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I don't think that one counts. If you look at their site, all their stated concerns are for *safety* in nuclear energy, not preventing its use.

Nuclear power. The UCS is against it even though it is safer and cleaner than other sources. I just OWNED YOU BITCH!!. Go back to school, little boy.

Hardly. Go check out their site on nuclear power. They are concerned about safety, not "being against it". Looks more like YOU are the bitch.

This reminds me of Soviet Russia or a dictatorship. Having a political "officer" involved in every decision. This is why we hire experts, educate people, etc.

Imagine that: politicians in government.

The directive, according to TFA, "bans any regulation from moving forward without the approval of an agency's regulatory policy officer, who would be a political appointee."

Uh, isn't this a good thing? The alternative would be some guy hired for the job by some random person. This guy would have no accountability to anybody but his boss, who could also have little accountability.

This new directive will make politicians who appoint these people responsible for the actions of the department.

Regulation shouldn't move forward unless our elected officials say so. I'm shocked this wasn't in place before. I really hope they don't have any more agencies where this is necessary.

I mean, imagine a person writing regulations that affect your life who aren't even accountable to the person you voted for. Yes, it's bad to give the president more power, but if there's regulation happening, I want it under someone directly or indirectly accountable to the people. Having them appointed by an elected official is good enough. If it were up to me, I wouldn't even have most of these agencies, but since everyone loves government these days, I'll settle for accountability.

I think this group who wrote the article (UCS) is pretty obviously writing this article because they fear Bush (and specifically Bush, look at their site) will use this power to further bring this government away from environmental protection. That's a valid concern, but you can't have it both ways: either the government can regulate the environment, or they can't.

If you want to grant the government the power to mess things up, you have to accept that the people you elect may use that power.

"The executive order bans any regulation from moving forward without the approval of an agency's regulatory policy officer, who would be a political appointee."

- UCS Press Release

"Don't turn around.
Der Kommissar's in town."
- Falco

There's an In Democratic Republic of Germany joke in there, but my regulatory political officer oversees me.

Thanks, here is some push in Congress http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/new-repor t-shows-economic-0046.htmlto get a national renewable energy standard which might lead to a national net metering law but so far these have been going state-by-state.
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Silicon! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

hmmm, how about people who die from heat stroke during the summer, or asthmatics having an attack due to smog, or i don't know people who die in a tornado or hurricane that is more intense due to it being 1 degree hotter. Do you work for Exxon? You might as well :( Stuff: Exxon Still Funding Climate Change Deniers $900 BILLION OF INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS PRESSURE EXXON MOBIL ON GLOBAL WARMING Scientists' Report Documents ExxonMobil's Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science EarthTalk: Exxon/Mobil's Climate Change Contrarions Report: ExxonMobil Spends Millions Funding Global Warming Skeptics ExxonSecrets

Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect. Why don't you move there and report back to us your findings? Seriously though, it is not just "warming" that has me concerned, but it's secondary effects (runaway greenhouse effect not withstanding). When I look at the declining health of the oceans, the disappearance of honeybees, the loss in the bird population (we are actually seeing a lot of extinction of species right now), it is an alarming trend. I think these phenomena are indicative of the poor health of our planet and I fear humanity is too arrogant, ignorant, and complacent to actually do anything about it.

"BTW, Both sides of the argument are full of shit. Having been to many of the countries in Europe (and spent significant time in some) I have seen that most European countries are much less concerned about the environment than the US is, they require significantly lower standards and allow vehicles to smog freely."

This is complete and utter fabrication. Cars sold in the European Union is on average much more efficient than their counterparts in the US. Someone else posted the massive difference between BMW models in the US and the EU in miles per gallon. Granted, the UK gallon is 20% more than the US gallon, but the differences in MPG are several times this difference. The same goes for other cars.

Unless you spent your entire time in Europe in non-EU countries, I can't accout for how you could get such a massively wrong impression other than you just lying.

This states that the US is 15 years behind the European Union in fuel economy. And, shock horror, it is a US-source.

Of course Al Gore never said that he "invented" the Internet--that was wording that the RNC (Republican National Committee) came up with specifically to discredit Gore--and which has been repeated by the media and people like you either purposefully to smear Gore or because of ignorance/incompetence. As for there being "plenty" of evidence against human effects on global temperature, your belief is contradicted by statements signed by hundreds of scientists that study the issue--who believe that the preponderence of evidence is now that humans are almost certainly having an effect. Your hypothesis that Dems are just as bad as Bush at misusing science also fails to note several unprecedented actions that scientists have taken to protest Bush's misuse of science (e.g., http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/10600-sci entists-condemn.html).

How about "US threatens Putin with Missile Bases in Europe"?

Bush is an insane tyrant, a rogue regime that's turned everything it's touched into new danger. He dropped the ABM Treaty that Nixon had signed with the Soviets which kept the Cold War from spiraling out of control. Because Star Wars "missile defense" was the main Bush "defense" agenda: create as many missile threats as possible to "market" Star Wars to a terrorized American public.

Just as Bush didn't let the Qaeda's Afghanistan base of attacks stop him from invading Iraq instead, the foreign policy his cronies wanted despite the real world, Bush is roaring right ahead with Star Wars. He's goading Russia into a new nuke race because it's good for him, right according to their original plans that he never abandons. Just like Cheney tried to provoke an armageddon with China over Taiwan. Hell, even Bush Sr's plans for NASA to deliver Star Wars are now in full swing, with the old Star Wars hand Griffin running the show, and a new National Space Policy of militarizing space by NASA for the Pentagon and CIA.

These insane tyrants must be stopped. IMPEACH THEM NOW. Today. Before it's too late.

Translation, what China doesn't have on a per-capita basis, they make up for in sheer quantity.

Additionally, there are initiatives in the US already to reduce emissions. Sure, they may not move as quickly (the day before yesterday please!) as you'd like. But they ARE in progress.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 1000 Megawatt coal plant produces 250,000 tons of ash and 486,000 tons of sludge in a year.

So on a strictly weight-for-weight basis, nuclear is over 22,300 times cleaner than coal per megawatt. The nuclear waste is also highly regulated with stringent disposal requirements (if our politicians will get off their duffs and decide on a place to put it). A large portion of the ash and sludge from a coal plant is simply disposed into the atmosphere or sent to landfills where it ends up in our lungs and our water.

Yes, yes, everyone wants near-zero emission renewable energy. But given that that is currently not cost-effective enough to compete with coal, nuclear is a tremendously cleaner stepping stone that's available here and now, while we do the R&D to get the renewable costs down to where they're competitive.

Steven J. Milloy is NOT a scientist but industry-paid hack, is a columnist for Fox News and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. For years, Milloy has been scamming people on Fox News and on his junkscience site.

This guy has been bought and paid for many times over by companies like Phillip Morris and Exxon Mobil.

This report from the Union of Concerned Scientists documents how Milloy, headed a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke. Milloy also served as a member of the small 1998 Global Climate Science Team task force that mapped out ExxonMobil's disinformation strategy on global warming. Between 2000 and 2004, ExxonMobil gave $50,000 to Milloy's Advancement of Sound Science Center, and another $60,000 to an organization called the Free Enterprise Education Institute (a.k.a. Free Enterprise Action Institute), which is also registered to Milloy's home address.

ExxonMobil also gave $130,000 to Milloy's "Free Enterprise Action Institute" between 1998-2005. The organization is registered under Milloy's name and home address.

Milloy is also the former director of the "National Environmental Policy Institute". Yet another industry front group providing disinformation on climate science to which ExxonMobil gave at least $75,000.

As others have stated, Milloy never mentions the large amounts of mercury being released from coal-fired power plants that has resulted in levels of mercury so high in lakes and streams of New England that state health agencies have to warn pregnant women and young children not to eat too much fish caught from these waters. Milloy never mentions that his friends in the power industry (and unfortunately the current administrators in the EPA) fought tooth and nail to prevent the installation of equipment on the power plants to remove the large amounts of mercury released to the air.

As has been pointed out, the mercury in the CFL bulbs (unlike that being released from power plants) is contained and the bulbs can be recycled. Should we eventually move to other solutions with less potential for mercury contamination like LED bulbs. Absolutely! But LED bulbs are even more expensive now than CFLs.

What people like Milloy do and have done for years is nothing less then criminal: Take money from industry to lie and confuse Americans about the dangers of smoking, concerns about global warming, and other health, safety, and consumer issues.

Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart (a nurse by training, if you can believe that)

the public faces of the global warming scare are building vast energy-hogging mansions

We are being asked to overturn the very edifice of free-market capitalism

wild speculation about the significance of mere statistical noise, teased out of scant and questionable data by grant-chasing academics

draconian regulations they advocate for the rest of us

Cars and trucks account for less than 1/4 of CO2 emissions, or "slightly" less than "greatly to blame".

While Hummers and pickup trucks a convenient easy target, electric power generation is by far the #1 culprit (especially coal burning, however even nuclear power plants have a tremendous carbon cost). And while transportation is getting much better, electricity consumption has only been getting worse.

Funny you should compare Big Tobacco with Big Oil's tactics.

In all, 150 scientists reported a combined 435 instances of real or perceived "interference" related to global-warming research within the past five years.

The problem is that the US is NOT the biggest CO2 emissions maker in the world, that title belongs to China, and India is right behind it.

Utter bollocks.

China is catching up with the US but it hasn't got there yet (something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the emissions of the US). India is about 5th behind Russia and Japan as well as China and the US.

Assorted years for different countries.
http://www.carbonplanet.com/home/country_emissions .php

2003 figures:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_co2_emi-envi ronment-co2-emissions

2002 figures:
http://timeforchange.org/CO2-emissions-by-country

1996 figures:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/each- countrys-share-of-co2-emissions.html

Lots more here:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=global+emis sions+by+country&btnG=Search&meta=

Tim.

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interfe rence/scientists-signon-statement.html Let me be the first to welcome our new congressional oversight overlords.
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The future is NOT bleak, it's sunny: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.

You don't seem to understand the chaos theory you rely on, especially the difference between predicting small-scale events and long-term trends. The difference between weather and climate has been beaten to death in this forum, so I'll just limit my commentary to stating that your demand for a good thirty day forecast strikes me as irrelevant.

You say that climate is always changing, and that's true. But you're only arguing against a rather naive and simplistic view that the environment is entirely static, which no informed person on any side of the global warming debate shares (read: strawman). Having said that, it's clear that we've had about ten thousand years of relative stability, followed by a century of abrupt warming that coincides with mankind pumping billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. While certainly there is such a thing as coincidence, no alternative explanation can compete with the anthropogenic theory. Solar forcing is often proposed, but it only manages to account for a small fraction of the total.

Scientists know full well that they're dealing with a chaotic system when they're looking at the climate. But the climate has been reasonably stable over recent history, and that stability has been very good for human activity. Chaotic systems often fall into regions of stability, but they can be knocked out by external influences (say, pouring billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere). So if we know nothing else about the climate (as you want to lead us to believe) that only leads us to conclude that we're better off not messing with it so brazenly, because we don't know where it will end up or how easy it will be to adapt to the new conditions.

You want to convince us that "real science" doesn't do consensus, and that the media has been painting a false picture of emerging scientific agreement. I would argue the opposite: that the consensus among active researchers is far stronger than the media usually portrays. Two things are happening here. First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided, so if journalists believe that there might be two sides to the issue, they usually try to at least pay lip service to both. Second, entrenched industrial interests take advantage of this by paying a small, incestuous group of climate skeptics and policy organizations to cast doubt on the reality of global warming, its human origins, and the need to take political action to counter it.

In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming, and I would be skeptical of claims of robust disagreement. Industry forces have certainly tried to manufacture the illusion of deep disagreement in the past.

I'm opposed to this simply because I view it as an arguement to essentially dismantle peer review by flooding it with disinformation.

As the article mentions, there are many organizations that don't like scientific information having consensus and respect.

This is very clear by:
1. The Forced ShutDown of EPA Libraries
2. Scrapping the funding of the NASA earth program
3. Censoring of the US Geological Survey

_

Whats more,
The article mentions this guy is from an Exxon PR firm.
A group which stands the most to gain from disinformation.

I haven't taken a hard look into registering the array as an independent power company, but I know for our small sized business it isn't feasible. One of the main reasons we're doing it is because it'll drop our company out of the consumption range and rate of a 'large business' in the eyes of Seattle City Light. This will save us a lot of $$$. We already have motion sensors on many of the lights, and use CF bulbs everywhere. We're also renovating our HVAC system to cut our electrical use by half. A PV looks cool, is good for the environment, is a substantial building improvement, and simply makes financial sense for us.

As for wind power, don't tell that moratorium to our state's energy producers. A recent state bill passed requires them to use 15% renewable energy by 2020.

Also don't tell Kittitas County, as they have one of the largest wind generation plants in the county and more on the way.

The question was to highlight the fact that we cannot model anything that even remotely resembles a climate for a planet.

This is not true....depending on how pedantic you want to get about "remotely resembles". We already have this stuff.

Models that underpredict change are just worthless.

I would disagree. If a model predicts the opposite of what is happening, *that* would be worthless. Since we are getting closer, they are obviously not worthless.

What's your beef?
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Obviously there's a cycle, and it's possible humans have added (or even subtracted) from various aspects of the cycle.
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It's not "possible", it's all but proven. "Possible" is about as weak a word as you can get. We are seeing unprecedented changes in certain atmospheric conditions. On a general level, we see a correlation between historical changes and climate. Right now we are far outside the bounds on those historical atmospheric conditions.

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I conserve where I can, and encourage others to do the same. However, I'm not a fan of the whole "global warming" agenda.
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The "global warming agenda" is to build better models...or...what? What is it you aren't a fan of?

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My personal thoughts are that we are witnessing the transition from one phase of our climate to another, and entirely too many people are jumping to conclusions about what is the real cause.
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But the data would suggest that the "transition" is from a "pre-industrial" atmosphere to a "post-industrial" atmosphere...with a climate that could very well change radically to adapt....even to point of making said climate very inhospitable to the major cause of that quick change...the species responsible for the change.

You seem to think that the "agenda" people are making up data to fit pre-conceived notions. The data was already there (i.e. a warming planet and pretty much out of control changes in CO2 levles). The explanation and the *exact* models is where the work needs to be done.

There is very little argument about what is happening (hotter) or why (us)....well...very little argument in the professional circles...once you get to the layman level..the argument become fierce. BTW, you do know about the rather well confirmed "there's-no-issue-here agenda", yes?

1) So build machines plant trees to act as carbon sinks. Fund this by charging each CO2 producer, including people who burn wood, in proportion to emissions. No one wants this, because everyone would laugh at how little they'd be paying. And the purpose of environmentalism was never to save the environment but to shut down "big business".

2) There are no subsidies for oil producers. The alleged impact on foreign policy says more about the policy makers than about the impact of oil. Fact: Singapore, Switzerland, China, Japan, South Africa, and India manage to import Middle Eastern oil without putting troops there. The cost of troops is not a true cost of getting the oil. If anything, a military presence impedes the flow of oil.

3) What a crock. Markets efficiently allocate goods intertemporally as well. It's called a "futures market". Look it up. Markets don't "believe" oil is infinite; prices already reflect current knowledge of just how finite oil is. If you really believe in that Peak Oil crap, go long on oil.

The persuasiveness of the anti-global warming crowd has its origins in the argumentation structure of Holocaust Deniers. Please refer to Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" for a description of how to go about constructing the argument in an effective way.

Unfortunately, there are those among us who feel that Global Warming is a singular argument that can be disproven by one set of observations or by re-labeling part of the system.

Global Warming is a theory that arises from the confluence of many thousands of observations. It is generally accepted by the scientific community (see the Union of Concerned Scientists.) There are a very small number of scientists who believe otherwise.

Scroll down this list to Exxon and take a look at the list of foundations. Visit a few and then go to the excellent Exxon Secrets which was funded by Greenpeace a few years ago. Cool social networking analysis. You will see how sixteen million dollars was used to persuade you and I that it is not necessary to do anything about CO2.

You bought Exxon-Mobil's propaganda!

No, they're not giving prizes, sorry.

If you're mad at energy corps ripping you off, lying to you, paying/bribing others to lie to you or to rip you off, why not fight them directly?

Join the Union of Concerned Scientists, and fight with the good guys against the bad guys. It's much more fulfilling than just bitching on Slashdot, which only consumes power which pays the energy corps to rip you off and lie to you. And drains you of the fight that could be taken right to them.

A long history of Bush and Cheney working within the oil industry is enough to fund access to the Bush administration to block federal policies and shape government communications on global warming. In the face of scientific studies from around the world, the Bush administration has not been quick to be 'sceptical' of the sceptically funded sceptics with questionable agendas.

And if I'm not mistaken, a plethora of scientists have been arguing with Bush's political/corporate interpretations of scientific data since as early as 2004, and likely earlier. (First link I found..)

Ahh, here they are. http://www.ucsusa.org/

You don't even need wikipedia to realize the Union of Concerned Scientists isn't actually a union of scientists. They say so on their own page. "UCS members are people from all walks of life: parents and businesspeople, biologists and physicists, teachers and students." They declare 200,000 members, and invite everyone to join, whether you have anything to do with science or not.

It's pretty obvious they have their own agenda just by browsing their pages, and no, the agenda does not start from science.

Note that their BIG STORY is that ExxonMobil spent $16 million over the course of 7 years. Let's see...that's about $2.3 million each year. It's a tiny drop in the bucket...

What is their agenda? I'm not that familiar with it, so I'm interested to know where they deviate from widely accepted science?

Another poster mentioned their global warming FAQ, but I read it and thought that most of what I read was pretty uncontroversial among qualified climate scientists (apart from a few counter-views, which almost always seem to be oil-funded).

Given that you assert UCS is a special interest, how do they profit from acceptance of their assertions? It's obvious how oil companies profit directly from the rejection of a theory of human-generated climate change.

I agree that UCS is heavily biased and is just a political front group that has abandoned scientific reporting and married itself to marketing. Read their FAQ about global warming. They certainty about topics that are still heavily debated by legit scientists.

That said... Exxon has every right to honestly defend itself, but if they have indeed created front groups or are knowingly spreading misinformation they should be properly scorned.

I used to read Chrichton's fiction, but the difference between Jurassic Park the movie (a dark tale of the consequences of conscience-less and careless commercial exploitation of science) and Jurassic Park the movie (a simple horror flick, where "science" seems to be the bad guy, because no character seemed to bear any responsibility). It was clear to me that Chrichton had become a prostitute, a process that seems to have accelerated lately particularly with his own confusion about the fictional nature of his work. The relative lack of fatalities of major characters in the movie compared to the book really took the edge off of what I thought was the major theme.

Anyone who takes State of Fear too seriously should perhaps consider what actual scientists (as opposed to those who dabble in sciencey-stuff) have to say about that work: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/crich ton-thriller-state-of-fear.html

Correction: "David Horowitz, one of the most important and widely know new-left activists of the 1960s, turned conservative in the 1980s." Here, I fixed it for you. Also, he replied with documentation to each and every claim of inaccuracy in "The Professors", and most of his replies weren't replied to by his critics. Same for DTN, with the same no-replies-back by the critics.

Anyway, nothing prevents you from going into http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/financials.html and seek the owners^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontributors names by yourself.

By the way: funny that someone modded me "flamebait". I never buried someone with mod points just because I disagreed with him, much less when the guy offered links to actual data. Slashdot left-wing readers seem to be very similar to the left-wingers I know from University. A pretty standard behavior indeed.

No Nobel Laureate is a "nobody" (and really, who TF are you to say so?). But you want to ignore 52 of them together? You gotta be trolling me.

But that aside, this is NOT only about global climate change issues. See the whole panoply of issues in which the Union of Concerned Scientists is alleging political interference in the scientific and/or regulatory process.

The Bush administration has made a concerted effort like none before it to muzzle science it doesn't like.

Look at the board: http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/board.html
There you see the name of Richard Garwin, who was central to the technical effort of getting from the Teller-Ulam theory of the hydrogen bomb to the first working device, the Ivy Mike test. This was in the early fifties. After that he worked on satellite-based photography of the Soviets. To this day he serves on the Defense Science Board, which is basically a club of extremely smart techies that the pentagon asks for advice.
He sure sounds like an anti-American commie to me!

> I was just laughing at how TFA is very clearly an example of itself.

Amen. The UCS's complaints are not that the government is interfering with research done in peer-reviewed journals. Rather it's that government agencies are not saying and doing what they want them to.

The UCS is clearly a political group with many proposed policy changes: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/

When a group starts proposing policy changes, it leaves the realm of science and enters the realm of policy-making, that is politics.

Here're some of the corporations that own... I mean, that "contribute" to the Union of Concerned Scientists:

"Beldon Fund, the Compton Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Scherman Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Energy Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Turner Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts."

For more information on the "unbiased" nature of what these guys do, see its page on Discover The Network.

Kevin Knobloch is a Washington insider Democrat, who served on the staff of two Democrat Congressmen. He's a "No Nukes" activist and pushes the hybrid car/hug a tree agenda. He's got a degree in Journalism for crying out loud, not science.

I don't care if he's Jack The Ripper. Is he telling the truth or not? That's the only question relevant to this discussion.

I'm sick of this 'bias' shit. I don't care about bias. I only care about honesty and scientific rigour. I don't care if you're advocating nudism and free love or armageddon defense technology; if you have the data, show it to me. Then we can argue about what conclusions to draw from it.

This organisation, whatever its motivation, has provided a list of abuses of science by politicians. It's verifiable. So, please, for the love of Pete, either refute the list, or argue about the conclusions they reach from the data. But stop with the ad hominem attacks. This is exactly the kind of bad logic this group is complaining about.

More like "anti-American Comrades and Concerned Marxists".

http://www.ucsusa.org/

This is nothing more than an environmentalist wacko political action group. Take everything they say with a Costco-sized bag of salt.

Doesn't the failure of the model imply a problem with the theory?

Carbon exhaust is causing climate change. Okay.
1) there is no scientific consensus on this
2) I seriously doubt that consensus will be forthcoming withing less than 10 or 20 years

1. Ukraine 108431 81,664 1.33
   
2. Russia 431090 766,180 0.56
   
3. China 917997 2,224,811 0.41
   
4. India 272212 775,410 0.35
   
5. Poland 97375 300,533 0.32
   
6. South Korea 111370 793,070 0.14
   
7. Mexico 95007 768,437 0.12
   
8. Australia 83688 707,992 0.12
   
9. US 1446777 12,485,725 0.12
   
10. Canada 111723 1,130,208 0.10
    
11. Germany 235050 2,797,343 0.08
    
12. Japan 318686 4,571,314 0.07
    
13. UK 152015 2,201,473 0.07
    
14. Italy 110052 1,766,160 0.06
    
15. France 98750 2,105,864 0.05
    

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/each- countrys-share-of-co2-emissions.html

The US is by far the largest contributor of emissions, with China a distant second. Per capita, it's 5 chinese to 1 american contribution and 20 Indians. So. What's first on your agenda, buying a smaller car and telling your neighbours why, writing to your congressman, or joining in a march?

You assume this is an unforeseen threat our satellites are not designed against.

The Russians operated a multitude of surveillance satellites over the US in the 1960s-1980s. They still do I believe. As do the Chinese. As do, I believe, others. Almost all reconisiance sattelites should be able to "spy" on the US should their owners be so inclined.

If anyone cares enough to try to figure out exactly how many surveillence satellites are in orbit, here's a link to the Union Of Concerned Scientists sattelite database

It seems that a week cannot pass without finding big news about gas prices. They're up, they're down ...

What has prevented Bill Clinton, together with Al Gore, from doing anything about global warming?

Katrina isn't all that unusual, and there is no proof whatsoever that it was caused by global warming. There have always been hurricanes of varying strength in the region; it's certainly not a modern phenomenon (neither are the "heat waves").

Feeling ashamed is what environmentalists want us to do; this way they get to sell us green credits and give funding to their research projects.

Ah. So you've been with the side of Truth and Rightness all along, huh? Care to document that fact? If you're going to hold other people accountable for their opinions, where's the record of your opinion that others can scrutinize?

What have YOU done?

I don't know if people contribute in a substantial way to climate change.

well here's one, before Bush-Cheney slopped the trough
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/fuel_economy/ subsidizing-big-oil.html

and another
http://www.distributiondrive.com/Article4.html

and another
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v97.n252.a06.html

by the way, their average effective tax rate is lower than mine. 11% vs 17%. Oh by the way that does not include my gas taxes, property taxes or sales taxes.

Face it, Alaskans are not rugged individualists, they are welfare bums.

You need a chill pill....

Why do I think it's shady?? UCS is a extreme environmental group, in my opinion. They are against all genetic engineering of food, as far as I can tell are completly against nuclear energy, and their scientists are usually biased towards environmentalism v/s business.

If they called their organization 'An extension of Greenpeace', I might buy it. But their organization's name sucks people in and forces them to dig very deep (or start gettign emails) to find out what they are really about.

I enjoy getting their emails for 'Call to Action' that they forward to politicians. I like to change them to my viewpoint before sending them out.