Nancy Thorner made mention of  The Heartland Institute’s Fourth Climate Change Conference in her letter to the editor published by The Record.

To the editor:

I read with interest the Chicago Tribune’s editorial of Wednesday, Feb. 17, “Global doubting.” Although the editorial admitted that “the U.N. panel’s credibility is heavily damaged,” it later left open for debate the critical question of “what can and should be done to slow global warming.”

The Tribune based its editorial on the 3,000-page U.N. issued report which was found to contain false claims after the U.N report had stated unequivocally that long-term global warming could not be disputed and that if left unheeded it would result in catastrophic civilization-destroying events.

Unmentioned in the Tribune’s 2/17 editorial is the admission by Professor Phil Jones, Director of the prestigious Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, that there has been no statistically significant warming in the past 15 years. Jones further conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now, which suggest that global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. This sounds like fraud to me and what appears to be a hoax on the American people.

More and more evidence is surfacing against global warming claims. Even so, those dedicated to the cause are not about to let it go. Global warming has become like a religion to them and a means through which to implement their ideology of socialism. This ideology calls for government control over the American people through regulation and taxes, directed toward the replacement of free enterprise and capitalism with government-owned entities.

Cap and trade, if enacted, would speed this nation along a pathway already advancing toward socialism and away from the principles of our Constitution.

For those individuals who are on the fence or just wish to learn the facts from experts about global warming, it would be wise to visit the Heartland Institute website at heartland.org. Chicago’s Heartland Institute, a leader in exploring the issue of climate change, will be hosting its fourth international conference on climate change from May 16-19 in Chicago. This conference is open to the public and will feature 70 of the world’s leading experts on climate change as speakers and panelists.

It is telling that on Feb. 17 there was news that ConocoPhillips, BP, and Caterpillar had dropped out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. These prominent companies were part of a coalition of corporations and environmental groups that were pushing Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation.

With this important defection from the USCAP, may other companies soon follow suit. Cap-and-trade legislation would unfairly penalize industry, impose huge taxes upon the American people, and result in the loss of jobs at a time when both jobs and the economy are foremost on the minds of the American people.

Nancy Thorner
Lake Bluff

It is the Winter of the Living Dead as the Zombies stalk Washington. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are rampaging with glassy eyes, rotting flesh, and arms outstretched. They don’t know they are dead so they keep pushing for health care because it is the only thing they know how to do. It is what they did in life, so it is what they will continue to do until they are stopped.

I don’t remember how zombies can be stopped. Let’s see, a stake in the heart was for vampires, right? It was a silver bullet for werewolves, I think. But what stops a zombie? Maybe another election, though the elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts haven’t done the job. Wikipedia wasn’t any help, though it did have a pretty accurate description of the phenomenon — “zombies are depicted as mindless, unthinking henchmen under the spell of an evil magician.”

This past weekend was my annual Health Policy Poker Retreat in West Virginia. These guys are mostly former Kennedy staffers and Obama supporters. I’ve been playing poker and arguing politics with them for 25 years. Speaking of zombies, the buzz this year was how long will Bobby Byrd survive. Or perhaps he’s already dead and embalmed. They just roll him in when they need a vote. There are some pretty good taxidermists in West Virginia.

In any case, it looks like the Dems are going to keep pushing health care even while the entire country begs for mercy. Maybe that is the strategy. If they keep talking about it, we’ll all decide to let it pass just to shut them up. It is a very peculiar political strategy, but who knows? Maybe it will work.

And you thought they had outlawed torture.

– Greg Scandlen

from Consumer Power Report #212

A friend of The Heartland Institute shares his letter to the president.
        
The President of the United States
Mr. Barack H. Obama
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500                 2/19/2010                                                                   

Dear Mr. President,

Last October, I received a letter from your office in response to a note of mine on the subject of “Global Warming”, alias “Climate Change”. Truthfully, I was disappointed with your reply because it told me that the highest level of  Government continues to propagate incorrect information about weather and climate which will keep the public confused and delay an economic recovery.

With all due respect, Mr. President, but during a speech in Nevada recently, you clearly confused “weather” with “climate”, claiming unusual weather phenomena in Vancouver and Dallas did not mean the planet as a whole was not still getting warmer. It just is not so, Mr. President! Even some of the most adamant global warming activists, such as Dr. Phil Jones of CRU (the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia, UK), stated just the other day, in an about-face, that there has been no Global Warming since 1998.

Because the whole Global Warming affair was supposed to be the result of increasing amounts of man-made carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere, your ongoing hubristic emphasis on carbon-dioxide reduction efforts has therefore become irrelevant, politically damaging to you and really damaging to the economy, if you persist in pushing this infamous Cap and Trade idea, etc.

Lately, you have made it clear that you want to do whatever it takes to get the economy off the ground again. Unfortunately, that is very unlikely to happen if you continue to try raising taxes in whatever form.

Some key things that are really likely to change the economic outlook are:

1) significant, permanent tax cuts, for business as well as individuals.               2) cancellation of spending any remaining Stimulus funds.                      3) sharp reductions in government spending and control.   
4) stating Global Warming to be a non-issue upon which you will act.

Adopting the above recommendations would be doing the right things for the country in many people’s view and surely be a great assist during your 2012 re-election campaign.

Sincerely and respectfully,

 Frederik Engel

Join The Heartland Institute’s Peter Fotos, Jon Caldara and Linda Gorman of the Independence Institute, and other speakers at a roundtable forum addressing health care reform in Colorado and at the federal level.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The Future of Health Care in America:
A Roundtable Discussion
Denver Public Library — Central Branch
10 West Fourteenth Avenue Parkway
Denver, CO 80204

How to defeat Obamacare 2.0

Brendan Steinhauser of Freedom Works — one of the key players in the success of the tea party movement earlier this year — posted this encouraging report at Freedom Works Web site:

Many activists are wondering how to fight the final battle against Obamacare 2.0. Now that the president has made it clear he wants to jam a bad bill down our throats through “reconciliation” we must renew our efforts to stop this from happening.

After a morning conference call with activists from around the country, I wanted to share a few of their ideas with you. Most of these activities should be organized immediately, but their should be a major focus on the townhall idea during the congressional Easter Recess, which begins March 27th.

You can read the whole 2.0 manual here.

“Today’s editorial in the Chicago Tribune highlights the potential benefits of allowing around 35,000 kids to get a better education.

The Heartland Institute believes it’s a good start along the road of funding children, not bureaucracies.”

‘A decent education’

When state Sen. James Meeks asks fellow Democrats to give education vouchers to kids who attend some of the worst schools in Chicago, the legislators often tell him they don’t want to divert dollars from public education.

Meeks’ response: “If the public schools are not doing their job, why do you want to continue to reward them with money?”

Good question.

We have yet to hear a good answer.

Meeks is trying valiantly to shake up the status quo in public education, and we stand with him in that effort. He is pushing a solid plan to create a voucher program for Chicago. The Senate’s executive subcommittee on education is set to discuss the bill on Wednesday.

A discussion about vouchers always gets the hackles up. It prompts charges that proponents want to abandon public schools.

So we think it’s time to frame the question a little differently.

The Chicago Public Schools system isn’t failing for lack of trying. The system is in the midst of an ambitious and controversial effort — Renaissance 2010 — to give new options to children in the worst schools. Sometimes, that means taking the dramatic step of closing schools and opening new ones. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s Chicago Tribune has the first in a series of articles the reporter says will “sort fact from fiction” on climate change. The full text of the article is here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-0228-climate-science-20100302,0,1094646,full.story.

Reporter Michael Hawthorne says he’s interviewed scores of scientists. We don’t know if future articles will quote any of those with whom The Heartland Institute has worked, or will do so in any way approaching fairness. This first article is not promising.

There’s no evidence here that Hawthorne has a copy of Climate Change Reconsidered, so we’re sending one over to him today, along with an invitation to the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, taking place right across the street from the Tribune Tower.

Heartland staff and allies will be keeping an eye on future articles in this series. We’ll keep you posted.

That’s a dumb question. But the folks at the Science & Public Policy Institute, led by Bob Ferguson, checked anyway.

In several recent papers, SPPI scientists raised serious concerns for policy makers and the public about the “adjustments” that government-funded employees continue making to raw temperature data.

Intentional or not, the adjustments introduce an enhanced warming bias to thermometer?based measurements.

Continuing concerns about government tampering with official temperature data are further addressed in a new SPPI paper, Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data, by Dr. Edward Long.

Says Ferguson, “In layman terms, the federal government, through its funded agents, may be manipulating surface temperature data and historical records, in support of government?advocated cientific hypotheses and public policy. The need for a top?to?bottom audit, as recently called for by the Utah’s legislature, is urgent and immediate.”

You can read Dr. Long’s conclusions here.

So now in Massachusetts they are pushing for a global system of capitated fees that will rachet down over time. An editorial in the Boston Globe supports this effort saying, “But for such a global system to hold down costs, that annual amount has to go on a diet, with each year’s increase ratcheted downward.” Now, it escapes me how a state government feels it has the authority to dictate how a private insurer pays a private provider for a private service. But this is Massachusetts, after all, and Attorney General Martha Coakley is one of the biggest proponents of doing this.

Massachusetts hired the Rand Corporation to estimate the cost savings that might come from different approaches. The result is a curious mix of wishful thinking and selective perception. The study says it started with “an initial set of 75 broad approaches to cost containment,” from which it culled a subset of 12 options “for which there was some evidence of savings potential and some available data for making projections.”

Curiously omitted from the analysis is any form of consumer-driven health, despite evidence aplenty of dramatic cost savings (see CPR #210 for a report from Cigna of a 26 percent reduction in costs over four years of experience.) Rather, Rand looks solely at the flavor-of-the-week fads such as “bundled payments.” This despite there existing absolutely zero experience with bundled payments in real-world conditions or any evidence that it saves anything.

Rand is not deterred by any lack of evidence and estimates that bundled payments would save between 0.1 percent and 5.9 percent over a 10-year period. Now that is quite a range, but Rand covers itself by saying, “the estimates of savings from all 12 options are very tentative, because none has a proven history of reducing spending.”

Let’s repeat — none of the 12 options has a proven history of reducing spending. Rand goes on, “the amount of the reduction is highly uncertain, as indicated by the spread between the high and low savings estimates in the figure.”

But Rand does not let the lack of data get in the way of its optimism. It says, “If health care spending could be held to the rate of growth in the state’s GDP, then health spending in the state would be only $107 billion by 2020, representing a cumulative savings of 8 percent between 2010 and 2020.” Why, yes indeedy. And as my mother used to say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

And you wonder why American public policy is in such a mess?

SOURCE: Boston Globe; Rand Write-up

from Consumer Power Report #211

The Heartland Institute, hosts of 2010 Climate Change Conference shares this amusing American Spectator article, By Aaron Goldstein on 2.24.10.

Why did the chicken in Cambridge, Massachusetts cross the road?

So it could combat the climate emergency on the other side.

Tip O’Neill, the late House Speaker born in Cambridge, marveled at the ability of left-wing activists to “come up with a cure for which there is no known disease.”

How else can one explain the Cambridge Climate Congress? Chicken Little is alive and well and living in the People’s Republic of Cambridge.

Established by Cambridge City Council in May 2009, the Climate Congress has put forth a series of recommendations “to respond to the climate emergency” in Cambridge. According to the Congress, it is an emergency that has been “created by the growth of local greenhouse gas emissions.” These recommendations include the institution of a local carbon tax, the taxation of plastic and paper bags, and the elimination of street side parking. But the one recommendation that grabbed my attention was the establishment of “Meatless Mondays.” To be precise: 

Asking/mandating that local restaurants and schools institute “Meatless or Vegan Mondays” to increase community awareness and reduce reliance on meat, dairy and eggs as food sources.

I guess Free Range Fridays just couldn’t make the cut.

The Cambridge Climate Congress seeks to “raise awareness and promote action about the connection between food choices and climate change.” What exactly the connection is between climate change and not serving meat on Mondays isn’t made clear in their recommendations.

However, according to a report issued by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in November 2006, livestock generates more greenhouse gas emissions than automobiles. The report also concluded that raising livestock is a major source of land and water degradation. In September 2008, Rajendra Pachuari, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called on people to refrain from eating meat one day a week in an effort to combat climate change. Last December, shortly before the Copenhagen Climate Conference, Pachuari was joined by Sir Paul McCartney in a presentation before the European Parliament to promote this idea with the slogan, “Less Meat=Less Heat.”

Needless to say, eating fish fingers on Penny Lane is a distant memory for the ex-Beatle.

Yet nevertheless “Meatless Mondays” is beginning to catch on. Indeed, it was recently instituted in the Baltimore public school system. But the Cambridge Climate Congress wants to take it a step further and extend this policy beyond schools. It wants to include local restaurants.

Upon reading this policy recommendation the first thing that came to mind was Frank’s Steak House, a family restaurant I have occasionally patronized. Frank’s has been a fixture in North Cambridge for over seven decades. It was a favorite haunt of the aforementioned Tip O’Neill. How would have good old Tip reacted had he been told he couldn’t enjoy a plate of steak tips? If Cambridge ends up “mandating” that local restaurants implement “Meatless Monday” at their establishments, how exactly would it affect Frank’s Steak House? Would there be no porterhouse served near Porter Square?

“We’re not going to do that. We’re a steakhouse.” That was the reaction of George Ravanis, co-owner of Frank’s Steak House, to whom I spoke over the phone. Ravanis went on to say if the city had any intention of acting on this recommendation that he would be in “the front row at city hall asking them if they had lost their minds.” Yet he was more amused than he was angry. “It’s typical Cambridge,” said Ravanis. “It’s typical of what people think of Cambridge.” Besides what exactly is Ravanis to do if a family from Rhode Island drives all the way up to Cambridge on a Monday night to enjoy a sizzler only to find out his establishment isn’t allowed to serve it?

Now it is certainly possible that Cambridge City Council will be practical enough to recognize that imposing such a recommendation would be little more than chicken potpie in the sky. Would they compel McDonald’s on Massachusetts Avenue not to serve Big Macs on Mondays? Would they have Legal Sea Foods in Kendall Square stop serving New England Clam Chowder to the lunchtime crowd at the start of the workweek? Unless you serve vegan fare, who in their right mind would want to open an eatery in Cambridge? Does Cambridge really want its meat lovers to go on the lamb to Somerville to satiate their carnivorous cravings? Why would Cambridge want to subject itself to such ridicule and ribbing?

Yet one can never underestimate the capacity of government to butt in places where it does not belong. If Cambridge should decide that restaurants must go meatless on Mondays, what is to prevent them from telling grocery stores they cannot sell meat on Tuesdays? Then, again, even if Cambridge went completely meatless somehow I don’t think it would stop the city’s pork barrel spending.