Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

All great national powers have relied on access to and control of large quantities of natural resources, including energy and foodstuffs, to maintain their influence and status. Government policy that limits access to these resources must certainly weaken the nation as a whole.

The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009 is worse than nothing: it is a con and a fraud. It pretends to be a vehicle for reductions in CO2E emissions. In fact it is designed to permit increases in CO2E emissions.

Discussions about global warming are marked by an increasing desire to stamp out “impure” thinking, to the point of questioning the value of democratic debate. But shutting down discussion simply means the disappearance of reason from public policy.

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

In this short clip Gore repeats most of the falsehoods from his movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” What’s amazing is he does this even though many other groups have identified the errors. For example, among scientists Lord Christopher Monckton identified 35 major errors.

'In recent years, many Americans have had cause to wonder whether decisions made at EPA were guided by science and the law, or whether those principles had been trumped by politics," declared Lisa Jackson in San Francisco last week. The Environmental Protection Agency chief can't stop kicking the Bush Administration, but the irony is that the Obama EPA is far more "political" than the Bush team ever was.

“We are meeting one month before the Climate Change Copenhagen Summit and several weeks before the U.S. Senate hearing regarding the cap-and-trade scheme. For these reasons, today’s meeting can’t be an academic conference, even though the topic still needs academic discussion. There is no consensus – neither in science, nor in economic analysis or politics."

Policymakers need to know whether prediction is possible and, if so, whether any proposed forecasting method will provide forecasts that are substantially more accurate than those from the relevant benchmark method. An inspection of global temperature data suggests that temperature is subject to irregular variations on all relevant time scales, and that variations during the late 1900s were not unusual.

Yet another serious invitation to Al Gore for a public debate on global warming science.

TESTIMONY OF MARLO LEWIS

SENIOR FELLOW IN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

LEGISLATIVE HEARING ON S. 1733, CLEAN ENERGY JOBS AND AMERICAN POWER ACT

TESTIMONY OF IAIN MURRAY

VICE-PRESIDENT FOR STRATEGY, COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

LEGISLATIVE HEARING ON S. 1733, CLEAN ENERGY