The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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Special Note 1: All US Citizens should take one minute to formally object to a proposed extension of the wind PTC. (Please pass this email onto your lists.) [PTC Elimination Act now has 50 co-sponsors, Horse trading in Congress: Lifting oil ban for extending wind and solar tax credits, and 7 U.S.…

“Many observers have speculated that the cooling [global] could be the beginning of a long and persistent trend in that direction—that is, an inevitable departure from an abnormally warm period in climatic history.”

– Paul and Anne Ehrlich and John Holdren. Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (1977), p. 686.

“Predictions of future climate trends by Stephen Schneider and other leading climatologists, based on the prevailing knowledge of the atmosphere in the early 1970s, gave more weight to the potential problem of global cooling than it now appears to merit.”

– Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and Reason (Washington: Island Press, 1996), p. 34.

There was once talk of a coming Ice Age from John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich, and Steven Schneider. among others, before all got global warming religion.…

“The proposals offered thus far for adoption at the UN Paris conference to drastically reduce world GHGs and hydrocarbon use by 2050 are fatally flawed, unrealistic and impossible to achieve without destroying the world economy.”

[Editor note: The first part of this post ran yesterday at MasterResource.]

Policy prescriptions for drastically reducing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, to keep global temperatures from increasing by 2° or 3° Celsius (3.5 to 5.5° Fahrenheit), are based on unverified computer model projections, which are themselves based on the much-contested assumption that carbon dioxide now controls Earth’s climate.

Even if that assumption is correct, however, eliminating fossil fuels over the next 35 years would reduce world per capita GDP to only about 4% of what it is otherwise forecast to be, under a “business as usual” scenario.…

On October 5, 2009, President Obama issued an executive order, FEDERAL LEADERSHIP IN ENVIRONMENTAL, ENERGY, AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE, that sneak-previewed policies toward reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the rest of his time in office.  The 15-page executive order, divided into 20 sections, provided strict guidance for all agencies in the executive branch and their interactions with outside organizations.  Portions of the executive order follows: 

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release October 5, 2009

FEDERAL LEADERSHIP IN ENVIRONMENTAL, ENERGY, AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to establish an integrated strategy towards sustainability in the Federal Government and to make reduction of greenhouse gas emissions a priority for Federal agencies, it is hereby ordered as follows:  

Sec.…