politicians are still chanting the ethanol mantra in order to save the planet from supposed CO2 pollution? (Explanation: The corn grower / ethanol lobby is very influential.) 

Let's hope these increasingly anti-ethanol articles and news stories about world food shortages and pollution will embarrass our Federal and State legislators into voting against or better yet repealing global warming and ethanol mandates. Otherwise, I am afraid we won't have much choice but to eat and drink ethanol! 

Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket

Ethanol's Failed Promise

Let Them Eat Cake

Hunger fuels food riots in Haiti 

Go, Jim and Jeff, Go! Repeal Those Ethanol Mandates (links to legislators included)

Links: Don't forget, Free Pass To Movie Preview of "The Enemy God" Saturday at 3pm