By Julia A. Seymour | December 4, 2015 | 10:51 AM EST

Biofuels should serve as an instructive lesson for negotiators in Paris, because they are proof that not all energy sources work as well as anticipated. But journalists are unlikely to remind them or the public.

The early 2000s were the heyday of good press for biofuels. Major newspapers like The New York Times ran stories about Willie Nelson’s biodiesel startup and individuals converting their vehicles into “veggie” cars to run on french fry grease and other forms of biodiesels. The Washington Post even editorialized about people “dreaming big” plans like replacing hydrocarbon fuels (gasoline) with biodiesels.

By Seton Motley | October 28, 2015 | 12:48 PM EDT

The media are, of course, almost uniformly Leftist - which means they just about always toe the Party line.  Including the belief that in order to help the poor - government must perpetually grow.  Of course we conservatives also want to help the poor - we just think shrinking government is the way to actually do it.

When things get more expensive - the poor get hammered hardest.  But the media misses the obvious - the more government there is, the more things cost.  It is axiomatic - in (at least) two ways. 

By Seton Motley | April 16, 2015 | 9:25 AM EDT

It was the best of coverage - it was the worst of coverage.

By Clay Waters | April 10, 2015 | 8:26 PM EDT

Obama adviser Brian Deese was the subject of a fulsome New York Times profile by biased environmental reporter Coral Davenport and biased political profile writer Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who teamed up for "On Climate For Obama, Point Man Learns Fast," pitting lovable wonk Deese against the "anger" of Big Coal. And Deese is far from the first Obama staffer to get such favorable treatment.

By Tom Blumer | November 24, 2014 | 6:16 PM EST

As of 5:30 p.m. ET today, a search on "Koningstein" at the Associated Press's national web site returned no results.

That's an indication that the wire service's globaloney-believing pseudo-science reporters are still trying to figure out how to respond to a November 18 article in the IEEE Spectrum by Ross Koningstein & David Fork, a pair of Google engineers tasked by the company in 2007 to "tackle the world’s climate and energy problems." The pair, whose active work on the project at Google ended in 2011, have concluded, as succinctly stated in the UK Register (HT Instapundit), that renewable energy sources "will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists."

By Geoffrey Dickens | November 3, 2014 | 2:13 PM EST

On Thursday, Charlie Rose invited singer-songwriter Neil Young on his PBS show to promote his latest album and played a clip of the Woodstock-generation singer’s first single - basically an anthem against Big Oil called “Who is Going to Stand Up?” In the clip Young calls for the end of fossil fuel and fracking.

By Jeffrey Meyer | April 21, 2014 | 10:52 AM EDT

On Friday April 18, the Obama Administration announced yet another delay on whether or not to proceed with the Keystone XL pipeline. The Obama Administration’s decision came in the wake of a new ABC News-Washington Post poll which found 65 percent of Americans support the construction of the pipeline with only 22 percent opposed.

Following the latest delay, NBC mostly ignored the story, giving it a paltry 18-seconds on the Saturday April 19 Today. Keystone was briefly mentioned on Sunday’s Meet the Press during an interview between moderator David Gregory and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL). CNBC’s Squawk Box was the only NBC program to mention that Democratic billionaire and environmentalist Tom Steyer had pledged $100 million for Democratic candidates on the condition that Keystone not be approved. [See video below.]

By Seton Motley | March 4, 2014 | 9:13 AM EST

The Washington Post Editorial Board has long had a government agriculture policy position that is actually grounded in Reality. 

Going back at least half a decade - to the passage of the last terrible Farm Bill - they have been rightly pointing out that the Crony Socialist, picking-losers-at-the-expense-of-winners matrix of taxes, subsidies and quotas is simply a disaster.

By Ken Shepherd | November 12, 2013 | 1:30 PM EST

So it appears the Associated Press has discovered what conservative and libertarian economic critics have been saying all along: top-down government regulation to promote "green energy" has numerous unintended consequences, including negative repercussions for the environment.

In their November 12 article, "The secret, dirty cost of Obama's green power push," AP writers Dina Cappiello and Matt Apuzzo laid out how "the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today," adding (emphasis mine):

By Mike Ciandella | April 15, 2013 | 3:33 PM EDT

Biofuels harm the planet more than fossil fuels, and even lead to greater deforestation, according to areport put out this month by the British think tank Chatham House. The study also said that biofuels are far less cost effective than traditional fuels.

The think tank said that sticking with traditional fossil fuels might actually be better for the environment, since the use of cooking oil as an alternative fuel leads to higher imports of palm oil from Indonesia, a product often grown on deforested land.

By Tom Blumer | February 27, 2013 | 8:35 AM EST

The rogue collection of bureaucrats known as the Environmental Protection Agency continues its lawless ways. The establishment press continues to serve as enablers.

In January, a federal court vacated the EPA's regulations mandating the use of cellulosic biofuels which weren't produced at all until last year, and barely exist now. In response, the agency, directly defying the court, increased the production requirement of these fuels for 2013. In covering the story, as I noted at NewsBusters on January 31, the Associated Press's Matt Daly only wrote that "An oil industry representative said the Obama administration was thumbing its nose at a ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia" -- as if the agency's action was only a matter of some eeeevil oil guy's opinion.

By Matt Vespa | February 22, 2013 | 5:42 PM EST

Yesterday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner featured a discussion about the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is anathema to the environmental left, and which President Obama cynically delayed a decision on until after the 2012 election.  With the decision to approve or decline the project still looming for President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry -- who technically is the point person on approving the project -- Melinda Pierce of the Sierra Club was brought on the panel to discuss the pending doom we face with climate change, and disseminate the message that we can’t drill our way to energy independence.

To Wagner’s credit she did cite a piece from, of all things, Joe Nocera of the New York Times to give an alternative view to Pierce’s. Whereas Pierce responded by equating the approval of the pipeline to setting off a “carbon bomb”: