Arkansas Blog

Sanders is in over his head.

Haven't "journalists" lost their jobs after copying other people's work?

I'm mystified why this Fisher guy is held in such high esteem, but he does note identify a couple of errors while using them to leap to inaccurate conclusions. One, Sanders did not get any claim that CCS is funded by the ACLU from me -- his column was the first I'd heard of that. Sanders likely found the AP story without knowing a correction followed, which I would say is an understandable mistake.

Second, I nor anyone else at the Locke Foundation have claimed Beacon Hill's reports for NC and SC were peer-reviewed. That was not something that came from me either, but I assume in the deluge of information I discussed with Sanders that he may have gotten some of it confused. Nevertheless nowhere under my byline will you find such claims. What you WILL find are a number of BHI "peer reviews" of CCS's work, NONE of which they have had peer-reviewed (as far as their work for the states goes). In fact, they hide their work -- withholding their datasets used to arrive at their conclusions, claiming they are proprietary. Yet they claim great "transparency" in all the work their climate commissions do.

As for critiquing the governors, I have done so on many occasions. Here are a few examples:

http://spectator.org/archives/2007/07/23/republican-governors-who-wilt
http://climatestrategieswatch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=101&Itemid=1
http://www.globalwarming.org/node/2663

As for participation in public processes, that's a fool's errand when you've got a fixed process designed to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. Not interested in wasting my time when I can spend it better revealing the problems, activism, and bias behind these dog-and-pony shows. As for "misinformation," "innuendo," "smears," and "lies," I'd like to see the poster produce any examples of such from my own work or else refrain from engaging in his own smear tactics.

We're destroying the planet for future generations.

Fundamentally, anyone who opposes those who are trying to stop that destruction is morally no different than an abortionist.

They have no regard for the lives of our future generations, instead preferring to make their own lives easy and profitable.

Isn't it time we called them the child-killers they are?

By the way, my post above applies to Brantley's own smear as well, as he decided to amplify Fisher's comments to a separate blog post without checking his claims.

Looks like I may be guilty of my own jumping to conclusions about Fisher's claims on the AP having run a correction about the ACLU in their story. And if so I owe an apology to David Sanders.

That article was actually a Wichita Eagle article that AP picked up, and the way the story is written it looks to me like reporter Jeannine Koranda obtained that ACLU information directly from Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius's people. So I'd like to see evidence of that correction, which I should have requested before I assumed Sanders missed something. Here is a link to that Eagle/AP article:

http://www.cjonline.com/stories/062308/sta_293915811.shtml

If there actually was a correction it would be almost impossible to find that out unless you were looking for it, so for Fisher to hold that against Sanders is pretty slimy.

It seems to me that even though a consensus of serious scholars agree that the earth is warming due to man-made activity with inevitable cataclysmic results, there are those that seem to think that we can't afford to save the planet. If I discover that termites have partially destroyed my home, I'm not going to wait until the house falls down to do something about it. I'm going to do everything within my power to save my house. It might not look as pretty as it did and I might very well have to sacrifice something else to make the repairs, but I can't say, "well, I would have fixed my house before it fell in, but I really needed a new car and a new tv." The additional problem here is that this is the only house we have.

>>Second, I nor anyone else at the Locke Foundation have claimed Beacon Hill's reports for NC and SC were peer-reviewed.<<

Oh yeah?

January 09, 2008
"RALEIGH - A model the Appalachian State University Energy Center used to project the economic impact of N.C. climate change policies has "serious flaws" that undermine its credibility. That's the verdict of a new peer review report (pdf version) from a Boston-based economic research group.

Click here to view and here to listen to Dr. Roy Cordato discussing this press release.

The John Locke Foundation is drawing attention to the peer review it commissioned from the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University. The peer review raises red flags about the model's projections. "The Appalachian State Energy Center used this model to predict hundreds of thousands of new jobs and a major positive impact on North Carolina's economy," said Dr. Roy Cordato, JLF Vice President for Research and Resident Scholar. "Trained economists conducting this new peer review found that the model is so flawed that no one should trust the results."

Who ya gonna believe these days.

blue name

Since Sanders is so bothered about who funds the research supporting climate change action, maybe he should reveal who funds the John Locke Foundation. A brief look at their webpage shows that their board are basically a bunch of right wing (not moderate) Republican political operatives and industry representatives: chief of staff from former Sen. Loch Faircloth of NC, former staff for Dan Quayle, a lawyer representing industry against clean air act enforcement, etc. John Locke Foundation has been funded partly by the cigarette industry. THIS is where Sanders looks for an independent assessment on air pollution and climate change? If Sanders is worried about political front groups, he should start looking in his own back yard.

Read more carefully, eLwood -- I said we never claimed BHI's studies were peer-reviewed by others. What I said was that BHI's reports were peer reviews of CCS's (and the various states' climate commissions') economic findings, which previously had none.

As for funding, lemthree, I won't get into a tit-for-tat about that, but I will pose this question: What if this had been Gov. Huckabee who created this climate commission and appointed a majority of members from fossil fuel industries, utilities, auto industry, with a small representation of enviro advocacy groups? And then he brought in a so-called "objective" management consultant who just happened to be a subgroup of a nonprofit like, say, the John Locke Foundation or the Heritage Foundation. And suppose the majority of the funding for their work came from wealthy conservative foundations or some of the donor-types you mentioned that are so offensive to the Left? And this consultant had near-total control over meetings, agendas, technical advice, meeting minutes, voting rules, control debate, Web site, etc.? "But hey, we're objective," Huck would say. "We've brought all the stakeholders to the table. We're going to recommend policy fairly and this management group is going to do it right."

Would you believe him? Would there not be outrage from your environmentalist friends and in the media? Yet that is exactly what has been established in Arkansas and many other states with the roles reversed, and of course you all and the media think that's okay. I would argue it only matters who the donors are in that we are not the ones trying to set government policy under the auspices of an official state government commission, but that is exactly what CCS is doing with their enviro-activist funders.