Fenger Pointing
Becky Fenger | August 27, 2008
Napolitano’s million dollar heist
Arizona Democrats and the fawning Arizona Republic are all atwitter over Gov. Janet Napolitano’s role in addressing the Democratic National Convention in Denver to help lay out Barack Obama’s economic plan for the country. “She’s breathing rarified air,” gushes Arizona Democratic Party Chairman Don Bivens, noting her trajectory as a rising star.
One of Napolitano’s pet projects is the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), a group of American and Mexican states and Canadian provinces formed to take a regional approach to what she calls one of the most serious issues facing Arizona and the world – global climate change. She wants the WCI funded so badly that she resorted to hijacking a $1 million fine (called a Supplemental Environmental Project, or SEP) paid by Honeywell for environmental pollution. The story was broken by the irrepressible Espresso Pundit blogger, Greg Patterson, on August 13.
This usurpation of a cool million by the Guv caught the attention of Arizona Corporation Commissioner Gary Pierce, who notified Napolitano: “By choosing to fund the WCI via Honeywell’s SEP, you have diverted $1 million that could have gone to help the people in the affected community for the development of the WCI, a regional program. I can see no justification for diverting these funds from the local community.”
Not to be intimidated by a lowly Commissioner, Napolitano told the host of “Horizon” on public television that Pierce will be getting a long letter from the director of Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, Steve Owens, setting Pierce straight. Newsflash for the Governor: ADEQ does not have the authority to let Janet commandeer the $1 million from poor neighborhoods for her own purposes. So there.
More importantly, before Napolitano uses her leadership in WCI to continue on plans for a regional cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions in the mistaken hope of staving off global warming, she’d better take a look at an August 14 release by Michael Doherty, a New Jersey Assemblyman. He calls on New Jersey Governor John Corzine to halt their reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in light of new scientific evidence that the earth is actually cooling, and has been since 1998. In fact, due to the slowing of sun spot activity, the cooling could last another 20 years and even be the start of another ice age. Why should Napolitano break our economic backbone if the earth is not even warming? No wonder John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, stated that man-made global warming is the greatest scam in history. Get a grip, people.
Last week there was a small victory for sound science, but the press was too busy swooning over the “Veepstakes” (a term thinking adults should avoid) to take note.
Silly me, of course the mainstream media wouldn’t report the news, even if they were paying attention, because it doesn’t heighten the hysteria over global warming fears. Instead, it points out to what lengths some “scientists” will go in order to dupe the public.
The Climate Change Science Program put out a “Unified Synthesis Report” last month for public comment, claiming to “synthesize 21 studies to present an alarming series of regional climate change projections.” Forget the fact that climate models are incapable of doing that, but only 8 of the 22 studies had actually been completed and released! This violates the federal Information Quality Act and the U.S. Global Research Act. Your methods have to be pretty pathetic to violate standards for federal government work.
“The authors go to great lengths to obscure their inability to credibly articulate human influence on the climate,” said Christopher C. Horner, Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “They do so through selectivity in research, alarmist language, failure to provide relevance or context to many of their claims, and generally throughout with transparent advocacy in tone and content.” Despite denying that the report is advocating for regulations, its authors call for controls on carbon dioxide emissions throughout the document. That’s a no-no in scientific circles.
Atmospheric physicist and founder of what is now the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, S. Fred Singer, responds to the shoddy report released by NOAA thusly: 1) The human contribution to global warming is insignificant, 2) Sea-level rise is natural and beyond our control, and 3) Models are not able to predict global impacts – much less regional ones. His recommendation? Scrap the damned thing, even though taxpayers have paid some $20 billion for this project so far.