State Senator Fran Pavley, who authored the business-killing AB32 environmental standards law, thinks that some regulations are unnecessary and harmful.

Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, said the goals of protecting the environment and streamlining government regulations are not mutually exclusive.

"I have to admit, not all regulations are needed, and some may be needlessly hurting our economy," said Pavley, whose district includes Oxnard and Port Hueneme.

Why would Pavley, who AUTHORED the business-killing AB32 environmental standards law, think that!

Has there been some controversy lately about environmental regulations hurting the economy that reached the ears of the senator, who authored the business-killing AB32 environmental standards law? [continue reading]

I'm not convinced that Global Warming is anthropogenic--that is, I'm not sure that there is a link between man-made pollution and climate change. I guess that makes me a Global Warming denier. In today's world, that's like admitting you're a Holocaust denier.

Once you're branded a Global Warming denier, those that are convinced that we are on the brink of destroying the world with our industrial activities immediately write you off as someone not worthy of debating. I must be incredibly stupid--or perhaps I am a tool of the polluting corporations. Otherwise, if I was rational I'd come to the "obvious" conclusion that almost everyone else has.

For any Progressive that is curious, let me offer a glimpse into how a Global Warming denier thinks.

First, we don't really deny that there is Global Warming--or at least we don't deny that the climate is changing. Progressives want to cast us as people so stupid that we can't see that the weather is different. It's in the moniker, after all--Global Warming denier.

It's a bit more complicated in that. I, for one, believe the climate is changing. I tell people that it seems all the seasons have shifted on step to the right. Summer is now a mild spring. Fall is now a hot summer. Where I live, the hottest week of the year seems to occur in October now.  I remember when June seemed like the hottest month of the year.

I differ with the Progressives on the cause of the changing. I'm well aware that climates change historically before civilization existed. The earth cooled and we had an Ice Age. It warmed and it went away. And so on to this very day.

Progressives point to evidence collected over the last hundred years that show that a) greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, and b) the temperature is increasing.

Even if the data is accurate--and I'm skeptical that data collected a hundred years ago is--it does not show a causal relationship. It may show that one might have to do with the other, but the data is far from showing cause. And that's what the debate is really about.

It may simply be that our pollutants are increasing at the same time the earth is going through one of its natural changes, fooling people into believing there is a relationship.  I'd like to settle that matter before we enact climate change laws that throttle the global economy.

Today, I read an article on CNN's website entitled, "Case for man-made warming increased in 2010, scientists say." Oh good, I thought, I can finally see some proof to convince me of what's oh-so-apparent to everyone else.

The UK's Met Office Hadley Center says data from a range of climate indicators continues to make an "overwhelming" case for long-term man-made global warming.

Overwhelming! I couldn't possibly be a rational person and still not be convinced by this article, right?

"As well as a clear increase in air temperature observed above both the land and sea we see observations which are all consistent with increasing greenhouse gases."

But here it is again. Essentially, the Met Office gathered data from 20 institutions worldwide and concluded that temperatures are increasing and so are greenhouse gases.

I still don't see proof of a causal relationship--I'm right back at the beginning. I see a potential relationship--but how can anyone reasonably say that when two graphs coincide it's because of a causal relationship?

In statistics, there exists a thing called a spurious relationship. Let's say we find a correlation between variable A and variable B. Now, most people assume that there are two possible outcomes: A caused B, or B caused A.

However, statisticians and logicians know that it is possible that neither of those maybe true. There could be an intervening third variable C that causes both A and B. In Latin, this logical fallacy is called "cum hoc ergo propter hoc," and it's a common trap that people fall into. [continue reading]

Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said President Obama is "a president in trouble" after the 2010 version of the Republican Revolution.

Noonan, addressing an audience at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Tuesday night, touched on a topic that bothers me about Obama and the Progressives.

Since last week's election, she said, Obama shows no sign of understanding why it happened, why he took such a drubbing. "So once again, he seems a little off-point, like he's not seeing the same reality as the American people."

Progressives have this thing about them where they think anyone who disagrees with them is just plain stupid. The universities, the high-society cocktail circuits, the chic A-list actors are all on their side.

But each of those groups has one thing in common, other than being factories churning out Progressive thinkers--they are all out of touch with the real world.

University professors strive for tenure, which is essentially another way of saying you don't have to compete for your job anymore. Unlike every other (private sector) employee in the world, tenured teachers don't have to stay on top of their game to remain viable. Wouldn't you love to have a job like that, where it's almost impossible to fire you? Consequently, teachers are shielded from market forces that affect businesses--yet they have plenty of free time to spout all sorts of theories on them, and they never have to apply their thoughts to a real-world situation. After all, their domain is a college campus, and what closer thing is there to an environment insulated from the rest of the world?

Then there's the high-society cocktail circuit. This is where your media elites and your trust-fund babies rub elbows to regurgitate information about the latest trendy causes, and guffaw at how ignorant people in flyover country are. The only people they associate with are other liberal elites, so they start thinking that their positions are the only real ones. Consider what longtime journalist Bernie Goldberg observed about these elites.

Just think back to that famous observation by the New Yorker's otherwise brilliant film critic Pauline Kael, who in 1972 couldn't figure out how Richard Nixon had won the presidency.

"I can't believe it!" she said. "I don't know a single person who voted for him!" Nixon carried forty-nine states to McGovern's one, for God's sake--and she wasn't kidding!

That's one of the biggest problems in big-time journalism: its elites are hopelessly out of touch with everyday Americans. Their friends are liberals, just as they are. They share the same values. Almost all of them think the same way on the big social issues of our time....After a while they start to believe that all civilized people think the same way they and their friends do.

Finally, we come to the A-list celebrities. Oh, the celebrities. Is there any group of people in the world more out of touch with reality than these people? Most probably don't know their own zip codes.

President Obama is a mix of all three out-of-touch groups--university professor, cocktail-circuit elite, and presidential rockstar.

He's never had a meaningful job in the private sector--he was a student, community activist, teacher, civil rights attorney, and a politician.

He is about as far removed from your average American as you can get, so it's no surprise he was blindsided when we turned against his Euro-socialist big-government policies.

But he learned the wrong lesson.

"[I]t's a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand," Obama told "60 Minutes."

See? We're stupid. We weren't bright enough to understand what he was doing, so he needs to try harder to get it through our thick, gun-and-bible-clinging skulls.

It's not just an annoying habit of Progressives--the attitude that they know what's best drives everything about their agenda. In a nutshell, they believe that some of us are enlightened and do the right thing, and some aren't--and the ones that aren't need to be coerced into doing what is right by Big Government.

You don't recycle like you should or you drive a big SUV? You small-minded person. You need to have those choices made for you. So we'll just make laws to correct that.

You want plastic bags for your groceries? You don't understand what effect that has on the environment. We'll just have to ban those.

You didn't get your environmentally friendly light bulbs on your own? We'll just have to force you to buy the right ones by banning the "bad" ones.

You Neanderthals still like to own guns? We need to think about others' safety so you can't have those anymore.

And on and on it goes until one day the government is telling you that you can only have one child per family. Meanwhile, the "smart" people aren't bright enough to see where this road leads.

By now, you think elected officials would think twice before telling Carla Bonney that they won't answer her questions.

Yet that's what happened at Monday's Ventura City Council meeting, with just a handful of people in attendance to listen to the council discuss a ban on plastic bags.

Before the end of the week, Bonney was speaking to millions, as the firebrand Tea Party organizer took her fight against the ban onto national airwaves.

At Monday's meeting, Ventura City Councilmen Brian Brennan and Carl Morehouse attempted to ban single-use plastic bags, citing their danger to the environment. Instead, they succeeded only in persuading the council to vote 4-3 to have city staff work with agencies to find ways to reduce the amount of plastic bags in the community.

Councilmen Neal Andrews, Mike Tracy, and Jim Monahan voted against the resolution.  Andrews said a ban risked an unknown economic impact, household inconvenience and potentially even litigation.

"I heard a lot of the same rhetoric coming out of Sacramento from the folks that were donated to by the chemical lobby," said Brennan, prompting Andrews to later say that he's never accepted such donations.

At that point Bonney entered the chambers to address the council.

"You're overreaching," Bonney said. "And the whole point of the Tea Party is that our government is overreaching in every area of our lives."

Mayor Bill Fulton interrupted Bonney to explain that the public is prevented from asking any questions or engaging in dialog with the city officials.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty limited forum," Fulton curtly said.

Not one to keep quiet, Bonney found a forum that wasn't so limited Thursday afternoon when she called talk radio heavyweight Mark Levin to complain about the council's actions.

"We have to pay attention to our city councils because they're sneaking these things through," Bonney told Levin, whose voice reaches 8.5 million listeners a week.

"Where the hell did they get this power from?" Levin asked.

Levin is tied for the fourth largest talk radio audience, behind Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, according to Talkers magazine. He is also a bestselling author.

Bonney is most likely the first person to take the proceedings of a Ventura council meeting to millions of people across the country.

Maybe now Mayor Fulton might pay her a little more attention.

President Obama met with twenty senators Tuesday night to discuss the heightened urgency of cap-and-trade legislation in light of the largest environmental disaster in American history. While the oil spill has dominated headlines for two months, very little attention is paid to the history of the idea of cap-and-trade and who would stand to benefit from putting the force of government behind it. Before we can examine the players in the lucrative climate change industry, we must first understand the game.

How the game of cap-and-trade is played

Climate change is a man-made event caused by high quantities of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by people, cars, industry, and so forth, according to environmentalists and many scientists. It will lead to climactic catastrophes if something isn't done and done soon, say people like Al Gore.

Whether Al Gore and the environmentalists are correct or not is outside the scope of this article. Just go along with it for now.

Carbon emissions from the biggest polluters--industries--need to be measured by independent auditors and then capped at some arbitrary amount to limit their impact on the environment. However, rather than a hard cap, which many companies would have a difficult time complying with, this is a soft cap. Companies would be able to exceed the limit provided they pay some sort of penance.

Companies that come in under the limit could sell that penance to them. The exact amount a company goes under would be quantified as a number of carbon credits. The "green" company could then sell the credits to the polluting company.

Cap, the arbitrary pollution limit, and trade, the act of one company getting its pollution "forgiven" by transferring its money to a redeemed company, acts as a carrot/stick stimulus for all participating companies. With this cap-and-trade legislation, the Democrats hope to compel companies to reduce global emissions.

Cap-and-trade is already a reality

While we're sitting around waiting to see if President Obama has enough Senators to pass cap-and-trade legislation, it's easy to forget that it's already going on in Europe and the U.S.

While European nations are complying with the Kyoto Protocol, some American companies are participating in cap-and-trade on a purely voluntary basis--for now.

They trade carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the United States' only 

carbon credit trading system.  The CCX is the stadium in which the game of cap-and-trade is played. Right now it's a minor-league sport, but it has some real superstars behind it.

How the players stand to benefit

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the plan is economically sound--that it won't raise consumer prices or put companies out of business. Let's say it works great--there are still some glaring conflicts of interest that we must examine.

At the beginning of the decade, a promising Chicago-area state senator named Barack Obama sat on the board of directors of the Joyce Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to Progressive causes such as gun control and the environment. The group contributed money to a research program at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University. In this program worked Richard Sandor, an economist known as "the father of financial futures."

Sandor's research would lead directly to the creation of the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Time Magazine would later call him "the father of carbon trading" and a "hero of the planet" for founding CCX and its European counterpart. Dozens of companies signed up for the privilege to buy carbon credits, either by altruism or so they can brag to their customers that they went green. CCX makes money each time a firm is audited to measure their carbon footprint and each time a carbon credit is sold on the exchange.

A "socially conscious" investment firm saw the potential in CCX and bought a stake in it. That firm was Generation Investment Management (GIM). GIM makes money every time CCX makes money, which again is every time a company buys a carbon credit. Who founded and currently presides over GIM?

None other than Al Gore, Mr. Climate Change himself.

It would seem Mr. Gore--along with co-investor Goldman Sachs--has a hefty financial stake in convincing companies to go green for the sake of the environment. So far he's been successful at it--GIM is worth $2.5 billion.

For their part, Goldman Sachs was the second biggest contributor to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and 75 percent of its campaign contributions go to Democrats.

Al Gore, Barack Obama, Richard Sandor and Goldman Sachs aren't the only players in this game. Would you believe Fannie Mae, the GSE that is in the home mortgage industry, also plays a prominent role?

On November 7, 2006--24 hours after the Democrats retook control of Congress--Patent No. 6904336 was approved by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office. That patent, which governs the software used to power the Chicago Climate Exchange, is owned by Fannie Mae even though it has nothing to do with its charter--giving the mortgage company proprietary control over the automated trading system in the CCX.

If you're keeping score: Barack Obama helped create the Chicago Climate Exchange--the "trade" in cap-and-trade--Fannie Mae (along with Obama fundraiser Kenneth Berlin) controls it, and Al Gore and Goldman Sachs stand to benefit from every transaction that occurs on it.

And they're all pushing to make their system the law of the land. Where is the media on this?