Five Ways Barack Obama Can Mess with Republicans in 2015

Bloomberg.com:

President Barack Obama knows how to get under Republicans' skin (in so many ways, but in this case we're talking about going around Congress to get things done), and he ended 2014 with a bang: A climate deal with China. Executive action on immigration. A move to normalize relations with Cuba.

As he makes his New Year's resolutions, the liberated, second-term, post-midterm president's list may well include some new maneuvers to enrage the opposition party. Here are five ways he could do it again in 2015.

Keystone

You already know more than you ever thought you would about oil-sands crude, right? TransCanada Corp. wants to complete an $8 billion, 1,179-mile pipeline starting in the Canadian province of Alberta and running 830,000 barrels of oil per day through Nebraska into a network to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. While Obama cares about the Keystone XL project in the context of foreign policy and maintaining good relations with neighbor, ally and trading partner Canada, in 2012 he blocked it because of concerns in Nebraska and kicked it to the State Department for more study.

Now, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said he wants to start the new Congress by taking up a bill by Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican, to approve Keystone under congressional authority. Environmentalists and major Democratic donor Tom Steyer are fighting the project, saying it will worsen global warming and could trigger toxic spills. Republicans largely back the project, saying it can create jobs and reduce gas prices. Opponents say such benefits are greatly overstated or downright irrelevant, given how low gas prices have fallen lately.

Obama was coy throughout the midterms about which way he'll go, maintaining that it was in the State Department's hands and that he would weigh the pros and cons. But he doesn't want Congress to tell him what to do. And in recent weeks, he's hinted strongly that he's turned against Keystone XL. He told comedian Stephen Colbert that while it would be good for Canada, “it's not going to push down gas prices here in the United States,” and that any economic benefit must be weighed against contributing to the warming of the earth, “which could be disastrous.” In his year-end news conference, the president said that “it’s not even going to be a nominal benefit to U.S. consumers.” Asked whether he was issuing a veto threat, he demurred. “I'll see what they do,” he said of Republicans in Congress. “We'll take that up in the new year.”

Campaign finance reform

So-called dark-money nonprofits, such as those affiliated with the Koch brothers, could find it much harder to muck around in elections. Under current practices, up to half of these groups' money can be spent on politics. Changes to the Internal Revenue Service regulations governing 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations could shrink the percentage they can devote to election activities such as advertising. Overall, the aim would be to make it more difficult for any nonprofit group to engage in campaign politics; in practice, it would likely be perceived as a disproportionate handicap of conservative donor-backed organizations. These are among the reforms that the administration, regulatory groups or Congress could take on if so inclined (which Congress probably is not).

Climate change

Think power plants and methane.

Last year, Obama proposed power-plant standards Republicans oppose to reduce carbon dioxide by 26 percent by 2020 and 30 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. The standards are set to be issued in June, and then states will have another year to adopt their own plans to carry the standards out. McConnell will make it a top priority to try to stop Obama, either by blocking funding to carry out the policy or by changing provisions of the Clean Air Act, said David Doniger, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council climate and clean air program. “It will be fought over by the Republicans all through the year,” he said. “There will be lots of lawsuits and so on. But the administration's very committed to this.”

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Former Weather Channel CEO John Coleman Goes off on CNN: ‘Hello, Everybody! There’s No Global Warming!’

Mediaite.com:

Former Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman made melted-iceberg waves recently when he denied the existence of climate change, to the point that the channel he helped found distanced itself from him. 

Coleman was defiant on CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday morning, telling (or rather talking over) host Brian Stelter that his former network had become politicized.

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“I resent you calling me a denier, that is a word meant to put me down,” Coleman said. “I’m a skeptic about climate change, not a denier.”

“CNN has taken a very strong position on global warming that it is a consensus. Well there is no consensus in science. Science isn’t a vote. Science is about facts. …It has been become a big political point of the Democratic Party and part of their platform, but the science is on my side.”

When Stelter tried to move on by saying it was unlikely they’d come to an agreement there, Coleman replied, “I know we’re not, because you wouldn’t allow it to happen on CNN. But I’m happy that I got on the air and got a chance to talk to your viewers. Hello, everybody! There is no global warming!”

Coleman was “terribly disappointed,” that his old network was on the climate change bandwagon. “The Weather Channel has bought into it,” he said. “But so has all the media. That’s no big surprise. 

“I created a channel to give people their weather, tell them what the weather is now and what it’s going to be. …to serve a real purpose. And that channel has become totally distorted.”

Current CEO David Kenny appeared afterward and reiterated the channel’s position that climate change is real.

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Global Warming: Al Gore’s Gold Mine

BizPacReview.com:

Hope springs eternal that some of America’s political blowhards will ease into the sunset, crushed into silence by life’s relentless realities. But there is no such luck when it comes to Al Gore and his climate mafia. Gore’s sizable bank account must be running low, because he is trying to crank up his propaganda machine again to tap into the “green pork bonanza.”

Gore made hundreds of millions of dollars from the hoopla surrounding his 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and resulting financial ventures. The bonanza happened in spite of the fact that a judge in London’s highest court ruled the documentary was “one-sided,” not an impartial analysis and clearly “a political film.”

The movie was based on a 1998 paper by Michael Mann, who “reported” sharp rises in global temperatures and argued that immediate global action must be taken to prevent uncontrollable temperature rises. But the real inconvenient truth is that the Mann paper was based on sloppy research. It has since been contradicted, and its projections have not materialized. In fact, there has “been no statistically significant increase in annual global temperatures” in the 16 years since the paper was written, the United Kingdom’s national weather office said. Global temperatures crested in 1998. Even the United Nations has finally admitted that such temperatures have not risen in the past 16 years.

Gore’s apocalyptic predictions were false, and his credibility has been shredded among objective observers. Today, polar ice caps are larger. Polar bear populations have increased. The West Antarctic ice sheet’s reduction was caused by sub-glacial volcanic magma. Americans have noticed that winters are getting colder.

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have joined the climate mafia, calling climate change “the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction” and insisting global warming is now “settled science, a scientific consensus.” Really? Well, I invite readers to ask true scientists whether they respect consensus thinking. Science is all about evidence, not consensus. In fact, science doesn’t respect consensus or majority views. Data, evidence and observations, not projections, are what convince true scientists whether a theory is wrong or right.

Global warming has been Gore’s gold mine. He has spent the past 15 years mining for profits and huckstering for carbon credits, and he’s made a killing. After all, he needed a lot of money to pay the electric bills for his 20-room Tennessee mansion’s annual 221,000 kilowatt-hours, more than 20 times the national average, according to ABC News.

Now, I don’t begrudge a man making money. But what’s wrong with Gore’s campaign is that, under the guise of protecting the Earth, Gore’s propaganda juggernaut has spread an agenda of hysteria and alarm based on poor science. He declares as fact that humans are the primary cause of global warming. He denies that natural phenomena causes most climate change. And yet, the Earth’s climate changes all the time. On average, the Earth experiences a warming cycle approximately every 1,500 years, and it has gone through dozens of what scientists call “little Ice Ages.”

Gore and other leftists have profited over the years by creating Chicken Little, sky-is-falling scenarios as a way to expand government and “solve the problem” they manufactured. How convenient for Gore to use alarmist propaganda, falsified charts and a hoax to create a problem. Gore and other leftists invented most of the manmade global warming “crisis,” empowering leftists all over the world to expand government’s reach and blame “greedy” corporations so they can be taxed to pay the global warming tab and so that all the liberals can “take care” of all the helpless corporate victims before life on Earth is destroyed.

Gore is not just wrong; he’s dangerous. His views are perilous because, as he engages in profiteering, he influences the U.S. government to take radical actions that severely impact America’s economy and the lives of millions of its citizens. Gore is a very clever man as he rakes in the money, but he has put himself into one hell of an ethical conflict of interest.

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Uber Rich Man Leonardo DiCaprio With Yachts and Planes Lectures World About Global Warming

Townhall.com:

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is a very rich man. His net worth sits at $220 million, which naturally means he owns many expensive things that require a lot of oil to enjoy. For example, here he is on his yacht.

Over the weekend, a march to stop climate change was held in New York City. DiCaprio took the time to leave his multi-million dollar Manhattan apartment and walked in solidarity with the crowd full of hipsters wearing their petroleum based shoes. He took selfies with marchers on their earth destroying iPhones. 

Luckily, the United Nations held a Climate Change Summit this week and DiCaprio was given a speaking slot. He is also a newly minted UN "messenger of peace." DiCaprio took advantage of the opportunity by lecturing the rest of the world about how to use less energy (through government force of course because changing individual, personal choices when it comes to energy consumption is just too hard apparently). 

When he was finished at the podium, there's no doubt DiCaprio left the stage to get into an SUV, which of course took him back to his private jet so he could start his next yachting vacation. 

"As an actor I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems," DiCaprio said in a suit that cost thousands of dollars. "I stand before you not as an expert, but as a concerned citizen, one of the 400,000 people who marched in the streets of New York on Sunday and the billions of others around the world who want to solve our climate crisis." 

Yes, DiCaprio is a concerned citizen just like the rest of us... 

"To be clear, this is not about just telling people to change their light bulbs or to buy a hybrid car, this disaster has grown beyond the choices that individuals make. This is now about our industries and our governments around the world taking decisive and large scale action," he continued. "This isn't hysteria. This is fact." 

As always with these people, less energy for thee but not for me. If DiCaprio wants really change, he should start with himself and lead by example. That isn't hysteria, it's a fact. 

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Rep. Lenar Whitney Proves That Global Warming Is A Hoax

Mediaite.com:

Republican congressional candidate and Louisiana state representative Lenar Whitney put out an ad just a few days ago really going off on global warming, accusing liberals (and Al Gore in particular) of perpetuating a hoax. She declares, “A specter is haunting America. It is perhaps the greatest deception in the history of mankind.”

Whitney claims the earth has gotten colder every year for the past few years and went after the Obama administration for claiming the opposite. She points to the decrease in global storms and the infamous “Climategate” case to dismiss global warming as a huge hoax.

She says that pushing the global warming “ruse” has had a “devastating effect” on America, and the U.S. push to do something about it is all about giving the executive branch more power and giving liberals the gift of regulating every aspect of American life.

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Liberal Rolling Stone Magazine Allows Billionaire Scam Artist Al Gore To Spout More Lies About Pending "Climate Change Doom"

Amazing that not a single, non-conservative professional journalist in America has the guts to take on Al Gore's continuous lies and the fortune he's accumulated thanks to his global warming lies and propaganda:

FORMER US vice-president Al Gore got rich by predicting global warming doom — but also got reckless. 
 
His film, An Inconvenient Truth, was found by a British judge to have nine significant errors, and Gore may have become even more unreliable.

Here are just some of the astonishingly false claims Gore made in a lecture last week to Climate Reality Project presenters in Melbourne.

“You sometimes hear this silliness where people say, well, global warming has stopped ... But the last decade has been by all odds the hottest decade ever measured.”

In fact, the atmosphere has not warmed for some 16 years.

“Super typhoon Haiyan [last year] became the most powerful, the most destructive ocean-based storm over to make landfall ... These events are becoming more common.”

In fact, the Philippine Met Agency says Haiyan was not even the Philippines’ most powerful typhoon. It had wind gusts at landfall of 275km/h — the same as Typhoon Sening in 1970, but less than the 320km/h of Typhoon Reming in 2006.

Haiyan killed about 6000 people, but the world’s 35 deadliest typhoons killed between 12,000 and 500,000.

Nor are cyclones and hurricanes becoming more common. Geophysical Research Letters in 2009 reported “no net change” in the number of cyclones hitting the Philippines, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said worldwide data over a century “suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific”.

“[Cyclone Yasi in 2001 was] one of the most powerful cyclones to hit Queensland ... These kind of events are happening with increased frequency all over the world.”

In fact, even the Australian Climate Commission, led by alarmist Tim Flannery, admitted Yasi and its floods “were … not the result of climate change”.

The Bureau of Meteorology adds: “The total number of [Australian] cyclones appears to have decreased to the mid-1980s, and remained nearly stable since.” Worldwide, cyclones have not increased.

“The warmer temperatures ... make the ocean-based storms more powerful.”

But the IPCC says “confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low”.

How does Gore get away with this?

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Scientists At NASA and NOAA Manipulated Temperature Data To Overstate "Global Warming"

Breitbart.com:

Scientists at two of the world’s leading climate centres - NASA and NOAA - have been caught out manipulating temperature data to overstate the extent of the 20th century "global warming".

The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science, where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show "climate change" before and after the adjustments.

When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted - ie fabricated by computer models -  20th century 'global warming' suddenly looks much more dramatic.

This is especially noticeable on the US temperature records. Before 2000, it was generally accepted - even by climate activists like NASA's James Hansen - that the hottest decade in the US was the 1930s.
As Hansen himself said in a 1989 report:

In the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.

However, Hansen subsequently changed his tune when, sometime after 2000, the temperatures were adjusted to accord with the climate alarmists' fashionable "global warming" narrative. By cooling the record-breaking year of 1934, and promoting 1998 as the hottest year in US history, the scientists who made the adjustments were able suddenly to show 20th century temperatures shooting up - where before they looked either flat or declining.

But as Goddard notes, the Environmental Protection Agency's heatwave record makes a mockery of these adjustments. It quite clearly shows that the US heat waves of the 1930s were of an order of magnitude greater than anything experienced at any other time during the century - far more severe than those in the 1980s or 1990s which were no worse than those in the 1950s.

These adjustments, however, are not limited to the US temperature data sets. Similar fabrications have taken place everywhere from Iceland to Australia.

The fact that supposedly reputable scientists can make these dishonest adjustments and get away with it is, notes long-time sceptic Christopher Booker, one of the more remarkable anomalies of the great climate change scam.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

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President of Godless Liberals, Barack Obama, Calls Climate Change Deniers A ‘Serious Threat’ to Future

No doubt, more and more of our "tolerant" liberals will use this as an excuse to censor manmade climate change deniers:. This man is pure evil:

Describing lawmakers and pundits who deny manmade climate change as a “fairly serious threat to everybody’s future,” President Obama on Saturday called for less debate and more action in combating warming trends. 

Delivering the address at University of California Irvine’s commencement, Obama underscored the view of some scientists that the effects of climate change are already being felt nationwide and said he was allocating new funds for communities recovering from natural disasters.

Speaking at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Obama compared the scientific problem of curbing climate change to that of putting a man on the moon. And while skeptics in the 1960s may have made a case against the mission, Obama said he couldn’t remember “saying the moon wasn’t there, or that it was made of cheese.”

“Today’s Congress, though, is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence about climate change,” he said. “They’ll tell you it’s a hoax, or a fad.”

Obama said Republicans had a long history of supporting environmental causes, naming Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush as examples of past presidents who did more than current GOP politicians. 

“People are thinking about politics instead of thinking about what’s good for the next generation,” he added later.

The White House has taken on climate change as a top issue for Obama’s second term, announcing at the beginning of the month proposed new restrictions on power plants that would reduce emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030.

On Saturday Obama announced a $1 billion fund for towns and cities recovering from disasters. About $130 million is reserved for places affected by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy; the rest will be distributed nationwide.

Opponents of Obama’s actions on climate change— some of whom deny humans are responsible for climate change — say the rules will kill jobs and increase the cost of energy.

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California Governor Jerry Brown Lies and Blames Rising Seawater on Climate Change

LATimes.com:

An aide to Jerry Brown confirmed Wednesday that the governor was wrong when he said global warming would eventually cause rising seawater to inundate Los Angeles International Airport.

Citing new studies, Brown called attention to the global warming issue on Tuesday, saying a predicted 4-foot rise in sea level within the next 200 years could force the relocation of LAX at a cost of billions of dollars.

But various sources say that the nation’s third-busiest airport -- bordered by the Pacific Ocean -- has elevations ranging from 108 feet to 126 feet and is protected by higher coastal bluffs on the west side.

“The governor misspoke about LAX,” said Evan Westrup, a spokesman for the Brown administration.

Environmental officials for Los Angeles World Airports, the operator of LAX, said the airport has an elevation of more than 120 feet. “A 4-foot rise in sea level,” they said, “should have minimal impact on airport operations.”

In addition, a recent study by USC's Sea Grant Program did not identify LAX as one of the coastal areas in Los Angeles threatened by sea level rise.

Airport officials said, however, that any organization with coastal structures should be concerned about the potential adverse impact of climate change. They added that the airport department is part of a citywide effort to explore and plan ways to cope with predicted increases in sea level.

During a news conference Tuesday in Los Angeles, Brown mentioned current research, which concluded that a 4-foot rise in the world’s oceans could happen within 200 years as a massive cluster of glaciers melts in Antarctica.

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