Environment

Nobel laureate Al Gore said this weekend that tax breaks for corn-based ethanol are "not good policy" and that he only supported these subsidies in order to assist his eventual run for president. Reuters Africa reported Monday the former Vice President made these comments while speaking to a green energy conference in Athens.

I owe Ottmar Edenhofer thanks for two things. First, I am grateful that Edenhofer, a German economist who is "co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change," has a last name on which searching is easy. I quickly determined that his name last name doesn't currently come up in searches at the Associated Press's main web…

Displaying a clear conflict of interest during Friday's 12PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Contessa Brewer did a story promoting electric car charging stations but did not disclose to viewers that the channel's parent company, General Electric, was selling the very same product. GE commercials for the charging stations have frequently aired on MSNBC in recent weeks. Brewer began the segment, a…

On Wednesday's Joy Behar Show on HLN, the host asked about parents who are "overpopulating" the world, and guest Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University professor, compared having a large family to littering, "as if we've got too many people on this planet to begin with." Fisher also bizarrely stated that "for billions of years, we [humans] ended up having one or two children per woman." Host Joy…

It’s been a year since thousands of emails and files were leaked from a prominent climate science group at the University of East Anglia, with startling comments including this one: “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment.” Other leaked emails showed potential manipulation of temperature data, a willingness to destroy information rather than release it under the British…

On Sunday, NBC Universal launched its annual "Green Week," as part of the company's "Green is Universal" environmental awareness campaign. As NBC embarks on yet another week of "environmentally themed programming," it falls to media watchdogs to point out the massive conflict presented by NBC parent company General Electric's significant financial interests in the policies "Green Week"…

During Monday's12PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Contessa Brewer helped promote the network's "Green is Progress" week by demanding greater government intervention to force people to follow an environmentalist agenda: "Until government says these are the standards that everyone has to aspire to, we're not really making progress." Brewer made the comments while interviewing Practically Green CEO…

An Oxford University think tank is taking the media to task for not doing more to whip up a frenzy about global warming. Apparently the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism crunched the numbers and found that "[l]ess than 10 percent of the news articles written about last year's climate summit in Copenhagen dealt primarily with the science of climate change." The study lamented the…

Thursday evening, NB's Ken Shepherd accurately pointed out how little establishment press interest there has been in prominently carrying an Associated Press report about how the Obama administration has been, in the words of the wire service's Dina Cappiello, "downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited." This is…

Nearly a year after leaked emails from the University of East Anglia revealed scientists manipulating data to embellish the case for anthropogenic global warming, journalists are finally starting to learn a few lessons. Unfortunately, few, if any, of those journalists are Americans. Margot O'Neill of the Australian Broadcasting Company reported last week: [A] key BBC news manager has…

They're back, they have their media water-carriers in place, and the Obama administration is smack dab in the middle of it. The United Nations is pushing for countries in the developed world to keep their "promise" to, in the worlds of Charles J. Hanley at the Associated Press,  "raise up to $100 billion a year in new money for poorer countries to cope with climate change and reduce their…

So just a day after the Republicans won big, President Obama ran screaming from the “cap and trade” program like it was a hooker with herpes. Remember, this was his solution for global warming: curb carbon emissions by hiking the price of electricity and gas, forcing us to use less. Well, that’s deader than the nerves in Nancy Pelosi’s face. Says Obama:

Wikipedia is the most popular source of written information in the world. It is the third most popular non-search engine site on the web, bested only by Facebook and YouTube. In other words, it can be a potent ideological force. And it has been. The site's administrators recently banned 16 users from editing any article related to global climate change. One user, William Connolley - also an…

The liberal mainstream media have a penchant for hyping all manner of "green" technology advances while ignoring their drawbacks and opportunity costs. Perhaps they could learn a few lessons from some University of Maryland student writers for the Diamondback such as Erin Egan. [For full disclosure, I graduated from the University of Maryland in 2001 and wrote columns for the Diamondback…